Introduction: Carl Schmitt's Challenge to Liberalism

Extract

The collapse of the Weimar Republic (1918-33) haunts political debate these days. Disaffected groups again challenge, with increasing support, the most fundamental values of the liberal democracies. In dealing with the “fact of pluralism” contemporary political philosophy grapples with this challenge. Any attempt to contest conceptions of the good life going against the grain of liberal democratic values invites the charge that liberalism is just one ideology among others, each seeking to enforce upon the whole its own partial idea of the good.