ABSTRACT
This chapter interprets Carl Schmitt’s interwar political thought as a form of neo-authoritarian populism. The interpretation proceeds in three steps. First, we review some of the works Schmitt wrote before and during the First World War to delineate his intellectual position at the onset of Weimar’s democratic experience. Second, we reconstruct his neo-authoritarian vision of modern politics based on an analysis of two works from the early 1920s, Dictatorship and Political Theology, paying close attention to his explicit and implicit demarcation from Max Weber’s and Hans Kelsen’s ideas. Third, we examine Schmitt’s conception of the people as the immanent source of political authority and legitimacy in the modern age, underscoring both its reliance on a vague notion of substantial homogeneity and its subordination to his neo-authoritarian decisionism. Throughout the analysis, we will also show how Schmitt uses a variety of other thinkers, from diverse political leanings and philosophical persuasions, as masks to convey his own ideas in a peculiarly underhanded way. We conclude that Schmitt’s neo-authoritarian populism fails to do justice to the singularity and complexity of modern democracy.
