“A fanatic of order in an epoch of confusing turmoil”: the political, legal, and cultural thought of Carl Schmitt

This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Carl Schmitt that incorporates insights from law, the social sciences, and the humanities. But it is also an intervention in its own right: it seeks to decenter the study of this most hyped thinker of the twentieth century. Two arguments are advanced. First, the authors argue that the motif of order is a powerful yet insufficiently utilized heuristic device for making sense of Schmitt’s thought. Placing the motif of order at its heart, they contradict the popular belief that no unifying thread runs through the jurist’s oeuvre. Second, they contend that a trinity of thought is discernable in Schmitt’s writings. They establish intellectual connections across his political, legal, and cultural thought, tracing the mutually constitutive relationships that exist among them. Schmitt’s ouvre, they find, amounted to a veritable network of ideas about the sources of social order, the cement of society.