In Response to Constitutional Crisis: The Latent Carl Schmitt in Zhang Junmai’s Legal Theories and Practices
This paper examines two responses to the global constitutional crises in the twentieth century, with a focus on a comparison between Carl Schmitt, a notorious German political theorist and critic of liberal constitutionalism and Zhang Junmai, a constitutionalist in Republican China. After the First World War, both Germany and China experienced constitutional crises, which prompted critical reflections among intellectuals. My paper is the first to discover and examine the latent element of Carl Schmitt in Zhang Junmai’s acceptance of the Weimar Constitution. By examining the intertextual relation between Carl Schmitt and Zhang Junmai, this paper reveals a latent aspect of the spectrum of Constitutionalism in the twentieth century and shows a special dialogue between a German critic of constitutionalism and a Chinese constitutionalist.
While Zhang seems to have simultaneously read and accepted parts of the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Schmitt’s liberal rivals, a hidden side in Zhang Junmai’s thought is his
acceptance of Schmitt’s critique of liberal understandings of the state and Rechtsstaat. My research is also the first to deeply explore the hidden intellectual impact of Max
Weber and Carl Schmitt on Zhang Junmai, especially on several key issues related to the
politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the sovereign and sovereignty,
the depoliticising bourgeois intellectuals, the rise of economic interests and the decline of
politics and state theory, and so on.