The Tyranny of Values - Carl Schmitt
Introduction This introductory essay[1] is a jurist’s contribution to a discussion on “Virtue and Value in the Theory of the State,” that followed a paper read by Professor Ernst Forsthoff at Ebrach, on the 23rd of October, 1959. On that occasion, Professor Forsthoff showed that while virtue still had a place in the system of absolute monarchy, the legalism of the bourgeois legal state no longer knew what to do with such a word as virtue and its meaning. The term “value” offered itself as a kind of substitute. Notwithstanding, even before WWI, pains had been taken to rehabilitate “virtue” by means of a philosophy of values (Max Scheler, 1913). After WWI, such notions and trains of thought, peculiar to the philosophy of values, were driven into the theory of state and constitution that stood behind the Weimar Republic and its Constitution (1919–1933). The intention was to provide a new interpretation of the constitution and its legal basis. Nevertheless, the legalistic vocabulary regain