Carl Schmitt and the Concrete Order

Chapter abstract: This chapter centers on Carl Schmitt’s influential theorizing by exploring his thoroughgoing revision of his previous decisionist paradigm. It investigates the major theoretical move whereby, based on Maurice Hauriou’s and Santi Romano’s teachings, Schmitt dispensed with his famed theory of the exception and put forward his “concrete order and formation thinking.” While his persisting obsession was with the homogeneity of the political community, he importantly changed his mind as to how it can be attained and how it should be preserved. These pages also shine a light on the difference with Santi Romano’s idea of order, especially as to how their disagreeing conceptions of it led to disagreeing conceptions of pluralism. Schmitt’s revision of his own theory, juxtaposed to Romano’s firm conceptualization of the juristic point of view, teases out what is at stake in the late-modern relation between the juridical and the political.