Carl Schmitt's relationship with Spain had not yet been subject to rigorous and detailed study. This relationship is twofold: academic-intellectual and political-affective. Sometimes these two aspects are contradictory, sometimes complementary. There is a Schmitt Hispanist interested in publishing on Spanish themes and reflect on various aspects of Spanish culture, from Don Quixote and Quevedo the role of Spain in the beginning of modernity. But his emotional and family ties with Spain, recurrent in the epistolary with her daughter Anima, will also be outlining a theory of Galicia who, like his native Westphalia, imagine how a balance between land and sea, or place the origin of shapeless postmodern war in the war of Independence against Napoleon.
The best known of that relationship issues are addressed in this book in a new light. Identification with Donoso Cortés allows to draw a conclusion for the interpretation of whole Schmitt thought: Donoso is for him the figure of decisiveness, an aspect that is integrated, not without tensions, as Schmitt's worldview thinker particular order. His approach to Francisco de Vitoria is invaluable to understand their position on the just war. Nowhere it is so clear that Schmitt just war is identical to total war and therefore the impossibility of politics. It makes Schmitt's relationship with the Franco regime, his supposed affinity must be nuanced, especially through exchanges to keep the German jurist, apart from Alvaro d'Ors, with other leading Spanish intellectuals (Díez of Corral Garcia Pelayo, Tierno Galvan, Truyol and Serra ...). This inquiry can finally assess in fair terms the place occupied by Schmitt in the reactionary tradition.
Hispanic culture, its literature and political history influence Schmitt, the model, offering a new peripheral gaze, which may explain that in a political world like today, the center of which is uncertain, the positions of Schmitt have not stopped have effect.