On Tuesdays I attend a psci class on modern theories of democracy.
Yesterday we talked about Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political (in the edition of 1932).
For Schmitt politics comes down to a simple question. Friend or foe? Therefore political action is uniting with your friends to fight the foe. If you quarrel with someone but none of you would be (at least theoretically) willing to use arms then it is not politics.
He mainly views politics as something international (conflicts between states). However, he says that so-called partisan politics can be politics if there is a chance for civil war emerging from the differences.
He also states that politics is completely separate from good/evil, beautiful/ugly, useful/harmful. This means your enemy could be good and beautiful and useful and still be your enemy.
The only thing determining the enemy would be the feeling that someone/something would be so foreign and different that you feel threatened in your way of life by it.
Of course it is obvious that the Nazis shared these positions when singling out the Jews as their enemies using this kind of reasoning for their genocide. Your Jewish neighbor could be morally good, nice, helpful and still would have to be eliminated because "Jewism" would threaten the "German way of life".
While the connotations are not clear in this edition in 1932, they are implied. The more we get into the 1930s the more Schmitt is coming clearer with what he means. In later works he names the foe. The foes are the Jews.
Schmitt felt his work as an answer to earlier theorists, especially to Thomas Hobbes. Therefore he published a discussion on the Leviathan himself in 1938.
Schmitt agrees with Hobbes that the state of nature is brutal, a war of everyone against everyone. While Hobbes constructs a social contract that enables people to fly from that grim state at least within a nation(Hobbes is a liberalist in that sense because it is the people who constitute society even if it is an absolute monarchy) Schmitt denies that ability. For him the state of nature is a reality that we have to recognize in order to be ready to deal with it. This is how he comes to the simple question: friend or foe?
In summary, Schmitt's theory is fit to justify genocide out of some paranoid notion.
Endless discussions have been going on about whether one can use some parts of his work in modern political discourse. Some would distinguish between his very clear analysis of political processes and the conclusions he and his followers drew from that analysis.
The fact that Schmitt's thinking still prevails (sometimes people don't even know that they think along Schmitt's lines) makes it obvious at least that we will talk about his ideas in the future.
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8 comments:
not sure if you knew this or not, but schmitt is normally considered a nazi apologist, explicitly.
I know. Why do you ask?
I made that point, didn't I?
However, I didn't mention that after WW2 he dropped the outright Nazi stuff but didn't completely depart from his earlier position.
I don't know if you wanted to imply that one shouldn't discuss him because he was a Nazi ideologist.
I think we should discuss him, because ignorance never helps. And since some of his thoughts (about the nature of men, or about solving conflicts for example) are very popular today, we should be aware of where this kind of thinking has led in the past.
I agree with you, Marco. Whereas he may have been an explicit apologist, perhaps some of his ideas are salvagable. His work should be vetted, of course, but to dismiss all work by a Nazi apologist intellectual may be to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," if you will.
As I understand it, even from the horrors of concentration camps some knowledge was salvaged from testing Nazi doctors performed on unwilling prisoners.
The method of obtainment may be completely objectionable, but once it's done perhaps it is best to harvest any worthwhile knowledge therefrom.
From the summary, i thought of several points:
1. There's no separation of politics and morality in his theory. To decide whether one is a friend or foe already includes an assumption that the person making that judgement is "right" (in his sense).
2. Schmidt is very extremist, he sees the world in black and white. When somebody is different and thererfore considered a foe, does that necessarily mean this person must be exterminated? Does he take account those with conflicts of interests? There are better ways to view the world than relegating a person different than you are immediately as a foe. His is a primitive concept of humans nature, egged on no doubt by the cynical Hobbes. Yuck.
So assuming that everyone on this planet sees people as a friend or foe, and when the unspoken law is people different than you are must be decimated... so who's going to be around in the end?
Another question is, what are his yardstick for measuring whats different?
If it's decided that "different" simply refers to difference of race, religion, culture, behavior, etc, (without regard to the propensity of the person involved to do good)... and that makes one a foe, what does that say about the person?
3. What's Schmidt's goal of politics?
Does he see it as a bid for power, or for right to exist? Is politics always a zero sum game?
"So assuming that everyone on this planet sees people as a friend or foe, and when the unspoken law is people different than you are must be decimated... so who's going to be around in the end?"
I don't think he says that everyone is to be regarded as friend or foe. What he is saying is: if you can not categorize someone as friend or foe (in the sense that you would even kill for fear of being killed yourself) then it is not a matter of politics.
And also he is not really referring to the individual level. He talks about states. Only in exceptions there could be politics (in his definition) in interior affairs. This exception being the chance for civil war.
About determining who is right in defining the enemy:
For Schmitt that doesn't matter. For him morale is not the issue. My guess is that he wants to describe processes that he believes to be realistic. He believes that a group who feels threatened for whatever reason in its way of life will strike to remove that threat.
He believes that every group on the planet could feel this way. He believes that to be a natural thing. This is why he doesn't feel the need to justify any action coming from that morally.
(Last paragraph ist just my guess. This part is not very clear in his 1932 book. I believe it to be more detailed in the 1938 publication (on the Leviathan) since this topic is directly related to the nature of men as seen by Thomas Hobbes. I can't say that for sure because I haven't read Schmitt's discussion of the Leviathan.)
No, I'm not sayin we shouldn't discuss him. Not at all. And I know that you know that he's a Nazi apologist. And now you know that I know that you know. ;-) My point was that in political theory circles, everyone's aware of his Nazi past & current sympathies, and so he's not really respected in any sense. Except by extreme right-wing types who're trying to pretend they're not fascists.
agreed, Miguel.
His thoughts are so radical, so extreme... I think they are dangerous. Because some parts sound plausible on first sight. This is quickly overcome, of course when one learns the whole story. But because not everyone might be aware of it I decided to post it.
I plan to post about Hannah Arendt's answer to Carl Schmitt next week. I 'll wait with that post till after class next Tuesday because I want to include class discussion into my post.
Can I just say that I love Hannah Arendt?
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