Can it really be true that modern democracy is at an end, possibly already dead, or if not, in a case of near-terminal decline? That seems to be the sense of it from a range of modern political scientists who have written on the subject recently. But whether this is because democracy can no longer deliver the goods it once promised, or because it never did and we just did not notice, or because democratic politics has basically come to mean liberal politics, and the threats to liberalism and the threats to democracy have become one and the same, it is hard to know. In an era of near permanent scandal, too—climate change and information manipulation, vote rigging and election tampering, the coarseness of the public language of political discourse—it is doubly difficult to take the measure of things.

All of which routinely sends us back to the recent past for historical parallels. We know that democracies have ended before, and that no forms of politics can be eternal. We also know that we cannot predict the future, only lay out possible developmental trajectories based on the evidence we have, but the evidence we have is itself limited. Amid our current crises of confidence, many colleagues seem to think that the closest historical parallels to our present moment are the 1930s, with failures of liberal democracy and economic strategy leading to forms of authoritarianism, populism, and antiliberal racism. Then, even such resolute liberals as John Maynard Keynes, liberals who well knew that the future is never like the past, admitted that global liberal capitalism really could not “deliver the goods” and needed to change. Today, however, we remain trapped in the hyperbolic present outlined by Frederic Jameson, where it actually seems easier to imagine the end of the world than it does to move away from a system of capitalism.

Nevertheless, if our politics can be both like and unlike the 1930s simultaneously, might some of the questions asked then about the nature of democratic competition, state strategy, and the popular sovereignty of the people amid economic uncertainty and populist demagoguery, still give us guidance now? In some ways, that is the opening gambit of Benjamin A. Schupmann’s detailed and compelling reconstruction of Carl Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory.

Schupmann begins, in fact, with the question of whether or not democratic politics can knowingly commit suicide. If it can, then perhaps it is worth considering again why that might be, and why it looked that way in the early years of the twentieth century, amid the modernity of mass democracy. This was, after all, a very live question in German politics and theory between 1930 and the end of 1932, when the issue of whether or not the “negative majority” of Nazis and Communists in the Reichstag could be forced out of their legislative deadlock by the constitutional and executive authority of the president, who in turn could try to constrain and limit the powers of a new chancellor, Adolf Hitler. So far, so familiar. But the complexity and systematicity of these debates about the relationship between law and politics under stress are often forgotten. Schupmann brings them back to life, focusing on the background formalistic assumptions of legal and state positivism within the academy, which came into conflict with more substantial and organic views of democracy and popular sovereignty.

For Carl Schmitt, of course, the route through these two extremes, namely “liberalism,” fudged the obvious differences he perceived between the merely legal dimensions of state positivism and the substantive legitimacy of popular sovereignty upon which these claims were based. So how could these claims be thought through at exactly the same time as a legally authorized chancellor was altering the constitutional fabric of a democratic society to turn it into a one-party state? Again, we know that this is part and parcel of a well-known story about how Schmitt, a vain and difficult man seeking proximity to power, came to carve out an intellectual and political career. But at the same time, what is new in Schupmann’s account is that he offers something of a “continuity thesis” for thinking about Schmitt’s work. Schmitt was, on his reading, always concerned with the limitations of modern liberalism, seeking to shake liberals from their dogmatic slumbers in order to see the real dangers around them (pp. 27ff), rather than simply wishing them ill and hoping for authoritarianism from the get-go.

What, then, were those dangers? Well, some were conceptual—the problem of toleration applied to democratic politics particularly, where the principle of an “equal chance” for those ambivalent about liberal democracy can lead to a situation where a democratic polity allows itself to be subverted from within. People make decisions that might bring about a situation in which they are no longer allowed to make any decisions at all, and democratic politics presumes that they should be allowed to. Versions of this thought are routinely applied to angry debates about whether Brexit in the UK really offers a form of democratic backsliding along these lines, or allows for the reassertion of democratic control by the people. For Schmitt, though, several versions of this problem relied on a series of oppositions that he thought were actually red herrings, even if they are often conflated as being his own position in work about him. That he thought parliament is impotent because it fudges questions of sovereignty is shown to be “apocryphal” (p. 61); that plebiscitarian democracy was a desirable solution is, too, something of a canard (p. 63). What Schupmann highlights instead are the historically concrete forms of thinking that Schmitt operationalized in his critique of legal formalism and contemporary liberal parliamentarism. Nineteenth-century parliamentarism worked, on Schmitt’s account, because there was background political stability, and differences of opinion were not merely tolerated but existentially expected. Parliament was not a site of friend–enemy distinctions but was adversarial only. By the 1930s, it had become existentially politicized, and what is more, this polarizing enmity signaled to Schmitt that what was most notably lacking was any background agreement about domestic friendship and political toleration.

Schmitt’s point was even more polemical, though. Noting that modern mass democracy had pushed the stability of older political structures beyond reasonable limits, what was needed was the recovery, from the history of political and legal thinking, of forms of constitutionalism that could both authorize democracy as well as constrain it in such ways that it could be protected against this subversion from within. For Schupmann, the most promising moments in Schmitt’s work are to be found in his complex genealogies of major political concepts, such as representation (via Sieyès); the awareness of juristic fictions (noting that states can be apolitical); of dictatorship (which always requires authorization); and a conceptualization of constitutionalism in the first place (which had Schmitt consider both “absolute” and “relative” constitutions, as well as the distinction between the written legal constitution and its legitimate foundations). Taken altogether, these make Schmitt a theorist of constrained democracy. This is the claim that one might substantively “guarantee” the content of the “Absolute Constitution,” thereby making it dictator proof, through the identification of the constitution with the very guarantee of its inviolability. Such guarantees could take the form of basic social rights, like those operative under the Weimar Constitution, in fact (p. 190). Schmitt’s constrained democracy could in theory, according to Schupmann, make the defense of substantive democratic values more secure than later proceduralist theories of “militant democracy.” For they routinely conflate positive law and democratic proceduralism in ways that Schmitt saw as normatively, as well as practically, self-defeating (p. 209).

Of course, Schmitt’s solutions and suggestions were, as he well knew, contextually specific. Democracy nearly a century later is challenged by different forces it seems to have little chance of controlling, but whether it can nevertheless adapt and cope with the globally networked nature of its current crises and scandals we simply do not yet know. What remains a vital lesson from this study of Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory is that we would do well to remember that even democratic suicide can be a lengthy and complex process, whose outcome is never in fact guaranteed. Perhaps the best we can do under the circumstances, to paraphrase a well-worn claim in the history of political thought, is to keep trying to do our own thinking about figures like Schmitt, very much for ourselves and for our own purposes.