The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, Part 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

Schmitt does not believe in the disappearance of the political. Any type of activity can take on a political dimension. The political is a fundamental concept of collective anthropology. As such, political activity can be described as substantial, essential, enduring through time. The state, on the other hand, enjoys only conditional authority, i.e., a contingent form of sovereignty. Thus the state can disappear or be depoliticized by being deprived of the political, but the political—as substantial—does not disappear.

The state cannot survive unless it maintains a political monopoly, i.e., the sole power to define the values and ideals for which the citizens will agree to give their lives or to legally kill their neighbors—the power to declare war. Otherwise partisans will assume political activity and try to constitute a new legitimacy. This risk particularly threatens the bureaucratic states of modern liberal social democracies in which civil war is prevented only by the enervating influence of consumer society.

These ideas are expressed in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt’s most fundamental work, first published in 1928, revised in 1932, and clarified in 1963 by its corollary Theory of the Partisan.[1] Political activity is defined there as the product of a polarization around a relation of hostility. One of the fundamental criteria of a political act is its ability to mobilize a population by designating its enemy, which can apply to a party as well as a state. To omit such a designation, particularly through idealism, is to renounce the political. Thus the task of a serious state is to prevent partisans from seizing the power to designate enemies within the community, and even the state itself.

Under no circumstances can politics be based on the administration of things or renounce its polemical dimension. All sovereignty, like all authority, is forced to designate an enemy in order to succeed in its projects; here Schmitt’s ideas meet the research of ethologists on innate human behavior, particularly Konrad Lorenz.

Because of his “classical” and Machiavellian conception of the political, Schmitt endured persecution and threats under the Nazis, for whom the political was on the contrary the designation of the “comrade” (Volksgenosse).

The Schmittian definition of the political enables us to understand that contemporary political debate is depoliticized and connected with electoral sideshows. What is really political is the value for which one is ready to sacrifice one’s life; it can quite well be one’s language or culture. Schmitt writes in this connection that “a system of social organization directed only towards the progress of civilization” does not have “a program, ideal, standard, or finality that can confer the right to dispose of the physical life of others.” Liberal society, founded on mass consumption, cannot require that one die or kill for it. It rests on an apolitical form of domination: “It is precisely when it remains apolitical,” Schmitt writes, “that a domination of men resting on an economic basis, by avoiding any political appearance and responsibility, proves to be a terrible imposture.”

Liberal economism and “pluralism” mask the negligence of the state, the domination of the commercial castes, and the destruction of nations anchored in a culture and a history. Along with Sorel, Schmitt pleads for a form of power that does not renounce its full exercise, that displays its political authority by the normal means that belong to it: power, constraint, and, in exceptional cases, violence. By ignoring these principles the Weimar Republic allowed the rise of Hitler; the techno-economic totalitarianism of modern capitalism also rests on the ideological rejection of the idea of state power; this totalitarianism is impossible to avoid because it is proclaimed humane and is also based on the double idea of social pluralism and individualism, which put the nations at the mercy of technocratic domination.

The Schmittian critique of internal pluralism as conceived by Montequieu, Locke, Laski, Cole, and the whole Anglo-Saxon liberal school, aims at defending the political unity of nations, which is the sole guarantor of civic protection and liberties. Internal pluralism leads to latent or open civil war, the fierce competition of economic interest groups and factions, and ultimately the reintroduction within society of the friend-enemy distinction which European states since Bodin and Hobbes had displaced outwards.

Such a system naturally appeals to the idea of “Humanity” to get rid of political unities.  “Humanity is not a political concept,” writes Schmitt, who adds:

The idea of Humanity in doctrines based on liberal and individualistic doctrines of natural Right is an ideal social construction of universal nature, encompassing all men on earth. . . . which will not be realized until any genuine possibility of combat is eliminated, making any grouping in terms of friends and enemies impossible. This universal society will no longer know nations. . . . The concept of Humanity is an ideological instrument particularly useful for imperialistic expansion, and in its ethical and humane form, it is specifically a vehicle of economic imperialism. . . . Such a sublime name entails certain consequences for one who carries it. Indeed, to speak in the name of Humanity, to invoke it, to monopolize it, displays a shocking pretense: to deny the humanity of the enemy, to declare him outside the law and outside of Humanity, and thus ultimately to push war to the extremes of inhumanity.[2]

To define politics in terms of the category of the enemy, to refuse humanitarian egalitarianism, does not necessarily lead to contempt for man or racism. Quite the contrary. To recognize the polemical dimension of human relations and man as “a dynamic and dangerous being,” guarantees respect for  any adversary conceived as the Other whose cause no less legitimate than one’s own.

This idea often recurs in Schmitt’s thought: modern ideologies that claim universal truth and consequently consider the enemy as absolute, as an “absolute non-value,” lead to genocide. They are, moreover, inspired by monotheism (and Schmitt is a Christian pacifist and convert). Schmitt claims with good reason that the conventional European conception that validated the existence of the enemy and admitted the legitimacy of war—not for the defense of a “just” cause but as eternally necessitated by human relations—caused fewer wars and induced respect for the enemy considered as adversary (as hostis and not inimicus).

Part 2 of 3

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[1] Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007)—trans.

[2] Cf. The Concept of the Political, 53–54—trans.