The Oxford handbook of Carl Schmitt

In: Oxford handbooks online

In: Political science

Abstract

Providing a detailed introduction to the thought of Carl Schmitt that incorporates insights from law, the social sciences, and the humanities, this Oxford handbook is also an intervention in its own right, seeking to decenter the study of this most hyped thinker of the twentieth century by advancing two interconnected arguments: that the motif of order is a powerful yet insufficiently utilised heuristic device for making sense of Schmitt's thought, and that a trinity of thought is discernable in Schmitt's writings comprising his political, legal, and cultural thought. We establish intellectual connections across these three bodies of thought and trace the mutually constitutive relationships that exist among them. Schmitt's thought, we find, amounted to a network of ideas about the sources of social order, the cement of society.