The State of Emergency and the State Without a Name in Carl Schmitt’s Thought: A Proposal for Radical Separation

Abstract

The concept of the state of emergency is one of the most frequently evoked elements from Carl Schmitt’s thought. In discussions which are referring to it, however, the conceptualization of the state of emergency, which Schmitt proposed in his juridical comment on Article 48 of the Weimar Republic’s constitution, is often linked with the theory of Ausnahmezustand. In this article I propose to separate the state of emergency from Ausnahmezustand. The main difference between the two consists in the different types of legitimacy. The state of emergency from the Constitution of the Weimar Republic finds its legitimacy in this document, however, read by Schmitt in a way that in his Constitutional Theory, he referred to it as relativization. To find legitimacy of the state without a name, one must refer to Schmitt’s political theology as not just a proposal rooted in the faith in Revelation.