The transformation of the concept of the person in the light of Carl Schmitt´´'s doctrine of Sovereignty

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discover the presence of the concept of person in the Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of sovereignty. Although this concept had a broad metaphysical development within Christian thought during late antiquity, it could never get rid of the legal imprint of its creators the Roman jurists. For this reason, it served as a conceptual support for the subsequent deployment of the notion of legal entity, systematized throughout modernity. To achieve our goal, we will try to trace the transformation of the concept of person throughout the middle ages and modernity, as well as review the concept of sovereignty in modern political theory. On the other hand, we will study the notion of decision in the work of Carl Schmitt, a notion that the great German jurist used to define his own conception of sovereignty. Based on these clarifications, we will try to establish the relationship between the notion of person and that of decision within the Schmittian conception of sovereignty, taking the theological presuppositions implicit in it as a guiding thread. As we shall see, such budgets will refer us to the work of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, whose doctrines will show us the full scope of the Schmittian approach. In this way, we can conclude that the concept of the person underlying Schmittian decisionism has been transformed, first, into that of political existence, a notion determined by the enmity relationship; and, secondly, in the unity of personality, a concept determined by the updating of the spiritual dimension within the human condition.