ABSTRACT
Focusing on the notion of nomos, the purpose of this chapter is to explore a reading of Hannah Arendt, which ‘reads’ Carl Schmitt in relation to law, space, politics and community, and to do so in a feminist ‘key’. Nomos, the Greek word for law, is a term that both thinkers use, emphasising its spatial meaning while retrieving an originary sense of law. In Schmitt (2003: 78), nomos , as the ordo ordinans , the ‘inner measure of an original, constitutive act of spatial ordering’ that is ‘essential to every historical epoch’, provides the central concept of a theory of law as ‘concrete order’ that he develops in his inter-and postwar writings and most famously in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeum. In Arendt, the term appears in a number of her works, most notably The Human Condition, Was ist Politik? 2 and On Revolution, and thematises one possible way, rather than the archetypal way, of thinking about law: namely law in its spatial dimension, as opposed to law as command or law as bond.
