Dopo lo Stato e oltre lo Stato. Istituzione e ordinamento concreto nella “filosofia del diritto internazionale” di Carl Schmitt

Schmitt's interest in international law and politics does not match a thematic and doctrinal caesura in his theoretical itinerary. This path can be considered continuous, and thus the subject of a unitary analysis. However, it would be wrong to consider it devoid of even sudden changes of direction. And it is precisely one of these turns - the origin of which is to be found in the four-year period 1933-1936 - that needs to be analysed with particular attention. An alternative had to be found to the concept of the state, which until then had best expressed a territorially concrete spatial order. It was not Nazi biologism that provided Schmitt with a cue in this direction, but the institutionalist conception. Through it, he focused on the inadequacy of the decisionist interpretation of experiences other than the modern European state, recovering the possibility of thinking of a law without a state. In addition to explaining 'what was before the state', it allows the possibility of proposing interpretative hypotheses of 'what will be after the state and beyond the state'.