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R e v ie w a r t i c l e by C h a r le s T u r n e r

The strange anti liberalism

of Carl Schmitt

Te x t s r e v i e we d

Carl Schm itt (1996)

Roman Calholz~zsm nd Polztzcal Form,

trans. and annotated

G.

L

Ulm en, Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, xli 68 pp., k35.95

Carl Schmitt (1996)

Leciathan

in

the Sta te Theory / Thornas Hobbes: Meaning

and Failure of' a Political Sj~ mb ol, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

xxxi 121pp., k44.5 0

Heinrich Meier (1995)

Carl Schmitt and Leo Stncuss: The Hidden Dialogue,

Chicago: Univ ersity of Chicago Press, xvii 136 pp. L15.95

John P. McCormick (1997) Curl Schnzitt:~Critique of' Liberalism, Cambridge:

Cam bridg e University Press, xii 352 pp., L30

The only difficulty was that what he wrote one day he could not see the next. This

was because the pages w r written without conviction

(Borges 1975)

I n t r o d u c t i o n

T h e work of Carl Schm itt is known to English readers primarily thro ugh trans-

lations of four books: Political Roma~zticism [l9191 1985), Political Theology

([l9221 1985), The Crisis of Parliammtarj~Democrac)~ [l9281 1985) and The

Concepl of'the Political

([l9331 1076, 2nd edition, 1997). In addition, in th e last

decade a number of essays have appeared in the journal

T e l o ~ . ~

ne w ould like

to think that the publication of two more translations, Roman Catholicism and

olitical Forrn of 1923 (hereafter RCPF) and Leciathan in the S l a ~ e heor.y of

Thomas Hnbbes

of 1938 (hereafter

L S T H ) ,

will be an opportunity to deepen

acquaintance with the th ough t of one of the century s m ost enigmatic legal and

political theorists. As matters stand, within Anglo-American scholarship the

debate over Sch mit t s significance, and over his invol\rement in the Thi rd R eich,

E~ on om y nd S o~z et)l Glurne

27

hurnber

4

,Voz'ember

1998

434 437

outledge 1998 0308-5 147


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Th e strlznRe antz-lzberulzsm of C ar l Schnz ztt

435

remains in its infancy, and is still pervaded by a context of polemic in which

Schmitt is either castigated or praised by North American conservatives for his

anti-liberalism or treated as the source of concepts and formulations which

migh t lead the post-Marxist left ou t of a theoretical impasse. ttempts at a bal-

anced a ssessment of his work as a whole are rare, and for this reason a lone John

McCormick's comprehensive and careful account is welcome.

l 'h e first noteworthy point about the Hobb es book (apart from its ludicrous

price) is that it has taken so long for an English version to appear. Indeed, it is

published here fully ten years after a translation of the first edition of Politicul

Theologj~, ne of whose chap ters is devoted to suc h forgotten figures as de Bonald

and Donoso Cortes. ~ be sure, Sch mit t has been better served than most

Ge rma n H obbes scholars. TGnnies, whose English editions of

Elemenls of L a m

and of

Behemoth

are used by scholars to this day, and whom Sch mitt dcscribed

as the best Hobbes scholar in Germany, still awaits an English translator for his

1896 book

Thomus Hobbes: Leben und Lehre.

T he translation of

L S T H

is welcome because the book is significant in at least

two respects:

1)

as a contribution to H obbes scholarship which emphasizes the

relationship between myth and politics; and 2) as a work which, published

alongside

a

translation of

Ro ma n C atholicism and Politir-ul Form

(even more ludi-

crously priced), raises the question of the relationship between the political,

theological and juridical aspects of Schmitt 's thought, and that of whether

Ge org Schwab's description of him as 'the Ho bbes of the twentieth century' is

accurate. Th es e texts are separated by a period of fifteen years in which Sch mit t

accommodated himself to both the Weimar Republic and the Thi rd R eich. I f

he could do so, is such an accomm odation at odds with th e unity of his thought,

an indication of how his thinking changed, me ndacious pragmatism or the con-

sistent expression of a thinking whose 'unity' and coherence are of a peculiarly

flexible character?

Hobbes

r o m a n t i c i s m , C a t h o l ic i s m

How could an avowed Catholic, even allowing for the vagaries of commentary,

get himself called the Ho bbe s of the twentie th ce ntur y? In wh at follows I will

attempt to make sense of the degree and nature of Schmitt 's debt to Hobbes,

and in so doing challenge the view of Heinrich Meie r who, in his

Carl Schmitt

und Leo Strauss, attemp ts to deny any substantial affinity between S chmitt and

Hobbe s. Meier 's book rec onstructs what he calls ' the hidde n dialogue' between

Schm itt and Leo S trauss over Schmitt 's best-known work,

Th e Cotzcept of t he

Polztzcal.

T h e effect of this dialogue was, so it is claimed, that S ch mi tt was forced

to clarify his position regarding the m etaphysical basis of politics, a clarification

which, according to Meier, led S chm itt to emphasize in the third, 1933 edition,

the theological dimension of his political thought, indeed its theological foun-

dations. T h e most significant produ ct of this clarification was a clear distinction

(1) between his own foundatio n for 'politics' evelation nd that of Stra uss


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436 harles Turner

eason-based philosophical reflection on the best regime and (2) between

either of these pre-modern accounts of politics and a mechanistic-rationalist

conception of the state associated with liberal modernity in general and with

Hobbes in particular. Meier argues that the course of this clarification took

Schm itt from an im mature, defensive concept of the political in the first edition

of 1927, to a mature, positive concept of the political in the fateful year 1933.

Schm itt s critique of liberalism m oved, then , from an accou nt of how liberalism

had failed to develop a political theo ry which takes the po litical seriously to an

account of the political which no longer has any need to establish its anti-liberal

cred entials because liberalism now belongs to a bygon e liberal age .

According to Meier, Strauss had noticed that, despite its anti-liberal claims,

the first edition of The oncept of the Poli tical remained within the orbit of a

basically liberal, neo-Kantian philosophy of cu lture, according to which differ-

ent hum an activities art, econom ics, politics, religion, politics, ethics are

assigned to domains or spheres each of which is governed by a basic no rm

which gives that activity its character. The largely protestant South-West

Germ an school and the mostly Jewish Ma rburg School of neo-Kantianism were

both comm itted to a philosophy of cultu re of this type, though they differed in

the degree of cultural pluralism they tho ugh t such a vision implied. T h e basic

argument was exemplified by Rickert, who argued that each domain was gov-

erned by a timelessly valid value such as beauty (art), profit (economics) or

goodness (ethics). Schmitt takes this up in the first edition and notoriously

tailors his formulation to suit what appears to be an anti-liberal purpose.

Schmitt argued that, rather than being governed by an ultimate value, each

doma in is governed by a value opposition ood/evil, beautiful/ugly and so on.

Th is then enabled him to define the polit ical domain in term s of the notorious

opposition between friend and enemy. Leaving aside the absence of any reason

for elevating enmity above friendship rather than friendship above enmity, the

point of the opposition was to allow Schm itt to argue that the dom inant politi-

cal doc trines of his day, liberalism and M arxism , intellectually and practically

failed to treat politics in anything other than instrum ental term s or liberal-

ism the s tate is a ventilating mechan ism for problem s which a rise elsewhere, for

Marxism it is a means to transform th e prod uction process. Neither l iberalism

nor Marxism was able to comprehend the specificity of the friend-enemy

relationship, and thus neither was able to reach a position at which an under-

standing of polit ics can be said to be central to an un derstanding of the hum an

condition. Liberalism moves between the poles of a deontological subjectivity

of rights protected by a constitutional state and an individuality which is ren-

dered determinate only through economic competition. Marxism moves

between a con ception of class struggle groun ded in an econom ic, non-political

friend-enemy relationship and th e utopian vision of an end to all friend-enemy

relationships.

Meier s point is that, while Schm itt s insistence up on basic questions

appears radical, the friend-enemy distinction merely remin ds us of the existence

of a political relationship b etween c onstitu ted, sovereign states. T h e conce pt of


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Thestrange anti-liberalism o Car1 Schmitt 437

enmity refers, conventionally, to foreign policy, and to the need of a state to

protect its citizens in the face of an external threat, a protection which is the

primordial condition of possibility for the economic competition or class

struggle on the basis of which liberalism and Marxism ground a theory of

society.

n

this account all

Sc hm itt is doing here is taking seriously

a

domain

of human action which liberalism and Marxism do not. Despite his insistence

tha t enmity implies the real possibility of physical killing , and tha t therefore

the friend-enemy distinction is existential rather th an normative, enm ity per-

tains only to the political sphere. For Schm itt, there cannot be eco nomic or aes-

thetic or religious enmity, since these domains are not defined in existential

terms a nd therefore cannot become political.

Thi s, S trauss pointed out, rem ains a liberal vision, and h/leier stresses this in

ord er to remind us that it is also Hobbes s view, and to argue that, when Schm itt

later moved away from this position, he moved away from Hobbes and towards

a clearer, mo re explicit account of the theological basis of his own thinking. Thu s,

while in 1927 Sc hm itt describes Hobb es as the greatest systematic political

thinker , by 1933 he is merely the thinker who keeps political understan ding

alive (M eier 1995: 36), a cooling off which Meier interprets as significant evi-

dence that Schm itt has taken on board Strauss s critique. In a fam ous passage

Strauss argued that, in order to complete the critique of liberalism, Schmitt

would have to strike at the founde r of liberalism , H obbe s, and that, had h e

understood his own thinking aright, he would have recalled that, as the founde r

of liberalism Hob bes was the anti-political thinker in Sch mit t s terms. F or

Hobb es, th e state of n atur e was overcome a nd suppressed by the political society,

while Schmitt restored the state of nature, warfare, to a place of honour

(Strauss, in Schm itt [ l9331 1997: 90). Whereas Hobb es in an unliberal world

accomplishes the founding of liberalism, Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes

the critqu e of liberalism (Strauss, in Schm itt [ l9331 1997: 92-3). T h e advan-

tage of this view is that the Schmitt of anti-liberalism and anti-Hobbesianism is

easier to reconcile with Catholic counter-enlightenment and counter-revol-

utionary theorists such as de Maistre, de Bonald and Do noso C ortes. T h e reason

for this has to do with an argu men t about just what the state of nature consists

in, and its consequences for the civil condition.

According to the more genteel of English Hobbes scholars, man in the state

of nature is prep ared to kill, but only for the sake of his self-preservation. Ma n s

natura l des ires are akin to those of beasts, and it is this which necessitates a tech-

nical or mechanical device as the political framework within which a brutish

but pacifiable creature m ight

lead

a commo dious l ife. Th is i fe would be secure

because in pursuing it the individual would not be reminded of the reality of

the h uma n situation. It would be the life, in sho rt, of the apolitical bourgeois.

Meier points out, however, that both Schmitt and Strauss initially admire

Hobbes for not holding to such a view, and for founding his political philos-

ophy on an anthropology of man as a dynam ic and dange rous being , who seeks

not merely self-preservation but the annihilation of others. Whe re they both go

beyond Hobb es is in linking this dangerousness to man s capacity to engage in


6/25

438 Charles Turner

extended chains of reasoning. Human nature is infinitely dangerous because

hum an evil is not the innocen t evil of beasts, but a knowing evil. Th is evil in

tur n is a consequence of original sin, and therefore the reasons behind the orig-

inal need for a state cannot be hidden from man in the way they are in Hobbes s

con structio n of the state. A state which arises on the basis of original sin would

remind its subjects of the proximity of the human situation and the constant

possibility of the emerg ence of a friend-enemy relationship, and would do so

in accorda nce with a very specific belief in what th e state s metaphysical foun-

dations were. T h e difference between Sch mitt and H obbes would lie, then, in

their accoun ts of the metaphysical assu mption s behind the need to found a state

knowing evil versus innocent evil . None the less, both may be reconcilable

with a foreign affairs accou nt of the political , such th at the significance of war

is that it remains a m ere potentiality whose function is the preservation of

the internal peace of a determinate polit ical comm unity. As John McC ormick

has put i t :

Sc hm itt seeks to make the threat of conflict of war elt and feared not as

an end in itse lf. but rather so as to make war s outbreak all the more unlikely

domestically, and its prosecution mo re easily facilitated abroa d. T ha t Sch m itt

aestheticised violent conflict to generate th e fear necessary to prev ent disord er

is not contestable hat he did so for its own sake is.

(McCormick 1994:

626)

T h e Sc hm itt of politics as foreign policy is manifestly not a theorist of total

mobilization of the sort exemplified by Erns t Junger. Th e emphasis upon

warfare and upon the fundamental character of the friend-enemy relationship

does not issue in the glorification of the warrior. Indeed, at one point Schmitt

makes an explicit distinction between the agon al and the p olitical.

However, Schm itt did part company with Hob bes in two respects. First , he

pushed the idea of politics as fate to the point where the state as a com pulsory

organization could legitimately deman d of th e individua l that he sacrifice his life

for it in war, confr ontin g a real friend-enemy situation and the real possibility

of death. For Hobb es, this is something a state cannot deman d (and it is not the

only thing , as we will see) of a being for the sake of who se self-preservation the

state was established in the first place. Second, and more importantly, by 1933

Sch mitt , encouraged by Strauss s comm entary, was confident enough of his anti-

liberalism to argu e that the political was not only foun dational for the state, and

thereby restricted to a particular domain , bu t entailed a relationship which

could, potentially, emerge in any domain By this stage in Schm itt s career, the

political relationship does not define a type of relationship opposed to other

types of relationship, but the degree of intensity of any associative or dissociative

relationship o any type 6 For Meier, this drives Schmitt s critique of liberalism

to its limits. For this critique n ot only conceives of the state as something which,

beyond being a mechanical device making a commodious life possible, reminds

man of the metaphysical grounds of its existence. It also extends the scope and

import of the

friend+nemy relationship.


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The strange anti-liberalism o f Car1 Schm itt

439

By turning away from the conceptio n of domains, Sch mitt renders his conce pt

of the political capable of encompassing civil war . T h e rise of the total state

makes one s vision keener for the potential u biquity of the political, and opens

up the prosp ect of beating liberalism on its own turf, domes tic politics.

(Meier 1995:

24)

The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it draws our attention

away from the fact that at the centre of most of what Schmitt wrote, from the

earliest essays to the Hobbes book of 1938 was the problem of sovereignty of

the polity, of the unity of the polity, the integ rity of political authority, in which

the ov erriding purp ose of political autho rity is the securing of internal peace and

the

prevention of civil war.

It gives the impression that for Schmitt the political

might be an all-pervasive j i ~ t u r e f human action, when, even in late formu-

lations of it in The Concept of the Political and th en in later works such as LSTH

and

Der Nomos der Erde

of

1950,

it is the constitutive

horizon jor

action.

The distinction, which Meier would deny, between external warfare, for the

sake of which individu al sacrifice may be deman ded because it remind s man that

politics is fate, and civil war, which destroy s the in tegrit y of the political com-

munity, can be made sharper by referring to two concepts of enmity associated

with them, one of which S chm itt endorses, the oth er of which he emphatically

rejects. T h e one he endorses is relative enmity, in which the enemy is conceived

of as a moral equal akin to an o pponen t in a duel. Th e one he rejects is total

enmity , in w hich the enemy (o r foe) can be degrad ed to the status of a criminal

or a morally inferior being. A concept of the political which em braces civil war

as well as war between states conceived of as amoral enemies threatens to

degrade the enemy to a criminal and to contaminate politics with moral cat-

egories. Moreover, part of Sc hm itt s Aktuulztat was that, as a critic of his age, he

was seeking to restore a concept of the political which had been realized thro ugh

the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which bro ugh t to an end th e confessional wars

of the later Middle Ages, the bloodiest and most destructive of which was the

Thirty Years War. Der Nomos der Erde

is a laudatio for the concept of relative

enmity and the mo dern E uropean states system which was the basis of the

Jus

P ub lic um E ~ r op ae um . ~h e end of the nineteenth century and World War I were

seen by Schm itt as threatening this states system. It was threatened by th e re-

emergence of a system of both in ternational and dome stic politics in which total

enmity th reatened to triu mp h over relative enmity. When th is occurs, the age of

the partisan and the terrorist has arrived. The apotheosis of the partisan idea, of

course, is Leninism . Th us, th e attempt by some contemporary commentators to

see Schmitt as more sympathetic to Marxism than to liberalism because of the

former s acknow ledgement of th e inescapability of violence and th e inevitability

of the friend-enemy relationship is wholly misplaced . In Sch mitt s term s, the

class struggle entails an international civil war in which the enemy is degraded

to the status of a criminal.

I

think,

contra

Meier, that it is this, and not the anti-liberalism of the third

edition of The Concept

of

the Political which is the more enduring theme in


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440

Charles Turner

Schm itt s work, work which c entres on t he m ode rn state, sovereignty, rep-

resentation, an d the relationship between legitimacy an d legality, and a utho rity

and power. It is these themes which figure in both the Catholicism and the

Hobbes books, and which allow us to discern a consistency of theme across

fifteen years. It is significant that Meier devotes little space to either of these

works.

To be sure, both are pieces of c ultura l criticism as well as systematic treatises,

and the suspicion remains that th e English-speaking world is still not ready for

the rigours of Yerfassunsglehre Legalitat und Legitzmztnt or Der Nomos der Erde.

If it was, the figure of the Catholic Hobb es might be less perplexing, for the

unity of his thinking is a unity centred less on the metaphysical grounds of the

political than on his jurisprudence. While there are rather obvious grounds for

stressing the Catholic dimension of Sc hm itt s political tho ugh t, Meier s

mistake is to formulate Schm itt s political theology in terms of the content of

Catholic belief and to see this as the metaphysical foundation for his attack on

the mo dern , liberal, technocratic age. Roman Catholiczsm and Political Form takes

us on to quite different terrain, terrain which Schmitt occupied before he had

had t he benefit of Strauss s helpful, clarification-inducing interpr etation in

1932. It is also, it should be noted, terrain on which an earlier critique of

Sch mi tt, by Karl Lowith, a critique will discuss below, is most at home. Th e

reason for this is that, here, Catholicism is relevant less in terms of the content

of Catholic belief than in its consequences for and relationship with worldly politi-

cal authority a nd power. It is here tha t Sch mit t seemingly both wishes to attack

a mod ern age which is illegitimate because it is no long er th e Mid dle Ages and

at the same time stresses the flexibility and ad aptability of the historical R oman

Ch urch s relationship with con stituted worldly authority, including, by impli-

cation, the worldly authority embodied in and by modern states. Contra Meier,

there is nothin g here on original sin, human evil or reason-versus-revelation, but

much on the institutional and sociological character of the Catholic church and

its mysteriously form ulated capacity for form .

Th is stress upon the flexibili ty of the Roman Ch urch and of C atholic culture

generally towards worldly authority, its comp romise w ith the world as Max

Weber called it, written in 1923, was remarkably poignant in the light of

Sch mitt s subse que nt collaboration with National Socialism, and the charges of

opportun ism which accompanied both Sch mitt s app ointment to the Prussian

State Cou ncil in 19 33 (from the left) and his dismissal from it in 1936 (from the

right). Meier s stress upon the co ntent of belief as the fou ndation of S chmitt s

concept of the political is unhelp ful for com preh end ing Schm itt s active involve-

me nt w ith regimes of very different character. Indeed , in Meier s t erm s this

accommodation would have to be interpreted as either careerism or a remark-

able capacity for changing on e s m ind. Eithe r that, or the alleged extension of

the concept of the political to include civil war would have to imply that, both

in a situation of po ssible internal civil war or anarchy a nd in one of possible attack

by a foreign enemy, the human being is confronted directly with the conse-

quences of original sin, and that, for these reasons, Schm itt could see in both the


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The strange anti-liberalism

o

Curl Schmitt

441

Weimar republic (anarchy) and the Third Reich (external threat plus internal

pacification) a theological^^^ significant raising of the stakes for man. But if

Schm itt believed this he took the opp ortunity to say so remarkably infrequently.

A different, secular-existentialist, interpre tation of this collaboration was

given by Lowith in 1935, and it is one worth discussing here, because it con-

trasts w ith Meier s in crucial respects. I.6with accounted for Schm itt s col-

laboration by arguing that the structu re of Schmitt s political thoug ht, which at

num erous p oints claimed to be decisionistic , bore all the hallma rks of what

Sc hm itt himself claimed was its opposite, occasionalism . Hi s was not a politi-

cal theology at all but a form of political romanticism, and Schmitt s critique of

the latte r a case of the narcissism of small differences.

Wha t is the romantic attitude which S chm itt purports to despise, and how can

an understanding of it contribute to an understanding of Schmitt s complicity?

It is characterized by Schmitt initially as an avoidance of present, concrete

reality, bu t an avoidance which, far from taking th e form of flight, or retreat into

mystical contemplation, or suicide, manifests itself in the search for an a l t ema

tiz reality that does not disturb and negate the individual (Schmit t [l9191

1985a: 71). In othe r words, the romantic s a ttitude to reality is an ironic one

which plays off one reality against anothe r in ord er to paralyse th e reality tha t

is actually present and limited. He ironically avoids the constraints of objec-

tivity and guards himself against becoming comm itted to anything. H e

regards being taken seriously as a violation because he d oes not w ant th e actual

present confused with his infinite freedom .

(Schmitt

[l9191 1985a: 71-2)

T h e effect of this is that

Neither the cosmos nor the state, nor the people, nor historical development

has any intrinsic interest for him. Everything can be made into an easily

managed figuration of the subject that is occupied with itself.

(Schm itt [ l9191 1985a: 75)

This subject might be the individual, it might be the community, history,

human ity. Th is style of thin king was exem plified by th e politically insignificant

German romantics, who treated political reality in terms of forces which were

pre-political. Everything which happens in the world is an occasion on which a

force external to that world manifests itself . T h e struc ture of roman tic though t

is one of pure effectivity in w hich there are no causes, no calculable relationships

between independently identifiable phenomena, in which all phenomena are

accorded equal weight, a re equally significant instance s of a given other-worldly

principle.

Th is attitude is nowhere better expressed than in romanticism s approach to

metaphysical dualism, a them e promine nt in

RCPF

T h e characteristic roman-

tic attitude is to claim to have overcome such dualisms. But this overcoming is

anoth er avoidance of reality. T h e dualism oul and body, intern al and external,

subject and object, man and woman s allowed to remain. T h e romantic merely


10/25

44

Charles Turner

makes it illusory by shifting it to a comprehensive third sphere (Schm itt

[l9191 1985a: 87).

T h e opposition between the sexes is suspended in the total hum an being ; the

opposition between individuals in the higher organism, th e state; the discord

between states in the higher organisation, the chu rch.

(Sch mitt [l9191 1985a: 88)

But th e resort to a higher third is merely a search for the natu re of things in a

domain different from the one to which those things belong. For [Adam]

Miiller, the natu re of money as an econ omic factor lies in the do main of law, not

in the domain of the economy, the nature of the legal does not lie in itself, but

rathe r in the theological (Sch mitt [l919 1 1985a: 91).

In oth er words, the higher factor is not genuinely transcendental, but rath er

any othe r domain, whatever hap pens to be different . In this way, and com bined

with occasionalism, the romantic accepts the world s nomological order even

as he believes he is changin g it. In co mm onplace reality, the intellectual revol-

utionary loves external order, even when he theoretically postulates tumult and

chaos (Schm itt (19191 1985a: 98). O n the ot her hand, since he operates without

substantive criteria of truth and justice and merely plays off different realities

against one anoth er, he is as likely to endo rse revolution as reaction :

As long as the revolution is present, political romanticism is revolutionary.

With the termination of the revolution, it becomes conservative, and in a

markedly reactionary restoration it also knows how to extract the romantic

aspect from such circumstances.

(Schmitt

[l9191 1985a: 115)

I n

Political Romanticism

Schmitt s combative rhetoric is sharper than anywhere

else. Bu t it is directed at a style of thin king w hich is closer to his own than any

other. H e attacks Adam M uller for failing to respect th e integrity of do mains, a

thoroughly liberal argumen t, but, later, he aba ndon s the attack in favour of a

reduction of the political to the theological, partly in favour of a concept of the

political which potentially embrace s every domain . Seco nd, Schmitt s own

history is one of accommodation to W ilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Repub-

lic and the Th ird Reich, in fact to any regime eactionary or revolutionary

which can be seen as the em bodim ent of concrete order.

The Schmittian response to the second charge would be that there is a sig-

nificant difference between th e passive acceptance of a reactionary resto ration and

the active endorseme nt of it o n the basis of clear criteria of what is right and just.

Schmitt was not a romantic, so the argument goes, because he had a clear com-

mit men t to a set of principles wh ich went against a liberal age of neu tralisations

and depoliticisations in which a mechanistic-rational concep tion of the state was

dom inan t. Romanticism w as anti-positivist , to be sure, but lacked the means

with which to be anti-positivist in practice, and ended in what today would be

regarded as pragmatism .8 Th is con trasted w ith the anti-mo dernism of, say,


11/25

The strange anti-liberalism o C ur l S ~ h m i t t

443

Burke s traditionalist conservatism or counter-revolutionary theories of the state

(de Maistre), each of which is based o n principles of historical or divine right.

In Political Romanticism Schmitt clearly tries to align himself with these

thinkers. Yet Lowith s charge was that he failed to d o so in practice. Ha d Schm itt

been a straightforward reactionary for whom the Weimar republic was to be

actively resisted, and who later in 1933 endorse d a regim e which was more to his

taste, then, however repugnant his views, the charge of occasionalism would be

false. But the fact is that, as long as the Weimar Republic lasted, Schmitt,

employed officially as an interpreter of the constitution, made every effort to

preserve it. Later, as Prussian Sta te Councillor appointed by Go ring, he helped

draft the legislation legalizing the Nazi seizure of power. It is, paradoxically, the

active character of Schm itt s re lationship with these regimes wh ich marks him

off as a political romantic. Schmitt cites Burke, de Bonald and de Maistre

approving13 and seeks to align himself with th em , because they were always

filled with the sens e that they were not elevated above the political struggle, but

were instead obligated to decide in favour of what they regarded as right

(Sc hm itt [l919 1 1985a: 116). Bu t Sc hm itt himself was a legal scholar, not a

politician, an interpreter, not a legislator. He was active rathe r than passive, but

active in th e role of one who is freed of the responsibilities a nd risks of political

office which his heroes had to undertake.

T h e best example of Schm itt s attempt to identify his own fate with that of a

gro up which was always filled with the sense that they w ere not elevated above

the political strugg le was the 1943 essay Th e pligh t of Euro pea n jurispru-

dence . He re S chm itt gives a self-legitimating a ccoun t of the relationship

between the legislator, the apolitical romantic and the interpreter. Since G erm an

unification in 1871, the legislative process had become hitched to planning and

administration and allowed to run out of control in a flurry of laws which

amou nted to decrees. Th is motorized legislation was the produc t of a system

in which the law enacted within a mode rn parliament is the majority decision

of a divided legislative body (Sc hm itt 1990:

48).

In the face of this development,

the need had arisen for the law to be honed into a unified and objective force

independent of the legislative coercion which parliament had made possible.

Schm itt saw jurisprudence in general and himself in particular as the agent of

this unification.

l

Bu t it was precisely in this role that Sc hm itt showed himself an occasionalist,

interpreting and commentating for whatever regime would have him, identify-

ing his own subjectivity with the forces of the age, be they republica n (1929-33),

national socialist (1933-42),

or,

as World War I1 was destined to e nd

in

Germany s defeat and a post-war Europe an settlement, the Eu ropean Spirit.

Moreover, for Lowith, Schmitt s principles are nowhere to be found, no t even

in the place in which one would most expect them, Political Theology. There,

Schm itt describes Marx and K ierkegaard as the first to oppose a decisionist style

of thinking to bourgeois or romantic existence. Yet, while Marx decided for

scientific socialism and Kierkegaard for a theologically defined one thing

needful , in Sch mit t s case:


12/25

444

Charles Turner

It will remain to be asked: by faith in what is Schmitt's demanding moral

decision sustained, if he clearly has faith in neither theology of the sixteenth

centu ry not th e metaphysics of the seventeen th century, and least of all in the

hum anitarian morality of the eighte enth century, but instead has faith only in

the power of decision?.

(Low ith 1995: 141)

As we have seen, the decisive criterion for 'the political' was one of extreme situ -

ations, the possibility of having one's own being negated by ano ther being in war.

The concept of the political does not refer to the maintenance of one realm of

determinate Being am ong others, and therefore contains no im plications con-

cerning the rights and obligations of m embers of constituted polities. A theory

of political Being w hich might accommodate questions of the best regime and

the d ifferences between democracy and dictatorship is reduced to a theory of

political existence.

Here, t he enemy seeks to destroy not a particular, d eterm inate mod e of being,

but 'my naked existence' (L ow ith 1995: 143). Express ed in Meier's term s, this

is the difference between the first and th e third editions of The Concept of the

Political, between the Sc hm itt of domains in which the enemy threatens a form

of existence, and the Schmitt of an intensification model applicable to all

domains. Note here that Lowith's and Meier's interpretations of this intensifi-

cation model are diametrically opposed. For M eier, Schmitt's th ought shifted

from a neo-Kantian, liberal and

formalist

concept of culture and politics, to an

anti-liberalism founded upon substantive theological com mitmen t. For Lowith,

it moved from an understanding of politics which might have allowed room for

substantive differences between d ifferent mo des of recognizably political Being,

to one in which Schmitt's existentialist criteria of the political betray his

for-

malism.

Here, 'it cannot be specified

what this intensity is an intensity o f

(Lowith

1995: 150). Unlike his two de cisionist forebears, M arx (a Jew) and Kierkegaard

(a Protestant) who opposed their age with substantive principles, Schmitt offers

nothing more than the capacity to

e

decisive, so that when Schmitt

is

con-

fronted with the contingency of having to display judgement, with having to

relate the particular case to the universal principle and act, he can invoke only

the 'capacity for form' from

RC PF

or the capacity to decide. T h e latter might

imply equally an anarchic insistence upon the need to decid e now or a claim that

the decisive decision has already been taken and that an existing state is the result

of such a decision. Whether that given state was imperialist,

communist-

proletarian, theocratic, military or constitutionalist, mattered less than

that

the

state in question is an authoritative unity ' (Lo with 1995: 150). Both of these

accounts, of the event which must occur now and of the event that has already

authoritatively occurred, were part of a devalued G erma n intellectual currency

in those 'Years of Decision' following the Fir st W orld War.'

So: Lowith sees Schmitt as a secular existentialist, Meier sees him as a

Catholic whose concept of 'the political' is Catholic, founded on a doctrine of

original sin, man's 'infinite evil' and a faith in revelation. There are problems


13/25

lzestrange anti-lzben~lzswt of Curl Schmzt t

445

with both of these approaches, as the Catholicism book and the Hobbes book

make clear. Against Meier, Lijwith's remark that

The Concept

o

the Political

belongs to a middle phase is surely correct. It is sandwiched between what he

calls the 'extreme normativism' of the earlier phase and a 'thinking about order '

after

1933.

But Liiwith himself reads Schmitt through the lense of a Heideg-

gerian problematic, so that th e political and jurisprudential dimension of his

Catholicism is underplayed in favour of questions of death and human finitude.

T h e translations of R PF and LTHmake clear, however, the centrality of th e

question of the state's authoritative unity to everything Sc hmitt wrote. Where

they differ is in the account given of the grounds of political authority.

Roman Catholicism political form and the juridical

R C P F

opens with a passage which alerts the reader at once to the question of

his collaboration. Sc hm itt remarks o n an accusation freque ntly lel-elled at

Catholicism by 'the parliamentarist and democ ratic ninetee nth century', namely

that of 'limitless opportunism' (p. 4), and sees it as part of a widespread 'anti-

Catholic tem per'. In response, however, he accepts that, as the heir to the Roman

Empire, the Roman Church has historically shown itself able to accommodate

itself to a wide variety of worldly powers. In relation to these powers it has not

shown itself to be a 'universalism' against which local or national powers have

developed legitimate grievances. On the contrary, and ironically, those oppon-

ents who see this as its most distinguishing feature are missing an opportun ity

to deepen the anti-Catholic mood. The y fail to grasp 'how m uch th e Catholic

Churc h is a compiexio upposztosum. Th ere see ms to be no opposition which it will

not embrace' (p.

1 5 :

' i ts history knows examples of astounding accom modation

as well as stubborn intransigence, the manly ability to resist and womanly com-

plianc e' (p. 7)' rule d autocraticall ; yet ruled by a leader elec ted by an aristoc-

racy of cardinals, an aristocracy which in turn is potentially open to anyone.

Crucially, given Lowith's com me nts on decisionism of the Kierkegaardian s ort

and Schm itt 's later reference to Kierkcgaard in

Political Theologj~,

chm itt for-

mulates this cumplerio oppositovum thus: 'Old and Ne w Testament alike are scrip-

tural canon, a nd th e M arcionitic either-or

is

answered with a n as-well-as' p.7).

And,

contru

Meier, nre have:

T h e fundam ental thesis to which all dogmas of a consistent anarchistic phil-

osophy of state and society ret urn , namely, the antithe sis of man 'h - natu re

evil' and 'by natu re good' his decisive que stion for political theory s in

no sense answered by a simple 1-es or no in the T ridentine Creed .

In contrast to the protestant doctrine of the total depravity of natural man ,

this Creed speaks of human nature as only wounded, weakened or troubled.

(Schmitt

RCPF:

7-8)

Yet Schmitt insists that this both-and formulation is consistent with what later

comes to be called decisionism. 'This limitless ambiguity combines with the


14/25

446 Charles Turner

most precise dogmatism and a will to decision as it culminates in the doctrine of

papal infallibility (p.

8).

And, even more explicitly, having noted that from a

political point of view Roman Catholicism is distinguished by a formal superi-

ority to the material of hum an life which makes for a substantial shaping of

hum an historical reality, Schm itt states that this capacity for shaping the w orld,

for imprinting upon it a form, despite its formal character, retains its concrete

existence at once vital and yet rational to the n th degree (p.

8),

a remark which

is followed imme diately by an adve rtisem ent for Catholicism s political pecu-

liarity, namely its strict adherenc e to what he calls the principle of

representation

Thus, in the space of the opening few pages, R C P F defines the political

imp ort of Catholicism in term s of:

the both/and character of its reasoning

the capacity for form

the capacity for decision

its existential ethos

its strict adherence to representation .

Sma ll wonder tha t the question of Sc hmitt s Catholicism has perplexed com-

mentators, and that M eier seeks to answer it through the circuitous route of Leo

Strauss s review of

The Concept o f the Political

Even to ask whether all this can be united through reference to an all-

embracing principle of unity, to Schm itt s oeuvre , risks misu ndersta nding his

claims about the C hurch as complexio oppositorum The very effort to reconcile

opposites, to overcome dualisms, to resolve contradictions in a higher third , as

we saw, is a typically modern , Pro testant a nd /or romantic move, which is neces-

sary only because it ac cepts in the first place a mo dern reality which Catholicism

refuses to accept, a reality pervaded by the sorts of opposition which modern

though t expresses through dualistic categories. Confron ted with th e realization

that this dualism has robbed it of the capacity for decision, modern thought

exhibits decisiveness in the only ma nner left open to it, negation of th e negation.

Th is con trasts sharply with the Ca tholic principle of decision which is referred

always to a realm

beyond a ll dualisms and oppositions

Freedom as the negation o r

transformation of such dualisms, or work upon o ne side of them , is one of the

great figures of modern thought to which Schmitt s critique of modernity was

resolutely opposed. H is decisionism, then, has nothing to do with the Lut her an

Here stand can do no other , or with the pragmatic choosing of sides by

parties to dispute.

Th is is exemplified by the C atholic attitude to nature, where culture and nature

are continuous rather than discontinuous, a continuity which is suited to the life

of peoples with a peasant past. The Catholic in exile never overcomes feelings of

homesickness, in contrast to Protestants (and by implication Jews) who are able

to live anywhere on earth by negating

nature through work. If liberalism and

Marxism are rejected on the grounds of their failure to develop a political theory,

they are rejected because, concomitantly, they combine metaphysical dualism, a

mod ern ideology of transforma tive work, and a mech anistic world-view:


15/25

The stncnge untz-l~beralzsnz Cu rl S~ h m zt t

447

T he world-view of the mo dern capitalist is the same as that of the industrial

proletarian, as if the one were the twin brother of the other. .T h e big indus-

trialist has no oth er ideal than that of Le nin n electrified earth .

(Schmitt RCPF: 13)

Crucially for the question of Schm itt s Catholicism, and its cont inuity or lack of

it with the Hobbes book, he opposes this economistic-mechanistic world view

to that of po liticians and jurists (p. 13). Thus the shortcomings of liberalism

and M arxism do not consist in the fact that they lack an unde rstand ing of radical

hum an evil, and th e Catholicism with which Schm itt will oppose modernity is

not on e which is open to t he mythical, irrational or mystical aspects of the tran -

scendent. Catholicism counters modern rationalism with a superior nltionulitjl,

which m anifests itself in what he calls a capacity for form , bu t a capacity which

resides in institutio ns and is essentially juridical (p. 14). In contra st to the

objectifying logic of econom ism, Catholicism is eminently political (p. 16).

Political in what sen se? No t in a Machiavellian capacity to confro nt th e vagaries

of internatio nal diplomacy an d power politics, nor in th e Chu rch s having

accommodated itself to a mechanistic age by becoming ever more centralized

and bureaucratic. In relation to th e contempo rary struggle for world dom ination,

the Ch urch s position is marginal. If the Ch ur ch has political significance it con-

sists in a patho s of autho rity in all its purity .

Th is authority derives from th e Church s status as a legal person. As such, it

is

a concrete personal representation of a concrete personality All knowledge-

able witnesses have conceded that the C hur ch is the consum mate agency of

the juridical spirit and the true heir of Roman jurisprudence. There in n its

capacity to assume juridical form ies one of its sociological secrets. Bu t it

has the power to assume this or any other form only because it has the power

of representation. It represents the civitas humana, it represents in every

moment the historical connection to the incarnation and crucifixion of

Ch rist. Th erein lies its superiority to economic thinking.

(Schmitt RCPF

19)

T hi s ecclesiastical principle of represe ntation had its parallel in the secular prin-

ciple of representation which partly shaped feudal lordship. Here, the lord, or

prince, did not stand for anoth er body, but stood before a populace as the rep-

resentative or embodiment of a higher principle. T h e same was true of other rcp-

resentative figures. As Jiirgen Hab erma s pu t it, drawing explicitly on Schm itt,

When the territorial ruler convened about him ecclesiastical and worldly lords,

knights, prelates and cities this was not a mat ter of an assembly of delegates

that was someone else s representative (Hab ermas [l9621 1989:7 .T h e medieval

ecclesiastical principle of r epresen tation is essentially a Catholic, juristic prin-

ciple of which m odern representation is a pale imitation. According to this

principle, only that which is perso nified is representative. Today s mo dern rep-

resentatives, by contrast, are delegates, functionaries, representing sectional


16/25

448

Charles Turner

interests rather than the w orth associated with a particular estate. Th e G erm an

distinction between

Re@rasentatzon

and

Vertretung

captures this shift of meaning.

Th is does not, however, mean that a mod ern state is incapable of representation

in principle, for S chm itt leaves open the possibility tha t the possible objects of

representation include not only Go d but freedom, justice or the people . W hat

cannot be represented is production and consumption. A world dominated by

production and cons um ption, the world of liberal-marxist modernity, is also one

in which the state is conceived of and operates as a mechanism: once th e state

becomes a leviathan, it disappears from the w orld of representations (p. 21).

The emphasis upon authority at the expense of power is crucial, because it

contrasts sharply with

Leviathan,

which according to Sch mitt reduces authority

to power. Th is early hostility to Hobbes will be modified in 1938 when H obbe s

is identified as a theorist of order who understood that the primary function of

the state is to put an end to civil war, that the modern state inaugurates a per-

ma nent preventive counter-revolution. Inde ed, put ting an end to civil war is vir-

tually th e definition of the political in that book.

T hu s the two main pillars of political autho rity for Schm itt are legitimacy and

power, manifested in representation and a capacity for form ( the source of legit-

imacy in

R C P F )

and p utting an e nd to civil war (the higher power of

Leviathan) .

T h e expression the authoritative unity of the state covers both these pillars. In

the end , Schm itt found a complete polit ical theory adequate to the modern age

in neither legitimist Catholicism nor modern state theory, and it is this which

makes reading R C P F and L S T H such a bewildering and re warding exercise.

In the H obbes book, the tensions in Hobbes s work, between the state as

person, as a machine, and as the sea monster Leviathan, are brought to the

surface. Here, in 1938, following the N azi establishme nt of their own version of

concrete order, Sc hm itt comes to recognize, in a way in which he did not in 1923,

the virtue of a concentration of power capable of putting an end to civil war,

regardless of its capacity for representation, regardless of its em bodying a higher

principle or not, regardless of its English or continental-absolutist character,

regardless of its being in accordance with or c ontrar y to Catholic principles.

For a Catholic political theorist this is, to be sure, a remarkable concession.

For, according to the doctrin e of Papal governme nt, the key difference between

authority and power is that authority

auctoritas)

is one and indivisible, while

power

potestas)

is not. And indeed, towards the end of the Hobbes book, Sch mitt

brings this distinction to the fore in an accoun t of the main p oint of weakness in

Hobbe s s system , the point at which the comm and-obedience relationship

established by a concentration of power falls short of demanding a determinate

set of beliefs, leaving the individual p erson free to believe whatever he likes as

long as this belief finds no p ublic expression. I t is precisely because it is a power

organization, not an indivisible authoritative unity, that th e mo dern state can fall

prey to other pow er organizations. T h e sea mo nster Le viathan symbolizes a

concentration of power which can never be anything other than provisional,

since the activity of such a state has the character of perm anen t crisis manage-

ment. The modern state which is merely a power organization is permanently


17/25

Thc strllng-r antz-lzbcralzsm of Cu1.1Schmzll

449

oriente d to the emcrgcnc y (h'otstnnd which can always intervene, not to the

exception (/lusnahme) which lies permanently beyond all organizational and

legal order.

But the point of Schmitt's political theory was to show that the secularization

which had brought with it a mechanistic-rational modern state implied some-

thing other than that the Catholic Church was obsolete, something more than

that Catholicism \\-as a m ere m/ta~zschauun,gopposed to the m odern age. Just as

Schmitt argues for Catholicism's relevance to a liberal age, so the Hobbes book

is far from an anti-Hobbesian tract. T h e problem with Hobb es was not that he

was

a

possessive individualist liberal hc relation between state and subject is

one of comm and and obedience but that his conceptual construction of the

state was not secured firmly enough against the more pernicious versions of

liberalism which subsequently developed it in a distorting fashion. Perhaps

nothing summarizes more precisely Schmitt 's compromise between a Catholic

theory

o authority and a modern theorj- of power than the statement that 'every

order is a legal order; every state, a constitutional state' (p. 25). T h e continuities

of a European understanding of politics, continuities of which Schinitt saw

himself as the custodian, are the continuities of a juristic co nce ption of con crete

human order, a conception which unites RCPF and L S T H .

Schinitt shares with writers such as Hannah Arendt the belief that to the

extent that they are modern, modern states are anti-political. And, just as Arendt

attem pted to avoid classicist nostalgia for the polis, so Sc hm itt does not concl ude

that liberal modernity has wholly trium phed over Catholicism. Rather, Catholi-

cism might still adapt itself to a situation in which powers whose basis is econ-

omic

take on the tasks of political responsibilit ; tasks whose 'political' cha rac ter

can be obscured bu t not eliminated. N either liberalism nor Marxism is able to

generate a theory of concrete hum an order, and here Catholicism can seize its

chance.

T he dominat ion of capital behind the scenes is still no form , though it can

undermine an existing form and make it an empty facade. Should economic

thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about an absol-

utely- unpo litical con diti on of h um an society, the clzurch wozlld remain the only

~cgency political thinking an d poIitU .alj)rm .

(Schmitt RCPF: 25, emphasis added)

But, by the same token and conlrrl Meier, precisely because liberalism and

Marxism are so powerful, any thinker, including the anti-Papist H obbes, who

can 'keep political understanding alive' is regarded bj Sch mitt as an indispens-

able resource, whether or not he ceased to be 'the greatest systematic political

thinker '.

'There are, to be sure, passages at the end of R PF in which Sc hm itt insists

upon a hierarchical relationship between Catholicism and jurisprudence, on th e

grounds that Catholic political theory is oriented towards 'The Idea' while

jurisprudence is oriented to any power complex which displays 'a sufficient

minimum of form' (p.

30); that Catholicism can create new law while


18/25

450 Charles Turner

jurisprude nce can only make existing law appear as a coherent unity. T h e history

of the Roman Church, even in its most institutional and bureaucratic phase,

which inspired the wrath of Dostoyevsky, is the history of a representative of

Christ reigning, ruling and conqu ering (p. 31).

In Schm itt s later work, however, the Christolo gy is subordin ated to juris-

pruden ce as the defender of a principle of publicity against a modern world split

between a publicity which has degenerated into mechanistic externality and a

privatized liberal freedom. The agents of this freedom are the institutional

bearers of private rights secret societies, esoteric associations, freemasons,

trade unions and, of course, Jews, all of whom have contributed to the destruc-

tion of a principle of an old Eur ope an, Catholic, juridical princ iple of publicity.

H o b b e s L e v i a t h a n : p e r s o n , m a c h i n e , m o n s t e r

In RC PF , the link between a degenerate modern ity an d a set of privatizing insti-

tutio ns ap pears all the mo re polemical for Sch mitt s refusal to give a causal

accoun t of it, a perplexity w hich has him retreating from an appeal to Christ tri-

um pha nt and invoking the West European tradition more generally. By 1938,

as a jurist rather than a Catholic, Schm itt was ready to write a critical yet sym-

pathetic account of the anti-Papist Hobbes. Th re e aspects of the imm ediate

context are relevant.

First, two years earlier Sch mitt had been dismissed from the Prussian State

Council. The reasons have been rehearsed elsewhere, but it is clear from

Schmitt s other writings that, however slippery his principles, his conception of

the source of the state s unity was too jurisprudential and notvolk ish enough for

the Thi rd Reich. By 1938 and despite his appalling blindness to what was hap-

pening aroun d him , he had witnessed the effect of an attempt to found a mod ern

state on substantive principles.

Second, the turn to Hobbes is less an exercise in political theology than an

account which purports to take seriously the mythological dimension of

Hob bes s political theory. Th is renew ed sensitivity t o political myth was

common currency in the late 1930s, amon g Ge rma n liberals as well as the Nazis.

Cassirer s The M-yth of the Sta te is an obvious example, and Tho ma s M an n saw

projects such asJoseph

un

his Brothers as an attem pt to save myth from its m is-

appropriation by Nazism. Gunther Maschke, in the afterword to the German

edition of L ST H , even describes Schm itt himself as a political mythologist and

the Ho bbes book as the puzzling key to his life s w ork

LSTH

p. 202 orig.).

Th ird , there is the context of anti-Semitism. LSTH contains numero us gra-

tuito us references to the Jewish backgro und of certain thinkers, and to the

Jewish-liberal character of modern institutions and practices which would

earlier have been called merely liberal. There is probably little point in asking

whether this amou nts to a genuine hardening of S chmitt s anti-Semitism over

fifteen years, because a) if it did, it would n ot be exceptional for the times; a nd

b) there is strong evidence that Sch mitt s appeal to the juridical left him op en


19/25

The

str~rnge

ntz-lzbesaltsm

o url

Schmztt

45

to the opportunism with which he has most frequently been charged. He had

after all, in the true spirit of European jursiprudence, helped confer upon the

Nazi seizure of power 'a mod icum of form'. T h e anti-Semitism is no less awful

n its consquences or coming from the pen of an opportun ist jurist rather

than from that of a principled C atholic anti-Semite.

LSTH places Hobbes's political theory in a field of tension defined by three

rival images of the state's authoritative unity. According to the first, the state is

a person; according to the second, it is a machine; according to the third, it is

the mythical sea monster Leviathan. Schm itt 's purpo se is to show that Hobbes's

conceptualization of the state's unity is ultimately an heroic failure, partly in its

own terms, but partly because it left a space open which subsequent Jewish-

liberal though t and practice was able to exploit. Hobbes's failure was the failure

of an attem pt to restore a unity between politics and religion which the Judaeo-

Christian tradition had destroyed. This search, in effect for a way of reducing

authority to power, for 'an original political unity' (p. 21) took Hobbe s away from

the Catholic personalist principle of authoritative representation, towards the

con struc tion of th e state as a power mecha nism devoid of all political-theological

elements. But in the course of the search he appealed to a mythological image of

a Biblical sea monster. Schmitt seizes on this because it shows Hobbes being

unable to maintain a consistently secular, mechanistic state cons truction. Thu s:

the question m ust be whether the myth of leviathan created by Hobbe s is a

genuine reestablishment of an original life unity, whether it has guaranteed

itself as a political-mythical image in the struggle against t he judaeo-Christ-

ian destruction of a natural unity, and whether it is fitted to the hardness and

malevolence of this struggle.

(Schmitt

LSTH

22-3)

Moreover, despite his mechanistic constructio n of the state, Hobbes holds to the

belief that Jesus is the C hrist and that the m onarch is God's Lieuten ant. Yet his

philosophy is inconsistent with such beliefs, which he could defend only throug h

agnosticism. No traditional or customary conception of monarchy was available

to him. T h e nearest he comes to it is in his transfer of the C artesian idea of man

as a mechanism with a soul to the 'great man', the state. Here, the state is a

machine 'beseelte' by a sovereign representative person. But this ensoulment is

the antithesis of the genuinely personalist idea of representation. It is true that:

Th at which emerges beyond th e social contract, the only guarantor of peace,

the sovereign representative person, comes into existence not thro ugh, b ut o n

the occasion of consensus. The sovereign representative person is incom-

parably mo re than could be generated by the a ccumulated force of all partici-

pating individual wills.

Bu t 'the inn er logic of the artificial prod uct state leads not to a pers on, but to

a machine. It is a matter not of the representation thro ugh a person, bu t of the

factual present achievemen t of real protection ' (p p. 52-3). In this sense it is a

prototypical work o f a new technical age. T h e personalism which seems to lie at


20/25

45 Charles Turner

the heart of the idea of the state as a man d oes not halt the process of technifi-

cation, but com pletes it. Even th e soul is only a com pon ent of a machine created

by man. Finally,

his concept of the state therewith becomes a factor in the great four century

process in which, with the h elp of technical ideas, a general neutralisation

occurs and the state in particular is turne d into a technical neutral instrumen t.

(Schmitt LSTH 62)

But it is only a factor. Wh ich brings us to anti-Sem itism.

To read S chmitt s Hobb es book is to read an account of the internal decay

of the thought of the one modern thinker who came closer than anyone to a

genuinely polit ical conception of human order. The decay seems inevitable,

however, for from the start Schm itt alerts us to the fact that Hob bes did not

have available to him a symbo lism w ith the mod ernity to m atch the m odernity

of his conception of the state. Here there are palpable continuities of theme

with RCPF. Th ere , one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the mo dern age

was incapable of representation was the fact that the future-oriented Soviet

Union, striving for an electrified earth, employed as its state symbolism the

hamm er and sickle, instrum ents appropriate to a medieval mode of prod uction.

Hobbes too is seen as having to draw upon pre-modern symbolism. This

foreign element, introduced into an essentially mechanistic c onstruction from

the outside, was not only pre-modern, it was mythological. Moreover, it was

drawn from an Old Testamen t myth which had as much resonance in the kab-

balist tradition as in seventeenth-century P uritanism. In th e book ofJob, the

sea monster Leviathan and the land monster Behemoth appear as pagan,

earthly powers upon whom, at a final messianic banquet, Israel is destined to

feast. While the kabbalistic tradition anticipates this b anquet, Sch mitt argues

that the nineteenth century m ade it a reality when the forces or indirect

powers of conte mp orary civil society associations, trade unio ns, interest

groups in general, Jews began to promo te sectional interests and threaten the

unity of the state.

Th is, for Sch mitt , was the long-term conseque nce of an attempt to reduce

authority, wh ich is indivisible, to power, which is not. A concentration of power

is only ever provisional, forever at the potential mercy of those powers which

might opp ose i t .

A state conceived of in these terms lacks the form-giving,

society-shaping capacity Schmitt attributed to the Catholic Church, whose

unity was assured by the personalist principles of autho rity and representation.

In Ho bbes s case, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that Levia than treats

religious belief as a purely private matter. The relationship between state and

subject is one of external protection and external obedience. T h e problem with

Leviathan, then , is not i ts mechanistic-neutral character alone, but the fact that

it gran ts to its subjects freedom of conscience, the o rigin, according t o Jellinek

and Weber, of modern, secular, private freedoms. The privatization of religion

gives rise to the sacralization of the private. T hi s argumen t had already been

made in

RCPF,

and it is repeated here in

1938

with an anti-Semitic twist.


21/25

The strange anti-liberalism C a d Schmitt

45

Freedom of conscience, as set down in the chapter of Leaiathan devoted to

miracles, in which m iracles a re whatever the state says miracles are, bu t only

for public purposes, was the crack in Hobbes s ostensibly gapless system. It was

this gap, according to Schmitt, which subsequent liberal and Jewish thought

expl oited. Re inhard t K oselleck s Critique rrnd Crisis is, for all the priase h eap ed

upon it, an extended elaboration of the Schmittian point that the history of

enlightenment is the history of the expansion of this crack within an absolut-

ist state to the point where a morality of private conscience becomes the cri-

terion from which to judge and possibly condemn existing political

arrangements.

It was the first liberal Jew , Spin oza, who seized upo n the Hobb esian sepa r-

ation of inner and outer and reversed the priority, developing out of it the basic

principle of freedom of thought and expression of opinion, a basic principle

which was not be protected b y the state, but was to be thefi)undation

of

the state.

T h us a small switch of thought deriving from Jewish existence, and carried with

plain consistency, in a few years seals the fate of Leviathan (pp. 88-9).

The absolute state can demand everything, but only externally. The bearers

of the inner freedom which had been allowed to remain surreptitiously were:

secret societies and organisations, rosicrucians, freemasons, illuminists,

mystics, pietists, sectarians of all sorts, the many silent in the cou ntry , an d

above all here onc e again the shiftin g spirit of the Jew, who knew m ost pre-

cisely how to assess this situation to the point where the relationship between

public and private, behaviour and conviction, was turned o n its head.

(Schmitt LSTH 92)

It was Moses Mendelsohn who understood that the undermining of the state

meant the emancipation of his people. His writings gave rise to the first great

and tru e opposition between Ge rm an wisdom and the Jewish tactic of making

distinctions .

A

worldly god which is merely a public power has only t he simulacra of divin-

ity on its side. Any recognition of the opposition between inner and outer is

already a recognition of the sup eriority of the inner. This superiority has many

forms, but wh ethe r it is in mason ic lodges, conventicles, synagogues or literary

circles (p. 95) they are ll oppo nents of Leviathan. Th e effect of this, since the

eighteenth century, is that Hobbes s great man has become some thing inhum an

and subhu ma n, destroyed from th e inside by parasites. I t lived on in the nine-

teen th century, bu t only in the form of the positivist Gesetzstaat, a state open to

the legislative coercion which Schmitt described in 1943 as motorized legis-

lation . Su ch legislation coincided with the t rium ph of Leviathan s old oppon-

ents, indirect powers which threaten th e state s unamb iguous power to provide

protection in retu rn for obedience.

It is of the essence of an indirect power that it blurs the clear connection

between state command and political danger, between power and responsi-

bility, protection and obedience, and out of the irresponsibility of a


22/25

454

Charles Turner

domination which is no less intense for being indirect, enjoys all the advan-

tages and faces none of the d ang ers of political power.

(Schmitt LSTH: 117)

T h e upsho t was that Leviathan broke apart on the distinction between state and

individual freedom. Th e organizations which now represent that freedom have

come to resemble the guests at the kabbalists messianic ban que t. Th ey are

merely the knife with which anti-individualist forces cu t up Lev iathan and

divided th e flesh amongst themselves (p. 118). It is worth noting, too, that this

relationship between th e mod ern state as a power organization and those powers

which act in a state-related fashion in a compe tition for resources is the staple

diet of m ode rn political sociology, for which th e problem of auth ority is largely

non-existent.

T h e anti-Semitic tone continues with Schm itt s treatment of Friedrich Julius

Stah l. Stahl (1802-61) was a Bavarian Jew who conv erted to Protestantism, an

advocate of Prussian conservatism g roun ded in the idea of a Christian state, who

had changed his name from Jolson. In earlier works Schmitt had referred to him,

conventionally, as E J Stahl. But by the 1930s he had becom e Stahl-Jolson.ll

Stah l is described here as merely the cleverest of those me mb ers of a nineteenth-

century Jewish Front which includes Marx, Heine and the Rothschilds. Unlike

them , baptism provided him n ot only with entrke into society, but also with

entree in to the sanctuary of a G erm an state which was still highly stable [sehr

solzde]

From the position of high office he was able to ideologically deceive

and spiritually paralyse the innerm ost workings of this state monarchy, aris-

tocracy, and the Lutheran Church.

(Schmitt

LSTH:

108)

Believing himself a conservative, Stahl defended the monarchy against parlia-

mentarianism. But the monarchy he defended was a constitutional monarchy,

and it was, according to Schmitt, constitutionalism which ultimately weakened

the Prussian m ilitary state from within and led to the defeat of 1918.

onclusion

Th er e is not the space here to enter into th e complexity of Schm itt s position

in 1938, to trace the relationship between his Catholicism and his anti-Semi-

tism, not least because Sc hm itt was at his most anti-Sem itic when h e was least

Catholic. Th at a positive reference to the solidity of a Prussian state founded

upon Lu theran ism could have come from the pen of one who had written that

the mo dern , non-Catholic world is incapable of representation and has reduced

authority to power is proof eno ugh of Sch mitt s enigmatic status. Perhaps his

work is best summ ed u p by saying that his account of the mod ern world is per-

vaded by a sense of what the m ode rn world lacks, and by his search for th e next

best thing. It was a search which sometimes led him to contrast the modern


23/25

Th e strange anti-liberali.~m

o

Car1 Schm itt

455

with the pre-m odern political world, but which also produ ced a theory of secu-

larization in which pre-modern theological concepts live on in modern secu-

larized form. His interest i n Hobbes does not make h im the Hobbes of the

twent ieth century, and to this extent Heinrich Meier is surely r ight . But in

Hob bes S chm it t saw a pol i tical theory wh ich, whi le i t mis takenly reduced auth-

ori ty to power and made of t he s tate a prevent ive mechanism, saw the ul t imate

purpo se of the s tate as the prevent ion of c ivil war and the maintenance of peace,

a theme w hich has obvious continuitie s with medieval Furstenspzegel l i terature.

Ha d S chm it t res t r ic ted his account of Hobbes to this theme, as he does implic-

itly in Der Nomos der Erde the reference to fai lure in the t it le would have been

omit ted. But Sch mit t chose to focus , in 1938, less on the th eme of maintain-

ing peace as such, th an u pon those forces which, according to Hobbes , const i -

tuted a threat to the s tate s uni ty, what Hob bes cal led the equivalent of wormes

in the entrayles of a natural man . Hobb es himself was thinking of sects of on e

sort or another. Schm it t meanwhile drew an analogy between threats to th e

uni ty of the s tate in the seventeenth centu ry and the sorts of associat ions , c lubs

and interes t group s which bo th l iberal democrat ic and social democrat ic theo-

rists have long seen as central to the u nity an d stability of a mode rn polity. Wit h

no reference at a ll to th e sociology of social groups , nor to t he magis terial work

of the legal historian Gierke o n these mat ters , S chm it t s implis t ical ly maps o ne

type of group on to another. Moreover, he at tempts to wri te the empirical

his tory of the modern s tate as though i t can be unders tood in terms o f elements

of Hobbe sian political philosophy, in suc h a way that th e develop ment of nine-

teenth-century l iberal ins t i tut ions and interes t groups is theorized as the cruel

exploitation by Jewish-liberal thinke rs of weaknesses in Hobb es s system . T h u s

any intermedia te organization or association is a potential threat to t he unity o f

the mo dern s tate . T h e consis tent i f not social -phi losophical ly acute conclus ion

of this kind of reasoning is that the sup pression of su ch organizations in a world

in which the pu rsui t of power is a zero-sum game is to be welcomed. T h e sup-

pression of civil society organizations is thus an act which ensures concrete

order . At least, this was the way matters appe ared in

1938. For a Cathol ic con-

servative the gr eat irony of this is that, if i t makes him t he twentieth-century s

Hobbes , i t a lso makes hi m o ne of i ts Rousseaus .

University of Warwick

otes

A

theologian in death , in

A Un ioers al H2stor.y

o

Injamy

London: Penguin, 1975,

p. 103.

2 Th e legal world rev olution , Glos

5

(Summer 1987); The plight of European

jurisprudence , 7210s

83

(Spring 1990); The constitutional theory of federation , Elos 91

(Spring 1992);

Appropriation/distribution/producrion:

oward a proper fo rmulation of

the basic questions of any social and economic orde r , Telns 95 (Spring 1993); The age

of neutralizations and depoliticizations ,

Glos

96 (Summer 1993).


24/25

456 Charles Turner

3

See Holmes (1993: ch.2); Gottfried (1991); and, from the left, Ulmen (1991) and

Mouffe (1993).

4

On Donoso Cortes (1808-53) see Cortes (1888);

J.

T. Graham (1974); on De Bonald

(1754-1840), see Laski (1919: ch.2); Nisbet (1986).

5

E Tonnies,

Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre,

3rd ed. Stuttgart: Frohmann, 1925;

Hobbes und das Zoon Politikon ,

Zeitschr ftfur Vulkerrecht

12 (1923), pp. 471-88. For

Schmitt s remark on Tonnies as a Hobbes scholar, see 1950: 65.

6 This is in itself hardly original. See, for instance, Plessner:

There is politics between husband and wife, client and service staff, teacher and

pupil, doctor and patient, artist and patron, and in whatever private relationship

we care to mention, just as in the public realm there is a legal, economic, cultural

and religious politics, and a social politics alongside that of state and party.

Plessner

[l9 3 ] (1981: 194-5)

7 On this, see

Der Nomos der Erde,

pp. 1 234 3, 200-12.

8

See, for instance, Richard Rorty s advice (1982) to accept the metaphysics of the day .

9 See Spengler (1928); von Krockow (1990).

10

For an account of this distinction, see Zygmunt Bauman s

Legislators and Interpreters

(1987), one of a series of anti-liberal, anti-modernist texts which have marked Bauman s

later years. His elevation of the postmodernist-pluralist interpreter above the modernist-

legislator is quite different from Schmitt s appeal to jurisprudence, which is at the same

time an appeal to the continuities of European history. Bauman s position implies as much

disdain for the juridical interpreter, preserving the unity of the law s will, as for the

motorized legislator, whose laws amount to decrees.

11 Embarrassingly, in his introduction to

Political Romanticism

Guy Oakes refers

uncritically to Schmitt s apparent resurrection of the obscure Jewish figure Stahl-Jolson

(see Schmitt

1985a: xxxiv).

eferences

Bauman, Z (1987)Legislators and

Interpreters,

Cambridge: Polity.

Borges,

J. L.

(1975)

A Universal Hi s to ~y

o f In fum )~ , ondon: Penguin.

Donos o Cor tes (1988)

Essay on

Catholicism, Liberalism and Soc ialism,

Dublin.

Gottfried,

F

(1991)

CarlS chmzt t: Politics

and Theory,

London: Greenwood Press.

Graham,

J.

(1974)Donoso Cortes,

Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Habermas,

J.

([1962]1989)

The

Structural Transformation o the Public

Sphere, Cambridge: Polity.

Holmes , S. (1993)

The Anatomy of 'Anti-

Liberalism,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

von Krockow, C. (1990) Die Entscheidung,

Frankfurt am Main: Campus.

Laski,

H.

(1919)

Authority in the Modern

State, New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.

Lowith,

K.

(1995)

Mar tin Heidegger and

European Nihilism,

New York: Columbia

University Press.

McCormick,

J.

(1994) Fear, technology

and the state: Car1 Schmitt, Leo Strauss

and the revival of Hobbes in Weimar

Germany ,

Polztical Theory

22(4).

Mouffe, C. (1993)

The Return of the

Politzcul,

London: Verso.

Nisbet, R. (1986)

Conservatism,

Milton

Keynes: Open University Press.

Plessner, H. ([1931]1981) Macht und

menschliche Natur , in Gesammelte

SchriftenV, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Rorty,

R

(1982)

Consequences of

Pragmatism,

Brighton: Harvester.

Schm it t, C. (1950)

Der Nomos der Erde,

Koln: Greven.

([1919]1985a)

Political Romanticism,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[1922]1985b)

Political Theology,

Cambridge, MA: M IT Press.


25/25

T h e strunge antz-lzberulzsm

?f

Curl Schmztt 457

[l92811 9 8 5 ~ ) he Crtsis of

Parlimentarj~Democmr:)~, ambridge,

M A :

M I T

Press.

(1987) Th e legal world revolution ,

Telos 72.

1990) Th e pl ight of European

jurisprudence , Telos 83.

1992) The constitutional theory of

federation , Telos 91.

1993) Appropriation/distribution/

product ion: toward a proper formulation

of the basic questions of any social and

economic order , Telos 95.

1993) The age of neutralizations

and depoliticizations , 7210s

96.

[ l93311997) The Concept cif the

Political, New Brunswick: Rutgers.

Spengler 0

1928) L)ie3ahre der

Entsrheidz~ng,

Miinchen: Beck.

Ulmcn

G (199

1)

M a x IVeber unrl Curl

Schmitt. Weinheim: Acta Hum aniora.

turner ch - the strange anti-liberalism of carl schmitt

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