Over the last decade, there has been a veritable explosion of Anglo-American interest in the works of Weimar constitutional and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. Even before joining the National Socialist party in 1933, Schmitt launched incessant theoretical assaults against liberalism in the twenties and early thirties. He depicted the principles of pluralism, publicity, discussion, and representation; the practices of separation of powers, judicial review, and majoritarian elections; and such institutions as the Western European parliament as misguided and dangerous endeavors that ultimately only paralyze the modern state. Such principles and practices inhibit a state's ability to decide on the unavoidable question of friend and enemy, what he termed “the political,” as well as leave it vulnerable to an unforeseen emergency, which he called the “exception.”

Almost concurrently there has been a revival in the treatment of technology as a subject worthy of social-philosophical inquiry. Attention is again being devoted to the theoretical and political implications of technology's seemingly ever-expanding role in contemporary Western postindustrial societies and to the arguments developed to address this issue in twentieth-century German theoretical traditions: recent efforts explicitly draw on Edmund Husserl and phenomenology, Martin Heidegger and existentialism, Georg Lukács and critical theory, as well as the thought of Hannah Arendt.

Yet the two scholarly movements have surprisingly passed each other by. Surprisingly because, as I will demonstrate, the German critique of technology is crucial for understanding the works of Carl Schmitt, especially his criticisms of liberalism.