The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, Part 1

Translated by Greg Johnson

We met Carl Schmitt in the village of Plettenberg, the place of his birth and retirement. For four remarkable hours we conversed with the man who remains unquestionably the greatest political and legal thinker of our time. “We have been put out to pasture,” said Schmitt. “We are like domestic animals who enjoy the benefits of the closed field we are allotted. Space is conquered. The borders are fixed. There is nothing more to discover. It is the reign of the status quo . . .”

Schmitt always warned against this frozen order, which extends over the Earth and ruins political sovereignties. Already in 1928, in The Concept of the Political,[1] he detects in the universalist ideologies, those “of Rights, or Humanity, or Order, or Peace,” the project of transforming the planet into a kind of depoliticized economic aggregate which he compares to a “bus with its passengers” or a “building with its tenants.” And in this premonition of a world of the death of nations and cultures, the culprit is not Marxism but the liberal and commercial democracies. Thus Schmitt offers one of the most acute and perspicacious criticisms of liberalism, far more profound and original than the “anti-democrats” of the old reactionary right.

He also continues the “realist” manner of analyzing of politics and the state, in the tradition of Bodin, Hobbes, and Machiavelli. Equally removed from liberalism and modern totalitarian theories (Bolshevism and fascisms), the depth and the modernity of his views make him the most important contemporary political and constitutional legal theorist. This is why we can follow him, while of course trying to go beyond some of his analyses, as his French disciple Julien Freund, at the height of his powers, has already done.[2]

The intellectual journey of the Rhenish political theorist began with reflections on law and practical politics to which he devoted two works, in 1912 and 1914,[3] at the end of its academic studies in Strasbourg. After the war, having become a law professor at the universities of Berlin and Bonn, his thoughts were focused on political science. Schmitt, against the liberal philosophies of the Right, refused to separate it from politics.

His first work of political theory, Political Romanticism (1919),[4] is devoted to a critique of political romanticism which he opposes to realism. To Schmitt, the millennialist ideals of the revolutionary Communists and the völkisch reveries of the reactionaries seemed equally unsuitable to the government of the people. His second great theoretical work, Die Diktatur [Dictatorship] (1921),[5] constitutes, as Julien Freund writes, “one of the most complete and most relevant studies of this concept, whose history is analyzed from the Roman epoch up to Machiavelli and Marx.”[6]

Schmitt distinguishes “dictatorship” from oppressive “tyranny.” Dictatorship appears as a method of government intended to face emergencies. In the Roman tradition, the dictator’s function was to confront exceptional conditions. But Machiavelli introduces a different practice; he helps to envision “the modern State,” founded on rationalism, technology, and the powerful role of a complex executive: this executive no longer relies upon the sole sovereign.

Schmitt shows that with the French jurist Jean Bodin, dictatorship takes to the form of a “practice of the commissars” which arose in the sixteen and seventeenth centuries. The “commissars” are omnipotent delegates of the central power. Royal absolutism, established on its subordinates, like the Rousseauist model of the social contract which delegates absolute power to the holders of the “general will” set up by the French revolution, constitutes the foundation of contemporary forms of dictatorship.

From this point of view, modern dictatorship is not connected with any particular political ideology. Contrary to the analyses of today’s constitutionalists, especially Maurice Duverger, “democracy” is no more free of dictatorship than is any other form of state power. Democrats are simply deceiving themselves to think that they are immune to recourse to dictatorship and that they reconcile real executive power with pragmatism and the transactions of the parliamentary systems.

In a fundamental study on parliamentarism, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923),[7] Schmitt ponders the identification of democracy and parliamentarism. To him, democracy seems to be an ideological and abstract principle that masks specific modalities of power, a position close to those of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. The exercise of power in “democracy” is subject to a rationalist conception of the state which justified, for example, the idea of the separation of powers, the supposedly harmonious dialogue between parties, and ideological pluralism. It is also the rationality of history that founds the dictatorship of the proletariat. Against the democratic and parliamentarian currents, Schmitt places the “irrationalist” currents, particularly Georges Sorel and his theory of violence, as well as all non-Marxist critiques of bourgeois society, for example Max Weber.

This liberal bourgeois ideology deceives everyone by viewing all political activity according to the categories of ethics and economics. This illusion, moreover, is shared by liberal or Marxist socialist ideologies: the function of public power is no longer anything but economic and social. Spiritual, historical, and military values are no longer legitimate. Only the economy is moral, which makes it possible to validate commercial individualism and at the same time invoke humane ideals: the Bible and business. This moralization of politics not only destroys all true morals but transforms political unity into neutralized “society” where the sovereign function is no longer able to defend the people for whom it is responsible.

By contrast, Schmitt’s approach consists in analyzing the political phenomenon independently of all moral presuppositions. Like Machiavelli  and Hobbes, with whom he is often compared, Schmitt renounces appeals to the finer feelings and the soteriology of final ends. His philosophy is as opposed to the ideology of the Enlightenment  (Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, etc.) and the various Marxian socialisms as it is to Christian political humanism. For him, these ideologies are utopian in their wariness of power and tend to empty out the political by identifying it with evil, even if it is allowed temporarily—as in the case of Marxism.

But the essence of Schmitt’s critique relates to liberalism and humanism, which he accuses of deception and hypocrisy. These theories view the activity of public power as purely routine administration dedicated to realizing individual happiness and social harmony. They are premised on the ultimate disappearance of politics as such and the end of history. They wish to make collective life purely prosaic but manage only to create social jungles dominated by economic exploitation and incapable of mastering unforeseen circumstances.

Governments subject to this type of liberalism are always frustrated in their dreams of transforming politics into peaceful administration: other states, motivated by hostile intentions, or internal sources of political subversion, always emerge at unforeseen moments. When a state, through idealism or misunderstood moralism, no longer places its sovereign political will above all else, preferring instead economic rationality or the defense of abstracted ideals, it also gives up its independence and its survival.

Part 1 of 3.

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[1] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)—trans.

[2] Cf. Julien Freund, L’Essence du politique (Paris: Sirey, 1965), and La Fin de la Renaissance (Paris: PUF, 1980).

[3] Carl Schmitt, Gesetz und Urteil. Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis [Law and Judgment: An Investigation into the Problem of Legal Practice] [1912] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968) and Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen [The Value of the State and the Meaning of the Individual] (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914)—trans.

[4] Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1985).—trans.

[5] Carl Schmitt, Die Diktaur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf [The Dictator: From the Origins of Modern Theories of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1921)—trans.

[6] In his Preface to the French edition of The Concept of the Political: Carl Schmitt, La notion de politique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1972).

[7] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986). See also Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty [1922], trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986)—trans.