2. CONFRONTING DEFEAT: CARL SCHMITT BETWEEN THE VICTORS AND THE VANQUISHED

Quoting a text on Tocqueville written by Carl Schmitt in 1946, Reinhart Koselleck hypothesized about the epistemological advantage of being vanquished in writing history. This essay analyzes Schmitt's intellectual and political positions in reaction to three successive defeats: the collapse of the German Empire in 1918; the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933; and the overthrow of the Third Reich in 1945. Schmitt was a German nationalist and, at least until Hitler's rise to power, an anti‐Nazi conservative, but he easily adapted to both the Weimar Republic in 1919 and National Socialism in 1933, two political turns that coincided with significant improvements in his academic career. He felt vanquished only in 1945, after his double imprisonment, the Nuremberg trial, and finally his retirement to Plettenberg. 1945 was a watershed that he symbolized through two metaphorical figures: the reactionary thinker of Spanish Absolutism Juan Donoso Cortés and Melville's literary character Benito Cereno. Thus, the case of Carl Schmitt does not confirm Koselleck's hypothesis, insofar as the most productive and creative part of his intellectual life does not fit into an awareness of being vanquished. Koselleck's statement deals with the gaze of the ruled, whereas Schmitt belonged to a different tradition of political thinkers interested in building domination and smashing revolution (Hobbes, Maistre, Donoso Cortés). He was a thinker of action, not of mourning. Defeat did not inspire, but rather paralyzed his thought.