Comments on: Carl Schmitt

By: dipnut

dipnut — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 22:03:23 +0000

Josh, I’m tired of this. Right, left, whatever: call it squids and turnips, for all I care. When applying political labels out of context, the best you can hope for is 52 percent effective communication. Even with the best effort to provide context, the labels are such a hindrance that it might be better to eschew them altogether. The labels are certainly good for deliberate obfuscation. Wolfe plays a nasty trick with “liberal” in his essay, turning the meaning around 180 degrees from beginning to end. The idea that today’s “liberals” are idealists, helpless in the face of the Schmittian scorched-earth politics waged by “conservatives”, is ridiculous. To be sure, “conservatives” are Schmittian, but “liberals” are more so (at least in Wolfe’s “nothing more important than victory” terms); and such as Schmitt called liberals are no longer significantly in the game. All our politics is about social utility now. The rights of the individual are considered at the last ditch, if at all. Indeed, politicians talk about society granting rights and taking them away, as though this were possible; as though there were nothing inherent in the human condition having to do with rights! It’s down to a fight over which government-mandated utopia we’ll live in. As for any confusion I’ve sown, I’m not merely resorting to whatever rationale lets me stick fascism on the left. I find it conceptually necessary, to put my own thoughts in order. Your mileage may vary. I call myself a right-winger, and I’m on board with the heroic warrior ideal mentioned by “mc” above, so if you like, fascism is on the right and I’m a fascist. I do not equate society with the state. The state is real; society is abstract. The state is a cornerstone of civilization; without it, humankind wallows in savagery. But along comes society, and puts the state to arbitrary uses. What and where is society? No matter, some individual(!) will come along and say, “society needs this, society wants that,” and bring this and that under the aegis of the state. And the one who asks, “by what right does society put the state to such uses?” is laughed out of the room.

By: Steve S.

Steve S. — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 21:48:14 +0000

Someone like Chomsky can be interpreted or explored as a language fascist and he is certainly of the left.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 19:49:14 +0000

No offense, dipnut, but you sound like a character in an Aldous Huxley novel. (George Bernard Shaw play? H.G. Wells? It’s been decades).

By: dipnut

dipnut — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 19:37:06 +0000

Robin, First, don’t mistake me for an anarchist. “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” is all but religion with me. As for the rest, I daresay my obligations to my fellow human beings are far greater than your own, and I bear them better. I know my duty in my blood. It is you who have a problem with obligation. The whole point of society as you envision it is to eliminate all obligations other than the paying of taxes. You dream that civilization demands no real sacrifices; oh, I know better! and I don’t begrudge them. You would pay your dues, and leave society to take care of your “fellow human beings”. You want a machine for living, a formalized and standardized lifetime, an equal portion of gruel. You appeal to men’s bellies, to lust and greed and envy; and you call me a shirker because I reject your appeal. Society is an abstraction. It has no moral standing, no appeal to the human spirit. It can offer only a half-hearted, lackluster existence. The social democracies lack the moral and material vigor to stay long out of the swamp of history. Each successive generation is a net loss to civilization. Thanks to people like you, who scoff at freedom and dignity (and the responsibilities these entail), England is in the incipient stages of a catastrophic decline; eaten away at the edges by anarchy, invested from within by the police state. Bad show!

By: josh

josh — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 05:52:17 +0000

Just a very quick addition to this interesting discussion: the leftism/fascism discussion above, while fun in a combative sort of way, seems to me to go a bit astray. First of all, there’s the problem of dipnut’s definition of leftism as believing that society is morally sovereign. This seems to me mistaken as a description (as well as not very well worked out: ‘society’ is used very loosely, and seems to encompass the State as well as various groups): there are some fiercely individualistic thinkers who thought of themselves, and are thought of, as leftist (or leftish), and a number of thinkers who are generally regarded as Rightist who favour the demands of various supra-individual entities over the rights of individuals. I think that liberal and illiberal, or individualist and collectivist, are better terms to use to distinguish the opposed viewpoints dipnut refers to. (Especially as the Right traditionally, in Europe at least, has been identified with authoritarianism and anti-individualism). Indeed, it seems to me that dipnut projects his (?) own perception of the philosophical divide in contemporary American politics (itself arguable) back onto European intellectual history, which just doesn’t work at all. To the extent that the left/right distinction can be made coherent and singular (which is limited), it seems to me to hinge far more on the question of equality—Leftists believe, at least in theory, in maximising equality, while Rightists oppose attempts to maximise equality in the name of other, opposed values, whatever these may be. Schmitt certainly seems solidly in the Right-wing camp, as John Halasz suggests. He also seems to me to be no conservative, but rather an essentially radical thinker (conservative and radical also being terms that get mixed up with, but are I think distinct from, Left and Right), which may be why some on the Left find him so alluring, and why it does make some sense to invoke him in discussing the Bush administration (I’ve more thoughts to this effect up at my own blog, btw)

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 23:25:27 +0000

Dear Sir Churchill: I doesn’t bother me a whiff, if no one reads what I type. I simply take the time to puzzle out what I have to say. But, at least, my post gives some indication of the actual content and import of Schmitt’s work and why, repulsive as he is, he is none the less of interest, in contrast to the superficiality, if not downright nonsense, of some of the other comments here. I much prefer Hannah Arendt for getting my getting my bearings about the political. But Arendt’s conception of “power” as rooted in the public sphere specifically ignores, if it does not explicitly oppose, the notion of sovereignty, which is, after all, a want of realism. And her heuristic contrast between violence and political speech, instructive though it is, is also an evasion of any consideration of their relation. Schmitt, in his extremism, at least makes for a rigorous consideration of the contrary case.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 22:30:51 +0000

If Nazism was in fact a leftist movement, then how do you explain that all their contemporaries (including the right wing parties) considered the nazis an extreme right party? After all the german right made an alliance with the Nazi Party, which enabled Hitler to reach government.

By: Robin Green

Robin Green — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 22:00:51 +0000

[i]I want society to bugger off.[/i] I want Thatcherites who whine like babies about their obligations to society (which they claim doesn’t exist) to bugger off. No, really. If you don’t want to live in society and don’t want to be subject to any obligations towards your fellow human beings, please, bugger off and become a hermit. Win-win scenario.

By: Daniel Lam

Daniel Lam — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 20:16:42 +0000

This article is weird. It spends the first half pointing out the fascination that Schmitt has for some on the radical left, who study his writings and hold seminars on him. The second half is devoted to intepreting the actions of some conservatives in Schmittian terms, while acknowledging that they have probably never even heard of the guy. The conclusion is then drawn that Schmitt is an animinating spirit of modern conservatism. Why? Because Schmitt was plainly anti-liberal and everyone knows that the opposite of liberal is conservative. Right?

By: dipnut

dipnut — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 17:31:55 +0000

Fascism was not just extreme nationalism and authoritarianism but also very extreme socially conservative policies, colonialism, racism, etc.. Quibble: “social conservatism” is not “conservatism”. It was based on a far-right idea of warrior-like heroism… …the ideologies behind [authoritarian arrangements] can be very different, and you can’t erase those differences… I stated repeatedly that those differences exist. My point is that they’re not at all important. The differences are so much air, the similarities are bricks and mortar. I don’t care what the fascists and communists blather about. I care how they institutionalize their societies. There is virtually no difference, as you acknowledge. And the question whether a human being is first and foremost an element of society, or a creature in his own right, is of paramount importance. It is THE question, and fascists, communists et. al. all give the same answer. When I say that fascism is left, I’m proposing a conceptual space of which yours is a sub-dimension. I reiterate: a spectrum with fascism and communism at opposite ends, has no space in it for the individual as such. Doesn’t that bother you? Do you never question whether “society” really even exists? Schmitt gave the wrong answer, but he asked the right question. His ideas are perenially relevant, and I’m glad to have found out about him. I am absolutely a liberal in the sense Schmitt would recognize. I do not want to argue about the good of society. I want society to bugger off.

By: Steve S.

Steve S. — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:37:49 +0000

mc – “That Mussolini started out in politics as a socialist at the early stage has nothing to do with what he later became and founded. He was never exactly a Marxist in mentality, he just chose to speak to the workers too, that was his chosen audience. He was a populist.” Mussolini was a marxist for a long time. He wasn’t of the center/conservative persuasion and he wasn’t a royalist either you. So the way he started out was very similar to the way he ended up, of a totalitarian mentality. Why do ya think both the groups you seem to think are so diff. ended up with the killin mentality, both with the concentration camp mentality, both with the govt. is the center of everything mentality and both with the imperial mentality? When it has a quacking mentality its probably a duck.

By: W. S. Churchill

W. S. Churchill — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 12:17:26 +0000

Dear Mr Halasz, no offense, but somehow I think your posts could be a bit more concise. At least there’s no harm in trying. It’s hard to escape the feeling that your statement, by its very lenght, defends itself against the risk of being read.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 08:18:36 +0000

Carl Schmitt, his considerable association with Nazism aside, belonged to the line of violently authoritarian reactionary Catholic political thinkers that goes back to Josephe de Maistre and Donoso Cortes. That stated and its considerable repugnance noted, I don’t see why an interest in Schmitt should be deemed perverse or unworthy, as if, through guilt by association, to sanctify and legitimate the prevailing political order in its most conventionalistic interpretation. Schmitt’s conception of the political as determined by the distinction between friend and foe brings out the violence, potential or manifest, ingredient in any political order and does so with a specifically theological resonance. Now, if one takes theology as a discourse fundamentally inflected by concern with the ultimately desirable, then is that not precisely the context in which to consider the inevitable issue of political violence and its commitments, historically and prospectively, (as opposed to blindly denying one’s involvement or complicity in it, while enjoying its benefices)? If the political realm involves the articulation and resolution of conflicts that emerge from the inevitably collective nature of existence within a body-politic and the constitution of authoritatively binding decisions for ordering its affairs, then violence, the power of death, the threat of violence, and recourse to coercive means can not simply be ruled out by a harmonistic conception of interests and the resort to neutral procedures. Further, the collective existence of the body-politic requires not just the maintenance and securement of bonds of mutual recognition between its members and the establishment of common ground, but also the need for collective action, projects of which must not only be deliberated on and legitimated, but decided on and carried out. It is here that the violent potentials of the body politic are transferred onto the state as the organized monopoly on legitimated means of violence, as sovereign power. But it is bootless to deny that conflict over and contestation for this sovereign power does not partake of the very violence of the sovereign power, deriving from the body-politic, even as it is at once pacified and constituted by it. Schmitt, whose provenance is as a legal and constitutional theorist and not as a political philosopher or a propounder of a political doctrine, constantly emphasized this constituent power behind any constitutional and legal order. Any procedural means for the securement of authoritatively binding decisions can not simply be a neutral and disinterested matter. Not only is it constituted in the first place by some prevailing interests or balance of interests, but it is inflected by the mode in which those interests operate. And the origins of a political order in its constituent power will always “shine through” its formal means, such that those means are subject to contestation, reinterpretation, recontextualization and refunctioning, so that to appeal to the supposed neutrality of means in arriving at authoritative decisions is precisely to mask their actual functionning and stakes. So why would one want to consider the work of Carl Schmitt, in the light of the repugnant nature of his misanthropic values, his violent authoritarianism, his totalitarian insistence on the homogeneity of the body-politic as the basis of disambiguating legal order, not to leave out his considerable complicity in genocide? Perhaps it is not so much out of a boredom and resentment with the complacent pieties of the prevailing political order, as from a recognition of the prevailing economization of that order and how it has been so de-politicized and instrumentalized in those terms, of how popular participation and social needs have been left out of it and how it denies the real violence of its effects. Perhaps it is in recognition, inverting Schmitt’s own tergiversations about the dithering of liberal parlimentarianism and the need for decisiveness in political action, of how, under today’s conditions of plebescitary and “representative” mass democracy, political actors are all to free to take their initiatives. Perhaps it is in recognition that political arguments, in the end, boil down into a macabre game over corpses, how they are tagged and labeled and displaced, which ones get honorable burials and which are denied and consigned to oblivion- (very much as with “Antigone”)-, which perspective is re-enforced when one considers that the existence of future corpses is at stake. Perhaps it is out of a desire, very much against Schmitt’s intentions and in terms he entirely despised, to return the constituent power of the political order to the pluralism of the body-politic and to accountability to a public sphere. Perhaps, rejecting Schmitt’s demand for a decision of friend or foe, it is in the recognition that the revival of the political order depends on a decision for friend and foe. Perhaps it is because Schmitt, in his deserved opprobrium, inspite of his considerable intelligence, speaks to that which the prevailing political order, in its neutrality and “tolerance”, renders illicit to speech. To be sure, violence as a means of ensuring or achieving political arrangements is a dubious proposition, far more likely to lead to political derangement. But to fail to bespeak the violence of the prevailing political order is to contribute to such derangement. The article in question badly missed its chance in adducing Schmitt. What is at stake is not that the current “conservative” hegemony is low-down and unscrupulous, (which is true), whereas their liberal “opposition” is too high-minded, (which is false); it is as always a struggle over constitutional order and its implications and derivatives, which is what the dumbfounded “oppostition” is missing and fails substantively to address. For a long time now, American liberalism has contained a considerable admixture of self-regard and self-congratulation. Not only does this squarely, if not rightly, invite a sucker-punch, but, when all else fades, the self-regard and self-congratulation remain.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 07:51:18 +0000

Not to distract too much from this Marxists were fascist thing, but regarding Schmitt, wouldn’t he include pretty much all modern Western governments and parties as ‘liberal’ under his definitions? Like this description of liberals: “Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power.” The idea that other societal influences should counterbalance the government is a central influence on Republican thought. “Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule — even an ostensibly fair one — merely represents the victory of one political faction over another.” The neutral rules thing is the definition of the US textualist judicial philosophy. Basically I don’t think his idea of liberal and conservative can possibly be regularly attributed to any of the major political parties.

By: mc

mc — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 07:16:53 +0000

Why do I say fascism is leftish? Because I denife leftism as the belief that society is morally sovereign (“the benefit of society” is more important than the rights of the individual). Fascism, communism, and social democracy embrace this proposition (which I hold to be the most important ideological aspect of them all), the only difference being who gets to define “the benefit of society”. Now, if fanatical nationalism is the defining aspect of fascism, and if such nationalism is a right-wing thing, then fascism is right-wing. The first proposition is a matter of opinion; I insist that the defining aspect of fascism is its postmodernism, not its strident nationalism. What a mess, dipnut. Fascism was not just extreme nationalism and authoritarianism but also very extreme socially conservative policies, colonialism, racism, etc.. It was based on a far-right idea of warrior-like heroism. It was extremely and explicitely anti-communist. Marxism was a materialist economic theory. Fascism was all about mythology. That Mussolini started out in politics as a socialist at the early stage has nothing to do with what he later became and founded. He was never exactly a Marxist in mentality, he just chose to speak to the workers too, that was his chosen audience. He was a populist. In practice, of course authoritarian regimes are all the same. But the ideologies behind them can be very different, and you can’t erase those differences only because of the practical consequences of deprivement of freedoms etc. are the same. Or just because you want to make some convoluted point about all such regimes being leftist…