Carl Schmitt, Theorist of the Community

In this introduction to the translation of Carl Schmitt's article "The Opposition between Community and Society as an example of a twofold distinction: Considerations on the Structure and Destiny of such Antithesis", we intend to determine in broad outline the role that the concept of "Community" (Gemeinschaft) plays in the work of the author. We analyze the different meanings that this notion takes on in Schmitt's thought in the light of both the aforementioned article and of a number of fundamental texts that belong to the most decisive period of his intellectual life, namely the one that spans from the end of the 1920s to the early 1930s, a time marked by the development and end of the Weimar Republic and by the rise of the National Socialist Regime.