Political Romanticism

Romanticism causes more stupidity and the ‘friend/enemy’ thing causes more harm.

How do I love taxes ?
Let me count the ways..
I love them to the bredth and depth my bank account can reach,
And yet beyond, well into credit’s realm.
I love them to the level of my state’s most ardent need, both day and night.
I love them freely, as they freely fall, on rich and poor alike.
I love them purely, for their own sweet self.
I love them with a passion put to use to settle life’s old scores.
I love them with a childlike faith that they are good.
I love them as they render unto caesar,
And thus express the wisdom of old saints.
I love them with my flesh, and bones and skin, my very hide,
Which they may freely take, and often do.
And for the grace of audit, which computes
the very open boundary of my love

And if God choose,
I shall but love them better after death

I don’t think that Schmitt believed that one is free to choose one’s enemies. In any case, the passage you quote from COP doesn’t suggest such a view. All it says it that political enmity is not reducible to moral or economic or aesthetic difference.

To believe that enmity can then only be a result of arbitrary subjective choice is precisely what makes one a liberal (or romantic), in Schmitt’s view. He is concinced that this belief is wrong, but this conviction, as he points out, inolves a theological view of human nature and human history that is itself a matter of faith, not of philosophy.

I don’t sympathize with Schmitt’s view, but there seems to be no open contradiction between COP and the attack on romanticism.

As I tried rather unsuccessfully to say over at Balkinization, being pro-authoritarianism and skeptical of liberalism wasn’t exactly confined to Nazis in 1933.

There were plenty of smart people who believed, even feared, that liberal democracy was a flash in the pan, and that either fascism or communism would be the eventual master of the earth.

So, whatever one’s ultimate evaluation of Strauss, I wouldn’t zero in upon a letter from 1933.

Hannah Arendt once told me that Leo Strauss looked in the stars and saw that Hitler had to come to power. Seems she was closer than I realized at the time.

No, I find Schmitt’s thought inimical. As I said.

My first impression of after reading Schmitt — biography aside — was a very bad one. I still am not sure that I completely understand what he’s trying to say, but I will stick with my negative judgement unless someone gives me a good reason to change my minds. And likewise for Strauss.

“Friend vs. foe” may be some part of any political position whatever, but the way Schmitt makes it the central idea of politics was highly inauspicious, and history emphatically confirmed the bad omen.

That was the only person in France Strauss asked for an introduction to, and I believe that he said in his letter that he was the only one he wanted to meet. And Schmitt himself was already a Nazi by then, though Strauss did not know it. And in the new letter at Balkin, Strauss describes himself as a fascist. He also expresses a disdain for all the other refugee Jews in France.

Only so much special pleading is possible before you start to look silly. This is not a non-question or a paranoid accusation. Straussians may have an answer, but they should bring it forward.

Well, it would make sense for Strauss to ask Schmitt for an intro to Maurras, given Schmitt and Maurras’s politics. Strauss did, in fact, meet a number of other intellectuals in France, whom he seemed (at least in later years) to esteem more than Maurras (among them Alexander Kojeve, who to the extent that he’s classifiable at all, wasn’t exactly in the fascist camp – though he also was no liberal). I don’t think that one can conclude that Maurras was the only intellectual Strauss wanted to meet, or that Strauss’s intellectual sympathies were limited to the far Right, from that one letter.
That said, Strauss undoubtedly was pretty far to the Right in the ’30s. Then again, he was also on very good terms with, and was supported by (including, decisively, for his post at Chicago) by the esteemed democratic socialist R.H. Tawney. So, again, I’m not sure how much we can conclude from association …

Does it seem to anyone else that “sarcastic minimalization” is especially characteristic of the right?

You don’t see anyone saying, for example, “Oh heavens me, Stalin didn’t want his enemies to have control over society — does that really make him a tyrant?”

(I’m well aware that the left has characteristic tropes, but those of the right are more obvious to me. I do not object in principle to the use of rhetorical tropes.)

Often called “Stalinists” by those who can’t read Stalin’s native Georgian language.

It might be helpful to note that political romanticism was the favored posture of thinkers on the German Catholic right, which is one of the main targets of “Political Romanticism”. Of course, abroad there were currents of revolutionary romaniiicism on the left, which, in turn, were criticized from still further left. So Schmitt is performing a characteristic operation of criticizing political currents of both left and right by re-deploying criticisms they make of their opposite numbers. But I think it’s fair to say that Schmitt intended his notion of clarifying and consequential existential decisionism as a kind of political realism, upholding the “seriousness” of the political, aimed not just against romanticism, but legal positivism, as well.

The “famous” distinction of friend from enemy as the criterion of the political realm is a bit more complicated than might at first appear. Aside from being attached to a state-centered conception of politics, with the classical notion of sovereignty, “inalienable and entire”, as the “organized monopoly of legitimate violence”, and seeking for the basis of the legal order of the modern state in crisis in the “concept of the political”, the intention is to provide a means for “defining” the political distinctively as an “autonomous” sphere, (such that contents from other cultural spheres can enter into the political and partake of its dynamics of intensification without the political being reducible to those spheres or their concerns), but, at the same time, as Strauss notes, Schmitt is rejecting, in his concept of the political, the standard German neo-Kantian view of culture as comprised of differentiated autonomous value spheres, (which Strauss characterizes as “aesthetic”, but might perhaps better be construed in line with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical subjectivism). In other words, though the political is a distinctive sphere, it is not just one such optional sphere amongst several with their own criteria, since in the political is encountered conflicts of whole ways of life. What Schmitt rejects is any merely “superstructural” conception of politics. (A lot of his early basic conception seems to have been cribbed from Lukacs). That is why the political is figured as an “amoral” realm, since it involves a conflict of moralities rooted in the permanent potential of violence, (not its actuality), and since it constitutes a kind of distinctive “ethics” of its own distinct from private morality. (And the over-moraliztion of politics is itself morally and politically damaging). That might also explain Schmitt’s evocation of “justice”, which for him would not be a matter of free-floating normative speculation, but rather would presumably refer to an interpretation of “dike” as the order and authority required for the legality/legitimacy of the state.

The philosophical background is a little beyond me, but it might be worth noting that “someone named Kotzebue” was the author of the theatre piece that became Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens and another piece (I can’t recall the name) that is now known only from association with Beethoven. At least I now have a little imprecise context on why someone would have assassinated a mediocre playwright.

By the way, pace John Emerson, the sixties were innocuous.

“I submit in all seriousness that surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss’s ideas.”

That’s Buryeat.

One of the costs of Straussian esotericism is that you only get the real teaching once you have been initiated and are trusted to maintain the security of the message. So you might read a bunch of Strauss’s books, and conclude that Strauss did not believe that representative democracy was a good political system, and you might even agree with Strauss. But if you run into your favorite Straussian and explain that you believe that Strauss had really destroyed the philosophical case for representative democracy, you’ll get a double take. And you won’t know whether it was because your reading of Strauss was incorrect, or whether you had blundered by saying something liek that out loud.

So arguments with Straussians end up being very difficult to follow, because you really never know where in the esoteric-exoteric topology you happen to be standing at any given moment .

#25: “Once you have the concept “friend”, the world automatically divides into friends and not-friends. But you need a further step to translate “not-friends” into “enemies”. ”

Absolutely. And that step is (in their widest senses), the realm of politics, of social policy, of law.

On an individual level one can have an abortion or not, or smoke marijuana or not. But in a given society, these things are either legal OR illegal. And whichever it is, there’s an “other side” who lost. And their loss is enforced by the force of law. If abortion is illegal, you can be arrested for getting one, and if it’s legal, you can be arrested for blocking the entrances to abortion clinics. If the #21 poster wishes to disabuse me of zero-sum thinking (which I indeed do), he can explain how marijuana and abortion can be legal and illegal at the same time.

On post #21: When you refer the “use of force in politics” are you referring to both legitimate and illegitimate force? To violence AND force AND coercion AND indoctrination?

Schmitt believed that the government’s use of force, meaning primarily physical force and violence, could not be restricted by law, and that the government could suspend the laws when it was judged necessary. But he got to this position by a route which seems to make repressive force the fundamental essence of the political, and seemed to think of the state as primarily defined by its use of force against external and internal enemies. Granted that the monopoly of legitimate violence is part of most definitions of the state, Schmitt’s slant (or filter) seemed to privilege this part of the definition over everything else, to the point of forgetting the rest and giving a violent interpretation to everything government does (and while giving “the political” primacy over everything else.)

This strikes me as an example of the kind of tendentious essentialism that anti-essentialists rightly oppose. The German thinkers seemed to have this fetish about getting as deep as possible and finding The Essential, and some of their contempt for liberal democracy is because L.D. does not go deep enough. But Schmitt’s choice of something to count as The Essential looks biased and destructive to me.

Okay, never mind about the line breaks, just an artifact of the preview function.

What about the classic country/western love song “I’ll Waltz Across Taxes with You”?

mcd, I was writing briefly to make the point about your implicit reliance on zero-sum assumptions. It’s obviously true that there are some legitimate (in the sense of being both beneficial and legal within a constrained constitutional system) uses of force by states, such as collecting taxation to finance public goods.

So, let me start with the observation that war is inherently a negative-sum activity and the empirical fact that, in practice, aggressive war is almost invariably a negative-return activity for the inhabitants of countries that undertake it, Germany in the first half of C20 being a striking example. Schmitt and similar thinkers manage to construct logical frameworks that insulate them from crucial facts like this.

…war is inherently a negative-sum activity…

It’s a nice thought, but is it always true? Not intuitively. Take the US civil war, for example – you could argue either way, but most observers would probably count it as a use of political violence with overall positive result. Or American revolutionary war – not an aggressive war, but still political violence.

The German thinkers seemed to have this fetish about getting as deep as possible and finding The Essential

Well, but often the French too, for example. I’ve long had the vague thought that such tendencies may be connected to the possibly varying emphasis that specific languages place on Big Abstract Nouns (or, in German, Bigabstractnouns). Has anyone investigated this properly?

Sovereignty in Latin Christendom, which had kept the European peace….

Sovereignty is the sticking-point for me with Schmitt and also makes Foucault’s “Society must be Protected” difficult for me to follow.
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Sovereignty strikes me as an inherantly unstable concept (or a “contradiction”). How many sovereigns can there be in this world? Genghis Khan said “Only one sun in the sky”, and that makes sense.

After the Peace of Westphalia there was a multi-state system with the renunciation of claims to a European empire for 150 years, and then Napoleon made his try which was squashed, and then there was a period of British hegemony, and then the Germans made their couple of tries. My point is that whatever peace there was came from the muti-state system required a weakening of sovereignty (and Christian unity) even though the states’ power over their subjects was afoten almost absolute.

I remember when the EU was being put together George Will huffed and puffed about the lss of sovereignty of the European nations, and I asked, “Why should George care? Why should anyone care except the sovereigns?” (In particular, I asked whether anyone at all cared about Belgian sovereignty; Belgium has existed for a couple of centuries, but in what sense has it been “sovereign”? — The answer, which I didn’t know at the time, is that the Vlaams Blok was caring about Belgian sovereignty already as I spoke).

Sovereignty seems inherently particularistic and conducive to warfare, and in 1914 the various European sovereignties did what sovereigns do.

So anyway, it seems to me that the reaffirmation of sovereignty was not a reasonable response to the 1914 disaster, just as a more thorough illiberal critique of liberal democracy was not a reasonable response to the 1918-1932 disaster.

In the commentaries to the two Schmitt-Strauss books in English, the Weimar Republic’s inability, because of its commitment to legality and due process, to suppress violent anti-State movements was raised as the motive for Schmitt and Strauss. If I were sure that the two of them had given the Republic a fair shot I might feel differently. The lesson I drew was that you can’t impose democratic forms on a people which does not want it — Weimar democracy was easy to see as an imposed foreign burden, like the reparations. (The thing that most shocked me during my informal study was the unmistakable lack of enthusiasm for democracy among German centrists like Weber and Thomas Mann — “Confessions of a Non-political Man” — and perhaps Schmitt and Strauss should be grouped with them, though I somewhat doubt it, and they both opposed Weber’s conception of the State.)

The ironies have piled up to Heaven by now, because our home-grown Straussians have recently been amazed to see that that our Iraqi Weimar Republic isn’t working very well. In the same way, During the Reagan-Dubya administrations I’ve been tempted at times to give in, and agree that demagogic populism proves that liberal democracy is no damn good, but when I went to my Straussian friends to confess my democratic errors, I found that they were all pimping for Reagan and Bush. So Guelphs were now fighting Guelphs, and Ghibellines are fighting Ghibellines.

On top of that, one Strauss defender instanced McCarthyism as proof that Straussians were too subject to persecution, just like al-Farabi and Spinoza. I was willing to grant the Straussians equal status with crypto-communists, but I don’t think that that was what was wanted. (Strauss did oppose McCarthy, presumably as a raving populist demagogue with Nazi sympathies — McCarthy after all ultimately accused Gen. George Marshall of treason — but unless he had changed drastically since his Schmitt period, I’m pretty sure that Strauss supported a more responsible suppression of Communists).

The point I had been trying to make was that Straussian dissembling is not justified in the absence of actual persecution. Al-Farabi and Spinoza had good reasons to write in code (called “Aesopian language” by Czarist writers), but Strauss really didn’t. What at issue for Strauss was a high position in a major university, and what was at issue for his students and grandstudents was political power. Not persecution.

In some sort of broad historical way I might be able to forgive Strauss, though he did not accept historical thinking of that kind, but I sstill think that there’s something fishy about his message to America; it’s as though the credentialed failure was giving lessons to the self-taught success. As for Schmitt, it seems to me that he was just one of the many blind, violent, bloody-minded, intellectual actors impelling interwar Germany toward some kind of gruesome apotheosis, and even Strauss probably was saved from that fate only by an accident of birth.

Granted that “war for oil” is the most plausible possible case for a profitable war, it’s instructive to observe how unprofitably candidates for this class (Indonesia in East Timor, the Falklands/Malvinas, Iran-Iraq, Chechnya, GW I [specifically, Saddam’s seizure of Kuwait) and GW II) have turned out, particularly for the party that initiated hostilities. And the same point is true more generally: countries that avoid war do much better than those that throw their weight around.

Well, Novakant, I think that people who are incapable of drawing historical comparisons are silly. So there. We’ll have to agree to disagree.

The post-WWI failure to impose democracy on Germany strikes me as a better analogy to Iraq than the post-WWII success. Perhaps the T-34 tanks massed on the W. German border, combined with the fact that Germany was exhausted and most of the Nazi militants and loyalists had dutifully gone to their deaths, caused the W. Germans to conclude that democracy was a lesser evil. (Was there significant real opposition to denazification? I’m certainly not knowledgable about that, but it seems that what actually happened was “effective consent”, which didn’t happen after WWI. If the reason for the difference was a more heavy-handed occupation after WWII than after WWI, then I stand corrected).

That certainly didn’t happen after 1918, and considering that the Germans had had experience with parliamentary government already, and many of the prerequisites of democracy were already therey, even Germany in 1918 was a better prospect for democracy than Iraq is now.

East Germany is something of a red herring here; I wasn’t arguing that it’s not possible to impose a communist occupation government on a defeated nation.

I wanted to nod in agreement at John Emerson’s comment upstream about the virulent hatred in a lot of early 20th century writing and add a comment that struck me while seriously researching the literature of and about the Great War from about 1916 on through the rise of the fascist powers.

Too many of the people who wrote (often movingly and with real insight) about their betrayal by the warmaking powers…without acknowledging that they had themselves been enthusiastic boosters of the whole thing earlier. Or if they do, they couch it purely in the language of deception by others, and not of having made bad choices for which they are responsible. We’re getting this again now with regard to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The body of work by people who say “I backed the desires and people who made this possible, and I chose badly” is quite small. Presumably it will be after any such conflict; I just found the parallels between these two cases pretty striking.

‘Saddam on trial’ is an event of no significance. But he could stop acting out and submit more or less unconditionally to the Great Father in Washington. That would’ve saved a lot of grief to a lot of people.

And yes – the French aristocracy could save their necks by giving away some of their assets and privileges.

John is right that most of the outcomes can theoretically be negotiated, and they often are (for example: de Klerk, Gorby), but it requires realistic assessment on the both sides.

I’m pretty sure that the postwar constitution was effectively forced on the Germans, though the individuals who wrote it were German. There was immediate violent resistance and defiance both from the left and the right, and little apparent enthusiasm for it from any sector of society. I come to the latter conclusion from reading things by moderates such as Thomas Mann.

However, my studies have been pretty haphazard and from this point on I will defer to anyone who knows more than I do. Novakant does not seem to be such a person, however.

Expanding a dogmatic rejection of historical analogies to greater length doesn’t make it any more compelling. A lot of writing about history is analogy, and some analogies are good and some bad. It’s quite possible that my original analogy wasn’t that great, but specific arguments against what I said are more convincing.

So what was Mann, in German terms? Certainly not a Leftist, certainly not a Nazi, so he’s in the 30% “other” category, no? What was that category called? Were there any liberals or moderates at all left in Germany, or did thay all migrate to Minnesota and Wisconsin after 1848? Who was it that wrote the constitution, then?

Did you just say that the Weimar Constitution was not in any way imposed by the victors? If it wasn’t, then I’m wrong on that point.

The analogy is that Germany got a liberal constitution in 1919, but it failed because so few people wanted a liberal constitution. By 1932 2/3 of the Germans supported anti-democratic parties., and as I have said, even the other 1/3 seems to have been half-hearted.

Is it far-fetched to point out that in Iraq, those who want a liberal democratic constitution are also few, and that those who would work to destroy it are many?

I use the 1919 example because the Iraq-democracy hawks use the post-1945 successes as an argument for their plan, and I’m just introducing the 1919 failure into the equation. This is hardly a profound idea, but not really as unintelligible or stupid as you claim.

My terminology for Mann may have been wrong, but my point about the absence of support for liberal democracy seems to be, if anything, strengthened. I have found no actual evidence for my claim that the constitution was an imposed one, but the weakness of subsequent support for it suggests that it must have been. How was the assembly which wrote the constitution selected?