The Enemy An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

The writings of Carl Schmitt form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original, and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought. In the English-speaking world, he is terra incognita, a name associated
with Nazism, the author of a largely untranslated oeuvre forming no recognizable system, coming to us from a disturbing place and time in the form of fragments.

The Enemy is a comprehensive intertextual reconstruction and analysis of all of Schmitt's major works presented in an arresting narrative form. The format reveals the complex ways in which his ideas took shape in the intertwining time lines of civil and world wars.
"Carl Schmitt is probably the major twentieth-century political theorist whose work remains internationally unknown. Balakrishnan's comprehensive and sophisticated intellectual biography should rectify this. Here is a book
which everyone interested in modern political theory should read." - Michael Mann

Gopal Balakrishnan is on the editorial board of the NewLeft Review and is the editor of Mapping the Nation