German political and legal theorist — Nazi party member and 'Crown Jurist of the Third Reich' — whose concepts of the exception, sovereignty, and the political have been widely influential across the ideological spectrum.
The political as friend-enemy distinction: Schmitt's Concept of the Political (1932) defines the specifically political as the distinction between friend and enemy. Every political community constitutes itself by naming its enemy. This is not metaphorical — it implies the possibility of existential conflict. The related concepts: Sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) — the situation where normal legal rules are suspended. This 'decisionist' account of sovereignty (the sovereign stands outside the law while guaranteeing it) influenced Agamben's biopolitics, Derrida's deconstruction of sovereignty, and — on the right — all authoritarian theories of executive prerogative. Schmitt was a virulent antisemite; the Nazis eventually purged him for internal factional reasons.
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