Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. He was the presiding legal expert at meetings during the early stages of the Third Reich that resulted in a formal decision to bypass the process of formulating a new constitution. An approach that would nominally maintain the former constitution was adopted, even though the Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) was promoted to a transcendent supra-legal status. Schmitt claimed that the adoption of the Leader Principle in place of a legal constitution was legitimized by the presumed "Volkisch" or racial composition of the German people, and their identification with Adolf Hitler. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he was noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. His works covered political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology. However, they are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for, and active involvement with, Nazism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Schmitt was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. But there can be little doubt that his preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease."