Abstract
In Concept of the Political, Schmitt does not start with tabula rasa.1 Rather, he takes his starting point to be the existing interpretation of the political by his own society2 and the history of political theorization. Schmitt points out that, for liberal societies, the political is an activity that takes place in a predetermined area at predetermined times. Violence that takes place in the street or out of hours does not qualify as political according to the definition of his contemporaries; instead, such violence remains invisible. Liberal societies and liberal theorists emerge from Schmitt’s account as ‘a herd of blind men led by a blind man who gropes his way forward with a cane’.3
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Notes
As pointed out by Bolsinger,’ schmitt’s understanding of theory and concept formation must be seen as sensitive to the real existing social and political contexts’. See E. Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political: Carl Schmitt’s and Lenin’s Political Realism (London: Westport, 2001), p. 24.
For example, he draws the reader’s attention to the fact that ‘the word political is today often used interchangeably with party politics’. C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [1932] 1996), p. 32.
Although the expression is Schmitt’s own, he himself did not use it in relation to liberalism. C. Schmitt, Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Baskerville: MIT Press, [1922, 1934] 1985), p. 54.
Schmitt writes that ‘a part of the theories and postulates which presuppose man to be good is liberal’ C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 60; on the romantic ambiguity about good and bad human nature see C. Schmitt, Political Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, [1919, 1925] 2001), p. 124.
Schmitt’s original list can be found in Schmitt, op. cit., p. 61. As Herbert Butterfield puts it: ‘The truth is that if men were good enough neither the ancient city state nor the medieval order of things nor modern nationalism would collapse. Neither humanism, nor liberalism, nor democracy would be faced with intellectual bankruptcy’. H. Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell & Sons 1954), p. 56.
C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, [1938] 1996), p. 43.
See, for example, C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, pp. 43–4; C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, [1923] 1985)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1954)
E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, [1952] 1987), p. 77.
Richard Mulgan, ‘The Role of Friendship in Aristotle’s Political Theory’, in P. King and H. Devere (eds) The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (London: Frank Cass, 2000) 15–32
J.M. Cooper, ‘Aristotle on Friendship’ in A.O. Rorty (ed.) Essays on Aristotles’ Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) 301–40
A.W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
On the history of friendship see for example the Introduction by Preston King in P. King and H. Devere (eds) The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 1–14.
See, for example, G.L. Ulmen, ‘Return of the Foe’, Telos, 72 (1987) 187–93.
G. Schwab, ‘Enemy or Foe: A Conflict of Modern Politics’, Telos, 72 (1987) 195–201
E. Kennedy, ‘Hostis not inimicus. Toward a Theory of the Public in the Work of Carl Schmitt’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 10 (1997) 35–47.
S. Prozorov, ‘Liberal Enmity: the Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35:1 (2006) 75–99.
T. Hobbes, Behemoth (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 110.
Ibid., p. 28. Derrida has rightly pointed out that Schmitt seems to be unaware that there is an asymmetry between the Romans’ distinction inimicus / hostis and Plato’s distinction quoted by Schmitt. Whereas Plato’s means enemy in interstate wars and can be compared to the Latin hostis or public enemy, Plato’s means enemy in civil war and is therefore different from the Latin inimicus or private enemy. See J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 89ff.
‘Who can understand a thesis formulated in such abstract terms?’, C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 7th edn (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), p. 13.
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by E. Curley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, [1651] 1994), p. 76.
Schmitt’s interpretation of the Cold War is not unusual: ‘the Cold War was a classic example of splitting between righteous self (the West) and a projected evil (the East)’, N. Gurr and B. Cole, The New Face of Terrorism (London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002), p. 187.
On the non-totalitarianism of Carl Schmitt, see G. Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921–1936 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), pp. 146–8.
For an interesting discussion of this and other issues see E. Van der Zweerde, ‘Friendship and the Political’, Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy, 10:2 (2007) 147–265.
C. Clausewitz, On War (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1997).
He writes: ‘Ich bin der letzte, bewuβte Vertreter des jus publicum Europaeum, sein letzter Leherer und Forscher in einem existenziellen Sinne’, C. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, [1950] 2002), p. 75.
J. Bendersky, ‘Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg’, Telos, 72 (1987) 91–107
This is discussed in B. Arditi and J. Valentine, Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 36–43.
A discussion of the influence of Schmitt’s thought on the European Left can be found in J-W. Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 117
F. Dallmayr, ‘Derrida and friendship’ in P. King and H. Devere (eds) The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (London: Frank Cass, 2000) 105–30.
G. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 2000).
Important contributions to this debate can be found in P. Hirst, Representative Democracy and its Limits (Cambridge: Polity, 1990)
J. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
R. Bellamy, Rethinking Liberalism (London and New York: Pinter, 2000)
J. Huysmans, ‘Know your Schmitt: a godfather of truth and the spectre of Nazism’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1997) 323–8
D. Kelly, ‘Rethinking Franz Neumann’s Route to Behemoth’, History of Political Thought, 23 (2002) 458–96
R. Cristi, ‘Carl Schmitt on Liberalism, Democracy and Catholicism’, History of Political Thought, 14 (1993) 281–300
J.Z. Muller, ‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the radical conservative critique of liberal democracy in the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, 12 (1991) 695–715
P. Caldwell, ‘Ernst Forsthoff and the legacy of radical conservative state theory in the Federal Republic of Germany’, History of Political Thought, 15 (1994) 615–41
W. Scheuerman, ‘The rule of law under siege: Carl Schmitt and the death of the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, 14 (1993) 265–80
W. Scheuerman, ‘Legal indeterminacy and the origins of Nazi legal thought: the case of Carl Schmitt’, History of Political Thought, 17 (1996) 571–90.
S. Holmes, The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994)
E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2004)
H. Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
H. Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998).
J. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 208.
S. Holmes, ‘“Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich” by J. Bendersky, Book Review’, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983) 1066–7
J.P. Sartre, What is Literature? (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949).
M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. xlvi.
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© 2009 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2009). Continuity and Novelty, Clarifications and Recommendations. In: Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234673_2
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