In one of his most famous dicta, the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt proclaimed it “obvious” that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning,” because “[t]hey are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation.” Taking Schmitt at his word, I argue that one must read Schmitt's masterpiece of comparative law from the Weimar period, Verfassungslehre, as a response to the Weimar state crisis. Schmitt's conceptual approach in Verfassungslehre aims to create a form of constitutional theory capable of compensating for structural defects of the Weimar state. Reading Verfassungslehre in this way also reveals that Schmitt does not present his constitutional theory as an alternative to liberal constitutionalism, but rather Schmitt's comparative history of constitutionalism in Verfassungslehre locates his decisionism at the very core of the liberal constitutional tradition.