Benjamin Schupmann

Benjamin A. Schupmann is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His research sits at the intersection of democratic theory and the history of political and legal thought. In particular, he is interested in exploring how the ideas of early twentieth century German political and legal theory can help solve pressing problems that face constitutional democracies today.

At MacMillan, he is completing a book manuscript (contracted with Oxford University Press), which develops a new normative theory of militant democracy. A normative theory of militant democracy explains the legitimacy of measures of constitutional entrenchment, such as unamendability and political rights restrictions, as a means to defend democracy against parties who adopt legal revolutionary methods to realize their antidemocratic political goals. Populist parties in power, such as Fidesz and the BJP, illustrate this kind of legal revolutionary threat to democracy.

This book builds on the conclusions of his first book, Carl Schmitt’s State and Constitutional Theory (Oxford University Press, 2017). That book argues that Schmitt’s anti-positivist jurisprudence is the narrative thread that unites and systematizes his seemingly aphoristic and disparate writings on the state and constitution. It analyses both how Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory anticipated some inherent problems of twentieth century “mass” democracies and the solutions that he advocated, as well as how some of those solutions were codified in the 1949 German Basic Law.