In an early article, “Die politische Theorie des Mythus”, Carl Schmitt supports the existence of a strict relationship between the emergence of a political theory of myth and the crisis of parliamentarianism. The theory of myth, he contends, is the most powerful sign of the decline of the rationalism of parliamentary thought (Schmitt 1988: 17). His argument can be summarised as follows: if myth is the “symptom of a form of energy”, of an “enormous enthusiasm”, then the mechanism of “the discussing, bargaining and parliamentary procedures” cannot but appear as a “betrayal of myth” and an act of fundamental infidelity to the vital enthusiasm from which myth derives (1988: 13).

Schmitt, in the first chapter of his Political Theology, identified the basis for his intellectual enterprise in a “philosophy of concrete life” (1985b). In his decisionist thesis, which is outlined at the beginning of the book, he states that he who decides on the state of exception is sovereign. It is exception that creates the rule, and not vice versa. In his view, “in the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become turbid by repetition”; consequently, a philosophy of concrete life cannot withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree (1985b: 13–15).