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Carl Schmitt and the Sacred Origins of Law

During the formative years of National Socialist Germany, Carl Schmitt abandoned the decisionism he had been developing since the beginning of his career and turned toward institutionalism, known also as "concrete order thinking" and the philosophy of nomos. Schmitt had outlined his decisionist theory as a critical response to the normativist approach in legal positivism represented especially by Hans Kelsen. In Schmitt's understanding, normativism identified law (Recht) with legal rules and norms, dismissing the existential dimension of personal judgment and decision in the theory of law.¹ Schmitt's decisionism meant a revival of this existential dimension: "Law is concretized only in...