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June 25, 2008
Schmitt’s political and legal thought has returned to the forefront of current debates within political theory. The interest in Schmitt's understanding of the political has been triggered by a growing skepticism with regard to liberal political thought, such as John Rawls’s theory of justice and Kantian models of communicative action and discourse ethics, which both Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck have sought to establish as models for a deliberative democracy with cosmopolitan reach.
This interest remains despite Schmitt’s vehement criticism of Weimar constitutionalism, which together with his attack on the legislative state, promotes concepts of sovereignty and political decision that have clear tendencies toward totalitarianism.
What is of interest is Schmitt's pointing to the imminent “collapse of the parliamentary legislative state” and the increasing transition of a highly complex administrative democracy to a total state. In Legality and Legitimacy he says:
[G]iven the absence of another authority, the individual parts of the German civil service could become a focal point of the strong need for a tendency toward an authoritarian state, and the civil service on its own could attempt to “produce order” in an administrative state. . . . In the peculiar, though practical, alliance of legality and technical functionalism, the bureaucracy in the long run . . . transforms the law of the parliamentary legislative state into the measures of the administrative state.(pp. 13–14.)
Schmitt rationalized administrative structures as expressing an increasing “technicity” (Technizität) that stood at the heart of the legislative state.The formalized rule through administrative organization
and measures not only limits the space of politics but also opens the door for a shift toward authoritarian rule.
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