Beyond Enmity: Carl Schmitt’s Unlikely Interlocutors

Carl Schmitt is as influential as he is controversial. Recent scholarship has made the enmity in his life and work its focus. This workshop, on the contrary, puts friendship front and centre. Reconstructing conversations between Schmitt and contemporaneous critics—free lawyer Theodor Sternberg, legal positivist Hans Kelsen, and neo-orthodox theologian Dietrich Bonnhoeffer—workshop participants recover Schmitt’s intellectual milieu. By doing so, they challenge conventional narratives of 20^th-century legal and political thought—first and foremost the distinction between putatively liberal and illiberal forms of jurisprudence. Synthesising the theories of Schmitt and his adversaries thus sets the foundation for both better understanding their philosophies and developing novel insights into the nature of state and law.

Join via Zoom: https://lse.zoom.us/j/83065349863

Please note this event will operate on a first-come first-serve basis.

Speakers/ Discussants:

Katharina Isabel Schmidt (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law & Yale Law School): ‘“Fetishistic” Formalism: Carl Schmitt, Theodor Sternberg, and German Free Law Thought’

Anna Lukina (London School of Economics and Political Science & University of Cambridge): ‘Beyond Political Decisionism and Legal Normativism: On The Three Types of Juristic Thought (1934) and Schmittian-Kelsenian Synthesis’

Valentin Jeutner (University of Lund & University of Oxford): ‘Deciding without Exception: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Carl Schmitt on Sovereign Decision-Making’

Lars Vinx (University of Cambridge)

Thomas Poole (London School of Economics and Political Science)