Carl Schmitt's work - consisting of polemical moves in immediate intellectual and political
contexts - is not usually thought of as forming a recognizable system. A Philosophy of Concrete
Life challenges this interpretation. In this book the author demonstrates that there is indeed
a common metaphysical core passing through Schmitt's work as a whole. On account of this
metaphysical core the author calls Schmitt's thought a philosophy of the extreme thus
emphasizing its embeddedness in the late modern tradition of philosophical extremism from
Kierkegaard to Foucault. Despite this strictly philosophical objective however the book is
also a lucid presentation of all of Schmitt's central ideas and concepts from the 1920's to the
1960's offering a comprehensible introduction to the work of this controversial political
thinker.
