Hugo Preuss: his concept of the state and his position in German state theory, editorial introduction by Martin Loughlin

After the publication of The Concept of the Political (1927) and Constitutional Theory (1928), Carl Schmitt shifted the orientation of his work towards state theory. Unlike most leading public law scholars, he never published a general theory of the state. But in this lecture, delivered in 1930, Schmitt outlined his views of the general trajectory of German state theory from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary era and argued that the Weimar Constitution's conception of the state as a 'neutral state' cannot survive unless its leaders were prepared, like Hugo Preuss, actively to defend its substantive liberal-democratic values.