The State of Exception and the Unbound Executive

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Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 112 There's a political theory known as unbound executive theory. It originates with a German thinker, later turned Nazi, named Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, whose political theories were useful to Fascists and finds employment by the CCP in the People's Republic of China today, believed that for a sovereign or chief executive to truly be sovereign, he must be able to exempt himself at need from the general rule of law. That is, the executive must be able to become unbound by law, including the national constitution. Schmitt argues this should take place under special emergency circumstances called "the state of exception," which is to say a crisis, perhaps like Covid-19 or to remove Woke infiltration. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay gives an introductory overview to this strongly unAmerican political theory and explains its popularity with Woke tyrants on both Left and Right. Join him to understand how the "post-liberal" factions on Left and Right both increasingly think about executive power. New book! 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 #Nazi

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. This is James Lindsay. You are listening to New Discourse's
0:14.4	Bullets, where I give a short bullet point like summary of a single topic relevant to
0:18.8	wokeness that we need to understand so we can stop it.
0:23.1	Today is going to be controversial
0:25.1	with what I want to talk about.
0:26.4	I want to talk about the unbound executive theory
0:30.4	and the state of exception that is attached to this.
0:34.5	Now, this is a political theory
0:35.8	that certainly Marxists have subscribed to,
0:40.0	although maybe even before, really, it got codified. It was certainly political theory that the Nazis
0:47.6	subscribe to dictators across the board would subscribe to it. But it's also the political theory
0:53.0	that kind of guides, guided, I should say,
0:56.0	are experienced through COVID-19 in particular, the state of exception and the unbound executive.
1:03.1	So this theory is credited to a thinker that I really need to do more podcasting about,
1:09.0	who's very, very popular as a thinker in the woke right.
1:13.6	His name is Carl Schmidt.
1:15.5	Carl Schmidt wrote an awful lot of political philosophy in Germany
1:19.7	in the 1920s through the early 1930s.
1:24.7	In 1932, he wrote his most famous work, which is called the concept of the political.
1:31.9	That's what I need to actually probably go into at some point. But in 1933, in January of
1:38.0	1933, Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, became chancellor of what was the Nazi Reich over Germany, and Carl Schmidt
1:49.1	dutifully joined right up, joined the Nazi party, in fact, became known as the Crown
	...

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