Carl Schmitt's 1933 involvement with national socialism constitutes a frequent interpretative entry point into his work. From there, his pre-Weimar as well as his post–World War II writings become logically implicated with his infamous role as the Third Reich's “Crown Jurist.” It is the merit of Ellen Kennedy to break away from this dominant, often redundant, trend to offer an original reading of Schmitt's constitutional and political theory. Instead of debating whether his endorsement of Nazism was a matter of principle, Kennedy boldly shifts direction to address broader, more interesting theoretical issues prompted by his writings. Her main goal is to address the relevance of Schmitt's Weimar-era work for contemporary political and constitutional problems.

Kennedy deftly combines a historical reading that traces the development of Schmitt's thought in the intellectual and political context of its time with a careful textual analysis of his major works. With this dual approach that blends the historical and the textual, the biographical and the theoretical, she distinguishes the enduring from the ephemeral in Schmitt. Her starting point is Schmitt's famous critique of liberalism. Instead of dismissing it as an alarming symptom of his fascist sympathies, she places it at the center of her narrative. She locates its origins and follows its shifting trajectory, probes its content, assesses its character, and reflects on its meaning. Kennedy seeks to demonstrate the relevance of Schmitt's antiliberalism for current debates on pluralism and its limits, political conflict, and rational consensus. Schmitt's critique of liberal constitutionalism, she correctly argues, originated in his early confrontation with legal formalism. He objected to the exclusion of the political dimension of the law and the optimistic belief in the capacity of abstract, formal norms to replace the conflictual nature of politics. He saw liberalism as an antipolitical doctrine of the ordinary, indecisive, and fragile, unable to cope with the exceptional.

This aspect of Schmitt's quarrel with liberalism is noted by most scholars of his work. Where Kennedy's approach differs is in the attention she devotes to some other, equally important aspects of this critique frequently neglected by the secondary literature. Schmitt attached to his critique of liberalism a theory of sovereignty that was not solely linked to states of emergency. He also redefined sovereignty as the constituent power of the people acting prior to and outside the established constitutional order. For him, a constitution is democratically legitimate when it emanates from the popular sovereign, in its higher capacity as the constituent subject. The sovereign is not only the one who decides about the exception but also the one who creates the constitution. As Kennedy notes, in Schmitt's constitutional reflections there is a democratic kernel. This fresh reading of his notion of sovereignty is coupled with an original interpretation of his definition of the political. Kennedy invokes Hegel to argue for elements of recognition in Schmitt's distinction between the friend and the enemy. In her view, Schmitt's conceptualization highlights the fact that the formation of a collective identity implies the construction, in fact the recognition, of a concrete difference. Every political identity is relational. The affirmation of a difference becomes the precondition for the existence of any identity. In his concept of the political, the sense of a common identity is dialectically associated with the recognition of difference and otherness.

For Kennedy, the significance of these insights is not simply interpretative; nor is her only goal to place Schmitt within the canon of Western political thought, although she does this admirably. Her main objective is to demonstrate his enduring relevance. Her argumentative strategy, however, is less compelling. It presupposes a strong correspondence between Germany during the interwar years and the present. She finds in the collapse of the Weimar constitution a generic, emblematic deficiency of liberal constitutionalism as such. I do not agree with this assumption. First, it does not account for the relative stability and steady expansion of the liberal constitutional model over the last six decades and, second, it portrays Schmitt exclusively as a thinker of crisis, relevant in times of political disruption, of constitutional failure.

A more pertinent question, I think, is not how liberalism has sustained a dysfunctional, weak political order but how it has been able to persist in conflicts, crises, and wars. Here, it seems to me, both Schmitt and Kennedy are misguided. They seem captive to a questionable understanding of liberalism. By that, I do not mean Schmitt's much-commented antiliberalism. On the contrary, I think that his understanding of liberalism was idealized and this idealization is shared by Kennedy. They both look at liberalism through the lens of the liberal political discourse(s), seeing liberalism as it wants to be seen—as rational, normative, dialogical, and consensual, thus vulnerable. By falling under the spell of an idealized liberalism, they both underestimate its deeply political nature. It might well be the case that liberalism is not an apolitical doctrine. Rather, it could be political in Schmitt's sense of the term, able to distinguish between friends and enemies, to decide about the exception, even to resort to dictatorship to protect its interests. Do not our own times provide a confirmation of liberalism's political and polemical nature?

Moreover, Schmitt's interpretation on democracy suffers from a serious blunder that Kennedy does not fully investigate. He equated democracy with equality. While liberty is an inherent attribute of liberalism, substantive equality, by contrast, is the defining mark of democracy. He also donated to the liberal tradition the public practice (and value) of speech that, in fact, is co-original with the ancient birth of democracy. These are historical and conceptual errors, which affected his understanding of democracy. For instance, he could not acknowledge the centrality of collective autonomy in democratic politics, the ideal of living freely under one's own laws. This denial of freedom and speech ultimately led him to advocate plebiscitary democracy. Lacking other means to express itself and with no particular passion or desire for liberty to motivate it, Schmitt's popular sovereign is left with nothing more than the passive option of noise and shouts. Kennedy is aware of these problems but does not go far enough to locate them at the heart of his partial, distorted understanding of democracy, a mirror image of his doubtful views of liberalism.

These two last points do not obscure the implications of Kennedy's overall project. This is the most balanced, persuasive interpretation available to date of Schmitt's constitutional and political theory. Kennedy offers an honest, thoughtful engagement with his Weimar writings, doing justice to the complexities and depth of his work while remaining mindful throughout of the controversies surrounding his name. She uncovers the intricate relationship between his political theory and the tradition of constitutional jurisprudence and shows how constitutionalism remained a central concern throughout his Weimar writings. Schmitt's writings represent a unique case in which the constitution is understood in political terms while democratic politics is analyzed in constitutional terms. Kennedy's interpretation recognizes this centrality of constitutionalism to his thought, explores its implications, and considers its legacy. In doing so, she does nothing else than transform our understanding of Schmitt.