LAUSR

The recent publication of Carl Schmitt’s Dialogues on power and space (1954–1955), fully translated in English for the first time by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, and the new edition of Schmitt’s Land and sea (1942), published in a fresh, thoroughly annotated translation by Zeitlin and Russell Berman, offer unexpected and important insights into the thought of one of the most influential, and controversial, political/legal theorists of the twentieth century. Since Schmitt’s death in 1985, Anglo-American scholars have repeatedly turned to his work at pivotal historical junctures, in an attempt to see whether the most (in)famous of Weimar conservative jurists could help decipher ongoing political transformations at national and international levels. Three distinct phases are worth highlighting in the English reception of Schmitt over the past three decades. The publication of The crisis of parliamentary democracy (1985), Political romanticism and Political theology (1986), The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes, Roman Catholicism and political form, and The concept of the political (1996, the last two trans-