Revolutions and Constitutions: Hannah Arendt's Challenge to Carl Schmitt

Abstract

No two names better recall the polarized character of political life in mid-century Europe than Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. Like so many of his peers in the Weimar intelligentsia, Schmitt eagerly polemicized against the Weimar Republic and actively sought its destruction. In 1933, he sold his soul to the Nazis and soon became one of their most impressive intellectual apologists. In striking contrast, Arendt risked her life to help anti-fascists and fellow Jews struggling to escape Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi takeover. Forced to join the ranks of the thousands of “stateless” persons stripped of their German citizenship by the new regime, she ultimately found her way to New York City and a stunning career as one of our century's most impressive critics of totalitarianism. While Schmitt would continue to seize every opportunity to belittle the achievements of liberal democracy, even after the establishment of the relatively robust German Federal Republic in 1949, Arendt refused to abandon her chosen Heimat, the United States, even in its darkest hours. For Arendt, Vietnam and Watergate offered indisputable proof that the republican legacy of the American founding demanded our critical loyalty, but hardly—as one can imagine Schmitt arguing—of the inevitability of senseless political violence and authoritarian government.