  Schmitt apparently hoped, throughout the Weimar Republic’s years of relative stability, that presidential dictatorship in defence of the existing constitution might be sufficient to create a condition of normality that would allow the Weimar Republic to function. But this hope was disappointed in the final crisis of the Weimar Republic. Schmitt’s writings during that crisis started to toy with the view that the president should attempt to assume a role much closer to full sovereign dictatorship than even Schmitt’s own interpretation of art. 48 would have permitted and to engineer an authoritarian transformation of the positive constitution (LL 85–94). This project failed when the Nazis managed to take power through the kind of abuse of constitutional procedure that Schmitt had warned against (Kennedy 2004, 154–83). After a very brief period of hesitation Schmitt nevertheless offered his services as a legal advisor to the Nazis. He was careful to emphasize that the Machtergreifung amounted to a true revolution, despite its seemingly legal form, to maintain consistency with his view that a constitution cannot undergo fundamental change through formal amendment (SBV 5–9), but he was quick to translate his identitarian theory of democracy into the racialist idiom preferred by the Nazis (SBV 32–46) and started to advocate an institutionalist theory of law that was supposed to take its bearings from the authentic form of life of the German people (TJT 47–57, 89–95). Schmitt himself presented this shift as a fundamental reorientation of his legal-theoretical approach from a ‘decisionist’ perspective to ‘concrete order thought’. It is doubtful, however, whether the term ‘concrete order’ designates more than the situation of normality that Schmitt had always taken to be the basis of determinate legality. His claim (or hope) was simply that the Nazis have successfully restored normality (but see Croce and Salvatore 2013, 11–76).  The national socialist movement, in Schmitt’s view, had managed to orchestrate an exercise of constituent power and to create a new constitution; one that was willing to draw uncompromising distinctions between the German people and its internal and external enemies. Given this description of the Machtergreifung, Schmitt’s political and constitutional theory seems to imply that Hitler’s rule was perfectly legitimate. It therefore seems unnecessary to postulate a radical discontinuity between Schmitt’s views before and after 1933 (Dyzenhaus 1997, 82–101; Mauss 1998; Scheuerman 1999, 113–39; Hofmann 2002, 152–88).