In Constitutional Theory, Schmitt defended the Weimar constitution, which had been adopted August 11, 1919. In the Weimar Republic, there were only two: Friedrich Ebert and Paul von Hindenburg. What stability existed in Weimar Germany was provided by the president, as the framers of the constitution foresaw. The fourteen years and two months of the Weimar Republic witnessed fifteen governments, thirteen different chancellors, and fifteen coalitions. The prediction was accurate in the case of Weimar, with a Reichstag beset with multiple parties that were unable to form the coalitions necessary to agree for long on the composition of the cabinet.

In Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (1923), translated as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1988), Schmitt doubted the viability of parliamentary government, predicting that factionalism would doom it to stalemate. A sovereign dictator, on the other hand, replaced the constitutional foundation of the state and became a tyrant with unlimited tenure. His Die Diktatur (1922) distinguished between what he called 'commissarial dictatorship' and 'sovereign dictatorship.' The former, characteristic of the dictators appointed for limited terms during the Roman republic, functioned in times of emergency, not to abrogate, but to preserve the constitutional footing of the nation. The trajectory of his legal-political thought tended toward justification of strong executive government. His copious political and legal writings continue to challenge liberal thought, engendering countless scholarly books and articles and a quasi-cottage industry of articles in the journal Telos. Schmitt's reputation suffered from his membership in the NSDAP and his many publications in support of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1936-whether sincere or opportunistic-has been a matter of vigorous debate. The last work published in his lifetime appeared in 1970.1 Schmitt (1888-1985), the so-called Crown Jurist of the Third Reich, published his Verfassungslehre during the only sustained period of calm that the Weimar Republic enjoyed. His scholarly works span several eras of German history, beginning in the Wilhelmine Empire of 1910, traversing the First World War years, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and World War II, and postwar Germany. Carl Schmitt's Constitutional Textbook This first English translation of Carl Schmitt's Verfassungslehre (1928), prepared by Jeffrey Seitzer and published under the title Constitutional Theory, makes a welcome contribution to the growing corpus of Schmitt's writings available in English.

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