Abstract

The author argues that the recent interest that Carl Schmitt’s works has been focused on two issues. One of them has been the Schmittian realist and often bitterly skeptical account of the twentieth-century development of international law and international relations that exposes the concealed or even unconscious agendas of American idealism and the type of normative theorizing represented by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. The second is the logical structure given by Schmitt to that realist account. The fact that Schmitt has made a centre if his attention the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion has elicited a variety of reactions which testify to the power of his in-depth understanding of the problems of the international relations. Key words INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, SCHMITT.