Si la teología política es uno de los temas centrales que recorre la obra de Carl Schmitt, el problema de los valores —a pesar de los pocos trabajos dedicados al tema— no deja de tener importancia en relación con las reflexiones de este autor. El propósito de este trabajo es, precisamente, mostrar el vínculo existente entre uno y otro, entre la teología política schmittiana y su reflexión en torno a los valores. Para ello, nos proponemos recorrer, por una parte, sus (...) textos tempranos, que nos permitirán dilucidar la relación entre teología y política en la modernidad y, por otro lado, la crítica a la filosofía de los valores elaborada en La tiranía de los valores. A partir de ese recorrido bifurcado intentaremos trazar la continuidad existente entre la teología política y los valores, que, a nuestro juicio, puede rastrearse ya en El valor del Estado y el significado del individuo. (shrink)

The jurist Carl Schmitt’s views on the total state and race need further clarification as long as the English language edition of his Concept of the Political presents an apologist commentary. The questions are to which degree Schmitt’s works written during the Weimar Republic are tainted with totalitarian and racist ideas and whether Schmitt gave up fundamental principles during Nationalist Socialism. This thesis examines writings by Schmitt between 1913 and 1940 to reconstruct a coherent anti-individualistic legal viewpoint and its arguments. (...) The first part finds that Schmitt undermines the individual rights of the Weimar Constitution. The second part discusses Schmitt’s role as a theorist of totalitarianism. The third part considers Schmitt’s anti-Semitism as underlying motivation for his political theory and analyzes his racism in light of his anti-individualism. Schmitt frequently argues by invoking necessity of history and by justifying some political action as necessary. These arguments should be rejected. (shrink)

This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt's concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt's anti-individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt's framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the condition which makes possible the (...) political. Acknowledging the previous criticisms of Schmitt raised by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young, this article takes a different path by pointing to certain historically tacit assumptions in 1927 Germany which Schmitt took for granted, but which are not suitable for a contemporary political theory. The demonstration is done first by showing how the structure of interruption functions in the works of Schmitt, then showing how he conceives of the individual as a possible interruption of the political in history, and then placing this structure of interruption in the historical context of Schmitt's writing. (shrink)