The Cult of Carl Schmitt

As a political thinker, the German philosopher Carl Schmitt was enamored of symbols and myths. His biographer has shown that during the 1930s Schmitt was convinced that providing National Socialism with a rational justification was self-contradictory and self-defeating. The alternative that was conceived by Schmitt, a conservative who was an eminent member of the Nazi Party, was to establish the Third Reich’s legitimacy by means of symbolism and imagery culled from the realms of religion and myth.