I’m not surprised that Schmitt continues this idea.

Whether William Vollmann should be considered an authority is debatable, but his typology of justifications for violence is interesting. I have skimmed (could not bring myself to buy) the unabridged edition of Rising Up.

One of those is from Genghis Khan, not Schmitt, though DeLong suggests they’re soulmates.

…religious, moral and other antitheses can intensify to political ones and can bring about the decisive friend-or-enemy constellation.

Stalinists divided people to ‘socially allied’, ‘socailly allien’ and ‘enemies of the people’. A typical criminal, murderer for example, whose parents were factory workers would count as ‘socially allied’. A radical marxist professor would forever remain ‘socailly allien’.

The fascist approach seems similar, only it’s based on nation instead of class.

I read this essay as defining “political” to mean partaking of a friend/enemy distinction, whether fictive or real.

I guess that my or abb1’s surface readings would be the exoteric, and yours – on your very plausible interpretation of what he actually means by “existential threat” – would be the esoteric. But it is awfully turgid stuff in any case.

So, if this is correct, then this is more about propaganda than anything else; which is not necessarily all that interesting. This is all quite trivial these days.

So, the “existential threat” language could be read to mean that only purely defensive war is permissible, but if Schmitt had meant that he would have ended up in Buchenwald or exile. Alternatively, it could mean something like a maximal Lebensraum doctrine – the existence of the Aryan race is incompatible with anything less than absolute power in Europe. My money is on this interpretation.

I guess the hidden message interpretation is also possible, but then which is the esoteric and which the exoteric?

This links to the more general problem of whether a philosopher’s views can/should be linked to their political actions. Heidegger is the obvious problem case – I’ve been thinking about a post on this.

If, in fact, this occurs, then the relevant antithesis is no longer purley religious, moral, or economic, but political.

I guess one’s reading hangs on whether one thinks of Schmitt as being descriptive (lamentably, although there are rarely good reasons for war, unjustified wars happen anyway because irrational hatred is stoked up) or normative (irrational hatred is a good reason for war). On the surface, the passages here cited seem to me to be saying the former. I don’t see a good textual reason to read them otherwise. I would hesitate to decide my interpretation on some such basis as “He was a fascist, so he must have meant the latter.” (Not that I am accusing you of doing so.)

But perhaps the problem is that his prose does not really distinguish clearly between descriptive and normative modes. He may even, of course, be obscuring the difference deliberately, encoding a hidden message for initiates à la Strauss.

I read the quotes John H has given as disdaining rational arguments for war precisely to promote irrational hatred as the appropriate basis (I think that’s John’s reading also).

Well, I think he’s a bad writer, but the following doesn’t strike me as particularly sinister or crazy (from before and after John Holbo’s second quote):

No program, no ideal, no norm, no expediency confers a right to dispose of the physical life of other human beings. [...] There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one’s own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically. (p46)

I can’t find Schmitt to be “placidly untroubled”, in John’s phrase, by war here. Obviously there are arguments to be had about what constitutes an “existential threat”, and Schmitt might have a sinister notion about that somewhere else, which wouldn’t surprise me given his history. But this particular text isn’t very ambivalent about the desirability of war in general.

If you define “sovereignty” in a manner that precludes anything but an authoritarian sovereign personality, then it is not too surprising that you conclude that only such an entity can exercise sovereignty.

The guy was certainly smart, but put me down with the Lenin-comparison comment above, until I read something else of Schmitt’s.