Le lacrime di Achab. L’istituzionalismo mitologico di Carl Schmitt

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the relationship between Schmitt’s institutionalist phase typical of the 1930s and the grafting, within it, of a reflection on the political myth, a reflection that will be a constant Leitmotiv in the subsequent thought of the jurist. Schmitt, having always concentrated on the problem of order and on the constitution of the system – specifically on the constitution of a concrete and lasting system that can give shape to a plural reality – experiments in the course of his long production with different ploys, concentrating first on the decision, then on the probative force of the institutions, but always keeping in mind the unitary problem of the maintenance of the system. These reflections will come together during and after the Nazi phase, in the delineation of the effective aspects of the political myth, as a creator of regulation in the moment in which a sovereign decision captures situational elements of the life of a people that are not immediately juridical or political in the restricted sense of the expression and configures them in relation to what is law and what is politics.