“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5).
The footnote to the above quote highlights the context in which “the exception” is decided upon. It is specifically economic and political situations in which the application of “extraordinary measures” takes place. The sovereign is one who is not constrained by legal structures or mores. This is no Kantian leader.
“...every legal order is based on a decision, and also the concept of the legal order, which is applied as something self-evident, contains within it the contrast of the two distinct elements of the juristic—norm and decision. Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm” (10). The norm is what creates the milieu in which the law can be achieved, but it takes a decision to institute that law. Decisions are what move history.
In reference to Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution: “This provision corresponds to the development and practice of the liberal constitutional state, which attempts to repress the question of sovereignty by a division and mutual control of competences” (11).
“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (15).
Politics as Old Theology: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” (36).
