Bonavero Network Series: Why Read Carl Schmitt Today?

We will be joined by Martin Loughlin and Sam Zeitlin for a critical exploration of Carl Schmitt’s enduring relevance and contentious legacy in legal and political thought. Together the speakers will reflect on what insights — and cautions — Schmitt’s ideas offer for contemporary debates about democracy, sovereignty, and the political.

Martin Loughlin

Martin Loughlin is Professor of Law, Emeritus Professor of Public Law. He was educated at LSE, the University of Warwick and Harvard Law School and held chairs at the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester before returning to LSE in 2000. He was a member of the Editorial Committee of The Modern Law Review from 1987 to 2010, serving as General Editor between 2002-07, and now sits on its Advisory Board. Martin was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and in 2015 was awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh. He has held research fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2007-8), Princeton University (20012-13), Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2016-17), Edinburgh Law School (2019) and Yale Law School (2023) and been a Visiting Professor at several law schools including Osgoode Hall, Paris II, Pennsylvania, Renmin University (Beijing), and Toronto.

Samuel Zeitlin

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is a Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History at University College London. 

Sam studies and teaches the history of political thought, the history of international relations, political philosophy, and intellectual history. His work on Francis Bacon examines the themes of war and peace in Bacon’s political philosophy. His work on Carl Schmitt has offered new interpretations of Schmitt on history, law and state theory. Sam’s translation and edition (co-edited with R.A. Berman) of Land and Sea won an award in the “Religion” category at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2016.  He is currently working on monographs on Bacon and Schmitt as well as articles and edited volumes on Hobbes and Nietzsche as well as on constitutions in the history of political thought.

Before joining the UCL History faculty, he taught courses at University of California-Berkeley, at the University of Chicago, at Queen Mary, University of London, at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, and at the University of Cambridge, where Sam was a College Lecturer and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.