Like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt was a German philosopher who became a prominent member of the Nazi Party. Because he was a political philosopher and jurist, in many ways, his academic views had much more practical import to the Third Reich. Today, Schmitt remains decidedly relevant as he is actively read and often cited by the Chinese Communist Party inteligencia. In this short book, Schmitt is concerned mainly with external politics—the politics between nations. His philosophy is political realism on steroids.
Schmitt begins by stating that society and the State are not synonymous. Neither is the State exactly politics. “The equation state=politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.” For Schmitt, the State is always above society, “German political science originally maintained (under the impact of Hegel’s philosophy of state) that the state is qualitatively distinct from society and higher than it. A state standing above society could be called universal but not total,” necessarily.
The single idea that pervades all of Schmitt’s work is the friend versus enemy dichotomy. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation…. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor…. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible…. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence…. The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols.”
Politics, for Schmitt, stands above all other cultural standards and those other standards, in fact, cannot exist absent the political. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” That is because the political unit, the State, holds the life and death of each of its subjects within its hands. This is the case no matter its form—monarchical, democratic, theocratic, or socialist. “By virtue of this power over the physical life of men, the political community transcends all other associations or societies.”
For Schmitt, it was the pessimistic political philosophers who were on the right track. “Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and often Fichte presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy. For Hobbes, a truly powerful and systematic political thinker, the pessimistic conception of man is the elementary presupposition of a specific system of political thought. He also recognized correctly that the conviction of each side that it possesses the truth, the good, and the just bring about the worst enmities, finally the war of all against all…. [Pessimist] realism can frighten men in need of security…. As long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists.” However, in the case of any emergency, man reverts to his beastly nature.
In Schmitt’s system, the political entity is opposed by the liberal individual. He stands for his own rights beyond and above the political fray. “The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consistent individualism, leads necessarily to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces and forms of state and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics…. [There exists] absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics. The systemic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the state.” The demands of the State cannot help but be anathema to the true liberal for “the political entity must demand the sacrifice of life. Such a demand is in no way justifiable by the individualism of liberal thought.”
According to Schmitt, by way of its self-seeming neutrality the economic sphere has tried to encroach upon the demands of politics. “A domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility.” However, it will not work when push comes to shove. “State and politics cannot be exterminated. The world will not be depoliticized with the aid of definitions and constructions, all of which circle the polarity of ethics and economics…. This allegedly nonpolitical and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.” In the end, pure economic relations merely put on a show, serve the interests of the ruling status quo powers, and sneak politics in through the backdoor.
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