Constitutionalism as practice

Abstract

When writing 'Der Begriff des Politischen' for the Heidelberg-based journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (1927), Carl Schmitt could seemingly not resist a polemical sneer at his intellectual opponents. His starting point was an infuriation with liberalism. Schmitt contended that while it claimed to rest on a set of ideas and institutions that would guarantee apolitical social and economic progress, liberalism was in reality deeply political. For liberals, distance to politics was fundamentally a laudable condition, because, in their minds, it reeked of arbitrariness and unchecked power: politics needed to be reined in, framed, and the best tool for this caging in of politics was the rule of law based on a constitution. This, for Schmitt, was merely a scapegoat, a diversion from the claims to power inherent in liberal ideology. In 1932, Schmitt turned the article and a 1928 lecture into a short but influential book and lashed out in footnote number two that those who claimed to be apolitical were even more political than anybody else, because they tried to hide their political convictions.