The Twenty-First Century Response to Carl Schmitt.

Recent events, particularly the Bush Administration's controversial policy at Guantanamo Bay and skepticism towards the Geneva Convention, have focused the world's attention on the need for limits on executive power in democracies. Many scholars have looked back to the authoritarian writings of Carl Schmitt to explain this behavior, because Schmitt insisted that even democracies need to be willing to utilize emergency powers to defend themselves from public enemies. Yet identifying Schmittian logic is not the same as finding solutions to the problems that face democracies in peril. This paper assesses several recent critical responses to Schmitt which are each concerned with the possibility of human rights catastrophes stemming from unbounded power. Focused on the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, we ask several questions: are their critiques of the dangers of the state of exception sufficient to warrant global reorganization and limitation of power? If so, what kind of international rights, laws and institutions would be necessary? Would their ideas help resolve the dilemma of "friend-foe" relations or simply displace them as Schmitt feared would happen? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]