State Composition and Collapse of the Second Reich

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important and influential political theorists of the twentieth century.Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History at University College London.

• Editor’s Note and AcknowledgmentsForeword by Reinhard Mehring State Composition and Collapse of the Second Empire Appendix: The Logic of Spiritual Subjection (1934) NotesBibliography

"A classic of authoritarian nostalgia and anti-liberal ressentiment, Schmitt's State Composition exhibits all the excesses and limitations of autocratic fantasies plaguing right-wing populism today. As the delusion goes, if only a charismatic, autocratic leader could be completely unfettered from constitutional restraints, national greatness would prevail undaunted on the universal stage. The familiarity of Schmitt's arguments should be chilling for readers in our own times."John P. McCormick, University of Chicago"The current collapse of the 'international rules-based order' and the return of wars of aggression keeps offering evidence of the productivity of Schmitt's insights, not despite but because of their inherently polemical character. His reconstruction of the collapse of the Second German Reich, written at the advent of the Third, is perhaps the most topical of all his writings in the crisis of our times. The impeccable translation and commentaries of Schmitt's relatively unknown work make for an impressive addition to the growing English-speaking scholarship on the German jurist."Miguel Vatter, Deakin University