The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

Der Begriff des Politischen #1

by Carl Schmitt

In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism’s basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state—a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab’s introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt’s intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by Tracy B. Strong placing Schmitt’s work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt’s 1929 lecture “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update on a modern classic, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science, Law, Theory, German Literature

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Carl Schmitt's early career as an academic lawyer falls into the last years of the Wilhelmine Empire. (See for Schmitt's life and career: Bendersky 1983; Balakrishnan 2000; Mehring 2009.) But Schmitt wrote his most influential works, as a young professor of constitutional law in Bonn and later in Berlin, during the Weimar-period: Political Theology, presenting Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, appeared in 1922, to be followed in 1923 by The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, which attacked the legitimacy of parliamentary government. In 1927, Schmitt published the first version of his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, defending the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy. The culmination of Schmitt's work in the Weimar period, and arguably his greatest achievement, is the 1928 Constitutional Theory which systematically applied Schmitt's political theory to the interpretation of the Weimar constitution. During the political and constitutional crisis of the later Weimar Republic Schmitt published Legality and Legitimacy, a clear-sighted analysis of the breakdown of parliamentary government Germany, as well as The Guardian of the Constitution, which argued that the president as the head of the executive, and not a constitutional court, ought to be recognized as the guardian of the constitution. In these works from the later Weimar period, Schmitt's declared aim to defend the Weimar constitution is at times barely distinguishable from a call for constitutional revision towards a more authoritarian political framework (Dyzenhaus 1997, 70–85; Kennedy 2004, 154–78).

Though Schmitt had not been a supporter of National Socialism before Hitler came to power, he sided with the Nazis after 1933. Schmitt quickly obtained an influential position in the legal profession and came to be perceived as the ‘Crown Jurist’ of National Socialism. (Rüthers 1990; Mehring 2009, 304–436) He devoted himself, with undue enthusiasm, to such tasks as the defence of Hitler's extra-judicial killings of political opponents (PB 227–32) and the purging of German jurisprudence of Jewish influence (Gross 2007; Mehring 2009, 358–80). But Schmitt was ousted from his position of power within legal academia in 1936, after infighting with academic competitors who viewed Schmitt as a turncoat who had converted to Nazism only to advance his career. There is considerable debate about the causes of Schmitt's willingness to associate himself with the Nazis. Some authors point to Schmitt's strong ambition and his opportunistic character but deny ideological affinity (Bendersky 1983, 195–242; Schwab 1989). But a strong case has been made that Schmitt's anti-liberal jurisprudence, as well as his fervent anti-semitism, disposed him to support the Nazi regime (Dyzenhaus 1997, 85–101; Scheuerman 1999). Throughout the later Nazi period, Schmitt's work focused on questions of international law. The immediate motivation for this turn seems to have been the aim to justify Nazi-expansionism. But Schmitt was interested in the wider question of the foundations of international law, and he was convinced that the turn towards liberal cosmopolitanism in 20th century international law would undermine the conditions of stable and legitimate international legal order. Schmitt's theoretical work on the foundations of international law culminated in The Nomos of the Earth, written in the early 1940's, but not published before 1950. Due to his support for and involvement with the Nazi dictatorship, the obstinately unrepentant Schmitt was not allowed to return to an academic job after 1945 (Mehring 2009, 438–63). But he nevertheless remained an important figure in West Germany's conservative intellectual scene to his death in 1985 (van Laak 2002) and enjoyed a considerable degree of clandestine influence elsewhere (Scheuerman 1999, 183–251; Müller 2003).

Unsurprisingly, the significance and value of Schmitt's works

Reviews

[Matthew W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carl Schmitt, like Martin Heidegger, has the scary Nazi stain permanently covering his philosophical legacy. Despite his "tainted" reputation, "The Concept of the Political" is still regarded by those on the "right" and "left", as one of the best overviews on how politics work (or more like how they don't work).

Schmitt brings up such things as how whenever the leaders of a country want to go and mass murderer a bunch of people in war, the leaders go on about protecting "humanity." Of course, the enemy of humanity (despite being part of humanity) is no longer part of humanity but something lower, something worthy of extermination. This tactic was used by "revolutionaries" like Lenin, but can be used by both ends of the political spectrum.

Schmitt spends most of the book critiquing liberalism and how it is at odds with the state. In fact, liberalism always attempts to ignore the state and politics and replaces them with two heterogeneous spheres such as: ethics and economics, intellect and trade, education and property, etc. People can no longer look past themselves and their feelings. With this kind of thinking, a truly successful state can never prosper. It makes one wonder what the future will hold, but it surely won't be good. One just has to look at all the imaginary "progress" that has taken place in our world since the book was written. We are no doubt headed towards some type of international chaotic (we already have the chaos) explosion. Whatever happened to good old organic kultur?

I guess intellectual abstractions aren't always so good. Poor Marx, he must be philosophizing in his grave. Someone will get Marxism right one day....

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10.

Different sectors of life have different antinomies: for morality, good and evil; for aesthetics, beautiful and ugly; for economics, profitable and unprofitable. What is the antimony for the political? It is the friend/enemy distinction.

The political is not based on morality, but instead on the survival of one's identity. It is based on intractable differences of identity that cannot be solved through cooperation. The enemy is different; he is the Other. We (friends) have land, and on that land have a specific culture, religion, race, and economy. The enemy is on different soil and differs in all the other above aspects. Thus, if he wants to expand and gain resources and power, he is an existential threat.

The limit of the political, which reveals its true importance, is war — death. In the political realm always looms the prospect of conflict — not rhetorical "conflict", not economic "conflict", but physical violence. The state determines the friend/enemy distinction and has the right to send its citizens to death for its preservation.

Here comes a major contradiction with individualistic liberalism. Liberalism (which both the Democrats and Republicans share) values the individual over all. All state activity is to be directed to him and for him. He is the end goal of existence. But if this is the case, then why should the individual sacrifice himself for his state? Would not that be statist "repression" of the individual's desire in liberalist terms? How can the liberal state even justify itself? What is it aimed towards?

The liberal state uses economic and moral ruses to cover up the political. When a country asserts its political will vis-a-vis another country and "world peace" internationalists do not like it, liberalism decries such an attack as against "international order", "democracy", or "freedom". Using moral terms, it disguises its political (friend/enemy) interest in pious garb. The liberal state uses economic sanctions as a political move against nations it does not like, while mouthing about the morality of such sanctions.

Liberal "political theory" does not realize that the political is not moral, nor is it economic. The political is about protecting us and our way of life. If our leaders endorse radical feminism, homosexuality, multiculturalism, and abortion, then they will start wars (or use sanctions) on a "moral" basis in countries where these supposed benefits are "suppressed". Prime examples include the wars in Iran, Iraq, and Serbia. "This regime is immoral", so sayeth our leaders, "thus we must invade!". Various things like the suppression of women, supposedly evil rulers, and the "international rules-based order" may be invoked.

But once one declares war in the name of "humanity", the enemy immediately becomes un-human. Thus moral, humanitarian wars are the most deadly and vicious (think WW2).

Liberalism roots its view of man in optimism. It believes man to be perfectible and able to reach world peace. It views war and conflict as irrational, outmoded things. Thus the liberal conceives of an international order where peace reigns forever. But this would destroy the political. If all of mankind were one, there would be no distinctions, and thus no friend/enemy. It would destroy the identity of everyone and mix them into a massive soup of amalgamation. This is not realistically possible. Thus liberalism spends its life fighting for world peace — what an obvious contradiction!

But there are some who are not optimistic about man. The anthropological pessimist, the believer in Original Sin, sees him differently. Man is an evil, rapacious creature. Man fights for his tribe — because it is his. Thus pessimists understand the political, for if man is not perfect, then he cannot reconcile fundamental differences. Therefore the friend/enemy distinction will always remain.

Political realism arises when the "humanitarian" conquers one and makes one suffer. Only when the invader justifies his invasion in the glamorous garbs of morality does the conquered truly realize what the political is. One can think of Macchiaveli after Italy was subjected to invasion after invasion in the early 1500s; or Fichte and Hegel after Napoleon's invasion of Germany; or Schmitt after the "humanitarian" Versailles Treaty raped Germany.

The political will not go away. Differences of identity will remain and the prospect of violence will always remain. When violence occurs, moral garments will be thrown upon the conflict, making your side angels and the other side demons. "International law" is law made by internationalists to support their identity and interests. Countries disobeying such a law are not "immoral", but are simply acting in a political sense, i.e. fighting for their own interests. This defuses the UN notion of "human rights" and the need to intervene everywhere to protect such supposed "rights". It is interesting how such "protection" often leads to mass death and killing — but that is the political for you. The political is not about morals, but survival. Your leaders' interests determine their actions, and morality is brought in as a clean-up job.

A clear perception of one's political leaders requires a cleansing of the moral from the political. Only when such cleansing is made can one see the real reasons for the conflicts and wars happening today.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two ways to make a big deal of a book: make sure its author was momentarily a Nazi, and, by the logical principle of contagion, follow the logic: author was a nazi --> book is certainly nazified; reader reader book --> reader becomes a nazi. Bam! This is the most dangerous book you'll ever read!

Except it's barely 'political' in that sense at all, and is more of an essay than a book. The thought process is clear and not unreasonable: if there's something called politics, it must have certain characteristics. If we purify our concept of 'politics' from such extraneous concepts as morality, aesthetics, economics and so on, what are we left with? For Schmitt, at least, you're left with the opposition between friends and enemies, where enemies are people in the world who threaten the sovereignty of your (political) state. QED. Sure there's an odd suspicion that Schmitt really wishes there was more war between friends and enemies. His critique of liberalism as a theory which leaves no room for fighting people who undermine liberal state sovereignty might look icky, but only if you've drunk the pacifist cool-aid and think nothing's worth fighting for. Otherwise it just looks like a reasonable complaint against people who want to rid the world and our lives of all meaning.

So don't worry. You can let little Sammy read this book without fear that he'll suddenly goose-step his way over your face.

Otherwise, there are three commentators here, Strong, Schwab and Strauss. Strong is the most contemporary, and spends a bit of time talking about how Schmitt is the golden boy of the New Left Review types, as well as various reactionary lunatics. Schwab sets CP in its historical setting. Strauss, you will be surprised to learn, over-reads the text; makes wild and implausible assumptions about its argument really being about 'culture' and human nature; doesn't really say anything particularly concretely and does so in a rambling, repetitive and turgid manner. IT IS TO UNDERSTAND SOCRATES indeed.

[Brad Lyerla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vladimir Putin had a good week here in Michigan this past week. Opponents of liberal democracy and the rule of law are slapping hands over the spectacle of a group of heavily armed Michiganders trying to force their way into the State House to demand that the governor and state legislators roll back the stay at home rules implemented to slow the spread of Covid 19. To show their displeasure, they enthusiastically waved the Nazi and confederate flags that they must keep at home to bring to the next political rally for our drama-queen-in-chief. (If you show up with a swastika, you can’t come inside because of the cameras. You have to stand outside, wave your flag and cheer for the others as they arrive and leave.)

Waiving confederate flags and swastikas is meant to outrage and provoke us. In its own way, it is a way of expressing unhappiness with the government not quite as time-honored as the burning of the American flag has become for the left-leaning. The irony of this would be mildly humorous if not for the automatic weapons. These volk regard themselves as genuine patriots even as they celebrate two of the most heinous enemies our country has waged war against. It would be easy to dismiss them as clueless. They are largely clueless if they care about persuading the rest of us that their grievances have merit. But it is equally true that their rage runs deeply and they absolutely hate liberal democracy as practiced in the American Republic since WWII.

Liberal democracy has two flaws that are easily exploited by enemies abroad and demagogues at home. By positing sovereignty in individuals, liberal democracy elevates liberty far above justice. That weakens the bonds between fellow citizens and empowers extremism. If you are your own sovereign, then you are empowered to do whatever you like, and you can rationalize negative effects on others by invoking emotional appeals to the founders, liberty and the supposed moral authority of individualism. That message directed to weak-minded audiences can result in spectacles like the one we saw here in our state’s capital a few days ago. That is liberalism’s first flaw.

The second is related. It is that the strong version of individualism makes collective action very hard to orchestrate. Covid 19 and the Republican Party’s response to it has exposed this weakness very nicely. Many people do not want to be inconvenienced by social distancing and liberalism gives them a respectable argument for why they should not have to be. Their argument is a version of the old “you are not the boss of me” in a mash up with high flown concepts like federalism, inalienable rights and personal choice. Unlike other national emergencies, such as World War II for example, where citizens were willing to defer to the greater needs of the country and accept rationing of gasoline, tires, food and other necessities, now far too many people, suffering from the egoism of liberalism unbalanced by a sense of justice, are unwilling to accept any meaningful sacrifice whatsoever. The fellow in the Whitehouse is expert at exploiting such confused thinking and that makes matters worse.

This brings us to Carl Schmitt. He was an enthusiastic Nazi and anti-Semite. There have been many critics of liberal democracy since it was invented in the seventeenth century. Many have been respectable thinkers and worthwhile human beings. That was not the case with Schmitt. He never apologized for his work on behalf of Hitler and he continued to author antisemitic propaganda well into the 20th century, long after the end of the Third Reich.

This is not to say that he was not clever. In fact, he was quite clever. Evilness and cleverness are not mutually exclusive. Schmitt’s cleverness had to do with his hatred of liberal democracy. He formulated an argument directed towards the second of liberal democracy’s flaws discussed above. And his argument has gained a good deal of traction among the intelligentsia in the west over the past 30 years or so. His book, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL, is regarded as the best introduction to this argument.

Schmitt’s argument, as I interpret it and translate it into my own language, is that Hobbes got human nature and its relationship to government wrong. Individuals do not enjoy sovereignty that is ceded to a strong ruler for the mutual benefit of providing everyone a defense against an aggressive enemy. Rather the political does not begin to exist until something happens that organizes us into friend and enemy “groupings”. For this purpose, the enemy is a collective enemy. Personal enemies do not count. Once we are grouped, we then begin to do the political. And we do it as a volk. The political belongs to the volk, Schmitt seems to say.

As an aside, it is not perfectly clear that doing the political is the same thing as practicing government, as Schmitt thinks of it. But for my purposes, I have interpreted him as equating the two for the most part. Otherwise, I do not know what the point of his discussion would be.

Doing the political, then, becomes helping your friends and hurting your enemy. Schmitt sees this struggle as existential. The enemy threatens to cancel your very way of life. Therefore, it empowers collective action and sacrifice in a way that liberal democracy cannot. In particular, it empowers the ultimate sacrifice. The individual’s participation in the volk includes, and this is critically important, the will to die for your volk. Because the political is existential in this way, warfare (or its possibility) is ultimately the human activity that pervades and animates all of what we do when we do government.

Schmitt ridicules liberal democracy for its commitment to process, law and diplomacy. He thinks those reflect a profound misunderstanding of human nature. He allows that war is to be avoided when possible. But the reality of war, and the reality that it is necessary sometimes for the volk to continue to exist, is what lies at the heart of the human impulse to organize government.

Given that ‘warfare for the volk’ still makes for uncomfortable dinner conversation for most of us, one may wonder why reading Schmitt is back in fashion? This is an interesting question. It has been plausibly argued that critics of liberal democracy on both the right and the left, may not like Schmitt’s theory in the details, but do share his distaste for process, diplomacy and law. They read him now and that has had the collateral consequence of resuscitating his reputation a bit. Plus, he offers a rationale for collective action that appeals to some and arguably might be validated to a degree by the wartime experiences of liberal democracies.

For myself, I regard Schmitt as the perfect philosopher for the Klingon Empire. No, thank you Herr Schmitt. Liberalism is the philosophy that I want to prevail where I live. I am not blind to its limitations, but I see clearly that the alternatives are far more dangerous. The challenge for liberalism today is to talk our cohorts back into the fold where we thoughtfully balance (and rebalance as needed) our mix of liberty and justice. I instinctively agree with those who have argued that the way to do this is to rethink the meaning of citizenship toward an understanding that citizenship inherently requires moderation and sacrifice in equal measure with liberty.

As for Schmitt, he is not required reading in my syllabus.

[Mesoscope · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Of the conservative thinkers I have read in the last few years, Schmitt is by far the worst. I disagree with him on every level – philosophical, ethical, practical, formal, psychological, and empirical. He epitomizes what Nietzsche describes as the worst characteristics of German intellectual life – ponderous, metaphysical, impatient, hostile, totalizing in his rigid framework, and completely humorless. I haven’t disagreed with a work so completely since I read Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones, which is not altogether dissimilar from Schmitt’s essay in spirit. "

My full review is here:
https://mesocosm.net/2018/10/15/carl-...

[… · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.” -Carl Schmitt

After completing this book, the first of Schmitt’s work that I’ve read I, oddly enough, was drawn toward pondering the notion of God, both his New and Old Testament variations - a seemingly strange topic to meditate on since the work isn’t about divinity or religion in any explicit sense, although Schmitt’s ‘Concept of the Political’ is, as he says, a fundamentally existential issue.

For our purposes, we’ll just define God as the presiding force and total aggregate of laws governing human nature. Or, to put it in even simpler terms, God is nature; both the nature (laws) that rules the natural world as well as its human sub-variant that makes us creatures driven by fundamental instinct and limited by our own physiological bounds.

The God of the Old Testament is rigid and inflexible just like, well… nature is. Even in our most nascent and primitive stages we are bound by the steel-casing of biological principle. Nature is unforgiving and therefore provides the most superior truth from which all other truths are derived. Nature, before it is anything else, is truth.

However, I more than likely found Schmitt existentially evocative due to the fact that I was struck by certain presuppositions he makes to reach political conclusions, namely those concerning the mode of existence and ways of being that affirm our humanity in more abstract terms - eating and sex are matter-of-fact instinctual drives, but courage or love or hate are something else.

For Schmitt, to really be human means to be ’serious’ - to approach life as rigorously as possibly, to understand it as an inescapably moral undertaking, ‘Moral’, understood in the modern sense errs toward common ethical universalism or global humanitarianism (the dominating orthodoxy of Western liberalism), which he would categorize as ‘political romanticism’ (something that abstracts or deflects from the truly political ).

Rather, the core and indispensable feature of the truly political, according to him, is a concretized possibility or actuality of physical violence and death. In other words, the potential for the most potent and acute confrontation with physical reality is the fundamental prerequisite for the genuinely political. ‘Morality’ and consequentially, the political, is only ever fully embodied in extremis - “….people will only be responsible for what they are if the reality of death and conflict remain present.” Because according to him, “The possibility of dying for what one was was the final determining quality of the human.”

Because, after all, ‘seriousness’ as a human objective requires a “burning at the edges” - possible risk of suffering and ruination; a communion with ultimate reality.

Schmitt confirms something that we’ve long forgotten in the West - seeing as how we have been severed from the immanence of our own bodies - and it is this: the physical is always the portal to the existential. Whether it’s sublimity or annihilation, the full spectrum and weight of human experience and all the truth delivered to us will be delivered via the corporeal form and the haunting, ever-present risk of its destruction.

I suppose this qualifies as a digression since Schmitt’s critique of liberalism isn’t heavily invested in the metaphysics of man, although this inarguably ungirds his entire criticism. And also because fleshing out his ideas about death’s inextricable link to the political is pretty sexy. For Schmitt, politics is an almost exclusively ontological question.

If this is true, then the current iteration of liberal democracy (postmodern technocracy) consequentially and inevitably makes one irresponsible and therefore apolitical and ultimately, inhuman.

At risk of also becoming inhuman or inhumane are the more concealed presumptions underlying the animating ethos of liberalism whose all-encompassing inclusivity or ethical universality naturally suggests a certain infallible dogma that arrogates to its practitioners, these wielders of the most supreme political ethic, a limitless supply of “means” that are all a priori self-justified for achieving the ends. We see how this could end badly.

For him, liberalism is actually a negation of the political and therefore, a negation of man altogether. It neutralizes man and politics. ‘Neutralization’ being a key term here - notice the etymological similarity with the word “neuter” to get a sense of where we’re going with this.

Most fundamental to Schmitt’s thought, at least in this particular text, is his concept of the’ friend-enemy’ distinction, which he insists raises the stakes of politics to the appropriate intensity. According him, we must judge and, if we judge, must necessarily condemn and hate those who pose an existential threat to our way of life. In other words, antagonism is a necessary prerequisite for identity formation and self-understanding, at least in terms of political ordering. And it is only through its recognition and practice that we become responsible and ultimately serious political creatures. “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.”

Schmitt’s theory finds its inception in the same quarters that all serious political theorizing does, which is with the concept of human nature. It’s “the problematic or unproblematic conception of man that is decisive for the presupposition of every further political consideration…” with Schmitt stating that “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil”

Certain observations about human nature are complemented by an historical framework. For Schmitt, world events and the evolutionary history of contemporary politics can be refracted through the five domains that have occurred since the Renaissance. These ‘domains’ act as the sociopolitical nucleus of different eras and can explain the trajectory and movement of the historical cycle while also allowing us to make educated assumptions about where it’s going. History, as we’re told, always dares to repeat itself. Its investigations are ultimately about cultivating a responsiveness that would enable us to prevent certain mistakes and ‘never-again’ atrocities. But besides this, and perhaps more importantly, the study of history concerns itself with its own possible end - a most horrifying, barbaric, and insidious conclusion where power and control and consensus come preordained and are so thoroughly exacting, penetrative, and totalizing that man’s ontological meaning will be as good as snuffed out.

But back to those five domains - they are as follows: 16th cent. = theological ; 17th cent. = metaphysics/rationality ; 18th cent. = ethical humanism ; 19th cent. = economics ; 20th cent. = technicity

Schmitt sees these as steady and progressively more neutralized political domains.

But the terminus of neutralization, which basically means eradicating antagonisms, is the terminus of man. And what happens when we construct and usher in a domain that has no need for individual persons like say…. a domain of all-encompassing technology?

Additionally, democratic liberalism engulfs the state in intertwined relationships with social domains that are actually antithetical to the state as an unadulterated, purely political entity. The total state that emerges is one where traditionally neutral domains have penetrated and deformed the state’s teleological aim. Because the state that carries the entire socio-institutional spectrum of human affairs quite literally becomes incapable of appropriate action, and its effectiveness is weighed down and its proper trajectory subverted. This, in turn, becomes a matter of “winning for the entirety of the state all vital energies of the people.” Quoting Jacob Burckhardt:

“The state is thus, on one hand, the realization and expression of the cultural ideas of every party; on the other, merely the visibly vestures of civic life and powerful on an ad hoc basis only. It should be able to do everything, yet is allowed to do nothing. In particular, it must not defend the existing form in any crisis - and after all, what men want more than anything else is to participate in the exercise of its power. The state’s form thus becomes increasingly questionable and its radius of power ever broader.”

This allows us to expand on the friend/enemy concept so fundamental to Schmitt’s thought in this text. Whereas it is a reflexive habit of liberal democracy to establish collaborative efforts with these other domains or to use those domains as corroborative points that are theoretically meant to reinforce the logical, moral, practical etc. efficacy or “rightness” of political claims, “(the state) can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all these moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor…”

Schmitt sees the political as the strongest and most distinct categorization of which all other categorizations (ugly/beautiful, good/evil) can lend themselves for support but don’t necessarily have to; however, the autonomy of each of these distinctions must be maintained and are not necessary for reaching the ultimate friend-enemy distinction that is the fundamental political question of the state. This particular antithesis of friend-enemy can be reached independently of all the other antitheses previously mentioned: “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.” If anything we can think about the antagonisms that precede the ultimate friend-enemy distinction as a kind of hierarchical heuristic that ultimately crystalizes into the cardinal antithesis of the political.

When these other antagonisms do happen to culminate in the friend-enemy distinction, then these given antitheses are no longer sovereign antagonisms but have been intensified to the political realm, meaning, according to Schmitt’s theory, that there is, at this zenith of intensification, the possibility of violence or war. This and this alone is all that determines the political. In other words, moral, economic, and religious antagonisms that do not provide the possibility of war are not truly political. Only when they purport to the very real probability of physical killing do they crossover into the threshold of the political. And it is only through this very concrete embrace of potential violence encapsulated within the friend-enemy constellation that real political energy is to be found. If a religious community, for example, was to wage war against an enemy whether religious or not, then this community would not only be religious, it would be a supremely political entity:

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict. If, in fact, the economic, cultural, or religious counterforce are so strong that they are in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility from their viewpoint, then these forces have in actuality become the new substance of the political entity.”

If the very definition of “the political” is delineating between friend and enemy that could culminate in waging violence or war when posed with an existential threat then this precludes the existence of a universal state. A world government would be the ultimate neutralization, seeing as how the political, by its very nature, must exist as a competing political form against other political forms. The subsumption of all political forms into a universal government would thereby eradicate the political altogether.

But it is witnessing this universalizing tendency of postmodern democratic-liberal imperialism that perhaps makes Schmitt’s work more pertinent now than ever. Universalization, by its very nature, is totalizing - it captures every group and sub-group that makes political claims on it, exploits cultural modes and refashions them into expedients for the expansion of power, mediates opinion and morality with its overwhelmingly colossal media-entertainment apparatus, harnesses semantics to goad a very warped and hollow cultural discourse as a means of distraction.

Most important to this effort is the appropriation of morally-loaded language. “Ethics” is used as the animating term of imperial expansion and the totalizing state; “humanity” as a conceptual bludgeon that satisfies both the inherent expansiveness of power as well as the self-satisfied, congratulatory ethical trajectory of democratic liberalism. Semantics acts as an organizing power for a politics defined by abstractions with no concrete boundaries. And Transnational institutions established along these abstractions operate without the traditional modes of restraint that are usually concomitant with the limited nature of a state (territorial boundaries, the political demands of native populations). This culminates into a depoliticized world, neutralized by concepts and abstractions that are co-opted for an all-consuming power. The world and all its states ultimately subsumed into a giant economic cooperative.

Liberalism has given birth to many transnational institutions regarded as political, social, cultural, and economic triumphs. In actuality, these become vehicles that expand the potentialities for war since previously conflictual possibilities were informed by the limited nature of state politics as opposed to the universalizing tendencies of democratic liberalism. For instance, “The League of Nations does not eliminate the possibility of wars, just as it does not abolish states. It introduces NEW possibilities for wars, permits wars to take place, sanctions coalition wars, and by legitimizing and sanctioning certain wars it sweeps away many obstacles to war.”

To elaborate fully on this move towards an ell-encompassing world state via universalism and internationalism it is worth quoting Schmitt at length:

“Were a world state to embrace the entire globe and humanity, then it would be NO political entity and could only be loosely called a state. If, in fact, all humanity and the entire world were to become a unified entity based exclusively on economics and on technically regulating traffic, then it still would not be more of a social entity than a social entity of tenants in a tenement house, customers purchasing gas from the same utility company, or passengers traveling on the same bus. An interest group concerned exclusively with economics or traffic cannot become more than that, IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ADVERSARY. Should that interest group also want to become cultural, ideological, or otherwise more ambitious, and yet remain strictly nonpolitical, then it would be a neutral consumer or producer co-operative moving between the poles of ethics and economics. It would know neither state nor kingdom nor empire, neither republic nor monarchy, neither aristocracy nor democracy, neither protection nor obedience, and would altogether lose its political character.”

The entrenched pathologies of liberalism suggests that this would be a desirable state of affairs. Neutralization and depoliticization would register as progress - a triumph and validation of the ideology, since any diminishment of conflict would likely be interpreted as an advance towards peace.

However, this “peace” is deceptive because it creates a state of affairs that suggests it is an enactment of liberal values and ideals - a terminal triumph of political progress - when it is actually an incontrovertible and inescapable political configuration.

It’s liberalism’s underlying metaphysics, informed entirely by individualism, that demands the power of the state be subjugated, rendering states into devitalized and atomized perpetual debate stages that function along a dialectical spectrum featuring the counterpoles of “ethics” and “economics.” Again, this would strike the Western personality as a supremely civilized, “peaceful” society - endless discussion and shopping. What exactly this affords the individual as a political subject remains a mystery. Yes, supposedly “political” groupings are found within society, and yes, debates become public phenomenons that culminate into democratic referendums that transform social mores and the culture at large, meeting liberalism’s criteria for progress. However, as the true political is negated and the state becomes “society” forms of domination have not been dismantled but have been siphoned off into neutralized, uncontestable realms that function as stand-alone repositories of legitimacy.

Liberalism fights almost strictly to free itself from the repressions of the state where it can instead be subjugated by the axioms of global economics, or any other system that has subdued and ultimately subsumed the state.

It is through liberalism’s use of or acquiescence to illiberal forces that allows it to imagine it has obtained a kind of ultimate end. Instead, because it practices a ‘negative’ politics (one that fixates on governmental/political restraint for the purposes of personal freedom), it spearheads perhaps the biggest forfeiture of political power history has ever seen, since the systems that it unknowingly invites to supplant the state are so vast and technologically sophisticated that they will eventually liquidate the democratic principles they supposedly so adamantly support.

[Therese · Rating 3 out of 5]

First a longish preface about where I'm coming from in reading and reacting to this book - I'm a newcomer to reading about political theory/political philosophy. One thing I've become curious about is its boundaries as a discipline. Just from casual conversations, I get the impression that political theorists are at pains to differentiate the political from the non-political; of course that makes sense in terms of academics wanting to defend their own turf and establish special expertise as opposed to all the random curious and talkative people amongst the general public who might otherwise think they know everything about politics from reading the news. But it seems to go deeper than just boundary drawing.

For example, I get the impression there's a broadly accepted principle that you can't exactly apply the ideas you might have about interpersonal ethics in talking about politics. Personal virtues are intrinsically different from political virtues - for example, the Italian theorist Norberto Bobbio distinguishes between the political virtue of meekness in a moderate politician, versus the personal virtue of humility in a private citizen, even though to me they sounded kind of like the same thing. And when I posted about how nice I thought it was that Ellen DeGeneres and George W. Bush shook hands and laughed together at a baseball game, a left-leaning friend with an Ivy League degree in politics became very critical of the notion that, if kindness and civility are important interpersonally in day to day life, they could also be laudable, or even just acceptable, between political opponents.

Of course, I read Machiavelli a gajillion years ago, and I get the idea that political expediency has its own logic and rules, but it's still a little surprising to me if there's the notion that the personal and the political are so separate and different as all that, and if it's generally accepted by theorists that politics is by definition amoral Machiavellian politics. And what about one of the catchphrases of 1970s feminism that "the personal is the political"? I think, as a group, women certainly have experienced public policies as having the potential to be intensely personal and intimately invasive, given that politics can directly threaten or protect our sexual and reproductive autonomy - we have so long had to combat dehumanizing views of our bodies as a public good, a common resource to be distributed and regulated through patriarchal public decision-making. George Orwell's 1984 also explores how intimately authoritarianism can invade individuals' lives in shaping and limiting their emotions, thoughts, and sexual expressions, and conversely how intimacy can be a political act. And of course we've seen in this era of resurgent far-right nationalist authoritarianism how these movements invade people's private lives and relationships as political differences in people's allegiances lead to estrangements between formerly close family members and friends.

So in compiling lists of books to read to get more educated about politics and authoritarianism, the thesis of this one was very intriguing to me, since it sounded like it explicitly confronted and expounded on this question of the boundaries of what is political and not, as well as the seemingly foundational (??) assumption of (some??) political theory that the personal isn't the political and the political isn't the personal, and thus personal ethics don't apply in the political sphere. And all the more so, because of the author's personal history - his decision to join the Nazi Party in 1933, a year after the 1932 publication of this book during the Weimar Republic interwar period in Germany (interestingly, Schmitt became officially a Nazi the same month and year as the philosopher Martin Heidegger).

The last book I read before Schmitt's was political philosopher Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Stanley focuses on authoritarian nationalist Far Right thinking and rhetoric as it revolves around the opposition of "us" and "them," which can be turned to dehumanizing and violent purposes ranging from hatred and oppression to pogroms and mass killings. Of course, it's not hard to convince me that that fascism, racism, and genocide are all Bad Things, and this "Us vs. Them" rhetoric that drives it is dangerous.

Schmitt's big idea, however, is that the opposition between "us" and "them" is precisely what defines the political - he uses different terms and calls it the opposition between friend and enemy, but it seems to be the same idea. In ethics (according to Schmitt) the defining opposition is good versus evil, while in aesthetics it's the ugly and the beautiful, and in economics it's the profitable and the unprofitable ... just as each of these areas has its own rules and logic and system of values, so also does the political. However, the political is different, in that any type of conflict between groups in any of the other areas becomes political when it rises to the level that it creates friend-enemy differences. So the relationship of ethics or morality to the political is that conflicts over right and wrong or questions of what is good and evil turn into us-versus-them or friend-enemy conflicts, and then they are political differences. So, political differences can never be about actual ethical differences, because when they intensify to the level of the political they're by definition political, not ethical.

Schmitt then critiques liberalism on this basis - and here liberalism isn't in the sense of U.S.-style Democratic leftist-progressive ideas, but rather it means more or less classical liberalism, basically the combination of believing in free markets and individual liberty, safeguarded by democratic institutions, the separation of powers, and checks and balances to prevent any one set of interests from overreaching. In Schmitt's view, liberalism attempts "to tie the political to the ethical and subjugate it to economics." And so liberalism tries to pretend that there can be politics or governance based on ethical concepts like fairness and compassion instead of friend-versus-enemy power struggles. In Schmitt's eyes, this means that liberalism is in denial about the impossibility of taking the political out of politics and governance, so liberalism ends up pretending that political disagreements can really be about ethics or goodness, when the reality is they can't. Instead, these claims by various parties of haveing superior ethics just end up creating new friend-enemy, or us-versus-them conflicts.

To this point he quotes Hobbes: "The conviction of each side that it possesses the truth, the good, and the just bring about the worst enmities, finally the war of all against all." And Schmitt writes, "The worst confusion arises when concepts such as justice and freedom are used to legitimize one's own political ambitions and to disqualify or demoralize the enemy." And the (classical) liberals who tout the importance of rule of law are just engaging in the legitimization of a self-benefiting status quo. I think this raises a genuine question of whether Schmitt is overly cynical about the possibility of an overarching morality that can govern political and economic behavior alike, or whether he is correct - if only within the context of his own definitions and system of thought where this is presupposed to be the essence of the political: that all moral stances have their political uses.

One of the criticisms that I've seen leveled against Jason Stanley's book about fascism, for example, is that Stanley's presentation of fascism ends up hypocritically creating its own "us versus them" opposition, with conservatives who may have legitimate and sincere differences of opinion, based on deeply held views about what is moral, demonized as evil dumb fascists and lumped in with Nazis. And there is perhaps a little kernel of truth in this criticism, though I am no friend to moral cynicism. (By moral cynicism, I mean ideas such as that all morality is relative, and the serial killer's view that serial murder is good is just as valid someone else's view that murder is evil, because all morality is made-up and artificial, culturally determined simply to define in-groups and out-groups.) For me a more useful and constructive criticism of Stanley might have to do with moral condemnation and outrage as one of those games where the only real way to win is not to play. Authoritarian propagandists love the outrage game, but it doesn't mean we need to get drawn in and play it, as there is always the risk of taking on the characteristics of authoritarians in opposing them. As Nietzsche argues, we must be careful when we go out to fight monsters, lest we become them.

Schmitt also writes about the importance to political theories of the concept of mankind (aka the philosophical anthropology) that underlies them. While liberalism sees humans as basically good or non-dangerous, Schmitt says that "All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil." (That is, humans are dangerous and there is a genuine risk that they will try to wipe you out of existence. In this fear of loss of identity, in which the other threatens our existence by virtue of being different, we definitely see a key tribalist anxiety of the authoritarian right.) Of course, if political theory has as its (implicit or explicit) grounding the idea that politics is intrinsically Machiavellian and amoral and operates according to a separate internal logic, this is perhaps also correct. In its way.

Perhaps the most trenchant criticism Schmitt makes of classical liberalism is one that will appeal to the authoritarian Left: "A domination of man based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility." Schmitt sees the freedom of mutual contracts deteriorating into exploitation and repression, such that the oppressed can't defend themselves economically, but only politically. This a tenet embraced by the social justice movement, and we can see plenty of evidence for it in the present moment.

Of course, I'd say one of Schmitt's big problems overall is his tendency to think sloppily and imprecisely in binary opposed categories rather than in terms of nuanced, multidimensional spectrums. There's no middle ground between friend or enemy. His "friendship" or "us"-hood seems to consist exclusively of loyalty and group identity if it exists at all, and there is no concept in his system of anything like mutual beneficence, cooperation, or symbiosis. There are only zero-sum win-lose games, and no concept of win-win or lose-lose strategizing. The concept of political moderation is entirely absent. Liberalism which might think of itself as a form of governance that moderates between extremes and promotes compromise, is instead characterized as a chaotic anarchic vacuum that simply enables new authoritarian power grabs. He constantly seems to mix up classical liberalism with straightup anarchism, and he seems to slide instantly down a slippery slope where, if the government needs to provide a little control to protect people from economic exploitation, then the whole classical liberal idea of limited government balancing individual freedom with collectively mediating various interests has to be chucked out the window. And humankind has to be either basically good or basically evil and sinful - it can't just be that we're complicated and human with strength and weaknesses, neither good nor evil.

So, it doesn't take much imagination to follow this simplistic thinking to where he decides the Third Reich is the government for him, and strongman-based authoritarian government will cure the ills of the Weimar Republic ...

At the end of the day, I still want a better and more nuanced theory and explanation that accounts for the complexity of how the personal relates to the political, and where ethics comes in, and what a vision of politics looks like where "us versus them" is just one approach rather than the only possible approach.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This, Carl Schmitt’s best-known work, first published in 1932, is a crucial book for our present moment. The clear-eyed Schmitt, who stands far above any modern political philosopher, writes here of timeless principles that lie behind political action, and he slices through the ignorance, doublespeak, and confusion that surround any discussion today of the “why” of politics. As always, he offers a crisp analysis of reality, with implications and applications for all times and moments. And for Christians in today’s America, this book has extra value, because reading it restores the proper Christian understanding of “enemy,” something that has been (quite recently) lost, to our great detriment.

The Concept of the Political is not infrequently brought up today, though I very much doubt most people who mention it have read it. They should, however—it is more accessible than most of Schmitt’s books, even if it’s not beach reading. As with most, or maybe all, of Schmitt’s work, it only became available in English decades after it was originally published. George Schwab translated it in 1976 (discussing the translation with Schmitt himself), although as far as I can tell Schwab’s translation was only first published in 1996. This 2007 revised edition contains not only the core book (which is an expansion of an article Schmitt published in 1927), but an Introduction by Schwab, a Foreword by the political scientist Tracy B. Strong, and a translation of a 1929 article by Schmitt related to the book, which had been published with the 1932 edition. Finally, and quite interestingly, this edition contains notes made by Leo Strauss in response to Schmitt’s original publication.

We should first dispose of a stumbling block to Schmitt appreciation, his famous dalliance with the National Socialists, out of his desire to make his mark on history. Strong makes this the central theme of his Foreword, and any discussion of Schmitt usually discusses this episode at length. But really, who cares? The fact itself tells us nothing, except that little has changed since Plato went to Syracuse to direct and mold the tyrant Dionysus, and barely escaped with his life. Intellectuals often cozy up to dubious regimes, drawn by power like moths to a flame. We should instead ask ourselves, why do always hear about Schmitt’s brief ties to the National Socialists, while we never hear how intellectuals of the Left have, for more than a century, wholly and unreservedly supported all actions of all modern Left regimes, including Stalin and Pol Pot, which regimes have killed far more people and caused far more damage to the world than did Hitler and his henchmen?

It does not take a genius to understand why. All references to the National Socialists today are not offered for historical insight, but rather are a demand for preemptive apologies—“I’m not like those Nazis, and I can prove it by bowing to you!”—used to keep the Right on the back foot. Schmitt’s ties to the National Socialists, irrelevant to any aspect of his thought, are only brought up by the Left to dismiss Schmitt. They are afraid of him, because he shows they are on the wrong side of history, hurtling down a dead end. This is, to be sure, just the usual Left practice of dishonestly refusing to engage with any Right argument—though it is no matter, because the time for engagement is long past, and we should not be wasting any time in trying to achieve engagement, at least intellectual engagement. And the Right needs to spend zero time thinking about or talking about the National Socialists, except to the extent history is interesting (they should, in this context, be thought of in the same sense as we think of the Etruscans), and to the extent their seizure of power offers valuable lessons that can be applied today.

While we’re disposing of anti-Schmitt propaganda, we should address a second criticism of the man. This is a bit more substantive, though not by much. He is not “nice,” in the same way as Niccolò Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes (one of his heroes) is not nice. True, the gravamen of this complaint has changed over time—such carping used to mean that a writer was immoral because he was too realist and unwilling to demand all political action be based on Christian morality, while today it means a writer is inadequately feminized, found disagreeable because he offers truth, and his writing is by its existence a reproach to Left featherweights such as John Rawls. The practical use of this criticism by the Left is that anyone who finds value in someone not “nice” is himself deemed toxic, therefore anathema and someone who must be ignored. In either case, this criticism is nearly as dishonest as the first criticism, because it is also an attempt to avoid engagement, in this case with reality itself, and it should receive the same treatment—being disregarded.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with today’s event. Schmitt begins by pointing out “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.” Whatever else the modern state may be, it is an entity born of a particular people, a particular society, that exercises authority on behalf of that people. What does political mean, then? It cannot be defined as what pertains to the state; that is circular.

We can figure out what the political is, however, by working backward. Every “endeavor of human thought and action” has final distinctions—good and evil for morality, beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, and so forth. Politics is no different. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” The enemy is “the other, the stranger.” The enemy “is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in “the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.” Such conflict is “the extreme case,” but only the “actual participants can . . . judge the concrete situation and settle” the conflict. The participants base this decision on whether “the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.” The specific reasons that drive this decision vary; the essence is that the distinction among two groups exists.

Thus, we come to a definition of the political. “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.” “The phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics.” Any antithesis that forces groups into the position of friend and enemy is political, and this determines the “mode of behavior,” which supersedes prior antitheses, such as religion and class, creating “the decisive human grouping, the political entity.”

All political action revolves around this distinction, even when the “extreme case” is far from anyone’s mind, and therefore “all political concepts, images, and terms” have a polemical meaning grounded in this distinction. And the ultimate form of that polemic is combat, which Schmitt does not shrink from defining, in its essence, as killing other men. “War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.”

(Schmitt is very clear that he uses the term enemy in the sense of “public enemy,” rather than “private enemy.” “An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.” For Christians trying to live up to the commands of Christ, this is a key distinction, to which we will return.)

Schmitt rains contempt on those who try to avoid this existential distinction, trying to frame as central to politics instead economic competition or intellectual debate, or find the distinction and the conclusions it drives barbaric and hope that if it is ignored, it will disappear. “The concern here is neither with abstractions nor with normative ideals, but with inherent reality.” At the same time, Schmitt is at pains to point out that none of this implies a totalitarian state, or even a state with any power beyond that to ultimately determine who is friend and who is enemy. Yes, if it lacks that latter power, it is not a “unified political entity,” and in fact “the political entity is nonexistent.” But any number of other powers and considerations can, and should, exist within the political entity, which constrain political action.

The omnipotent state perceived as the norm by moderns, as Schmitt earlier pointed out in Political Theology, is merely a “superficial secularization of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God,” not a necessary, or even serious, political analysis. The state, however, is assuredly not pluralist, composed of many different entities wearing different hats at different times. That would be “nothing else than a revocable service for individuals and their free associations.” Rather, the state is an entity, and its key characteristic is deciding on the friend-enemy distinction, thereby “transcend[ing] the mere societal-associational groupings.” (All this is, of course, in line with Foundationalism’s call for a state of limited ends, but unlimited means to those ends.)

War is certainly not to be encouraged; Schmitt was not one of those who think that war is healthy or necessary for a strong society. But war will come, sometimes. “War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior.” However, it is extremely important for Schmitt, and for us, that the modern liberal state, with its claims of the primacy of individualism and the dominance of economics, falls perilously close to being unable to justifiably call for war. Therefore there is something close to illegitimacy, close to political nonexistence, in the character of the modern liberal state. All that can justify killing is “an existential threat to one’s own way of life,” not a higher GDP. “To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.”

If a people living under liberalism cannot make the decision for war, by implication because they have no common way of life and thus have no common enemy, then the political entity of that people, the state, no longer actually exists. This suggests that any state overly enriched by diversity, such as modern America, is not really a political entity. We should not shrink from recognizing as the core matter Schmitt’s reference to “one’s own way of life,” which defines who is friend, for whom one would be willing to die. For all of us Americans today, this is not everyone in our society, because those who rule would gladly destroy, and are already doing their best to destroy, the way of life of many, if not most, Americans. Thus, Schmitt helps us realize that too much diversity of the wrong sort, can, in the extreme circumstance, not only justify, but also warrant, war—and in a way is the only legitimate justification for war.

This leads to an inevitable logical chain. The enemy of a collectivity can be anywhere, but a key distinction for Schmitt is whether that enemy is outside a nation’s borders, or inside. In the usual course, the state represents a people’s decisions with respect to the friend-enemy distinction, with regard to enemies located outside the borders of that state. But if “internal antagonisms” become excessive, if “domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference,” “the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not the foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict.” That is, civil war. We might call this conclusion the “Highlander principle”—there can be only one, in this case only one collectivity in a nation, and somehow or other, this must be decided (which, of course, leads into Schmitt’s other writings on sovereignty and decisionism).

Short of civil war, Schmitt focuses on the need for the state to maintain internal peace, and the necessity to that end for the state to determine the internal enemy. If there is not internal peace, then no legal norm is valid, and there is, ultimately, again no state but rather an unstable situation of civil strife (what the Greeks called stasis). He ignores the possibility that the state itself could engage in anarcho-tyranny, or rather in a throwback to old-fashioned factionalism exercised by violence, as exemplified by the state-sponsored and state-protected Floyd Riots. At first reflection, I assumed that Schmitt ignored this possibility because it was probably incomprehensible to him in the jus publicum europaeum tradition that a state would so abdicate its responsibility. But that’s clearly wrong—it had only been a few years since elements of the German state had also done exactly that, in the spasms of violence across Germany that followed World War I. Probably Schmitt just wanted to approach the topic abstractly, rather than emotionally. For us, however, it is important to see that our current state, most notably in, but hardly limited to, the terroristic actions (and inactions) of the so-called Department of Justice that are designed to achieve precisely the opposite of internal peace, has declared its enemy. All that is happening now, unfortunately, is positioning the pieces until the starter’s pistol sends up a puff of smoke.

Schmitt being Schmitt, he adds more swipes at liberalism (something he associated with parliamentarianism, and distinguished from democracy in his The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy—not that he had any truck with democracy either). Individual rights, a core focus of liberalism, are far less important than the rights of, and survival of, the group. Political romanticism, the endless conversation which typifies liberalism (the topic of another whole Schmitt book), is an attempt to avoid reality. Both are distractions from the core of politics. “Although liberalism has not radically denied the state, it has, on the other hand, neither advanced a positive theory of the state nor on its own discovered how to reform the state, but has attempted only to tie the political to the ethical and to subjugate it to economics. It has produced a doctrine of the separation and balance of powers, i.e., a system of checks and controls of state and government. This cannot be characterized as either a theory of state or a basic political principle.” Liberalism offers only a critique of politics, not a form of politics, because it denies the friend-enemy distinction, instead offering only feeble and second-order attempts to control the state, dissipating its energies focusing on economics and ethics, while at the same time inviting the politicization of everything (which leads effectively to totalitarianism). Regardless, it is all fake, in a sense—Schmitt says that even a state focusing on economics will inevitably turn to distinctions based on friend and enemy that will lead to war. This certainly seems to be the arc of Western so-called liberal democracies, or at least of the regimes that run them, proving Schmitt correct once again.

A related topic, again central to today, that Schmitt also directly addresses is how wars can unnecessarily become ideologized and totalized—something that reached a fever pitch only a few years after he wrote, in World War II, but has been true of all Western wars since. Schmitt (both here and in other works) is highly critical of the denial of humanity to one’s enemies which flows from ideology that tries to deny the reality of the friend-enemy distinction, because this inevitably leads to far more dreadful wars. “Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.”

“When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy.” “There always are concrete human groupings which fight other concrete human groupings in the name of justice, humanity, order, or peace. When being reproached for immorality and cynicism, the spectator of political phenomena can always recognize in such reproaches a political weapon used in actual combat.”

In later works, Schmitt specifically identified this tendency as inherent to liberalism . . . [review continues as next comment].

[Amir · Rating 5 out of 5]

آدم به باید به انسان هایی که در کارشان جدی اند و طرفدار جدی بودن هم هستند احترام بگذارد. حتی اگر زشت باشند، بی اخلاق، شرور یا حتی "دشمن". مخصوصا در زمانه ای که همه چیز در حال تبدیل شدن به سرگرمی است.
به‌ همین دلیل هم اشمیت قابل احترام است.

پ.ن: وقتی از اشمیت می‌خوندم: "در عصر کمال خنثی سازی سیاست ممکن است حتی اتفاقات جالب توجهی نیز بیافتد" یاد این ماجرای آدم فضایی های کنگره می‌افتم:)
حالا آخرش ماجرای آدم فضایی ها به کجا رسید؟

[Muhammad Ehab · Rating 4 out of 5]

مفهوم السياسي للقانوني الألماني كارل شميت ترجمة دار مدارات
لمن لا يعرفه، كارل شميت منظِّر النازية، وبداية الكتاب مقدمة من المترجم يوضح بها أهمية كارل شميت للقارئ العربي مدافعًا عنه من الانتقادات التي توجه له في الأوساط الأكاديمية.

ولكن على الرغم من تلك الحقيقة، فإن كارل شميت مهم للغاية لأي قارئ مهتم بالنظرية السياسية في القرن العشرين. تنبع أهمية شميت أنه يكتب لانتقاد [الليبرالية]، وهي الأيديولوجيا السياسية السائدة في الغرب الآن. ينتقد شميت واحدة من الركائز الثلاثة للنظم السياسية الأوروبية في القرن العشرين، وربما يحتاج المرء إلى [العدو/الصديق] كليهما لفهم الحالة بشكل كامل، بتعبير شميت. سادت الحالة السياسية في القرن العشرين في أوروبا مبنية على الليبرالية كأيديولوجيا سياسية وعلى الرأسمالية كمنظومة اقتصادية وعلى الديمقراطية كوسيلة للحكم. فليس عجيبًا أن نجد شميت ينتقد الليبرالية مقارنًا إياها بنظم الحكم السابقة عليها ونجد أنطونيو غرامشي ينتقد الرأسمالية ونجد جون ديوي ينتقد الديمقراطية. ومن المؤكد أن الثلاث مفاهيم وتجسدهم الواقعي لم يعودوا كما كانوا من قبل.

لذلك، يجب فهم شميت في سياقه التاريخي الكامل، دون اقتطاعه مع النازية في صورة مبتورة للحكم عليه. يرى شميت أن مفهوم السياسي يفترض مفهوم الدولة. بالنسبة لشميت، السياسي يتمثّل في حالة من الاصطفاف على نقيضة [العدو/الصديق]، فلا يحتوي السياسي على مضمون في ذاته، إذ يمكن أن يتحول كل خلاف في مجال الأخلاق أو الاقتصاد أو الجمال إلى سياسي بمجرَّد صياغته في ثنائية العدو والصديق. وبالتالي فإن هذا الصراع الذي يتحول من الخلاف البسيط إلى ثنائية العدو والصديق يفترض صراعًا وجوديًا، فالسياسة هي في جوهرها صراع وجودي وليس أيديولوجيًا، يسعى كل طرف فيها إلى فرض نفسه عبر الوصول إلى الحكم. وفي خضم تلك الصراعات، يفترض شميت أن الحاكم السياسي [الدولة ممثلة في ملك ما] تفصل بين تلك الصراعات في حالات الاستثناء، وهذا نقد صريح لليبرالية، إذ تفترض الليبرالية دورًا محدودًا للدولة للحفاظ على الحريات، ولكن شميت يرى استحالة هذا الوضع، فالمآل الطبيعي للصراع في أي مجال أن ينضج إلى صراع سياسي في نهاية المطاف، وتتدخل الدولة في حالات الاستثناء لحفظ السلم والأمان الاجتماعي دون الوقوع في حالة من الفوضى. وهذا التدخُّل الاستثنائي للدولة حتى تحت ظل الليبرالية يراه شميت مناقضًا لمبادئ الليبرالية التي دعت لها منذ البداية، وبالتالي نافية لها.

يتناول شميت مفهوم [تحييد السياسي] في الأيديولوجيا الليبرالية، من خلال النسبوية الشائعة بها. فبغرض احترام فردانية الجميع وحقهم في اختيار أنساقهم الفكرية، وبمد هذا الخط على استقامته، يتخلى الجميع عن صلابة العقيدة، وتتسم الحالة الفكرية بنوع من السيولة بتعبير باومان، على أثر حالة الإفراط في التسامح التي تفرضها الفردانية الليبرالية. تحيِّيد الليبرالية السياسي من خلال تحويل الصراع إلى مجال الحوار [ولم أفهم هل مطلوبًا أن يكون الجميع في حالة حرب دائمًا!] وهذا في رأي شميت نوع من ارتداء الأقنعة والمناورات السياسية لتمرير أهداف سياسية تخدم البعض، فلا بد للعودة إلى حالة السياسي مرة أخرى طالما كان هناك دولة، فالبنسبة لشميت لن يختفي السياسي إلا بتحول الكوكب إلى حالة الدولة الواحدة، وهذا مستحيل، فستظل الصراعات السياسية على السطح دائمًا، لأن البشر سيظلون في حالة الصراع السياسي إلى نهايتهم، اللهم إلا إن توحد البشر جميعًا في مواجهة خطر خارجي كوباء أو فضائيين، ولكن في تلك الحالة سيكون السياسي على أشده ولن ينتهي، لأن تمييز العدو/ الصديق موجود، ولكن مضمونه اختلف فقط.

يوضح شميت في فقرة يسهب عنها في كتابه الآخر [اللاهوت السياسي] أن العلمنة المستمرة لا تنفي استمرار الفضاء اللاهوتي للبشر، فبالنسبة لشميت لا يعبِّر اللاهوت عن بنية دينية فحسب، بل يعبِّر عن الحالة الوجودية للبشر. وعلى ذلك، فإن العلمنة [أي المسافة المتساوية من جميع الأفكار] ستتحول إلى لاهوت هي الأخرى، وستتحول المفردات اللاهوتية الدينية إلى مفردات لاهوتية علمانية، وبهذا تدخل مجال السياسي مرة أخرى، المجال الذي لا فرار منه.

ثمة أطروحة مهمة يقدمها لنا شميت في هذا الكتاب وتصدق في الحالة العربية. يوضِّح شميت كيف تحوِّل الليبرالية النزاع من مجال السياسي إلى مجال الأخلاق تارة وإلى الاقتصاد تارة أخرى، بتحويل تمييز العدو/الصديق إلى تمييزات أخرى من قبيل المربِّح/المخفق، والطيب/الشرير. الملاحظة جديرة بالبحث، ولا أعتقد أن ربطها بالليبرالية سيجد ما يؤيده في الحالة العربية، على جدارتها للإسقاط في الحالة العربية، خاصة الأخلاق والمزج بينها وبين السياسة. من حيث الغاية، تمثِّل كل سياسة نسقًا أخلاقيًا له فرضياته، ولكن آليات السياسة بعيدة عن الأخلاق، وترتبط بتمييز العدو/الصديق الذي يتحدَّث عنه شميت، أو أن الغاية تبرر الوسيلة كما يقول مكيافيللي.

الترجمة جيدة، قراءة مثمرة للجميع.

[Gijs Huppertz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deze review betreft dit boek en Parlement, Democratie, Dictatuur van Schmitt.

https://ongeduld.com/2022/01/21/carl-...

De houdbaarheid van de democratie evenals de opkomst van identiteitspolitiek en steeds verdere polarisatie op een gehele reeks onderwerpen motiveerde mij de werken te lezen van een denker met een zekere alternatieve opinie dan doorgaans gewoonlijk is. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was een Duitse politiek filosoof van de vorige eeuw, en een van de meest controversiële. Waarom? Openlijk uitte hij zijn steun voor het Nationaal Socialisme en met de machtsovername van Hitler week Schmitt er niet voor uit om juridisch de beweging te steunen evenals Joodse wetenschappers uit zijn werk te schrappen. Desondanks denk ik dat Schmitt waardevol is om te lezen om verschillende redenen, zijn kritiek op Liberalisme, de kritiek op de democratie en meest belangrijk van al, zijn vriend-vijand concept binnen de politiek.

Eerst wil ik enige context geven voordat we duiken in Schmitt zijn kritiek op Liberalisme. Waar leefde Schmitt? In wat voor tijd? Wat kan zijn ideeën beïnvloed hebben? Schmitt studeerde af in 1910, enkele jaren voor de eerste wereldoorlog startte. Over zijn vroege volwassen jaren zag Schmitt het keizerrijk Duitsland in oorlog vervallen met Frankrijk, England en Rusland, om zelf in 1916 de wapens op te pakken en de loopgraven in te duiken. Na de eerste wereldoorlog kwam Schmitt in een van de meest turbulente tijd van Duitsland terecht, het interbellum met de Weimar Republiek. Met het aftreden van de Duitse keizer probeerde men in Duitsland een democratische parlementaire republiek te creëren. Aan de grondslag hiervan lag een zeer democratische en liberale constitutie, maar deze verandering ging gepaard met veel problemen. Duitsland bevond zich in een zwakke positie met veel ontevreden burgers na de oorlog. Veteranen keerde terug van het front, vele families waren uiteengevallen door sterfte en tegelijkertijd kwam het communisme op in Rusland dat zijn invloed uitte in Duitsland. Dit alles zorgde voor een gevaarlijke cocktail van ideologieën, gefrustreerde burgers en vele volkstemmers die van mening waren dat zij de weg voorwaarts predikten. Deze periode verliep dan ook vrij bloedig met momenten van politieke knokploegen op de straten en politici die het leven niet zeker waren door politieke tegenstanders.

Dit is de tijd waarin Schmitt zich bevond, ervaringen op deed en schreef [1]. Wat vond Schmitt van het Liberalisme dat uiteindelijk de basis van de Weimar constitutie vormde? Het korte antwoord is, niet positief. In zijn gebonden essaybundel Parlement, Democratie, Dictatuur start Schmitt met een uiteenzetting van de eerste fout die men heeft begaan, de combinatie van parlementairsisme, democratie en het Liberalisme. Schmitt probeert deze te ontleden om de tegenstellingen bloot te geven. Het parlementairisme dat streefde naar discussie[2] en openbaarheid is geïnfiltreerd door de massademocratie. Schmitt beschrijft dat als volgt, “De situatie van het parlementarisme is op dit moment daarom zo kritisch, omdat de ontwikkeling van de moderne massa democratie de op argumenten gebaseerde publieke discussie tot een

[1] Wellicht is het opvallend om te zien dat zowel Schmitt als Hobbes (een van zijn inspiratiebronnen) schreven over een sterke staat terwijl zij leefde in tijden van onstabiliteit en bloedvergiet.
[2] Discussie ziet Schmitt niet als de huidige vorm van uitwisseling van ideeën, maar als een strijd. Hier zal later op terug gekomen worden. Men moet de discussie benaderen als een uitwisseling van argumenten, waarbij een partij uiteindelijk de ander zal overwinnen.

lege formaliteit heeft gemaakt.”[1]. Buiten de discussie die is weggevallen benoemt Schmitt dat de massa tegenwoordig beïnvloed wordt door propaganda waarmee wordt ingespeeld op de directe belangen en lusten. Dit ontneemt de effectiviteit van het parlement. Met deze ontwikkeling vervalt de ‘waarheid’ of ‘juistheid’ van de argumenten en valt men terug op het simpelweg behalen van een meerderheid. Maar het Liberalisme dan, vraag je je af. Het Liberalisme heeft volgens Schmitt deze massademocratie geïntroduceerd met de gedachten van de gelijkheid van de mens. Dit is volgens Schmitt geen democratische gedachten, maar een Liberale.

Hier komt een van Schmitts zijn meest omstreden ideeën op. Schmitt stelt dat democratie niet gegrond is in de gelijkheid van de mensheid. De democratie volgens Schmitt, is iets dat homogeniteit benodigd van zijn burgers. Kortom, de democratie benodigd een bepaalde eis die het aan de burger stelt dat de bevolking homogeen maakt. Dit kan een bepaald soort burgerschap zijn zoals ze bezaten in de Romeinse tijd, maar dit kan ook etniciteit zijn[2]. Om Schmitt zijn gedachten helder te maken:

Het parlementarisme werkt niet, want het is beïnvloed door massademocratie dat geen waarde meer hecht aan juistheid, waarheid en discussie, maar draait om het winnen van een meerderheid.
De democratie werkt niet, want ze benodigd homogeniteit en dat kan het Liberalisme haar niet geven, omdat het uitgaat van een gelijkheidsprincipe.
Het Liberalisme werkt niet, want het kan nergens voor staan.

Laat mij dit laatste punt verder toelichten. We moeten even een sprong maken in Schmitts denken. In zijn boek “Het Begrip Politiek” breidt Schmitt zijn concept vriend-vijandschap verder uit. Schmitt is van de fundamentele veronderstelling dat er een ‘waarheid’ of ‘juistheid’ in de politiek is, dit drijft zijn gedachten over de politiek dan ook. Schmitt stelt dat de discussie zoals die in het parlement gevoerd behoorde te worden, draaide om overtuiging niet om compromissen, wat Schmitt uiteindelijk concludeert is dat politiek draait om vrienden en vijanden. Schmitt benoemt het als volgt, “Vijand is dus niet de concurrent of de tegenstander in het algemeen. Vijand is ook niet de tegenstander die men privé en vol antipathie gevoelens haat. Vijand is enkel een collectiviteit die ‘minstens eventueel’- dat wil zeggen op grond van een reële mogelijkheid-, strijdend tegenover een andere collectiviteit komt te staan.” [3] . Zoals te lezen is oorlog een zekere optie binnen dit vijandschap en is dit volgens Schmitt ‘maar’ het uiterste van vijandschap. Vriend- en vijandschap vormt dus de het menselijk handelen binnen de politiek. Volgens Schmitt vormde de staat in eerste instantie de vormende eenheid achter deze binaire distinctie. Het Liberalisme heeft de staat echter zijn kracht ontnomen, sterker nog, de staat is nu in dienst van het liberale individu en doet niets anders dan het delegeren van problemen binnen de

[1] Parlement, Democratie, Dictatuur, bladzijden 37.
[2] Hier is wellicht Schmitt zijn antisemitisme te herleiden evenals zijn inmenging met de Nationaal Socialistische Duitse Arbeiders Partij.
[3] Het Begrip Politiek, bladzijden 39 en 40.

maatschappij, waarbij alle conflicten terugkomen op de verantwoording van het individu. Dit laat allereerst een machtsvacuüm open binnen de samenleving. Als de staat geen orde geeft aan de vriend-vijand distinctie, dan kan een andere partij dit opvullen. Verder heeft de staat volgens Schmitt als enige het recht om zijn burgers te vragen te sterven voor de collectiviteit, echter zal niemand dit verrichten in een liberale samenleving gezien er geen spraken is van een cohesieve collectiviteit. Het ergste is dan nog wel dat het Liberalisme, het vrije individu en het kapitalisme in elkaar verwikkeld, want wat heeft het Liberalisme gedaan, het heeft probeerde de politiek vanuit de ethiek te binden en aan het economische ondergeschikt te maken. Kortom, binnen de politiek draait het nu, zoals eerder benoemd, om het winnen van zielen voor een meerderheid. Dit zou doormiddel van rationaliteit en discussie gedaan kunnen worden, maar Schmitt herleidt dat dit gemakkelijker gaat door het gebruik van financiële middelen zoals omkoping en propaganda.

Schmitt stelt uiteindelijk dat het Liberalisme niet succesvol is geweest in het uitbannen van de vriend-vijandschap distinctie, want stelt Schmitt, er is geen enkele democratie die geen vreemde, vijand of ongewenste kent. We gebruiken alleen andere terminologie, we kennen geen ‘oorlog’, maar ‘sancties’, ‘internationale politie’, ‘vrede vaststellen’ of ‘het beschermen van verdragen’. Schmitt waarschuwt ons verder voor het ontkennen van het vijandbeginsel, want benoemt hij, de Franse edel kende geen vijandschap en verheerlijkte het bestaan van het Franse platteland evenals de Russische prinsen de boer als christelijk ideaal zagen en beide werden overrompeld door revolutie[1].
Ondanks zijn scherpe uiteenzetting is het Liberalisme nog steeds dominant evenals de ontkenning van vijandschap en Schmitt waarschuwt ons aan het eind van het essay hiervoor, “Een leven dat niets anders dan dood meer tegenover zich heeft, is geen leven meer maar onmacht en hulpeloosheid. Wie geen andere vijand meer kent dan de dood en in zijn vijand niets dan een lege mechaniek ziet, staat dichter bij de dood dan bij het leven.”[2]. De uiteindelijke uitweg voor Schmitt was een sterke leider die de eenheid van de politiek weer kon vormen en de binnenlandse strijd ontnam. Een leider die homogeniteit bracht, op een verschrikkelijke wijze en een leider die zich verzette tegen het Liberalisme en streed voor de collectiviteit. Volgens Schmitt was Hitler niemand anders dan de democratische vertolking van het volk dat uiteindelijk zijn rechtmatige plek opeiste om de Duitse fragmenten bij een te houden.

Persoonlijk denk ik dat Schmitt zijn kritiek op het Liberalisme nog steeds vlijmscherp is. De constante compromissen waar Nederland om bekend staat, zonder harde discussies, de zogenaamde polderpolitiek. Het doorschuifluik van verantwoordelijkheid in het Nederlandse parlement. Zelfs de identiteitspolitiek die voortkomt uit het gebrekkige staatsvormende kracht valt te verklaren vanuit Schmitts denkwijze en ik sluit mij er deels bij aan. Het is ook een beeld van de mensheid dat aansluit op modernere kennis op psychologisch en sociologisch vlak en waar ik mij kan vinden. Het ziet het denken van de mens in termen van binaire distincties

[1] Schmitt is dan ook verbazingwekkend positief over Marx en Engels, omdat hij de distinctie tussen het proletariaat en de bourgeoisie ziet als een van de meest succesvolle vriend-vijand splitsingen.
[2] Het Begrip Politiek, bladzijden 110.

(tegenstellingen zoals koud en warm, goed en kwaad of schoonheid en walging), en dit zit geïntegreerd in hoe de mens zich opstelt in de wereld en vormt een groot deel van ons referentiekader. Hier past vriend-vijand perfect bij en niet ver gezocht. De mens is nu eenmaal geneigd te denken in heuristieken[1]. Buiten dat is binnen de sociale psychologie het concept van in- en outgroups steeds concreter gevormd. Dit komt neer op het vormen van een groep die bepaald eigenschappen deelt (zoals hobby’s of interesses, maar dit kan ook een etniciteit of religie zijn). Bij het vormen van deze groep kan een bepaalde identificatie ontstaan met de in-group en over tijd kan zelfs een out-group ontstaan, de groep die tegenover de in-group staat. Dit kan gepaard gaan met daadwerkelijk nadelige effecten zoals het minder geneigd zijn de ander te helpen of vijandige gevoelens[2]. Zo is Schmitt zijn beeld zeer realistisch.

Als we geheel eerlijk zijn richting de politieke theorie van Schmitt dan behoren we ook te erkennen dat zelfs de West-Europese landen zoals Nederland inderdaad nog steeds naar een vijandbeeld handelen. Al houden wij ons het beeld van het tolerante land voor, kunnen wij zien dat ook Nederland nog handelt vanuit vijandschap principes, alhoewel wij geneigd zijn de pacifistische termen te gebruiken als sancties en het beschermen van verdragen[3]. Ik ben echter wel van mening dat het polariserende beeld dat hij schept, een zogenaamde conflicttheorie, geen gezonde theorie is voor een maatschappij. Ja er moet kritisch gekeken worden naar onderliggende problematiek en ja er moet verbaal gestreden worden om ‘juistheid’ te herleiden. Echter is een theorie van constante strijd in mijn optiek een theorie die tekortdoet aan het empathische en liefdevolle aspect van de mens evenals de lange traditie van coöperatie die tirannie en dictatorschap heeft overleefd.

Helaas moet ik toch erkennen dat ik bang ben dat in tijden van verveling, onrust en instabiliteit men zal overstappen van deze coöperatie naar vriend-vijandschap en hoewel dit in de politiek (als in directe discussies) naar mijn inzien productief is, is dit een gevaarlijk fenomeen wanneer dit overslaat naar de bredere volksbewegingen die, antiparlementair, aan de hand van volkstemmers, invulling geven aan vijandschap.

[1] Heuristieken zijn mentale short-cuts die zorgen voor het nemen van snelle beslissingen. Dit kan ten goede komen in momenten waarbij snelle beslissingen van groot belang zijn, maar kan ook mentale luiheid veroorzaken wanneer dit toegepast word bij alledaagse beslissingen.
[2] Een van de meest concrete voorbeelden hiervan zijn voetbalsupporters.
[3] Men kan zelfs beargumenteren dat wij indirecte vijanden voorhouden die wij niet met de terminologie vijand benoemen, maar wel zo benaderen. Zo kan je bijvoorbeeld de vluchtelingen zien als een groep die geen vijand is, maar wel zo wordt behandeld.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

People talk about politics and the domain of the political with seeming ease. I always found it rather confusing. A haze of intermingled mashup conceptual frameworks operating at multiple levels. The terminology used in the theory of politics is usually highly abstract and unusually difficult to get a grasp on, while the actual practice of politics is dumbed down to the level of parody. Or rather - it is so dumb that it excludes the possibility of parody. I always found it difficult to get a grasp of what the essence of politics really is. At the same time, absolutely everyone around me, from the dumbest to the brightest, all seem to engage in politics with no such difficulties as I face. In a way, the lack of an overarching frame makes my mind spin toward no end, and thoughts diverge and disintegrate when approaching ‘the political’. The concept of the political therefore expand omnidirectionally to encompass anything and everything, with an pacifying effect. If morality is about good and evil, aesthetics is about beautiful and ugly, what is politics about? What is its domain, irreducible to any other domain? When does something become ‘political’? Schmitt’s answer is very simple, but I think also, elucidating - and probably just correct?

Politics is about the existential distinction of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, and this being the ultimate or totalising dichotomy, to which other dualities such as good and bad may rise up into - they can become political. Ultimate in that, once a movement or a group consciousness has enough energetic potential behind itself, it may rise up to the level of ‘political’ - it gains the existential dimension, of being defined against something. The ‘political’ is like a threshold of intensity, past the point of which a new autonomy occurs - that of friend / enemy. Its dynamic interplay arises through this differentiation and potential existential threat. Nothing can morally or legally justify war for example, Schmitt says, only politics can. When something is important enough - and it being existential would define it as such - it becomes political. There’s a real politik dimension here, as he seems to imply that liberalism is disingenuous, it hides the true interests and power dynamics that politics simply is, while masquerading as a ethical movement on ‘behalf of humanity’ or a similar ‘propagandist fiction’ which is used to disarm opponents, forcing them into the evil side of this enforced moral dichotomy. These are familiar ideas that you can find (applied) in John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs today, both of which have unmasked the US, showing how its ‘democratising’ projects abroad is just imperialism in disguise, its true interests behind hidden behind a false front. I suppose Schmitt is making a more metaphysical claim. Westerners today have to, increasingly, reckon with what the nazis probably had to reckon with after WW2 (insert meme template): ‘are we the bad guys? Ref pre and post 9/11 invasions in the Muslim world, the absolute moral catastrophe of Palestine, the evil of the Zionist regime we are aligned with through NATO and the US and so forth. All has been done with the idea of us being good these being our friends, these others our enemies, thus justifying their destruction - isn’t this what we’ve grown up to believe, and is it not a big fat lie? Isn’t it rather clear, that ‘our interest’ has been, factually, furthered because we have deemed these ‘others’ our enemies, existentially so? Schmitt’s framework predicts exactly this dynamic, the side that controls the friend/enemy designation controls the moral narrative, and the current crisis in Western self-understanding is precisely the moment when that designation is being contested.

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic political piece of work on the nature of politics, or as Schmitt puts it; 'the political.'

Schmitt fundamentally describes politics as a realm whereby groups of people with shared characteristics compete for collective power over other groups with opposing characteristics. Schmitt is the political theorist who famously coined the 'friend/enemy' distinction, meaning that within the realm of politics, a group has allies and opponents. Schmitt argued that if your group had no enemies, then it was not truly political.

Interestingly, Schmitt also theorises that those political groups who argue they are 'fighting for humanity' must ultimately class their enemies as inhuman, and not worthy of human rights. He theorises that the more grandiose a political group claims it is fighting for morality, the more immoral they can class their political enemies, and the more worthy they are thus of being eliminated. This personally reminded me of the radical left of today, who claim to be fighting for humanity, but also classify their right wing opponents often as 'scum' ‘evil’ etc. and thus not deserving of belonging to the group they have coined 'humanity.'

Schmitt also criticises the ideology of liberalism, describing it fundamentally as an open vacuum whereby it allows political groups with strong beliefs to compete for power and social dominance. Liberalism is fundamentally an apolitical belief according to Schmitt and is an ideology that fundamentally remains opposed to the State having power. Schmitt thus argues that if a group of individuals choose to remain apolitical, they are destined to be dominated by another group that asserts its political right to rule.

This essay is well worth the read for anybody interested in politics. I will probably revisit it again in the future.

~

Kindle Highlights:

"If a people no longer possess the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear."

'The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.'

'Liberalism in one of its typical dilemmas of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary. In the domain of economics there are no enemies, only competitors, and in a thoroughly moral and ethical world perhaps only debating adversaries.'

'it cannot be denied that nations continue to group themselves according to the friend and enemy antithesis, that the distinction still remains actual today, and that this is an ever-present possibility for every people existing in the political sphere.'

'An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.'

'War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.'

'A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.'

'Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.'

'The political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives its last psychic motives.'

'If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognises enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them. Such a declaration does not abolish the reality of the friend-and-enemy distinction.'

'If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule.'

'It would be ludicrous to believe that a defenceless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of a resistance. No one thinks it possible that the world could, for example, be transformed into a condition of pure morality by the renunciation of every aesthetic or economic productivity. Even less can a people hope to bring about a purely moral or purely economic condition of humanity by evading every political decision. If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.'

'the word humanity, to invoke and monopolise such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.'

'The Geneva League of Nations does not eliminate the possibility of wars, just as it does not abolish states. It introduces new possibilities for wars, permits wars to take place, sanctions coalition wars, and by legitimising and sanctioning certain wars it sweeps away many obstacles to war.'

'The radicalism vis-a-vis state and government grows in proportion to the radical belief in the goodness of man's nature.'

'Thus the political concept of battle in liberal thought becomes competition in the domain of economics and discussion in the intellectual realm. Instead of a clear distinction between the two different states, that of war and that of peace, there appears the dynamic of perpetual competition and perpetual discussion.'

[postmodern putin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very impressive work here from Mr. Schmitt. A true masterclass in political analysis. This work emerged from the chaos of the late Weimar Republic, where Schmitt's framework was crafted not to promote conflict, but to prevent Germany's slide into totalitarianism through clear-eyed political realism.

Schmitt's critique of liberalism is delivered with unmatched clarity and precision. He exposes the contradictions within liberal thought, showing how liberal ideology often obscures the true dynamics of political life. What actually struck me most was the delicacy with which Schmitt approaches war and combat. Far from glorifying violence, he treats these subjects with genuine respect for human life, challenging common mischaracterizations of his work.

Perhaps most astounding is his deconstruction of the hidden malevolence in liberal economic warfare. Schmitt reveals how economic competition can serve as a form of conflict no less consequential than traditional political battles, yet operating under the guise of neutral processes.

Schmitt demonstrates a truly brilliant intellectual capacity that remains especially relevant today. This book has immediately moved Political Theology to the top of my reading list. Highly recommended for anyone interested in serious political philosophy.

[Mohamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

سبعة شهور مع هذا الكتاب ومع ذلك لم أفهم الكثير منه ولعل قراءة ثانية تزيل الكثير من عدم الفهم. نسأل الله التساهيل

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

People might find this interesting

...........

When Trump claims he can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, he’s channelling Schmitt.

..........

Carl Schmitt, a brilliant jurist and political philosopher, both predicted the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and was – for a short time – a passionate defender of Hitler’s regime.

He fell out with the Nazi party in 1936, but spent the rest of his life writing powerful critiques of liberal politics.

[Ambushed by an accusation of neo-Hegelianism by a faction of the SS in 1936, Schmitt found himself in great political peril and was likely saved from death only by the personal protection of Goring]

After years in the wilderness, his works are again attracting attention.

............


Three of his big ideas, in particular, shed some light on the way the new authoritarians think about politics.


The ‘sovereign leader’
Schmitt argues that effective states need a truly sovereign leader who is not shackled by constitutions, laws and treaties. A truly sovereign president who will cut through red tape and take whatever action is necessary.


Us and them
Schmitt’s second big idea is that politics is fundamentally about the distinction between friends and enemies. Liberal democracies are hypocritical, says Schmitt. They have constitutions and laws that pretend to treat everybody equally, but this is a sham.

All states are based on a distinction between “them” and “us”, between “friend” and “enemy”.

A nation needs to constantly remind itself of its enemies to ensure its own survival.

The new authoritarians embrace Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction with gusto. Trump has a litany of opponents – Mexicans, Muslims, the Chinese – that seek to undermine America.


Rise of authoritarianism
Schmitt’s third radical idea is to redefine democracy. In Schmitt’s view, democracy is not a contest between different political parties, but the creation of an almost mystical connection between the leader and the masses. The leader articulates the internal emotions of the crowd.

..........
..........

Some think of Carl Schmitt as the 20th Century Machiavelli

or the most dangerous political theorist of the century

Essentially

Every government will have enemies

sometimes there are enemies in society and government realizes the problem as well

Leadership must connect to the people, and they must be effective.

Essentially it's Nihilist Leadership

See a Problem - Deal with the problem - but Connect with society

And the left and right has borrowed from Schmitt
because enemies are everywhere

.......
.......
Quote from the book

"The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing."
........
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Like other German theorists of the state, Carl Schmitt held to the idea that politics is always about violence; if we really and truly disagree with other people, we ought to treat them as enemies. Fish does not follow Schmitt this far. To be sure, he fills his books with examples of people who ought to, and usually do, hate each other: secular liberals dealing with religious fundamentalists; full-stop opponents of affirmative action confronting those who support it; defenders of speech codes and critics of hate-crime laws.

Alan Wolfe
2009 The Future of Liberalism
Chapter Five: Mr. Schmitt Goes to Washington

.......
.......
more quotes
.......
.......
The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
.......
.......
Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity.... 'Humanity' thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as 'human being" thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby 'asymmetrical'.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
.......
.......

[Leopold Benedict · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is most recognised for his idea of friend-foe distinction. The ability of a group of people to define their enemies and friends constitutes the political. The ultimate consequence and litmus test of this this process is war. I find it interesting, that the friend-foe distinction is not the result of his thought process, but its starting point. He postulates the friend-foe distinction as the axiom of the political sphere and develops his thinking on concepts such as liberalism, pacifism or the League of Nations (he does not think much of any of these) from that point. He is deeply skeptical of waging war for normative reasons such as peace ('the last war of all wars'), democracy, liberty or international law because it blurs the real reasons underlying the conflict and escalates war into a totalitarian conflict. Notably, he admires Marxism for excelling in creating friend-foe distinction across the globe. Apart from that Schmitt still believes that the nation state is the core category of friend-foe distinctions. Schmitt's essay is short, precise and non-dull. I appreciate the clearness of his analytical framework and I will add it to my toolkit of analysing political conflict.

[burak · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books which will remain lingering in your mind and desires assiduous notes.

[Alexios · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the wake of Trump’s political victory in 2016 there has been a growing interest in America in criticisms of liberalism. Some of these critiques are motivated by the belief that contemporary liberalism does not take the practical steps necessary to defend the values it is typically associated with.

This sentiment can be found both in contemporary Left- and Right-wing thought, and for this reason I think it is worth reading Carl Schmitt. Though the American political situation has not grown as desperate as the state of the Weimar Republic in 1927, when Carl Schmitt wrote this book, the stresses on American politics have only grown since the anticlimactic conclusion of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Hopefully, if you’re reading this you essentially believe in Aristotle’s ethics, even if you claim to be a Nietzschean or something. If you are such a reader, the question that will constantly pop up in your head when reading Carl Schmitt is whether the kind of Judicial and Executive authority he espouses (as a direct result of what he considers to be political) are compatible with such ethics.

Schmitt is extremely alienating for most because his reading necessitates the constant asking of this question. Maybe this is a uniquely American thing, the result of passages like the end of the first Chapter of this book, where Schmitt argues that “In actuality it is the total state which no longer knows anything absolutely nonpolitical, the state which must do away with the depoliticalizations of the nineteenth century and which in particular puts an end to the principle that the apolitical economy is independent of the state and that the state is apart from the economy.”

In Schmitt’s world the claim that a free market produces free men is completely off the table. Despite this direct opposition to commonly held American values, he must be taken seriously as a more controversial, contemporary, Montesquieu.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [reprint 2007].

In what concrete apparatus does political authority lie? Answers could be God or natural law or the social contract? That might be true in an ultimate sense, but power is always mediated. To phrase it another way: who is the actual sovereign?

Carl Schmitt begins on rather innocuous grounds: the state cannot be simply equated with the political. In other words, society cannot be equated with the political. What, then, is the political? It begins “with the distinction between friend and enemy” (Schmitt 26). To be sure, as Schmitt notes, this is a criterion, not an exhaustive definition. (Schmitt is using ‘enemy’ in a terminological sense, not in a moral sense of ‘bad guy’.) The enemy is one who intends to negate your way of life. To ward off confusion, Schmitt says it is a public, not a private enemy. Indeed, the enemy in this sense “need not be hated personally” (29).

Jesus’s comments do not contradict this. He is speaking of private enemies. As Schmitt notes, “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks” (29).

The contrast between friend and enemy is most stark in the context of war. There contrast becomes absolute and internal tensions within the political structure become relativised (e.g., as a patriot I dislike moderates, but in the face of an existential external threat, I put that dislike aside). Indeed, “War is the existential negation of the enemy” (33). A world without war would be a world without the friend-enemy distinction: it would be a world without politics.

We can now tentatively define the political as an entity which is able to escalate the friend-enemy distinction to war. It is any community “that possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of promoting that decisive step” (37).

Subordinate societies within the political certainly exist. These are Burke’s “little platoons” or “free associations.” They are necessary to health of the state. Schmitt’s reiterates his point, though, with stark clarity: “the political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives [its power]. It exists or does not exist. If it exists, it is the supreme, that is, in the decisive case, the authoritative entity” (43-44). We might recoil at his conclusion, but it remains true that the political, not the church or the guild, is able to use the sword.

I think at this point Schmitt is still at the level of theory, for there are examples in European history where entities other than the state had the power to wage war. Theoretically, he is correct.

Any group that has the power to make this distinction and does not do so ceases to exist. As Schmitt notes, if a group within the political chooses not to engage in the friend-enemy distinction, it in fact joins the enemy. “Only a weak people will disappear” (53).

Interestingly enough, we can apply Schmitt’s insights against globalism. If the political presupposes an enemy, it means another political entity, another state, must exist. “As long as a state exists, there will always ben in the world more than one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist” (53). The enemies will not cease to exist. The world-state will simply transfer the category to a group of whom it deems “deplorables.”

The Contradiction of Liberalism

Liberalism seeks to protect individual rights and liberty. It does so by hindering the state’s control. While noble, this also means liberalism cannot really accommodate the existential nature of the political as mentioned above. If war arises, the political can demand that you sacrifice your life. Classical liberalism says it can’t make that demand. It is here that Schmitt gives his famous rule of the exception, the rule that fundamentally kills liberalism: “An individualism in which anyone other than the free individual himself were to decide upon the substance and dimension of his freedom would be only an empty phrase” (71).

This doesn’t mean liberal societies cease to exist. They undergo a transformation. “A politically united people becomes…a culturally interested public.” “Government and power turn into propaganda and mass manipulation, and at the economic pole, control” (72).


Evaluation

This isn’t as shocking as it appears. Politics is about negating the other. I want my political candidate to win. That means I want the other to lose. Completely. Democrats want Republicans to lose. Republicans want patriotic Republicans to lose, and so on. Of course, at this point it hasn’t yet come to war. Actually, that’s’ not true. The Democratic Party has numerous paramilitary groups burning cities.

I’m not sure I would build a political worldview on Schmitt’s thinking. Questions like pursuing the Good and virtue are not relevant for him. He doesn’t dismiss them, to be sure, but they have no meaning on the friend-enemy distinction. Nonetheless, he writes with bracing clarity and forces the reader to grapple with hard issues.

Note on Hegel: all spirit is present spirit. Hegel is also the first to bring the nature of the bourgeois forward: “The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere” (Schmitt 62). The enemy, for Hegel, is “negated otherness.”

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is organized into four parts. First, there are helpful Foreward and Introduction sections that outline and orient the contents of the following three parts; then Schmitt's "Concept of the Political"; then Schmitt's "Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticization"; and finally, a critique by Leo Strauss.

First, some commentary should be made on Schmitt's Nazi associations. On the one hand, the case could be made that he was a product of his times. In particular, he was enraged by the treatment of the Weimar Republic by the victors of World War I. The bleak economic and political state of affairs in Germany at the time, combined with his devout Catholicism, means that it should be no surprise that he developed what could be viewed as an appreciation for authoritarianism and the ultimate sovereignty of the state, and a deep suspicion for the liberalism taking the world by storm following the first World War. On the other hand, as the Foreward writes, historical context is no reason to excuse him, and there is the frightening possibility that those who read and espouse his ideas may also adopt his eventual route in life as well. For myself, I think these fears, while not to be dismissed, should not stop someone from deeply engaging with the content of his work. For what it's worth, he wrote very positively of and maintained a friendship with Leo Strauss, a German Jewish philosopher that critiqued Schmitt's own work, shared his anti-liberal sentiments, and later became a professor at the University of Chicago. In any case, it's no reason not to read and deeply understand his foundational ideology.

The Concept of the Political begins with Schmitt's attempt to define the political. He poses a number of antinomies that define conceptual spheres of human life. In morality there are the antitheses between good and evil; in aesthetics between beautiful and ugly; in economics, profitable and unprofitable; and so on and so forth. In the political sphere, there is the friend/enemy distinction. Schmitt goes on to argue that it is concretely and descriptively true – not just abstractly, normatively, or theoretically true – that these spheres are independent of one another (though later he seems to say that moral, religious, or economic considerations can escalate into political battles). From this definition emerges a number of corollaries, such as the claim that states are those political entities that have the capacity for decisive political action – i.e., waging war.

Schmitt's critique of liberalism is that it seeks to do away with political antagonisms entirely, reducing them to economic and intellectual antagonisms. In doing so, liberalism produces a number of absurdities, including the idea that there can be a war to end all wars, and that the friend/enemy distinction can be eliminated by simply making the world your friend, as the League of Nations sought to do following WW1. (Schmitt thought it was ludicrous to believe that a defenseless person only has friends: "only a weak people will disappear" and "the political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.")

In particular, there is a sense that liberalism is disingenuous: in trying to do away with the political, liberalism has only obscured it in order to pave the way for its own will to power. The dynamics of power and conflict still exist, and are in fact intensified by attempts to obscure it. This is because, when political battles are made moral battles, the tendency to dehumanize the adversary leads to their total annihilation. “He [becomes] an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.” In this way, Schmitt could be viewed as arguing against moral universalism, or absolutes of any kind, as they would lead all too easily to utter destruction (perhaps, one might note, like the sort that faced the world in WW2 by the hand of Nazi Germany). Unsurprisingly, he is also skeptical of the likes of Hegel, Comte, and Vico.

In the Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticization, Schmitt notes that society has progressed, in the last four centuries, through a number of "central domains": theological, metaphysical, humanitarian-moral, and finally economic / technocratic. In each age, the social order is in harmony if and only if the questions of that era are answered: in a theological age, for example, everything is in order if there exists a coherent shared theology. Domain shifts occur when participants are in conflict for too long without answers. So, failed reconciliation of disparate Christian theologies gave way attempts to create a "natural" system of metaphysics, in which the idea of God becomes a "concept" rather than an "essence". Schmitt questions whether or not this progression is an ascent or descent, noting technology's gruesome domination of nature.

Strauss shares Schmitt's illiberal tendencies, but believes that Schmitt's critique of liberalism was itself predicated on liberal morality. For one, Strauss notes how Schmitt sees the reality of the political as inescapable, but also acknowledges the possibility of a depoliticized world state. If the concept of the political is indeed threatened, then Schmitt's words could be viewed as an affirmation of the political, or of power itself. This affirmation, Strauss argues, is a moral one, which is self-defeating because, by Schmitt's own words, the political sphere exists outside the realm of moral. In this way, Schmitt himself is a liberal, but with "opposite polarity". Still, Strauss is sympathetic to the friend/enemy distinction, noting that it is in principle easy to agree about "means" but not "ends": the seriousness of the question of right and wrong has, and perhaps always will divide masses of people.

[Jared]

That was...definitely written by a nazi. (Spoiler alert: he was a nazi.)

[Jef Gerets · Rating 4 out of 5]

De omstreden Schmitt geeft een duidelijke analyse van wat politiek inhoudt, namelijk altijd een vriend en een vijand. Het is deze eeuwige strijd die de politieke strijd is. De laatste decennia is dit intrinsiek conflict meer en meer verdoezeld. Alles wordt gereduceerd tot beleid en economische overwegingen. In die zin wordt de politiek gedepolitiseerd. Dit kan het onbehagen in de politiek deels verklaren: de politiek is namelijk niet langer politiek maar een bureaucratische rompslomp. Geen wonder dat mensen het gevoel hebben dat het niet uitmaakt op wie ze stemmen aangezien toch steeds hetzelfde blijft gebeuren. Schmitt gaf al bijna 90 jaar geleden een actuele analyse van het huidige liberale bestel.

[Jesse · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't like giving fascist texts any stars, but this was at least more readable and thought-provoking than his "Political Theology". Starting from the binary of life/death, and a notion of friend/enemy backed up by the example of warring nation-states, he argues that politics is (or ought) to be about discovering who your friends and enemies are, i.e. what group you belong to and who you are willing to kill. Liberalism, in his view, involves denying the existence of politics, depoliticizing all spheres of life by reducing them to individualistic, economic calculations.

A crystal-clear demonstration of how geopolitics, nationalism, Hobbsian pessimism about the nature of man, and anti-liberalism, combined with a load of sophistry and a touch of mockery of pacifists and anarchists, leads to fascism. In other words, a slippery argument which takes "external" politics of nations, equates it with all politics, and concludes that "internal" domestic politics follows the same harsh rules, justifying the identification of "internal enemies".

His criticisms of liberalism are similar to some Marxist critiques, and he praises the Bolsheviks for viewing the world in terms of a war between proletarians and bourgeoisie. But I would hope that Marxists aren't fooled by this faint praise - he is saying that one should kill to defend their nation and its values, and his crude caricature of class struggle obscures the fact that the true battle is against systems, not people.

[Daniel Polansky]

Schmitt: Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.
Me: Republicans, imperialists, doctrinaire liberals, academicians, people who underline things in library books, people who ride their bikes on the sidewalk, people who think Pearl Jam are a serious band, anyone who ever liked Forest Gump, people who are rude to waiters, e-sports enthusiasts, celebrity gossip journalists--
Schmitt: ...I think I left the oven on.

[TR · Rating 5 out of 5]

A frank explanation of politics, and the fact of an ever-present adversary in some form. No 'political science' is really science, and most 'political theory' is nonsense, but Schmitt seems to be saying things that match up with reality here.

I need to read this again.

[Theo]

shocking how early along in the 20th century the ambivalences of liberalism were apprehended- 1932! reading this book is enhanced knowing soon after schmitt joined the nazi party, giving you pause when you feel like you want to criticize liberalism along with him. yet all these things we must reckon with- the rise of economic imperialism, risking the creation of enemies of humanity, as opposed to simple political enemies. i want our politics to be based on a striving for universal goodness, but of course, this is never the case in reality. moral goodness is a political surplus good. schmitt understood this reality, did not seem to advocate totalitarianism in writing, yet fully decided to take in nazi rhetoric and espoused it. this is the worst outcome for him, and perhaps for anyone who is disillusioned with liberalism. yet still there is something redeemable about the project of rights, international law, and the affluence created by economic growth. yet we must find a way to make good on these without turning to a schmittean conception of politics, as this will spell the undoing of the achievements of the 20th century. we can try marxism probably? if you guys are in?

i will not rate this book because my star ratings are Moral Appraisals, so i’d have to give it one star for Moral Failure. but it’s worth reading if only to experience shock and horror

[inside an airport · Rating 1 out of 5]

Before we talk about the book, we should talk about the Nazi Carl Schmitt. He was the political theorist of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and one of the supporters of the Nazi regime and the Third Reich. 70 years after the WWII and the horrors of nationalism that Nazi Germany brought upon Europe and world, some anti-liberal academics now decided to preoccupy themselves with Schmitt’s rigid neo-Hobbsian theories that prioritizes state and statehood above all else. Chantal Mouffe, Paul Hirst, Andreas Kalyvas, Jan Müllerand, and Jorge Eugenio Dotti are some examples.

A majoritarian nationalist philosophy that was crafted in order to make a case for the existence of a fascist Germany. Radical European academician from both left and right, try to present Schmitt as an innocent political philosopher, who was favoring unity of state over liberal-humanitarian ideals. Schmitt’s violent decisionism was manifested in Hitler’s rule and the violent wars it waged around the world (to external enemies) and inside Germany (to internal minorities).

In the recent book "Wars and Capital", Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato referred to Carl Schmitt many times with references to most of his works without even mentioning his Nazi background. This shocking fact shows how much the radical left is willing to go backward in order to attack liberalism.

"Although Schmitt is not one of those in Germany who consider war to be a social ideal, something to be cherished, or something normal, it is, nevertheless, an ever present possibility. But the decision as to whether or not to go to war is a purely political decision and hence, in Schmitt's construction, something only the state can decide.14 More precisely, as a state cannot exist without a sovereign authority, it is this authority which in the final analysis decides whether such an extreme situation is at hand.15 Schmitt thus links state, politics, and sovereignty." -Introduction, by George Schwab

Schmitt’s friend and enemy distinction is presented in this book as “natural”. It is meant to be implemented in state-level politics and later created the total-state. A good example of this ideology was presented at Nuremberg trails when the Nazis argued; you have your own values and 'we' have our own, the only reason that we are on trials is that we have lost the war.
The national ‘We’, as always, refers to a state that has a few as its representative, rather than 'a people' who have (or don’t have) the ’state’ as their representative.

Today, the reactionary nationalism and far-right authoritarianism that is on the rise everywhere would support Schmitt’s case to the end. It would evidently result in more walls/borders and less human movement. Call for national sovereignty and right of self-determination would come out of the darkest spots of the world, namely, the nations who have been involved (or complicit) in imperialism and direct colonialization.

To me, it seems like, one of the requirements of Schmitt’s political concept is a common grand which can be interpreted as an identitarian state. This is very different from a politically united people. In the identitarian state, minority groups who do not commit to the majority rule would not be tolerated. An integral part of Schmitt's political philosophy is the critic of pluralism. The idea that pluralism would only be interpreted as "the existence of multiple nation-states" rather than diversity of a people whiten a particular nation-state or cosmopolitanism. A very violent idea that directly gives permission to the colonization of peoples without a unified state, or peoples with extremely weak states.

Schmitt identifies the problem of “depoliticization” as characteristic of the modern age. In this view, Hitler’s Nazi Germany would probably be the most political system. Depoliticization would lead to the blurring of the boundaries of state and eventually chaos. And as a good-old Hobbsian, Schmitt would do anything to prevent chaos.

Schmitt’s ideas on technology are very Eurocentric and violent. He sees it natural that colonialization has been possible by technological advancement and utilization of technology by European Imperialism. He mentions; “Technology serves everyone, just as radio is utilized for news of all kinds or as the postal service delivers packages regardless of their contents, since its technology can provide no criterion for evaluating them.” Following the book, Leo Strauss in his notes continued this statement as:

“It thus becomes intelligible that modern Europe, once it had started out—in order to avoid the quarrel over the right faith—in search of a neutral ground as such, finally arrived at faith in technology.”

I feel bad for those political science students who are subject to reading this type of gibberish during their studies in European universities.

[Iz]

surprise surprise it’s nazischeiss.

schreibe gerade meine HA über den Politikbegriff Chantal Mouffes und anderer linker Theoretiker*innen in Anlehnung an Schmitt und ich checke nicht wie man sich so einlullen lassen kann. Schmitt schreibt mies präzise aber die Implikationen seines Antiliberalismus gekoppelt an Antipluralismus ist halt literal Genozid. Die Analyse die er bringt ist meiner Meinung nach weder smart noch kann man eine Liberalismuskritik wie Schmitt sie fährt (weder normativ noch analytisch) so sehr entkontextualisieren.

[Sam Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schmitt fumbles a fair bit in this (e.g. by relying on strict binary divisions, by rehashing his old theory of human nature from PT,) but the overall concept is very intriguing and the final chapter's critique of liberalism sharp.