 This argument appears to assume that all legal norms are material norms providing substantive grounds of legal decision. But modern legal systems typically contain norms of competence in addition to material norms. Hence, it seems that the view that all legitimate political authority depends on legal authorization is not as indefensible as Schmitt suggests (Kaufmann 1988, 337–45). The law can determine, for any material legal norm, which person or institution has the competence to interpret and apply it. Subjects of the law may admittedly have to accept that a final decision might turn out to be binding even though wrong. And in this limited sense, Schmitt is right to appeal to Hobbes’s dictum that it is authority and not truth that makes the law.  (PT 33–4) But that a legal system, through its norms of competence, provides for the authoritative interpretation of its material legal norms hardly entails that it must contain a sovereign in the traditional understanding of that term. Schmitt’s implicit reply to this objection claims that the applicability of legal norms presupposes a general condition of social normality. Legal norms, Schmitt argues, cannot be applied to a chaos. They require a “homogeneous medium.” (PT 13) No legal norm, in Schmitt’s view, can govern an extreme case of emergency or an absolute state of exception. In a completely abnormal situation, the continued application of the law through the normal administrative and judiciary channels is going to lead to haphazard and unpredictable results, while preventing effective action to end the emergency (PT 13; GU 44–114; Scheuerman 1996; Hofmann 2002, 17–33). If the applicability of material legal norms presupposes a condition of normality, Schmitt assumes, a polity must be entitled to decide whether to suspend the application of its law on the ground that the situation is abnormal. Hence Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty, according to which the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception: If there is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then to use extra-legal force to normalize the situation, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity (PT 5). Any legal order, Schmitt bluntly concludes, is based on a sovereign decision and not on a legal norm (PT 10, 12–3).