Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism.
Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jaime Guzmán, and Slavoj Žižek. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Schmitt was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. But there can be little doubt that his preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease."