{"id":108680,"date":"2016-10-13T10:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-10-13T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=108680"},"modified":"2016-10-13T10:00:54","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T18:00:54","slug":"a-fascist-philosopher-helps-us-understand-contemporary-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=108680","title":{"rendered":"A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prof. Alan Wolfe writes in 2004 for the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a>:<\/p>\n

To understand what is distinctive about
\ntoday’s Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and
\nvery conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is
\nnot Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of
\nthe Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in
\nmany ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.<\/p>\n

Strauss and Schmitt were once close professionally; Schmitt supported
\nStrauss’s application for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to Paris
\nin 1932, the same year in which Strauss published a review of
\nSchmitt’s most important book, The Concept of the Political. Their
\npaths later diverged. Strauss, a Jew, left Germany for good and
\neventually settled in Chicago, where he inspired generations of
\nstudents, one of whom, Allan Bloom, in turn inspired Saul Bellow’s
\nRavelstein. Schmitt, a devout Catholic who had written a number of
\nwell-regarded books — including Political Theology (1922), The Crisis
\nof Parliamentary Democracy (1923), and Political Romanticism (first
\nprinted in 1919) — joined the Nazi Party in 1933, survived World War
\nII with his reputation relatively unscathed, and witnessed a revival of
\ninterest in his work, from both the left and the right, before his death in
\n1985 at the age of 96.<\/p>\n

Given Schmitt’s strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi
\ncommitments, the left’s continuing fascination with him is difficult to
\ncomprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner M\u00fcller, a fellow at All Soul’s College,
\nOxford, points out in his recently published A Dangerous Mind, that
\nattraction is undeniable. M\u00fcller argues that Schmitt’s spirit pervades
\nEmpire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization
\nmovement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as the
\nwritings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, recently much in
\nthe news because of his decision to turn down a position at New York
\nUniversity as a protest against America’s decision to fingerprint
\noverseas visitors (although not those from Italy). <\/p>\n

When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of political and
\nsocial science at the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, the
\nefforts of the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a conference
\non Schmitt’s thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish donor
\nwho informed me that he was not going to give any more of his money
\nto an institution sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to “that fascist.” I was
\ntempted to tell him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had
\nbecome the rage in leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968
\ndedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences,
\nhad started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt’s legacy,
\nimpressed by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt
\nfor Wilsonian idealism. A comprehensive study of Schmitt’s early
\nwritings, Gopal Balakrishnan’s The Enemy, published by the New
\nLeftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt’s conclusion that liberal
\ndemocracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left
\nhope that its present stalemate will not last indefinitely. Such
\nprominent European thinkers as Slavoj Zi\u00fbek, Chantal Mouffe, and
\nJacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt’s ideas. It is
\nnot that they admire Schmitt’s political views. But they recognize in
\nSchmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism
\nin favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a
\nperspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like
\nMichel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.<\/p>\n

Schmitt’s admirers on the left have been right to realize that after the
\ncollapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable rethinking. Yet
\nin turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they have clung fast to
\nan authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such 20th-century
\nthinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn’t just been
\nSchmitt. Telos, in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist
\nthinkers and movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything would
\nbe better than Marx’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his legacy.
\nSchmitt’s influence on the contemporary right has taken a different
\ncourse. In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco Miglio in
\nItaly, Alain de Benoist in France, and the German writers contributing
\nto the magazine Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built on
\nSchmitt’s ideas. Right-wing Schmittians in the United States are not as
\nnumerous, but they include intellectuals — often described as
\npaleoconservative — who expend considerable energy attacking
\nneoconservatism from the right. One of them, Paul Edward Gottfried, a
\nhumanities professor at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, is
\nespecially prolific. Himself an occasional contributor to Junge
\nFreiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine for rejecting “the view that
\nevery German patriot should be evermore browbeaten by selfappointed
\nvictims of the Holocaust.” No wonder he has a soft spot for
\nCarl Schmitt. Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term
\n“fascism” in quotation marks, as if its existence in the European past is
\nsomehow open to question.<\/p>\n

But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place
\nanywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important
\nconservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is
\nunlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian
\nsympathies. Still, Schmitt’s way of thinking about politics pervades the
\ncontemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has
\nflourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his
\nanalysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals
\nand liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.<\/p>\n

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of
\nhuman endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is
\nconcerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly,
\nand economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the
\ncore distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes
\npolitics different from everything else. Jesus’s call to love your enemy
\nis perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the lifeor-death
\nstakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are
\npreoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making
\nthe world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does
\nnot demand annihilation. Not so politics.<\/p>\n

“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism,” Schmitt
\nwrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short
\nof war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as
\nantagonistic to everything in which you believe. It’s not personal; you
\ndon’t have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to
\nvanquish him if necessary.<\/p>\n

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt’s conception of politics much
\nmore thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with
\ntitles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the
\nWar on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American
\nRight, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were
\nremoved from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic
\nticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis.
\n“Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam,” she wrote, “which
\nwould make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in
\nfavor of friendly fire.”<\/p>\n

…Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political.
\nLiberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas “all
\ngenuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.” Liberals believe
\nin the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting
\npositions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule —
\neven an ostensibly fair one — merely represents the victory of one
\npolitical faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley
\nFish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as
\nprinciple, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt’s ideas
\npervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that
\nthere exists something called society independent of the state, but
\nSchmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state
\nwould ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest
\nits power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and,
\nbecause they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.
\nNo wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and
\nHobbes, who treated politics without illusions. Leaders inspired by
\nthem, in no way in thrall to the individualism of liberal thought, are
\nwilling to recognize that sometimes politics involves the sacrifice of
\nlife. They are better at fighting wars than liberals because they
\ndispense with such notions as the common good or the interests of all
\nhumanity. (“Humanity,” Schmitt wrote in a typically terse formulation
\nthat is brilliant if you admire it and chilling if you do not, “cannot wage
\nwar because it has no enemy.”) Conservatives are not bothered by
\ninjustice because they recognize that politics means maximizing your
\nside’s advantages, not giving them away. If unity can be achieved only
\nby repressing dissent, even at risk of violating the rule of law, that is
\nhow conservatives will achieve it.<\/p>\n

In short, the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the
\ndifferences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the
\npolicies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself.
\nSchmitt’s German version of conservatism, which shared so much with
\nNazism, has no direct links with American thought. Yet residues of his
\nideas can nonetheless be detected in the ways in which conservatives
\ntoday fight for their objectives.<\/p>\n

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics,
\nfor liberals, stops at the water’s edge; for conservatives, politics never
\nstops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies;
\nconservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42763],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carl-schmitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t