Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, twentieth-century Germany's premier right-wing authoritarian political thinker, most American scholars continue to downplay the centrality of Schmitt's legal thinking to his overall theory. This article attempts to overcome this lacuna by critically scrutinizing Schmitt's influential critique of liberal constitutionalism. However provocative, Schmitt's critique ultimately proves untenable because (1) it relies on an overly selective, even caricatured reading of the history of liberal jurisprudence and (2) it reproduces the most worrisome methodological claims of Schmitt's main intellectual opponent, Hans Kelsen's legal positivism.