Carl Schmitt a theorist of the material constitution?

The essay aims to answer the question of whether Carl Schmitt can be counted among the legal theorists who insist on the need to understand the constitution in a material sense. In this regard, after a brief conceptual clarification of the otherwise somewhat ambiguous dimension of a juristically relevant materiality, an attempt will be made to substantiate two different but related claims: 1) how and in which sense every Schmittian reference to a prior normativity - ranging from a self-constituting constituent power to any form of ethical communitarianism - lacks real theoretical consistency; 2) how and why no room is left, in Schmitt's theorising, to instances of constitutional normativity whose emerging and influence can be said actually independent from the political and its ordering mediation. The lack of a cogent account of what should be considered as previous normativity and how it can be translated in legal terms and transplanted in the existing legal system, along with Schmitt's fierce opposition to any ordering principle other than that enforced by the state, lead ultimately to a (conditionally) negative answer to the question raised in the article. With a final warning: in a very different sense, Schmitt's constitutional institutionalism does come under the sign of materiality and concreteness, but the mortar used in construction is poured in a political, and not a social, mould.