The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.

This line reflects a core claim in Schmitt’s political theory: that what counts as a state depends on a prior understanding of what is political, rather than the political being merely an activity within an already-defined state.

The idea is that you can’t define or justify the state purely through legal, administrative, or moral categories; you first need a criterion for what makes something political (for Schmitt, a decisive distinction that can organize collective life). Only once that is in place does the state become intelligible as a specific form of political unity.