Dictatorship by Carl Schmitt
Publisher:        Polity       
Year:        2013
Language:        English       
Pages:        288
ISBN:        0745646476, 9780745646473


Dictatorship is Carl Schmitt’s most scholarly book and arguably a paradigm for his entire work.

Written shortly after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Schmitt analyses the problem of the state of emergency and the power of the Reichspräsident in declaring it. Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, is a necessary legal institution in constitutional law and has been wrongly portrayed as just the arbitrary rule of a so-called dictator.

Dictatorship is an essential book for understanding the work of Carl Schmitt and a major contribution to the modern theory of a democratic, constitutional state. And despite being written in the early part of the twentieth century, it speaks with remarkable prescience to our contemporary political concerns.