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Carl Schmitt's concepts of war: a categorical failure
Carl Schmitt’s conceptual history of war is routinely invoked to comprehend the contemporary mutations in the concept and practice of war. This literature has passively relied on Schmitt’s interpretation of the nomos of the Ius Publicum Europaeum, which traced the transition from early modern ‘non-discriminatory war’ to the US–American promotion of discriminatory warfare as a new category in liberal international law . This chapter provides a critical reconstruction of Schmitt’s antiliberal narrative of war and argues that his polemical mode of concept formation led to a defective and, ultimately, ideological counterhistory of absolutist warfare, designed to denigrate liberalism’s wars as total while remaining silent on Nazi Germany’s de facto total wars. The historical critique is supplemented by an interrogation of his theoretical presuppositions: decisionism, the concept of the political, and concrete order thinking. It shows that Schmitt’s history of warfare is not only empirically defective but also theoretically unsecured by a succession of arbitrarily deployed and hyperabstract theoretical registers. At the center of Schmitt’s work yawns a huge lacuna: the absence of social relations as a category of analysis.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Publisher
Oxford University PressPage range
367-400Pages
828.0Book title
The Oxford handbook of Carl SchmittPlace of publication
OxfordISBN
9780199916931Series
Oxford HandbooksDepartment affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
Oliver Simons, Jens MeierhenrichLegacy Posted Date
2014-06-02First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2016-03-22Usage metrics
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