In Carl Schmitt’s attempt to capture the essence of the liberal state, he ends up describing a movement that takes place within the Weimarian liberal-parliamentary democracy: the shift to the total state. This concept, introduced by him in 1931, appears as an unfolding translated into the turn of the liberal State to a type of multiparty state, which becomes the self-organization of society, resulting in the disappearance of the differentiation between state and society. It is to this unfolding of the state to something that no longer differentiates itself and no longer overlaps society, rather, mingling with it and intervening in all aspects of social life, which Schmitt will call quantitative total state. Under guiding thread of the theological-political, as of his decisionism, it seeks to explain how Schmitt points out in liberal-parliamentary democracythe potential to unfold of a total state, in order to have a better understanding of the subsequent defense of a qualitative total state, in the paradigmatic ways of the Italian statototalitario, capable of restoring state strength and authority undermined by pluralism.
Keywords: State; society; unity.