Summary: Publisher Summary 1 The only English-language translation of one of Schmitt's most controversial works.   Publisher Summary 2 Schmitt's (1888-1985) 脺ber die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens, first published early in the Third Reich, challenges long-standing, commonly assumed liberal ideas, ideals, and standards of law, says Bendersky (history, Virginia Commonwealth U.), especially as they relate to government and political culture. He finds that its challenge to the legal positivism and normativism that were closely linked to the political liberalism of Schitt's time, opened the way for the elements of contingency and indeterminacy at the heart of contemporary debates over social and political modernity. Annotation 漏2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)   Publisher Summary 3 Bendersky provides the only English-languge translation, with extensive notes and introduction, to one of Carl Schmitt's most controversial works. At the time of its publication in 1934 and during the war and post-war years, the treatise was seen as a rationalization of the Nazi legal order. With the renaissance of Schmitt studies beginning in the 1980s, the man and his work, and this work in particular, was reinterpreted. While some maintained that it was a foundation of Nazi legal theory and practice, others see it as a failed attempt at a conservative counterweight to the most extreme tendencies in National Socialism.