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This article attempts to contextualise how Max Weber influenced Carl Schmitt’s concept of the state and the political. By looking into Weber’s definition of the political association, the article firstly addresses an intimate relationship between his concept of the political and the feature of exercising violence. Under this definition, the state, as one kind of the political associations he defined, could be seen as an association that achieves “the monopoly of legitimate physical violence.” This Weberian definition of the state seems to influence how Schmitt defines the concept of the political. The article then analyses how Schmitt transformed such a Weberian definition into his concept of the political, i.e. to distinguish friends from enemies by which to decide what group is the aim of violence, and his concept of the state, i.e. a political entity that monopolises any decision from the political. The article concludes Schmitt’s Weberian legacy by pointing out that Schmitt, how-ever, tried to decouple the concept of the political from the state in order to account political developments. That is, how the international law and the world order trans-form when the states can no longer hold the monopoly of exercising violence. |
