When I penned this volume’s first edition over twenty years ago, the Carl
Schmitt “bug” had just hit the Anglophone intellectual world, with many
political theorists, jurists, and others suddenly paying close attention to
Schmitt’s ideas and their possible significance. In part by highlighting the
ways in which Schmitt’s theoretical agenda opened the door to his disastrous
flirtation with National Socialism, I hoped to push back against the emerging
Schmitt renaissance.
By any standard, those efforts were a failure: Schmitt is now a household
name in the English-speaking academic world, and his work is more popular
than ever. Elsewhere as well (e.g., China) Schmitt has since garnered a significant
collection of disciples. The worldwide rise of right-wing populism
means that he is very much in the news, with many far-right intellectuals
energetically advising would-be rightist demagogues about Schmitt’s lessons.
Why then this second edition?