The Infinite Conversation: Carl Schmitt on Parliamentarism and Romanticism

The paper examines the conceptual architecture of Carl Schmitt's 1924 work The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Schmitt famously argues that democracy and parliamentarism are distinct, and that democracy does not require parliamentary institutions. Less well known is that Schmitt explores the analogies between parliamentarism and Romanticism. Schmitt sees the former as the dominant nineteenth-century bourgeois political institution and the latter as the dominant nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetic movement. Both parliamentarism and Romanticism, he also insists, are committed to forms of “infinite conversation” in which mediation and reconciliation are prioritized over conclusive decision making. For Schmitt, parliamentarism and Romanticism are parallel manifestations of the European bourgeoisie in its era of political and cultural supremacy from 1789 to 1848.

Duke Scholars

Author Jakob Norberg German Studies