Geo-Political Spaces

This book focuses on the geographical and geopolitical sources for Carl Schmitt’s multilayered political thinking in order to uncover the relation between the political and the geographical aspects of his concept of space from 1939 to 1950. The aim is therefore to open up a field of enquiry, specifically to investigate Schmitt’s sources in the geographical and geopolitical literature inside and outside Germany in order to reconstruct the genealogy of his idea of space, territory and international order. In doing so, the contributors aim both to distinguish concepts that have generally been only vaguely defined in the literature on Schmitt, namely his idea of space, political territory and land, and to define more precisely the relationship between Schmitt's Großraum and the National Socialist Lebensraum.

This book refers to, complements and goes beyond three different approaches – International Relations, geography and philology: First, in that it explores the genealogy of Schmitt’s concept of space by adopting a twofold methodology of intellectual history and philology; second, in that it considers the relevance of language in Schmitt’s discourse on power and space; third, in that it relates Schmitt’s thinking to the transnational literature on geopolitics and political geography.

Geo - Political Spaces will appeal to academics and the well-informed public at large. It is also suitable for academic teaching, especially when it comes to historical theory, the concept of space or the history of political thought.