From Maistre to Schmitt and Beyond

Why Absolutism Will Dominate the 21st Century

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Absolutism is often thought of as an obsolete political paradigm, but the rise of strongman politics in the 21st century proves the enduring power of its insights.

Last week we detailed the chain of absolutist thinkers from Bodin to Maistre. This week we will continue that chain to Carl Schmitt, dwelling at length on his thought. Finally, we will explain the rebirth of absolutism in our time, and why it is the only truly foundational alternative to liberal democracy.

From Maistre to Schmitt: Absolutism in the 19th and 20th Centuries

After Maistre, absolutist ideas continued to circulate in a quieter form throughout the 19th century, even as overt expressions of absolutism declined in an age dominated by constitutions and parliamentary rule. Monarchs such as Austria’s Prince Metternich practiced a politics of restoration and reaction, suppressing liberal uprisings in the name of public order. However, these efforts often proceeded without the backing of detailed or novel theoretical arguments. Despite this, the intellectual tradition of absolutism persisted, adapting to shifting political circumstances. One key figure who helped carry absolutist reasoning from the post-revolutionary era into the 20th century was the Spanish Catholic political theorist Juan Donoso Cortés.

In the wake of the 1848 revolutions, Donoso Cortés made a notable intervention in the Spanish Cortes, arguing that in times of deep crisis, only dictatorship could protect society from collapse. Donoso, like Maistre, viewed liberalism as too indecisive and passive. When societies face existential threats—such as socialism or violent revolution, in his case—a temporary dictatorship becomes preferable to procedural deadlock. His argument, that refusing to impose dictatorship in an extreme emergency amounts to a forfeiture of responsibility, foreshadowed the reasoning of later absolutist thinkers. Carl Schmitt would later cite Donoso Cortés explicitly as a precursor to his own theory that “sovereign is he who decides the exception.” In this way, through Donoso, the decisionist strand of absolutism—focused on the need for a single will to override legal norms in emergencies—passed into 20th-century thought.

At the same time, political developments in the later 19th century featured the rise of authoritarian nationalism. Even as Europe’s constitutional monarchies formally distanced themselves from absolutist structures, some regimes retained or revived authoritarian practices. In Russia, for example, Tsars Nicholas I and Nicholas II upheld an overt autocracy under the banner of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” In Imperial Germany, despite the appearance of constitutional government, real authority often centred on the Kaiser and the Chancellor, fostering an increasingly personalist and illiberal political style.

New intellectual movements reinforced this shift toward strongman rule. Ideas like Social Darwinism and Romantic nationalism encouraged belief in leader-centric governance—whether through the great man theory of history or the emerging Führerprinzip rooted in völkisch thought. By the early 20th century, many European states seemed ready for the return of explicitly absolutist leadership, though now dressed in populist or nationalist rhetoric rather than divine-right theory. The trauma of WWI and the instability of interwar democracies left large portions of the public disillusioned with parliamentary government and yearning for authoritative leadership capable of restoring order and national pride.

This climate paved the way for the most famous modern theorist of absolutism: Carl Schmitt, who developed his ideas in the crisis years of Weimar Germany and during the rise of the Third Reich.

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985)

Carl Schmitt, a German legal and political theorist, reinterpreted absolutism for the 20th century, marking a notable departure from earlier monarchist and religious forms. Schmitt lived through the political chaos of Weimar Germany and eventually aligned himself with the Third Reich, joining the National Socialist Party in 1933. His key works—Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Dictatorship, and the controversial essay The Führer Protects the Law—outline a theory of sovereignty and politics that rejects liberalism and parliamentary rule.

Unlike Maistre or Filmer, Schmitt did not anchor his version of absolutism in divine right or hereditary monarchy. Instead, he grounded it in the practical necessity of decisive leadership to maintain order and to forge the existential unity of the political community. Schmitt’s absolutism made several key claims, each standing in sharp contrast to liberal-democratic principles.

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”¹ This maxim, Schmitt’s most well-known, expresses his core idea of sovereignty. For Schmitt, sovereignty does not reside in routine legal administration but in the power to override the law during a crisis. The sovereign holds the authority to declare a state of exception—a moment in which normal legal constraints no longer apply—and thereby reveals himself as standing above the legal order. In Schmitt’s framework, political order depends on this capacity for decisive intervention. All legal systems assume the existence of a normal situation.² When that normality collapses, only a sovereign decision can re-establish order.

This view directly opposes liberal constitutionalism, which aims to constrain all political power within fixed rules. Schmitt insisted that in moments of existential threat, those rules cannot enforce or defend themselves. Someone must judge whether the threat justifies suspending the rules, and that someone is sovereign. Schmitt thus framed sovereignty as fundamentally personal and will-based—not a feature of legal procedure, but a power embodied in the individual who decides. In formulating this position, he drew explicitly on earlier absolutist thinkers such as Bodin, Hobbes, and Donoso Cortés, demonstrating the continuity of a tradition that privileges decision over deliberation, unity over pluralism, and authority over normativity.

Schmitt rejected the liberal notion that politics revolves around solving problems through reasoned debate and compromise—a view embodied in the parliamentary ideal. In The Concept of the Political, he argued that politics has its own unique distinction: that of Friend versus Enemy.³ By this, Schmitt meant that politics arises wherever human groups define themselves against others who they perceive as existential threats. This Friend–Enemy distinction does not operate like moral categories (good vs. evil) or economic ones (profitable vs. unprofitable); rather, it concerns survival and identity. For Schmitt, the political begins when a group identifies an enemy whose existence jeopardizes its own way of life.

This approach treats politics as inherently conflictual and, at times, violent. When communities see one another as enemies, Schmitt observed, rational dialogue breaks down. What matters in such cases is not persuasion but the readiness to confront and, if necessary, to fight. As a result, he considered liberal ideas of open discussion, endless deliberation, and compromise as naive or even dangerous in times of deep division. Liberalism, in his view, tries to neutralize politics by replacing real antagonism with procedural talk—but this only functions in periods of peace. When crises emerge—those that fracture society along Friend–Enemy lines—a decisive act becomes necessary.

Schmitt therefore championed strong leaders capable of naming the enemy and mobilizing unity among their followers. He distrusted parliaments, which he regarded as ineffective assemblies prone to endless, inconclusive speech. Citing the chaos of interwar Europe, he argued that democratic regimes had failed to act decisively when faced with serious threats. He remarked approvingly that by the 1920s, “public discussion [had become] an empty formality,”⁴ and that newer movements had begun to discard liberal assumptions. Schmitt’s absolutism, then, rested on existential decisionism: the sovereign defines not only legal exceptions but the very political identity of the community by identifying its enemies. Sovereignty, in this sense, becomes the act of drawing the boundary between “us” and “them.”

In Dictatorship, Schmitt traced the history of emergency rule from the Roman Republic to the modern age. He distinguished two main types of dictatorship: commissarial dictatorship, which temporarily suspends the law to preserve an existing constitution, and sovereign dictatorship, which uses extralegal power to create a new constitutional order. In both cases, he defended dictatorship as a legitimate tool under certain conditions—a means for restoring or founding the political unity that ordinary legal mechanisms cannot secure.⁵

From this, Schmitt concluded that every constitutional system ultimately depends on a moment of decision that lies outside law. The legal order, he argued, cannot found or preserve itself without recourse to extra-legal authority during exceptional crises. For instance, he cited Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which granted emergency powers to the President. He endorsed its use, arguing that only a decisive actor—unconstrained by normal legal rules—can safeguard the state during grave threats.

This perspective directly opposed liberalism, which places its trust in rule-bound procedure and fears the concentration of power. Schmitt showed that without someone authorized to act outside the law when necessary, the state would succumb to determined enemies or unpredictable emergencies. He accused liberal democracies of hypocrisy: although they claimed to reject dictatorship, they often resorted to it through emergency measures when pushed to the brink. Rather than conceal this reliance, Schmitt urged that such power be acknowledged and made explicit.

In the Weimar context, Schmitt supported President Hindenburg’s liberal use of emergency decrees and later viewed Hitler’s extra-constitutional seizure of authority as a form of sovereign dictatorship—one that created a new political order. While many critics later condemned Schmitt’s support for the Nazi regime, his theoretical position argued for open recognition of the dictatorial element hidden within constitutionalism. In his view, a state functions more honestly and more effectively when it entrusts emergency powers to a strong executive rather than pretend that law alone ensures survival.

Schmitt, following Hobbes, adopted a legal positivist position in which he denied the existence of any transcendent or moral source of law beyond the state. He extended this view by insisting that law takes shape only through concrete acts of authority. “The law is not a norm of justice but a command, a mandate from the one who holds supreme power,”⁶ Schmitt declared, directly citing Hobbes. In this framework, law gains its meaning not from objective truth or moral correctness, but from the sovereign’s capacity to impose and enforce it. Schmitt held that normativity follows power—law begins not with abstract principles but with a sovereign decision that brings those principles into operation.

This approach became most evident in Schmitt’s critique of liberal jurisprudence. He accused liberal legal theorists of treating law like an autonomous system of norms, similar to a scientific code. Yet Schmitt contended that rules possess no force until an authority interprets and applies them. A rule, he argued, cannot interpret or enforce itself. Every application of law requires a decision; every legal situation demands a judgment from someone authorized to act. Therefore, he concluded that all law is situational—it depends on the context, and the sovereign defines that context.⁷ From this standpoint, creating and applying law do not differ in substance; both require an authoritative decision. Schmitt summarized this view with the statement: “Authority, not truth, makes the law.”⁸

According to Schmitt, a functioning legal order consists of the crystallized will of the sovereign, and its validity persists only so long as the sovereign can uphold it. This perspective justified his support for strong executive power, including instances where the leader overrides statutes or constitutional norms. For example, in his 1934 essay defending Hitler’s extrajudicial killings during the Night of the Long Knives, Schmitt portrayed the Führer’s actions as acts of law-creation. “The Führer, as the supreme judge, does not derive his authority from a statute but from the people’s mandate […] he decides in a concrete situation what is to be law.”⁹ According to Schmitt, Hitler’s personal decision to eliminate perceived traitors—without legal process—transformed his will into law. He interpreted this act as preserving the legal order not by adhering to codified norms but by removing threats to the state’s existential unity. In Schmitt’s theory, such an action could not count as illegal, because legality itself flows from the sovereign’s authority to decide.

In Political Theology, Schmitt famously observed that many modern political concepts mirror earlier theological structures.¹⁰ He pointed out, for instance, that the sovereign in politics resembles an omnipotent god in theology; the state of exception parallels the miracle—a suspension of normal rules through divine intervention. Schmitt argued that liberal constitutionalism represents a political form of deism: a model in which the law, like a self-governing universe, functions on its own, with the sovereign removed from daily affairs. Absolutism, by contrast, he likened to theism with miracles: a sovereign who intervenes directly when necessity demands it.

Although Schmitt, a lapsed Catholic, did not advocate for a return to medieval theocracy, he insisted that all political legitimacy contains a quasi-theological dimension. In his view, liberalism aims to neutralize politics—to render it procedural, impersonal, and rule-bound—just as deism envisions a distant, inactive god. But this, he argued, drains politics of existential meaning and robs it of the decisive element required in emergencies. Absolutism, conversely, preserves what Schmitt considered the “transcendent” quality of politics: the sovereign decision that does not emerge from norms but breaks through them in moments of crisis.

One could say that Schmitt regarded absolutism as sacramental—imbued with religious force in the decisive moment—whereas he saw liberalism as deist, based on the absence of active authority. “Political concepts are secularized theological concepts,”¹¹ he wrote, highlighting this structural continuity. Through this insight, Schmitt connected Maistre’s ultramontane political theology with modern forms of executive absolutism. Both, in his analysis, reject the Enlightenment’s effort to separate the divine from the world (or the sovereign from the law), preferring an immanent model—where authority acts within history, like God performing a miracle or a dictator asserting control during a crisis.

Carl Schmitt presented a sharp critique of the liberal parliamentary system, focusing especially on its function in Weimar Germany. He argued that 19th-century parliamentarism had rested on certain ideals—open debate, rational persuasion, and the formation of a general will through deliberation—which, in his view, no longer held relevance. Observing modern mass democracy, Schmitt claimed that real political power had moved away from parliaments toward executive agencies, centralized party structures, and charismatic figures who appealed directly to the public. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, he contended that if democracy means aligning the people’s will with the law—a view even Rousseau accepted—then plebiscitary dictatorship might offer a more authentic form of democracy than a parliamentary system based on checks and balances.¹²

Schmitt argued that in practice, democracy rarely involved the people deliberating continuously. Instead, it involved the people selecting a leader who would embody their collective will. On this basis, he asserted that democracy could align with—and in some respects favour—absolutist leadership. He contrasted rule by elected committees with rule by an elected leader who receives public acclamation. In Schmitt’s view, the latter better expresses the democratic principle of unity. He famously remarked that in the political conflicts of the 1920s, “democracy stands on the side of dictatorship, not on the side of parliamentarism.”¹³ By this, he meant that the unity and equality at the heart of democratic theory found clearer expression in decisive acts—such as referenda or direct leadership—than in the compromise and division of parliamentary procedure.

Schmitt praised developments such as plebiscites, strong executive presidents, and the weakening of legislatures. He claimed that a unified executive could reflect the people’s unified will, while parliaments only fragmented and diluted it. In Nazi Germany, this view was raised to its highest form: Adolf Hitler positioned himself as the tribune of the Volk, standing above parties, institutions, and legal constraints. Schmitt provided intellectual support for this model, arguing that a leader who connects directly with his people possesses greater legitimacy than any abstract law or constitutional structure. In The Führer Protects the Law, Schmitt declared that the Führer’s actions drew validity “not from abstract norms but from the Volkswillen (people’s will) he embodies.”

Through this lens, Schmitt reinterpreted popular sovereignty in illiberal terms: the People express their sovereignty not through parliamentary representation, but through identification with a single, authoritative leader. This view culminated in what might be described as a form of populist absolutism: a political model in which the Leader embodies the homogeneous will of the People and thereby holds the authority to act fully in their name.

Although Carl Schmitt and Joseph de Maistre both rejected liberalism, their versions of absolutism diverged in ways that reveal distinct underlying assumptions. Maistre presented a sacral and universalist vision of absolutism—he envisioned a single throne and a single faith guiding all of humanity. Schmitt, by contrast, articulated a form of absolutism that operated in a post-theological, particularist register. He made no appeal to divine right or Catholic mysticism; instead, he justified sovereignty through the secular logic of realpolitik. For Schmitt, sovereignty rested on the existential necessity of decision-making and the maintenance of order. His justification emerged not from sacred authority, but from the practical requirement of political survival.

While Maistre upheld a universal authority—the Pope—as a supranational sovereign transcending individual nations, Schmitt (especially after aligning himself with National Socialism) defended a sovereignty rooted in the unique identity of each Volk. He rejected all forms of cosmopolitan or universalist unity. Within the ideological framework Schmitt later accepted, the idea that one sovereign could rule all peoples appeared deeply flawed. Instead, völkisch absolutism posited that the Führer’s authority held meaning only for his specific people. This model resembled a pre-axial particularism, reminiscent of pagan traditions in which each tribe revered its own god and king.

Schmitt’s doctrine of Führerprinzip—the leadership principle—reflected this view. Just as archaic tribes had patriarchs who embodied tribal will and issued law, Schmitt believed that each nation should possess a supreme leader whose will defined law within that national context. He praised the Führer as the embodiment of the people’s unity and final authority, unbounded by legal or institutional constraints. In The Führer Protects the Law, Schmitt showed that the Führer’s actions created both law and justice—not because of conformity with abstract norms, but because of the office he held and the existential needs of the people he represented.

This marked the culmination of absolutist logic: the leader is the law. Maistre had offered a similar formulation in theological terms, asserting infallibility and finality for the Pope or a divinely anointed monarch. Schmitt, however, advanced this position in secular and nationalist terms. He retained the core structure of absolutism—unified, unchecked authority—but stripped it of its religious content and recast it within a modern framework of ethnic identity and state realism.

In sum, Schmitt built the 20th century’s most intellectually developed framework for absolutism, one detached from monarchy and religious legitimacy yet firmly rooted in nationalism and political realism. His work, though unsettling to defenders of liberalism, forced later scholars to grapple with the deeper implications of sovereign power. Schmitt demonstrated that liberal democracy, through its internal tensions and procedural rigidity, could open the door to a new form of absolutism—one that mimics democratic form by claiming to express the people’s will, yet functions autocratically in substance. By the 1930s and 1940s, this vision became reality: dictatorial regimes across Europe nearly eliminated liberal governance from the continent, realizing Schmitt’s absolutist theory in historical form.

Decline, Resurgence, and the 21st-Century Revival of Absolutism

Following the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, absolutist ideology faced a deep crisis of legitimacy. The example of Nazi Germany was held up as a stark warning against the dangers of unchecked sovereignty. In response, the post-war international order, imposed by the Allied victors and codified through institutions such as the United Nations, reasserted the primacy of constitutional government, the rule of law, human rights, and the separation of powers. In Germany, political reconstruction involved a conscious rejection of Schmitt’s ideas. Democratic institutions re-emerged with numerous safeguards designed specifically to prevent the rise of another figure like Hitler.