The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

by Gopal Balakrishnan

The writings of Carl Schmitt form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original, and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought. In the English-speaking world, he is terra incognita , a name associated with Nazism, the author of a largely untranslated oeuvre forming no recognizable system, coming to us from a disturbing place and time in the form of fragments.

The Enemy i s a comprehensive intertextual reconstruction and analysis of all of Schmitt’s major works—his books, articles and pamphlets from 1919–1950—presented in an arresting narrative form. This form reveals the complex ways in which his ideas took shape in the intertwining time lines of civil and world wars and retraces the path of his interventions on the constantly shifting battlefield of the inter-war era.

The lines of thought which emerge out of this meticulous study on democracy, constitutional law and international law will be startling to those who know nothing about Schmitt, as well as to those who have had to rely on the existing secondary literature to form an opinion of him. For the first time, the stature and topicality of this disturbing figure is incontrovertibly demonstrated.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, Politics, Germany, Nonfiction, Law, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

A prolific writer and independent scholar, Gopal Balakrishnan has authored numerous books, essays, chapters, and articles covering a broad range of intellectual interests. His published books include The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt and Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War. His edited volumes include Mapping the Nation and Debating Empire. He is the author of numerous essays and book chapters, and his work has been translated into multiple languages. In recent years, Balakrishnan has developed a distinctive interpretation of Karl Marx’s later economic thought and is working to refine his findings into a cohesive and politically resonating form. He has also begun collaborating with the editors of SS African Mercury. This journal delivers bold theoretical analyses and critiques of the political and cultural landscape across the ideological spectrum. He will be publishing most of his future work with SS African Mercury.

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a dense and borderline unreadable intellectual biography of Carl Schmitt, which is so poorly edited that at times it is impossible to determine whether the author is citing his own thoughts, Schmitt’s, or one of the dozens of other intellectuals whose writings he explores over the course of the work. [[[**Update: I take the introduction back actually this book is great and despite the poor writing its lessons have stuck with me**]]] Having said that, despite its major flaws and general unsuitability as an introductory work to Schmitt (the book unstatedly assumes at least an intermediate level of knowledge of the milieu in which he arose) there were a few interesting materials excavated from the corpus of his controversial work.

Schmitt’s political conception of Catholicism and religion generally is a consistent theme running through his writings. In his view, the body of the Catholic Church was the universalizing institution that had initially bound together Europe as one community. The laws of the modern secular state were a working out of a de-Christianized idea of law, with the “state of exceptions” that arise during periods of emergency appearing to Schmitt as something like the old miracles of religion, in which the natural laws of the world were temporarily suspended and the real dynamics of power were revealed. Like many others he saw modern politics as being theological at core, with ideas of a paradise on earth quietly cut and pasted from the Messianic expectations of old.

In his early writings, Schmitt appeared to see the only two political choices available in modernity as dictatorship from above or dictatorship from below. He seemed to opt for the former, though in his more radical later years he embraced something like the Rousseauian idea of a General Will expressed by radical mass politics. Schmitt’s idea of Catholicism seems very much like modern Islamists view of a caliphate, a vehicle for subsuming political differences, uniting a general body of followers and expressing pure power. Schmitt was not personally religious and neither he nor the Islamists seem to have much patience to discern spiritual values in their view of politics. He very much favored a total interpenetration of state and society, viewing the state as some kind of warrior body for the people to express themselves and their will.

One of the most important ideas in Schmitt’s political thought is about the power of myth. Any socio-political program requires a foundational myth to drive its followers with the necessary zeal to impact the prevailing power dynamic. Importantly, it doesn’t matter whether the myth is true or not, just that it is sufficiently motivating and powerful. As Schmitt saw it, modern parliamentary democratic states were hollow at the core since they did not have a powerful myth driving them and were instead based on the contentious idea that politics can move forward simply by rational discussion. His later embrace of fascism seemed to have been motivated by the fact that it did have a powerful myth (Aryan racial supremacy, Germany’s world-historical destiny etc.) behind it and thus offered a more vital form of politics than a seemingly bovine and drifting “parliament.” Thinking about this issue today it seems no less true that foundational myths are the most powerful force driving society. One may think today of the myth of Progress as probably the most potent in the West, claiming many devoted adherents and overpowering less powerful myths stemming from older racial and religious beliefs. Again, it doesn’t strictly matter whether any of these myths are “true” or not, by rather if they are sufficiently powerful to drive social and political change and compel obeisance.

Schmitt’s take on the demoralization of politics offers some interesting insights. Ironically enough his view of a world divided by cold expressions of power might actually be more humane at times than a sentimental view of affairs. He argued that in conflict there is no inherent need to define the enemy as “evil,” as we tend to do today. Convincing ourselves that we are fighting in the name of “humanity” tends to promote a murderous sort of self-righteousness that can lead to unwarranted brutalities or aggression against the Other. Rather, if we see the enemy as simply one to be overcome in order to achieve our interests, we might be less inclined to absolutely eradicate them out of supposed moral concerns. This is important since Schmitt essentially saw all politics as a form of sublimated conflict. In this light, the sentimental nature of American power today actually seems more brutal than a demoralized alternative. Of course, however, the life of Schmitt himself offers a poor counterpoint given his later embrace of Nazism and its moral-apocalyptic worldview.

The most interesting part of Schmitt’s thought dealt his views on the emerging cult of technology. Technological advance during his time had come to be taken by the masses as an alternative to politics. It remains as such today and if anything the processes that he identified have accelerated precipitously. Even then, many people were hoping that technicians would be able to transform themselves into a new class of visionary political and spiritual leaders. This is a hope that continues to embodied in people like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or even Richard Dawkins, who constantly flirt with ideas that are far out of their narrow expertise and are granted an eager audience to do so. The unwarranted prestige that we grant such people is an expression of the dangerous cult of technology and technical progress that we remain entranced by. I wish the book had spent more time on this subject.

Radical thought strikes fertile soil in a world that has been otherwise disenchanted. As Terry Eagleton wrote, a world whose objects have been drained of meaning “clears the way for some marvellous new totalization.” The frightening myths that Schmitt embraced were an attempt to re-enchant the world, no less than Marxism was. “When an epoch of history is grasped in human consciousness this provides proof...that the theorized epoch is finished.” Now that people are increasingly able to “grasp” the epoch that we live in and criticize it from the outside, it may indicate that it is coming to a close and a new one is being birthed. The post-liberal world that Schmitt foresaw, and whose arrival was postponed by the United States assuming the mantle of global hegemony from a destroyed Europe, may still come into fruition in the future. Schmitt’s willingness to countenance a terrible regime, even embracing its vilest bigotries by providing intellectual cover to the eventual destruction of the German Jews, should give us pause when we consider what our own pessimistic intellectuals may one day be willing to approve.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carl Schmitt, preeminent antiliberal, is that rare thing, the modern political philosopher relevant long after his time. Remembered by the simple only for his grasping embrace of Nazism when it came to power, the more astute have in recent times found much to ponder in Schmitt’s protean writings. He is still relevant because he did not offer ideology, as did so many forgotten political philosophers, but instead clear analysis of power relations, untied to any specific system or regime. So, as the neoliberal new world order collapses, and the old dragons of man, lulled for decades by the false promises of liberal democracy, rise from slumber, such matters are become relevant once more, and Schmitt informs our times, echoing, as they do, his times.

This book, Gopal Balakrishnan’s "The Enemy," slickly analyzes Schmitt’s complex and often contradictory writings. Because Schmitt offered no system, and often contradicted himself in sequential writings, or at least offered ideas hard to rationalize with each other, too often he is seen as an “affectively charged symbol, not as someone whose thought could be understood through a comprehensive and systematic study.” Balakrishnan’s goal is to accomplish that latter task. “My objective is to reconstruct the main lines of his thought from 1919 to 1950 by identifying the problems he was addressing in context.” The author makes clear up front that he wants to explore Schmitt’s thought, objectively, not through the lens of his association with Nazism: “Those who still insist on adopting the role of either prosecutor or defence attorney in discussing Schmitt can, I hope, be convinced that there are far more interesting issues involved.” And, critically, while the Balakrishnan is a leftist, his views never, as far as I can tell, infect the text in any way—perhaps, in part, because he feels strongly that Schmitt is not himself monolithically on the Right.

I have not read any Schmitt directly, yet, and so I cannot say if Balakrishnan’s summaries of Schmitt’s thought are accurate or complete. But I turned to Schmitt because his name kept coming up in modern books by leftists (and was used by #NeverTrumper Bill Kristol when trying to tar his opponents). Certainly, at first glance, his thought is relevant not only to the Left, but is just as relevant for today’s reactionaries, such as me. This is because Schmitt’s thought did not revolve around a retreat to the past, imaginary or otherwise. He was not interested in such restorationism; he correctly saw it as a false path. Rather, all of Schmitt’s thought revolved around taking what exists today and, informed by the past instead of by some utopian ideology, creating the future. He was master of identifying and rejecting the historical anachronism in favor of reality; such clarity is one key to effective Reaction.

Born in 1888, of a provincial Roman Catholic family in the Rhineland, Schmitt studied jurisprudence (which then included political science and political philosophy) in Berlin in the early 1900s. At that time, the legal philosophy of positivism dominated German thinking. Positivism held that the law consisted only of, and was derived only from, legal pronouncements, and formed a seamless whole through and by which all legal decisions could be made uniformly and predictably, if only one looked hard enough. This, a modernist concept beloved of liberals, had erased the earlier philosophy of natural law, under which much of the law existed outside specific legal mandates written down in books, whether divinely mandated or the result of custom and human nature. Schmitt’s early writings expressed some doubt about positivism, which in the pre-war years had come under some attack as permitting, then ignoring, gaps, as well as for ignoring who made the law. The war, however, firmly set his thought on the path it was to take for the rest of his long life, which was opposition to positivism, as well as all other liberal forms of law.

Schmitt volunteered, but due to an injury, served in a non-combat capacity in Berlin. Here Schmitt associated not with the Prussian elite, but with a more bohemian crowd. After the war and the post-war revolutionary disturbances, the mainline left-center parties, over the objections of the defeated rightists and cutting out the violent Left, promulgated the Weimar constitution, in August of 1919. This document governed Germany until 1933, and it was ultimately the springboard for the most important of Schmitt’s thought. But Schmitt’s first major work was not on the new constitution; it was a book about aesthetics as related to politics, "Political Romanticism." Here, he attacked the German Romantics for refusal to politically commit, instead remaining detached observers of critical events, manipulating words to create emotional effect while standing back from history. They would not decide what was worth fighting for; they merely engaged in “endless conversation,” all talk, no action. As Balakrishnan notes, this book is neither Left nor Right, and one cannot tell where on the political spectrum the author fell, though Romanticism was generally associated with the Right. Schmitt even cited Karl Marx to support his arguments. He thus, at this point, had very little in common with the anti-Weimar Conservative Revolutionaries, men such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck or Ernst Jünger. Not that he was a man of the Left; he was merely hard to classify.

Declining to work in government, Schmitt began his academic career in Munich, and in 1921 published "The Dictator." Though the book was written earlier, 1921 was immediately after the various Communist revolts, as well as the Kapp Putsch; the political situation was, to say the least, still unsettled. Article 48 of the new Weimar Constitution allowed the new office of President to rule by decree, using the army, in order to ensure “public safety,” a provision that assumed immense importance later. Even though he mentioned this power, "The Dictator" wasn’t narrowly focused on Weimar; it was an analysis of all emergency power itself, and its use in the gaps that existed even under a system of legal positivism, where gaps were supposed to not exist. Schmitt maintained that dictatorial power of some sort was essential in a political system, but distinguished between “commissarial dictatorship,” used to defend the existing constitutional order through temporary suspension (with the classic example of the Roman dictator), and “sovereign dictatorship,” a body or person acting to dissolve the old constitution and create a new one, in the name of, or on behalf of, the people as a whole. The commissarial dictator has no power to change the structures or order of the state, which remained unchanged and in a sense unsullied by the dictator’s necessary actions; the sovereign dictator does have such power.

This had obvious applications to Weimar, but Schmitt did not focus on the modern; instead, his analysis revolved around sixteenth-century France, where the King claimed the right to suspend customary right in the execution of royal justice. Opposed to the King were the Monarchomachists, part of a long tradition of political philosophy holding that a tyrannical or impious king could justly be overthrown, and that no extraordinary measures could be taken by the king without tyranny. In between was Jean Bodin, author of "The Six Books of the Republic," who argued that the king could indeed overthrow customary law, but only in exceptional situations, and only to the extent he did not violate natural law as it ruled persons and property. This view, endorsed by Schmitt, rejects Machiavelli’s instrumentalism, and holds that the dictator is he, of whatever origin, who executes a commissarial dictatorship, as opposed to a sovereign, one who claims the right to execute a sovereign dictatorship.

In the modern context, though, for Schmitt, the sovereign dictatorship is not always illegitimate, because the old structures have imploded. What was wrong for the King of France in the sixteenth century was right for the Germans in 1919. That is, through his analysis, Schmitt concluded that the Weimar Constitution was wholly legitimate, even though it was the result of a sovereign dictatorship, because the sovereign dictator, the provisional legislative power, the pouvoir constituent (the power that makes the constitution), existed for a defined term and then dissolved itself. The resulting political problem, though, was that if a new constitution was promulgated in the name of the people, the people remained extant, as a separate point of reference, from which “emerges ever new forms, which it can at any time shatter, never limiting itself.” This, combined with the revolutionary proletariat threatening civil society, created at least the conceptual need for quick elevation of a commissarial dictator, to deal with illegitimate revolutions, before the possible need for a sovereign dictator arose. Such was Cavaignac’s suppression of the Paris mob in 1848. (It is no accident that "The Dictator’s" subtitle, often omitted in mentions of it, is “From the Beginnings of the Modern Conception of Sovereignty to the Proletarian Class Struggle,” and Schmitt has much to say about internal Marxist debates of the time, another reason he is still read by the Left.) Schmitt viewed Article 48 as authorizing such a commissarial dictatorship—but under no circumstances authorizing a sovereign dictatorship, which had been foreclosed upon the promulgation of the new constitution, whatever external threats might still exist. Though that did not preclude, perhaps, another such moment, which, in fact, arrived soon enough.

As you can tell, "The Enemy" is in essence a sequential look at Schmitt’s written output, trying to fit each piece into the context of its immediate time, and with other pieces of Schmitt’s work. Balakrishnan next covers two short but influential books revolving around Roman Catholicism, "Political Theology" and "Roman Catholicism and Political Form." Although often Schmitt is seen as a Catholic thinker, he had a tense relationship with the Church (not helped by his inability to get an annulment for his first marriage), and much of his thinking was more Gnostic than Catholic. While very different from each other, both books more clearly set out Schmitt’s views on how European decline could be stopped, and it was not by more liberalism. "Political Theology" begins with one of Schmitt’s most famous lines: “Sovereign is he who decides on the emergency situation.” The book is an exploration of what the rule of law is, in real life, not in theory; an attack on legal positivism as utopian through a presentation of the critical gaps that positivism could not address; and an explication of the actual practice of provisions like Article 48.

Someone must be in charge when it really matters, in the “state of emergency”; who is that to be? It is not decided, at its root, by positive law; deep down, it is a theological question (hence the title). Turning from his earlier suggestion that only a commissarial dictatorship was typically necessary, Schmitt came closer to endorsing sovereign dictatorship of an individual, not derived from the people, in opposition to the menace of proletarian revolution. He praised another anti-proletarian of 1848, the obscure Spaniard Juan Donoso Cortes, who saw “reactionary adventurers heading regimes no longer sanctioned by tradition,” such as Napoleon, as the men who would fight back atheism and Communism, until the earthly eschaton would restore traditional rule. This vision did not entrance Schmitt for long; it smacked too much of restorationism, of trying to turn back the clock, rather than creating a new thing informed by the old. Still, this was and is one of Schmitt’s most influential books.

Less influential, perhaps, but more interesting to me, is "Roman Catholicism and Political Form." Schmitt had fairly close ties to the Catholic Center Party, but this book is not a political work. Nor is it a book of natural law; as Balakrishnan says, in it “names like Augustine and Aquinas are nowhere to be found. His portrayal of the political identity of the Church was a cocktail of themes from Dostoevsky, Léon Bloy, Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras.” A diverse group, that. The book portrayed the Roman Church as the potential pivot around which liberalism and aggressively sovereign monarchs of the old regimes could be brought together, through its role in myth and in standing above and apart from the contending classes, as well as being representative of all classes and peoples. (It sounds like this book has a lot in common with a current fascination of some on the American right, Catholic integralism, a topic I am going to take up soon.) What the people thought didn’t matter, but they should be represented and guided, in their own interests, by a combination of aristocrats and clerics, presumably.

Both these books, and for that matter all of Schmitt’s thought, saw modernity as a mistake, however characterized: as bourgeois capitalism, liberal democracy, or what have you. Spiritually arid, divisive, atomizing, impractical, and narrow, it had no future; the question was what future Europe was to have instead. In 1923 Germany, it certainly seemed that things were about to fall apart, which called forth Schmitt’s next work, translated as "The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy" (though as Balakrishnan points out, and I have enough German to have noticed first myself, a better translation of the title is "The Spiritual-Historical Situation of Today’s Parliamentarianism"; the word “crisis” is not in the original title). Here Schmitt lurched away from the idea of the sovereign imposing good government on the masses, and focused on the mass, the mobilization of the multitude that can give authority to the sovereign who decides on the state of exception, citing men like the violent French syndicalist Georges Sorel and impressing on the reader the power of political myth, rather than Roman Catholic truth. Schmitt discussed the tension between liberalism and democracy, among other things focusing on rational discourse as the key to any parliamentary system, and that rational discourse tends to be lacking in proportion to the amount of direct democracy in a system, though Schmitt attributed that to the power of political myths creating political unity, not to the ignorance and credulity of the masses, as I would. (This was once something that was universally recognized and assumed, but today the divide between rationality and democracy is ignored. This change, or debasement, derives from a combination of political ideology, in part informed by Marxism and cultural Marxism, and ignorance, from the forgetting of history and thousands of years of applied political thought. It will not end well.) Schmitt is not recommending a particular resolution or political program; Balakrishnan attributes that to Schmitt still building his own thought, without an ideological goal in mind. To this extent, as I say, Schmitt is the correct type of reactionary: a man who sees what is wrong about today, and what is right about the past, and seeks to harmonize the two to create a better, but not utopian, future.

Various other writings followed, responsive to the events of the 1920s. Among many interesting points, Balakrishnan notes that “Schmitt rejected what would later be called ‘Atlanticism’: the idea that the USA and Western Europe belonged to a common civilization, and thus shared political interests.” (In the years after World War II this was a particular focus of Schmitt, giving him something in common with the later French New Right, as well as the Left in general.) He also mocked the League of Nations; if what matters is who is sovereign, international “law” is the final proof of the contempt in which positivism should be held. He wrote a massive work on German constitutional law (which is untranslated to English), analyzing the relationship between democracy and the Rechtstaat, the core structures of German law revolving around the rule of law, which did not presuppose any particular form of government. In these writings, Schmitt addressed a wide range of thorny problems, including the legitimacy of law and who authorizes a new constitution, from which arise questions of legitimacy, and, just as importantly (and about to become more important at that time), questions of whose interpretation commands assent. This latter set of questions began to crystallize Schmitt’s adherence to “decisionism”—the idea that what matters, above all, to the legitimacy of a decision is not its content, or its tie to some underlying document or system, but that it be made by a legitimate authority. This is, needless to say, directly contrary to the claims of legal positivism.

As German politics moved toward its climax, Schmitt’s next work was more theoretical, "The Concept of the Political" (first published in 1927, then substantially revised in 1932, in part as the result of correspondence with Leo Strauss). This book sounds like the most relevant to today, both in its topic and in the specifics it diagnoses about modern liberalism. Its overarching theme is the most famous of Schmitt tropes: the enemy. While, like all Schmitt’s works, this book is complex, its premise is that “the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political,” and what ultimately defines the political is the opposition between friend and enemy—not, as Balakrishnan notes, private friends and enemies, but political communities opposed to each other.

Politics is thus, at its core, not separate from the rest of life, but, ultimately, the way in which a political community determines its destiny, in opposition to those who hold incompatible beliefs, through violent conflict if necessary. This is an internal decision to each political community, not susceptible to rational discussion with those outside the community, and it is not a moral, but rather a practical, decision. Liberalism, which believes that politics is a matter of pure rationality with a moral overlay, not only misses the point, but by being wrong, exacerbates the chances of and costs of conflict, especially by turning all conflict into a crusade where the enemy is evil, rather than just different. Liberalism makes war and death more, rather than less, likely. “Schmitt claimed that the logic of these decisions cannot be grasped from a non-partisan perspective. The point he was making was directed at those who, failing to understand the irreducibly partisan, emergent dynamics of such scenarios, see the causes of major political events in the small tricks and mistakes of individuals. Lenin, he said, understood that such people must be decisively refuted.” In fact, conflicts which seem irrational after the fact are not at all irrational; we just cannot, if we ever could, see clearly the rational impulses that drove them, which, again, boil down to the friend/enemy distinction.

[Review continues as first comment.]

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a book that I would typically personally select to read of my own accord; but as I am often motivated to books by recommendations from friends, I embarked upon reading this biography of the relatively obscure Carl Schmitt. I have often remarked about the mysterious ways in which certain books seem to come to hand and this one is certainly no exception. The synchronicity is not lost upon me that this book was given to me just after I finished reading Max Weber, as this work references Weber quite frequently.

This is perhaps the only book I’ve ever read that seeks to reveal the perspective of Nazi intellectuals during the war years. In this case, that perspective is of the constitutional and international law professor, Carl Schmitt, who’s theorizing became tumultuous under an array of radically different governments.

There is much to be gleaned from this reading regarding the fact that constant change affects political systems, just as it does everything else. Through the flux of the several different governments under which Schmitt lived, we can view varied perspectives of the dichotomy between the masses (seeking more goods/services) and the propertied classes (seeking safety, stability and the squelching of their fear of losing their accumulations).

These perspectives can bear particular significance in our evaluation of the political crises in the United States today. Reading about Schmitt’s unwavering view of the flaws of parliamentarianism, it is easier to discern the diminished effectiveness of the U.S. government, which has lost potency amidst endless political jostling. Perhaps there is no better example of unceasing political flux than Schmitt’s ever-changing views.

Since the demise of monarchy, this constant battle between popular sovereignty and executive power has continued in a furious, unabated manner; and history has demonstrated to us that neither extreme is workable. Not only the corrupt monarchies of old, but also the dictatorial nation-states like Germany, have perpetrated enormous evils in the world. On the other side, the popular movements have been unable to sustain themselves, either becoming lost in the ineptitude of argumentative politics, or giving themselves over to a corruptible charlatan who leads them astray, as with Stalin.

Schmitt puzzled over this dilemma but never arrived at a solution; and our world remains enmeshed in this governmental conundrum, awaiting the arrival of the perfect man, immune to corruption, who will invariably make good and right decisions at every turn.

Is eschatology valid?

Much of the theorizing that Schmitt embarks upon seems to bump against eschatology because at the base of it all Schmitt is attempting to contrive the best and most efficient means of governance. This task can be approached differently, dependent upon whether one sees history as chaotic movement or as a discernable progression, the latter of which has been adopted by most religions.

Like many before him, Schmitt seems afraid to render his honest opinions about eschatology. And as the book progresses, we see that Schmitt’s life and work becomes more and more fragmented, as he attempts to adapt to the alternative governments under which he finds himself, particularly the final Nazi domination. The reader comes to discern, by the end of the book, that the underlying static law Schmitt craves will always become outmoded and eventually obsolete, because we live in a world of constant change.

What we can see in history is that when deeply rooted cultural norms start to change dramatically, it can render populations asunder, as witnessed with the fall of Rome, the French Revolution, the holocaust, the World War’s, etc. To synthesize this, Schmitt seems to have eventually given himself over to the notion that a popular mythology must be prominent in order to sustain social organization; and in this he bears relation with his Roman predecessors.

Nonviolence.

Schmitt is an example of the sort of passivity that so many Germans acquiesced to in their toleration of Hitler’s horror, which is essentially a failure to stand up for what they truly believe because of fear and because of selfish ambitions. People like Schmitt are essentially the antithesis of ones like Jesus, MLK, or Gandhi, who stood firm in their convictions, even in the face of torturous death. Until broader humanity gains such steadfast conviction, corruption will always rise.

The idea of nonviolence is an all too often overlooked or misinterpreted message of Jesus. Populations of people do not believe in war; but are instead coerced into war by minority ruling factions seeking to retain or expand particular fiefdoms. People are coerced by propaganda, indoctrination and absurd mythologies. Society must beware of, and passively resist (via nonviolence), the dictatorship of the press and the monstrosity of media outlets that arise through massive infusions of capital in order to spew, indoctrinate, and propagandize people into subservience.

Utopia

Until the broader population learns to stand firmly in their inner convictions, social ills like war, worker exploitation, poverty, ignorance and disease will continue to plague us. We must empower the “moral dictator” that lives within our hearts. Utopia can only be possessed by self-regulated believers who cultivate their spark of inner goodness and allow their heart-felt emotions preeminence. Such “spiritually evolved” human beings will not require the regulations of police power.

What I’m talking about is the wider-spread occurrence within modern humanity of the same sort of spirituality that we’ve so far only observed in a few spiritually advanced individuals. Utopia arises when we become more motivated to create “sacred space” on our planet, than we are to participate in pathological, individualistic accumulation.

Despite all the theorizing of scholars like Schmitt, there is no ultimate, esoteric law to be found that can replace the need for a penultimate self-awareness in humanity. Nihilists view the hereafter as overly optimistic, but it is only the birth of this sort of awareness that can render us more than finite and integrate us within a much broader existence, comprised of all living things. The profound worth of this broader awareness must become our “utmost concern” and outweigh the selfish concern of how much an individual can hoard unto himself during the ephemeral existence of one lifetime.

An end goal is essential to eschatology and so it must involve utopia. What else is heaven but utopia? Schmitt seems to think of utopia as something frivolous, at least until his old age. Schmitt seems to view post-Romanism as possessing the necessary conservative function of holding world civilization in place, against pressing barbaric chaos. Perhaps even today many orthodox Catholics are of the same mind, even with the historical knowledge that the Roman empire persecuted Christians horribly.

A wider perspective reveals that Roman orthodoxy was nothing less than a model for justifying the evils of slave-based Romanism and to keep the masses in check. And yet, historical synthesis never ceases. The back and forth of dialectic, protest, revolutions and philosophies continue to bear us forward towards a future destination, the definition of which eludes us; and about which we can for now only debate (dialectic). This is the sort of awareness unveiled by Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Rise of the Masses

The substance for any sort of enduring rise of awareness in the world’s population must inevitably involve education, something that the majority of the masses seem to resist, either because they are fully engaged in seeking sustenance, are entangled in substance abuse, become workaholics, or just dislike deep thought and study. We see this in those who fail to finish high school, never become literate, never pursue secondary education, or never even use their spare time to self-educate.

Conversely, those enlightened by education, awareness and spirit, regardless of from whence it comes, must endeavor to establish streams of learning into the wastelands of the modern dystopian landscape of impoverishment, gang culture and addiction. Perhaps it was well said in the lyrics of the rock band Rush:

“And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality
Closer to the heart
Closer to the heart
The blacksmith and the artist
Reflect it in their art
They forge their creativity
Closer to the heart
Yes, closer to the heart
Philosophers and plowmen
Each must know his part
To sow a new mentality
Closer to the heart
Yes closer to the heart
You can be the captain
And I will draw the chart
Sailing into destiny
Closer to the heart”
-”Closer To The Heart” -RUSH

Society must escape from the mindset of segregated intellectuals like Schmitt, who are seemingly trapped within their past. Instead, modern intellectuals must recognize and embrace the undeniable fact that the world is in flux and that our challenge is to change appropriately with it. The ability to adapt is the cornerstone for existence.

Anti-Human (Anti-Christ)

The intellectual must cease being a minority amidst masses of instinctual beings who refuse contemplation and who move aimlessly through their lives concerned only with subsistence and pleasure. Already, the masses swarm to the internet for direction, for answers to their questions, for solutions and relief of their existential angst in decision making.

The non-human reservoir arises out of technology to gain sovereignty and to communicate ubiquitously amidst the masses and unify them in directions of its choosing. Unfortunately, it fosters an acquiescence of human free will and an abdication of basic human choice, thus it becomes an abomination leading humanity, pied-piper-like, into robotic, intellectual morbidity.

The cell phone is now in everyone’s hand, logging their whereabouts, instructing them where to go, serving as their medium of exchange and answering their every question. When technology poses an answer to all questions, the human is essentially rendered an unthinking mass of watery flesh. If technology removes our choices, what are we but automatons?

The process of giving ourselves over fully to inhuman machinery is the ultimate sacrifice of the soul. It is an acquiescence of a living being to that which is not living. It is an abomination to organic life.

In Hitler’s Germany, the motivating myth became Aryan superiority which served as the unifying feature, as contrasted with Stalin’s proletariat, or the Catholic Churches hierarchy. The next great myth on the horizon is the glorification of technology. Our perceptions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are incredibly naïve, particularly if we envision it as a naturally unifying force that will resolve all problems and conflicts in the world.

Just as human spheres of influence arise geographically, so likely will AI, and it is not hard to imagine mechanized warfare amidst factions of machines, each seeking world dominance for the particular philosophy of their computations. Technology is no more a God than was Pharaoh; it is merely the upsurgence of a particular dominating rationalism that gains power in a certain epoch of history.

Myth or Not?

It is only through optimism that the path of humanity resists chaos and we preserve hope; and this invariably involves belief in the ultimate redemption of humanity. Schmitt essentially acknowledged this in his assertion that myth was instrumental to successful governance. But is it really just myth?

Do you really believe “The American Dream” is mere myth? Certainly, all have not achieved “The American Dream”, but it is undeniable that others have. Certainly, there isn’t really a mystical Uncle Sam residing in the clouds of Washington issuing commandments like the Monroe Doctrine; but to totally dismiss the idea of “The American Dream” as myth is clearly to err. It is akin to dismissing hope.

The same fundamental logic applies to eschatology. Persistent hope is what leads to effective action. Conversely, the pessimism of nihilism restrains effectiveness and cultivates indolence. The assent of humanity arises out of hope, optimism and action; essentially the components of what we generally refer to as “belief”. However, we must stop trying to stabilize that which is inexorably mutable and instead embrace the wave of evolution by positioning ourselves to work within it, because we are unquestionably a part of it.

Conclusion

We humans will always be differentiating ourselves from one another because that is the process of the evolutionary medium within which we live; and it’s fundamental to our existence. As a result, factions, sects and polarized groups will persistently form. Our task is to cease trying to extinguish them and instead manage them by recognizing their value to the formation of dialectical synthesis. By ceasing to recognize them as enemies (“The Enemy” is the title of this book), we may see them instead as vital components for discerning proper progress.

Much of the political dynamics of pitting “friend” against “enemy” closely resembles the innate dialectic of “self” and “other”, each struggling for dominance. The contributions of Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), in planting the seeds of dialectical synthesis, are thus invaluable, even though the broader populace and most politicians remain ignorant of it.

This brings to mind Bob Marley’s Jamaican sect, The Rastafarians who have the practice of saying “I and I”, even in conversation with people who are not Rastafarian, in order to signify a third level of being, in which divisions are broken down into oneness. They sense the manifestation of a higher synthesis that can arise out of dialectical converse. Similarly, Hegel sensed something like an “abstract man” behind the formulation of laws and history. But, quite the contrary, for Schmitt, it is the State itself that serves as the enduring “entity” of rationalization.

We must cease defining ourselves as the polarized opposite of our enemy; in fact, we must optimistically recognize that what we perceive as an enemy may not be an enemy at all. Because humans inevitably factionalize, utopia can only arise out of a better understanding of the value of diversity to dialectical synthesis. We must become aware of and progress toward the new spiritual man.

continued in comment section below

[Luke Echo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty balanced and readable biography of Schmitt, and not a bad introduction to his work.

[Ty Usey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ambitious intellectual biography of one of the 20th century's most complex and controversial thinkers. While book generally did a good job of portraying Carl Schmitt's intellectual development and how it evolved with Germany's tumultuous regime changes, sometimes its desire to contextualize Schmitt within the complex politics of Weimar and Nazi Germany obscured his actual beliefs and legal writings.

[Derek Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and written, sometimes boring.

[Lamar · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent analysis of the career and intellectual journey of Carl Schmitt.

[Minäpäminä · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and quite comprehensive for its length. The tone is cool and sticks to the issues. Balakrishnan doesn't downplay Schmitt's Nazism nor compulsively interpret everything in light of it.