Carl Schmitt Archives - Public Seminar

Columnists

Let’s Call the Republican Party by its Proper Name—Fascist

A word that gets the side eye from main stream commentators should be part of the conversation

May 25, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ Journalist John Harwood had a piece in CNN Sunday reflecting on an essay published in 2012 that accurately predicted the coming of today’s GOP. “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem” was written by Thomas Mann, who was at the time with the Brookings Institution, along with Norm ...

Let’s Call the Republican Party by its Proper Name—Fascist

East Asia & Pacific

China’s Return to Global Dominance

What it means for America — and for the future of democracy around the world

April 1, 2021 • by John Keane

_____ When future historians look back on our discordant times, they will surely report an epochal shift of global importance: a transition from failed attempts to restore America’s greatness to China’s return, after two centuries of subjugation, to world pre-eminence. The writing is already on the wall, but strange prejudices, bitter ...

Democracy

“Carl Schmitt’s Comeback?”

Understanding Trump and global authoritarianism

February 17, 2021 • by William E. Scheuerman

As the saying goes: “that was then, but this is now.” I had little inkling that Schmitt would soon become pertinent to present-day political developments. With the dramatic worldwide emergence of authoritarian populism, Schmitt’s thinking seems disturbingly relevant. As the Cambridge jurist Lars Vinx has correctly noted, Schmitt’s significance today ...

Democracy

Don’t Personalize Donald Trump’s Response to Covid-19

It’s classic neoliberalism — with a Schmittian face

April 24, 2020 • by William E. Scheuerman

“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.” President Donald Trump, April 13, 2020 Carl Schmitt, Germany’s most influential authoritarian jurist, has long played a major role in political and legal debates around the world. Because of ...

Don’t Personalize Donald Trump’s Response to Covid-19

Feature

The Demons of Neoliberalism

Adam Kotsko’s Political Theology

September 11, 2019 • by Luke Mergner

This critique was left tantalizingly underdeveloped in The Prince of this World. How could more freedom make us less free? Neoliberalism's Demons answers this question by reading neoliberalism through the lens of political theology. The result is not a new history of neoliberalism but a refocusing on how such an economic system makes ...

Feature

Civil War by Other Means

Or: Somewhere, Carl Schmitt is Smiling

May 21, 2019 • by Laura Nelson

In a piece I wrote for Public Seminar in September 2015, I argued that Donald Trump’s campaign augured a turn to the kind of “Friends/Enemies” political imaginary cooked up by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was unimpressed by the niceties of liberal democratic practice, and saw politics as a Kampf between irreconcilable parties, where ...

Feature

Emergency Powers and Trump: Lessons from Carl Schmitt

Why Trump’s executive actions might be legal yet unconstitutional

March 22, 2019 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

The threat to the constitution that Donald Trump poses was apparent as soon as he entered the presidential primary race. Since his election, Trump has only confirmed that threat: he has abused emergency powers and other executive privileges to advance his private interests and illiberal, antidemocratic values. Despite incessantly broadcasting ...

Emergency Powers and Trump: Lessons from Carl Schmitt

Feature

terra nullius, Jules Ferry Calais

Readings and Exhibits to mark the First Anniversary of the Destruction of the Jungle

November 1, 2017 • by Siraj Izhar

There are spaces outside memory that belong to no-one or to nature, and there are places cast out of memory and returned to nature or to no-one. Across them there is an order, an order that brings together in time the ground, the territory, the space, the place, the land, ...

Feature

Adorno’s Uncanny Analysis of Trump’s Authoritarian Personality

Part 2

October 5, 2017 • by Jay M. Bernstein

During the election, Trump bragged that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” (January 23, 2016). In claiming this, Trump understood something about the social-psychological bond between his core supporters and himself that his critics have noted but largely ...

Feature

Fortress America

The state of exception and Trump’s politics of forgetting

January 31, 2017 • by Siobhan Kattago

As Timothy Snyder reminds us, Trump’s policy to "Make America Great Again" harkens back not only to the protectionism of the 1930s, but also to America First, the conservative group in the 1940s who opposed US intervention into World War II. Trump’s promise to make America great again is one of ...