Theory of the Partisan

The book began as two lectures Carl Schmitt gave in March 1962 in Francoist Spain — at Pamplona, hosted by the Estudio General de Navarra, and at the University of Saragossa — and appeared as Theorie des Partisanen the following year from Duncker & Humblot in Berlin. Schmitt was 74, stripped of his German academic positions since 1945 for his Nazi-era jurisprudence, and writing through a network of Catholic-conservative European interlocutors who had not joined the broader academic boycott. The Spanish venue is not incidental: lecturing in Franco's universities was one of the few public platforms still open to him, and it shapes the book's audience-of-record. The English translation by G. L. Ulmen, published by Telos Press in 2007, is the standard scholarly reference in anglophone work and includes Ulmen's substantial introductory essay.

The argument develops the figure of the partisan — the irregular combatant who fights for a piece of land that is the combatant's own — and traces it through four marks: irregularity, intense political engagement, mobility, and what Schmitt calls the telluric character (rootedness in soil, in territory). The genealogy runs from the Spanish guerrilleros against Napoleon, through nineteenth-century irregular movements, to Lenin and Mao, where Schmitt argues the figure mutates: the modern partisan loses telluric attachment and becomes an instrument of global revolutionary politics, ceasing to be a partisan in the original sense. The friend–enemy distinction, central to Schmitt's earlier Concept of the Political (1932), is operative throughout.

The text is primary in the sense that it is Schmitt's articulation of the partisan concept; subsequent work on irregular combatants in political theory and international law either builds on or contests this exposition. It is also late Schmitt, and reads partly as a self-positioning exercise: writing about combatants who do not fit the state's law of war is not biographically neutral for a jurist who spent the 1930s arguing for the German state's untrammelled sovereignty. The book has been read as both a lucid analysis of post-Westphalian violence and as a coded apologia, and serious secondary work tends to hold both readings in view.

Schmitt's stake is permanent and unresolved. He never publicly renounced his Nazi-era writing, and Theorie des Partisanen sits inside an unbroken intellectual project that includes his most indefensible work; reading him requires neither dismissing the intellectual content nor detaching it from the biography. The political afterlife of the book runs across the spectrum — taken seriously by Telos's heterodox left, by international-law scholars, by the European New Right, and by post-9/11 thinkers on terrorism and irregular warfare — which is itself a clue to how thin the purely "analytical" reading is.

For this corpus, the operative donation is the picture of the land-tied irregular combatant who is neither soldier nor mercenary, and the question Schmitt presses: what happens to the law of war when combatants stop being assimilable to the state. The figure maps onto the post-Westphalian configurations of armed force that Kaldor later describes empirically and that private military companies, chartered companies, and contemporary volunteer formations occupy in different ways. Schmitt diagnoses an opening; the rest of the corpus is the question of who walks through it.