Constitutional theory

The publication of Carl Schmitt's Constitutional Theory (1928) fills a sig nificant gap in the available English translations of this important politi cal thinker. The text is remarkable for two things: its rigorous conception of a constitution and its concepts and the mastery of historical evidence and usage that informed and for long shaped the central ideas of law and political theory in the West. Constitutional Theory has never been out of print in German, and has long been available in the other major European languages. It now appears here in a felicitous and scholarly translation by Jeffrey Seitzer at an especially appropriate time.

Written simultaneously with his most famous text, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt's Constitutional Theory addressed the boundary of the po litical. The first text makes the radical claim that the distinction between friend and enemy is a criterion by which all political actions and motives can be judged-a claim that appears to reduce our conception of politics to struggle, suggesting in a remarkable reversal of Clausewitz that politics is the extension of war by other means. The apparent imbalance is redressed by this book. The topic here is the political association of friends that is possible in the modern world and within the legal structure of the modern state.