The Concept of the Political

This is the first text by the famous jurist, constitutional scholar and political theorist Carl Schmitt in Arabic, translated directly from German in a full, authorised and rigorous translation. Schmitt (1888 – 1985) lived a long life of nearly a century, during which he witnessed great horrors that engulfed his homeland Germany and the whole world. In this text, which he first delivered as a lecture in 1927 and later published as a book in 1932 amid political disintegration and the comprehensive defeat suffered by his homeland, Schmitt addresses the issue of “the political”, seeking to free its concept from the constraint of the moral criterion and economic calculation, and revealing its essential seat in the existential alignment of human beings into enemies and friends, which grants the state representing this alignment the powers of sovereign decision, bound only by itself. In this text Schmitt aims not only to make a new contribution to legal and political theory, but also to restore the standing of political authority with its absolute powers over society, which he saw as an antidote for his afflicted homeland Germany, torn by disintegration and fragmentation that he attributed to liberalism. The similarity between the historical context in which Schmitt issued this text and the historical context through which our Arab world is passing today, in addition to Schmitt’s intelligence and brilliance, the uniqueness of his dissection of this context and the difference of his treatment of it from the established traditions of the left’s critique of liberalism, indeed his focused critique of those traditions, were among the most important factors that motivated us to translate this text and make it available to Arabic readers, as it offers a different illumination of political affairs and public management.