Book review: Dictatorship by Carl Schmitt

"Dictatorship." Carl Schmitt. Polity Press. November 2013. --- Now available in English for the first time, Dictatorship is Carl Schmitt’s most scholarly book and arguably a paradigm for his entire work. Written shortly after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Schmitt analyses the problem of the state of emergency and the power of the Reichspräsident in declaring it. Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, is a necessary legal institution in constitutional law and has been wrongly portrayed as just the arbitrary rule of a so–called dictator. For those who are already interested in Schmitt but are unable to read in German, this book offers an insight into Schmitt’s formative period, when his well-known ideas were beginning to take shape, and for those who have not yet discovered Schmitt, it is a good place to start, writes Ignas Kalpokas.