131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Introduction:
Carl Schmitt's Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context
Ellen Kennedy
Le principe détermine les formes;les formes révélert le principe.
—Guizot (1851)
In der Tat steht und fällt eine Institution nicht mit ihrer Ideologie, sondern mit dem, was Carl Schmitt selbst
als ihre Vitalität, Substanz, Kraft bezeichnet.
—Rudolf Smend (1928).
The most common reading of Carl Schmitt's Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen
Parlamentarismus starts from the assumption that it was a text "welcome to the broad
spectrum of antiparliamentary prejudices in the Weimar Republic," which by its method as
much as its content pushed the polarities of the Weimar constitution further apart. According
to this interpretation, Schmitt was "the theorist for the resentments of a generation" whose
critique of parliamentary democracy undermined the foundations of the first German republic
by calling into question one of its central political institutions, the Reichstag. Little has
changed in that view since 1923. Sixty years later, Schmitt's Parlamentarismus was
described as a text of ''terrible relevance," one to be read as a warning about "where one ends
up if the temptations of antiparliamentarism are once given in to." There is only one
alternative to parliamentarism, Christian Graf von Krockow wrote in
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