Prof. Alan Wolfe writes in 2004 for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
To understand what is distinctive about
today’s Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and
very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is
not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of
the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in
many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.
Strauss and Schmitt were once close professionally; Schmitt supported
Strauss’s application for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to Paris
in 1932, the same year in which Strauss published a review of
Schmitt’s most important book, The Concept of the Political. Their
paths later diverged. Strauss, a Jew, left Germany for good and
eventually settled in Chicago, where he inspired generations of
students, one of whom, Allan Bloom, in turn inspired Saul Bellow’s
Ravelstein. Schmitt, a devout Catholic who had written a number of
well-regarded books — including Political Theology (1922), The Crisis
of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), and Political Romanticism (first
printed in 1919) — joined the Nazi Party in 1933, survived World War
II with his reputation relatively unscathed, and witnessed a revival of
interest in his work, from both the left and the right, before his death in
1985 at the age of 96.
Given Schmitt’s strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi
commitments, the left’s continuing fascination with him is difficult to
comprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at All Soul’s College,
Oxford, points out in his recently published A Dangerous Mind, that
attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that Schmitt’s spirit pervades
Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization
movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as the
writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, recently much in
the news because of his decision to turn down a position at New York
University as a protest against America’s decision to fingerprint
overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).
When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of political and
social science at the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, the
efforts of the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a conference
on Schmitt’s thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish donor
who informed me that he was not going to give any more of his money
to an institution sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to “that fascist.” I was
tempted to tell him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had
become the rage in leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968
dedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences,
had started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt’s legacy,
impressed by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt
for Wilsonian idealism. A comprehensive study of Schmitt’s early
writings, Gopal Balakrishnan’s The Enemy, published by the New
Leftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt’s conclusion that liberal
democracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left
hope that its present stalemate will not last indefinitely. Such
prominent European thinkers as Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal Mouffe, and
Jacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt’s ideas. It is
not that they admire Schmitt’s political views. But they recognize in
Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism
in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a
perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like
Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.
Schmitt’s admirers on the left have been right to realize that after the
collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable rethinking. Yet
in turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they have clung fast to
an authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such 20th-century
thinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn’t just been
Schmitt. Telos, in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist
thinkers and movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything would
be better than Marx’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his legacy.
Schmitt’s influence on the contemporary right has taken a different
course. In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco Miglio in
Italy, Alain de Benoist in France, and the German writers contributing
to the magazine Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built on
Schmitt’s ideas. Right-wing Schmittians in the United States are not as
numerous, but they include intellectuals — often described as
paleoconservative — who expend considerable energy attacking
neoconservatism from the right. One of them, Paul Edward Gottfried, a
humanities professor at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, is
especially prolific. Himself an occasional contributor to Junge
Freiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine for rejecting “the view that
every German patriot should be evermore browbeaten by selfappointed
victims of the Holocaust.” No wonder he has a soft spot for
Carl Schmitt. Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term
“fascism” in quotation marks, as if its existence in the European past is
somehow open to question.
But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place
anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important
conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is
unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian
sympathies. Still, Schmitt’s way of thinking about politics pervades the
contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has
flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his
analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals
and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of
human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is
concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly,
and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the
core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes
politics different from everything else. Jesus’s call to love your enemy
is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the lifeor-death
stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are
preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making
the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does
not demand annihilation. Not so politics.
“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism,” Schmitt
wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short
of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as
antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It’s not personal; you
don’t have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to
vanquish him if necessary.
Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt’s conception of politics much
more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with
titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the
War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American
Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were
removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic
ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis.
“Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam,” she wrote, “which
would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in
favor of friendly fire.”
…Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political.
Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas “all
genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.” Liberals believe
in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting
positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule —
even an ostensibly fair one — merely represents the victory of one
political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley
Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as
principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt’s ideas
pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that
there exists something called society independent of the state, but
Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state
would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest
its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and,
because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.
No wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and
Hobbes, who treated politics without illusions. Leaders inspired by
them, in no way in thrall to the individualism of liberal thought, are
willing to recognize that sometimes politics involves the sacrifice of
life. They are better at fighting wars than liberals because they
dispense with such notions as the common good or the interests of all
humanity. (“Humanity,” Schmitt wrote in a typically terse formulation
that is brilliant if you admire it and chilling if you do not, “cannot wage
war because it has no enemy.”) Conservatives are not bothered by
injustice because they recognize that politics means maximizing your
side’s advantages, not giving them away. If unity can be achieved only
by repressing dissent, even at risk of violating the rule of law, that is
how conservatives will achieve it.
In short, the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the
differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the
policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself.
Schmitt’s German version of conservatism, which shared so much with
Nazism, has no direct links with American thought. Yet residues of his
ideas can nonetheless be detected in the ways in which conservatives
today fight for their objectives.
Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics,
for liberals, stops at the water’s edge; for conservatives, politics never
stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies;
conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition.
