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By

Joe Millis

Opinion

Whom do they quote?

July 17, 2011 19:37
5 min read

In his hysteria to show support for the anti-Democratic Boycott Bill, Ronen Shoval, the founder of Im Tirzu, an Israeli far right group, quotes here from Carl Schmitt, whom he describes as a German legal expert.
Interesting. But who was Carl Schmitt?
Here it says:

This student of Max Weber was a legal and politcal theorist of Weimar and Nazi Germany. This chap was a paid up, active Nazi – though his friends have tried to exonerate him of these charges.

Schmitt’s political theory was founded on the idea of exception (Ausnahmezustand) from where he launched an attack on liberalism. According to Schmitt unforeseen and sudden situations in the political render unstable any system build on pre-planned responses and fixed legal codes. The political rests on a fundamental contingency and basic conflict hence it cannot adopt apriori rules of procedure. Liberalism disregards this inherent contingency and does not account for exception in its constual of rules.

Here it says:

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