Carl Schmitt’s Dictatorship is a work of constitutional theory and legal history, first published in German in 1921 and translated into English by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward for Polity Press. It traces the concept of dictatorship from its origins in Roman and early-modern thought through to the revolutionary governments of the twentieth century, arguing that the idea has a coherent juridical structure that can be recovered from the historical record. Schmitt wrote it in the shadow of the First World War and the German revolution, while serving in the Bavarian military administration in Munich during the tumultuous years of 1918–19.
The book’s central claim is that dictatorship is not lawlessness but a juridical concept with its own logic — a commission to accomplish a concrete task, exercised outside the normal legal order yet still bound to a purpose. Schmitt distinguishes two forms: commissary dictatorship, where a constituted authority delegates extraordinary powers to an agent to defend the existing constitution, and sovereign dictatorship, where a power acting in the name of the people’s constituting will suspends the old order to bring a new one into being.
From the Roman Commissar to the Proletarian Class-Struggle
The Book’s Frame and the Translators’ Setting
The English volume arrives with a dedication to Thilda and Iriyana and the epigraph “Love dictates,” a phrase whose irony the reader only later appreciates. The translation, supported by a Goethe-Institut grant, presents Schmitt’s study of dictatorship running from the beginnings of modern sovereignty to the proletarian class struggle, and its architecture is worth noting at the outset: an opening chapter on commissary dictatorship and state theory, a second on royal commissars through the eighteenth century with an excursus on Wallenstein, a third on the shift to sovereign dictatorship in eighteenth-century theory, a fourth defining sovereign dictatorship, a fifth on people’s commissars in the French Revolution, and a sixth on the state of siege in contemporary law. An appendix takes up the dictatorship of the Reich president under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, and Schmitt’s forewords to the 1978, 1964 and 1928 editions precede the original 1921 remarks.
The translators place Schmitt in Munich in 1919, a city where his office sat at the centre of Reichswehr resistance to the soviet republic proclaimed that April. He had spent the war administering martial law, and out of that experience came his early essays distinguishing law from necessary “measures” in times of crisis, defending a strong state against liberal individualism and advocating a commander who acts by delegated power. The Introduction sketches how the Kaiser’s monarchy had already hollowed itself out, leaving Hindenburg and Ludendorff as virtual dictators until Ludendorff’s resignation in October 1918 handed victory to the Reichstag. Dictatorship, the translators insist, was nothing new.
Schmitt’s Forewords and the Quarrel over Article 48
Schmitt’s later prefaces are brief and defensive. By 1978 he observes that interest in conceptualising the state of exception has grown unpredictably, and by 1964 he can point to essays tracing dictatorship’s passage from the classical police and military siege to the financial and social emergency of the twentieth century. The 1928 foreword is the substantial one: the Article 48 discussion, delivered at Jena in 1924, is appended unchanged in substance, and Schmitt complains that his first edition met only praise, silent borrowing and sardonic remarks—except for Ulrich Stutz, who argued that the ius reformandi could be read as a supreme prerogative. Schmitt grants the phrase’s ambiguity but denies it fits the 1632 Wallenstein agreement, where the highest royal rights appear as extraordinary compensation rather than an electoral dignity.
Against Nawiasky and Grau he is withering. Their claim that the constitution is inalienable, he says, collapses the constitution into each of its 181 articles, so that Article 1 §1 and a clause about officials’ personnel files become equally untouchable—an absurdity proving that formal constitutional laws must be distinguished. He notes enabling laws and open dictatorship spreading across Europe, and declines to prophesy, unlike Beckerath or Nawiasky, who had predicted Mussolini’s fall.
Machiavelli and the Technique of Rule
The analytical heart opens with Machiavelli, whose contempt for the half-hearted dilettante in politics reveals an absolute technicity indifferent to the purpose it serves. The anthropological pessimism of The Prince is not a moral doctrine but a technical premise: human material must match the regime, since virtù can live with a republic but never with absolutism. On this view the masses are the “many-headed beast,” irrational stuff to be shaped by a reason that does not argue but dictates. The dictator is the commissar of action, judged only by whether his concrete means accomplish the concrete end; legal restrictions become mere hindrances, and within a functioning executive there is no consultation, only obedience—the postal worker who opens letters destroys the organisation’s point.
Raison d’État and the Executive State
Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, stands at the modern state’s cradle. The doctrine of raison d’état, running from Machiavelli and Guicciardini through Botero and Boccalini, sets a maxim above legality and illegality alike, and its carrier is the trained officialdom—an executive technically indifferent to whose service it performs, since its rules rest on practical expertise rather than the employer’s legal character.
Bodin’s Commissar and the Regular Officer
The controversy, Schmitt shows, turned on the contradiction between commissary and sovereign dictatorship, and Bodin founded the commissary type juridically while limiting himself to it. In Book III of the Republic he contrasts the officier and the commissaire: the officer holds by published law, permanently, with a quasi-right to his office and a remit fixed in place and time; the commissar holds by simple ordinance, only “selon occasion,” as a precarium revocable at will, bound strictly by instructions.
The Commissar’s Blank Cheque
The document’s catalogue of powers runs to a final catch-all: the commissar may do or command whatever seems necessary for the church’s standing or his subordinates’ welfare, and every official, army commissar and treasurer must obey and fund him, with sentences against rebel leaders ratified in advance. Beside this civilian director stands a commissarius armorum for equipment and munitions—proof that “commissar” already named a fairly specific job. That army commissar was the old provveditore who inspected fortifications and garrisons from Frederick II’s day in 1239, though the name had not yet displaced “commissar” for jurisdictional and governmental business. Not every extraordinary measure required one: a rector or governor granted widened authority to keep the peace was not thereby a commissar, since such provisions rested on the law of reformation and correction and aimed at restoring the old order. The army commissar often held no authority beyond watching the commander, discipline and bargaining with soldiers—and watching slid easily into surveillance, direct command and punishment. Others merely negotiated with rebels, sealed contracts or granted pardon.
Obeyed “Just Like the Pope Himself”
The telling formula demanded obedience to the commissar tamquam nobis—as to the pope in person. In theory no new legal situation arose, since he only did what his commissioner would have done, in the same way, had he been present. Toward the condottiere the pope’s rights rested on a free contract; toward subordinates, on superior power abolishing privileges under the right of reformation. His remit was usually drawn so he could do everything needed for a particular goal, and three types emerge: the commissar of service, handling routine authority; the commissar of business, appointed for specific tasks; and the commissar of action, empowered by the goal itself through listed powers plus a general authorisation to do what was necessary. An inspection commissar was a service commissar if inspection was routine, could become a means to a goal, or a springboard for further interference. Security commissars combined regular and extraordinary authority, becoming commissars of execution—hence of action—only where they had to render a judicial verdict to ground legal measures, as in summary procedure.
Delegates, Procurators, and the Blurred Concept
“Commissar” was never used for diplomatic delegates, nor for the permanent delegations from the mid-fifteenth century, nor for the older semi-permanent envoys of royal courts from the thirteenth. In the papal curia the diplomat’s title became procurator, borrowed from procedural law; like “commissar” it carried a mandate exceeding ordinary judicial procedure, yet delegate and commissar differ: the delegate, facing another force of government, had jurisdiction only over his own retinue, while the commissar proper was tied to the exercise of superior authority against those subject to the commissioner’s power. Estates sent commissars insofar as they held the right of government. The concept blurred because every kind of commissar was also called delegate, deputy or steward, and commissar was occasionally confused with the legate of international law. To accomplish the revolution turning estates into the absolutist state, only commissars of action could serve. Because jurisdiction was traditionally the true content of state authority, the commissar of execution came first, then the commissar of reformation; in Prussia the latter began as a plain commissar of business and became one of service through regular use, despite a pragmatism centred on the army that erased historical rights and customs. The discussion confines itself to Germany.
Execution and the Outlaw
An execution’s legal basis was the binding judicial decision; procedure could limit its effect, and it was not permanently governed by its end. Registration could never formalise a single enforcement act—the bailiff’s confiscation of a pledged object, the warden’s imprisonment of a criminal. Where constructs like the declaration of an enemy appeared, the aim was to strip away the chief restraint on action serving legal order—respect for the legal person of the exequendus—and allow maximum freedom; in extreme form, outlawry meant complete absence of peace and abolition of the outlawed person’s legal personality. Execution’s scope and intensity depended on the concrete situation, first on the resistance of the other side.
Wallenstein as “Dictator”
Contemporaries and later tradition freely called Wallenstein “dictator”; the question is whether his instruments of commission bear that out. Language had drifted toward sovereign dictatorship, yet what looked dictatorial was a special autonomy from the commissioner, contradicting the commissarial character Bodin conceived. State theory of the day used the word for the highest military command independent of other authorities—hence Orange, Cromwell as Lord General, and Pufendorf’s Wallenstein. His first generalship rested on an imperial resolution of 17 April 1625 making him capo over the emperor’
The One-Sided Natural State of Constituting Power
Sieyés’s claim that the nation remains always in a natural state has nothing to do with international law, where nations face one another as equals. It concerns the nation’s relation to its own constitutional forms and to every functionary who acts in its name. One part of the state therefore always stays in a natural state while the other sits in a legal state—or more precisely a state of duty. The constituting power has rights but no duties; constituted powers have duties but no rights.
Representation and the Shaping of the People’s Will
From this asymmetry Sieyés drew the legitimacy of representation. The delegates of 1789 were representatives, not bearers of a binding mandate; they were not to deliver an already existing will but to shape it. The modern state’s population differs from that of a classical republic: under the division of labour only a small proportion have the time and capacity for politics, while the rest are absorbed in production and consumption and become working machines. Even so, the representative’s unconditional, commissarial dependence on the people’s will subsists—and that will can remain unclear, indeed must remain unclear if the constituting power is to be truly unconstitutionable. Sieyés stressed, more than Rousseau, that all state organs act commissarially and that the nation can manifest itself at any moment in the immediacy of its plenitude of power. The correlation between greatest external power and ultimate internal dependence holds only formally: the ideal would be a military order whose firmness matches prompt execution. Normally such dependence requires a binding mandate, but Sieyés escaped it by arguing that the people’s will concerns only the person of the representative and whether there should be representation at all—once shaped, the will ceases to be constituting and becomes constituted. Extraordinary representatives executing the constituting power may therefore enjoy some latitude; their mandate is performed once the constitution is drafted and either passed or submitted to a referendum.
Inhibiting the Constituting Power
The people’s free will can be enslaved by contrived methods, external constraints, or general confusion. Borgeaud held that for the people to act in full sovereignty it must have a choice between an old and a new regime; after a revolution tradition is severed, and presenting the people with a new constitution is itself an exercise of sovereignty by those who propose it. The longing for order is so great that judgement may remain free. This can justify a revolutionary power enacting a provisional charter—but only until the new government is constituted and order restored. The same principle applies beforehand, if the existing order is seen as inhibiting the free exercise of the constituting power; new revolutions and new appeals to it are always possible. In both cases there is a commission of action, as in commissary dictatorship, and the concept remains functionally dependent on the idea of a rightful constitution.
Commissary and Sovereign Dictatorship Distinguished
The decisive distinction: the commissary dictatorship is authorised by a constituted organ and has its identity in the existing constitution; sovereign dictatorship exists only quoad exercitium and derives directly from the amorphous constituting power. It is a genuine commission, not a refusal to pass authority to earthly representatives as an appeal to a transcendent mission would be. It appeals to the ever-present people, who can act at any time and thus carry immediate legal significance. A minimum of constitution remains as long as the constituting power is recognised. Because external conditions must first be created for that power to take effect, the content of the constituting will is not actually available—so this dictatorial power is sovereign, but only as a transition, and sovereign in a wholly different sense from an absolute monarch. The commissary dictator is the unconditional commissar of action of a constituted power; sovereign dictatorship is the unconditional commission of action of a constituting power.
The Convention and the Comité de salut public
The National Convention, assembled on 20 September 1792, was charged with drafting a constitution and acted as the extraordinary organ of a constituting power. After the constitution of 24 June 1793 was drafted and accepted by the people, its mandate was concluded. War and counter-revolution then threatened the constitution, and on 10 October the Convention was declared the unique pulsing centre of the government. All agencies and civil servants were subjected to the direct control of the Comité de salut public, and to the Comité de sûreté générale in surveillance and internal police. The provisional constitution of 14 Frimaire II stated explicitly that execution of the laws divides into surveillance and application; duties formerly held by representatives passed to agents nationaux appointed and monitored by the committees. Most representatives were recalled in May 1794. Carnot complained that representatives busied themselves with minutiae and that official bodies, as if paralysed, left everything to them—welcome while those bodies were politically unreliable, but now the government wanted orderly administration. Bureaucracy was stabilised through sovereignty: the commissar of action became a commissar of control, a regular commissar of service.
Article 48 as Incomplete Law and the Distinction from Constitutional Emergency Law
Schmitt treats Article 48, §2 as settled law that nonetheless remains incomplete—a “lacuna,” a term he credits to the count of Dohna—until the detailed regulation promised in §5 is issued. He is careful to separate the president’s extraordinary authorities from what he calls constitutional emergency law (Staatsnotrecht): the latter arises when an organ possessed of power acts outside or against constitutional provisions in an extreme, unforeseen situation to save the state’s existence. Most governments resorted to something like it during the war, and it is routinely justified by an alleged lacuna. But Article 48, §2 does not carry constitutional emergency law merely because the constitution frames it as a responsibility. Such emergency law could conceivably be enforced autonomously alongside Article 48, and in specific circumstances the government of the Reich—not its president—might support it, even against a president who refuses to declare a state of exception, as when large parts of the Reich were enemy-occupied or a coup d’état occurred. Article 48, §2 instead regulates the state of emergency as a constitutional legal instrument, which makes confusion with constitutional emergency law impossible. Whether constitutional emergency law permits eliminating the constitution itself—a right to a coup d’état—need not be discussed; such a right certainly does not follow from Article 48.
The President, the Monarch, and the Latent Plenitude of Power
The president of the Reich receives about as little status as a sovereign prince under the monarchical principle, which always leaves open reintroducing the full, undivided power of the state. Alongside ordinary constitutionally apportioned power, an extraordinary state power coexists in latency, and its bearer proves to be sovereign by deciding whether it appears in full form—whereupon the entire constitution except the monarch’s own position becomes a stop-gap arrangement and a rented transaction. As long as the decision remains with the monarch, he is the true sovereign. Under the Prussian monarchical constitution, Article 63’s emergency regulation arguably left the king able to change any law, even the constitution itself, needing only a counter-signature. A republican president can never be sovereign in this sense; one cannot speak of an extraordinary organisation of the state springing from Article 48 coexisting with the ordinary one—in a republic that would be a hybrid duplication of state power. In a sovereign monarchy the monarch preserves the plenitudo potestatis despite the constitution and represents the constituent unity of the state.
Democratic Arguments for Extraordinary Powers
General Maercker’s Vom Kaiserheer zur Reichswehr is quoted to the effect that the law does not permit justifying that the constitution of a free state grants the supreme official of the Reich rights neither emperor nor king received on this scale. Dr Cohn, a member of parliament, remarked in the National Assembly that Article 48, §2 goes even beyond the Prussian law of 1851, which offered more legal guarantees. Such comparisons, Schmitt answers, ignore that even in a democracy—especially in it—extraordinary powers are possible; democrats understood the far-reaching authorisations of Article 48 as specifically democratic. Preuß and Haas represented this view in the National Assembly, and Reich minister of justice Schiffer explicitly adopted it in the frequently cited speech of 3 March 1920, arguing that in a democracy there is basically consensus between the leading parliamentary majority and the government, which must be given all means of power deemed necessary. The democrat Petersen stated in the same session that no form of government can be granted means of power with less hesitation than democracy, because democracy rests on the equality of right of all citizens.
Sovereign Dictatorship and the Constituent Power
The idea of a constituent power up to the people—pouvoir constituant—arose from democratic thought as well; it is the source of all constitutionally constituted and therefore circumscribed power, yet differs from it by being unlimited and unlimitable. The possibility of a legally unlimited power, such as belongs to a constituent assembly after a revolution, rests on basically democratic reasoning: as long as such an assembly has not accomplished its work—the constitution—it possesses any imaginable authority; all state power is amalgamated in its hands and can manifest tempestuously in any arbitrary form; standardisation and segmentation of responsibilities has not yet come into existence; the constituent power of the people has not yet been bound to constituted limits; the assembly can exercise plenitudo potestatis at its discretion. For this Schmitt suggested the phrase “sovereign dictatorship,” because here is an unlimited legal power completely at the discretion of the empowering body (as long as “sovereign” can be used), while the constituent assembly is only commissioned, like a dictator; it is not sovereign like a monarch in an absolute monarchy or one based on the monarchical principle.
The Editorial Apparatus: Sources and Debts
The closing stretch of the edition is given over to endnotes rather than argument, and they read as a map of Schmitt’s reading. For the pages on administration he leans on the German administrative-law canon—Otto Mayer’s Deutsches Verwaltungsrecht, Fleiner’s Institutionen, Erich Kaufmann’s encyclopedia article—and on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique for the esprit des lois and the old Parlement de France. The physiocrats arrive through Eugène Daire’s edition and the Dubois editions of Dupont de Nemours and Baudeau, with the Éphémérides du citoyen identified as the movement’s central document. D’Holbach’s Système social supplies the image of the sovereign as the head setting every other force in the political body in motion; China, with its mandarins, serves as the era’s ideal country, and Voltaire’s defence of Russia against Montesquieu is noted as partly a courtesy to Catherine II. The decisive citation is Le Mercier de la Rivière: in his twenty-fourth chapter Euclid himself is a true despot, and legal despotism and the legislator’s personal despotism are one—the irresistible force of evidence.
From Mably to Marx
The notes to the following pages trace the same idea through Cerutti’s Mémoire pour le peuple français, Morelly’s Code de la nature, and above all Mably, whose Doutes proposés aux philosophes économistes carry the burden of the lawgiver’s duties. Paine’s Common Sense appears alongside them. One editorial remark stands out: reading Mably on the futility of political reform without abolishing private property, the editor observes that one might be reminded of the Marxist theory of the state.
Martial Law, Mutiny, and the Soldier’s Privilege
On pages 151 to 223 the notes turn technical. Wellington is quoted on the American war instruction of April 1863: martial law in a hostile country means the occupying authority suspends criminal and civil law and substitutes military rule as necessity demands. Winthrop and Birkheimer are cited, and the soldier’s forum is treated as a privileged Gerichtsstand through eighteenth-century manuals by Liinig, Ludovici, and Winckler—works that, when they speak of insurrection, really mean soldiers’ mutinies. Joseph II’s court orders of 1788 and the Austrian penal code of 1803 follow, with Kleinschrod and Buchner on Standrecht.
Coercion Without a Prior Order
Prussian administrative law supplies a fine point: under the law on general state administration, only a complaint lies against the allocation and execution of a coercive measure, and the same remedies attach to the directive as to the directive it enforces. Where police act by direct coercion without first ordering capitulation, the deed itself contains the order—the citizen loses his remedy because the police have acted in advance via facti. Decisions of the Prussian Oberverwaltungsgericht from 1909 and 1911 are marshalled in support.
Dumouriez, Wallenstein, and Execution as Sentence
The claim against Dumouriez rests on Aulard’s Recueil. Ferdinand II’s military regulation, cited by Ludovici, outlaws the deserter without trial—made a scoundrel, stripped of freedom, safety, and escort—and English law’s treatment of the felon shows the same logic of forfeiting rights by one’s own deeds. The 1634 pleading against Wallenstein argues that in notorious treason no process is needed, execution itself standing in place of sentence, and any man may strike a public enemy; the reply in the Relation aufs Parnasso objects that arming subordinates as prosecutors, judges, and executors of their superiors collapses charge and execution into a single instant.
Duisburg, 1920
The sharpest illustration comes from the German National Assembly. On 29 March 1920 Geßler, the Reich defence minister, reported the Duisburg proclamation of 25 March, in which the communist revolutionary leadership announced that order would be kept by the revolutionary Volkswehr and that robbers, looters, thieves, and usurers would be court-martialled and shot. Geßler’s comment—”here you can see the new constitutional law”—prompts the editor’s remark that execution seems to precede sentence, and that such an official act cannot be distinguished from unauthorised assumption of authority, since immediate execution and murder look identical; in the juridical night of official acts, all cows are black. Steinlein’s line is called splendid: whoever has killed a man cannot claim it was a duel in which the first stroke was the challenge.
The Commissar and the Official
The conceptual backbone of the book is Bodin’s distinction between the officier and the commissaire — the regular magistrate whose authority derives from law and endures despite changes of person, and the extraordinary agent whose mandate comes from a specific commission, lasts only as long as the business at hand, and can be revoked at any moment. Schmitt finds in this pair the juridical DNA of dictatorship: the commissar acts not on his own right but as the instrument of the sovereign who sent him, doing what that sovereign would have done had he been present. The formula recurs across centuries — the papal commissar to be obeyed “just like the pope himself,” Wallenstein’s patent empowering him to act “as we ourselves would do if we were present.” Dictatorship, on this reading, is always a form of representation in the strict sense: the dictator is the commissar of action, sent to accomplish a concrete goal, and his authority is measured by the appropriateness of his means to that goal rather than by conformity to general norms.
The Two Faces of Sovereign Power
The book’s most consequential move is the separation of commissary from sovereign dictatorship. The commissary dictator is authorised by an existing constitution and remains tethered to it — Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War is Schmitt’s example of a dictator defending the constitutional order in its concrete form. The sovereign dictator, by contrast, appeals to a constitution still to come, to the pouvoir constituant of the people, which is always present and always capable of producing new forms. Sieyés’s claim that “the nation is always in a natural state” gives this power its juridical shape: one part of the state remains in a state of nature, having rights but no duties, while the constituted powers have duties but no rights. The sovereign dictator is the unconditional commission of action of this constituting will — sovereign, but only as a transition, and only because of his dependence on the task. The distinction matters because it explains how revolutionary governments from the National Convention to the Bolsheviks could claim to act legally while suspending every existing law.
The Rationality of Dictatorship
Schmitt’s genealogy runs through Machiavelli, whose prince governs by technique rather than moral justification, treating the masses as material to be shaped by a constructing artist’s will. Reason does not argue with the irrational; it dictates. This technical understanding of politics — the raison d’état literature, the trained officialdom that forms the kernel of the executive state — is what makes dictatorship possible as a rational instrument. The dictator intervenes directly through concrete means because a concrete goal must be accomplished; only expediency of means to result can be asked of him, not legal considerations. Schmitt is careful to note that this technicity is indifferent to whose service it serves: efficient functionaries can move between states because the rules of functioning are independent of the employer’s legal peculiarities. The observation carries an uncomfortable charge, written as it was by a man who would later serve a regime he had theorised.
The Separation of Powers as Anti-Dictatorial Device
Montesquieu appears in the book not as an abstract rationalist but as a political thinker fighting royal absolutism with the doctrine of intermediate powers. The separation of powers, Schmitt argues, was always directed against whoever disturbed the exchange of arguments and made consensus impossible through a prejudicial claim to power — whether that claimant was a Stuart king, a Whig parliament, or a Cromwellian general. The doctrine’s practical point is that every officer must have limited authority and that even the highest institutions must not expand their competences unilaterally; without an equipoise of authority to authority there is no responsibility. Despotism, for Montesquieu, means the suspension of this balance, the state omnipotence intervening arbitrarily with its full plenitude of power. Schmitt’s historical eye notes that Montesquieu did not overlook the general significance of extraordinary commissars for the transition from republic to Caesarism: when commissions extraordinaires were mandated, as to Sulla and Pompeius, the separation ceased and influential individuals seized sovereign power.
Rousseau and the Despotism of Freedom
Rousseau occupies a pivotal place in the argument. His Contrat social restricts the word dictatorship to a constitutionally legitimate, short empowerment for emergencies, but his deeper contribution is the justification of a rule of virtue that supplies the formula for what Schmitt calls the despotism of freedom. The general will cannot be represented; the virtuous minority may use all force if the majority tends to corruption; the political foe is morally corrupt and must be made innocuous. Rousseau’s own formula — one is forced to be free — becomes the hinge on which commissary dictatorship turns into sovereign dictatorship. The legislator, who stands outside and prior to the constitution, is powerless right; the dictator is lawless power. When the legislator can be given a dictator’s power, the transition is complete.
The Legacy of a Concept
The book closes with the appendix on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, written in 1924 and appended to the second edition. Schmitt examines the dictatorship of the Reich president as a provisional solution, distinguishing it from constitutional emergency law, from the sovereign prince, and from the sovereign dictatorship of a national assembly. He is sceptical whether interpreting Article 48 outside a democratic theory of the constitution is fruitful or permissible, and he notes the strange phenomenon across almost every European country of open dictatorship, enabling laws, and seemingly legal breaches protecting amendment forms. The book’s afterlife has been shadowed by its author’s later career, but its analytical achievement stands apart from that career: the recovery of dictatorship as a juridical concept with a history, a structure, and a logic that liberal constitutionalism ignores at its peril. Schmitt refrains from prognosis, but the twentieth century supplied the verdict on his distinctions — and on the states that made them necessary.
