When being questioned at Nuremberg after World War II, Carl Schmitt famously said: “I wanted to give the word national socialism my own meaning” (Schmitt, 2000, p. 65).1 Schmitt also noted to one of his students, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: “It was my mistake, that I believed, one could bring about something in 1933” (Quaritsch, 1988, p. 336). Schmitt (2000, p. 54) continued to believe that he could give his own meaning to Nazism until the December 1936 attacks against him by the SS-journal Das Schwarze Korps forced him to leave his most important party offices apart from his Berlin professorship and the title of Staatsrat (cf. Koenen, 1995, pp. 651–764; Blasius, 2001, pp. 153–180; Mehring, 2009, pp. 378–380).

All of Schmitt’s Nazi-era publications from 1933 to 1936 are characterized by a revolutionary ethos. In a situation in which the Weimar constitution and the liberal era have been overcome, but in which “there is still no new philosophy of the state (Staatsphilosophie)” (Schmitt, 1933b, p. 247), Schmitt declares with a creative fervor: “We are rethinking the concepts”; “we are on the side of the coming things!” (Schmitt, 1934d, p. 229). Schmitt describes the Nazi-revolution as “the breakdown of an artificial world not only in legal thinking, but in every sphere of spirit and the soul” (Schmitt, 1934e, p. 12). With this revolution “the whole liberal-democratic way of thinking” has become “cancelled” (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 5). Schmitt repeats countless times that “with the end of the liberal cycle and the beginning of a new era of a total politics … it becomes necessary to find new concepts” (Schmitt, 1936d, p. 465). The Nazi revolution inaugurates a great process through which “the German people transforms itself internally and reorganizes itself, receiving another domestic-political structure and a new spiritual constitution” (Schmitt, 1934c, p. 391). Schmitt, like other aspiring Nazi-theorists, is now standing before “the task of finding proper forms and concepts to the knowledge that flows from our new life” (Schmitt, 1934e, p. 12); he is confronted with “the difficult task of rethinking and recultivating traditional concepts (Umdenkens und Umpflügens der überlieferten Begriffe)” (Schmitt, 1936g, p. 264).

Schmitt now emphasizes more clearly than ever that “political contradictions and struggles for power (Machtkämpfe)” are also often “played out in the form of a conceptual struggle (Wortkampfes)” (Schmitt, 1934b, p. 713). In fact, the Nazi-revolution enables Schmitt to realize that

world history is not only a struggle (Kampf) of military weapons and not only a struggle of economic means of power; it is also a struggle of concepts (Begriffe) and legal convictions (Rechtsüberzeugungen). Such a struggle is not an empty game of words. It is a matter of victory and defeat, friend and enemy (Schmitt, 1934b, p. 714).

Engaged in this “struggle of concepts,” Schmitt now positioned himself against what he called the “invasion of liberal ideas during 1789” (Schmitt, 1934b, p. 714). In doing so, Schmitt was not only battling such anti-German ways of thinking, like liberalism and received Roman law, but also other rivaling Nazi legal theorists like Otto Koellreutter (Rüthers, 1989; Stolleis, 1994, 2002; Meierheinrich, 2018).

This article argues that Schmitt’s Nazi-era writings from 1933 until 1936 are defined by the systematic attempt to develop an entirely new political–legal language, the language of Nazism. While numerous studies have offered contextualized analyses of Schmitt’s Nazi-engagement (e.g. Schwab, 1970; Bendersky, 1983, 2017; Rüthers, 1988, 1989; Noack, 1993; Meier, 1994, 2013; Koenen, 1995; Gross, 2000, 2017; Blasius, 2001; Balakrishnan, 2002; Hofmann, 2002; Kennedy 2004, pp. 11–37; Mehring, 2009, pp. 304–436; Kervégan, 2011; Scheuerman, 2020), Schmitt’s sustained attempts at forming the political language of Nazism have not been previously analyzed with sufficient systematicity (on Nazi language and mindset, see Klemperer, 1991; Stolleis, 1994, pp. 94–125; Chapoutot, 2018).

I maintain that Schmitt’s efforts at defining the language of Nazi-ideology correspond with his famous move from decisionism to what he begins in 1933/1934 to describe as “concrete order thought.” It has not been sufficiently acknowledged that “concrete order thought” is Schmitt’s own vision of Nazi-ideology; his attempt to “give meaning” to Nazism and his effort to “bring about something in 1933.” While the legal historian Michael Stolleis (2002, pp. 323–325, 346) emphasizes the broad influence of Schmitt’s concepts in the early years of the Nazi regime, he also notes that Schmitt’s concrete order thought remains a “relatively fuzzy sketch” and “vague” (cf. Stolleis, 1994, p. 32; 2002, p. 324). Although Stolleis rightly emphasizes the irrational elements in Nazi thinking, my aim is to show that Schmitt’s concrete order thought is nonetheless more than a sketch. Offering an in-depth reading of Schmitt’s rarer Nazi-era writings, his diaries and correspondence, I argue that between 1933 and 1936, Schmitt theorized the Nazi-revolution in terms of three conceptual revolutions that carried profound historical–symbolical meanings.

First, Schmitt theorizes the revolution of the liberal-democratic state of Weimar into what he calls a one-party-state (Einparteistaat) or a Führer-state in which political power becomes concentrated to the hands of the Nazi party and its leader Adolf Hitler. Schmitt maintains that Hitler’s rise to power coincides with the death of the bureaucratically neutral state, realized most perfectly in Prussia and France. This overcoming is symbolized by the “death of Hegel.” By analyzing Schmitt’s texts that compare the differences between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, I demonstrate how after April 1933 Schmitt gradually distances himself from his earlier enthusiastic support for the state of Mussolini’s fascist Italy (see Schieder, 1989) in favor of Hitler’s movement in Nazi Germany. While fascism expands the state to its extreme limits, the new “concrete order” of the Nazi movement explodes this whole statist framework.

Second, Schmitt also envisions the overcoming of state-based sovereignty in Germany with a new form of power, which he calls Führertum, “leader-shipness” (sometimes also rendered as Führen, “leading,” or as Führungssouveränität, “leadership-sovereignty”). While the death of Hegel symbolizes the expiration of the neutral state, the symbolical deaths of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes disclose the inextricably connected outdatedness of state-based sovereignty and decisionism. Hitler is not the sovereign of a state, but the Führer of a movement – something absolutely different. Unlike the sovereign, who represents the nation, Hitler incarnates the immediate racial unity of the German people.

Third, Schmitt argues that Nazism introduces racial homogeneity, Artgleichheit (literally: “similarity of kind” or “similarity of species”) as the basis for the German racial state, and in doing so, overcomes the previous bases for homogeneity available in the era of democratic legitimacy, especially the idea of the nation. By offering an in-depth analysis of Schmitt’s Nazi-era texts and notebooks, it is shown that (together with the idea of Führertum), the idea of race is the central theoretical element of Schmitt’s concrete order thought.

This article argues against the dominant form of scholarship on Schmitt and Nazism, which has failed to take seriously the central role of race in Schmitt’s Nazi-era writings (e.g. Schwab, 1970; Bendersky, 1983, 2017; Noack, 1993; Meier, 1994, 2013; Koenen, 1995). The recently published voluminous Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2017) is an illustrative example, for it avoids in-depth confrontations with the question of Schmitt, Nazism and racism during the crucial years between 1933 and 1936. The only articles that focus explicitly on the subject are from Bendersky (2017) and Gross (2017), who offer slightly revised versions of their earlier interpretations: While Bendersky continues to deny that Schmitt was a racialist Nazi, Gross sees his earlier thesis according to which all of Schmitt’s thinking is based on antisemitism verified (on the various explanations for Schmitt’s Nazism, see Mehring, 2009, pp. 310–313).

I maintain that taking Schmitt’s racism seriously means taking the idea of Nazism as a revolution seriously. Although Schmitt (2010a, 2014, 2018) was a profoundly anti-Semitic person during the Weimar-era, it is only after he joins the Nazi-party that systematically articulated racism becomes the defining feature of his political-legal thinking. It is in this sense that Schmitt emphasizes in Über die Drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (1934) that the Nazi Revolution not only overcomes the normativistic way of thinking that had subdued Weimar, but also the sovereigntist decisionism that Schmitt himself had formerly advocated. In what follows, I will examine chronologically each of the three key features of the Nazi revolution envisioned by Schmitt after which I will conclude with an analytical overview.

Politics Beyond the Neutral State: The Rise of the Movement and the Symbolical Death of Hegel

“On the evening of Easter Wednesday, the 15th of April 1936, I had a discussion of some length under four eyes with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia,” Schmitt notes in a 1960 letter to Jean-Pierre Faye. The discussion concerned “the relationship between the party and the state.” Mussolini had proudly stated, in a critical gesture against Nazi Germany, that he is a “Hegelian” and that for him “the state is eternal; the party perishable (vergänglich).” Schmitt responded by noting that also Lenin was a Hegelian, from which the question followed: Where is the true spiritual–historical residence of Hegel’s Geist; in Rome, Moscow or Berlin? When Il Duce replied by asking Schmitt to respond, he noted: “Then I must, naturally, say: In Rome!” To Schmitt, the discussion with Mussolini was “a great, intellectual enjoyment” and as such remained “in all of its details unforgettable” (Mohler, 1995, p. 418). How should one understand this story that Schmitt shares with Armin Mohler?

Schmitt’s story of his meeting with Mussolini is understandable only if one remembers that after Schmitt joined the Nazi party he declared that the day Hitler took power was “the day Hegel died”; the day when the classical Prussian state-model, based on the separation of powers, the objectivity of the bureaucratic machine and the independence of the judges, became substituted with the totality of Nazi-ideology. The liberal-neutral state was now replaced by a “tripartite” structure consisting of the state, the movement and the people, in which the state functions as the “static-political” element and the people as the “unpolitical” element, which “grows” in the “protection and shadow” of the “dynamic-political” movement that now occupies every layer of this new construction (Schmitt, 1933, pp. 12, 31–32). Through these internal changes to the legal–political framework of Germany, “the state … loses its monopoly of the political” and becomes nothing more than an “organ of the Führer” (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 15, 1993, p. 55). Although the state does not die entirely with the death of Hegel, it is completely subdued when “a powerful movement dominated by a Führer steps forward [and] openly lays claim to political leadership and also to the responsibility before history and the people” (Schmitt, 1933b, p. 251). Not the state, but the Nazi party is the leading element in Schmitt’s tripartite construction; the movement is both the element that “carries the state” (staatstragende) and “carries the people” (volkstragende), as Schmitt puts it. The most fundamental law of the new Nazi political entity is the “unquestioned primacy of the political leadership, as it is constituted in the national socialist movement under its Führer Adolf Hitler” (Schmitt, 1933b, p. 245).

Thus, when Schmitt notes to Mussolini in 1936 that Hegel now resides in Rome, this is simply another way of recognizing that Italy had not engaged, at least to the same extent, in all of these radical changes that now characterized Nazi Germany. Schmitt also voices this same opinion in two lesser-known texts that explicitly compare the systems of Germany and Italy. The first of these, entitled “Fascist and national socialist legal science,” published in May 1936, opens by emphasizing that both Italy and Germany stand united against the world of liberal parliamentarism in the West and against Soviet Bolshevism in the East. However, Schmitt highlights that there are “great ideological differences” between Italy and Germany, emphasizing especially that “in Italy, the problem of race is ignored,” and that, second, unlike for Nazi Germany, “the primacy of the state before the party is a self-evident fact for fascism.” As Schmitt stresses, the completely different evaluation of the state and the party forms “the deepest difference in terms of legal science” (Schmitt, 1936f, pp. 619–620). While Nazi-Germany is controlled by a total movement, fascist Italy remains a total state that intensifies the state to its extreme limits. This is what Schmitt means when he once again uses the historical symbol of Hegel to illustrate the differences between Italy and Germany: “The battle concerning Hegel, the question, whether he is still alive or dead, whether the living Hegel resides today in Rome, in Berlin or perhaps even in Moscow, has been decided in favor of Rome” (Schmitt, 1936f, p. 620).

Schmitt repeats these same arguments in another text from 1936, entitled “I caratteri essenziali dello stato nazista” (“On the essential characteristics of Nazism”). Schmitt again notes that only fascist Italy sustains the primacy of the state above the party and that only the Nazi regime is defined by racist Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”) ideology. Also the idea that the day Hitler took power was indeed the day, on which both Hegel and therewith the classical German philosophy of the state had died, is repeated (Schmitt, 1956, pp. 19, 23–24). However, Schmitt now also analyses the Soviet Union. Unlike state-based fascism and Nazism that is grounded on the new tripartite political–legal structure, the Soviet Union is a one-party state that subordinates everything to the party and aims at a world-revolution. Despite their crucial differences, the völkisch Nazi movement and the Italian fascist state are united in an ideological battle against this Soviet monstrosity – an idea which Schmitt repeats in his defense of the Nuremberg laws (Schmitt, 1956, pp. 18–19, 22–24, 1936c, p. 207).

These two important essays show clearly that after 1933, for Schmitt, fascist Italy was no longer the “constitutional-political model for the restoration of statehood” as it still had been in the early 1930s (Mehring, 2009, p. 242). While fascism sustained the notion of the state, Nazi Germany was “a body politic (Gemeinwesen), which sees the state as an instrument for the national socialist ideology (Weltanschaaung)” and one in which “law (Gesetz) is plan and will of the Führer” (Schmitt, 1936a, p. 184). Only in the Nazi system is the Führer “the highest judge, who creates law without mediation” (Schmitt, 1934a, p. 228). In this way, Nazism inaugurated a profound internal transformation of traditional statehood, which to Schmitt was represented par excellence by the traditional models of France and Prussia (Schmitt, 1935a, p. 436, 1936a, p. 185), and then later, in a more intensive form, by the qualitatively total state of fascist Italy.

What is rarely perceived in the analyses of Schmitt’s Nazi-thought is that the reconfiguration of decisionism to concrete order thought signifies a new kind of fundamental acceptance of the total character of politics, which was missing from Schmitt’s writings before 1933, a totalization of politics that no longer expands the state but now rather subsumes it under the leadership of the movement (cf. Schmitt, 1933a, p. 21, 1985a, p. 7, 2011, pp. 20, 26, 44). All of this shows how problematic and simplistic it is to describe Schmitt as a “statist.” Emphasizing these conceptual nuances is very important because when Schmitt writes about the “Nazi-state,” he means this in a very particular way. The Nazi “state” is not a state in the traditional sense of the word, but rather an entirely unprecedented one-party state or a Führer-state defined by a unique tripartite structure, whose meaning can only be understood against the traditional neutral state, as Schmitt emphasizes, citing Hitler (Schmitt, 2011, p. 5). This is what Schmitt means when he retrospectively notes that “it is not the state, but rather always only a party, that can be the subject and bearer of a totalitarianism” (Schmitt, 1958, p. 366 n. 3) and when he emphasizes that “the total state is a very liberal thing in comparison to the total party” (Mohler, 1995, p. 33, my emphasis).2 As we will see in the following section, Schmitt’s farewell to the notion of the Hegelian neutral state is inextricably connected to his simultaneous self-distancing from the notion of state-based sovereignty.

Politics Beyond State-Sovereignty: The Development of Führertum and the Symbolical Deaths of Bodin and Hobbes

In a review of Franciso J. Conde’s 1935 book El pensamiento politico de Bodino. Schmitt offers a very interesting analysis of the contemporary relevance of Jean Bodin, who, as Schmitt (1936e, p. 181) puts it, is “the father of modern constitutional law (Staatsrecht) and its concept of sovereignty.” Bodin develops the notion of sovereignty as a response to the religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century. Schmitt emphasizes that in the mid-1930s, Bodin’s thinking no longer reflects the present reality of European politics. What Conde’s portrayal of Bodin’s political theology discloses with particular lucidity is precisely the “historical outdatedness of Bodin’s concept of sovereignty.” In the mid-1930s, Bodin remains relevant as a historical analogy that makes it possible to understand the “set of problems concerning the concept of the state that are bursting into the open from all sides and in all countries” (Schmitt, 1936e, pp. 181–182). Schmitt’s self-distancing from Bodin and his notion of sovereignty are symbolically represented by the fact that Bodin is now revealed to be a Jew: “Hermann Corning’s often doubted claim, that Bodin would be of a Jewish descent from the side of the mother, has, through the work of E. Pasqué, in the meantime… been confirmed: His mother, Catalina Dutestre, was a Spanish Jewess, who had emigrated from the ‘intolerant’ Spain to the ‘tolerant’ France.” Schmitt closes his review by noting that the revelation concerning Bodin’s Jewishness is “most essentially connected” to the theory of the modern “neutral state” itself (Schmitt, 1936e, pp. 181–182).

The explanation for this claim can be found in Schmitt’s 1938 antisemitic book on Hobbes. After joining the Nazi-party, Schmitt also distances himself from Hobbes, whose “extreme individualism” is now attacked (cf. Schmitt, 2009, p. 60, 1933a, p. 46). By 1934 Schmitt has absolutely no problem in referring to “the liberal theories … of Hobbes or Constant” in the same sentence (Jünger and Schmitt, 2012, p. 24). This interpretation is systematized in the 1938 book, which describes Hobbes as the very first liberal thinker, whose ideas – particularly his distinction between personal faith and the public confession of faith, which undermines the unity of the state – are later radicalized by Jewish thinkers, in particular “the Jew Spinoza” (Schmitt, 1938, pp. 86–87). In 1938, Schmitt explicitly states that the Hobbesian neutral state can no longer function in a qualitatively different era of politics (Schmitt, 1938, p. 124). Schmitt’s entirely new and radical critique of the theory of sovereignty and its two main developers, Bodin and Hobbes, works with a neat logic. While Bodin is now revealed to be a Jew, Hobbes is accused of thinking like a Jew and portrayed as the central “proto-Jewish” thinker. Both are, ultimately, visionaries of an inherently Jewish state-theory that problematically leaves room for individual thought. Such a “neutral state” remains fully unable to ground kind of novel totality that defines the Nazi movement.

When Schmitt later refers to himself as “the brother” of Bodin and Hobbes (e.g. Schmitt, 2002a, pp. 63–64), this should not be understood in the sense that Schmitt understands his thinking as substantially similar. Schmitt means something different: If it was the faith of Bodin and Hobbes to be the witnesses of the decline of feudalism, the rise of European-wide civil wars of religion, and by the same token, their faith to become the theorists and visionaries of a new era – the era of sovereignty and the modern neutral state – then it was the faith of Carl Schmitt to be a witness to an era in which the state and sovereignty were now coming to an end. By the same token, it was also Schmitt’s faith to become a theorist of a new era in which new political concepts would arise, such as movements, Reiche and Grossräume – notions whose meaning was to be understood in distinction to the now outdated era of sovereignty theorized by Bodin and Hobbes. This is the analogical–historical brotherhood of theorizing that Schmitt refers to when he calls himself the “last conscious representative of the ius publicum Europaeum, its last teacher and scholar” (Schmitt, 2002a, p. 75; cf. Schmitt and Koselleck, 2019, p. 330). In short, after 1933 Schmitt no longer saw himself as a follower of Hobbes, but rather as a twentieth-century thinker comparable to Hobbes.

In Schmitt’s concrete-order thought, the influence of Bodin and Hobbes is replaced with new exemplary figures, especially with Maurice Hauriou and his institutionalism (Schmitt, 1993, pp. 18, 45–46). Descriptively, Schmitt notes: “Association with Hauriou (instead of Bodin and Hobbes)” (Schmitt, 2015, p. 25). In another highly symbolical move that describes Schmitt’s self-distancing from his earlier decisionism, Schmitt now not only describes Hobbes’s central theoretical enemy, Aristotle, as a predecessor to his concrete-order thought (Schmitt, 1993, p. 34), but even declares that the Nazi state has now “returned to the old Aristotelian concept of law” that no longer recognizes any separation of powers or sphere of privacy beyond its totality (Schmitt, 1935a, p. 439).3

But what will replace state-bound sovereignty as the distinctive form of power that defined the state-based system of Westphalia? In a diary entry from 4 February 1934, Schmitt describes a discussion with Johannes Popitz on “the difference between state-sovereignty and leadership-sovereignty (Führungssouveränität),” adding that Popitz “does not want to let go of the state” (Schmitt, 2010a, p. 327; cf. Mohler, 1995, p. 419). This remark reveals something essential about Schmitt’s understanding of Nazism. The kind of power that defines the Nazi-movement is no longer the kind of power described by Bodin and Hobbes: Their outdated “state-sovereignty” is now replaced or supplanted with a “leadership-sovereignty.”

But what is the distinctive nature of this Führungssouveränität in distinction to “state-sovereignty”? Schmitt usually refers to this Nazi concept as “Führertum” (literally “leader-shipness”) or simply as “Führen” (“leading”). It is theorized in detail in Schmitt’s early Nazi-era work, Staat, Bewegung, Volk (1933) which, together with Über die Drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (1934), offers nothing less than a tentative articulation of how to think of politics and law in a situation in which the state and its central concept, sovereignty, lose their traditional meanings. In the former work, Schmitt diagnoses two conceptual shifts: first, from sovereignty to Führertum, and second, from homogeneity (Gleichartigkeit) to racial homogeneity (Artgleichheit). These two specifically Nazi concepts are “the basic concepts of national socialist law” (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 32).

Schmitt emphasizes that Führertum is something unprecedented; there is no historical equivalent that can describe this “specifically German and national socialist concept.” Every attempt to discover historical precedents “through an assimilation to foreign categories” only “blurs” and “weakens” this Nazi notion (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 41). In order to clarify how Führertum “stems in its entirety from the concrete, substance-filled thinking of the national socialist movement” (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 42), Schmitt offers a list of three historical “images and comparisons” through which the “relationship between those who rule and those who are ruled” has been previously conceptualized. As the first incorrect analogy, Schmitt mentions the pastoral image of the “shepherd” and his “flock,” which became effective in the Roman Catholic church.4 Second, Schmitt points to Plato’s images of the stateman as a “physician,” a “shepherd” and as a “helmsman” (Steuermann), of which the last ultimately prevails over the two others. This helmsman was translated into Latin as “gubernator” that then gradually became “gouvernement,” “governo” and “government” in modern romance languages. Also these “juridical-technical” images fail to grasp the essence of Nazi Führertum. Thirdly, Schmitt names the analogy of the horse and the rider, which was used by Hippolyte Taine to describe Napoleon’s reign, as another false image (Schmitt, 1933c, pp. 41–42).

What, then, forms the substance of Nazi Führertum? Schmitt defines it as “a concept of unmediated present and real presence” (unmittelbarer Gegenwart und realer Präsenz) that defines the new Nazi state “in every atom of its existence” (Schmitt, 1933c, pp. 42, 33). As a concept of total presence, the notion is grounded on an “absolute racial similarity between the Führer and his followers” (eine unbedingte Artgleichheit zwischen Führer und Gefolgschaft) (Schmitt, 1933c, pp. 42, 1933b, p. 250). To grasp the radical novelty of this new form of power, we must shortly turn to Schmitt’s 1928 work Verfassungslehre where he argues that all governments can be conceptualized through two conceptual poles: identity and representation. While the extreme realization of the principle of identity is found in direct democracy, in which the people is fully present to itself without distinctions between the rulers and the ruled, the extreme example of representation is found in absolute monarchy in which the person of the king embodies the unity of the nation, leading to a form of government in which the rulers and the ruled are separated by a qualitative gap. For Schmitt, the essential argument here is that every government requires some degree of both identity and representation and that neither can ever exist in a pure form (Schmitt, 1928a, pp. 205–206, 214–215). This is precisely what changes with the rise of Nazism that explodes all our former categories of thought.

What Schmitt suggests in 1933/1934 is that the notions of “leading” and “racial equality” replace with their “real presence” the notion of representation with an unmediated racial identity – something that the Hobbesian decisionism cannot comprehend. What is eliminated is precisely the distance. The Führer does not represent; he incarnates without any artificial mediation the will of the German Volk as a homogeneous race. Schmitt explicitly emphasizes that Hitler has nothing to do with the monarchs of former times. Just as the people (Volk) transforms into a “followership” (Gefolgschaft) of the Führer, Hitler no longer represents the German people, but rather embodies and incarnates the will of the “community-of-the-people (Volksgemeinschaft), that is a followership (Gefolgschaft) of the Führer” (Schmitt, 1935c, p. 924). It is in this sense that Schmitt refers to “Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German people, whose will is today the nomos of the German people” (Schmitt, 1933b, p. 252). Hitler’s decisions arise organically from the absolute racial similarity between the Führer and his followers, which also constitutes their “mutual loyalty” and hinders Nazism from degenerating into mere “arbitrariness” (Willkür) (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 42, 1933b, p. 250).

All of this shows that Hitler’s power can no longer be understood within the decicionist framework of sovereignty, as described in Politische Theologie (Schmitt, 1985a, pp. 42, 44): Hitler’s decisions do not appear “ex nihilo” out of a normative nothingness but from the natural reality of race itself; the Nazi vision of order is not grounded on a substantially empty affirmation of the Hobbesian “auctoritas non veritas facet legem” but arises directly from the traditions, culture and substance of the German Volk (contra Scheuerman, 2020, pp. 20–21, 38, 134–135, 146). Schmitt’s underlying argument is that Nazism is the most imminent and perfect form of direct democracy in human history just as it is the most anti-liberal government ever developed. In the next two sections, I will move on to explore how the notion of racial homogeneity that grounds the functioning of Führertum makes its way into the very center of Schmitt’s thinking.

From Personal Antisemitism to Systematic Racism: A Close Reading of Schmitt’s Diaries

Although racist arguments remain absent from Schmitt’s publications before 1933, Schmitt’s diary-entries from the late 1920s and early 1930s disclose how the notion of race begins to make its way to Schmitt’s thinking. The centrality of antisemitism to Schmitt’s diaries is disclosed by one symbolically important reformulation. While in 1929 Schmitt famously states that “in middle-Europe, we live sous l’oeil des Russes” (Schmitt, 2009, p. 73), in his diary-entries he changes the ending of his own formulation as follows: In Europe we live under the eye of the Jews, “sous l’oeil des Juifs” (Schmitt, 2018, pp. 455, 460; ending as “du Juif” in Schmitt, 2010a, pp. 409, 411).

Schmitt’s 1928 move to Berlin marks a turn in the sharpening of his antisemitic attitudes. He is living in a “Jewish-city (Judenstadt), insulted and defiled (geschändet) by the Jews” (Schmitt, 2010a, pp. 160ff.), despising the “cheers of triumph by the Jew-press (Judenpresse)” (p. 227). In early 1928 Schmitt notes: “I once again escape into Germanness (Deutschtum); away from the Jews, the French, the Catholics.” Schmitt is now on his way to “Heimat, humility, purity, decency” (Schmitt, 2018, pp. 427ff). This illustrates Schmitt’s alienation from the Church and describes his journey toward a growingly antagonistic relationship toward “the Jews.” For instance: “I perceive the Jews as our controllers and inspectors. They demand that we are genuine (echt), genuine Germans, genuine French. And they respect us only as long. They themselves will never be genuine Germans, genuine French.” More and more, Schmitt “cannot stand seeing another Jew, disgusting” (p. 420).

Schmitt refers to the “universality” of the Jews and laments their “missing connection to land (Erde)” (pp. 450, 452). They are a people who “look for the one, who will carry the responsibility on their behalf” (p. 488). The Jews “pollute (verpesten) … the air with their nihilism” (p. 470). When Schmitt sees Shakespeare’s play The Life and Death of King John he feels “the horrendous power of the Jews, which has nothing to do with us and dominates us. Appalling” (p. 291). Schmitt’s remarks sometimes also utilize a more generally racist terminology: “What an egregious transformation: A colored human being can today appear as beautiful and noble! This is the beginning of our submission” (p. 441). Schmitt bemoans a train trip from Berlin to Cologne “in third class, among Mexicans, Poles. Foolish anxiety, quailing anxiety due to this <mixing> (<Mischung>)” (p. 442) and describes a visit to a barber shop by noting, “a negro was there, awful, disgusting” (Schmitt, 2010a, p. 151ff).

In the early 1930s, Schmitt deplores Germany’s desperate political situation (pp. 16, 62, 63, 94, 117, 220, 238, 265, 411), describes the Germans as a “political pariah people” (p. 152), who are the victims of the secret power of the Jews in Germany (p. 59) and in danger of facing the “vengeance of the Jews” (p. 282). In a compulsive manner, Schmitt uses a plethora of vulgar adjectives, such as scheusslich, furchtbar, fürchterlich, widerlich, eklig, elend and ekelhaft, to describe both Jews in general and particular Jewish persons (pp. 4, 9, 21, 34, 66, 68, 69, 72, 79, 83, 85, 92, 109, 128, 129, 130, 146, 147, 163, 164, 172, 184, 192, 197, 199, 214, 229, 247, 255, 267, 278, 286). Although the use of such language is not limited to antisemitic utterances (Schmitt uses similar terminology even to describe himself), it is just as obvious that the continuous antisemitic outbursts clearly stand out from the pages of Schmitt’s diaries – a fact testified by a plurality of other kinds of antisemitic remarks (pp. 20, 26, 44, 65, 81, 91, 92, 116, 145, 185, 191, 198, 199, 208, 210, 225, 243, 244, 252, 268, 269, 272, 273, 284, 312, 316, 344, 402, 406, 408, 415, 416, 417, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 434, 435).

Already in 1930 Schmitt declares his particular “disgust for the shit-Jew Kelsen (Ekel vor dem Scheißjuden Kelsen)” (p. 73; cf. p. 131) with whom he also has “a nice discussion” (p. 227). In April 1933 Schmitt finds it impossible to sign a “ridiculous appeal” against Kelsen’s removal from the university of Cologne and wonders how this “miserable community” can now “campaign on behalf of a Jew in this manner, while at same they [the Jews] are letting a thousand proper Germans starve to death and go to rack and ruin in cold blood…. This power of the Jews kept me out of it” (p. 283).

Schmitt refers to his former Jewish friend Erich Kaufman as “repulsive” and “hideous” (pp. 83, 125; cf., 90, 113, 135) and notes triumphantly that he witnesses the providence of God when a black woman enters the same building in which Kaufman resides (p. 259). Schmitt also calls his former Jewish disciple Otto Kirchheimer “awful” (p. 210) and “disgusting, this Jew” (p. 231). In relation to his other former student, Werner Becker, we read the following words in April 1933: “Werner Becker. Great disappointment. He has become a chaplain in Marburg, he told of a Rabbi, from whom they had cut away the beard and whom he wanted to protect as a catholic priest. We laughed at him (wir lachten ihn aus)” (p. 286).

Before joining the Nazi-Party, Schmitt laments the “disgrace of Germany, the triumph of the Jews, of the destruction of German substance at the universities, in art and theater” (p. 424). Seeing “Jews, on all stages, all lecturing desks” (p. 417), he opposes his “disgust of Berlin” with the capital of the Nazi movement as follows: “much love to Munich and to the part of Germany which has not yet been destroyed by Jews” (p. 255). Schmitt is “disgusted by the poisoning through Jews (Vergiftung durch Juden)” and by the “artificial Jewification (Verjudung)” (pp. 255, 271). He alerts one of his friends about “the Jews, their dangerousness and deceitfulness, their hate against the Christians and Germans, the shamelessness of assimilation” (p. 271). In another set of antisemitic gestures, influenced by Ernst Jünger, the Jews are connected with “ritual murder” (pp. 217, 413, 418), presented as the murderers of Christ (pp. 417, 420, 421, 427), and referred to as the “chosen people” of “Satan” (p. 243). All of this shows the immense profundity of Schmitt’s antisemitism long before he joins the Nazi-party on the 27 April 1933 (p. 287).

However, no matter how utterly racist these diary-notes are, it is something different to note antisemitic and racist sentiments in a personal diary than to make the idea of race the center of a systematic political ideology. While Schmitt’s hateful antisemitic diary-notes illuminate why Nazi-ideology was appealing to him, they do not allow us to jump to hasty conclusions and to presume that he would have fostered a singularly positive understanding of Nazism (which is not the same as antisemitism) before actually joining the party (as argued by Gross 2017, p. 105, while Bendersky 2017, pp. 129–137 downplays Schmitt’s racism).

Schmitt refers to Hitler by noting that: “It is like in the jungle, you do not know, whether it is a dove or a snake” (Schmitt, 2010a, p. 263ff.). He notes his “anger about the dumb, ridiculous Hitler” (p. 257) and declares his “worries (Besorgnisse) about Hitler and the Nazis” (p. 277). The month before joining the party, Schmitt demonstrates insecurities, only gradually becoming excited about the idea of joining the Nazis (pp. 276, 281, 285, 286). On the day Schmitt actually joins the party he does so “nach einigem Hin und Her,” after some “to and fro” (p. 287). Hitler and Nazism are often either mentioned neutrally (pp. 50, 51, 241, 258) or sometimes very negatively (pp. 132, 419; Schmitt, 2018, p. 108).

However, we also find numerous instances of support for the Nazis. By 6 April 1933, Schmitt writes: “Saw Hitler and Goebbels. Saw both accurately. Great excitement. Hitler like the insatiable bull (gierige Stier) in the arena. Shocked (erschüttert) by this view” (Schmitt, 2010a, p. 279; cf. pp. 428ff). Likewise, although on 27 January Schmitt laments that Hindenburg has “gone crazy,” because now either von Papen or Hitler will seize power, on the 30th Schmitt writes: “I went to Café Kutschera, where I heard that Hitler has become Chancellor and [von] Papen Vice-Chancellor. Excited, happy, pleased” (pp. 256–257). Schmitt also notes his support for the Nazi Judenboykott in March/April 1933 (p. 275). All of this demonstrates how Schmitt gradually comes to terms with his insecurities. By early May 1933, Schmitt takes part in Nazi festivities, singing the Horst-Wessel Lied “with great excitement” (pp. 287–288). As we will see in the next section, it is at this point that systematic racism becomes the defining characteristic of Schmitt’s concrete-order thought.

Artgleichheit: Racial Homogeneity as the Theoretical Fundament of Nazi-Ideology

Schmitt always saw the “political power of democracy” in its ability to “eradicate and keep away” both “the foreign and the unequal,” naming the “radical expulsion the Greeks” in Turkey and the Australian policy of only accepting the “right type of settlers” as paradigmatic examples (Schmitt, 1985b, p. 14). In Verfassungslehre, Schmitt contrasts the liberal notion of abstract universal human equality with the democratic Gleichartigkeit (homogeneity), which must be political and distinguish friends from enemies (Schmitt, 2010b, pp. 223–238). While in the Verfassungslehre Schmitt still provides a list of “imageries” (Vorstellungen), which may ground the homogeneity of a state – mentioning race, religion and the hegemonic image of the nation as examples (Schmitt, 2010b, pp. 223–238) –, after 1933 Schmitt maintains that in Nazi Germany political–legal order is grounded on racial homogeneity (Artgleichheit) that now also guarantees the functionality of Führertum. As Schmitt states by referring to Hitler and Hans Frank, “the idea of race (Rasse)” is the ground on which National Socialism is built: “Without the basic-notion of Artgleichheit the national-socialist state could not exist and its legal-life would not be imaginable” (Schmitt, 1933, p. 42). Schmitt’s thinking is now grounded on “organic, biologic, and völkisch differences” and on the fact that “all the way into the smallest fibers of his brain (bis in die kleinste Gehirnsfaser hinein), the human being stands in the reality of belonging to a given people and race (Volks- und Rassenzugehörigkeit)” (Schmitt, 1933c, p. 45).

With these terminological changes Schmitt perverts the liberal-democratic citizenship and equality before the law into the particularistic völkisch equality of the race – a move that was theorized also by many other Nazis (cf. Hill, 1966, pp. 14, 205–295; Rüthers, 1989, pp. 25, 101–180; Hofmann, 2002, pp. 168–188; Scheuerman, 2020, pp. 133–164).5 This change is reflected in Schmitt’s diaries, which reveal how Schmitt’s personal Jew-hatred begins to transform into the kind of systematic racism inherent to Nazi-ideology. In a particularly telling entry, Schmitt describes the intrusion of biology to the field of politics:

Through the fact that everything nature-related (Naturhafte) is concentrated on the human being (while all excess nature is dominated and domesticated by the human being), also every nature-related (naturhafter) opposition inside the human being becomes [stronger]. The opposition of the sexes (Geschlecter) becomes greater, the opposition of races (Rassen) more unescapable (unüberwindlicher). A huge mistake to think that the epoch dominates technical nature (the breakdown of natural limits) [and] makes the human being the only lord over nature. It only makes the battle between human beings more perfect <?> (vollkommener <?>) … The battle with nature stops, the battle between human beings begins (Schmitt, 2010a, p. 434).

Schmitt diagnoses a profound transformation of the human existence from a battle with nature to a battle of and in nature. When all other areas of differentiation have been neutralized, we are left with unescapable biological differences, such as the oppositions concerning the “races” and “sexes.” In another diary passage from the beginning of May 1933, Schmitt describes his reasons for joining the Nazis as follows:

I lost some weeks, because I hoped to join the party with a greater number of constitutional lawyers (Staatsrechtlern), but one could hardly find five. The others stand on the side of the Jews. The Hakenkreuz is the only cross, which still makes the Jews afraid. This is enough for me also theologically (Schmitt, 2010a, pp. 438ff.).

Schmitt now draws a new friend-enemy distinction: Those who are not with the Nazis are “on the side of the Jews”; to be against “the Jews” is sufficient enough reason for Schmitt to be on the side of the Nazis. Fully agreeing with the new racial foundation for German domestic politics, Schmitt notes that he “fully agrees about the Jews” with the Nazi lawyer Otto Koellreutter (p. 275; cf. p. 323), who, rather ironically, will later be central in ousting Schmitt from the party by attacking Schmitt for not being truly völkisch. That Schmitt takes the idea of biological racism seriously is also shown by several other notebook entries, like this one: “I can still barely see Frau Schmitz (despite of my sympathy for her), so disturbing (störend) is the idea of half-Jews (Halbjuden) and mongrels (Bastarden)” (p. 320: cf. p. 329).

Appropriately, Schmitt now also recalibrates his definition of “the political.” While in 1932 Schmitt named economic, moral and aesthetic differences as realms that could animate a political antagonism, the Nazi version of the Der Begriff des Politischen from 1933 now explicitly adds the “völkisch” antagonism as one of the basic forms of the political (Schmitt, 1933a, p. 20). The enemy is no longer described as “something strange and other,” but rather as something “strange and by nature different (Andersgeartet).” Simultaneously, the friend now transforms into someone “by nature similar (Gleichgeartet)” (Schmitt, 1933a, p. 8).

Schmitt also offers a systematic defense of the Nazi race laws. In 1935, Schmitt praises the new racial legislation as “the first German constitution of freedom in centuries.” Emphasizing that for the “first time in several centuries the concepts of our constitution have again become German,” Schmitt celebrates the fact that “German blood and German honor are the main concepts of our law” (Schmitt, 1935b, pp. 1133–1135). In another text that analyzes the Nurnberg laws in greater detail, Schmitt emphasizes that unlike Soviet legislation that aims to destroy European traditions, the Nazi race-laws aim to save European traditions from Entartung, from degeneration: “Areas of life (Lebensordnungen), which are common to all European peoples, institutions like marriage, family and home (Haus) should once again become pure, healthy and genuine (echt).” Legitimizing the Nazi race-laws as “defensive,” Schmitt writes: “We, in distinction to Bolshevism, fall in line with the circle of European peoples and their ancient Aryan way of life (altarischen Lebensordnung) – marriage, family, possession and heritage” (Schmitt, 1936c, p. 207).

These very same ideas are also expressed in the infamous anti-Semitic conference on “Jewishness in legal science,” which Schmitt organizes in 1936 (see Rüthers, 1989, pp. 125–142; Mehring, 2009, pp. 372–378). Schmitt opens the event by formulating three principles. The first comes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “By fighting off the Jew, I struggle for the work of the lord.” The second comes from Hans Frank: “The racial legislation is finished; but it remains the task of our relentless education to uphold the awareness of the Jewish danger among the German people.” The third principle is derived from the Nazi martyr Theodor von der Pfordten: “For decades you have watched idly and indifferently how the flood of non-German endeavors loosened the structure of the state and penetrated our science with its deadly poison.” Through these principles, the 1936 conference aims to “free the German Geist from all Jewish falsifications” and to openly engage the “spiritual power of Jewishness”; to disclose the “Jewish infection (Infektion)” by means of “science.” This Jewish infection is something completely different from the influence of “Aryan peoples,” like the English, Italians or the French. The Jew is not only a non-Aryan, but an Artfremder in a specific way. Schmitt announces: “We thank the Rassenlehre for the recognition of the difference between Jews and other peoples” (Schmitt, 1936b, pp. 14–16).

In his closing words, Schmitt praises the “German protectors of the law and teachers of law,” who have now made their own contribution to “racial science (Rassenkunde)” (Schmitt, 1936b, p. 28). He pleads for the creation of a Jewish bibliography and demands the removal of all Jewish texts from German libraries. If a Jewish author is to be quoted, then this must be done with the ancillary note “Jewish,” since “already the mere mentioning of the word ‘Jewish’ will cause the outburst of a healing exorcism” (Schmitt, 1936b, pp. 29–31). The emblematic target of Schmitt’s racist polemics is Friedrich Julius Stahl, whom Schmitt always refers to with his Jewish name “Jolson.” During the 1936 conference Schmitt declares:

When it is again and again emphasized that this man was “subjectively honest,” it may be so, but I must add, that I cannot see into the soul of this Jew and that, in general, we do not have access to the most inner essence of the Jews. We can only recognize their disproportion (Missverhältnis) to our kind (Art). Who has understood this truth, also knows, what race is (Schmitt, 1936b, p. 32).

For Schmitt, Stahl exemplifies the Jewish “world power,” which is the “deadly enemy of all true productivity amongst all other peoples.” Ultimately, the battle against the Jews is the battle for “the genuine own type (Art), the undamaged purity of our German people” (Schmitt, 1936b, pp. 33–34).

All of the above shows that nothing is more absurd than to argue that “Schmitt never succumbed to a belief in the biological racism of the National Socialist ideology” and that Schmitt’s references to race would be simply “irrelevant to the content of his work and artificially placed within the text” (Bendersky, 1983, p. 208; similarly in Koenen, 1995, p. 728). Schmitt’s racist arguments in the 1936 conference should also not be interpreted as a unique antisemitic exception in his Nazi-thought – something that even critical commentators accept (Hofmann, 2002, p. xliv). Rather, one must recognize that Schmitt’s concrete-order thought as such is, by definition, a racist way of thinking. What are often highlighted as Schmitt’s most explicitly problematic texts – his 1936 antisemitic conference, legitimation of Nuremberg race laws or the justification of the Röhm Purge – are not exceptions but rather fully harmonious applications of Schmitt’s concrete-order thought.

In Conclusion: Schmitt’s Nazi Engagement and the Role of Racism

This article has examined how Schmitt transformed from an authoritarian fascist into a racist Nazi with the German Revolution of 1933 – a transformation whose radically antisemitic motivations I have traced through a close reading of Schmitt’s diary-entries. Schmitt saw the Nazi revolution as a profound historical rupture that made it possible to develop a political–legal language cleansed from nineteenth century liberalism. It was shown that Schmitt’s Nazi writings from 1933 to 1936 legitimized the Nazi revolution in terms of three major conceptual breaks; first, as a shift from the state to the movement; second, as the transformation of sovereignty to Führertum, and third, as the conversion of homogeneity to racial homogeneity.

In order to illustrate how race penetrates into Schmitt’s thinking in 1933, let me turn shortly to the terminology developed by Michel Foucault, whose notion of “biopower” takes its bearings precisely from the kind of inner transformation of sovereign power that Schmitt diagnoses in his Nazi thought. To paraphrase Foucault, it is in 1933 that Schmitt introduces a new “biological extrapolation” (or perhaps a reduction) of his own friend/enemy distinction, based on the racist tendency toward “the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race,” which consequently leads to the “political death,” “expulsion” and “rejection” of the Jews (Foucault, 2003, pp. 256–257). Indeed, what Foucault (2008, pp. 259–260) terms the paroxysmal point of conversion of “sovereign power” and “biopower” in the Nazi state – their “demonic combination” (Foucault, 2000, p. 311) – seems for Schmitt to be the only solution that made it possible to overcome the disarray of Weimar-era liberalism. To paraphrase Foucault (1978, p. 89) once more, with the development of Führertum and Artgleichheit as the basic principles of Nazi-ideology, Schmitt believed the time had finally come to “cut off the head of the king” – that it had now become necessary and possible to theorize a politics beyond representative modes of sovereignty and the state.6

However, because Schmitt’s career in the Nazi party was cut off in 1936, Schmitt’s conceptual revolutions remain tentative. It is in this sense that Schmitt deplores the failure of the Nazi revolution in his Glossarium:

The movement was a failure (Mischkrug). Its meaning was de-confusion (Entmischung). It did not come to this, because the conceptual approach was too miserable; it was already completely paralyzed by the unresolved mixture of the concepts of race and people and community (Schmitt, 2015, p. 193).

While Schmitt was a leading Nazi legal thinker until his downfall and although his conceptual definitions enjoyed broad support (Stolleis, 2002, pp. 323–325, 346), they never became an official party doctrine. Hitler’s hatred of intellectuals and his particular distaste for lawyers is a broadly accepted fact that not only led to the downfall of particular lawyers like Schmitt, but eventually to the gradual destruction of all legal theory as the growing radicalization of the regime revealed that its bombastic words were nothing more than conceptual facades for barbarity and terror (Rüthers, 1989, pp. 21–22; Stolleis, 1994, pp. 19–21, 32–34, 91, 119, 141–144, 151, 156, 160, 2002, pp. 316–350; Chapoutot, 2018, p. 94; cf. Meierhenrich, 2018, pp. 103, 150–151). Beyond testifying Schmitt’s fierce support for the “Nazi Revolution,” which has been downplayed in the commentary literature, his Nazi-era writings also serve as a commentary concerning the development of the regime (cf. Stolleis, 2002, pp. 318–319).

As Mehring (2009, p. 380) emphasizes, after Schmitt’s ousting in late 1936, his passionate attempts to “give his own meaning” to Nazism lose much of their revolutionary élan. Already in 1936 Schmitt criticizes the “younger generation of legal science” that aims to “radically negate all general concepts (tutti concetti generali),” which now appears as an “exaggeration” (una esgerazione) to him (1956, p. 18). This testifies to the fact that by 1936 Schmitt begins to sense that Nazism will lead to a permanent state of exception in which legal science threatens to become superfluous as such. According to Mehring (2009, p. 355) Schmitt would have realized this as early as late 1934. However, since Schmitt (2000, p. 54) himself openly admitted that he continued to believe that it was possible to give his own meaning to Nazism until 1936, I see no reason why we should not take this statement seriously (cf. Stolleis, 2002, p. 255). It is in 1936 that Schmitt begins criticizing the “younger generation of legal science” and starts using the example of the Soviet Union as a warning example of full-blown totalitarianism that subdues all power to the party. In this extremely limited sense, one can say that during 1936 Schmitt began “salvaging statist elements for the new order … while other younger and more radical Nazi jurists sought to subordinate everything to the movement” (Müller, 2003, p. 38).

However, although the racially loaded terminology falls to the sidelines of Schmitt’s publications after 1936, it never disappears. Schmitt defends his own interpretation of the Nuremberg laws in 1939 (Schmitt, 1939, pp. 305–306) and utilizes Blut und Boden imagery in his Grossraum-theory (Minca and Rowan, 2016, pp. 153–186). It is only in 1942/1943, when German victory on the Eastern front is no longer likely, that Schmitt distances himself from Nazism more clearly (cf. Meier, 1994, p. 255; Gross, 2000, p. 296; Mehring, 2009, p. 436; Kervégan, 2011, pp. 11, 43, 231). And yet this self-distancing is half-hearted. Even in 1954 Schmitt defends his 1936 antisemitic conference by stating that in this event he aimed, “through exact legal historical work, to examine the share of the Jewry to the history concerning the criminality of last centuries (Geschichte des Verbrechens der letzen Jahrhunderte)” (Mohler, 1995, p. 166). Similarly, when reading Hasso Hofmann’s study on his own thinking, Schmitt underlines the adjective “antisemitic” and adds to the margins his own word, “Judenkritisch” (“critical of the Jews”) (Hofmann, 2002, p. xxviii). Instead of denouncing Nazism and racism, Schmitt’s postwar works remain deeply antisemitic and offer unrepentant self-mythologizations. Readers of Schmitt today must see through these apologetic strategies by which Schmitt sought to construct non-existent continuities to his own thinking by describing it as consistently “statist” and “Catholic” (see Suuronen, 2019). In reality it was with unreserved willingness and revolutionary fervor that Schmitt legitimized the subjugation of the German state to the hands of the Nazi party and its leader Adolf Hitler.

Notes

  1. 1.

    All translations are mine.

  2. 2.

    However, Schmitt never uses the concept of “totalitarianism” affirmatively (Mohler, 1995, pp. 18, 32–33, 417–419; Schmitt, 1958, p. 366 n. 3). This is often overlooked: Chappel (2011).

  3. 3.

    However, as Schmitt’s (1933a, p. 10) critique of Greek “agonism” makes clear, his Nazi writings do not endorse full-scale ancient nostalgia.

  4. 4.

    This passage is misquoted by Koenen (1995, pp. 433–435), who uses it to interpret Schmitt as an advocate of Christian Reichstheologie. In reality, there is nothing Christian in Schmitt’s Nazi-writings (contra Meier, 1994, 2013; Koenen, 1995; Chapoutot, 2018, p. 115). On Schmitt’s postwar reinvention of himself as a “Catholic,” see Suuronen (2019).

  5. 5.

    That Schmitt indeed understood the notion of Artgleicheit in the racial-biological sense is not only testified by all his Nazi writings, but also by a letter included into the correspondence with Ernst Jünger, in which Schmitt notes that word formations, including the word Art, “haunt me since the times of Hitler. Art-Gleich; Art-ungleich; etc. Rasse” (Jünger and Schmitt, 2012, pp. 451–452).

  6. 6.

    However, Schmitt is sometimes connected to Foucault’s biopower too directly (e.g. Minca and Rowan, 2016). While Foucault (2009, pp. 184, 193, 215) discovers the roots of modern biopolitics from the Judeo-Christian pastorate, calling it the “prelude,” “basis” and “background” of modern state-racism, Schmitt rejects this pastoral imagery. Unlike Schmitt, who understood Nazism as a movement, Foucault analyses Nazism as a form of “state-racism” (Foucault, 2003, pp. 82–83, 89, 239–263). Only later does Foucault realize that instead of expanding the state, totalitarian governments actually develop a new “governmentality of the party” (Foucault, 2008, pp. 190–191).