A Philosophy of Concrete Life

Today, twenty years after his death, Carl Schmitt is considered one of the leading political theorists of the 20th century. Consisting of polemical moves in immediate intellectual and political contexts, his oeuvre is not usually thought of as forming a recognisable system. This book challenges this interpretation. Mika Ojakangas demonstrates that there is indeed a common metaphysical core passing through Schmitt's work as a whole. On account of this metaphysical core, Ojakangas calls...
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Today, twenty years after his death, Carl Schmitt is considered one of the leading political theorists of the 20th century. Consisting of polemical moves in immediate intellectual and political contexts, his oeuvre is not usually thought of as forming a recognisable system. This book challenges this interpretation. Mika Ojakangas demonstrates that there is indeed a common metaphysical core passing through Schmitt's work as a whole. On account of this metaphysical core, Ojakangas calls Schmitt's thought a 'Philosophy of the extreme', thus emphasising its embeddedness in the late modern tradition of philosophical extremism from Kierkegaard to Foucault. Despite this strictly philosophical objective, however, the book is also a lucid presentation of all of Schmitt's central ideas and concepts from the 1920s to the 1960s, offering a comprehensible introduction to the work of this controversial but highly original political thinker.