The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

The writings of Carl Schmitt form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original, and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought. In the English-speaking world, he is terra incognita, a name associated with Nazism, the author of a largely untranslated oeuvre forming no recognizable system, coming to us from a disturbing place and time in the form of fragments.

The Enemy is a comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of all of Schmitt’s major works—his books, articles and pamphlets from 1919 to 1950—presented in an arresting narrative form. The revelation of his work is that, unlike mainstream Nazi ideology, Schmitt makes a strong philosophical claim for the necessity of confrontational politics within a democratic system; a claim that has resonance in today’s hegemony of consensual politics.