5.6 CONCLUSION

In the summer of 1981, in Plettenberg, the journalist Eberhard Straub enquired of a 93-year-old Schmitt what role the vocation as a jurist had played in his life. Schmitt pondered over the question at length; then raised his voice slowly to respond with the words of Hugo Ball, the founder of the Dada movement.

Retrospective statements such as this one, condensing the entirety of a life into a single sentence, are prone to conceal as much as they reveal. But this chapter has shown that Schmitt's self-understanding seems less contorted. There is an astounding continuity in the ways in which Schmitt tackled the major theoretical questions of his scholarly life. The interpretation that Schmitt cloaked himself in the garb of a legal academic to repel prosecution attempts after the Second World War may well have its merits. However, Schmitt may also have simply continued to act according to his deep-rooted desire to firmly anchor politics within Allgemeine Staatslehre.

Schmitt remains an influential source of inspiration for the necessary critique or ‘deconstruction' of contemporary international law. With powerful eloquence, Schmitt proclaims that ‘the most horrible war is fought but in the name of peace, the most horrible oppression is enforced but in the name of freedom and the most horrible inhumanity is committed but in the name of humanity'.^[360] This is an important sting, not only for liberal consti­tutional thought.