Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

From Tracy B. Strong’s Foreword: “The intense and renewed attention to the work of Carl Schmitt, whether hostile or favorable, is due to the fact that he sits at the intersection of three central questions which any contemporary political theorist must consider. The first is the relation between liberalism and democracy. The second is the relation between politics and ethics. The third is the importance of what Schmitt called "enemies" for state legitimation and the implication of that importance for the relation between domestic and international politics.” (xiii)

The political, according to Schmitt, is the arena of authority rather than general law, and requires decisions that are singular, absolute and final, rather than general and universal. the sovereign decision has the quality of being something like a religious miracle: it has no references except the fact that it is, to what Heidegger would have called its Dasein.” (xiv) Political acts do not require any legitimation; they “have the quality of referring only to themselves, as moments of “existential intervention.” (xiv) Universalist claims of liberalism are, therefore, endanger the political and, therefore, the democratic. “From this standpoint, Schmitt came to the following conclusions about modern bourgeois politics. First, it is a system which rests on compromise; hence all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional, never decisive. Second, such arrangements can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy. By the universalism implicit in its claims for equality, democracy challenges the legitimacy of the political order, as liberal legitimacy rests on discussion and the compromise of shifting majority rules. Third, liberalism will tend to undermine the possibility of the political in that it wishes to substitute procedure for struggle. Thus, last, legitimacy and legality cannot be the same; indeed, they stand in contradiction to each other.” (xv) The second point very curiously resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony through ‘hegemonic circles’ into which minorities which possess power include most active and dangerous social and political groups to

“The driving force behind this argument lies in its claim that politics cannot be made safe and that the attempt to make politics safe will result in the abandonment of the state to private interests and to "society"… The political defines what it is to be a human being in the modern world and that those who would diminish the political diminish humanity.” (xv)

As for the relation between ethnics and the political, according to Smith (in Tracy B. Strong’s interpretation), “inquiry into the political was an inquiry into the ‘order of human things’.” (xvi-xvii). Five stages that Europe underwent since the 16^th century, ending with the ‘technicity’ of the 20^th century, hence the danger of the Soviet Union, as it tries to appropriate ‘technicity’ as something of its right.

George Schwab: “According to Schmitt in the essay translated here, even ostensibly nonpolitical categories have the potential of becoming political.” (7) Very similar to what Althusser and then French discourse analysts speak of political implications in every enunciation.

Schmitt himself starts with a claim that a definition of a state can be reached only thorough the understanding of the political. “The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state-as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains - religion, culture, education, the economy-then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics.” (22)

In defining of what the political is, Schmitt uses the logic of phenomenologists: “the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way. The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced.” (26) It’s interesting, that Schmitt clearly differentiates between the political and aesthetics – something that, as Benjamin argues, was not true for either the Bolshevik or the Nazi regimes. Schmitt argues that just as other spheres of human life are defined through distinctions (beautiful and ugly for aesthetics, good and bad for morality, etc.), so there is a basic distinction that defines the concept of the political: the distinction between friend and enemy. Schmitt argues that it is possible to reduce all political meanings and constructs to this basic distinction.

“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.” (27) Therefore, there can be no neutral party to negotiate a conflict (and, thus, to interfere into the political): since the political is defined ‘phenomenologically’, on its own terms, and is existentially important (without this distinction, there can be no political), no third side can intervene.

Schmitt, curiously, appeals to the ideas of rationality when he explains why the concept of the political is based on the distinction friend-enemy. “rationally speaking, 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.” (28) – that is, rationality is necessary for him to develop his theory, and European rationality becomes that philosophical foundation upon which his entire concept of the political is drawn.

Having defined the political, Schmitt goes on to the state: “In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.” (30) And here, we moves to that section which is directly related to why Koselleck took so much from Schmitt, “Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on, are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term. (30-31)

Curiously, as Schmitt draws so much on the distinction friend-enemy, the political system of the Soviet state comes to mind where this distinction became the most vital in the 1930s, but later, under Khrushchev and then particularly Brezhnev, was reduced to compromises. Also, Benjamin: aestheticization of politics under the Nazi regime should be confronted by the politicization of aesthetics under Bolsheviks.  

But, in Schmitt’s speculations between the state and the political, what about the changing nature of states?

Curiously: “[war] 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.” (33) And later: “Both [concepts of political sovereignty and political entity] do not at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person's life or that a centralized system should destroy every other organization or corporation.” (38-39)

Also: “Should only neutrality prevail in the world, then not only war but also neutrality would come to an end.” (35) Cf: Laclau, Emancipations (discusses the distinction of universal/particular in the same terms). “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.” (37) In general, this interplay and interdependence of right and left ideas resembles future collaboration between Derrida and Paul de Man.

It seems to me, that at some point Schmitt is driven in his writing by the experience of German defeat from Western liberal states in the WWI (p. 47-48, for example, where he discusses sacrifice as an important aspect of the political), so his writing is a way to shape the future (and the German state & society) which would be able for an effective mobilization for another European war. This quotation is, in particular, symptomatic of this: “it remains selfevident that liberalism's negation of state and the political, its neutralizations, depoliticalizations, and declarations of freedom have likewise a certain political meaning, and in a concrete situation these are polemically directed against a specific state and its political power.” (61)  and then: “The question is how long the spirit of Hegel has actually resided in Berlin. In any event, the new political tendency which dominated Prussia after 1840 preferred to avail itself of a conservative philosophy of state, especially one furnished by Friedrich Julius Stahl, whereas Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin.” (63)

Curiously, once again a statement that Laclau implicitly involves in Emancipation(s): “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… To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize 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.” (54)

Interesting: the political (can) require sacrifice; hence Schmitt refers to Hegel’s definition of bourgeois as “The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use.” (62-63) – this is a peculiar distinction between the private and the public spheres. Private space is the one which rejects the political; it is embedded in material culture (!!!).