Schmittian Moment 13: Roger Green on Schmitt (1)

Political theorist Roger Green’s lecture on Essay One of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology takes us straight to the live wire in Schmitt’s thought: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.” Green reads that opening as more than a slogan. For Schmitt it is a borderline concept that sits at the foundation of state theory. The exception is the moment that reveals what a legal order really is and who truly rules. 

Because the exception cannot be codified in advance, someone must decide that it exists. That someone is the sovereign. Hence Schmitt’s famous paradox: the sovereign stands outside the legal norm in order to constitute the norm; authority proves it can produce law without itself being grounded in law.

Set against Weimar’s fragile constitutionalism, the move is both diagnosis and attack. Green stresses the context: post–First World War defeat, the new Weimar Constitution, antagonisms between left and right, and the proximity of revolutionary upheavals across Europe. In that setting Schmitt’s target is liberal constitutional theory, which he argues has spent a century trying to banish the sovereign by dissolving power into procedures, checks, and abstractions. In emergencies, those abstractions falter. Legal positivism and rationalist accounts of the state (Locke, Kant, and their heirs) are, for Schmitt, structurally unable to think the exception. They presume normality; they forget that normality itself is the creature of a prior decision.

To anchor this, Schmitt reaches back to Jean Bodin. Green is clear about what Schmitt borrows: sovereignty is indivisible, not something that can be shared out among estates, chambers, and committees without ceasing to be sovereignty. The prince (read: the decision-centre of a polity) must hold the last word on war, emergency, and fundamental change. If “sometimes Parliament rules and sometimes the prince rules,” sovereignty evaporates into a logical muddle. Schmitt takes Bodin’s absolutist insight and retools it for the twentieth century: every legal order rests, ultimately, on decision rather than norm.

This is why Schmitt lingers on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Its ambiguity, allowing both president and Parliament to proclaim an emergency, perfectly stages the question “who decides?” For Schmitt, an exception suspends the entire legal order yet does not yield anarchy; the state remains while the law recedes. Order subsists, but it is no longer the ordinary juristic order. Crucially, law presupposes a “normal situation” to apply at all, and “he is sovereign who decides whether the normal situation exists.” The circularity is the point: the ground of legality is extra-legal decision.Green follows Schmitt as he broadens the polemic. Liberal constitutionalism, legal positivism, and instrumental reason conspire, in Schmitt’s view, to fetishise rules and procedures while ignoring the irrational, the unforeseen, the moment when the crust of mechanism cracks and “the power of real life” breaks through. Hence Schmitt’s preference for the exception over the rule: the exception “proves everything.” It shows that a theory of the state that cannot account for decisive acts in extremis is a theory of nothing. Here political theology enters: modern state concepts are secularised theological ones, and the sovereign’s decision on the exception functions like a miracle, an intervention not deducible from the norm yet constitutive of order. Green notes Schmitt’s nods to Bodin’s Catholic natural law and to Kierkegaard’s Protestant reflections on the exceptional, underlining how theological idioms frame the argument without reducing it to piety.

What makes the lecture feel contemporary is Green’s careful use of examples. Emergency politics after 9/11, terror-alert systems, the Patriot Act; assertions of executive immunity; disputes over whether actors who subvert constitutional order can appear on ballots; the tug-of-war between federal and state authority, none of these are presented as partisan talking points. They illustrate Schmitt’s core claim: when normality is in doubt, institutions gravitate toward a decider. Populist styles of rule actively cultivate crisis to justify the exception; liberal proceduralism is tempted either to imitate decisionism or to be paralysed by it. Schmitt helps us see the mechanism at work.Green’s appraisal is not an endorsement. The diagnostic bite is real in that emergencies do expose the limits of rule-bound governance but Schmitt’s cure is perilous. If the exception is foundational and the decider’s will is primary, emergency becomes easy to declare and hard to exit; pluralism shrinks; legality becomes hostage to personality. The Weimar example, and Schmitt’s own trajectory, are not footnotes here but warnings.The upshot of Green’s deep dive is a disciplined, historically situated takeaway. Schmitt teaches that behind every legal architecture lies a power to decide and that crises force us to confront it. That insight explains both the appeal and the danger of sovereignty-as-decision. For critical theory, the task is to absorb the diagnosis without swallowing the prescription: build constitutional orders that can act under pressure without collapsing into permanent exception like emergency powers that actually end, clarity about who decides and under what constraints, a culture that prizes adversaries over enemies. Read Schmitt to understand the storm; use him to design better breakwaters.