ABSTRACT

Carl Schmitt accepts a number of prestigious appointments within the Nazi legal establishment which includes the Presidency of the Union of national-socialist jurists, the foremost association of Nazi lawyers and a professorship of jurisprudence at the University of Berlin. Schmitt's efforts to provide a legitimating theoretical gloss for the regime's actions, to keep pace with the brutal extension of its reach, would soon be carried from the domestic realm and into the realm of imperial expansion. This chapter focuses on the transformations in Schmitt's conception of the people and the changing relation he charted between population, space and sovereignty, because it is here that he explicitly linked the legitimacy of the Nazi state to the, literal, 'life of the people'. Schmitt's theoretical development and political entanglement brings the spatial dimension of 'concrete order' into communication with biopolitical dimension of his new Volkish understanding of the German people.