Politonomy

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s contribution to political jurisprudence. It approaches the issue through the concept of politonomy, a concept first alluded to by Schmitt but which he never developed. Politonomy seeks a scientific understanding of the basic laws and practices of the political. The chapter situates Schmitt within the German tradition of state theory and shows that his overall objective was to build a theory of the constitution of political authority from the most basic elements of the subject. It suggests that Schmitt occupies an ambivalent position in political jurisprudence and that this is because of his distrust of the scientific significance of general concepts. To the extent that he acknowledged the existence of a ‘law of the political’, this is found in Schmitt’s embrace of institutionalism in the 1930s and later in his account of nomos as the basic law of appropriation, division, and production.