Carl Schmitt > Quotes

“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
― Carl Schmitt

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”
― Carl Schmitt

“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”
― Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”
― Carl Schmitt

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
― Carl Schmitt

“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief. Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self-determination, and education: moral perfection. In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress. To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain - they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.”
― Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form

“The transformation of the community into an administrative state responsible for total social welfare leads to a paternal totality without a house-father when it fails to find any archy or cracy that is more than a mere nomos of distribution and production.
I consider it to be a utopia when Friedrich Engels promises that one day all power of men over men will cease, that there will be only production and consumption with no problems, and that "things will govern themselves." This things-governing-themselves will make every archy and cracy super­fluous , and demonstrate that mankind at last has found its formula, just as, according to Dostoyevsky, the bees found their formula in the beehive, because animal s, too, have their nomos. Most of those who swarm around a nomos basileus fail to notice that, in reality, they propagate just such a formula.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum

“The most brazen humiliation ever inflicted upon God and mankind, justifying all the curses of the synagogue, is to be found in the 'sive' of the formula Deus sive Natura.”
― Carl Schmitt, Glossarium : Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947 - 1951

“The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant.”
― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

“In the nomadic age, the shepherd (nomeus) was the typical symbol of rule. In Statesman, Plato distinguishes the shepherd from the statesman: the nemein of the shepherd is concerned with the nourishment (trophe) of his flock, and the shepherd is a kind of god in relation to the animals he herds. In contrast, the statesman does not stand as far above the people he governs as does the shepherd above his flock. Thus, the image of the shepherd is applicable only when an illustration of the relation of a god to human beings is intended. The statesman does not nourish; he only tends to, provides for, looks after, takes care of. The apparently materialistic viewpoint of nourishment is based more on the concept of a god than on the political viewpoint separated from him, which leads to secularization. The separation of economics and politics, of private and public law, still today considered by noted teachers of law to be an essential guarantee of freedom.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum

“How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent?”
― Carl Schmitt

“Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity . . . "Humanity" thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as "human being" thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby "asymmetrical.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Legality has become a poisonous dagger, with which one party stabs the other in the back.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“All genuine political theories presuppose man to be ‘evil’.”
― Carl Schmitt

“The remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis [is] that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Norms are valid only for normal situations.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity.”
― Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form

“If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“An historical truth is only true once”
― Carl Schmitt

“Modern technology easily becomes the servant of this or that want and need. In modern economy, a completely irrational consumption conforms to a totally rationalized production. A marvelously rational mechanism serves one or another demand, always with the same earnestness and precision, be it for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever. Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can "satisfy." In the modern metropolis, it has erected an edifice wherein everything runs strictly according to plan— everything is calculable. A devout Catholic, precisely following his own rationality, might well be horrified by this system of irresistible materiality.”
― Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form

“In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“All that can justify killing is 'an existential threat to one’s own way of life. . . . To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.”
― Carl Schmitt

“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Every fundamental order is a spatial order. One speaks of the constitution of a country or a piece of earth as of its fundamental order, its Nomos. Now, the true, actual fundamental order touches in its essential core upon particular spatial boundaries and separations, upon particular quantities and a particular partition of the earth. At the beginning of every great epoch there stands a great land-appropriation. In particular, every significant alteration and every resituating of the image of the earth is bound up with world-political alterations and with a new division of the earth, with a new land-appropriation.”
― Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation