(Greg Johnson, Ph.D., is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. and North American New Right.
“Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the PoliticaI” 2/24/11 http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/reflections-on-carlschmitts-the-concept-of-the-political/)///CW
Carl
Schmitt
’s short book The Concept of the Political(1932) is one of the most important works of 20th century political philosophy.
¶
The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics
. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.
¶ In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world
.
¶
Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things
. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But
Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict.
Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely
.
¶ Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity
. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.
¶ Us and Them ¶ What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?
¶ First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective
.
He is talking about “us versus them” not “one individual versus another.” ¶ Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”).
The political is founded on the distinction between friend
(those on one’s side) and hostis
(those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.
¶
Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence.
One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there
. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.
¶ Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious
. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.
¶ Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction
. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil
. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.”
Enmity is relative
, but morality—we hope—is not.
¶ Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical
, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.
¶
In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.
¶
It is important to note that
Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics
. The rivalries of politicians and parties
, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity
in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations — the relations between sovereign states and peoples — rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.
¶ Sovereignty ¶ If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness
, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.
¶
For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.
¶
If a sovereign declares an

enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus
Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”
(Greg Johnson, Ph.D., is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. and North American New Right.
“Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the PoliticaI” 2/24/11 http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/reflections-on-carlschmitts-the-concept-of-the-political/)///CW
Why the Political Cannot be Abolished ¶ If the political is rooted in human nature
, then it cannot be abolished.
Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics
—and history— all over again
.
¶
But the utopians will never even get that far
. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace
- and lovemongers have enemies too
, namely
“haters” like us
.
¶
Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics
. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness
that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.
¶ Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration
. And since it is a mere conflict of interest
—in which both sides, really, are right— rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil
, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities
.
¶
But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism
— global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”— it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration
. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.
¶
Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman
, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate.
The road to
Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love
: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.
(Greice Grinke is a graduate student at Universidade Federal do Pampa, Campus Santana do Livramento for
International Relations. “How does Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism help to explain the current 'war on terror'” http://www.academia.edu/7397601/Carl_Schmidt_and_the_war_on_terror)///CW
The war on terror
proclaimed by the Bush government right after the 9/11 attack, is
nonetheless a clear call upon the state of exception as a way to strengthen national power
and to enhance cohesion within citizens about the identities and the values this society needs to defend. In the same night that the terrorist incident happened, Bush in his speech declared that ¶ “America and … [its] friends and allies [will] join with all those who want peace and security in the world and … [will] stand together to win the war against terrorism” ¶ .
¶ 10 ¶
This statement provides an evident example of grouping people towards a common enemy, and reestablishing
the ¶ raison d’être ¶ of the political unity
. In proclaiming war, the US government re-concentrated power and initiated ¶ „an existential negotiation of the enemy‟ ¶ 11 ¶
.
The sovereign power is reasserted over the rule of the law in a state of emergency
; a state in which all means are justified in defending the world from a new axis of evil. Hence the US legitimized its actions from
9/11 onwards in the state of exception
, originated in a need to suspend basic rights to ensure security to its citizens and allies. Nevertheless, the US was using this power of politics above the law ¶ – ¶ as an exception ¶ – ¶ to reinforce the hegemonic power of the country towards a constructed enemy, to expand liberal democratic values and its notion of freedom. Placing politics above the law is in any mean a problem, because ¶ inter arma silent regis ¶ ¶ 12 ¶ . This war against the terror is

controversial as the allied forces proclaim themselves as defenders of humanity, human rights, justice and freedom
; however it is a mascara to impose ¶ 9 ¶ ¶ ¶ 5 ¶ cultural values on communities that do not think the same way as western societies do. The US seeks to triumph in the international scenario more than just economically, but politically, using unfair ways to coerce institutions or individuals who do not want to cooperate, for example, economic sanctions and torture in Guantanamo Bay. The US utilizes its hard power, the exceptional state of law, to reinforce its soft power toward world politics. This is not the first time in history that a nation justifies its imperialist actions in defense for a major and higher cause. The religious wars during the XVI and XVII century were also justified in the assumption that the church and catholic states protected humanity from a bigger evil: a new doctrine that is not sacred embodied by the protestant church. However, these confrontations only occurred because in the medieval period, the state was weak as a consequence of society being spread in small communities ruled by feudal authorities. States found themselves in a conflicting framework of authority, and to unite society the creation of a common cause was necessary; one which all individuals, in this case primarily Catholics, would fell connected to same values and the same identity, fighting together against a common threat.
¶
13
¶
As we can see, the situation of the US today is not much different from the circumstances 400 years ago; more than that, they also share the same moral conviction of God to protect humankind.
The US claims the intrinsic right to guide a world order in order to claim for the validity of its way of life
; as a burden designated from God, to export liberal
¶ democratic values and free the humanity from the constructed
„ devil
‟ enemy.
¶
The US wanted
¶
to „
¶
legitimize
¶
its policies through the war on terror‟
¶
14
¶
, and as Carl
Schmitt agrees it is natural for the concept of the political to justify actions towards the
¶
13 ¶ ¶ 6 ¶ distinction between friendenemy
relations.
Nevertheless, this war waged by the America government is contradictory in its justification of actions as a defense for humanity, liberty and freedom
, in the definition of the goals about waging this war, and also in its lack of a clear definition of the enemy
.

(Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of The
American Way of Strategy. He was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Virginia Tech. He has been an editor or staff writer at The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest “Carl Schmitt’s
War on Liberalism” 4/23/15 http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/carl-schmitt%E2%80%99s-war-liberalism-12704)///CW
OVER THE past few years, the conviction that
the end of the Cold War inaugurated an era of great-power peace to accompany
the inevitable spread of democratic capitalism has been shattered
. In Georgia and Ukraine, thousands have died as Washington’s attempt to fence in Russia with NATO
allies and affiliates has been answered by Moscow’s determination to rebuild a Eurasian sphere of influence. In East Asia,
China’s growing assertiveness has alarmed its neighbors and collided with America’s determination to remain the dominant power
in the region. Regime-change efforts sponsored by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya and
Syria have created power vacuums and bloody regional proxy wars, to the benefit of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
¶
In geoeconomics
, too, the Pax Americana
and the neoliberal version of capitalism are increasingly contested
.
China
, with the help of
India, Russia, Brazil
and other countries, has sought to organize alternatives to global economic and development institutions like the World Bank
and the IMF, which are still dominated by the Western powers. In different ways, Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Narendra Modi’s India represent an alternative economic model, in which free markets and state capitalism are blended under strong executive rule.
¶
This
moment of crisis for global liberalism coincides with the
translation into English of a fresh appraisal of Carl
Schmitt
, a leading twentieth-century German thinker who, in the course of a long life, was a consistent critic of political and legal liberalism and American hegemony
. In Carl Schmitt: A Biography, published in German in
2009 and published in English late last year, Reinhard Mehring, a professor of political science at Heidelberg University of Education, has provided the most thorough study yet of the anfractuosities of the political theorist known to his detractors as “Hitler’s Crown
Jurist.” ¶ SCHMITT, WHO was born into a Catholic family in Westphalia in 1888, rose to prominence as a conservative legal academic in the 1920s. His discipline of Staatslehre is much more than narrowly technical “law” or “jurisprudence,” including as it does elements of political philosophy and political science.
¶
Schmitt’s intellectual allies were, by and large, the conservative nationalists of the Weimar Republic, not the more radical Nazis. In his diaries after the Second World War, Schmitt not inaccurately described Hitler as “an entirely empty and unknown individual” who rose “out of the pure lumpenproletariat, from the asylum of a homeless noneducation.” However, following Hitler’s seizure of power, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. Thanks to the sponsorship of
Hermann Goering, Schmitt was appointed state councilor for Prussia, president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists, editor-inchief of the German Jurists’ Journal and a professor at the University of Berlin, where he replaced Herman Heller, a Jewish socialdemocratic legal theorist who had been forced into exile.
¶ At the height of his brief prominence, Schmitt was even received by
Mussolini. Schmitt would recall: ¶ I had a longer conversation in private with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia on the evening of the
Wednesday after Easter. We talked about the relationship between party and state. Mussolini said, with pride and clearly directed against national socialist Germany: “The state is eternal, the party is transient; I am a Hegelian!” I remarked: “Lenin was also a
Hegelian, so that I have to allow myself the question: where does Hegel’s world historical spirit reside today? In Rome, in Moscow, or maybe still in Berlin after all?”
¶
Schmitt did not consider the possibility that the world-historical spirit might have taken up residence in Washington, DC.
¶ As Hitler consolidated his tyranny, Schmitt became more abject. He defended Hitler’s Night of the
Long Knives on June 30, 1934, and described the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws against Gentile-Jewish intermarriage as “the constitution of freedom,” even though, according to Mehring, in his youth he had briefly hoped to marry a Jewish woman, Helene
Bernstein.
¶ Some of Schmitt’s newly adopted “racial” rhetoric was so excessive—he proposed that the word “Jew” be placed next to the names of Jewish authors in footnotes in legal texts—that some hostile expatriates and devout Nazis alike believed they discerned in his writing not the zeal of the convert, but the cynicism of the opportunist. In 1936, the journal of the SS, Das Schwarze
Korps, published several articles questioning his true commitment to Nazi ideology. Schmitt’s friendship with Goering and Hans
Frank, who was later hanged for his war crimes as governor-general of German-occupied Poland, saved him from the clutches of the
SS. He withdrew into recondite scholarship, which included musings on a Monroe Doctrine for Europe that would justify German expansionism and a history of the alleged struggle among maritime and continental great powers. Detained for a time by the Allies after the war, Schmitt explained: “In 1936, I was publicly defamed by the SS. I knew a few things about the legal, semi-legal and illegal means of power employed by the SS and the circles around Himmler, and I had every reason to fear the interests of the new elite.” ¶ In a legal brief for Friedrich Flick, a German industrialist who had collaborated with the Nazis, Schmitt, having used arguments about the limits of positive law to justify the Hitler regime, opportunistically deployed them to justify war-crimes trials
(though preferably not for his client): “Here, all arguments of natural sense, of human feeling, of reason, and of justice concur in a practically elemental way to justify a conviction that requires no positivistic norm in any formal sense.” The Allied occupation authorities were unmoved and imprisoned Flick until 1950, but after detaining Schmitt twice, once for more than a year, they decided that he had been too marginal a member of Hitler’s system for prosecution to be worthwhile.
¶ Like the philosopher Martin

Heidegger, who had also disgraced himself by enthusiastically welcoming the Nazi dictatorship when he became rector of Freiburg
University in 1933, Schmitt was banned from teaching in German universities from 1945 to his death in 1985. Schmitt nevertheless managed to gather a small coterie of disciples and exercise some influence on German jurisprudence. He continued to write and also had distinguished visitors, including the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In his old age in his native Plettenberg, Schmitt named his home “San Casciano” after the Tuscan village where Machiavelli spent his final years in exile. In his intellectual diary, the Glossarium,
Schmitt bitterly complained: “How harmless were those who sensed the opportunity for intellectual change at the awakening in
Germany in 1933, in comparison to those who took intellectual revenge on Germany in 1945.” ¶ In the decades before his death in
1985, Schmitt interpreted current events in terms of what he described and dreaded as “the legal world revolution”—a world order, promoted by the United States and symbolized by the European Union, in which legalistic concepts like human rights and the rule of law became the only source of political legitimacy. What most liberals view as triumphant progress, Schmitt viewed as the disastrous marginalization of continental European statism as an alternative to the maritime liberalism of the Anglo-American world: “World politics reaches its end and is turned into world police—a dubious kind of progress.”
¶
IF SCHMITT were merely one of many German conservatives of the Weimar era who disgraced themselves by collaborating with the Nazis, he would be of interest only to historians. Instead, Schmitt’s reputation as a major thinker endures, sometimes in surprising quarters. American law professors wrestle with Schmitt’s theories about constitutionalism and power, while the Western Left is impressed by his denunciation of liberal globalism as a mask for Anglo-American and capitalist imperialism. In the late twentieth century, the American journal Telos, a meeting place for heterodox leftists and paleoconservatives, helped further the revival of interest in Schmitt’s thought, along with studies by G. L. Ulmen, Joseph J. Bendersky, Gopal Balakrishnan and many others. Some claim, absurdly, that Schmitt influenced the neoconservative movement by way of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, a respectful critic and correspondent in the 1920s.
¶ This interest is justified, because
Schmitt is
a classic thinker—perhaps the key thinker—of modern antiliberalism
.
Antiliberalism can be contrasted with preliberalism as a variety of nonliberalism.
¶ Confronted with Enlightenment liberalism in its various versions, preliberalism finds itself at a disadvantage in the battle for modern public opinion, because appeals to preliberal sources of social authority—divine revelations, local customs and traditions—are unlikely to persuade those who are not already believers. Unable to hold their own in debate with liberals, adherents of preliberal worldviews tend to withdraw into sectarianism, which may be defensive and quietist like that of the Amish, or manifested in millenarian violence, like the Salafist jihadism of Al
Qaeda and the Islamic State.
¶ In contrast with preliberalism, modern antiliberalism like Schmitt’s seeks to defeat liberal thought on its own chosen ground of public debate, using its own preferred weapons, rational analysis and secular scholarship. It is modern because it takes for granted the post-Enlightenment intellectual environment of secularism and science. And it is antiliberal because it defines itself against modern liberalism, on point after point. It is a reaction to liberalism that would not exist without liberalism— a Counter-Enlightenment, not an ancien régime.
¶ In the Weimar Republic, Schmitt was associated with Catholic conservatives.
Relations were strained when he divorced his first of two wives, Pawla Dorotic, whom he met when she was a Spanish dancer in a vaudeville theater. The Vatican was not impressed by his request for an annulment, on the grounds that the Munich-born Protestant dancer had lied to him about having an aristocratic pedigree as the daughter of a Croatian baron. Moreover, according to Mehring,
Schmitt did not attend church during the Nazi years.
¶
But those who argue for his lifelong affinity with strains of Catholic reactionary politics can make a good case. Notwithstanding his embrace of Nazi racism, Schmitt’s sympathies lay with Latin authoritarianism rather than Teutonic totalitarianism. His only child, his daughter Anima, born to his second wife, married a Spanish law professor belonging to Franco’s Falangist party, and she translated some of Schmitt’s writings into Spanish. In Political Theology, he praised the nineteenth-century Catholic counterrevolutionary thinker Juan Donoso Cortés. In later life, he understood modern world events in terms of apocalyptic imagery borrowed from Christian thought, including the idea of a “katechon,” a figure who, by maintaining order, delays the end of the world. The katechon might be thought of as Schmitt’s answer to Thomas Hobbes’s metaphor of the
Leviathan.
¶ ¶ BUT SCHMITT did not think that the answers to modern problems could be found in Thomism or a restoration of papal authority. There was no going back to the Middle Ages. Schmitt embraced modern populism and tried to turn it to antidemocratic, illiberal ends. In his Verfassungslehre (Constitutional Theory) of 1928, for example, Schmitt praised the French revolutionary thinker
Abbé Sieyès, author of What is the Third Estate?, for distinguishing between the pouvoir constituant and the pouvoir constitué, the maker of constitutional government and the constitutional government that is made.
¶
The idea that constitutions exist at the will— and for the benefit—of the sovereign people or nation was central to the French and American Revolutions and goes back to the social-contract theory of John Locke and his successors. It was stated not only by Sieyès but also by Thomas Jefferson, in the
Declaration of Independence:
¶
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
¶
As William E. Scheuerman and Renato Cristi point out in their contributions to a 1998 anthology edited by David Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism,
Schmitt puts an antiliberal spin on the theory of popular sovereignty
. Sieyès, like the American Founders, takes it for granted that the exercise of popular sovereignty operates under constraints, even if it is not constrained by constitutions or statutes. Even when acting in revolutionary fashion, by discarding one government and forming another, a sovereign people cannot violate natural law (in the version found in early modern social-contract theory, that is, not the natural law of premodern
Scholasticism). Moreover, in a revolutionary interim between governments, the people are expected to act through representative, consultative bodies, such as constitutional conventions. The sovereign people’s natural, extralegal right of revolution is not an excuse for either communal atrocities or the dictatorship of an individual.
¶ The "smoking gun" emerges behind one of the biggest conspiracies in American history.
¶ By dispensing with these constraints, Schmitt turns the theory of popular sovereignty into a rationale for Caesarist dictatorship. The cryptic first sentence of Political Theology, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception,” shows that the sovereign people have been conflated with the sovereign executive. Social-contract theorists would have written,
“Sovereign are they who decide the exception.” ¶ Schmitt does not mean that any malcontent colonel who manages to carry out a putsch is the “sovereign.” Instead, the sovereign is a charismatic leader who saves the people from

danger by acting decisively
, outside of the law if necessary. Because the paralysis of parliamentary politics can itself pose a danger to the nation, in the view of Schmitt and other antiliberals, the eighteenth-century French and American method of a quasiparliamentary constitutional convention to represent the sovereign people must seem to be merely the attempted correction of one weak debating society by another.
¶ The decisive leader creates the new order by deeds, not chatter. The Schmittian leader is a plebiscitarian ruler who can have his actions ratified by the acclamation of a grateful people, but he does not act on their instructions. In his Constitutional Theory, Schmitt argued that “the natural form for the direct expression of the popular will is the yea-saying or nay-saying shout of the assembled crowd.” Cristi notes that Schmitt “comes to accept and recognizes the pouvoir consituant of the people only because he has found a way to disarm it.”
¶
THE “FRIEND/ENEMY” distinction is another original concept in Schmitt’s antiliberalism. All political theories that do not advocate for a global government must have some way of determining who belongs in particular polities
and who does not. In deciding on the boundaries of new states formed from the partition of dynastic or colonial empires, the standard in international law has been the so-called Latin American doctrine: the borders of newly independent successor states in general should follow the boundaries, however arbitrary, of administrative or political units within the former, larger state.
¶ An alternative approach, the so-called Central European approach, favors redrawing arbitrary political boundaries to create more homogeneous ethnic or linguistic groups. Neither doctrine is inherently illiberal. In his Representative Government, John Stuart Mill thus argued that liberal, representative government is most likely to succeed in countries in which most of the citizens share at least a common language, a thesis that the continuing disintegration of multiethnic states in our time would appear to confirm. In Mill’s words, “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellowfeeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” Neither approach to defining the citizens of sovereign states equates political independence of one community from another with inherent and unremitting enmity.
¶ In keeping with his decisionist approach to law and politics,
Schmitt is not interested in adumbrating general rules like these. The people are more than a collection of human beings in a common territory or sharing various characteristics like language and ethnicity. Rather, for Schmitt, the people must have a mystical solidarity defined by the recognition of common public enemies
, who may be external or internal or both.
The friend/enemy distinction
in a particular context, like the exception or state of emergency in a particular situation, by its nature cannot be identified or limited in advance
. Rather, it is the essence of great leadership to grasp
, at any given time, which approach to legality or its opposite and which set of public enemies is in the interest of the nation.
¶ Schmitt is sometimes compared to Hobbes as an authoritarian thinker. But the temperaments and mentalities of the two were quite different. The Hobbesian sovereign, while prepared for war and anarchy, prefers peace and quiet. Schmitt’s authoritarianism is histrionic and apocalyptic. What is most extreme is most authentic. The exception is the rule. The emergency is the norm. The nation is constantly on the verge of collapse and threatened by enemies without and within. Parliament is the problem, not the solution. The times demand leaders who can take bold and decisive action, not waste time in idle debate. Quoting Schmitt on parliamentary democracy (“The value of life stems not from reasoning; it emerges in a state of war where men inspirited by myths do battle”), Stephen Holmes observed in 1993, “That is Mussolini, not Hobbes.” ¶

(Daniel Trombly is a graduate of GWU and defense contractor. He writes with an emphasis on conflict, strategy, geopolitics and political theory. “Let’s Talk Real Schmitt” 7/5/12 https://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/lets-talkreal-schmitt/)///CW
As I pointed out in an earlier post I wrote about Romney’s remark about Russia as a “number one foe,” there remained, for
Schmitt
, a distinction between the
real enemy – defined merely by the potential for conflict in the extreme case
, and the absolute enemy, whose political existence was intolerable to the body politic.
¶ In other words, the sort of Manichean friend-foe distinction is derivative of, but not inherent to, the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt, in fact, would become quite concerned with drawing a distinction between the friend-enemy relationship which acknowledged what he believed was an enduring political reality – the delineation of communities on the basis of fear of violent death – and one which demanded the vanquishing of one’s enemies as a matter of necessity.
¶
Schmitt believed the most significant source of these problems was liberalism, which sought to destroy the foundations of international
order. To
Schmitt, in Concept of the Political, not simply traditional sovereignty but also the basis of neutrality and other vital facets of international law and behavior. Beginning in the 1930s and culminating in his 1950 Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt described the Jus
Publicum Europaeum, the idealized system of the 18th-19th century world order.
Critical to Schmitt’s understanding was that
this order, in recognizing the real friend-enemy distinction, also recognized jus hostis – the rightful enemy – by which two sovereigns could clash without either being a criminal
. In liberalism, as exemplified by World War I and confirmed by World War II, aggression – the exercise of the prerogatives of jus hostis – the international order criminalized aggression, and further defined as a meaningful normative body “humanity,” against whom stood only enemies of humanity
. In a theme Schmitt discusses in the latter chapters of the Concept of the Political and elaborates for decades after, the universalizing tendencies of liberal states defines enmities in a manner that makes compromise impossible, for who can compromise with an enemy of humanity and universal values?
In this manner,
Schmitt saw liberalism as marking all its enemies
, not as jus hostis, but as hostis humani generis, the enemies of all humanity
, like pirates, outlaws, and barbarians.
¶ In other words, the sort of Manichean worldview which defines all other countries either as willing and grateful supplicants to the liberal international order – with an American orientation – was not the kind of perspective Schmitt advocated, but the one he most vociferously despised. He did not want a world where all political confrontations tended towards competition, and certainly not one where enmity had to characterize relationships beyond “the political.” While Schmitt recognized certain kinds of foes as absolute enemies – his Theory of the Partisan in some ways foretells the global, technologically-advanced revolutionary as such a threat – he wanted to avoid a world order which sought to characterize its enemies in such a way.
¶

(Arthur Versluis, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Professor in the College of Arts & Letters at
Michigan State University, holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has published numerous books and articles “How Carl Schmitt Spawned Fascist America” 8/10/06 http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/08/10/how-carl-schmittspawned-fascist-america-nbsp/)///CW
The invasion of Iraq is, of course, not the only example, just the one with the most far-reaching and visible consequences. There are others. Consider the abrogation of
FISA
, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, whose purpose was to limit the abuse of federal uses of wiretaps
or other forms of surveillance after the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s had been revealed.
The scope of the wiretapping
and other invasions of American citizens’ privacy is not yet fully known
, but no doubt eventually many abuses will be revealed. Only long after the election shenanigans of November, 2004, did Americans even learn that the Bush Jr. administration once again had unilaterally abrogated American law, asserting here too the “power of the unitary executive.” What very few people have realized is that this notional “unitary executive” power
has an instructive precedent, which is outlined in the works of the
German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt. In the 1920s, Schmitt sharply criticized the parliamentary system of the Weimar
Republic
, in an analysis that has a striking resonance with the contemporary American Congress’s morass of ineptness, paralysis, and manifest corruption. When National Socialism came to power in the 1930s, Schmitt defended the Third Reich and its right to peremptory justice by reference to the juridical example of the
Inquisition.
¶
According to Schmitt, the ultimate power of government is not to be found in legislation, but in the executive power to
abrogate or suspend legislation. What matters is not the rule, but the exception
, and “sovereign is he who decides the exception.” Schmitt’s aphorism describes how Hitler in fact took power, with the unilateral abrogation of civil liberties in Germany. Hitler imposed a “state of exception” on those whom he deemed alien to or a danger to the regime, and those in such a state of exception no longer have the rights of citizens. This state of exception, willed by the German unitary executive power, was the juridical basis for the Nazi death camps. The assertion of notional
“unitary executive power” in part results from officials’ prior disgust at the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system to forcefully address long-term problems facing society, like a weak fiat currency, economic crisis, or terrorism. A “unitary executive power” appeals to the “Right,” to which Schmitt and purportedly the Bush Jr. administration belong, but, one has to note, it also could have appeal for the “Left.” Such executive powers no doubt appeal to all who are certain of their own rectitude, certain that they are guided by destiny or by God to act, to be decisive. Thus one characteristic of fascism is said to be “decisionism.” “At least we’re doing something,” a decisionist says – even if what “we’re” doing is in fact despotic and destructive. George W. Bush is, he tells us, “the decider.”

(Daniel Trombly is a graduate of GWU and defense contractor. He writes with an emphasis on conflict, strategy, geopolitics and political theory. “Let’s Talk Real Schmitt” 7/5/12 https://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/lets-talkreal-schmitt/)///CW
Schmitt saw great power politics, with spectrum of neutrality, detentes, “humanzied” limited wars and elitist, decisionist ethos not simply as normal, but as morally superior to the alternative of the universalistic hegemon that overstepped its right as a major power, upending what Schmitt saw as a fundamentally pluralist international order.
A foreign policy that saw Russia as an ugly country and an irascible foe for exercising a sphere of influence, for resisting the will of an American, Western-backed liberal universalism, and advocating for the traditionalist, hardline interpretation of state sovereignty, would not be Schmittian
, but closer to the ideals Schmitt believed were fundamentally antithetical to his vision of politics. There are certainly relevant ways to apply Schmitt to American foreign policy, but
Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction is actually a lot more nuanced than most IR writing gives him credit for
– and, while it’s a low bar to clear, it’s a lot more nuanced than campaign-trail rhetoric.

(Robert D. Rachlin is a lawyer in Vermont and a professor at the Vermont Law School, “A New Chicago Edition of Carl
Schmitt's Seminal Work” October 2007 http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13761)///CW
The fundamental status of this concept did not prevent Schmitt
, in his Nazi reincarnation, from using the idea of the enemy as a theoretical basis for identifying the Jews with that baleful role
(or hamper leaders of the Third Reich in doing so, either).
But it is important to avoid confusing Schmitt's opportunistic use of the friend/enemy concept in service of the NSDAP with his exposition of it in The Concept of the Political
. This notion of the need for national unity bolsters Schmitt's considerations on the topic of war.
Although government exhortations to war are almost always couched in terms of humanity, peace, and justice
(p. 54), the fact of war
, for Schmitt, owes its sole rational justification to the need to overcome a threat to national existence. Schmitt is punctilious
, to the point of redundancy, in rejecting the notion of a just or unjust war
, citing Grotius's dictum: "I do not include justice in the definition [of war]," rendered by Schwab as "Justice is not included in the definition [of war]" (pp. 49-50).[2] In an apparent, though not explicit, reference to Woodrow Wilson's resort to the slogan "war to end all wars," Schmitt scorns the idea of "demand[ing] of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there will never again be war" (p. 48). The idea is derided further at the end of the book: "A war waged to protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of humanity" (p. 79). (In the original, letzten Krieg der Menschheit is set in scare quotes. Omission of the scare quotes in the translation denatures the irony.) War is thus completely abstracted from normative justifications. Schmitt leaves unanswered an obvious follow-up question: is there a rational place for laws of war?
(Christian J. Emden is a professor at the Department of German Studies at Rice University. He was a Fellow of Sidney
Sussex College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Cambridge, England. Professor Emden is on the editorial board of Modern
Intellectual History and the Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, co-edits the book series Cultural History and Literary Imagination and serves as an external reviewer for the European Science Foundation. “Emden on Gross, 'Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The "Jewish
Question," the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory'” July 09 https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45893/emden-grosscarl-schmitt-and-jews-jewish-question-holocaust-and-german)///CW
Without realizing it, however,
Gross increasingly begins to fall victim to the strange logic of Schmitt's argument and even adopts what can be termed a kind of "Schmittianism in reverse," characterized by the assumption that any critique of universalism is necessarily Schmittian and continues the latter's antisemitism
. Philosophers call this type of argument a category mistake: in the same way that
Schmitt, especially after 1933, openly describes a normative, formal, and legalistic interpretation of constitutional law, represented by Kelsen and
Hermann Heller, as "Jewish," Gross links the critique of universalism to a Schmittian antisemitism.[31] He repeats, in other words, Schmitt's own category mistake, simply in reverse.
¶ But Gross's category mistake is not the only problem of his methodology, for he also presents us with a kind of informal fallacy: Gross explicitly argues that Schmitt's critique of the constitutional state as a "Jewish legal state" really only emerges after 1933 but then proceeds to show that the logic of Schmitt's bizarre claim is already structurally present in his earlier works, such as the first edition of Der Begriff der Politischen and Politische Theologie.
It is "structurally" present, for instance, in Schmitt's distinction between "friend" and "enemy," although there is no reason to assume that such a distinction
-as undoubtedly problematic as it is-has to be read exclusively in terms of Schmitt's antisemitism
. Does the binary structure of Schmitt's claim make it inherently antisemitic?
¶ To be sure, antisemitism rests on such a binary opposition, but it would surely be far-fetched to argue that all binary oppositions are antisemitic
, such as, for instance, the "Hegelian dialectic." Indeed, the universalism and formal procedural qualities of the modern Rechtsstaat, and the notion of civil society that underlies this state, rest on a philosophical tradition--German Idealism and especially Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel--that operates rather often with such binary modes of thought. Although it has been claimed, somewhat unpersuasively, that Kant's philosophy is marked by the traces of antisemitism that run through German Idealism,[32] it should also be noted that Kelsen's own Reine Rechtslehre (1934), the counterpart to
Schmitt's work, relies heavily on a Kantian model.[33] Does this imply that Kelsen's own defense of the democratic state, because it rests on a clear binary distinction between a formal and a substantive notion of law, ultimately follows the logic of Schmitt's argument?[34] This conclusion would be a necessary implication of Gross's own argument.
¶ Gross's "Schmittianism in reverse" also leads him to an overly simplified opposition between a liberal strand of German intellectuals, represented by Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, and Aby Warburg, and an irrational one, represented by Schmitt, Oswald
Spengler, and Martin Heidegger. Such clear-cut distinctions might be a helpful heuristic device, but hardly reflect the complexity of intellectual culture

between 1918 and 1933. Weber's liberalism remained an aristocratic one and his assessment of mass democracy was not entirely positive.[35]
Likewise, it is certainly true that Cassirer and Warburg regarded myth as "a threat to liberal values," but Cassirer's Philosophie der symbolischen
Formen (1923-29) as well as Warburg's unfinished Mnemosyne-Atlas (1924-29) also emphasized, much like Walter Benjamin, the anthropological inevitability of myth-making.[36] ¶ Seen against this background, the central problem of Gross's argument is what I have called his "Schmittianism in reverse": he falls into the trap of Schmitt's ideas and is forced to give up critical and analytical distance
. On the positive side, much can be learned from the material that Gross presents, and current scholarship on Schmitt will do well to take it seriously.