Luke Ford

Paul Gottfried wrote for National Review in 1987:

ON APRIL 7, 1985, the death of Carl Schmitt, at age 97, brought to an end the longest and stormiest career in the history of political thought. Schmitt’s hero, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), another explicit political realist, would probably place second among long-lived theorists of the state. Attacked for his belittling comments about the Weimar Republic and for his initial support of the Nazis in power, Schmitt spent the postwar years in semi-official disgrace. The West German government and most of the postwar German press studiously ignored a figure once called “Hitler’s Crown Jurist.’ Released from American detention after the war, Schmitt went into permanent retirement at Plettenberg, the Rhenish village of his birth. There he received mostly foreign visitors, such as his French commentator, Julien Freund, his later American biographer, J. W. Bendersky, and a new generation of devotees from Latin Europe.

Germans were understandably more reluctant to recognize Schmitt, despite his pre-eminent standing among European political thinkers. Embarrassed by their recent past, they pretended that this celebrity of the Weimar period (to whom Leo Strauss devoted one of his earliest writings) had already departed, together with the Nazis he had briefly endorsed. Not until October 1986 did German academics call a conference, at Speyer, to discuss Schmitt’s achievements. These included 43 books and several hundred articles, which had inspired hundreds of dissertations in the last decade alone.

Has Schmitt found a foothold in America? Joseph W. Bendersky wrote an exhaustive biography of him, published by Princeton University Press in 1983. In 1985 MIT Press put out translations of two of his works, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty; last year MIT published Political Romanticism. If truth be told, none of the English editions has sold well. The publicity editor at MIT Press told me with obvious chagrin that all the Schmitt translations have yielded only 1,500 sales. Writings by Jurgen Habermas and other members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School featured in the same series, Studies in Contemporary Social Thought, have enjoyed far more success. Utopian Marxists simply sell better in this country than self-described conservative realists.

In Europe, however, Schmitt still draws attention and raises hackles. Right after his death, Die Welt, Die Zeit, and other German newspapers both Right and Left charged him with being a proto-fascist, “closer to power than to justice.’ Writing in Encounter, the Swiss journalist Francois Bondy insisted the Nazis “were only too pleased to be able to exploit theories of identity between Fuhrer and Volk; to echo his [Schmitt’s] thesis that robust legitimacy took priority over pale and empty legality; and to accept the friend/foe political dichotomy which sent them off on a total search for total enemies.’

The charges Bondy raises are perhaps more serious than the attempts to link Schmitt to the Nazi regime. As his defenders, including Freund (a Gaullist of Jewish descent), have stressed, Schmitt quickly lost favor with the Nazis, whose revolutionary racist ideology clashed with his own traditional authoritarian concept of the state. The fact that Schmitt denounced the Weimar Republic in the early Thirties for not resisting Nazi violence effectively enough also made him unwelcome to Nazi theorists. Through most of the Third Reich he lived under a cloud of suspicion, where he remained unalterably after 1945.

Despite the accusatory tone, bondy is correct about the thrust of Schmitt’s demystification of politics. Although he quotes admiringly from Catholic traditionalists of the Latin South, like Aquinas, Donoso-Cortes, and the Spanish Jesuit Suarez, Schmitt follows more closely two students of power politics, Machiavelli and Hobbes. Like them he sees the world as a jungle in which the shrewd and bold are destined to rule. Like other lapsed Catholics who continued to hate the Left, Schmitt valued community above individual liberty. He taught that hierarchy, not equality, is natural to the human condition. He repeatedly asserted that governments that rest on mere legality cannot protect themselves either at home or abroad.

Though remembered and sometimes ridiculed for citing “exceptional circumstances’ as the test of liberal democracy, Schmitt believed that democracy would destroy the state from within, even if there were no sudden catastrophe. Parliamentary and pluralistic democracy was preoccupied with balancing the interests and settling the grievances of contesting parties and strident minorities. The liberal democracies analyzed by Schmitt made themselves contemptible by currying favor. Ironically, they aroused revulsion and fear of despotism in proportion to their efforts to be acceptable to everyone. As Schmitt presciently observed: “A pluralist state run by parties becomes a total state not by its effectiveness but by its weakness. It intervenes in every aspect of life because one expects it to satisfy the rising demands of all claimants.’

The political entity being discussed lacked the cohesion characteristic of established national communities. Moreover, it was incapable of adapting itself to the state system that had existed in Europe since the early modern period. Without a sustained diplomacy and a continuing awareness of political enemies (as opposed to counter-litigants or competing party coalitions), modern democracies ceased to be recognizable as states. In most cases, they could not defend themselves against adversaries foreign or domestic (being unable or unwilling to distinguish friend from foe), or else they turned all international struggles into ideological contests. This second course endangered sovereign states. It represented an attempt at hegemony by people who pursued globalist dreams instead of limited national interests.

Significantly, Schmitt identified this expansionist tendency with American democracy, while seeing political impotence as the mark of European parliamentary government. His observations on American hegemony have given him vogue among Marxists, particularly in Italy. Always ready to stick it to the Americans while deploring the corruptness of bourgeois parliamentarians, Marxists have been less hesitant to draw on Schmitt than have many European and American conservatives.

Even among his qualified defenders (among whom I number myself), it is often wrongly assumed that he is addressing the problems of a strictly non-Anglo-American culture. Despite his undiminished popularity in Latin countries, Schmitt is now increasingly relevant for America. No less than James Burnham, Schmitt underlined the self-destructive tendencies of modern democratic societies, both their globalist illusions and their inner fragmentation. He also saw that these two traits can operate interchangeably in the absence of genuine community. Faced by a Congress that cannot tell friend from foe, sincere patriots who invoke universalist rhetoric when they should speak of national survival, and a “gay community’ whose sensitivities the media urges us to protect even as we try to battle AIDS, Americans should be taking Schmitt seriously. Here was a thinker who recognized the fatal tendency of modern democracy to confuse legality and legitimacy. Our own government, even more than that inter-war German one Schmitt found defective, makes the mistake of seeking respect by passing laws for every human predicament and contingency. This quest for legalistic totality must and does infringe on established patterns of communal life. It is also producing a decayed regime that claims to protect everything, but fails to safeguard even life and property. For all his reckless overstatement (which, alas, Bondy needlessly exaggerates), one may say about Schmitt what he often said about Hobbes: “Magister, frustra non iam doces!’–“Master, you still do not teach in vain!’

Review: Paul Gottfried’s brilliant new work elucidates Schmitt’s view of the state. As Gottfried stresses, Schmitt rejected the pluralism of
Harold Laski, who saw the state as but one of many groups within
society. This anti-political view ignored the essence of the state, its
monopoly of coercive power.

Schmitt maintained that liberals overemphasized legality: their
quest for a precisely organized system oflegal rules was a futile effort to avoid political decision. Thus, Hans Kelsen, the leading liberal jurist of the German-speaking world and Schmitt’s arch-rival, argued that every legal system stems from a basic rule or Grundnorm. From the basic rule, the entire legal system can be logically deduced.

Schmitt questioned the fundamental basis of Kelsen’s Pure Theory
of Law. The key to sovereignty lies not in a system of principles,
but rather in the power to make exceptions to customary legality in
order to deal with emergencies. A state exists not by itself but as one
of a group of contending powers. The chief function of the sovereign
is to preserve order. Rival states need to be contained and internal
factions kept in line…

As Gottfried ably brings out, Schmitt refused to subordinate order
to any “higher” political goals. In spite of Schmitt’s reputation as a
collaborator with National Socialism, “Schmitt in fact expounded a
modified traditionalist view of the state that had little in common
with Nazi theory or Nazi practice” (p. 3).
During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt strongly
opposed the Nazis as a manifest threat to political stability. In line
with his doctrine of the exception, he urged that a presidential
dictatorship be established to contain both the Nazi and Communist
threats. His advice was of course not followed, and after Hitler
became Chancellor in January, 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party.
His period of effective collaboration with the Nazis came to an end in
1936; he was never the “Crown Prince” of Nazi jurists, as leftist
writers endlessly repeat.
Schmitt’s brand of conservatism differed entirely from the Nazis’
emphasis on race and party above the state. He saw himself in the
tradition of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes…

A leitmotif of Schmitt’s work was his continued efforts to demonstrate
how theology gave birth to political ideas. His association of
doctrines of the Trinity with imperial assertions of power in the
Roman Empire, a thesis that embroiled him in furious controversy
with Erik Peterson, is the most famous instance…

To Schmitt, the analysis of intellectual movements was much
more than an academic exercise. He maintained that the “tyranny of
values” endangered contemporary political order. Intellectuals in the
grip of abstract universals threaten to overthrow political order,
principally by perfervid advocacy of democracy. Rather than view the
state as the preserver of order, the democratic ideology subjects
society to total politicization (p. 80). In this way it bears a close
connection with totalitarianism.

Schmitt traced the contemporary ”tyranny of values” in part to
the ethical universalism of Immanuel Kant, who not coincidentally
favored a world federation of nations.

Gottfried applies Schmitt’s insights in a fascinating way to
neoconservatism. Although supposedly rightwing, the neoconservatives
favor total commitment to democracy in the exact fashion stigmatized
by Schmitt. Their Wilsonian interventionism and worship of democracy
bear no resemblance either to traditional conservatism or libertarianism. Gottfried insightfully compares Allen Bloom’s universalist position with Kant’s (p. 91).

Paul Gottfried has given us not only a lucid account of Carl
Schmitt but also an illuminating analysis of contemporary politics.
In both tasks, he displays remarkably wide-ranging and thorough
scholarship. Gottfried is clearly an original thinker of high rank.

Paul Gottfried writes in 2015:

Carl Schmitt: A Biography, Reinhard Mehring, Polity, 700 pages

Reinhard Mehring’s study of the long-lived German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is the most exhaustive biography known to me of a deeply fascinating subject. Given his opportunistic embrace of the Nazis in 1933, Schmitt does not fit the image that postwar Germans have worked to create for themselves. Yet Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Legality and Legitimacy, Dictatorship, Law of the Earth, and Political Theology continue to be read because of their conceptual depth and stylistic brilliance.

These elegantly phrased works cannot be reduced to the circumstances that inspired them—Weimar Germany, the Nazi regime, and the postwar American order—any more than Hobbes’s masterpiece Leviathan can be seen purely as an artifact of the English Civil War. Indeed, aphorisms can be found in Schmitt’s works that are so pregnant with meaning that they invariably fail in translation: “Sovereign is the one who determines the challenge of the exception,” “All modern political teachings are secularized theological concepts,” and “Historical truths are true only once.”

Schmitt has always appealed to the political outliers, from the revolutionary right to the anti-capitalist, anti-liberal left. Geoffrey Barraclough’s observation that the Hegelian right and the Hegelian left clashed at Stalingrad in 1943 might be applied even more appropriately to Schmitt, if we allow for a certain hyperbole. The Frankfurt School Marxist Walter Benjamin devoted one of his most famous essays to an elaboration of Schmitt’s observations about Renaissance politics. Otto Kirchheimer—who was Schmitt’s graduate student at Bonn—and the young Jürgen Habermas were only two of the numerous German socialists who tried to adapt Schmitt’s critical studies of Weimar German politics for leftist agendas. It was hardly accidental that Leo Strauss’s first published work was a commentary on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, which Schmitt graciously appended to the second edition of his work.

In interwar Germany, Schmitt enjoyed indisputable renown. Leading jurists of the time like Hans Kelsen and Rudolf Smend, who had sharp disagreements with him, readily conceded his mental acuity and gift for language. It may have been almost incidental that Schmitt held a professorship in Bonn and eventually one in Berlin, or that he became the major legal advisor to the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag during the Weimar era. As a literary and scholarly star he operated on a different level from the professional posts he held.

The details of his life of more than 96 years are truly staggering. Although the author of an intellectual biography of Schmitt, I learnt from Mehring things about Schmitt’s life I encountered nowhere else. Even longtime Schmitt-researchers may be surprised, or shocked, by some of these revelations. Schmitt’s first wife, for example, whom he divorced in 1922, was not, as is often believed, a Serb or Croatian from a prominent family but a thief and embezzler from Vienna who may have been involved in a prostitution ring.

The womanizing Schmitt became involved in an affair with an Australian teaching English, Kathleen Murray, while his divorce was still pending. At one point he promised to marry her, but she returned to Australia, having used Schmitt to complete her German-language dissertation. Later Schmitt plunged into other liaisons, perhaps most passionately with a certain “Magda” while he was still a professor in Bonn.

Teaching in Berlin while his second wife was in a sanitarium, he became so sexually promiscuous that Mehring refers to this period in his life as an “erotic state of the exception.” Just as Schmitt argued that constitutional government required an awareness of “exceptional circumstances” in order to function even in normal times, so too did the survival of Schmitt’s conjugal life depend on his liberty to plunge into serial affairs.

Perhaps curiously, given his sexual passion, Schmitt had chosen for his second wife a gravely ill, tubercular woman. The union brought Schmitt high medical expenses but minimal sexual satisfaction. This remarriage after a divorce also led to his excommunication. Mehring suggests that Schmitt’s straying from his strict Catholic upbringing, a development hastened by his unsatisfied sexual desires, intensified his amoral careerism, culminating in his kowtowing to the Nazis. Although this causal connection is not provable, Schmitt’s Catholic students and colleagues brought it up after 1933 when they attempted to explain their teacher’s unexpected accommodation of the Third Reich…

Mehring understandably questions whether Schmitt really believed in Catholic Christian doctrines. Here one should note Thomas Molnar’s observation that Schmitt was a Catholic of sorts but certainly not a Christian. The inverse may also apply: Schmitt was intermittently some kind of a Christian but not a believing Catholic. In Concept of the Political—which interpreted the “political” as the most intense of human relations, characterized by friend-enemy relations—there is no underlying Catholic theme. Among the outraged critics of this work, as Mehring points out, were Catholic theologians. One surely discerns no Catholic leanings in Schmitt’s praise for Hobbes as “the completer of the Protestant Reformation.” Hobbes, as Schmitt reminds us, was the thinker who characterized papal influence over European sovereign states as “the kingdom of darkness.” It is far from clear that Schmitt found this judgment to be objectionable.

Even more illuminating are the parts of Mehring’s work dealing with Schmitt’s attitude toward his Jewish connections. Attempts to find anti-Semitism in his writings and personal relations before his fateful decision to join the Nazi Party in May 1933 have turned up, as far as I can judge, nothing of consequence. Indeed, the Nazis had every reason to suspect Schmitt of dissembling in his anti-Semitic statements after 1933, given his longtime intimate association with Jewish mentors, benefactors, colleagues, and students.

Leo Strauss may have approached this academic luminary in the hope of obtaining a Rockefeller grant to do research in England precisely because Schmitt seemed especially friendly toward Jews. He also warned sternly against the Nazis before they came to power and had called on the German government in 1931 and 1932 to ban Hitler’s party.

After 1933, however, Schmitt went out of his way to inject anti-Semitic remarks into his writings, while unceremoniously cutting off relations with his numerous Jewish acquaintances. Although the SS kept surveillance on him, as a suspect party member married to an ethnic Serb—his second wife—he nonetheless continued to flatter the regime. He even organized a conference of jurists in 1934 to discuss ways of removing Jewish influence from the German legal profession. Despite these gestures, Schmitt was upset that his onetime Jewish colleagues and students would not associate with him after the war. In letters and diaries he complained that he was being unfairly targeted for having decided to remain in Germany after 1933.

Schmitt was not the only amoral careerist who ever entered the academic world, but his character flaw was all the more shocking because of his greatness as a thinker and how he treated longtime friends. As a law student in Strasbourg he had been befriended by the son of a Jewish press magnate from Hamburg, Heinrich Eisler. Heinrich’s son Fritz was his closest companion, and Fritz’s soldier’s death near the Marne in September 1914 left Schmitt bereaved. Almost 10 years later he dedicated a book to his fallen comrade, and in the intervening time Fritz’s brother Georg became Schmitt’s bosom friend, particularly when the latter was between wives.

The elder Eisler had sent Schmitt, while he was an impoverished student and poorly paid legal clerk, regular gifts of money and had entertained him repeatedly at his sumptuous home in Hamburg. In his diaries Schmitt contrasted his admiration for the Eisler family, including the mother of Fritz and Georg, with his estimation of his own less generous and less well educated parents. But Schmitt suspended his relation with Georg in 1933, as well as cutting ties with Georg’s sister, who had been his private secretary in Berlin.

There are two problems with Mehring’s biography, other than the baffling absence of my writings on Schmitt in the extensive bibliography. One, the author provides such a mass of details that one sometimes loses sight of the forest for the trees. The chronological framework may not suffice to bear the crushing weight of all the data assembled. The author also shows a tendency to dart back and forth between discussions of Schmitt’s writings and his personal and political life. In some chapters the result can be chaotic.

Two, Mehring never explains, certainly not to my satisfaction, why any of Schmitt’s writings made such a profound impression on his contemporaries. Why would his Jewish editor Ludwig Feuchtwanger, who did not share Schmitt’s political views, consider Concept of the Political a conceptual masterpiece? Mehring approaches Schmitt’s work with painful reservations, as a “problem” in the history of German illiberalism. He dutifully quotes Schmitt’s liberal and Catholic critics, but he never really explains why his subject’s work bedazzled readers from across the political spectrum. As one of the bedazzled multitude, I would have appreciated a treatment of Schmitt’s work that recognized more fully what made it so compelling. Although Schmitt was a morally flawed genius, one would have liked to find more in the biography about his genius and perhaps a bit less about the unmistakable moral defects.

But it may be hard for German academics, driven to engage “the burden of German history,” to provide such perspective in writing about someone like Schmitt. We should therefore take what Mehring offers and attribute the resulting thematic imbalance to the burden of being a German academic historian.