Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The "Jewish Question," the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory

by Raphael Gross, Joel Golb (Translator), Peter C. Caldwell (Foreword by)

Overview

German jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) significantly influenced Western political and legal thinking in the last century, yet his life and work have also stirred considerable controversy. While his ideas have been used and diffused by prominent philosophers on both the left and the right, such as Jürgen Habermas and Leo Strauss, his Nazi-era past, especially his active efforts to remove Jewish influence from German law, has cast a cloud over his life and oeuvre. Still, his many supporters have generally been successful in claiming that Schmitt's was an "antisemitism of opportunity," a temporary affectation to gain favor with the Nazis. 
     In Carl Schmitt and the Jews, available in English for the first time, historian Raphael Gross vigorously repudiates this "opportunism thesis." Through a reading of Schmitt's corpus, some of which became available only after his death, Gross highlights the importance of the "Jewish Question" on the breadth of Schmitt's work. According to Gross, Schmitt's antisemitism was at the core of his work—before, during, and after the Nazi era. His influential polarities of "friend and foe," "law and nomos," "behemoth and Leviathan," and "ketechon and Antichrist" emerge from a conceptual template in which "the Jew" is defined as adversary, undermining the Christian order with secularization. The presence of this template at the heart of Schmitt's work, Gross contends, calls for a major reassessment of Schmitt's role within contemporary cultural and legal theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299222406
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	07/02/2007
Series:	George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas
Edition description:	1
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Raphael Gross is director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, director of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, and reader in history at the University of Sussex. Joel Golb is an independent editor and literary historian. He lives in Berlin.

Editorial Reviews

No one interested in Carl Schmitt can afford to ignore Raphael Gross’s powerful discussion of how intimately linked were Schmitt’s anti-Semitism and his political theory. Gross persuasively argues that Schmitt’s post 1933 writings on the “Jewish” origins of universalism and positivism had a central importance for both Nazi aims and his work as a whole. A new Afterword demonstrates that Gross’s work has elicited a broad discussion and inserts his own moral and intellectual voice into contemporary debates.”—Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University


“Gross’s study not only documents, analyses, and highlights Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, but it also demonstrates in great and nuanced detail how his anti-Jewish attitudes permeated the very structure and grounds of Schmitt’s thought and categories.”—Steven E. Aschheim, Hebrew University, Jerusalem


 “By removing Carl Schmitt into the nineteenth century discourse on Emancipation, Raphael Gross lays open the very meaning of the notorious legal scholar’s perception of the Jews. A brilliant undertaking in the history of ideas.”—Dan Diner, Leipzig University and Hebrew University, Jerusalem

“Gross deserves credit for disclosing new documentation, providing certain important insights, and demanding that scholars seriously confront and explain Schmitt’s anti-Semitism.”—Joseph W. Bendersky, Journal of Central European History

From the Publisher