Among serious readers of his work, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is known as an analyst of the European sovereign state. From the 1920s on he wrote extensively on this entity, examining the historical context that gave rise to it and the legal arrangements it incorporated. He viewed the sovereign state as a legacy threatened by the emergence of new historical configurations. From various revolutionary ideologies and the tyranny of values to the breakdown of international order and the technological obsoleteness of military engagements of the kind that had taken place in earlier centuries on the continental European chessboard, the sovereign state, Schmitt believed, was now under siege.
