Specters of Leviathan: Schmitt and Neumann on Law and State

Abstract

The two of the main debates of the political philosophy in the 20th century occurred within the framework of the definition of totalitarian state as a new political form and the critique of the ideal of the rule of law. It could be asserted that through the political disputes of the Weimar Republic and the succeeding Third Reich, the German state theory has taken a central part in these two debates. The Nazi jurists’ effort to establish a legal basis for the Third Reich was criticized by the social democratic jurists in the post-war era. In this paper, through the critique of the rule of law carried out by both Carl Schmitt, the known chief jurist of the Nazi State, and Franz L. Neumann, one of the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School, how these two figures defined the concepts of law and the state and related them to one another will be discussed. Thus, both thinkers disagreed upon how the Nazi State could be defined in terms of its legal structure, and reached opposite conclusions while both took Hobbes’ Leviathan as a starting point in terms of the state definition. While Neumann diagnosed the Nazi state as the death of the Leviathan and the birth of the Behemoth, Schmitt argued contrarily, stating that what led to the death of the Leviathan had been the ideal of the rule of law and only a totalitarian Führer State [Führerstaat] could revive it. The debate between these two thinkers upon the concepts of law and the state inspired the problem which we could define as “the antinomy of the law” within the tradition of political philosophy. Interpreting this antinomy within the frame of such a debate will offer a suitable beginning in order to rethink the rule of law today.

Keywords

• Schmitt
• Neumann
• Hukuk
• Devlet
• Hukuk Devleti
• Totaliter Devlet
• Leviathan