Carl Schmitt's Institutional Theory

‘An excellent new study developing the complexity of Carl Schmitt’s thought without concealing its unsavoury consistencies. Mariano Croce and Andrea Salvatore’s judicious scholarship offers a clear-eyed, sobering look at Schmitt as a legal theorist of normality rather than exception.’ Clara Maier, Columbia University

‘This is a bold book. By foregrounding Carl Schmitt’s legal thought, Croce and Salvatore upend conventional wisdom about the twentieth century’s most dangerous jurist. They paint a picture of an institutionalist disguised as a decisionist. With skill and verve, they show that Schmitt cared more about the norm than the exception after all. The fascinating, revisionist interpretation that it contains makes Carl Schmitt’s Institutional Theory essential reading for anyone who cares about the problem of legal order, then or now.’ Jens Meierhenrich, Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the author of The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat

‘The attraction toward and yet repulsion of Carl Schmitt’s political ideas is a trait of post-world war two liberal-democratic identity. The relation between jurisprudence and politics or the ‘normal’ and the ‘emergence’ allows Croce and Salvatore to propose a reading of Schmitt’s juristic practice as an endeavor that is detached from ‘political tutelage and severed from domestic politics.’ Without giving themselves the mission of salvaging this controversial protagonist of the twentieth century, the authors offer a brilliant portrait of Schmitt as a jurist who deemed jurisprudence as a vital complement of legislative power in the making of the law.’ Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory, Columbia University

‘… a useful book for those who study Schmitt … Recommended.’ M. Blitz, Choice