New Review of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea

Writing at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, David Ragazzoni reviews Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, published by Telos Press Publishing. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and co-edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Schmitt’s Land and Sea is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on your purchase by using the coupon code BOOKS20.

Land und Meer appeared in English for the first time in 1997, but the new translation offered by Zeitlin and Berman stands out for its philological accuracy. It takes into account multiple variations between the 1942, 1954, and 1981 German editions, as well as textual changes in the 1952 Spanish translation (in which some passages omitted in the 1954 version were retained). It also explores the historical and intellectual context of Schmitt’s geopolitical thought before Der Nomos der Erde (1950), in which he offered his most systematic analysis of the trajectory of the jus publicum Europaeum from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. In their extensive introductions—respectively titled “Geography, Warfare, and the Critique of Liberalism in Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea” and “Propaganda and Critique: An Introduction to Land and Sea“—Berman and Zeitlin highlight the defining features of what can be best described as a narrative of the history of civilization through the antithesis between terrestrial and maritime cultures. . . . Zeitlin and Berman’s introductions to this new edition of Land und Meer successfully provide a detailed account of the intellectual and historical background of the text.

Read David Ragazzoni’s full review here (sub. reqd.).