After 1945, Schmitt was, to borrow A. C. Goodson's apt phrase, an ‘historically disappointed man’. His political, moral and intellectual gamble in favour of Nazism had collapsed around him. The dream of a European Großraum under German stewardship had been rendered absurd. Far from ‘restraining’ the onward march of individualism and nihilism, Nazism had given way to a political setting that seemed to confirm Schmitt's worst fears. Domestically, it is an understatement to suggest that ‘the “restorationist” Bonn Constitution must now have seemed to [Schmitt] decisively inferior to the Weimar Constitution’. The Federal Republic's new constitutional arrangements and their legal management from Karlsruhe marked the total ascendancy of legal positivism and liberal indeterminacy. Internationally, the only corrective to ‘Atlanticism’ was the even more moralistic and annihilatory spectre of revolutionary Communism. A divided Germany appeared to represent in microcosm the very consequences that Schmitt had sought to prevent – the collapse of the European state, the privileging of morality above politics, and the elevation of the enemy from a mere existential other to a mortal foe.

In this extreme setting, much of Schmitt's response was embittered, maudlin and reactionary. Schmitt was interred awaiting possible indictment at Nuremberg, spending nearly two years in American custody. His letters and essays written in prison (many collected and published in 1950 under the title Ex captivitate salus) are unapologetic for his association with the Nazis, and express regret for their defeat.