The first line of Schmitt's Political Theology is perhaps the most famous sentence, certainly one of the most infamous, in German political theory: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” [Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet]. And yet the full significance of this famous sentence is often underestimated. In this chapter, I focus on (1) its significance in the overall trajectory of Schmitt's Weimar work, and (2) its significance for constitutional theories of emergency powers in general.

I will examine Schmitt's first major theoretical engagement with the issue of emergency powers, in Die Diktatur from 1921, and explain how his position, or at the very least his mode of presentation, changes in his second effort on this subject, Political Theology, published only a year later. In the earlier work, Schmitt describes the classical Roman institution of dictatorship as a theoretical-historical standard for emergency measures that preserve a constitutional order in a time of dire crisis and also explicitly as the appropriate conjunction of Technik and Politik. In classical dictatorship, political technology is consigned only to the temporary exceptional moment, and in this scheme the normal and rule-bound regular order is considered substantively correct by Schmitt and worthy of restoration. However, in the latter work, Political Theology, the exceptional situation is that which calls for the emergence of a potentially all-powerful sovereign who must not only rescue a constitutional order from a particular political crisis but also charismatically deliver it from its own constitutional procedures, procedures that Schmitt pejoratively deems technical and mechanical.