Abstract

The author examines the critique of the epoch, which German philosopher of law and political theoretician Carl Schmitt worked out in the 1920s. Since this topic is present in most of Schmitt’s works from that period, author chose to discuss three, in which this subject isn’t considered on the margins, but on the foreground: a text concerning the poem by Theodor Däubler Nordlicht, Political Romanticism and Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations. While the latter is well known in Poland, the first two – a little worse, as well as the whole reflection and biography of Carl Schmitt in that period. The consistency with which Schmitt engaged in the criticism of the times in which he lived, allows us to show how he was born as a political thinker: main ideas of his political theology have their source in the criticism of the era. In addition, the author presents criticism created by Schmitt on the background of that one developed by other thinkers, to point out the differences between this two approaches to the same epoch. The aim of the study is, first, to bring Polish reader closer to the not-so-well-studied period of Schmitt’s reflection and biography (by reaching beyond the above-mentioned works also to the journal of Carl Schmitt, as well as his youthful literary work Schattenrisse, written together with Fritz Eisler), secondly: to present Schmitt as an original thinker of his era.