The Nazi Experiment, Vol. 8: Carl Schmitt's Politics and the Nazi State

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 107 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 182 What was the underlying structure of politics in the Third Reich, and what bearing did this view of politics have on the unfolding Nazi Experiment? In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay continues this sprawling series on Nazism, showing not just that it was a disaster but also why it was a disaster. In this episode, he presents the politics of Carl Schmitt, which informed and meshed with the Nazi totalitarian program at its deepest levels. Lindsay presents some of Schmitt's famous The Concept of the Political (1932) to set the stage and then presents a short essay by Schmitt from 1936 simply titled "Politics" (https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/carl-schmitt-politics-1936) that leaves little doubt that his politics were Nazi politics, and Nazi politics were his politics. The relationship to the politics of Maoism (https://newdiscourses.com/2023/02/woke-mao-and-the-american-cultural-revolution/), discussed elsewhere on the podcast, are also made clear. Join him for this eye-opening look into the Nazi political world, which is particularly alarming given the Woke Right effort to mainstream Schmitt in conservative politics today. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #CarlSchmitt

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay. You are listening to the New Discourses podcast, and we are
0:23.7	continuing with our ongoing series about the Nazi experiment. This one will be volume 8. I don't know how many
0:32.4	volumes there will be. I'm guessing maybe as many as 20.
0:38.6	I don't know if you'll get there.
0:45.6	In this episode, we're going to depart again from Minkomph to which we will return soon.
0:53.8	We're going to explore a little bit more of the Nazi jurist or juridical theorist Carl Schmidt. We're going to talk about an essay he wrote in
0:57.3	1936 while he was very much a Nazi after having joined the party in 1933, where he discusses
1:06.4	the concept of politics. And so the idea behind this episode, the title of this episode, is to reveal
1:13.3	that Karl Schmidt's philosophy on the truth about what politics is guided the Nazi party,
1:20.3	or therefore guided the Nazi experiment. And in particular, we're going to focus on his development
1:25.1	of what he calls the monopolization of the
1:27.6	political, which he places in the hands of the NSDAP, that is, the Nazi Party.
1:34.2	So he's going to explain in this short essay how politics gets monopolized by the Nazi
1:42.0	party under its totalitarian state.
1:44.4	In the previous episode devoted to Schmidt, which was episode six,
1:48.0	we talked about how, in fact, he recognized that the Nazi party, the Nazi government,
1:53.9	was a totalitarian government.
1:55.8	And he tries to justify this by saying there is no normal state that is not totalitarian that was in his legal basis for
2:03.5	the total state document which I don't know that Hitler needed a legal justification for doing what
2:11.1	he wanted to do but it certainly greased the wheels and made it possible and provided a lot of
2:16.7	logical structure underneath
2:19.7	the Nazi experiment. Now, as I've done in every one of these episodes, let me briefly explain
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Discourses, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New Discourses and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.