ABSTRACT
The attempt to approach Carl Schmitt's thought faces complex hermeneutical challenges. These hermeneutic obstacles are exacerbated by the fact that during the post-war period Schmitt often revisited his earlier work from the 1920s and 1930s, reinterpreting and producing commentary on his own corpus and by the persistent interpretative dissensus in the secondary literature. This chapter examines some troubling issues that must be navigated in traversing the difficult terrain between the 'textual and the biographical planes' of Schmitt's work. In particular, it discusses the two areas of consistent contention in debates around his work: his relationship to the Nazi state and the role of anti-Semitism in his thought. Jan-Werner Muller's study seeks to dredge Schmitt's influence on post-war European thought and focuses on the area that Gopal Balakrishnan's study leaves out. The concept of the political and constitutional theory issues a steady stream of interventionist articles that comments on topical affairs.
