The Constitution’s Sovereignty: Carl Schmitt on Normality

Title: The Constitution’s Sovereignty: Carl Schmitt on Normality

By Jonas Heller (Goethe University of Frankfurt, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, October 22, 2026

Time: 1530-1700

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: The legal scholar Carl Schmitt is best known for his theory of the emergency (“Ernstfall”), to which he attributes a heuristic function: only the exceptional case, he argues, allows the fundamental concept of modern statehood – sovereignty – to be defined unambiguously. Yet Schmitt attaches two distinct meanings to sovereignty when dealing with the emergency: the political unity of order and the binding legal decision of an individual. His theory of the exception does not unite them. Surprisingly, it is his theory of normality, the “Constitutional Theory”, that integrates the legal and political dimensions into a differentiated unity characteristic of modern sovereignty. While Schmitt explicitly grounds his theory of sovereignty in an authoritarian conception of the state of exception, the concept acquires its sharpest profile where he describes the normality of the liberal-democratic constitution. The paper shows how Schmitt, as a theorist of sovereignty, is also a theorist of normality – and why his conception of normality is more interesting than his conception of the exception.

About the speaker: Jonas Heller is a Research Associate in Practical Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he also completed his PhD and habilitation. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, Critical Theory, and questions of historical transformation. He received the Werner Pünder Prize in 2018 for his work on states of exception and human rights as well as the Maria Weber Grant in 2026 for his research on philosophical conceptions of historical change. He has also held visiting research positions at the University of Chicago, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Columbia University. 

Organized by the Department of Philosophy