[4][5] Schmitt claimed that the adoption of the Leader Principle in place of a legal constitution was legitimized by the presumed "Volkisch" or racial composition of the German people, and their identification with Adolf Hitler.

[16][17] In 1923, he contributed to the second volume of Melchior Palyi [de]'s Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber[17] In 1921, Schmitt became a professor at the University of Greifswald, where he published his essay Die Diktatur (on dictatorship).

For Schmitt ... the very essence of the bureaucratic conduct of business is reverence for the norm, a standpoint that could not but exist in great tension with the doctrines of Carl Schmitt ... Hegel had set an ignominious precedent by according this putative universal class a position of preeminence in his political thought, insofar as the primacy of the bureaucracy tends to diminish or supplant the prerogative of sovereign authority.The Nazis engineered the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933 in March, which changed the Weimar Constitution to allow the "present government" to rule by decree, bypassing both the President, Paul von Hindenburg, and the Reichstag.

[citation needed] In June 1934, Schmitt was appointed editor-in-chief of the Nazi newspaper for lawyers, the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung  [de] ("German Jurists' Journal").

[citation needed] Nevertheless, in December 1936, the Schutzstaffel (SS) publication Das Schwarze Korps accused Schmitt of being an opportunist, a Hegelian state thinker, and a Catholic, and called his antisemitism a mere pretense, citing earlier statements in which he criticized the Nazis' racial theories.

[34] In 1945, American forces captured Schmitt and, after spending more than a year in an internment camp, he returned to his home town of Plettenberg and, later, to the residence of his housekeeper Anni Stand in Plettenberg-Pasel.

[8] Despite being isolated from the mainstream of the scholarly and political community, from the 1950s on he continued his studies, especially of international law, and frequently received visitors, both colleagues and younger intellectuals, well into his old age.

[citation needed] Schmitt was at pains to remove what he saw as a taboo surrounding the concept of "dictatorship" and to show that the concept is implicit whenever power is wielded by means other than the slow processes of parliamentary politics and the bureaucracy:[36] If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.For Schmitt, every government capable of decisive action must include a dictatorial element within its constitution.

According to Agamben,[37] Schmitt's conceptualization of the "state of exception" as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a "pure" or "revolutionary" violence, which did not enter into any relationship whatsoever with right.

Through the state of exception, Schmitt included all types of violence under right, in the case of the authority of Hitler leading to the formulation "The leader defends the law" ("Der Führer schützt das Recht").

[citation needed] On Dictatorship was followed by another essay in 1922, titled Politische Theologie (political theology); in it, Schmitt, gave further substance to his authoritarian theories with the now notorious definition: "The sovereign is he who decides on the exception."

[39] A year later, Schmitt supported the emergence of totalitarian power structures in his paper "Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus" (roughly: "The Intellectual-Historical Situation of Today's Parliamentarianism", translated as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy by Ellen Kennedy).

Although many critics of Schmitt today, such as Stephen Holmes in his The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism, take exception to his fundamentally authoritarian outlook, the idea of incompatibility between liberalism and democracy is one reason for the continued interest in his political philosophy.

[40] In chapter 4 of his State of Exception (2005), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued that Schmitt's Political Theology ought to be read as a response to Walter Benjamin's influential essay Towards the Critique of Violence.

Distancing himself from the tradition of legitimist "restorative conservatives" such as Adam Müller or Joseph de Maistre, Schmitt instead champions the thought of the 19th century Spanish reactionary thinker Juan Donoso Cortés, who advocated for a dictatorship.

Lukács quotes Schmitt's comment that Cortes's 'great theoretical significance for the history of counter-revolutionary theory lies in [that] his contempt for human beings knew no bounds; their blind understanding, their feeble wills, the derisory elan of their carnal desires seem so pitiful to him that all the vocabulary of all human languages is not sufficient to express the full baseness of these creatures,' and Lukács writes:[51] Here we clearly perceive Schmitt's association with all anti-human tendencies, past and present, along with the reason for it in socio-human terms: he is an enemy of the masses grown blind with hatred, a fanatic in the campaign against Vermassung or mass feeling.Schmitt provided a positive reference for Leo Strauss, and approved his work, which was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany.

As contemporary writers on Schmitt have noted, his anti-Semitism may be read as more a kind of "anti-Judaism" as, unlike his Nazi allies, he did not attribute the dangers of Judaism to "biological" reasons but strictly religious ones.

[55] Hobbes' concern was mainly to convey the sovereign person as a frightening creature that could instill fear into those chaotic elements of man that belong to his interpretation of the state of nature.

[59] Despite his critiques, Schmitt, nonetheless, finishes the book with a celebration of Hobbes as a truly magnificent thinker, ranking him along with other theorists he values greatly like Niccolò Machiavelli and Giambattista Vico.

According to Schmitt, the United States' internal conflicts between economic presence and political absence, between isolationism and interventionism, are global problems, which today continue to hamper the creation of a new world order.

But however critical Schmitt is of American actions at the end of the 19th century and after World War I, he considered the United States to be the only political entity capable of resolving the crisis of global order.

In it, Schmitt focuses his attention on Shakespeare's Hamlet and argues that the significance of the work hinges on its ability to integrate history in the form of the taboo of the queen and the deformation of the figure of the avenger.

Beyond literary criticism or historical analysis, Schmitt's book also reveals a comprehensive theory of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that responds to alternative ideas developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

[63] Both because of its scope, with extended discussions on historical figures like Napoleon, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong, as well as the events marking the beginning of the 20th century, Schmitt's text has had a resurgence of popularity.

[70] According to historian Renato Cristi in the writing of the 1980 Constitution of Chile, Pinochet collaborator Jaime Guzmán based his work on the pouvoir constituant concept used by Schmitt (as well as drawing inspiration in the ideas of market society of Friedrich Hayek).

[71] Schmitt's anti-parliamentarian political theory received renewed attention as a historical reference with immediate contemporary relevance during the electoral cycles and administrations of the U.S. President Donald Trump.

[77][78][79] Leading Chinese Schmittians include the theologian Liu Xiaofeng, the public policy scholar Wang Shaoguang,[80] and the legal theorist and government adviser Jiang Shigong.

While some scholars regard him as a faithful follower of fascism, others, such as Liu Xiaofeng, consider his support to the Nazi regime only as instrumental and attempt to separate his works from their historical context.

[88] Most notably the legal opinions offered by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo et al. by invoking the unitary executive theory to justify the Bush administration's legally controversial decisions during the War on terror (such as introducing unlawful combatant status which purportedly would eliminate protection by the Geneva Conventions,[89] the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program and various excesses of the Patriot Act) mimic his writings.

[90] Several scholars have noted the influence of Carl Schmitt on Vladimir Putin and Russia, specifically in defence of illiberal norms and exercising power, such as in disputes with Ukraine.