The Cult of Carl Schmitt

 

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/the-cult-of-carl-schmitt/

RICHARD WOLIN

The Cult of Carl Schmitt

         I

         As a political thinker, the German philosopher Carl Schmitt was enamored of symbols and myths. His biographer has shown that during the 1930s Schmitt was convinced that providing National Socialism with a rational justification was self-contradictory and self-defeating. The alternative that was conceived by Schmitt, a conservative who was an eminent member of the Nazi Party, was to establish the Third Reich’s legitimacy by means of symbolism and imagery culled from the realms of religion and myth. Schmitt’s attraction to symbols and myths stemmed from his skepticism about the value of “concepts,” which he viewed only instrumentally, as Kampfbegriffe or weapons of struggle. As Schmitt explained, about reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, “we learn how concepts can become weapons.” “Every political concept,” he claimed, “is a polemical concept,” a statement that reflects the essential bellicosity of his thought.

When it came to fathoming the mysteries of human existence, Schmitt insisted that the cognitive value of symbols and myths was far superior to the meager results of conceptual knowledge. This deep mistrust of reason was related to his veneration of “political theology,” which Schmitt introduced into the mainstream of modern political thought. Schmitt’s devaluation of secular knowledge was exemplified by his well-known dictum that “all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts,” an assertion that reflected his disdain for the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism. That disdain is what has given Schmitt’s thought new life in our own bleak and inflamed times.

         Schmitt was born in 1888 and died in 1985. He was a constitutional theorist who wrote brilliant polemics against parliamentary democracy and on behalf of dictatorial rule. He played a prominent role in providing a pseudo-legal justification for the Nazi seizure of power and was a virulent anti-Semite. During the early 1920s, the myth that captured Schmitt’s imagination was the “myth of the nation,” a trope that Mussolini had refashioned into a core precept of Italian fascism. Schmitt explored this theme in 1923 in the concluding pages of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. His unabashedly enthusiastic treatment of unreason offers an important clue with respect to his future political allegiances.

Echoing the phraseology of the proto-fascist and anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barrès, who died in that year, Schmitt extolled Mussolini’s March on Rome as a triumph of “national energy.” He thereby acknowledged fascism’s capacity to infuse modern politics with a vitality that was absent from the stolid proceduralism of political liberalism. Schmitt was present at the University of Munich in 1921 when Max Weber delivered his celebrated lecture on “Science as a Vocation.” Schmitt agreed wholeheartedly with Weber’s characterization of modernity as an “iron cage:” a world in which the corrosive powers of “rationalization” and “disenchantment” had precipitated a crisis of “meaninglessness.”

Schmitt’s antidote to this malaise, and to the intellectual maturity of liberalism, was his “decisionism” — his reconceptualization of sovereignty as the right to decide on the “state of exception.” The ruler was the one, the only one, who had the power to decree a state of exception, and to enforce it. Schmitt attributed a cultural and even epistemological superiority to the “exception” as opposed to the “norm” and the “rule.” It was the antithesis of Weberian disenchantment. As Schmitt exulted, “In the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” In keeping with the discourse of political theology, Schmitt stressed the parallels between the “state of exception” in jurisprudence and the “miracle” in theology.

Schmitt exalted the fascist coup as a historical and philosophical turning point in the struggle to surmount the straitjacket of rule-guided bourgeois “normativism,” a legacy of the Enlightenment that Kulturkritiker such as Nietzsche and Spengler deemed responsible for modernity’s precipitous descent into “nihilism.” For Schmitt, the March on Rome was the state of exception come to life. The scholarly nature of his treatise notwithstanding, Schmitt was unable to conceal his prodigious pro-fascist fervor. “Until now,” he wrote, “the democracy of mankind and parliamentarism has only once been contemptuously pushed aside through the conscious appeal to myth, and that was an example of the irrational power of the national myth. In his famous speech of October 1922 in Naples before the March on Rome, Mussolini said, ‘We have created a myth, this myth is a belief, a noble enthusiasm, it does not need to be reality, it is a striving and a hope, belief and courage. Our myth is the nation, the great nation which we want to make into a concrete reality for ourselves’.”

Schmitt celebrated Mussolini’s mobilization of the “national myth” as “the most powerful symptom of the decline of the… rationalism of parliamentary thought … [and the] ideology of Anglo-Saxon liberalism.” (We would now call Schmitt’s position “post-liberalism.”) Italian fascism was the harbinger of a brave new world of conservative revolutionary political ascendancy: a glorious form of Herrschaft predicated on the values of “order, discipline, and hierarchy.” Mussolini’s putsch represented much more than a simple “regime change.” It signified a qualitative setback for the “ideas of 1789” and a resounding triumph of the counterrevolutionary ethos, as represented by the “Catholic philosophers of state” — Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), and the relatively unknown Spaniard Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853) — whom Schmitt revered.

Following the Great War, the political challenge that Schmitt confronted was how to “actualize” the tenets of counterrevolutionary thought in a godless secular age whose assault on the twin pillars of traditional political authority, throne and altar, had eliminated absolute monarchy as a viable political option. Schmitt’s French doppelgänger, Charles Maurras, the leader of the Action Française, grappled with this dilemma as well. Schmitt was an avid reader of Action Française, which Maurras edited, and he regarded Maurras as France’s most interesting thinker. Maurras, despite his counterrevolutionary revulsion against the legacy of 1789, remained anachronistically wedded to monarchism. Schmitt, by contrast, opted for a Flucht nach vorne, what we would call a forward defense, which is to say, he went on the attack. At the dawn of what he believed would be a new post-liberal era, Schmitt made a definitive break with all forms of traditionalism with his particular doctrine of dictatorship.

Schmitt found ample ideological support for his authoritarian credo in the counterrevolutionary doctrines of Maistre and Donoso Cortés, both of whom occupied a privileged position in Schmitt’s pantheon of esteemed intellectual precursors. In 1821, in Les Soirées de St. Petersbourg, Maistre — like Schmitt a proponent of “political theology” — exalted the figure of the Executioner as God’s emissary on earth and an agent of Divine justice. Maistre apotheosized the Executioner as a puissance créatrice, a creative force, and an être extraordinaire, an extraordinary being. Maistre maintained that, in view of humanity’s innate propensity for evil, the Executioner was the ultimate guarantor of secular order. As such, he alone separated human society from a headlong descent into anarchy and chaos.

Yet it was Donoso Cortés’ unmatched political clairvoyance that expanded Schmitt’s horizons, thereby allowing Schmitt to transcend the constraints of traditional conservatism, whose gaze — as the case of Charles Maurras demonstrated — was obsessively and counter-productively fixated on the past. In Political Theology, Schmitt praised Donoso Cortés as a paragon of “decisionistic thinking and a Catholic philosopher of state who was intensely conscious of the metaphysical kernel of all politics.” According to Schmitt, Donoso Cortés was the only counterrevolutionary thinker who drew the proper conclusion from the “Scythian fury” of the revolutions of 1848, which “godless anarchists” such as Bakunin and Proudhon had directed against the forces of the ancien régime: that absolute monarchy had indisputably become a thing of the past. It was over. As Schmitt put it in Political Theology, insofar as “there were no more kings, the epoch of royalism had reached its end.” The conclusion that Donoso Cortés drew was that because “[monarchical] legitimacy no longer existed in the traditional sense… there was only one solution: dictatorship.”

Donoso Cortés exalted dictatorship as an inviolable and sacrosanct decision — a decision, that, as Schmitt explained, is “independent of argumentative substantiation” and that “terminates any further discussion about whether there may still be some doubt.” Schmitt’s encounter with Donoso Cortés’ “decisionism” was the “primal scene” of his political philosophy. It determined what Schmitt described in Roman Catholicism as Political Form in 1925 as the “complex oppositorum” between political theology and secular political rule. Schmitt embraced Donoso Cortés’ Christological understanding of anarchists and socialist as agents of the Antichrist, as political actors whose goal it was to “disseminate Satan.” For Schmitt, Donoso Cortés had correctly understood that the momentous battle between “absolute monarchy” and “godless anarchism” was not merely another profane political conflict. Instead it was a struggle that anticipated the Last Judgment.

Donoso Cortés’ apocalyptic view of politics as a final struggle between Good and Evil became the cornerstone of Schmitt’s “decisionism.” Schmitt praised decision as a force that “frees itself from all normative ties and thereby becomes absolute.” Hence, according to Schmitt, it was the “royal road” to dictatorship. As he explained in Political Theology:

The true significance of counterrevolutionary philosophers of state [such as Maistre, de Bonald, and Donoso Cortés] lies in the consistency with which they decide. They heightened the moment of the decision to such an extent that the notion of legitimacy . . . was finally dissolved. As soon as Donoso Cortés realized that the period of monarchy had come to an end because there no longer were kings . . . he brought his decisionism to its logical conclusion: he demanded a political dictatorship. . . Donoso Cortés was convinced that the final battle had arrived. In the face of radical evil, the only solution is dictatorship.

Donoso Cortés’ epiphany concerning the political-theological significance of dictatorship anticipated the Grand Inquisitor episode of The Brothers Karamazov. The important parallels between Schmitt’s views on dictatorship and Dostoevsky’s allegorical treatment of it were not lost on the renegade Jewish theologian Jacob Taubes. Following World War II, Taubes wrestled profoundly with Schmitt, whom he called the “apocalyptic prophet of the counterrevolution,” and with whom he had an interesting correspondence. Taubes’ reflections concerning the totemic significance that Schmitt attributed to Dostoevsky’s parable about the political consequences of human sinfulness are worth citing:

I had quickly come to see Carl Schmitt as an incarnation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. During a stormy conversation at Plettenberg in 1980, Schmitt told me that anyone who failed to see that the Grand Inquisitor was right about the sentimentality of Jesuitical piety had grasped neither what a Church was for, nor what Dostoevsky—contrary to his own conviction—had “really conveyed, compelled by the sheer force of the way in which he posed the problem.” I always read Carl Schmitt with interest, often captivated by his intellectual brilliance and pithy style. But in every word I sensed something alien to me, the kind of fear and anxiety one has before a storm, an anxiety that lies concealed in the secularized messianic art of Marxism. Carl Schmitt seemed to me to be the Grand Inquisitor of all heretics.

Support for Taubes’ intuition about Schmitt and the Grand Inquisitor as fraternal spirits is provided by a friend from Schmitt’s Munich days. In a letter in February 1922, Hermann Merk suggested to Schmitt, half-seriously, that, “if someone were to establish a Lehrstuhl at the University of Munich for the justification of the Spanish Inquisition, you would be the ideal person to occupy it, and I would be your most devoted student!”

Schmitt’s glorification of dictatorship as a sovereign decision that “terminates any further discussion” resurfaced in his landmark debate in 1931 with Hans Kelsen, the eminent jurist and legal philosopher who was forced to leave Germany two years later because he was a Jew, about who is the “Guardian of the Constitution.” Schmitt’s numerous champions have portrayed his defense of executive sovereignty as a last-ditch attempt to safeguard the Weimar Republic against the encroachments of political extremism, both left and right. They have neglected to consider the political-theological underpinnings of Schmitt’s worldview. In the colloquy with Schmitt, Kelsen, a vociferous champion of Rechtsstaatlichkeit (rule of law), advocated strengthening the federal constitutional court as the instance of last resort. Schmitt, conversely, basing himself on Article 48, the Weimar Constitution’s notorious emergency powers proviso, argued in favor of a “sovereign” presidential dictatorship. In light of Schmitt’s strong commitment to the paradigm of political theology, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, in the debate with Kelsen, he favored “saving” democracy by destroying its institutional and normative guarantees. As Jürgen Habermas has aptly commented, “Anyone who would want to replace a constitutional court by appointing the head of the executive branch as the “Guardian of the Constitution” — as Carl Schmitt wanted to do in his day with the German president — twists the meaning of the separation of powers in the constitutional state into its very opposite.”

A year later, in July 1932, Schmitt played a key role in the infamous Preussenschlag controversy, Chancellor Franz von Papen’s constitutional coup against Prussia’s Social Democratic government. Schmitt vigorously argued the case on behalf of the Reich before the federal court in Leipzig. As chancellor, von Papen had contributed significantly to Prussia’s civic disarray by lifting the federal ban against the SA, in an ill-conceived attempt to curry favor with the Nazis. In January 1933, von Papen was named as Hitler’s vice-chancellor. In April, he appointed Schmitt to draft legislation that merged the Länder with the federal government in Berlin. By eliminating the last vestiges of provincial legal autonomy, the Gleichschaltung (synchronization) measures promulgated by Schmitt effectively sounded the death knell of the Weimar Republic. They marked a point of no return on the way to the Nazis’ consolidation of totalitarian rule.

In light of Schmitt’s concerted efforts to undermine the Weimar Republic’s constitutional stability, as well as the significant role that he played in providing the nascent Hitler-Staat with a veneer of juridical legitimacy, it is not surprising that after the war he was known as the “gravedigger of the Weimar Republic.” The pivotal role that Schmitt played in contributing to the Weimar Republic’s demise cannot be understood apart from his underlying commitment to the counterrevolutionary political theology of Maistre, de Bonald, and Donoso Cortés. In keeping with their visceral aversion to the heritage of “1789,” Schmitt viewed political liberalism’s fitful ascent during the nineteenth century with similar contempt. Following the revolutions of 1848, Donoso Cortés — an intrepid defender of monarchism and an ideological precursor of the “clerico-fascism” of Franco and Salazar — condemned the heretical strivings of a new generation of political radicals as “Satanism” pure and simple.

True to his counterrevolutionary lineage, Schmitt’s lifelong ideological animus against parliamentarism and the rule of law was motivated by a similar set of political-theological concerns. Schmitt, too, displayed a visceral aversion to the precepts of modern secularism and its political corollaries: humanism, liberalism, constitutionalism, and social democracy. Consequently, following the Nazi seizure of power, Schmitt had no compunction about glorifying the Hitler-Diktatur as a “Katechon,” a “restrainer” or “bulwark” who staves off the advent of the Antichrist, whose contemporary “agents” were the godless and heretical representatives of the political left: liberals, socialists, Bolshevists, communists, anarchists, and of course Jews.

 

         Schmitt’s glorification of the “national myth” comes in a chapter of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy devoted to “Irrationalist Theories of the Direct Use of Force.” His treatment of this theme was nothing if not timely. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, overthrew Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government and set the stage for seventy-four years of murderous dictatorial rule. The events in Russia had a significant ripple effect. In 1919, Bolshevik-inspired “council republics” were proclaimed in Bavaria and Hungary. Within months, however, both regimes were ruthlessly suppressed by counterrevolutionary militias that reveled in profligate acts of “White Terror.”

Among paramilitary veterans groups, such as the German Freikorps and the Italian squadre d’azione, violence was elevated to the level of a secular religion. In Central and Eastern Europe, right-wing forces frequently targeted Jews, whom they associated with the “Bolshevik menace,” notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of Jews were steadfastly opposed to communism. In Germany, antisemitism was the ideological catalyst behind the assassination of prominent Jewish politicians such as the Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner in 1919 and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. In Russia and Eastern Europe, heightened antisemitism incited indiscriminate and bloody pogroms. During the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921, counterrevolutionary armies in Ukraine murdered an estimated thirty thousand Jews.

During the war Schmitt was stationed in Munich, where he worked in the intelligence services of the German General Staff. His primary assignment was to monitor contacts between left-wing politicians and pacifists in neighboring Switzerland. The White Terror in Munich — much of which Schmitt witnessed first-hand — was especially bloody. Over six hundred people lost their lives, numerous sympathizers of the “council-republics” were summarily executed after the hostilities had ceased. Similarly, in Hungary, when Béla Kun’s Soviet Republic imploded in August 1919, 1,500 persons were killed, over three times the number of those who perished at the hands of the “Reds.”

The political tumult that rocked Germany following the left-wing revolution in November 1918, when workers’ and soldiers’ councils proliferated in the wake of the Kaiserreich’s collapse, might accurately be described as a permanent “state of emergency.” Both the war years — when civilian rule was de facto suspended in favor of the Ludendorff-Hindenburg dictatorship — and the prolongation of martial law during the postwar period conditioned Schmitt to accept the Ausnahmezustand, or state of emergency, as the new normal. It became one of his contributions to the vocabulary of modern political philosophy. It reinforced his commitment to authoritarian rule as well as his innate mistrust of civilian interference in politics. Schmitt’s inaugural lecture at the University of Strasbourg, in 1916, had examined the constitutional (staatsrechtlich) parameters of “Dictatorship and State of Siege.” The superiority of dictatorship over “constitutionalism” and “legalism” — both of which hampered the political sovereign’s ability to act forcefully and decisively in a state of emergency — became the defining theme of Schmitt’s work. It was not by chance, therefore, that in 1921 Schmitt selected Dictatorship as the theme, and the stark title, of one of his first major scholarly works.

The apotheosis of political violence that accompanied the Great War and the spate of civil wars that followed conditioned Schmitt’s famous reconceptualization of politics in The Concept of the Political, in 1927, as the capacity to distinguish “friends” from “enemies.” That was it: the essence, indeed the entirety, of politics. By seeking to ground sovereignty through war as the ultima ratio of politics, Schmitt sought to oppose the growing consensus in favor of international cooperation that followed the League of Nation’s founding in 1919. Following the precedent set in that year by Spengler’s Prussianism and Socialism, Schmitt furnished an urgent brief in support of the values of Prussian militarism. “The concepts of friend, enemy, and struggle [Kampf],” Schmitt insisted, “receive their real meaning insofar as they relate to and preserve the real possibility of physical annihilation. War follows from enmity, [from] the existential negation of another being.” “The political enemy,” he continued, “is the other, the alien, and it suffices that in his essence he is something existentially other and alien in an especially intensive sense . . . War, the readiness for death of fighting men, the physical annihilation of other men who stand on the side of the enemy, all that has no normative, only an existential meaning.” Those must be some of the most chilling words written in modernity. Schmitt’s account of politics wished to replace a rational world of norms and rules with a pre-rational order of visceral ruthlessness in which tolerance was inimical to survival and war was eternal.

Another one of Schmitt’s main goals in The Concept of the Political was to perpetuate the bellicist ethos of the Frontgeneration. It was an objective that was shared by other conservative revolutionary intellectuals: for example, Ernst Jünger, a conservative and a remarkable writer, whose fifty-year correspondence with Schmitt began in 1930 and ended in 1983. As Habermas has noted, “Schmitt was fascinated by the First World War’s Storms of Steel, to use the title of Ernst Jünger’s war diary…A people welded together in a battle for life and death asserts its uniqueness against both external enemies and traitors within its own ranks.” At one point Schmitt, invoking a metaphor taken from marksmanship, proclaimed that “the zenith of Great Politics is the moment when the enemy comes clearly into view as the enemy.” In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt also sought to combat the spirit of anti-militarism and international comity that, in response to the unprecedented carnage of World War I, had encouraged the expansion of international law in order to ensure a peaceful resolution of regional disputes — a movement that culminated in 1928 in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which quixotically sought to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy.

The Social Darwinist undercurrent of The Concept of the Political — Schmitt’s insinuation that preparation for war is the raison d’être of “the political” — anticipated his controversial Grossraum doctrine of the early 1940s, which brazenly redefined “natural right” as the “right of the strongest.” Although Schmitt’s champions have sought to portray him as nothing more than a political realist in the tradition of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Schmitt’s “existential” glorification of “war” as the “readiness for death of fighting men, the physical annihilation of men who stand on the side of the enemy … [hence] the existential negation of another being” is significantly at odds with that tradition. After all, the point of Hobbes’ Leviathan was to transcend the war of all against all by means of a civil compact, not to celebrate and expand it.

The ideological and political turmoil that convulsed Europe following World War I left Schmitt with a permanent fear of political instability. It also inculcated in Schmitt a hypertrophic and abiding fear of “Jewish Bolshevism.” As Paul Hanebrink observes in The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, “From the Vatican to Paris salons to paramilitary barracks in the south of Hungary, the history of the Munich Republic of Councils seemed proof of a Jewish plot to overthrow civilization and impose foreign rule on the nations of Europe.” Schmitt’s diaries from the 1910s are suffused with antisemitic invective. They betray a preoccupation with Jews that borders on the clinical. His Judeophobia was especially acute in the case of the assimilated Jews whom he encountered regularly during his student years and his career as a university professor. According to Schmitt, the major problem with assimilated Jews was that they made it nearly impossible to establish a clear divide between “friends” and “enemies.”

In a diary entry on October 13, 1914, Schmitt spoke about his “Jewish complex,” the confusing amalgam of fascination and revulsion that he felt toward Jews. Although German Jews superficially resembled “normal Germans,” Schmitt held that, on a more profound level, the differences that separated these two peoples were vast. Ultimately, Schmitt’s Judeophobia — which intensified during the “Judeo-Bolshevist” hysteria that coincided with the suppression of the Bavarian Räterepublik in April 1919 — metamorphosed into one of the defining features of his work. Schmitt’s lifelong animus against political liberalism, which culminated in his confrontation withs Kelsen’s “normativism,” was inseparable from his fears concerning the “disintegrative” and “corrosive” character of Jewish influence. His conservative revolutionary allies excoriated the Weimar Republic as a Judenrepublik; it was, they claimed, undeutsch. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt asserted that Artgleichheit, or “racial sameness,” was one of the indispensable hallmarks of the “leader-democracy” (Führerdemokratie) that he envisioned as parliamentary democracy’s successor.

As Schmitt’s diaries amply attest, he viewed the Jews as the Drahtzieher, or “string pullers,” who were secretly orchestrating these fateful developments from behind the scenes. Already in the 1920s, Schmitt’s sweeping critique of “political liberalism” and “total mechanization” flirted with the idea of a “Jewish world conspiracy” — a notion that was, among conservative revolutionary intellectuals, a truism. Schmitt’s indictment of modernity as an “age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” overlapped with the ascendancy of what the historian Shulamit Volkov has called “antisemitism as a cultural code.” In the discourse of Central European Zivilisationskritik, the agenda of antisemitism was often advanced under the semantic camouflage of a critique of “modernity,” “capitalism,” “technology,” and “liberalism.” Antisemites alleged that in all of these domains Jews played a deleterious and outsized role. A watershed in this line of attack was Werner Sombart’s well-known treatise The Jews in Modern Capitalism, which appeared in 1911, in which he highlighted the affinities between the Jews as a “nomadic desert people” and the “extraterritoriality” of contemporary international finance, and attributed the Jews’ economic success to their “rootlessness,” which, he claimed, engendered a mentality that was averse to firm conviction and conducive to abstract calculation.

After 1933, when the political situation became more propitious, Schmitt was free to propound his antisemitic views unabashedly and without fear of reprisal. He wasted no time. The semantic violence that was implicit in Schmitt’s disdain for Kelsen’s “legal positivism” now left nothing to the imagination. In 1934, in an essay called “National Socialist Legal Thinking,” Schmitt explicitly celebrated the Nazi legal revolution as a victory of the German over the tyranny of Jewish “legalism.” According to Schmitt, the Volk’s triumph was abetted by its return to “the natural forms of order that emerge from Blut und Boden [blood and soil].” Schmitt added that “normativism’s” predominance under Weimar was due to the “influx of the alien Jewish Volk.” A corrosive infatuation with “legalism,” claimed Schmitt, was “one of the peculiarities of the Jewish people, who for thousands of years have lived not as a state on a piece of land, but solely in the law and norm, which in the true sense of the word are ‘existentially normativistic.’” With Hitler in power, the antisemitic animus that was implicit in Schmitt’s critique of parliamentarism in the 1920s emerged in all its hatefulness.

II

Not only was Schmitt enamored of political myths. He was also an adept self-mythologizer. After the war, this talent proved invaluable in the course of his struggle for rehabilitation.

During the initial years of Nazi rule, Schmitt’s influence was omnipresent. In the words of his former student Waldemar Gurian, who fled Germany and became an important scholar of totalitarianism and a Catholic political theorist in the United States, Schmitt was the de facto “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.” Following the Nazi seizure of power, Schmitt accumulated, with astonishing speed, an impressive array of offices and titles. In July 1933, Hermann Goering appointed Schmitt to the Prussian State Council. Schmitt was also named to the presidium of Hans Frank’s Academy of German Law. In 1934, Schmitt accepted a prestigious appointment to the faculty of law at the University of Berlin. He served on the executive committee of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists and was editor-in-chief of the Association’s journal, the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung.

In July 1934, Schmitt furnished a legal brief justifying Hitler’s bloody purge of the SA on June 30, 1934 — the Night of the Long Knives. It was called “The Führer Protects the Law,” which became a famous slogan. Schmitt’s opinion was a resounding endorsement of the Führerprinzip as the wellspring of legitimacy. It is difficult to construe Schmitt’s article other than as a writ for unrestrained autocratic lawlessness.

Already in Political Theology, twelve years earlier, Schmitt had asserted that the sovereign must operate from a position outside of the constitution, at a permanent remove from the constraints of “legality.” One of the reasons that, after 1945, Schmitt found it difficult to shake the “gravedigger of the Weimar Republic” epithet was the widely shared view that, in his capacity as “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich,” Schmitt had merely transposed his earlier glorification of the “state of emergency” to the post-1933 circumstances.

Schmitt’s talent for self-mythologization became evident with the publication of Ex Captivitate Salus, a memoir, or more precisely an apologia pro vita sua, in 1950. Invoking Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno — the tale of a ship captain who, in the aftermath of a mutiny, must do the rebellious crew’s dastardly bidding — Schmitt confabulated the legend that his cooperation with the Nazis merely reflected a desperate struggle for survival. He insisted that his support for the regime had been, from start to finish, involuntary: the actions of someone who, to all intents and purposes, had a gun pointed at his head. Schmitt’s self-exculpatory claims are factually unsustainable. But the facts have not dissuaded a devout coterie of loyalists from accepting the Benito Cereno conceit. In the English-speaking world, the cult of Carl Schmitt was first orchestrated by a clique of postmodern Salon-Bolshevists, and more recently by a little but loud movement of “post-liberals.”

The legend of Schmitt’s innocence derives from two articles that were published in the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps in December 1936, which questioned Schmitt’s National Socialist bona fides. The articles portrayed Schmitt as an opportunist who had belatedly joined the party in order to advance his career and to camouflage his pro-Catholic loyalties. Schmitt’s detractors — one of whom, Reinhard Höhn, was a colleague of Schmitt’s at the University of Berlin — were political rivals who resented his meteoric rise to prominence in Nazi legal circles. Moreover, since Schmitt was widely regarded as a protégé of Hans Frank — the politician who eventually headed the Nazi occupation of Poland, oversaw four extermination camps, and was convicted for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and executed — his adversaries hoped that, by attacking Schmitt, they could also interfere with Frank’s political ambitions. Following the attacks, Schmitt was stripped of his party offices. Thanks to Göring’s patronage, he was permitted to keep his University of Berlin professorship and his position as Prussian state counselor. When viewed through the lens of the unending intraparty squabbles that were endemic to Nazi rule, however, the temporary setback that Schmitt experienced was hardly proof of heterodoxy. Moreover, following his rehabilitation by the SS, Schmitt was permitted to travel and lecture freely. Later Schmitt’s opponents were themselves ignominiously sacked.

Ever resourceful, with one eye trained on the impending outbreak of war, Schmitt reinvented himself as a specialist in geopolitics. Schmitt’s doctrine of Grossraum relied on Social Darwinist arguments concerning the “natural right” of so-called “large space nations” (Grossraum Völker) to subsume “small space nations” (Kleinraum Völker), thereby making a mockery of existing international law. In essence, Schmitt’s geopolitical thought underwrote the Third Reich’s draconian plans for Eastern European hegemony, the Drang nach Osten. Schmitt outlined his geopolitical theories in “Raum and Grossraum in International Law,” a lecture that he presented in Kiel on April 1, 1939, a fortnight after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. In his lecture, Schmitt invoked the precedent of the Monroe Doctrine to justify the supremacy of the Grossdeutsches Reich or “Greater Germany” in Central Europe. (Hitler was so enamored of Schmitt’s Monroe Doctrine analogy that he immediately included it in a speech in the Reichstag, warning President Roosevelt to refrain from intervention in the event of a future European war, which was in fact only four months away.) Schmitt’s arguments summarily disqualified existing international law and traditional claims to state sovereignty on the part of so-called “small space nations.” As the refugee scholar Franz Neumann observed in Behemoth, one of the first great studies of National Socialism, Schmitt’s Grossraum doctrine underwrote Hitler’s “Grossdeutsches Reich [as] the creator of its own international law for its own Raum or space.” Neumann aptly denounced Schmitt’s concept as little more than pseudo-scientific cover for the Third Reich’s geopolitical ambitions: “It offers a fine illustration of the perversion of genuine scientific considerations in the interest of National Socialist imperialism.”

The fact that Schmitt’s doctrine of Grossraum seemed to lack the customary obeisances to Nazi race doctrine — one of the main arguments brandished by Schmitt’s defenders to downplay his contribution to Nazi foreign policy doctrine — is immaterial, since this omission also had a tactical side: it imparted a measure of credibility to Schmitt’s theories in international law circles that they would have otherwise lacked.

Nor was the idiolect of Nazi race thinking entirely absent from Schmitt’s arguments. In “Grossraum and International Law,” Schmitt’s disparagement of Jews as an “artfremde Volksgruppe” — a “racially alien people” — was tantamount to a death warrant, since, according to the tenets of Grossraum, “racially alien” groups were devoid of legal standing. Nazi Grossraum doctrine — Schmitt’s included — was predicated on the twofold imperatives of Raum and Boden, “space” and “soil.” Since Jews were deemed a “rootless” or bodenloses people, they were denied the legal protections that accrued to “rooted” or bodenständige Völker.

With the publication of Schmitt’s Grossraum essays, and the adoption of his Monroe Doctrine analogy by the Führer, Schmitt’s “comeback” was virtually assured. As a reporter for The Times of London remarked about Schmitt’s address in Kiel in April 1939: “Hitherto, no German statesman has given a precise definition of Hitler’s aims in Eastern Europe. But perhaps a recent statement by Prof. Carl Schmitt, a Nazi expert on constitutional law, may be taken as a trustworthy guide.” Schmitt’s Grossraum concept was rapidly embraced by a cadre of high-ranking SS officers attached to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin. Infusing Schmitt’s approach with a more explicit völkisch-ideological orientation, they proceeded to invoke Grossraum as a pseudo-legal justification for a Nazi-dominated Europe, for German continental hegemony — a strategy that was predicated on the idea of German racial supremacy, in keeping with Nazism’s understanding of Deutschtum, or Germanness, as Herrenrasse, or the master race.

 

         Schmitt’s postwar apologetics suffered a posthumous blow in 2011, when his diaries from the early 1930s were published. They meticulously document Schmitt’s reactions to National Socialism’s political ascent. In an entry in February 1932, for example, Schmitt avowed that, in the upcoming presidential elections, he planned on voting for Hitler. On January 30, 1933, the day of the Nazi seizure of power, Schmitt remarked: “At the Café Kutschera [in Berlin], where I learned that Hitler had become chancellor and Papen vice-chancellor. Excited, happy, satisfied.” The reasons for Schmitt’s “excitement” at the café are not hard to fathom. He realized that Hitler’s rise to power guaranteed the demise of the Weimar “system,” an entity that Schmitt viewed with contempt and whose downfall he had sought to hasten. Whatever reservations Schmitt may have harbored concerning the advent of Nazi rule prior to January 30, 1933 dissipated rather quickly.

This conclusion is supported by Schmitt’s reaction to the Reichstag’s approval of the Enabling Act of March 23, which allowed Hitler to legislate by decree. In his comments, which were published in the Deutsche-Juristen Zeitung, not only did Schmitt hail the Act’s passage, he went so far as to attribute constitutional status to the emergency decrees that had been promulgated by the nascent Hitler-state. Thereby, he added, these decrees superseded the legal provisions of the Weimar Republic, whose constitution technically remained in effect. In a follow-up article that was published on May 12 in the Westdeutscher Beobachter, called “The Good Law of the German Revolution,” Schmitt reaffirmed, unequivocally and emphatically, that “the good law of the German Revolution is not dependent on respecting the legality of the Weimar ‘System’ and its constitution.” Gone was the distinction that he had established in his book Dictatorship between “commissarial” (temporary) and “sovereign” (permanent) dictatorship. If ever there was a “sovereign” dictatorship, it was Hitler’s.

The numerous political and legal commentaries that Schmitt penned in support of the Nazi dictatorship — many of which appeared in official Nazi publications such as the Völkischer Beobachter and the Westdeutscher Beobachter — are extremely revealing with respect to Schmitt’s attitudes at the time. They demonstrate that Schmitt’s accommodation to Nazi rule was speedy, seamless, and unstinting. It was as though, with Hitler’s Machtantritt, a dam had burst, and the new political circumstances allowed Schmitt to freely express political views that during Weimar he had been forced to suppress. The republication last year of Schmitt’s Nazi writings helped to resolve a major controversy that beset Schmitt scholarship for decades: whether January 30, 1933 marked a break with or a continuation of Schmitt’s previous political self-understanding.

One important measure of the continuities in Schmitt’s worldview is the persistence of race thinking. Prior to the publication of Schmitt’s diaries (the most recent installment, Tagebücher 1924–1929, appeared in 2018), Schmitt’s champions often appealed for a “pluralistic” and “differentiated” understanding of his legacy, an interpretive tack that dissuaded scholars from focusing too much on Schmitt’s anti-Semitism. Yet as evidence of Schmitt’s Judaeophobia began to mount, such appeals rapidly devolved into repression and denial. The publication of Schmitt’s diaries has demonstrated that the “Jewish complex” to which Schmitt alluded in 1914 was merely the tip of the iceberg, the harbinger of a fevered anti-Judaism that crested during the Nazi period.

In his diary in November 1931, Schmitt excoriated the left-wing Romanian poet and historian Valeriu Marcu as a “horrible Jew, of the dumb and superficial variety.” A month later, on Christmas Eve, Schmitt recounted having sung Christmas songs in his Berlin apartment and being overwhelmed by the “shame and scandal of living in a Judenstadt [Jew-city], insulted and shamed by Jews.” Schmitt’s wrath was often directed against assimilated Jews. In his eyes, by trying to pass themselves off as authentically German, they were doubly guilty. As he wrote on March 19, 1933: “Hopeful because of the Nazis, rage at the Jew [Erich] Kaufmann and the imposture of these assimilated Jews.”

Kaufmann was one of Schmitt’s colleagues on the law faculty of the University of Berlin. His name surfaced in a letter of denunciation that Schmitt wrote to the Minister of Education on December 14, 1934. In his missive, Schmitt claimed that Kaufmann’s presence was a “slap in the face [to the] National Socialist students.” It was not Kaufmann’s pedagogical abilities, continued Schmitt, that were in question. Instead, it was Kaufmann’s status as an assimilated Jew that mattered; or, as Schmitt put it, Kaufmann’s deleterious “influence on German spiritual life and German youth.” As Schmitt urged in conclusion: “Especially today, when the German Volk and German students are being educated through a process of National Socialist schooling, this type of Jewish infiltration and influence must be rigorously avoided.” Kaufmann was promptly dismissed.

After the war, Schmitt remained unrepentant and defiant. His journals from the years 1947-1951 are suffused with crude antisemitism. Schmitt derogated Jews as “Isra-Elites,” arguing that they were the only “elites” to have survived the war. And in a classic case of “Holocaust inversion” — transforming victims into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims — he claimed that the Jews had been World War II’s real victors. In September 1945, Schmitt was arrested by the Allies in a “general sweep” and interned as a possible “security threat.” Following his release, Schmitt was re-arrested in March 1947. He was transferred to Nuremberg, where he was interrogated by the American prosecutor Robert Kempner as a “potential defendant.” The indictment centered on Schmitt’s Grossraum articles, which Allied prosecutors regarded as a blueprint for Nazi Germany’s “war of annihilation” in the East. Schmitt avoided prosecution — a direct link between his theories and Nazi policy was not legally demonstrable — and was released two months later.

The experience left Schmitt embittered. He regarded himself and his fellow Germans as the victims of the Allies’ “discriminatory concept of war” and their indefensible “moralization of punishment.” Schmitt’s objections were consistent with his earlier fulminations against “just war” doctrine and the Versailles Treaty’s “war guilt” clause. In 1958, in his foreword to the Spanish edition of his memoir, Schmitt lamented that the Allied legal proceedings had resulted in the unjustifiable “criminalization of an entire people.” He continued: “As Germany lay on the ground, defeated… the Russians and the Americans undertook mass internments and defamed entire categories of the German population. The Americans termed their method ‘automatic arrest.’ This means that thousands and hundreds of thousands of members of certain demographic groups — for example all high-level civil servants — were summarily stripped of their rights and taken to a camp.” The un-self-awareness — or sheer mendacity — of such passages is breathtaking.

Schmitt’s exclusive focus on German suffering was characteristic of the mood of “repression” and “silence” that prevailed in postwar Germany. Schmitt excoriated the Nuremberg Tribunal as a violation of the time-honored legal maxim nulla poena sine lege — one cannot be punished for doing something that is not forbidden by law. By the same token, he gave little thought to the question of what form of punishment would be appropriate for the unprecedented criminality and mass atrocities that had been perpetrated by the Third Reich and its functionaries. Nor did Schmitt display a modicum of sympathy for the victims of Nazi Bevölkerungspolitik: the six million Jews who perished in Nazi death camps; the three million Soviet POWs who died in German captivity; the twelve million slave laborers who were dragooned to toil in German armaments factories; and so forth. Instead, he callously rationalized these misdeeds as unavoidable “casualties of war.” In Schmitt’s account, they were victims without perpetrators. Schmitt also liked to attribute the war’s tragic outcome to the “all-conquering progress of modern technology,” whose “dislocations” he proceeded to enumerate, mocking the liberal idea of “progress” along the way: “’Progress’ in the appropriation of the human individual, ‘progress’ in mass criminalization and mass automation. A giant apparatus indiscriminately swallows up hundreds of thousands of people. The old Leviathan appears almost cozy by comparison.”

Following the war — and before Schmitt’s own apologetics had time to take root — some observers recognized the significant contribution that Schmitt had made to consolidating Nazi rule. In Deutsche Daseinsverfehlung in 1946, Ernst Niekisch accused Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction of having furnished the “algorithm of bestiality” that was ruthlessly put into practice by the SA and SS. Similarly, Rudolf Smend, a former colleague at the law faculty of the University of Berlin, denounced Schmitt as a legal “pioneer of the National Socialist system of violence.” But Schmitt himself systematically eschewed questions of responsibility, personal as well as collective. Like the majority of his countrymen, he demonstrated little enthusiasm for probing the historical origins of the “German catastrophe.”

From a legal and constitutional standpoint, the Federal Republic of Germany — whose Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, was codified in 1949 — was Schmitt’s worst nightmare. In stark contrast to Weimar, the Bonn Republic was intentionally conceived as a parliamentary system. Its architects expressly sought to forestall the temptations of executive overreach that, under von Hindenburg’s presidency between 1925 and 1934, had plagued German democracy, thereby paving the way for Hitler. The entire project was anathema to Schmitt. He disparaged defenders of the Grundgesetz as “Grundgesetzler” (human rights-lings) and mocked Grundrechte or “basic freedoms” as the “inalienable rights of donkeys.” For Schmitt, the Federal Republic represented a double abnegation of politics, insofar as it elevated the “anti-political” institutions of “parliament” and “judicial review” above the prerogatives state sovereignty. Schmitt’s own bête noire was the federal constitutional court, whose seat was in Karlsruhe. Schmitt composed a sophomoric satirical poem, which he circulated among friends, comparing the justices to lemurs. (“In Karlsruhe there grows a rubber tree/Lemurs scurry around/They append the ‘value’ of ‘freedom’ to the rubber tree.”) Schmitt excoriated the Bonn Republic as a “Justizstaat” — implying that it was not a “real state” — which elevated abstract “values” such as “human dignity” over “authority.” One of Schmitt’s final works was called The Tyranny of Values.

III

Following Schmitt’s death in 1985, the German right leaped into action to popularize Schmitt’s critique of German democracy. As the Junge Freiheit, the flagship publication of the Neue Rechte (New Right), put it: “Whoever sleeps with the Grundgesetz under his pillow has no need of Carl Schmitt. Conversely, whoever recognizes that the Grundgesetz is a prison in which the German res publica has been interned reaches for his work.” During the European refugee crisis of 2015-2016, the right-wing ideologue Götz Kubitschek, co-founder of the Institut für Staatspolitik — a conservative revolutionary think tank allied with the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) — cited Schmitt’s “state of exception” as an argument for implementing emergency measures to rebuff the influx of Syrian immigrants. Alluding also to Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” dichotomy, Kubitschek declared:

I am convinced that in a “state of exception” … as the threats to one’s own group along ethnic, cultural, and civic lines become clear, so does the question of who ‘We are’ and who ‘We are not’… In other words, when people in this land have had enough, the question of [political] loyalty is bound to arise, as it does already when it is a question of customs, values, and the legal statutes that Islam places on the conduct of everyday life.

The New Right regarded the refugee crisis, which rocked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition to its foundations, as a classical Schmittian “state of emergency” — as a situation that, like the Algeria crisis in France in 1958 that paved the way for General Charles de Gaulle’s coup, portended the Bundesrepublik’s abolition and its replacement by an ethno-populist dictatorship. That Kubitschek’s advocacy of an executive decree banning asylum-seekers violated the Grundgesetz, as well as the tenets of European Union immigration law, seemed a matter of little concern.

Schmitt’s posthumous influence on German political culture has been enormous. During the 1950s, Schmitt’s site of exile in Plettenburg became a favored pilgrimage destination among radical conservative jurists who were disaffected with the Federal Republic’s Verwestlichung (turn to the West) under Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship in 1949-1962. Among Schmitt’s numerous acolytes was the jurist and future member of the Karlsruhe Constitutional Court, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, who applied Schmittian maxims in rulings that involved purported “social welfare” encroachments on state autonomy. And following German reunification in 1990, Schmitt’s intellectual currency skyrocketed. German conservatives asserted that the time had come to replace the “de-politicizations” and “neutralizations” of the liberal Bonn Republic with the prerogatives of a “self-confident nation” (selbstbewusste Nation), in keeping with the Bismarck-era traditions of étatisme and Machtpolitik. Who better to guide the Berlin Republic’s transformation in accordance with these precepts than Carl Schmitt?

During the 1990s, a contingent of radical conservative intellectuals undertook a public campaign to rehabilitate Schmitt, along with the reputations of like-minded conservative revolutionary thinkers such as Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. Prior to reunification, it had been difficult for Schmitt to escape the taint of his earlier career as the Third Reich’s “Crown Jurist.” Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, however, a chorus of national conservatives argued that, after forty years of democratic stability, the time had come to lift the taboo. Schmitt was resurrected as a deutscher Klassiker, a “German classic.” Notwithstanding the objections that were raised by a handful of intellectuals, his rehabilitation seemed complete.

Schmitt’s rehabilitation in Germany was merely the prelude to a multifaceted international revival of his work. Already during the 1990s, those who were disillusioned with neoliberal triumphalism and the “end of history” ransacked Schmitt’s corpus in search of political alternatives. And the ranks of the disillusioned were not confined to the right. Left-wing critics of TINA — the acronym for “there is no alternative,” derived from Herbert Spencer and popularized by Margaret Thatcher, to indicate an acceptance of the liberal order — thought that they had found the support they needed in Schmitt’s claim in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy that liberalism and democracy were mutually exclusive political forms. As Alan Wolfe noted in The Future of Liberalism, “To the extent that there is a revival of Schmitt’s ideas taking place in Europe and the United States, it is not because of what is happening on the right. It is because Schmitt has become something of a hero to the postmodern left.”

Schmitt’s arguments about the endemic corruptions of Western liberalism became increasingly popular among former Marxists who, following the collapse of communism and the discrediting of Marx’s “metaphysics of class struggle,” sought out alternative paradigms of contestation among non-Marxist sources. In light of the fact that the proletariat, the putative “gravedigger of capitalism,” was now comfortably ensconced amid the mind-numbing blandishments of bourgeois consumerism, the prospects of realizing the utopia of a “classless society” seemed more distant than ever.

Nominally, these self-styled “left Schmittians” embraced Schmitt’s no-holds-barred critique of liberalism in the name of “radical democracy.” Ultimately, however, their animus against the normative safeguards of liberalism proved so powerful and all-consuming that, much like Schmitt, they ended up countenancing brazenly authoritarian political solutions. In their haste to transcend the liberal democratic status quo, the left Schmittians were not averse to flirting with the temptations that Jacob Talmon long ago described as “totalitarian democracy.” They reprised an authoritarian political lineage that stretched from the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793-1794 to Lenin’s What is to Be Done? (1902) to the Chavismo that, since the late 1990s, has made state socialist autocracy a permanent feature of the Latin American political landscape.

To restate Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy in Rousseauian terms: whereas democracy strove to realize the “general will” or “universality,” liberalism, which was predicated on “interests,” was incapable of rising above “particularism,” or the mere “will of all,” which never rose to a higher unanimity. Schmitt claimed that “parliamentarism,” as a sphere of “representation” in which “interests” reigned supreme, inherently subverted the universalist strivings of democracy qua popular sovereignty. Hence Schmitt’s conclusion that liberalism and democracy inherently operated at cross purposes. (This is one of Victor Orban’s favorite refrains.) On the basis of these criticisms, Schmitt cynically dismissed parliament as little more than a Schwatzbude or “gossip chamber.” Following the lead of Donoso Cortés, he disparaged the bourgeoisie as spineless and effete, a class that was prone to endless discussion but incapable of a sovereign decision. During the 1920s Schmitt’s political hopes centered on the prospects of a Führerdemokratie, or leader-democracy, a term that for Schmitt and Schmittians is not at all oxymoronic: a form of political authoritarianism that was shorn of pluralism and constitutional interferences, a political system that replaced the liberal idea of “representation” with the “identity” between Führer and Volk, “leader” and “people.” Recall that Schmitt held that political obligation was grounded in “faith” and “myth” as opposed to rational consent. The identity between “leader” and “people” would be reinforced by a emotional emotional bond.

For ex-Marxists, Schmitt’s critique of political liberalism possessed numerous advantages. Unlike Marxism, it was not tied to an outmoded Hegelian philosophy of history that naively culminated in the grand soir of socialism. Nor was it wedded to an equally anachronistic understanding of the proletariat as the “universal class”: a class that, as Marx had claimed, epitomized all of the injustices of bourgeois society, while being systematically deprived of its benefits. From an empirical standpoint, the “laboring society” of nineteenth-century industrialism on which Marx had predicated his “critique of political economy” had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared. The demise of the factory system meant that the ideas of “class” and “class struggle” had likewise forfeited their centrality. Instead, as sociologists never tired of pointing out, “social stratification” and “status differentiation” had replaced “class” as the interpretive keys to understanding modern society. It was not hard to see that, shorn of “class struggle,” Marx’s theory of revolution had become obsolete.

The 1960s confirmed that the locus and the nature of political struggle had fundamentally shifted. Conflict was no longer confined to the shop floor or the workplace. Instead, the “new social movements” demonstrated that political contestation had been pluralized. Feminism, gay liberation, the civil rights movement, and environmentalism had exposed the analytical inadequacies of “class analysis.” The new sites of struggle centered on “post-material values” and cultural themes that transcended the economistic focus of traditional Marxism. Among post-Marxists, Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony” played a crucial role, insofar as it directly addressed the cultural dimension that Marx’s critique of political economy had neglected.

For left Schmittians searching for new forms of contestation in order to combat the “Washington consensus,” Schmitt’s rejection of political liberalism seemed to offer possibilities of radical struggle that the parliamentary left had long abandoned. Hence, Schmitt’s left-wing disciples enthusiastically embraced his “friend-enemy” opposition for infusing radical politics with an ethos of permanent conflict. As Chantal Mouffe argued in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt in 1999, Schmitt’s “concept of the political” anticipated a new era of “political agonism,” in which the consensual politics of liberal-democratic parliamentarism was swept away by a rising tide of dissent and conflict. Mouffe explained:

In spite of [Schmitt’s] moral flaws… ignoring his views would deprive us of many insights that can be used to rethink liberal democracy… Schmitt’s thought serves as a warning against the dangers of complacency that a triumphant liberalism entails. His conception of the political brings the crucial deficiencies of the dominant liberal approach to the fore. It should shatter the illusions of all those who believe that the blurring of frontiers between Left and Right, and the steady moralization of political discourse, constitute progress in the enlightened march of humanity toward a New World Order and a cosmopolitan democracy.

By trivializing Schmitt’s rather spectacular failings as “moral flaws,” Mouffe conveniently sidestepped the interpretive question that has preoccupied Schmitt scholarship for decades: the extent to which Schmitt’s celebration of dictatorship and Führerdemokratie during the 1920s presaged his conversion to Hitlerism in 1933. Moreover, was it not Mouffe herself who “blurred the frontiers between Left and Right” by enlisting the support of a conservative revolutionary thinker like Schmitt for the ends of radical democracy? Finally, in an era marked by unprecedented political polarization — “blue states” versus “red states” and so on — and ever-expanding ideological divisions, should not the construction of a common political discourse take priority over a “political agonistics” that would merely widen existing antagonisms?

Although Schmitt’s “concept of the political” may have liberated neo-Marxists from the straitjacket of historical materialism, it left them fully exposed to the dangers of Schmitt’s own extremely dubious political choices. In fact, by embracing Schmitt’s “decisionism,” as well as his inflexible “anti-normativism” — “the exception is more interesting than the norm,” Schmitt proclaimed; “the norm is destroyed in the exception” — Schmitt’s left-wing partisans opened themselves up to the excesses of “left fascism”: a quasi-aesthetic celebration of “struggle for struggle’s sake” and “conflict for conflict’s sake”; a glorification of endless war that blithely scorned institutional constraints and guardrails. Finally, in keeping with Schmitt’s decisionism, his left-wing disciples turned a blind eye to the content and the ends of struggle.

A decisionistic refusal to specify the ends of struggle has also been one of the hallmarks of the Schmittianism of the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau (who was Mouffe’s partner). In On Populist Reason, which appeared in 2007, Laclau described the content of political struggle as an “empty signifier.” According to Laclau, the meaning of struggle would be provided by the populist “leader,” who is tasked with aggregating the conflicting demands of the vox populi in order to achieve a new “hegemonic unity.” Whereas Mouffe’s neo-Marxism still felt obligated to pay lip service to the formal trappings of liberal democracy, Laclau held that the rituals of “parliamentarism” must be simply abolished for the sake of realizing the ever-elusive “general will.” Laclau uncritically adopted Schmitt’s argument in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy that “representative democracy” must be replaced by a plebiscitarian “leader-democracy”; and the Schmittian derivation of Laclau’s position may help to explain his neo-Leninism, his view that only the “leader” or “party” can provide the “people” with a unified, revolutionary consciousness, thereby raising it from its “fallen” condition as an inchoate, disaggregated mass. By constructing the “real people” against the “enemies” who have betrayed it — enemies that Laclau defined as the “oligarchy” or “elites” — the leader, so to speak, “extracts” the (real) people from its oppressors.

In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt claimed that genuine democracy was predicated on a series of “homologies” or “identities”: “the identity of governed and governing, sovereign and subject, the identity of the subject and object of state authority.” If, in Schmitt’s teaching, “democracy is not antithetical to dictatorship,” it was in part because dictatorship preserved the identity between the ruled and the ruler. According to Schmitt, dictatorship realized this identity through a process of mass “acclamation” as opposed to parliamentary “representation.” In sum: “Dictatorial and Caesaristic methods [embody] the direct expression of democratic substance and power.” Laclau endorsed Schmitt’s condemnation of representative democracy as a liberal subterfuge that sublimated and distorted popular will, thereby obstructing the identity between “leaders” and “people.” He also substituted Schmitt’s proto-fascist notion of “symbolic representation” — a leftover from Schmitt’s earlier political Catholicism — for the liberal democratic conception of “mandate representation.” Thus, in keeping with Schmitt’s framework, Laclau exalted the leader as the “symbolic representative” of the “general will.” The problem with the fascist glorification of leadership, for Laclau, was only that it was too extreme, though it is hard to know what extreme means for such a proponent of unity in tyranny.

Laclau’s repudiation of liberal democratic “proceduralism” — whose foremost twentieth-century representatives have been Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas — was an important component of the left Schmittians’ struggle against Enlightenment rationalism. This resolutely anti-Enlightenment disposition helps to explain the theoretical alliance between post-Marxists such as Mouffe and Laclau, on the one hand, and poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault, on the other. It also provides support for Habermas’ wise suspicion, voiced during the 1980s, that “postmodernity definitely presents itself as antimodernity.” “This statement,” Habermas continued, “describes an emotional current of our times that has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life.”

The left-wing cult of Schmitt often displayed a self-marginalizing, sectarian quality, which explains its difficulties in gaining acceptance outside of the insular confines of academe. The same cannot be said about the reception of his work among neoconservative policy circles following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Schmitt’s pronouncements about the imperatives of emergency governance and the fecklessness of liberal democratic “legalism” assumed canonical status.

Even civil libertarians, while disagreeing sharply with Schmitt’s conclusions, begrudgingly acknowledged his diagnostic prescience as well as the timeliness of his legal-juridical insights. “Mr. Schmitt Goes to Washington” was the shrewd title of Alan Wolfe’s discussion of the hypertrophy of executive authority under George W. Bush’s presidency. As the political theorist William E. Scheuerman conceded in The End of Law: Carl Schmitt in the Twenty-First Century, “Like no other political or legal thinker in the last century, [Schmitt] placed the problem of emergency government on the intellectual front burner, and he consistently did so as to unsettle those of us committed to liberal and democratic legal ideals. At the very least, his ideas about emergency rule call out for a response from those hoping to preserve the rule of law.” And in 2006, in an article on “Preserving Constitutional Norms in Times of Permanent Emergencies,” the legal theorist Sanford Levinson acknowledged that, in light of the Bush administration’s sovereign disregard for juridical accountability, America was experiencing a “Schmittian moment.” As Levinson put it, “The single legal philosopher who provides the best understanding of the legal theory of the Bush administration is Carl Schmitt, a brilliant German theorist of Weimar, who became, not all together coincidently, the leading apologist for Hitler’s takeover of what Schmitt viewed . . . as a hopelessly dysfunctional German polity.” Elsewhere he noted Schmitt’s status “as the jurisprudential guru of the post-9/11 world, a world in which the state of exception itself had become the new norm; in other words, as many analysts and observers assumed at the time, a permanent state of exception.”

Schmitt’s philosophy was indeed a great gift to the advocates of what John Yoo, a legal scholar and deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the White House, called “the Unitary Executive.” It was an idea that enjoyed a good deal of political support in the Bush years. “All law,” Schmitt wrote, “is ‘situation law.’ The sovereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. He has the monopoly on this ultimate decision.” The “sovereign” has carte blanche to respond to the changing situation as he sees fit, unimpeded by prior constitutional norms. Of course the West Wing Schmittians either misunderstood Schmitt or were using him dishonestly. Schmitt was not defending a constitutional status quo ante — as his champions continued to claim, despite mounting evidence to the contrary — but facilitating the transition to a “sovereign dictatorship,” in keeping with his glorification of the “Age of Absolutism” as the archetype of political excellence. What on earth was his ghost doing in the White House?

Constitutionalists such as Levinson and Scheuerman reacted to the “Schmittian moment” in American governance with dismay and alarm, but not all observers were equally troubled. In 2006, in Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule claimed that Schmitt’s arguments in favor of emergency powers unconstrained by congressional oversight and judicial review were exactly what the war on terror demanded. Posner and Vermeule derided opponents of torture for their “self-absorbed moral preciosity.” They described their goal in Terror in the Balance as “extracting the marrow from Schmitt and then throwing away the bones” — a rather infelicitous choice of metaphor. They sought also to combat the moral outrage of conscience-stricken civil libertarians: for example, the seven hundred law professors who, in December 2001, published a petition criticizing the Bush administration’s plan to employ military tribunals to try the Guantanamo Bay detainees. By arbitrarily reclassifying the Guantanamo captives as “unlawful enemy combatants,” the Department of Justice sought to strip them of the legal protections they would be entitled to under the Geneva Accords as prisoners of war.

The political challenges that the United States faced following the September 11 attacks were undeniably exceptional. For a democratic polity committed to the rule of law, however, the key to addressing the exception lies in insuring that the response is, from a constitutional standpoint, proportionate to the emergency in question. In other words, the response must be calibrated with a view toward returning to the legal-constitutional status quo ante. In 1861, between the attack on Fort Sumter in April and the return of Congress in July, Lincoln acted — to employ Schmitt’s terminology — as a “commissarial” (or limited) dictator. But Lincoln relied on emergency powers in order to safeguard the Republic; his actions always presupposed a return to constitutional normalcy; and so his “exceptional” conduct exemplified the responsible use of executive authority. Moreover, Schmitt’s attempt to define “the political” in terms of the “friend-foe” distinction, his notion of politics as war, is fundamentally at odds with central aspects of the Western political tradition, for which “justice” and “virtue,” rather than “enmity,” are the raison d’être of politics. In American terms, certainly, Schmitt’s “concept of the political” is really a concept of the anti-political, of the breakdown of politics, as in 1861. Our system of government was designed for conflict, which Madison regarded as a permanent feature of human affairs, but there is nothing Darwinian — or Schmittian — about it.

         Meanwhile the left Schmittians viewed the Bush administration’s proto-Schmittian apotheosis of executive authority as a welcome confirmation of their own longstanding antiliberal prejudices. Already during the 1990s, they regarded Schmitt’s arguments about the bankruptcy of political liberalism as received wisdom. Under the influence of French theory, the left Schmittians enthusiastically accepted Schmitt’s claim that liberal “norms” were little more than a swindle. They held that, insofar as norms were prescriptive — hence “normalizing” — they predetermined the parameters of socially permissible behavior. By pathologizing deviance and non-conformity, norms were an essential component of disciplinary society’s implacable social control. The illusion of “autonomy” was merely one of the ruses that “power-knowledge” employed to deceive us into thinking that we were free. This is what happened when Foucault was added to Schmitt. As Foucault wrote, “[the] will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rest upon injustice, that there is no right … to truth or foundation for truth … The instinct for knowledge is malicious, something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind.” In the eyes of Schmitt and Foucault, the dialectic of enlightenment culminated not in emancipation, but in catastrophe.

Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, which appeared in 2004, was conceived as a response to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and represented the consummate synthesis of Schmitt and poststructuralism. By fusing these currents, it raised anti-Enlightenment cynicism to new heights. Agamben maintained that there was nothing “exceptional” about the “state of exception” that, following the September 11 attacks, was declared by the Bush administration. It merely exposed the hidden capacity for violence that lurked beneath the peaceable façade of liberal democratic “legalism.” For Agamben, the state of exception already was “the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.” He praised Schmitt effusively as the theorist who, more than any other, had exposed the hidden link between the state of exception and bourgeois legal convention: “The specific contribution of Schmitt’s theory is precisely to have made such an articulation between state of exception and juridical order possible. It is a paradoxical articulation, for what must be inscribed within the law is something that is essentially exterior to it: nothing less than the suspension of the juridical order itself.” According to Agamben, however, the corrective to the state of exception is not to return to the rule of law, or to make law genuinely effective, since Agamben held, following Schmitt, that the state of exception is — in ways that are never clearly specified — inscribed in the rule of law itself. The vaporousness of all this was a formula for political impotence. The left Schmittians have little to offer apart from an abstract populism, an ill-defined theory of “direct action” and “agonistic struggle.” But will the people follow Agamben into the streets? The notion is a little comic — though the comedy disappears in the face of Agamben’s claim that there are no essential historical differences between Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz. They both express the hidden telos of “modernity.”

And now the cult of Carl Schmitt has been again updated. Recently a new authoritarian ethos has emerged on the right, a political current proclaiming that liberal democracy has entered into a state of terminal crisis. The proponents of this ethos claim that the signs of liberalism’s morbidity are omnipresent and undeniable; only fools mired in anachronistic ways of thinking would deny their obviousness. The slogan that has been widely brandished as a cure-all or panacea for liberalism-in-crisis — and an adage that has been enthusiastically embraced by autocrats and their apologists — is “illiberal democracy.” Unsurprisingly, the political philosopher whose doctrines have been repeatedly invoked both to explicate the reasons for liberalism’s irreversible demise and to justify the transition to a new form of authoritarian rule that will save us from its insolvency is Carl Schmitt.

Schmitt has been canonized by a new generation of “post-liberal” conservatives who have been heartened by the political “successes” of Donald Trump and the Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán. Following Schmitt, they have concluded that constitutional guarantees of civic freedom and legal equality must be jettisoned, since, as enablers of an anarchic centrifugal individualism, they bear primary responsibility for Western civilization’s precipitous unraveling. Last summer Orban received an enthusiastic reception at the CPAC convention in Texas, which provoked a reporter in Washington Post to described the “Orbánization” of American conservatism: “to right-wingers steeped in anti-liberal grievance, Hungary offers a glimpse of culture war victory and a template for action.”

The uncritical reliance on Schmitt’s positions attests to a revolting lapse of historical memory. Equally troubling, when pressed to identify a political successor to liberalism, the post-liberal responses track Schmitt’s ill-advised endorsement of “leader-democracy.” Schmitt’s argument that liberalism is incoherent and self-negating, since, as a form of political rule it is inherently averse to “authority” and “order,” in lieu of which “political rule” itself becomes meaningless, suffuses Patrick Deneen’s influential anti-liberal broadside, Why Liberalism Failed. As Deneen observes, parroting Schmitt, “democracy, in fact, cannot survive under liberalism.” The shameful lineage is clear. As Robert Kuttner noted appositely in the New York Review of Books, “Deneen’s thinking echoes an older line of reactionary argument on the folly and perversity of liberal democracy that extends back from twentieth-century anti-liberal intellectuals, like Leo Strauss and fascist theorists Carl Schmitt and Giovanni Gentile, to monarchic critics of liberalism, like Joseph de Maistre.” The fundamental flaw of Why Liberalism Failed is that its understanding of liberalism’s inadequacies derives from the worldview of a thinker who was rabidly opposed to liberalism and everything it stood for. Faulty premises yield faulty results. Schmitt’s representation of liberalism’s deficiencies contains a kernel of truth, though he was hardly the first or the last to worry about the labyrinthine tendencies of liberal governance; but his portrait of liberalism was a grotesque caricature — partial, self-serving, hysterical, and exaggerated, just like Deneen’s.

Deneen is not alone in his Schmittian amen corner. In A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, Matthew Rose, a contributor to First Things, sounds the death-knell not only of liberalism but also of traditional conservatism. According to Rose, in its place there will now arise “a new conservatism, unlike any in recent memory… Ideas once thought taboo are being reconsidered; authors once banished are being rehabilitated.” The inspiring doctrines of the “Radical Right,” whose ideas Rose seeks to retrofit for contemporary political use, emerged in Germany after World War I. “Known as the ‘Conservative Revolution’… its chief figures included Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Oswald Spengler.” Rose exalts these thinkers for their willingness to explore themes of “cultural difference, human inequality, religious authority, and racial biopolitics,” notwithstanding the fact that their approaches “were widely viewed as invitations to xenophobia and even violence.” That view was not only widely held, it was also true.

In a similar vein, Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard legal scholar and Catholic “integralist,” has invoked Schmitt’s adage that “all political concepts are secularized theological concepts” to indict the theological ferocity with which liberalism unrelentingly (in his account) has advanced its agenda at the expense of traditional communities, belief-systems, and lifeworlds. As with Deneen, what Vermeule’s arguments lack in precision and subtlety, they compensate for in sheer force of rhetorical will. Like Schmitt, Vermeule prioritizes voluntas over ratio. Schmitt’s adage was part of his more general assault on the mentality of modernity. Never mind that, in contrast to theology, modernity relies for its intellectual methods on evidentiary criteria that are “public” and “generalizable.” Its proposals and claims are open to discussion and criticism. Unlike the precepts of “political Catholicism” with which Vermeule strongly identifies, they are, as a matter of principle, fallible and non-dogmatic. Does Vermeule leave his faith at the seminar door or his reason at the church door?

There is no surer sign of intellectual and moral bankruptcy than an association with the thought of Carl Schmitt. The persistence of his cult into the present day is yet another of our time’s many unhappy omens. But as long as the hard work of a free and fair society feels too onerous for some of its intellectuals, the repulsive Schmitt will live; live again and be repudiated again.