ABSTRACT
It is pertinent to focus on institutions in a part of the book that discusses Carl Schmitt’s heterodox international thought. In fact, Schmitt’s major concern was precisely to search for the concrete meaning of institutions, while preventing a divorce between law and political science. On the one hand, as the jurist that he still represents himself to be at the beginning of Der Nomos der Erde, he unequivocally rejects the naively Machiavellian view of politics and its inability to grasp the cultural and juridical dimensions of order. Schmitt’s thought, on the contrary, revolves around the problem of reconciling form and decision, effective and juridical power, in an attempt to distinguish what power always is – the pure and simple ability to impose one’s will on others – from what it can become through law – a ‘restraining force’, as Schmitt defines it, borrowing the Pauline concept of katechon; namely, an instance able to channel the indomitable lack of restraint of the political into juridical form (Schmitt 1984, 1988).
