Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [reprint 2007].
In what concrete apparatus does political authority lie? Answers could be God or natural law or the social contract? That might be true in an ultimate sense, but power is always mediated. To phrase it another way: who is the actual sovereign?
Carl Schmitt begins on rather innocuous grounds: the state cannot be simply equated with the political. In other words, society cannot be equated with the political. What, then, is the political? It begins “with the distinction between friend and enemy” (Schmitt 26). To be sure, as Schmitt notes, this is a criterion, not an exhaustive definition. (Schmitt is using ‘enemy’ in a terminological sense, not in a moral sense of ‘bad guy’.) The enemy is one who intends to negate your way of life. To ward off confusion, Schmitt says it is a public, not a private enemy. Indeed, the enemy in this sense “need not be hated personally” (29).
Jesus’s comments do not contradict this. He is speaking of private enemies. As Schmitt notes, “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks” (29).
The contrast between friend and enemy is most stark in the context of war. There contrast becomes absolute and internal tensions within the political structure become relativised (e.g., as a patriot I dislike moderates, but in the face of an existential external threat, I put that dislike aside). Indeed, “War is the existential negation of the enemy” (33). A world without war would be a world without the friend-enemy distinction: it would be a world without politics.
We can now tentatively define the political as an entity which is able to escalate the friend-enemy distinction to war. It is any community “that possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of promoting that decisive step” (37).
Subordinate societies within the political certainly exist. These are Burke’s “little platoons” or “free associations.” They are necessary to health of the state. Schmitt’s reiterates his point, though, with stark clarity: “the political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives [its power]. It exists or does not exist. If it exists, it is the supreme, that is, in the decisive case, the authoritative entity” (43-44). We might recoil at his conclusion, but it remains true that the political, not the church or the guild, is able to use the sword.
I think at this point Schmitt is still at the level of theory, for there are examples in European history where entities other than the state had the power to wage war. Theoretically, he is correct.
Any group that has the power to make this distinction and does not do so ceases to exist. As Schmitt notes, if a group within the political chooses not to engage in the friend-enemy distinction, it in fact joins the enemy. “Only a weak people will disappear” (53).
Interestingly enough, we can apply Schmitt’s insights against globalism. If the political presupposes an enemy, it means another political entity, another state, must exist. “As long as a state exists, there will always ben in the world more than one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist” (53). The enemies will not cease to exist. The world-state will simply transfer the category to a group of whom it deems “deplorables.”
The Contradiction of Liberalism
Liberalism seeks to protect individual rights and liberty. It does so by hindering the state’s control. While noble, this also means liberalism cannot really accommodate the existential nature of the political as mentioned above. If war arises, the political can demand that you sacrifice your life. Classical liberalism says it can’t make that demand. It is here that Schmitt gives his famous rule of the exception, the rule that fundamentally kills liberalism: “An individualism in which anyone other than the free individual himself were to decide upon the substance and dimension of his freedom would be only an empty phrase” (71).
This doesn’t mean liberal societies cease to exist. They undergo a transformation. “A politically united people becomes…a culturally interested public.” “Government and power turn into propaganda and mass manipulation, and at the economic pole, control” (72).
Evaluation
This isn’t as shocking as it appears. Politics is about negating the other. I want my political candidate to win. That means I want the other to lose. Completely. Democrats want Republicans to lose. Republicans want patriotic Republicans to lose, and so on. Of course, at this point it hasn’t yet come to war. Actually, that’s’ not true. The Democratic Party has numerous paramilitary groups burning cities.
I’m not sure I would build a political worldview on Schmitt’s thinking. Questions like pursuing the Good and virtue are not relevant for him. He doesn’t dismiss them, to be sure, but they have no meaning on the friend-enemy distinction. Nonetheless, he writes with bracing clarity and forces the reader to grapple with hard issues.
Note on Hegel: all spirit is present spirit. Hegel is also the first to bring the nature of the bourgeois forward: “The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere” (Schmitt 62). The enemy, for Hegel, is “negated otherness.”
Scholastic Tory 