Abstract

Carl Schmitt and the Problem of the Realization of Law 1. The famous pithy aphorisms that Carl Schmitt used to open his major works - 'the sovereign is he who decides on the exception', 'the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political', etc. - have become a part of the common discourse of contemporary scholarship on politics and the law. The theoretical framework that animates these slogans, however, has remained somewhat opaque. It has often been argued that there is no such framework, that Schmitt was a situational thinker whose works are best understood as interventions in concrete political debates that do not add up to a grand theoretical vision.