Social movement and the construction of Polity: Carl Schmitt

Abstract

The German intellectual Carl Schmitt was involved with the national-socialist ideology and is not very well known in the Brazilian context. The paper search in Carl Schmitts thought the critics made to the liberal-bourgeois democracy and to the parliamentary-representative system, trying to obtain of it a contribution to the current debate on social movements. The author’s proposal is that the social movements, when assuming the permanent confrontation among legally confirmed issues and utopic demands, can vindicate the voice of those that have been ignored by the daily institutionalized politics and rescue the true space of politics. The argument starts with some assertions on the historic context that originated the Carl Schmitts theoretical concern. In the second section are presented the central aspects of a text by Schmitt published in 1933 under the title Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, movement, volk), around which are articulated systematic issues connected to social movements as indicators of lack of liberal democracy. By the end it is reconstructed the conductor line of the argument developed by Schmitt, to obtain the most important observations that contribute to clarify better the conceptual-systematic mark of the current debate on social movements. Key-words: Social movements; Carl Schmitt; Polity space; liberal democracy