States of Emergency - Centre for Policy Alternatives

Carl
 Schmitt:
 Sovereign
 Dictatorship,
 the
 Concept
 of
 the
Political
and
the
State
of
Permanent
Exception
As is well‐known, Carl Schmitt was the most prominent legal and
political philosopher to have lent intellectual support to the Nazi
regime. As will become clear presently, Schmitt’s ideas gave a
theoretical basis for Nazism’s notions of absolute power, its
rejection of the forms and values of liberal democracy, and for the
re‐interpretation of an older concept of German political
philosophy on the principle of national leadership
(Fuehrerprinzip) to Lit with the Nazi worldview. Stripped of his
Nazi baggage, however, it has become clear to liberal and positivist
scholarship in legal and political theory that Schmitt poses some
profound questions that require answers rather than dismissals.
His concept of the political holds that liberal democratic
assumptions about what is the normal condition of human life,
including critically the assumption that political power is or can at
all times be legally or normatively regulated, are false.
Furthermore, his theory of the exception and emergency powers
envisages a state of permanent crisis, which is a refutation of the
liberal assumption of separation between emergency and
normalcy. Finally, his idea of sovereignty, closely related to his
theory of the exception, contemplates an absolutist dictatorship as
the only realistic institution within a polity during a time of
(permanent) crisis.
The relevance of Schmitt to understanding the Sri Lankan
experience with states of emergency also needs open justiLication.
It would be a gross overstatement and certainly risk a failure of
analytical objectivity to draw too close a parallel between the Nazi
regime and the Sri Lankan State. Nevertheless, it can be
demonstrated that the Schmittian logic can be applied to the
behaviour of the Sri Lankan State in various meaningful ways that
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