Conclusions
The conclusion of the World War saw the defeat of the German Reich as both a political actor and a political concept. Schmitt’s predicted �dawn of the concept of the Reich’ never quite tracked reality, even if the territorially sovereign state seemed to be on the retreat.
And yet, over a decade after the war, Schmitt would return back to a component element of his defence of the concept, the essay in which he declared the state â€?a concrete concept bound to a historical epoch’, choosing to republish it as part of a collection of essays on constitutional law. Appended to the end of the essay, Schmitt included an editorial afterword, claiming that his strategy of historicising the concept of the state was in fact a means of shielding it from an ideological attack on three fronts. â€?One cannot forget the reality of our situation’, Schmitt reminds his readers, as â€?LiberalÂwestern democracy, Marxist communism, as well as. the Hitler-Regime sought to debase the state into an instrument or a weapon’[1517] In Schmitt’s retroactive justification, the precious concept of the state had to be shielded from being turned into an â€?ideological matter’ and historicising its origins was the only way to ensure its survival through such a calamitous period. However, Schmitt intentionally omits his prediction of what would follow the â€?overcoming’ of the state: the establishment of a supposedly higher and superior concept, the German Reich. This concept too was historical and spatially bound, designed to reflect the National Socialists’ expansionist and bellicose foreign policy.This chapter has attempted to show the double historicity of Schmitt’s arguÂmentation: not only did Schmitt view political concepts such as the state as conditioned by their origins and the concrete polemical function they served, but Schmitt’s own work must be read as a response to the historical events around him.
Indeed, over the next twenty years of his life, Schmitt would elabÂorate an historical approach to the studying political concepts, appropriating the language of the English philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood:Every historical deed and action of man is an answer to a question, which is raised from history. Every human word is an answer. Every answer receives its meaning through the question which it answers and remains unintelligible for those who don’t know the question. The meaning of the question in turn lies in the concrete situation in which it raises itself.[1518]
To understand the meaning of Schmitt’s work, it would therefore seem that an engagement with its history, its concrete situation, is unavoidable - a lesson that much Schmitt scholarship would do well to observe.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Edward Cavanagh, Eduardo Jones Corredera, Duncan Kelly, Lars Vinx, and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. This paper has also benefitted from feedback at the 2018 Cambridge International Relations and History conference.