Schmitt was a Marxist who embraced nationalism and became the leading theorist for Hitler's National Socialist party. Wolfe is just dressing up Bush=Hitler in fancy language.

pj:

Are you sure? I have a copy of the book with Strauss intro and his role is minimized more than that.

It's been a long time since I last read anything as wrong-headed as Alan Wolfe's notions about liberalism and conservatism.

First and most critical, it's liberals and their neighbors further to the Left who regard politics as an end in itself. Their incessant attempts to politicize the whole of life, such that no area of human thought or endeavor is theoretically free from collectivization and regulation, is precisely what distinguishes them from conservatives at the fundamental level. By contrast, conservatives have to be goaded into politics by a sense of crisis or moral outrage; after the battle is fought, win or lose, they tend to return immediately to their private pursuits.

From that relentless politicization of all things, and that readiness to judge every man solely according to his political stances and affiliations, flows every other important characteristic of American liberalism. Not one of them is consistent with Wolfe's capsule. Indeed, were he to invert his use of "liberal" and "conservative," he'd come much nearer to accuracy.

But Wolfe is merely acting consistently with his fellows. To lie copiously about their ideological opponents, in the hope that sheer volume will prevent meaningful discourse, is the most common tactic on the Left today.

All very true.

But I don't believe that the goal is "to prevent meaningful discourse." (It is, though, a means.)

The goal here is to make sure that the US leaves Iraq with its tail between its legs. The goal is to ensure that the US campaign in Iraq turns out to be a fiasco.

If one has to lie, twist facts, and otherwise engage in nonsensical arguments to achieve the goal, then so be it.

(Not-so-)Newspeak pure and simple.

Recognizing it for what it is is, I believe, the first step in countering it.

oj - In The Road to Serfdom (1944), F. A. Hayek called Schmitt "the legal theorist of National Socialism" (p 79). He further (p 178) quotes "Schmitt, the leading Nazi expert on constitutional law, [writing] that the evolution of government proceeds 'in three dialectic stages: from the absolute state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the neutral state of the liberal nineteenth century to the totalitarian state in which society and state are identical" (in a 1931 book).

Then (p 187) he writes that the assertion that "we can no longer find much meaning in the distinction between society and state" is "precisely the doctrine of Professor CarlSchmitt, the leading Nazi theoretician of totalitarianism and, in fact, the essence of the definition of totalitarianism which that author has given to that term which he himself had introduced".

This is the principal source of my opinion toward Schmitt.

Of course that definition of fascism appealed to Churchill and others, but let me see what I can dig up--the book's around here somewhere...

Here's some:

-Carl Schmitt (July 11 1888 - April 7 1985) (Science Daily)
A Forgotten Thinker On Nation-States vs. Empire (Paul Gottfried, V-Dare)

Schmitt is properly criticized for having joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. But he clearly did so for opportunistic reasons. Attempts to draw a straight line between his association with the Party and his writings of the twenties and early thirties, when he was closely associated with the Catholic Center Party, a predecessor of the Christian Democrats, ignore certain inconvenient facts. In 1931 and 1932, Schmitt urged Weimar president Paul von Hindenburg to suppress the Nazi Party and to jail its leaders. He sharply opposed those in the Center Party who thought the Nazis could be tamed if they were forced to form a coalition government. While an authoritarian of the Right, who later had kind words about the caretaker regime of Franco, he never quite made himself into a plausible Nazi. From 1935 on, the SS kept Schmitt under continuing surveillance.

There are two ideas raised in Schmitt's corpus that deserve attention in our elite-decreed multicultural society. In The Concept of the Political (a tract that first appeared in 1927 and was then published in English in 1976 by Rutgers University) Schmitt explains that the friend/enemy distinction is a necessary feature of all political communities. Indeed what defines the "political" as opposed to other human activities is the intensity of feeling toward friends and enemies, or toward one's own and those perceived as hostile outsiders.

This feeling does not cease to exist in the absence of nation-states. Schmitt argued that friend/enemy distinctions had characterized ancient communities and would likely persist in the more and more ideological environment in which nation-states had grown weaker. The European state system, beginning with the end of the Thirty Years War, had in fact provided the immense service of taming the "political."

The subsequent assaults on that system of nation-states, with their specific and limited geopolitical interests, made the Western world a more feverishly political one, a point that Schmitt develops in his postwar magnum opus Nomos der Erde (now being translated for Telos Press by Gary Ulmen). From the French Revolution on, wars were being increasingly fought over moral doctrines - most recently over claims to be representing "human rights." Such a tendency has replicated the mistakes of the Age of Religious Wars. It turned armed force from a means to achieve limited territorial goals, when diplomatic resources fail, to a crusade for universal goodness against a demonized enemy.

A related idea treated by Schmitt is the tendency toward a universal state (a "New World Order"?). Such a tendency seemed closely linked to Anglo-American hegemony, a theme that Schmitt took up in his commentaries during and after the Second World War.

German historians in the early twentieth century had typically drawn comparisons between, on the one side, Germany and Sparta and, on the other, England (and later the U.S.) and Athens - between what they saw as disciplined land powers and mercantile, expansive naval ones. The Anglo-American powers, which relied on naval might, had less of a sense of territorial limits than landed states. Sea-based powers had evolved into empires, from the Athenians onward.

But while Schmitt falls back, at least indirectly, on this already belabored comparison, he also brings up the more telling point: Americans aspire to a world state because they make universal claims for their way of life. They view "liberal democracy" as something they are morally bound to export. They are pushed by ideology, as well as by the nature of their power, toward a universal friend/enemy distinction.
The Sovereignty of the Political: Carl Schmitt and the Nemesis of Liberalism (S Parvez Manzoor)

Undoubtedly, the easiest access, and the best introduction, to Schmitt's radically original and disturbing vision of politics is afforded by his slim but immensely suggestive treatise, The Concept of the Political. Far more insinuative than what its modest title claims, the treatise forms, according to Leo Strauss, perhaps the most incisive and astute commentator of this infamous text, 'an inquiry into the "order of human things",... into the State.' Instead of offering an exhaustive and academic definition of the political, Schmitt conceptualizes it 'within the totality of human thought and action', in terms of the primordial and seminal antithesis between 'friend' and 'enemy': 'just as in the field of morals, the ultimate distinctions are good and evil, in esthetics, beautiful and ugly, in economics, profitable and unprofitable, so the significantly political distinction is between friend and foe.' For Schmitt, then, the political is primordial; it comes before the State and transcends its mundane and routine policies. It reveals itself, historically, at the foundational moment of the polity, and conceptually, in the unwritten metaphysics of the constitution. Indeed, the political in the specifically Schmittian sense incarnates existential totality and determines a choice between being and nothingness.

The totalizing thrust of Schmitt's argument is directed against liberalism, which by the postulation of a false universalism, according to him, obscures the existentially paramount nature of politics and replaces it with the struggle for purely formal notions of rights. Thus, Schmitt is at pains to underscore that, within the purview of his theory, friend and foe are not to be construed as metaphors or symbols, for they are 'neither normative not pure spiritual antitheses.' Elsewhere, he elaborates the same point in the following manner: 'The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist, theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transaction. 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 always possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined norm nor by the judgement of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.' (26-7; emphasis has been added.)

The political enemy, furthermore, must not be confounded with the private adversary whom one hates. For 'an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.' (28; my emphasis.) Given Schmitt's quintessentially tribal and bellicose conception of politics, it is not surprising that he is not disturbed by the New Testament exhortation: 'Love your enemies' (Matt: 5:44; Luke: 6:27) for the Bible quotation, he claims, does not touch the political antithesis, and 'it certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one's own people.' Thus, loving one's (private) enemy and pursuing the politics of the Holy Crusade are accepted as two complementary religio-political activities. Carrying his argument about the legitimacy of the two-tier, public-private, morality further, Schmitt then appeals to the logic of history itself: 'Never in the thousand year struggle between Christians and Moslems did id occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks.' (29) Thus, defining one's enemy is for him the first step towards defining the innermost self: 'Tell me who your enemy is and I'll tell you who you are,' Schmitt has pronounced on more than one occasion. Little wonder that he claims that 'the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism.'!

Given the possibility of actual, physical killing in a friend-enemy encounter, the political cannot be made subordinate to any other set of values or institution, whether religious, moral, aesthetic or economic. The political transcends all norms and upholds the sovereignty of the existential over the theoretical. Thus, 'war, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy - all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no programme no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy or legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction is not motivated by an existential threat to one's own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically.' (48-9; my italics) The justification for war, then, does not reside in its being fought for ideals or justice, or economic prosperity, but in its being fought for preserving the very existence of the polity.

In the final analysis, the political, inasmuch as it is sovereign, cannot be evaluated and measured by norms that are external to it; nor can it be avoided. The political is the fundamental fact of existence, the basic characteristic of human life from which man cannot escape; or, expressed differently, man would cease to be man by ceasing to be political. From the inevitability of the political, it also follows that pacifism is a lost cause and conciliatory visions of a universal humanity are nothing but pious delusions: 'The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will always be in the world more than just one state. A world state that embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.' (53). It is hardly surprising that Schmitt's concept of the political has been understood as a strongly polemical text that exposes the hypocrisy of liberal humanism. Liberalism, with its predilection for vacuous abstractions, its burdensome legal formalism, its vacillation between military pacifism and moral crusading, its sham universalism of rights and its real espousal of inequality, remains for him the ultimate enemy of the political man. As for liberalism's moral claim to universal humanism, Schmitt is mercilessly candid: 'The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperial expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.'
-Essay: Helmuth Plessner and Carl Schmitt: Closeness and Distance (Marek Cichocki, Centre for Political Thought)

In Schmitt's book on the concept of the political we find a key passage devoted to the problem of relation between anthropological assumptions and political theories. He argues there that all political and state theories can be classified and analysed in terms of their underlying assumptions on human nature. Some of these theories are based on the concept of human nature being intrinsically good, while others are founded on the assumption that human nature is irreversibly evil. Schmitt stresses that this fundamental anthropological difference should not be understood in any substantial moral or religious terms. It is only a regulative difference referring to the main question whether we have to do with a problematic or non-problematic concept of human being, and whether we can infinitely trust it, or maybe we should, rather, stand in awe of it as an unpredictable and in fact dangerous creature. Has the human being a definite and clear-cut character or not - this is for Schmitt the decisive question opening any political reflection. And in deliberating that question he makes a direct reference to Plessner's anthropological concept of the open character of the human being.

Plessner's concept of political anthropology is based on his philosophy of life and constantly acting man. According to that philosophy, acting man is like a king in the sense that he grows into what he is, he realizes all his potential possibilities and controls his destiny only thanks to his activity and creativity. It is not any aim but, rather, acting itself as a permanent process, that gives acting man sense and the ultimate justification. Only by acting, which is of course always an occasional, historical and temporal phenomenon, is the human being able to find access to its essence, greatness and its human nature. No physis exists in the sense of a universal pattern placed beyond the historical and temporal existence of human beings, which should be reflected or imitated in human life. The only unquestionable facts concerning human nature we can ascertain beyond doubt are its impenetrability and openness. An approximate insight into human nature is provided only through the countless human acts rooted in each historical situation. Our nature is impenetrable in terms of knowledge and science, but we receive an occasional and very narrow, mediated access to it through our acts. This point of view allows Plessner to give an anthropological definition of man as a subject responsible for his own world, a creative place from which all timeless systems and norms have come out, giving man a deeper sense and justifying his existence.

We can find a very similar argument in Schmitt's paper of 1929: Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitisierung. Schmitt points out there that all ideas from the spiritual sphere are pluralistic and therefore understandable only through instances of their concrete political existence. Accordingly, each nation has its own idea of nation, and each period in culture has its own way of understanding the idea of culture. In conclusion, Schmitt argues that all the relevant ideas of the spiritual sphere have an existential, rather than normative, character.

That brings us to another important point shared by Plessner and Schmitt, to the problem of decision and its anthropological foundation. According to Plessner's political anthropology, the creativeness of the human being is probably not one of the most important but simply the only guarantee of the emergence, and preservation, of a single, subjective autonomy. Autonomy results from the power able to create it. This situation we all as human beings are confronted with is our destiny we can neither overcome nor repeal. This means that every limit and every horizon enabling one to perceive one's own subjectivity as autonomous, amicable, familiar and existentially different from others, aliens, has to be first generated and then preserved. From that point of view, every kind of identity and difference between human beings is always rooted in a decision and has, in that sense, a historical, changeable and impermanent character. For Plessner, these existential decisions have no links to any kind of physis in the ancient sense of the term, and they are each historical, unexpected and unaccountable. Creative power construed as the destiny of the human being faced with its historical condition is the only source of, and justification for, these decisions and their normative results. This means that every normative rule lasts and is obligatory to the extent defined by that power, which has to be always behind it. There is no normative rule and no normative obligation without a link to the personal, subjective power of creativeness.

For a very similar reason, Schmitt attacked the argument of legal positivism proposed in the theory of Hans Kelsen as an unjustified claim to objectivity and universality placed above and beyond any human historical condition. His concept of sovereignty is based on the same assumptions of the unaccountability of human decisions, which are always 'incurably' deeply rooted in the occasional historical context. Precisely for that reason, no-one can justify the legitimacy of any sovereign decision through reference to the logic of history, to the absolute necessity of the progressive process or to the rational nature of tradition. History and tradition as such have no autonomous meaning and, being ta ton anthropon pragmata and absolutely profane, cannot be treated as a universally binding foundation for the acting human being. Schmitt's definition of nomos, which we find in his Der Nomos der Erde, seems to be decisive for his understanding of normative power. Defining the Greek term nomos as the ruler or the sovereign, Nomos Basileus, Schmitt adduces the famous fragment from Pindar, quoted also by Herodotus and Plato in his Gorgias, where law was described as a ruler acting all-powerfully and vehemently. Keeping his distance from the sophist Callicles and interpreting his statement in Gorgias as agreement to the simple normative force of the existing facts (Die normative Kraft des Faktischen) and the arbitrary right of the stronger, Schmitt argues that the original sense of the Greek nomos is, rather, the absolute immediateness and directness of the power creating the legal order, a pure act of legitimacy. This kind of creation of normative lines and horizons could be compared with the situation when someone has put down the first line on an entirely blank sheet of paper, or with the first land measurements taken on a newly discovered continent.

To sum up the main assumptions underlying Schmitt's concept of the political and Plessner's political anthropology, the political as a historical phenomenon arises from the human condition that should be perceived and understood, in some sense, as a lack (according to Christian tradition) and as an immanent openness and impenetrability (in accordance with the philosophy of permanently acting man). From that point of view they both, Schmitt and Plessner, cannot approve of the old understanding of human nature in the sense of physis, as we find it in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. This rejection of that fundamental idea of ancient political philosophy seems to be a decisive common feature in their philosophical approach to the problem of the political in modern times. The question whether to reject or not to reject the Greek concept of nature need not be solved automatically by declaring oneself in favour of modernity. In any case, the rejection of the Greek physis in political philosophy is not self-evident in the context of modernity, as the case of Leo Strauss clearly shows. In particular, Strauss gives a very clear definition of political philosophy, and of philosophy in general, reconstructed on the basis of the ancient concept of the political. To him, philosophy simply means an attempt to replace the widespread opinions (doxa) on the notion of the whole with the authentic knowledge (episteme) of the whole. By no means does he reject history: on the contrary, he perceives it as the only possible and attainable way for modern man to learn and retrieve the ancient and lost meaning of human nature. In a letter of 1946 addressed to Karl Loewith he makes a very significant remark on Loewith's approach to philosophy, which applies to Plessner and Schmitt, too. Strauss raises objections to Loewith that, instead of understanding philosophy as replacing doxa with episteme, he prefers philosophy in the sense of a mere self-understanding and self-interpretation of man, which in that particular case means man evidently historically determined. Finally, this point of view on philosophy inevitably leads, so Strauss, to a split between history and nature, and results in a complete philosophical rejection of any strong approach to human nature. Against that kind of Strauss' argument, Plessner would probably assert that his approach to nature does not mean its total rejection in favour of history. It is just a frank assertion that the link between nature and historical man necessarily has a paradoxical shape. That is the only thing that can be established from the human standpoint. Historically determined doxas are the one and only way available to man to provide him with any approximate idea of what his ahistorical nature can be. That situation is in itself paradoxical. Schmitt agrees in point of fact with this paradoxical view of human nature as an impenetrable phenomenon, and in that sense he stands entirely by Plessner and Loewith in their controversy against Strauss and his view on political philosophy. One can argue that Plessner's and Schmitt's position aims to recover that sense of the political which was rejected in Plato's political philosophy, as ta ton anthropon pragmatta - a sphere of human activity and human business. To avoid completely reducing politics to the simple techne and identifying them with material, worldly needs, Plessner ennobles ta ton anthropon pragmatta with the concept of the creative nature of human activity, and Schmitt with his concept of sovereignty. The political is thereby closed within the limits of the human, historical world, and any further deliberations on its metaphysical, rational or religious contexts are cut short.
-Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) (generation-online.org)
-LECTURE: Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes on violence and identity (Gabriella Slomp)

Rightly or wrongly, Carl Schmitt believes that Liberalism fails to see that politics is above all a struggle to establish our identity. In his view, Liberalism does not see identity as a problem, but as a starting point, as an assumption. As identity and rights are not questioned, but assumed as given, politics for liberals becomes just one field of human interaction, one among many, and in some respects less important and less fundamental than, for example, economic interaction. Exactly because liberals do not feel that identity is at stake, their politics is marked by never-ending discussions, procrastination, indecision, and general gossiping. Liberal politics becomes a discourse on matters of minor concern; tradeoffs and compromise are always considered possible because what is discussed in never existential. As a result, Liberal politics is never serious. Only when identity, life and death are at stake, we have according to Carl Schmitt a real concern, a real commitment, a real determination to find solutions, a real need to take decisions. When identity is at stake, compromise and tradeoffs are inconceivable. According to Carl Schmitt, the struggle for identity is real and not a product of philosophical imagination; it is a struggle that takes place all the time, both at a national and international level. From this briefest of accounts, we can see why, although most readers of Carl Schmitt regard him as a thinker with a remarkably penetrating mind, his concept of political has not been taken seriously (at least, in the Anglo-Saxon world). Some have claimed that liberalism can accommodate the problem of identity as defined by Carl Schmitt others have dismissed his views as irrelevant in the Western democratic world.

[T]he leading Nazi expert on constitutional law?

Does he keep company with Britain's leading chef? America's greatest opera singer? Canada's most decorated warrior? The UN's most ethical bureaucrat?

Nazism = Socialism.

oj -- was that a comment or a post? Inquiring minds ...

Uncle:

I added it to the post but I have no idea how people keep track of comment threads where they're participating--the site e-mails them to me--so I just wanted to make sure folks got to see the material.

The question is does Schmitt's fascism necessarily equate to National Socialism. It sounds like he was a pretty convinced anti-Semite at any rate.

Here's a good essay on fascism more generically:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/008763.html

oj --

I got a little caried away. What I meant to say is: Fascism = Socialism

The contention seemed to me to be that Carl Schmitt was a conservative.

RE: Post vs comment

First off IT IS YOUR BLOG but many bloggers that I have run across prefer "teaser & link" to a post length comment.

As a non-blogger I know that I prefer that approach when ever possible. Some folks don't have a web site, you do (I think.) [grin]

Uncle:

In school we were taught that Fascism was authoritarian, but not totalitarian--leaving the economy relatively capitalist and institutions like the Church fairly free. Hitler was obviously a socialist. Guys like Pinochet and Franco weren't. Is Nazism even fascism?

Fascism was Mussolini's movement, and that had the same origins as Nazism. I'm inclined to say they were the same except that Hitler followed fascism's logic to its conclusion with German thoroughness, while Mussolini made compromises. By the standard of intellectual origins, Pinochet at least was not a fascist (I don't know much about Franco), but rather an old-fashioned authoritarian. Of course his practice had some resemblances to Mussolini-style fascism. Perhaps we need a larger vocabulary to distinguish dictatorships.

oj - Re Schmitt, it seems to me the core of his thought was that (a) a totalitarian state was the natural and desirable culmination of social evolution, and (b) that such a state would be formed and live in a condition of perpetual war. This was essentially the same as Lenin's view. The Communists perceived the war as a class struggle, while the Nazis perceived it as a national/racial struggle, but both thought they should be rulers of a totalitarian state at perpetual war.

From your quotes, it appears that the post-war Schmitt clung to (a) and (b), but reconceived the war as now being conducted along ideological lines, with Anglo-American Liberalism as the evil to be warred against.

pj:

And we'd agree with his final analysis, though we're on the other side, no? America is universalist and is destroying all -isms and cultures in its way. Good riddance.

So he only became a Nazi for pragmatic reasons....

(Kind of like Heidegger, eh? Oh well, Hegelians will be Hegelians, don't you know....)

But he still had the prescience (not uncommon for the paranoid and psychopathic then and now) to view America as the true enemy. And to explain so painstakingly why, for the authoritarian personality, freedom is such a threat.

America should be proud to have such enemies as he.

Carl Schmitt was an old style European conservative. After the Nazi electoral triumph he thought he could help articulate Nazi political action to serve his political ideology to shore up European identity against both Bolshevism and American liberalism.

The actual Nazis didn't think it was right that this man who did not join the party early and did not fight in the streets should define Nazi constitutional theory. And indeed, Schmitt really didn't understand what Hitler actually wanted to do. So the Nazi's removed him from power before too long.

Like many people, Schmitt projected onto Hitler and the Nazis what he wanted them to be or thought they could control them. Almost everyone in Germany made the same mistake.

Schmitt was no Marxist. He also wasn't an American style conservative. People are way too loose in using a convenient label and then incorporating all sorts of baggage the label carries, but which is not based on the actual matter at hand.