McCORMICK, John P - Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism - Against Politics As Technology PDF
McCORMICK, John P - Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism - Against Politics As Technology PDF
McCORMICK, John P - Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism - Against Politics As Technology PDF
and cultural writings of Carl Schmitt, perhaps this century's most brilliant
critic of liberalism. Moreover, it offers an assessment of this most sophisti-
cated of fascist theorists without attempting either to apologize for or demo-
nize him.
Schmitt's eventual collusion with the Nazis has long discouraged any
serious engagement with the critique of liberalism that he undertook dur-
ing the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic. However, contemporary political
conditions, such as disaffection with liberalism and the rise of extremist
political organizations, have rendered Schmitt's work both relevant and
insightful.
Schmitt's Weimar writings confront the role of modern technology as it
finds expression through the principles and practices of liberalism. Just as
technology is characterized by both the abstractly formal logic of Enlighten-
ment science and the irrational will toward domination generated by mass
exhilaration and fear, so liberalism, according to Schmitt, lays out abstractly
neutral rules to govern a social reality comprising a plurality of mutually
irrational and incommensurable subjective perspectives. John McCormick
examines why technology becomes a rallying cry for both right- and left-
wing intellectuals at times when liberalism appears anachronistic, and he
shows the continuities between Weimar's ideological debates and those of
our own age.
By setting Schmitt's work in the context of contemporaries such as We-
ber, Lukacs, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Adorno as well as earlier figures
such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, John McCormick
has furnished philosophers, historians, and political theorists with the most
comprehensive account of Schmitt available.
CARL SCHMITT'S CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM
MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
General Editor
Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago
Advisory Board
Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame
Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt University, Berlin
Mark Sacks, University of Essex
JOHN P. McCORMICK
University of New Hampshire
w CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521591676
Acknowledgments PaSe * x
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
4 Representation 157
5 Law 206
There are many people and institutions who aided and encouraged me
to undertake and carry out this project. During my years as a graduate
student I was fortunate to benefit from the learned guidance and unfail-
ing support of perhaps the best mentors and colleagues in the world. I
especially thank Stephen Holmes, Bernard Manin, Robert Pippin,
Moishe Postone, Dan Carpenter, Ann Davies, Neil Brenner, Gia Pas-
carelli, as well as particular members of the Workshop in the History of
Political Thought, the Interdisciplinary Social Theory Forum, the Mod-
ern European History Workshop, and the Political Theory Sunday Night
Group at the University of Chicago. All were enthusiastic in their en-
gagement with this book in earlier incarnations, ruthless in their crit-
icisms of it, as well as faithful in prodding me to bring the various
versions of it to completion.
Other scholars whose help with the manuscript as a whole has proven
indispensable over the years include Richard J. Bernstein, Carl Caldwell,
David Dyzenhaus, Michael Geyer, Charles Larmore, George Schwab,
Tracy Strong, Leo Walsh, and Richard Wolin. Specific portions of the
manuscript have benefited markedly from the critical attention of Susan
Buck-Morss, Renato Cristi, Adam Daniel, Gary Herrigel, Ellen Kennedy,
Matthias Konzett, Reinhart Koselleck, Pasquale Pasquino, Lloyd
Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Bill Scheuerman, and Gary Ulmen.
The final manuscript has been drastically improved by the diligent,
creative, and always expedient editorial and production efforts of
IX
X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Terence Moore, Andrew Roney, Gwen Seznec, and Lisa Lincoln of Cam-
bridge University Press, as well as the copyediting work of Carol Roberts.
The shortcomings that remain in the finished product are of course my
own responsibility.
Without the financial support of the following institutions, I would
have been able to complete this manuscript in neither a moderately
timely nor a tolerably competent manner: The Mellon Foundation and
the Division of the Social Sciences and the Department of Political
Science of the University of Chicago provided generous dissertation
funding; the William J. Fulbright Foundation provided a grant to con-
duct research in Germany at the University of Bremen during 1994-95;
and the European University Institute awarded me a Jean Monnet
postdoctoral fellowship to reside in Florence, Italy, during 1995-96.
Moreover, I thank the many scholars in Europe at the time of my stay
who improved this project by reading and commenting on its chapters,
by discussing its contents, by providing public forums for it at their
institutions, or by simply offering friendship and community to a scholar
abroad: Perry Anderson, Marina Calloni, Dario Castiglione, Richard
Dienst, Klaus Eder, Michelle Everson, Andrea Gavriel, Christian Joerges,
Christian Joppke, Axel Honneth, Stephan Leibfried, Steven Lukes,
Ingeborg Maus, Reinhard Mehring, Jo McKendry, Peter Niesen, Claus
Offe, Gianfranco Poggi, Ulrich PreuB, Peggy Somers, Yasemin Soysal,
John Torpey, and Bruce Western.
I must also express my gratitude to the late Michael Harrington for
first impressing on me how essential German philosophy could be for
understanding political power, historical change, and social justice in
modernity.
To Gia Pascarelli I owe a special acknowledgment for all the support -
emotional, intellectual, and otherwise - that she has afforded me over
the years as a friend, a spouse, a partner, a colleague, and in so many
other capacities for which, fortunately, there do not exist categories.
Simply, thank you.
This book is dedicated to my parents, who encouraged me uncondi-
tionally in this as in all endeavors.
Permission to reprint the following is gratefully acknowledged: An
earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism 21:
4 (Copyright 1995 by Sage Publications); parts of Chapter 3 appeared
in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 10: 1 (Copyright
1996, Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario); and parts of Chap-
ter 6 appeared in Political Theory 22: 4 (Copyright 1994 by Sage
Publications).
ABBREVIATIONS
Listed below are abbreviations of the works by Carl Schmitt most fre-
quently cited in this study.* The publication dates of the original Ger-
man editions appear in brackets.
*Works by other authors that may be abbreviated in the study are listed in the notes of the
particular chapters.
xi
Xll ABBREVIATIONS
Over the last decade, there has been a veritable explosion of Anglo-
American interest in the works of Weimar constitutional and political theo-
rist, Carl Schmitt.1 Even before joining the National Socialist party in 1933,
1 Recent full-length studies on Schmitt include the reissue of George Schwab's Challenge of
The Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936
(Westport: Greenwood, 1989); Schmitt's intellectual-political biography by Joseph Ben-
dersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); as
well as Paul Edward Gottfried's Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (Westport: Greenwood,
1990). Perhaps surprisingly, it has been scholars on the Left who have been the most active
in promoting Schmitt in the English-speaking world. The journal Telos devoted a whole
issue to Schmitt (no. 72, summer 1987) and regularly publishes translations of, and com-
mentaries on, his work by G. L. Ulmen. The following monographs by veterans of the new
Left also confront Schmitt's work seriously: Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and
Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Paul Hirst, Law, ^Socialism and
Democracy (London: Routledge, 1986); and Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (Lon-
don: Verso, 1993). Jurgen Habermas, Stephen Holmes, and Richard Wolin, on the other
hand, express dismay over, and advise caution toward, this new enthusiasm for Schmitt. See
Habermas, "The Horrors of Autonomy," in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the
Historians' Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989);
Holmes, "The Scourge of Liberalism," The New Republic 199 (August 22, 1988); and Wolin,
"Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism and the Total State," in The Terms of Cultural Criticism:
The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992). For a critical survey of the recent literature on Schmitt, see Tracy B. Strong's
"Foreword: Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt," in the most recent
edition of Schmitt's Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996).
2 INTRODUCTION
2 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932), trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1976), hereafter CP
3 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 5; hereafter PT.
4 For a fair sample of this literature, consult the titles in The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of
Technology, directed by Don Ihde, such as Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation
with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and
Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, eds., Technology and the Politics of Knowledge (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Not in this series but also of note are Andrew
Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Roger
Fellows, ed., Philosophy and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
David J. Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics ofFacts and
Artifacts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love
of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
INTRODUCTION 3
The chief example of how the technological determinism of orthodox Marxism was appro-
priated in the seventies to justify the revival of traditional values by "neoconservatism" is the
work of Daniel Bell: see The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1972);
and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). The attempt to
impose a cultural asceticism by appeals to supposedly irresistible technological imperatives
is quite dominant today. For a lucid and now classic account of how state functioning in
Western mass democracies has become increasingly governed by the questions of efficiency
and control at the expense of the normative principles of democratic accountability - a
description that doesraolapse into neoconservative excess - see Glaus Offe, Contradictions of
the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). See also the more
recent book by Carol J. Hager, Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the German
Energy Debate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
For an early sociohistorical analysis of such questions, see Charles Maier, "Between Taylor-
ism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the
1920s," Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970); and for a more recent socio-aesthetic one,
see the essays contained in Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
4 INTRODUCTION
Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 120. Kennedy, "Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt
School," Telos^i (spring 1987): 41. Cropsey, foreword to Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and
Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), p. x. Tribe, introduction to Social Democracy and the Rule of Law: Otto
Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, ed. Keith Tribe (London: Unwin & Allen, 1987), p. 10.
Jerry Z. Muller and Richard Wolin, on the other hand, present Schmitt as a rather
unmitigated advocate of technology: see Muller, "Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the Radi-
cal Conservative Critique of Liberal Democracy in the Weimar Republic," History ofPolitical
Thought 12:4 (winter 1991); and Wolin, "Carl Schmitt, the Conservative Revolutionary:
Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror," Political Theory 20:3 (August 1992).
There is little mention of Schmitt at all in the philosophy of technology literature except
for Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), which relies too heavily on
the misinterpretation of Schmitt's attitude toward technology put forth by Karl Heinz
Bohrer in the otherwise excellent DieAesthetik des Schreckens: Die pessimistische Romantik und
Ernst Jungers Fruhwerk (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978).
CP and PT; Carl Schmitt, The Crisis ofParliamentary Democracy (1923), trans. Ellen Kennedy
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), hereafter P; Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre ([1928]
Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), hereafter V.
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism (1919), trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1985), hereafter PR; Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), trans. G. L. Ulmen
INTRODUCTION 5
to see more clearly - in total, and beyond mere apology and polemic - what
it is that Schmitt is actually trying to refute and combat.
(Westport: Greenwood, 1996), hereafter RC; "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticiz-
ations" (1929), trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, Telos 96 (summer 1993),
hereafter ND; Theodor Ddublers "Nordlicht": Drei Studien ilber die Elemente, den Geist und die
Aktualitdt des Werkes ([1916] Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), hereafter N
Here it can be said that the distinction between Technik and Technizitdt for Schmitt corre-
sponds fairly closely to the differentiation discerned by R. L. Rutsky in an analysis of
Weimar dispositions towards technology: the former, "a rationalist, functionalist notion of
technology" and the latter, "a notion that emphasizes the irrational, chaotic, and even the
destructive aspects of technology, that sees it as a dynamic, shocking, almost libidinal
force." Rutsky, "The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropolis, Nazism, Modern-
ism," New German Critique 0 (fall 1993). Miriam Hansen and Reiner Schurmann helpfully
explicate the use of terms pertaining to technology in the work of two representatives of
the intellectual traditions between which I seek to situate Schmitt as a procedural point of
departure - T. W. Adorno and Martin Heidegger, respectively: see Hansen, "Introduction
to Adorno's 'Transparencies on Film' (1966)," New German Critique 245 (fall/winter
1981-2); and Schurmann, 'Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on 'That Which
Saves' in the Global Reach," in Technology in the Western Political Tradition, ed. A. M. Melzer,
J. Weinberger, and M. R. Zinman (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1993).
b INTRODUCTION
critical attention. Moreover, because it is liberalism that stands "victorious"
over state socialism today, it is this aspect of Schmitt's project that is my
principle focus.
I do however believe that my title, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism:
Against Politics as Technology, specifies certain crucial aspects of Schmitt's
thought that I wish to emphasize in this study. The oppositional preposition
"against" reflects the confrontational quality of the theorist of the friend/
enemy distinction. "Politics" has a special connotation for the theorist of
"the political," which in Schmitt's sense implies the ever-present possibility
of conflict that modern "technology," as a supposedly neutral force, at-
tempts to suppress. As I will show, Schmitt explicitly equates liberalism - that
is, governmentally, the constitutional and institutional guarantee of limited
government and individual rights; culturally, the emphasis on compromise
over conflict, and the individual over the group - with this neutralizing
technical force. I do not use "critique" in the sense of mere criticism but
rather in the philosophically dialectical sense of analyzing something from
within its own categories, such that the rational core of the object of inves-
tigation is preserved. As I hope to show, Schmitt's critique of liberalism does
indeed indicate elements that are potentially problematic with the theory
and practice of liberalism, as well as that which ought to be preserved from
liberalism in changing historical contexts. This last fact will come as a sur-
prise to many, as it certainly would have to Schmitt himself. Furthermore,
my own critique of Schmitt will indicate not only the elements of his theory
that are not adequate to modern democratic theory but also that which is
worth taking seriously in his thought. In my estimation, the North American
reception of Schmitt's work has been too often characterized by an insuffi-
ciently theorized staking of positions. Schmitt is either denounced almost
out of hand from a liberal or neoleftist standpoint13 or positively appropri-
ated perhaps a bit too unreflectively for a leftist or rightist political
agenda.14
In the course of this study, it will often appear as though I merely recon-
13 See Martin Jay, "Reconciling the Irreconcilable?" Telos 71 (spring 1987); and Jeffrey
Herf's contribution to "Reading and Misreading Schmitt: An Exchange," Telos 74 (winter
1987-8).
14 The editors of the journal Telos draw on Schmitt to fill the apparent lacunae in the state
theory of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, and Chantal Mouffe deploys
Schmitt in a poststructuralist critique of liberalism in The Return of the Political. See Richard
Bellamy and Peter Baehr, "Carl Schmitt and the Contradictions of Liberal Democracy,"
European Journal of Political Research 23 (February 1993) for a left-liberal use of Schmitt.
The major effort to revive Schmitt for a contemporary right-wing theoretical orientation is
Gottfried's Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory.
INTRODUCTION 7
struct Schmitt's arguments in relatively mute agreement. However, I actually
hope to allow Schmitt's theoretical categories to emerge themselves
through my textual explication so that I may criticize him more fundamen-
tally by negating these categories against each other further along in my
analysis. I choose not to "refute" him from an a priori liberal or leftist
standpoint that holds him up to some external ideals to which he never held
himself. I hope to avoid such a potentially artificial method of critique that
unfortunately characterizes most of the literature on Schmitt by proceeding
more immanently to his theory - even if initially risking the perception that
I stand in silent agreement with all that he claims, often fantastically. By the
conclusion of each chapter, I hope to have shown how one can better
criticize Schmitt by reading him against himself, rather than by holding him
up to, for instance, a Kantian standard derived from either of its currently
predominant Rawlsian or Habermasian varieties. However, this does not
mean that I will fail to hold Schmitt accountable for the many distortions
and misrepresentations of the Enlightenment tradition to which he so often
resorts in his writings. On the contrary, there is much to be learned from
such misreadings; however, they will not be the major source of my crit-
icisms of Schmitt.
So much of political theory of the last twenty years - particularly that
associated with the question of liberalism - has followed a by-now-tired
course: One inevitably turns to A Theory of Justice15 and either proceeds to
employ it as a yardstick by which to measure a liberal-challenging alternative
or, conversely, holds Rawls's political philosophy up to some other standard
so as to judge liberalism's adequacy for that particular agenda (e.g., Aristo-
telianism, communitarianism, perfectionism, utilitarianism, neoconserva-
tism, feminism, environmentalism).16 Again, this is not the mode of proce-
dure of this project. I will not be comparing and contrasting Schmitt's theory
with that of any liberals to whom he did not explicitly compare himself in the
hope of demonstrating the respective advantages and deficiencies on each
side. Rather, I attempt to carefully read Schmitt's Weimar texts in light of the
many kinds of thinkers from his "context," broadly defined, to help demon-
strate the fuller ramifications of his thought for the relationship between
15 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
16 Robert Nozick began this trend with Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books,
1974), after which followed countless "critiques" of "Rawlsian" liberalism. It should be
noted here that Mouffe and David Dyzenhaus undertake challenging theoretical jux-
tapositions of Schmitt and Rawls; see Mouffe, The Return of the Political; and Dyzenhaus,
"Liberalism after the Fall: Schmitt, Rawls and the Problem ofJustification," Philosophy and
Social Criticism 22:3 (1996).
8 INTRODUCTION
17 In this way I hope that the study will serve as what Axel Honneth calls "a history of theory
with systematic intent"; see Honneth, The Critique ofPower: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social
Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. xiii. Of course I do
not wish to emphasize intellectual context to the exclusion of social context. Among the
major historical works consulted in the research of this study are David Blackbourn and
Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-
Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die
Auflosung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie
(Dusseldorf: Droste, 1984); Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and
Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Charles S. Maier,
Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World
War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable
Past: History, Holocaust and German Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1988); Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar 1918-1933: Die Geschichte der Ersten Deutschen
Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994); Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture, and the State in
Germany, 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Hans Mommsen,
The Rise and Decline of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996); and especially Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity,
trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992).
18 For examinations of the issue of Weber's liberalism, see David Beetham, "Weber and the
Liberal Tradition," and Tracy Strong, "Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie," both in The
Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. A. Horowitz and T.
Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). The work of Stephen Holmes, which
has had a profound impact on this book, perhaps best exemplifies a contemporary
"Weberian" liberalism: Holmes prioritizes as a central task of liberal politics the contain-
ment and redirection of the multifarious expressions of human irrationality, in Passions
and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), and he ruthlessly assails romantically inclined critics of liberalism and the Enlight-
enment whom he identifies as dangerous expressions of this irrationality, in The Anatomy of
Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). These are aspects of
Weber's political orientation and Schmitt's reception of them that will be discussed and
criticized in the course of this book.
INTRODUCTION 9
to the fore the issues of technology and politics more provocatively than a
crude comparison and contrast of Schmittianism and liberalism.19
The late Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic itself were characterized
intellectually by a divide between forms of neo-Kantianism and strands of
what can be identified for heuristic purposes as kinds of neo-Nietzschean
Lebensphilosophie. There was the abstract concern with normative formalism,
on the one hand, and with existential substance as such - that is, positivism
versus existentialism - on the other. The two poles can be interpreted as
reactions to a changing political and socioeconomic situation from the
laissez-faire arrangement of state and society of the nineteenth century to
the state-interventionist scenario of the early twentieth, in which technology
was perceived in varying ways as the agent of change.20 This scenario should
not sound altogether unfamiliar to students of the political philosophy,
social theory, and intellectual history of the last twenty-five years in North
America and Europe. In the midst of a present transformation from a
welfare-state configuration to what has been variously described as a postin-
dustrial, post-Fordist, flexible accumulation, or economically globalized
configuration, in which technology has again been assigned a central role,21
19 Recently published or forthcoming monographs that situate Schmitt within the broader
context of other Weimar constitutional lawyers, such as Kelsen, Hermann Heller, Otto
Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, Rudolph Smend, and Richard Thoma, are Peter C. Cald-
well, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of
Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); David Dyzenhaus,
Truth's Revenge: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997); and William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception:
The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). See also,
Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink, eds., Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
20 For one of the most profound accounts of this shift, see Jurgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger with the assistance of F. Lawrence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
21 As just a small sampling of the literatures on post-Fordism, multilateralism, international-
ization, and, most fashionably, globalization, see Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The
Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Scott Lash
and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987); Alain Lipietz, Towards a New Economic Order. Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Gerard Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters: The
Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Ash
Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994); and Robert O.
Keohane and Helen V. Miller, eds., Internationalization and Domestic Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996). A recent grappling with the broader intellectual
ramifications of these changes is Moishe Postone, "Contemporary Historical Transforma-
tions: Some Theoretical Considerations," unpublished manuscript, Department of His-
tory, University of Chicago (1995).
1O INTRODUCTION
we have likewise witnessed a revival of Kantian normative theory in the
political liberalism of Rawls and the communicative social democracy of
Habermas, as well as a resurgence of Nietzsche- or even Heidegger-inspired
neoexistentialism in the form of the deconstruction and postmodernism of
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and many of their devotees.
Besides ossifying these two intellectual antinomies, the first industrial
transformation in this century also opened up the opportunity for Hegel-
derived theoretical attempts that did not merely opt for one of the opposing
Kantian/Nietzschean poles of the changing dynamic but rather sought to
mediate the two antitheses and embed them within the historical transfor-
mation itself and understand the technological change for neither the
irresistible "iron cage" of bureaucratic rationalization or abstract normative
imperatives, nor the opportunity for expressing a concrete primordial will -
the extremes expressed by the two formerly mentioned modes of think-
ing.22 It is my hope that an analysis of a central figure of that initial transfor-
mation in its German context, Carl Schmitt, and the place of technology in
his thought, will aid in the ever more pressing theoretical apprehension of
the scope and ramifications of the present technological, intellectual, and
political change, including the possibility for progressive democratic prac-
tice as well as the danger of reactionary, authoritarian regression.23
Carl Schmitt, rivaled perhaps only by Martin Heidegger, is commonly
understood as the representative par excellence of one wing of the dualities
just mentioned: Nietzschean existentialism or Lebensphilosophie and the will-
driven project to seize technology in a supernationalistic reactionary
project. This is not an altogether inaccurate characterization, but it is cer-
tainly a rather undifferentiated account of Schmitt's theoretical efforts. I
attempt to show that Schmitt quite often simultaneously sought the route of
a Hegelian mediation of the intellectual poles of modernity and their rela-
tionship with technology, alongside the more commonly acknowledged
22 The left-Hegelianism of Lukacs and his "Western Marxist" heirs are perhaps the best
representatives of this methodology that sought to overcome the Kantian/Nietzschean
divide. For excellent general accounts, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory:
Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Martin Jay, Marx-
ism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), and Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the
Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
23 Two accounts of left-Hegelian methodology that preserve its viability as a contemporary
theoretical-political orientation are Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of
Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Moishe Postone,
Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
INTRODUCTION 11
24 Several recent revaluations of fascism that are inspired by contemporary trends include
Peter Baldwin, "Social Interpretations of Nazism: Renewing a Tradition, "Journal of Contem-
porary History 25 (1990); Roberto Vivarelli, "Interpretations of the Origins of Fascism,"
Journal of Modern History 63 (March 1991); Roger Griffin, The Nature ofFascism (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1991); and Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David
Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
25 On this transition, especially see the essays contained in Amin, ed., Post-Fordism; Keohane
and Miller, eds., Internationalization and Domestic Politics; and Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism
Matters.
26 Schmitt was, however, known to speak well of Italian fascism. For an excellent study of the
latter, see Mabel Berezin, Communities ofFeeling: Culture, Politics and Identity in Fascist Italy
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
27 See Jurgen Fijalkowski, Die Wendung zum Fuhrerstaat: Ideologische Komponenten in der pol-
itischen Philosophic Carl Schmitts (Cologne: Westdeutscher, 1958); Christian Graf von
Krockow, Die Entscheidung: Fine Untersuchung u'ber Ernst Ju'nger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger
12 INTRODUCTION
egy may serve to help upstanding, progressive intellectuals feel secure from
the threat and influence of the likes of this radical authoritarian and, fur-
ther, may serve to superficially keep other realms of thought, such as liberal-
ism or social democracy, sanitary from what is understandably perceived as
Schmitt's fetid influence.28 But such a potentially coerced quarantine in
fact serves mostly to distort history. Fascism, as Schmitt and others theorized
it, drew on, and interacted with, many intellectual sources.29 To deny this
with an attempt to pack Schmitt in a box affixed with a warning label and
indefinitely store him away will only yield further regressive outcomes. Such
a policy of containment toward fascism will prove - indeed has proven -
unsuccessful, a fact to which any halfway sensitive observation of the globe
today will attest. Fascism, as defined in the course of this study, has not been
locked away forever but rather lives on - not only in "developing" areas of
South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, but elsewhere in Europe and in
the United States. Avoidance of, as well as the purely polemical lashing out
against, Carl Schmitt will only ensure that what is necessarily repressed in
such approaches will strike back with ever more forceful vengeance and will
possibly contribute to the reemergence of fascism in the nineties and
beyond.
Fascism is often understood as a phenomenon cordoned off historically
by the dates 1918 and 1945, and geographically by the territorial borders of
Germany and Italy (and perhaps Vichy France and Franco's Spain). Because
of these starkly drawn boundaries, it is generally considered scholastically
idiosyncratic, not to say also politically suspect, to undertake a study of a
subject like the work of Schmitt. But as the emerging political realities of the
nineties suggest, fascism has not been so successfully contained as the asser-
tion of the temporal and geographical borders mentioned suggests: As
parliamentary institutions and practices reach an almost unparalleled low in
([1958] Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1990); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); and most re-
cently Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Benderskyjustifiably criticizes the interpretive excesses
of this literature but in so doing goes too far in understating the radical nature of
Schmitt's thinking; see "Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolution," Telos 72 (summer
1987)-
28 Liberal political theorist Charles Larmore, for instance, approximates an offhand
dismissal of Schmitt in "Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberal Democracy," in The Morals of
Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). After discussing only one of
Schmitt's works, Parlamentarismus, Larmore finds Schmitt's critique of liberalism "aston-
ishingly weak" and concludes that Schmitt's work does little more than affirm liberalism's
near invincibility (pp. 186, 188).
29 See the helpful source book edited by Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
INTRODUCTION 13
30 See Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Com-
parative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and Ulrich Wank, ed.,
The Resurgence ojRight-Wing Radicalism in Germany: New Forms of an Old Phenomenon? {Atlan-
tic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996).
31 See Herbert Marcuse, 'The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the
State" (1934), reprinted in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); and Siegfried Kracauer, "Revolt of the Middle Classes"
(1931), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed., T. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995). See also another classic critique of Schmitt recently made avail-
able to English-speaking audiences: Karl Lowith, 'The Occasional Decisionism of Carl
Schmitt," in Heidegger and European Nihilism, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995).
14 INTRODUCTION
32 See, most recently, Jiirgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 90.
33 On Hayek's debt to Schmitt, see Bill Scheuerman, "The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt
and Friedrich A. Hayek," Constellations4:2 (October 1997); and Renato Cristi, "Hayek and
Schmitt on the Rule of Law," Canadian Journal of Political Science 17:3 (1984).
34 Reinhard Mehring considers the status of these two interpretive poles in the recent
INTRODUCTION 15
though the apologetic stance toward Schmitt has been intensely and exten-
sively attacked in the literature, there are definite drawbacks to bald po-
lemics as well. Sympathetic approaches to Schmitt's authoritarianism may
indeed encourage cynical appropriation of his thought for contemporary
"conservative" agendas.35 But insufficiently theorized attacks may also aid in
an illegitimate rehabilitation and sanitizing of his dangerous positions.
Again, the lack of subtlety necessarily involved in polemicizing against
Schmitt's often quite nuanced and complicated theories may result in
caricatures of his positions that themselves invite the illegitimate resuscita-
tion of Schmitt by those who would point out misinterpretations simply in
the name of "clarity." Moreover, when critics resort to friend/enemy ap-
proaches in confronting the author of the "concept of the political," they
unwittingly draw themselves into adopting Schmitt's own pathological
methodology in an attempt to criticize him. By engaging such an opponent
on his own familiar terrain, who do they suppose will have the ultimate
advantage? The fact that North American academics in the nineties could
be so naive as to think they can emerge victorious from such a confrontation
with the cunning sage of modern tyranny suggests that the over-inflated self-
image of intellectual elites that proved disastrous in Schmitt's own Weimar
context persists today. If one wishes to ascertain the deficiencies of liberal-
ism that still make fascism an immanent sociopolitical alternative, as well as
technology's central role in this dynamic, neither apologies nor polemics
with respect to Carl Schmitt will prove sufficient. Moral outrage toward
Schmitt the historical, intellectual, and political figure, and cautious suspi-
cion toward those who would devote attention to him is appropriate and
warranted - but not at the expense of theoretical rigor and textual fidelity.
German literature: "Raffinierter Meister des AnstoBigen. Versuch jenseits von Apologie
und Polemik: Carl Schmitts Werk und seine Wirkung," Die Welt (May 21, 1994). Publica-
tions on Schmitt in German indeed abound, yet each decade seems to produce at least
one outstanding work; see Hasso Hofmann, Legitimitdt gegen Legalitdt: Der Weg der pol-
itischen Philosophie Carl Schmitts (Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1964); Ingeborg Maus,
Biirgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funktion und aktuellen Wirkung der The-
orie Carl Schmitts ([1976] Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980); and Mehring's own Pathetisches
Denken. Carl Schmitts Denkweg am Leitfaden Hegels: Katholische Grundstellung und antimarx-
istische Hegelstrategie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989).
35 Schwab's Challenge of the Exception and Bendersky's Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich are
most frequently and violently criticized as apologetic, yet they do not in fact promote
Schmitt for any particular political ideology. In contrast, as mentioned earlier, Gottfried's
Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory unabashedly incorporates Schmitt into a right-wing
project - a project so conservative that Gottfried dismisses the prefix "neo" in his develop-
ment of the notion of "jbtf&oconservatism." See Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement
(New York: Twayne, 1993).
l6 INTRODUCTION
Project Overview
Part One attempts to ascertain exactly what technology is for Schmitt. I
interpret his work from various stages of his Weimar career, drawing out his
notion of technology by accentuating its affinities and oppositions with two
sets of theoretical contemporaries, who might be somewhat vulgarly
categorized as Nietzschean existentialists and Marxian critical theorists.
Central to this part is Schmitt's reception of Weber's theory of rationaliza-
tion, for it is in confrontation with this that Schmitt develops his theory of
technology. Like Weber, who recognizes that the problem of technology
does not lie essentially with the proliferation of machines as such, Schmitt
sees technology as inherently linked with a way of thinking that he calls
"economic-technical thought." This phenomenon is concerned primarily
with the manipulation of matter, one that saps the world of meaning, and
establishes the possibility for novel and harsher modes of domination.
Schmitt holds these views in common with the more existentialist of his
contemporaries, who view technology as an overly quantitative and abstract
force that eradicates the concrete and qualitative particularities of human
existence. However, as mentioned earlier, I will suggest that Schmitt has
more in common on this issue with the critical theorists of his era who argue
that this abstract and quantitative characteristic is only one side of moder-
nity, and that modern technology also elicits a purely modern fixation on
the qualitative and the particular. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 1, this
eludes the existentialists as well as Schmitt's mentor, Weber. But again,
Schmitt's recognition of this unreflective privileging of the concrete in
Weber (e.g., the irreducible will behind the "warring gods" thesis of moder-
nity), or in romanticism (e.g., the aesthetic enrapture with the "occasion"),
does not prevent Schmitt himself from engaging in it. I show in Chapter 2
that his attempt to infuse the technologically disenchanted world with
meaning through "the concept of the political" or the "friend/enemy"
distinction (especially as expressed in a doctrine of cultural conflict versus
In Pathetisches Denken, Mehring also theoretically interrogates the rarely noticed dialectical
methodology employed by Schmitt and emphasizes the anti-Marxian ends to which he put
it. A recent work in the German literature on Schmitt that focuses on the role of technol-
ogy in Schmitt's work is Thomas Vesting, Politische Einheitsbildung und technische Realisation:
Ueber die Expansion der Technik und die Grenzen der Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990).
INTRODUCTION ig
39 Regarding Schmitt's work under National Socialism, see, in the German literature, Bernd
Riithers, Carl Schmitt im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft ah Zeitgeist-Verstdrkung? (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1989); and in the English, Peter C. Caldwell, "National Socialism and Constitu-
tional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi
State, 1933-1937," Cardozo Law Review 16:2 (December 1994).
40 On the subject of Schmitt's influence on both the Right and the Left in the BRD, see Hans
Lietzmann, "Vater der Verfassungsvater?: Carl Schmitt und die Verfassungsgrundung in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland," in Carl Schmitt und die Liberalismuskritik (Opladen:
Laske & Budrich, 1988); R. MuBgnug, "Carl Schmitts verfassungsrechtliches Werk und
sein Fortwirken im Staatsrecht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland," in Helmut Quaritsch,
ed., Complexio Oppositorum: Ueber Carl Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988); Ulrich
K. PreuB, "Vater der Verfassungsvater?: Carl Schmitts Verfassungslehre und die ver-
fassungspolitische Diskussion der Gegenwart," Politisches Denken Jahrbuch 1993, ed. V.
Gerhardt, H. Ottman, and M. Thompson (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1993); Dirk van Laaks,
Gesprdche in der Sicherheit des Scheigens Carl Schmitt in der Geistesgeschichte der fru'hen Bun-
desrepublik (Berlin: Akademie, 1993); and Reinhard Mehring, "Carl Schmitt und die
Verfassungslehre unserer Tage," Archiv des offentlichen Recht 55 (1995).
22 INTRODUCTION
41 As Chantal Mouffe articulately explains, "It is incorrect to assert, as some do, that
Schmitt's thinking was imbued with Nazism before his turnabout of 1933 and his espousal
of Hitler's movement. There is, however, no doubt that it was his deep hostility to liberal-
ism which made possible, or which did not prevent, his joining the Nazis." Mouffe, The
Return of the Political, p. 121.
42 On this question, see Volker Neumann, Der Staat im Burgerkrieg: Kontinuitdt und Wandlung
des Staatsbegriffs in derpolitischen Theorie Carl Schmitts (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1980); and
Ingeborg Maus, "Zur 'Zasur' von 1933 in der Theorie Carl Schmitts," in Rechtstheorie und
politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986).
43 See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cummings
(New York: Continuum, 1989); Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago: 1958); and Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics,
trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Habermas, The Theory of Communica-
tive Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984); and Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld
and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1987).
INTRODUCTION 23
44 Horkheimer and Adorno have been criticized for reducing all human activity to the
instrumental domination of nature. See, for instance, Honneth, The Critique of Power,
chaps. 2 and 3. Arendt privileges the political praxis she attributes to the ancient Greek
polis over modern, technified political action, and hence - her admiration for modern
political revolutionaries notwithstanding - it is potentially problematic to derive a mod-
ern theory of political action from her theory. See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism
and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1988), pp. 207-20. Habermas has been besieged on many fronts for espousing a
transhistorical notion of technology that compromises the attempt to grasp the specif-
icities of modern technology. See Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, chap. 6; and
Robert B. Pippin, "On the Notion of Technology as Ideology: Prospects," in Technology,
Pessimism and Postmodernism, ed. Y. Ezrahi, E. Mendelsohn, and H. Segal (Boston: Kluwer,
1994), pp. 107-10. It should be noted that although Thomas McCarthy provides a more
sympathetic account of Habermas's theory both in this regard and in general, in The
Critical Theory ofJiirgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), he also lays out
quite articulately the problem of technology and politics in the first subsection of the
work, "The Scientization of Politics."
45 As Sheldon Wolin observes, Horkheimer's and Adorno's theory of technology "meant the
loss of a political context." They "refused to recontextualize their politics around the fate
of democratic politics. They made no effort to develop a theoretical defense of even the
troubled form of it in the liberal regime of Weimar or, later, the more robust social
democratic politics of New Deal America." Wolin, "Reason in Exile: Critical Theory and
Technological Society," in Technology in the Western Political Tradition, p. 181. Arendt'swell-
known distinguishing of the "political" from the "social" that disparages the latter in the
name of the former may render her theory insufficiently equipped to deal with issues that
most persons interested in democratic theory would not be willing to abandon in a political
theory. See Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, pp. 214-20. Habermas is a more
complicated case, as he has always been quite willing to "descend" into discussions about
the practicalities of liberal-democratic politics. However, even his most recent work, Be-
tween Facts and Norms, which purports to mediate the concrete "facticity" of sociopolitical
reality with the normative "validity" of ethical-political theory, is still a bit too much of the
latter, with insufficient attention to the former; see Veit-Michael Bader, "Viel Geltung und
immer weniger Faktizitat: Zur Kritik an Jiirgen Habermas' diskurstheoretischer Rechts-
und Demokratietheorie," in Produktion und Klassentheorie: Festschriftfur Sebastion Herkommer,
ed., H. GanBmann and S. Kriiger (Hamburg: VSA, 1993); and Neil Brenner, "The Limits
of Civil Society in the Age of Global Capital: A Critique of Jiirgen Habermas' Mature
Social Theory," master's thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
(1993)-
24 INTRODUCTION
46 See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt
(New York: Harper and Row, 1977). If one reduces all action to technology-driven activity,
one no longer needs to take responsibility for one's own political actions, whatever they
may have been. Unlike Heidegger, however, Schmitt, even in his postwar writings, never
considers technology a fate or a destiny to which humanity must resign itself. See Schmitt,
"Die Einheit der Welt," Merkur 6:1 (January 1952); and "Der Neue Nomos der Erde,"
Gemeinschaft und Politik 3:1(1955). This distinction is important, because it demonstrates
that Schmitt's influential student, Ernst Forsthoff, a well-known German theorist of tech-
nology and politics, is actually closer to Heidegger in this regard. It is ironic that a critique
of technology that lapses into resignation emerges ultimately as an apology for neoconser-
vative technocracy. Again, however, this is the intellectual trajectory of Schmitt's student,
not of Schmitt himself. A study of postwar German conservatism that understands this
distinction is Peter C. Caldwell, "Ernst Forsthoff and the Legacy of Radical Conservative
State Theory in the Federal Republic of Germany," History of Political Thought 15:4 (winter
1994); and one that does not is Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: HansFreyer and
the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
47 Letter from Schmitt to Prelate Kass, head of the Catholic Center Party (Jan. 30, 1933),
quoted from Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, p. 187. Kass had - quite prophetically, as it turned
out - accused Schmitt of constitutional relativism and a willingness to resort to illegality in
matters of state.
INTRODUCTION 25
48 A few years ago, before he undertook the business of governing a fledgling government,
Vaclav Havel spoke of technology and liberal democracy together: "Technology, that child
of modern science . . . is out of humanity's control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us,
and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction. And humanity
can find no way out: we have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political
conception to help us bring things back under human control. . . . [Parliamentary
democracies] can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological
civilization and the industrial consumer society." Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in
Living in Truth (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 114-16. Recently the editors of a
volume on technology and politics expressed similar concerns: "Because of the intimate
connection [of technology and liberalism], it does seem peculiarly difficult for thinkers
working within the liberal democratic tradition to confront the problem of technology in
its most radical forms, as the relative silence on the topic by liberal theorists -John Rawls,
Ronald Dworkin, and Robert Nozick, for example - would seem to indicate. But for the
same reason it is above all necessary for liberals to address it. The problem of technology
26 INTRODUCTION
is, to a very great extent, the problem of liberal democracy." A. M. Melzer, J. Weinberger,
and M. R. Zinman, Preface, to Technology in the Western Political Tradition. Schmitt's political
theory is in its own terms hardly friendly to liberalism. Yet it might be of more than just
perverse interest to study it with an eye toward addressing a problem becoming ever more
salient in liberal democracies.
INTRODUCTION 27
49 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Lon-
don: Vintage, 1976), p. 181.
50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954).
28 INTRODUCTION
In his cultural-political treatises from the years 1916 to 1923, Schmitt at-
tempts to formulate a critique of modernity that properly apprehends tech-
nology's role within it, without either aesthetically valorizing or fearfully
fleeing from it - responses characteristic of many of his contemporaries.1
His first effort at this, in his commentary on the poem "Northern Lights" in
1916, is followed by another socioliterary study from 1919, Political Romanti-
cism.2 He then takes up this task more rigorously in Roman Catholicism and
PoliticalForm in 1923.3 Schmitt confronts the problem that modernity seems
to have two opposite intellectual poles: the one, economic-technical
Despite certain interpretive deficiencies with respect to Schmitt and others, Jeffrey Herf's
Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1984) provides many vivid examples of attitudes toward tech-
nology in this context. More generally reliable studies within the realm of cultural studies
are Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and a friendly criticism of the latter by R. L. Rutsky,
"The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropolis, Nazism, Modernism," New German
Critique 60 (fall 1993). See also in the German literature Karl Heinz Bohrer, Aesthetik des
Schreckens: Die Pessimistische Romantik und Ernst Jungers Fruhwerk (Munich: Carl Hanser,
1978).
Schmitt, TheodorDdublers "Nordlicht": Drei Studien u'ber die Elemente, den Geist und die Aktualitdt
des Werkes (Berlin: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1991), hereafter TV; Political Romanticism, trans. Guy
Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), hereafter PR.
Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Green-
wood, 1996), hereafter referred to as Political Form and cited as RC.
31
32 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), hereafter HCC.
An otherwise excellent account of the young Lukacs's intellectual context does not men-
tion Schmitt at all: Mary Gluck, Georg Lukacs and His Generation: 1900-1918 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Notable exceptions in this regard are Norbert Bolz,
Auszugaus der entzauberten Welt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1989); Stefan Breuer, "The Illusion
of Politics: Politics and Rationalization in Max Weber and Georg Lukacs," New German
Critique 26 (summer 1982); and especially G. L. Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert: Eine Studie u'ber
Max Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1991). See also Agnes Heller,
"The Concept of the Political Revisited," in Political Theory Today, ed. D. Held (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991). The connection between Schmitt and Lukacs's theoreti-
cal progeny in the so-called Frankfurt School has been more widely discussed, however; see
the debate on the topic engaged in by Ellen Kennedy, Ulrich K. PreuB, Martin Jay, and
Alfons Sollner in Telos 71 (spring 1987); more recently, see William E. Scheuerman, Between
the Exception and the Norm: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1994).
Both appear in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). Schmitt was in the audience for the
"Science" lecture (Nov. 7, 1917), a speech on "Germany's New Political Order" (Nov. 14,
1918), and the "Politics" lecture (Jan. 28, 1919). In the winter of 1919-20, he attended
Weber's course, "Outline of a Universal Social and Economic History." Throughout these
years, Schmitt had several private conversations with Weber. See Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert,
pp. 20-1.
In a controversial statement, Jiirgen Habermas remarked that Schmitt was a "true
student," or at least a "natural son," of Weber; see Max Weber and Sociology Today (1965), ed.
Otto Stammer, trans. K. Morris (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 66, n. 4. Regarding
Weber's influence on Schmitt more elaborately, see Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and
German Politics, 1890-1920 (1959), trans. M. S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 33
Indeed, much of the fury that Schmitt directs at romantics and romanticism
in his book of 1919 on that subject parallels Weber's denouncement of the
contemporary forces of irrationalism and passivity in the "Vocation" lec-
tures. Lukacs was a member of Weber's Kreis from 1911 to 1915, participat-
ing in his Sunday afternoon discussion group. 7 Like Schmitt, Lukacs comes
to his 1923 critique via socio-aesthetic studies of literature.8
Both young scholars were deeply affected by Weber's rationalization
thesis, particularly as it appeared in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. A juxtaposition to Lukacs's own coming to terms with Weber will
provide the best alternative example for assessing Schmitt's confrontation
with technology and politics in this chapter. What is perhaps most poten-
tially fascinating about a comparison of these two theorists is the startling
similarities, as well as important differences, that it highlights on the issue of
technology and liberalism between Schmitt, the great anti-Marxist, and the
tradition of Western Marxism or critical theory inaugurated in no small
degree by Lukacs; the theoretical flaws that it magnifies in the neo-
Kantianism of Weber's simultaneously technocratic and technophobic "lib-
eral" social science and political theory; and the political dangers it exposes
in even the most brilliant critiques of Kantian liberalism that too readily
endorse political action as an alternative. 9
Press, 1984); Rune Slagstad, "Liberal Constitutionalism and Its Critics: Max Weber and
Carl Schmitt," in Constitutionalism and Democracy, ed. J. Elster and R. Slagstad (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988); Matthias Eberl, Die Legitimitdt der Moderne: Kulturkritik
und Herrschaftskonzeption beiMax Weber und Carl Schmitt (Marburg: Tectum, 1994); and, most
extensively, Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert.
The intellectual relationship of Lukacs and Weber is well covered in the better English-
language studies of the former's social and political theory; see Andrew Arato and Paul
Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Pluto Press, 1979);
Breuer, "The Illusion of Politics"; and Andrew Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of
Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Their personal relationship is
examined in biographical studies of the respective figures: e.g., Arthur Mitzman, The Iron
Cage: An Historical Interpretation ofMax Weber (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1985); and
Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
Lukacs, Soul and Form (1910-11), trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974);
"Zur Soziologie des modernen Drama," Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (1914);
and Theory of the Novel (1916), trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).
These affinities between Schmitt and Lukacs might help account for the fact - mentioned
in my introduction - that over the last ten years an impressive array of ex-, post-, and neo-
Marxists have felt compelled to appropriate or confront Schmitt: Andrew Arato, Norberto
Bobbio, Jean Cohen, Paul Hirst, Martin Jay, John Keane, Chantal Mouffe, Paul Piccone,
Gary Ulmen, and Richard Wolin. Cohen and Arato, although justifiably critical of Schmitt,
laud his "dialectical virtuosity" in their book Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 236. Mouffe identifies Schmitt as "a rigorous and perspicacious
opponent," in The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 118.
34 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
Both Schmitt and Lukacs find Weber's thesis susceptible to the same
criticism of excessive formalism cum underlying irrationalism as the Kantian
philosophy on which it is based. Weber's theory generally perceives the
elements of irrationality that inevitably confront modern rationalization in
three ways: either as external or prior to the system of rationalism itself -
"old gods" who "ascend from their graves" to "resume their eternal strug-
gle"; as simply reactions to rationalization; or as deviations from the ra-
tional.10 In their respective works from this period, Schmitt and Lukacs
cautiously incorporate, while exploring the limits of, Weber's thesis and
illustrate how the supposedly premodern or extrarational irrationality that
remains impenetrable to Enlightenment rationality is an inherent part of
that very rationality.
By 1923, however, they come to view Weber's approach as insufficiently
one-sided, for it cannot adequately account for the existence of the con-
crete, qualitative manifestations of social reality and, relatedly, the per-
sistence of the irrational, the romantic, and the mythical in modern society.
Whereas Weber generally claims that the phenomena associated with this
latter category are either modern remnants of an irrational past or contem-
porary flights from an overly rationalized present, Lukacs and Schmitt at-
tempt to show that such irrationality and neomythology are intrinsically
linked to the abstract rationality that Weber describes and practices. In
other words, modernity, rather than fostering the "disenchantment" of poli-
tics or the banishment of cultural superstition, itself manufactures them;
concomitantly, Weber's Kantian methodology and politics, rather than pro-
moting Enlightenment rationality, instead harbors a potentially dangerous
irrationality. They derive much of the evidence for this argument from
Weber himself: The battle of the many "warring gods" to which the discus-
sion of values is reduced in Weber's theory of pluralism is eventually under-
stood as the latent, irrational, subjective will that serves as a mere comple-
Besides the brief and forceful thrust of such a medium, which matches Schmitt's prose,
Reinhard Mehring points out how the pamphlet expresses Schmitt's philosophical sus-
pension between "system and aphorism," between "Hegel and Nietzsche." See Pathetisches
Denken: Carl Schmitts Denkweg am Leitfaden Hegels: Katholische Grundstellung und antimarx-
istische Hegelstrategie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), p. 21. Arato and Breines remark
on Lukacs's essayistic approach: "[T]he essay and the fragment, in their brevity and
incompleteness, remain true to the living reality of their objects. Incompatible with
intellectual synthesis and resolution of actual antagonisms, the essay and the fragment
are, in an antagonistic world, the dialectical forms of expression par excellence." The
Young Lukacs, p. 4.
With respect to the influence of Catholicism on Schmitt's early career, consult his biogra-
phies: Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theoristfor the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983); Paul Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Propylaen, 1993); and
Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt: Sein Aufsteig zum "Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches"
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichen Buchgesellschaft, 1995), although the latter may over-
emphasize the importance of Schmitt's confessional disposition over the course of his
entire life. Schmitt was certainly a believing Roman Catholic in the early twenties, writing
frequently in the Catholic press but never officially joining the Catholic Center Party. He
was excommunicated by the Church in 1926 because of the complexities of his marital
situation. He apparendy grew quite bitter toward the Church in the late Weimar Republic,
publicly feuding with the more moderate Center party. His antipathy reached its peak
under National Socialism, as he is quoted to have said in 1938: "If the Pope excommuni-
36 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
cates a nation so therefore does he only excommunicate himself." After the war, Schmitt
seemed to have made some peace with Catholicism once his excommunication was lifted,
remarking years later, "I am as Catholic as the tree is green, but have my own ideas on it";
elsewhere, even more provocatively, "I am Catholic not only by confession, but rather also
by historical extraction - if I may be allowed to say so, racially." See Helmut Quaritsch,
Positionen und Begriffe Carl Schmitts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), pp. 33-4; and
Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Zur Einfuhrung, p. 169, n. 113.
Regarding Lukacs's own "sectarian-messianic," political-theological orientation, see
Joseph B. Maier, "Georg Lukacs and the Frankfurt School: A Case of Secular Messianism,"
in Georg Lukacs: Theory, Culture and Politics, ed.J. Marcus and Z. Tarr (Oxford: Transaction,
1989); Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch
and Modern Jewish Messianism," New German Critique 34 (winter 1985); and Richard
Wolin, "Reflections on Jewish Secular Messianism," in Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical
History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). For Lukacs's own
account of the relevance of his Jewish background to his work, see "Gelebtes Denken:
Notes Toward an Autobiography," in Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch, ed. I. Eorsi,
trans. R.Livingstone (London: Verso, 1983). Also note the way Lukacs and Ernst Bloch are
described in Weber's official biography: Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography (1926),
trans. H. Zohn (New York: Wiley, 1975), p. 466.
13 On Schmitt's early neo-Kantianism, see Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich, pp.
8-11.
14 On this as well as other reflections on the parallels between Schmitt and Lukacs, see
Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert, pp. 86, 115-24.
15 Lukacs, "Carl Schmitt: Politische Romantik" (1928), in Georg Lukacs Werke, vol. 2:
Friihschriften II (Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1964).
16 Observing the "special nuances" of Schmitt's thought, Lukacs remarks that "the overtly
reactionary" yet "superior" Schmitt "perceived in the antithesis of liberalism and
democracy an important present day problem." See The Destruction ofReason (1962), trans.
Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1980), pp. 652-54. Lukacs is
specifically referring to Schmitt's Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus
(Munich: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1926). Lukacs had written his own critique of liberal
parliamentarism in 1920: "Zur Frage des Parlamentarismus," in GeorgLukdcs Werke, vol. 2.
17 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin:
A N T I N O M I E S OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 37
Duncker & Humblot, 1963), pp. 61-3, n. 22. Under National Socialism, Schmitt either
refrained from citing Lukacs altogether or denounced him as a Jew and a Marxist; see
"Der Staat als Mechanismus bei Hobbes und Descartes," Archiv fur Rechts- und
Sozialphilosophie 39 (1937). He returned to serious considerations on Lukacs after the war;
see Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsdtze aus den Jahren 1924-1954: Materialien zu einer Ver-
fassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1958), pp. 425-6, 450.
18 On Schmitt's debt to Hegel or "Hegelian strategy," see Mehring, Pathetisches Denken. I
focus more on this strategy as it was practiced in Weimar in particular rather than in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, broadly conceived. Moreover, I
do not immediately focus on the "antimarxism" of Schmitt's approach but rather initially
on its similarities to Lukacs's particular Marxism. See Lukacs's own work on the philoso-
pher, The Young Hegel (1938), trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976);
as well as his remarks on the Hegelian quality of History and Class Consciousness in the 1967
preface to the work.
19 See Schmitt "Die andere Hegel-Linie: Hans Freyer zum 70. Geburtstag," Christ und Welt 30
(Jul. 25, 1957).
20 To mention just a few recent works from the enormous literature on the "Weberian"
framing of these questions, see Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics and
Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
Gilbert G. Germain, A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber:
Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996); as well as the essays included
38 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
The narrative of modernity offered by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, which structures the technology question in so many
ways, centers on a value transformation in the Western Christian world-
view.21 At the risk of perhaps crudely summarizing Weber's well-known
thesis, Reformation Protestants rebel at what they perceive to be the exces-
sive formalism of Roman Catholicism: its overemphasis on ritual, dogma,
and, in general, extrasubjective criteria. Radical Protestantism turns inward
generating, unbeknownst to itself, in a tragically ironic fashion, the struc-
tures of the most "formally" dominating society the world has ever known:
the modern West, a culture dominated by capitalism, bureaucracy, science,
and technology. The turn away from external, clerically imposed sanctions
liberates Protestants from priestly domination but simultaneously enslaves
them to a self-imposed domination actualized in anonymous social struc-
tures. Thus, Weber contrasts the "very human Catholic cycle of sin, repen-
tance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin" with the "tremendous
tension" of the Calvinist's psychological state, which lacks immediate
"atonement, hope of grace, certainty of forgiveness," and hence any "re-
lease."22 This tension is sublimated into activity in a world now free of the
magic attributed to it by Catholicism, activity that quantitatively calculates
and rationally manipulates this world, furthering the process that Weber
calls "disenchantment." The more dynamic conception of the Christian as
the "tool" of God's will in radical Protestantism supplants the relatively static
one of the Catholic as "vessel" of God's grace. In Roman Catholicism, ac-
tivity, good works, allowed one to attain salvation; some arbitrary, Church-
imposed number of works could guarantee admittance to the kingdom of
heaven. In Calvinism, good works confirmed a salvation that was already
established through predestination, but because no authority could deter-
mine or guarantee when or if that status had been in fact attained, there
ensues the compulsion to sublimate the consequent anxiety more and more
into one's economic vocation, one's "calling," in order to demonstrate
salvation.23
in Hartmut Lehman and Guenther Roth, eds., Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence,
Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For perhaps the most serious
engagement with the Protestant ethic thesis, see Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the
Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1983)-
21 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), trans. Talcott Parsons,
(New York: Scribner's, 1958).
22 Ibid., p. 117.
23 Ibid., pp. 114-15.
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 39
Hence, a religiously driven economic fervor that in the Middle Ages was
consigned to monasteries, and thus otherworldly directed, in modernity
enters everyday life through the "inner-worldly asceticism" of radical Protes-
tantism and generates the processes of modern commercial and industrial
activity - capitalism. According to Weber, the result is a world that comes to
be viewed as a machine: In its rejection of Catholicism, "ascetic Protestant-
ism" rejects metaphysical or superstitious interpretations of the world in
favor of solely empirical ones, thus reducing it "to a causal mechanism." 24 In
this way, Protestant asceticism is bound with the "technical and economic
conditions of machine production" that drive the mechanism that is the
modern world. When the religious motivations dissipate, the rational pro-
cesses continue to drive on, and aid in, the construction of the famous "iron
cage."25 Life itself becomes no more serious than sport, and death loses its
resonance as "science and scientifically oriented technology" take the place
of religion, but science unlike religion can provide humanity with no sub-
stantive meaning.26 It offers only the emotionally, psychologically, and spir-
itually unsatisfactory means for "mastery" through "calculation."27 This mas-
tery entails domination not only of nature but of human beings as well;
bureaucracy, itself an "animate machine," in Weber's estimation, has the
potential for unprecedented human enslavement: "Together with the inani-
mate machine [the factory] it is busy fabricating the shell of bondage which
men will perhaps be forced to inhabit someday, as powerless as the fellahs of
ancient Egypt" (ES, 1402). Weber at times offers this as the "inescapable
fate" of Western civilization and, alas, the world.28
There are, additionally, ethical-political ramifications of Weber's so-
ciological account of modernity which Schmitt initially struggles with and
eventually radicalizes. According to Schmitt and Lukacs as well, just as Kant
poses an irresistibly formal rationality that exists prior to, and is ultimately
unaffected by, the explicit subjectivity of his ethics, Weber's calls to responsi-
ble individual stands in his political tracts remain ineffective vis-a-vis the
objectively formal structures of society, whose development he so carefully
delineates in his account of modernity.29 Weber insists that one must act
ethically in order to legitimately attempt to seize the "wheel of history. " 30
But given the irresistible nature of the technorationalized process of mod-
ern history as described by Weber, it remains unlikely that such ethical
activity can substantively affect it. This "necessity versus freedom" opposi-
tion is of course completely consistent with what replays itself to this day in
the more familiar language of mainstream social science as the opposition
of fact and value, or of structure and agency.31
Moreover, the normative status of these personally subjective stands re-
mains ultimately indeterminate, as they are inaccessible to the hegemonic,
technical rationality of the objective forms they are severed from and posed
against. Modernity is hence characterized by Weber as a multiplicity of value
assertions, all mutually indefensible from a rational standpoint. 32 His dis-
tinction between an ethics of conviction and one of responsibility, and his
endorsement of the latter as a way to negotiate this "pluriverse" of "warring
gods," cannot ultimately be sustained in practice. Although Weber scorns
the unreflective practitioners of conviction who act solely on the basis of a
particular issue or cause, with little or no regard for the consequences of
their actions, his preferred politics of responsibility ultimately collapses into
a similar or even identical position. So long as adherents of the latter value
orientation take into account all of the possible and likely ramifications of
their actions and experience them "inwardly," according to Weber, he gives
them license to take the secularized Protestant stance: "Here I stand; I can
33 Ibid., p. 127; Weber does not pose these types of ethics as absolute opposites, however, nor
does he reflect on their propensity to dissolve into one another.
34 Ibid., p.i 17. The "subjective" and "objective" poles of Weber's thesis still manifest them-
selves in contemporary debates. Normative liberal theory, especially in its Rawlsian form,
replays the search for a political standpoint that can be legitimately maintained in a
"pluriverse of values"; see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993). Re-Kantianized as a "just" or "neutral," as opposed to a more modestly
"responsible," stand, the purportedly biased, prejudiced, and ethically problematic qual-
ity of these positions is repeatedly "unmasked" by poststructuralist and postmodernist
critiques. On the other hand, the rationalization thesis has been revamped by the impos-
ing theories of "societal complexity" or "systems differentiation," inspired by the work of
Niklas Luhmann, theories within which there is little room for normative considerations
or substantively meaningful action; see Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1995). The respective dead ends of these positions make the contemporary
revival of Schmitt's corpus particularly chilling, because, as we will see in what follows, it
had been quite similar dead ends in the first part of this century that inspired his work and
his proposed reactionary "way out." On these issues, consult David Dyzenhaus, "Liberal-
ism after the Fall: Schmitt, Rawls and the Problem of Justification," Philosophy and Social
Criticism 22:3 (1996).
35 Cf. Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," as well as the "Parliament and Government" lecture
appended to Economy and Society.
42 CONFRONTATION W I T H T E C H N O L O G Y
36 For instance, Weber characterizes charisma as pure substance and charismatic authority
as the concrete opposite of abstract bureaucratic authority (ES, 1112, 1116) and hence an
object for the aesthetic preoccupation of the masses.
37 I do not compare Lukacs's more Weberian/neo-Kantian literary studies from the years
during and immediately after the Great War with Schmitt's nearly identical efforts from
the same period here. For such an exegesis and analysis, see my 'Transcending Weber's
Categories of Modernity?: The Early Lukacs and Schmitt on the Rationalization Thesis,"
New German Critique (1997).
38 Theodor Johannes Adolf Daubler (1876-1934), born in Trieste, was known for his
celebration of southern European life and culture over its northern counterpart. Young
Schmitt, a German Catholic with certain pretensions about his cultural ties to France and
Italy, must have found in the poet a kind of role model. See Schmitt's biographies:
Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich; Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie; and
Koenen, DerFall Carl Schmitt
A N T I N O M I E S OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 43
Modern technology easily becomes the servant of this or that want or need. In
modern economy a completely irrational consumption conforms to a totally ration-
alized production. A marvelously rational mechanism serves one or another
demand, always with the same earnestness and precision, be it for a silk blouse
or poison gas or anything whatsoever. {RC, 14-15, emphasis added)
39 Such expressions against the technological nature of modern society also appear in
Schmitt's early legal treatises. In Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen
(Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914), Schmitt speaks of "the age of the
machine, of organization, the mechanistic age . . . the age that objectively exhibits its lust
and desire" (p. 5).
44 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
(RC, 15). As we will see, for Schmitt, Catholicism stands beyond the irra-
tionally subjective pole manifested in consumption and the rationally objec-
tive one expressed by technological production.
In the influential "Neutralizations" essay of 1929, 40 Schmitt is even more
precise about the issues of economics, technology, mastery of nature and
indifference to humanity. He situates the rise of modern technology within
the broader process of neutralization that drives modernity. According to
Schmitt, since the religious wars of the sixteenth century, the West has been
seeking a neutral sphere in which agreement could be reached and conflict
diminished. This project was sponsored by intellectual elites who sought
neutrality in various conceptual principles, Zentralgebiete or "central
spheres." Europe moved from the controversial sphere of theology in the
sixteenth century to the apparently neutral one of metaphysics in the seven-
teenth and, successively, to humanitarian morality in the eighteenth, to
economics in the nineteenth, and finally to technology in the twentieth. I
return to the issues of elites and the historical process of neutralization in
Chapter 2. Here it is important to note how Schmitt treats technology in the
essay.
Schmitt seeks to emphasize the fact that the truly compelling problem
posed by the primacy of the technical in the modern world is not the ma-
chines that characterize technology so much as the way of thinking and the
spirit that creates and continues to drive those machines. To this end, he
distinguishes between the machine-specific realm of technology [ Technik],
which is "dead," and the intellectual-spiritual [geistige] realm of technicity
[Technizitdt], which is very much "alive":
and worldly existence of man. This belief can be called fantastic and satanic,
but not simply dead, spiritless or mechanized soullessness. (ND, 140-1)41
41 Jeffrey Herf, among others, has interpreted this passage as proof of Schmitt's supposed
protechnology stance in order to group him in a reductionist manner with such figures as
Ernst Jiinger, Hans Freyer, Werner Sombart, and Oswald Spengler; see Herf, Reactionary
Modernism, pp. 3, 42, 44-6, 118-20. For a criticism of Herf on this point, see my "Intro-
duction to Schmitt's 'The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,'" Telos 96 (sum-
mer 1993).
42 Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), in The Question Con-
cerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),
p. 20. I deal with Heidegger somewhat more specifically in Chapter 2.
46 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
tween soul and soullessness, left as such, will do nothing to help one the-
oretically apprehend the age for what it is, or actively change it (N, 70).
Thus, despite his admiration and respect for the poet Daubler, "who
grasps and portrays the present more comprehensively than a critical histo-
rian," Schmitt ultimately finds his work theoretically lacking because "a
critical-historical standpoint cannot be found present in 'Northern Lights' "
(A/, 66). Because Daubler relies so heavily on dualisms, such as the mechani-
cal world versus living soul and spirit, his work can be little more than "a
compensation to the age of spiritlessness . . . a counterweight to a mechanis-
tic age" (N, 64). It is a negation of the age - perhaps "the last and most
universal negation" - but not a real critique of modernity, because it cannot
itself transcend the dualism of soul versus soullessness that is itself charac-
teristic of the age (A/, 65). Unlike Dante's Commedia or St. Thomas's Summa,
which are "fruits" of their age, "Northern Lights" is a negation of its age but,
most significantly for Schmitt, the negation of an age that structurally pro-
duces its own negation.
Schmitt does not himself offer an alternative to such a negation in "North-
ern Lights." Instead, in his next cultural-political treatise, Political Romanti-
cism of 1919, he follows up his critique of Daubler's insufficient response to
technology and provides an in-depth case study of the most pervasive form
of undertheorized negation of modernity: romanticism. He then tries to
bring both poles together - abstract technical rationality and concretely
obsessed irrational aesthetics; that is, production and consumption - in
Political Form. These two sides that Weber had related to each other in a
somewhat mechanistic stimulus-and-response fashion are theorized as more
intricately related in that work from 1923 that will be juxtaposed with
Lukacs's effort from the same year, History and Class Consciousness, in the
next section.
not yet, as he later will, more explicitly implicate Weber within the theoreti-
cal complex of technology-romanticism.
Schmitt traces this antinomial structure in which Daubler had partici-
pated to the very foundations of modern thought: Early-modern rationalism
had already compromised a unifying vision of the world in the split between
abstract scientific thinking, characteristic of Copernicus's objective ap-
proach, on the one hand, and the inward, individualistic rationality charac-
teristic of Descartes's subjective approach, on the other (PR, 52). This
culminates in the formal rationality of Kant that, in order to maintain its
universalism, must impute an inaccessible irrationality to concrete reality -
the world exists only as the product of human senses, as a collection of
things-in-themselves whose quality is derived solely from the observing sub-
ject and not from or by the objects themselves:
Natural Science ceased to be geocentric and sought its focal point beyond the
earth. Philosophy became egocentric and sought its focal point in itself. Mod-
ern philosophy is governed by a schism between thought and being, concept
and reality, mind and nature, subject and object, that was not eliminated even
by Kant's transcendental solution. Kant's solution did not restore the reality of
the external world to the thinking mind. That is because for Kant, the objec-
tivity of thought lies in the consideration that thought moves in objectively
valid forms. The essence of empirical reality, the thing in itself, is not a possible
object of comprehension at all. Post-Kantian philosophy, however, made a
deliberate attempt to grasp this essence of the world in order to put an end to
the inexplicability and irrationality of real being. (PR, 52 ) 4 4
44 See Robert B. Pippin, Kant's Theory ofForm: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) for an excellent explication and interrogation of the
formalism of Kantian transcendental philosophy.
48 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
surable relation to the romantic digression, which is the only thing essential
[to the romantic]. In consequence, there is no possibility of distinguishing a
romantic object from the other object - the Queen, the state, the beloved, the
Madonna - precisely because there are no longer any objects but only occa-
siones. (PR, 84-5, emphases added)
blending of every imaginable "antithesis" are justified: man and woman, city
and country, . . . body and soul, person and thing, . . . and so on. They are
interchanged. Sometimes they are treated as parallel contrasts, sometimes as
antitheses, and sometimes as identities. They always however remain mere
sounds and chords that blend, contrast, or harmonize in accordance with the
oratorical effect in a single case. . . . [E]very idea is construed in opposition.
(PR, 137-9)
47 See Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 53
whether the ability to make a decision between right and wrong is present"
(PR, 116). Romantics shy away from politics, which means making value
judgments that cannot be deferred into the quest for an ephemeral "higher
third" (PR, 117).
This necessity of deciding and acting on what is right and wrong leads
Schmitt to the bizarre position of employing Don Quixote as the model of
political activity: Quixote is superior to such romantics as Adam Muller and
A. F. Schlegel, because "he was capable of seeing the difference between
right and wrong and of making a decision in favor of what seemed right to
him," even if he was driven "to a senseless disregard of external reality" (PR,
147-8). Now performing the collapse into incoherence that inevitably
awaits Weber's distinction of politics of responsibility versus politics of con-
viction, Schmitt blurs the two such that "fantastically absurd" practice is
considered better than romantic activity, because it is not inherently passive
and is willing to act for what it perceives as right (PR, 148). By this standard
only do the often ecstatic theoretical efforts of Burke and especially Donoso
Cortes and Maistre - efforts that could easily be seen as extreme examples of
political romanticism - qualify as nonromantic because of the deeply con-
victed quality of their political attachments. Through the examples of these
figures, Schmitt attempts to Catholicize the seemingly essentially Protestant-
like quality of the "here I stand" orientation advocated by Weber. In commit-
ment to a cause that is both responsibly considered and absolutely unyield-
ing, Catholics can be as resolute as Protestants. In fairness to the Left,
Schmitt is willing to make concessions to your average revolutionary or
conservative who hold such convictions and have thoroughly considered the
consequences of their actions (PR, 147-8).
I draw conclusions about the ramifications of these insights for Schmitt's
theory in general as he spells out his own theoretical-political convictions in
Political Form and the "Neutralizations" piece later. Here we may observe that
in "Northern Lights" Schmitt focused on how the technoscientific aspect of
modernity abstracts away from all reality, such that it can manipulate it,
rendering all objects the same and hence meaningless, whereas in Political
Romanticism, he interrogates the opposite side of this rationality that ar-
bitrarily infuses all objects with aesthetic meaning, such that it is equally
irrational. The point of his early theoretical endeavor is to formulate a
rationality that can overcome both, but not in the purely rhetorical or
sentimental way of the romantics. What is clear from Schmitt's account is
the extent to which Weberian ethical stands, no matter how "responsible,"
may foster irrational activity by what Schmitt calls elsewhere "a senseless
disregard of external reality" when that reality is depicted as irresistible,
54 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
48 See Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 147-8.
49 See the collection, Die Seele und das Leben: Studien zumfruhen Lukacs, ed. Agnes Heller et al.
(Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977); and in English: Lukacs Reappraised, ed. A. Heller (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983). G. H. R. Parkinson's Georg Lukacs (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) nicely integrates the concerns of the early aesthetic
studies and those of History and Class Consciousness.
50 See my "Transcending Weber's Categories"; and in the German literature, Mehring,
Pathetisches Denken.
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 55
and the form" - but he does so in a way that prioritizes the latter, abstract
forms over the substantive content of soul.51 Just as Weber deploys the for-
mal, often transhistorically applied, categories of the "ideal type" to impart
meaning to empirical reality in his methodology, 52 Lukacs views literary
genres, for example, as the frameworks that allow the substance of literary
reality to emerge: "[F]orm sets limits round a substance which otherwise
would dissolve like air."53 Moreover, much like Weber's famous social-
scientific observer - the impartial, neutral, impersonal subject - who in
effect creates meaning through interpretive analysis of material reality by
means of the techniques of the atemporal formal types,54 Lukacs's literary
critic likewise draws reality from the chaos of literary material: "The critic is
one who glimpses destiny in forms: whose most profound experience is the
soul-content which forms indirectly and unconsciously conceal within
themselves."55
As is well known, in Weber the neutrality and atemporality of the meth-
odology does not, however, prevent the expression of a prejudiced disposi-
tion over historical specificity: for example, the melancholy ruminations at
the conclusions of The Protestant Ethic and the "Science" lecture, which fuels
the call for responsible personal stands in the "Politics" and "Parliament
and Government" lectures. Lukacs's early writings betray a similar lament
over, and desire to actively transcend, the alienation brought on by a ration-
alized modernity. In this regard, he frequently exhibits an existential pathos
derived often explicitly from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky. The
Theory of the Novel, for instance, much like Schmitt's "Northern Lights,"
repeatedly praises the artists and thinkers of the Middle Ages for capturing
what is simultaneously transcendent and finite in their world: Giotto, St.
Thomas, St. Francis, and, most important, Dante, are praised for expressing
a "wholeness" that is inaccessible to modernity.56 Weber lifts from Tolstoy
the biblical image of the contented Abraham to contrast with the alienated
citizen of modernity;57 curiously, Lukacs, again like Schmitt, employs the
title character of Cervantes's Don Quixote to make an even more profound
point: In Cervantes's novel, Lukacs finds the last historical instance when
objective reality and subjective experience, moments of the eternally un-
changing and the fleetingly ephemeral, coexisted in the West before disin-
tegrating in modernity. Lukacs laments that after Cervantes the relationship
of subjective disposition and objective reality, correlates to what he had
theorized as "soul and form," is fractured, leaving individual consciousness
alienated from the outside world and condemned to an "all-devouring con-
centration on a single point of existence," a "narrowing of their souls."58
This is the same frivolous enrapture with internal moods characteristic of
romanticism and Lebensphilosophie that Schmitt criticizes in Political
Romanticism
In their earliest literary studies then, both Lukacs and Schmitt adopt
Weber's theory of modernity as the culmination of a rationalization process
driven forward by modern capitalism. They also reiterate Weber's frequent
laments over the quantitatively impersonal forces that eradicate what is
qualitatively specific about human existence. In Soul and Form, Lukacs had
criticized modern aesthetics, particularly as manifested by romanticism, as
the appropriate expression of capitalism, despite its often self-understood
opposition to it. Romantics promote an "aesthetic culture" whose passivity
conforms perfectly with the helplessness of the bourgeois and the unreflec-
tive activity of industrial production that, for all its apparent frenzy, is still
deemed passive by Lukacs.59 Lukacs thus thoroughly criticizes the same
interiority and subjective preoccupation that fosters the social passivity iden-
tified by Schmitt, in his own literary studies.
Commentators find in the conclusion of Lukacs's Theory of the Novels, turn
from Kant to Hegel.60 Others have found in Schmitt's post-Political Roman-
ticismwork a dramatic declaration of independence from neo-Kantianism. 61
It is quite likely that the dissatisfaction with the opposition of subject and
object elucidated in their early works, its manifestation in the theory of their
mentor (individual ethic versus societal rationalization), and its apparent
inability to be transcended by "bourgeois" thought and reality foster this
The significance of Lukacs's title lies in the suggestion that capitalism has
not in fact facilitated the once-and-for-all constructed iron cage that perma-
nently arrests historical development, over which Weber laments at the
conclusion of his work. Rather "history" continues to foster qualitative social
transformation because the agent of this change is not the, in Weber's
estimation, now-exhausted Protestant sects and their "ethic" or "values" but
the still immanently active agency of productive labor now embodied in the
proletarian "class."
58 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
Schmitt's title, on the other hand, does not so much refute the specifics
of Weber's historical account of modernity as much as suggest a possible way
out of the petrified theoretical-practical dead end that Weber's thesis, its
process and its agents, brought about: The residue of the inward perspec-
tive of Protestantism that had generated a process of social change through
activity - whose results it can no longer control - now seeks refuge more and
more in types of privacy, manifested aesthetically in romanticism and politi-
cally in liberalism. This passive and stagnant retreat from the social world is
countered by Schmitt with a Catholicism that supposedly transcends objec-
tive and subjective antinomies rather than perpetuates them, and whose
public, as opposed to private, disposition is manifested in the primacy of
politics rather than a sacred domestic or economic realm. Both qualities
restore substantive meaning to the world.62
Both theorists support their new positions by reassessing the form/
content, object/subject relationship that they tried to navigate within neo-
Kantianism during Weber's lifetime. Rather than attempting to effect the
liberation of the qualitatively concrete aspects of social life by applying the
appropriate formally abstract a priori categories to it, as with the use of ideal
types in their socioliterary studies, both theorists pursue explicitly practical,
that is, not passive approaches that allow qualitative reality, especially social
reality, to emerge and itself determine and interact with the forms of specific
concrete existence. Political activity entails identifying the political forms of
social life's substantive expression. Schmitt and Lukacs perceive themselves
as carrying out this agenda without lapsing into a romantic enrapture with
such concrete reality that cannot itself apprehend the latter's qualitative
existence. To properly pursue such a strategy, the individualistic characteris-
tics of Weber's subjective standpoint - political and methodological - must
give way to a theorizing of a collective standpoint that will not participate in a
subject/object dualism but will itself be the identical subject-object that
transcends it philosophically and politically. An intersubjective standpoint,
made viable by changes in consciousness delivered through dramatic and
dynamic historical change, will supposedly overcome the metaphysical ap-
oriai of Kantian derived notions of an individual subject that interacts inde-
terminately, artificially, and "passively" with an objective world, and of his-
tory as interpreted in terms of a linear progression of ever-increasing
rationalization and complexity. The former aspect of this worldview renders
impossible the attempt to act in the world, and the latter precludes the
62 See Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert, pp. 179-211; and his introduction to Political Form, for his
own discussion of the significance of this set of titles.
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 59
The world-view of the modern capitalist is the same as that of the industrial
proletarian, as if one were the twin brother of the other. Thus they are of one
accord when they struggle side by side for economic thinking. Insofar as
socialism has become the religion of the industrial proletariat of big cities it
contraposes a fabulous mechanism to that of the capitalist world. . . . The big
industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin - an "electrified earth."
They disagree essentially on the correct method of electrification. American
financiers and Russian Bolsheviks find themselves in common struggle for
economic thinking. (RC, 13)66
63 Cf. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (London: Vintage,
1976) vol. 1, chap. 1.
64 For a more comprehensive analysis of the commodity form, see Moishe Postone, Time,
Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
65 See Victor Farias, Heidegger and the Nazis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
66 Cf. Heidegger's famous statement on the similarity of the United States and the Soviet
Union: "From a metaphysical view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary
A N T I N O M I E S OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 6l
Although both Schmitt and Lukacs criticize the romantic obsession with
concrete particularity and its own manipulation through subjective aesthet-
icization, both are sensitive to the vulnerability of qualitative reality in the
face of the power of abstract rationality. According to Lukacs, under the
imperative of "technical" and "economic autonomy" in the sphere of pro-
duction, "the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear in-
creasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with . . . abstract special
laws functioning according to rational predictions" (HCC, 89). The princi-
ple of rationalization "must declare war" on the "organic," the "irrational,"
and the "qualitatively determined" {HCC, 88).
Schmitt, in the mode of Catholic apologetics, asserts that the rationality
of the Roman Church, despite its universalism, has actually defended local
particularities of many sorts from various forms of universalization, even
when the enemy of the former was not necessarily an enemy of the Church
(RC, 6). Schmitt finds it ironic that Protestant opponents of Catholicism
would identify it as a mechanical force, "a papal machine," "a monstrous
hierarchical power apparatus" (RC, 4) . 6 7 Appropriating Weber into his apol-
ogia and turning against Weber's political-theological standpoint and Web-
er's own social scientific conclusions, Schmitt declares that it is of course
Protestantism and its accompanying rationality that actually level all the
particularities of nature mechanically:
The Huguenot and the Puritan has a strength and pride that is often inhu-
man. He is capable of living on any soil. But it would be wrong to say he finds
roots in every soil. He can build his industry far and wide, make all soil the
servant of his skilled labor and "inner-worldly asceticism," and in the end have
a comfortable home; all this because he makes himself master of nature and
harnesses it to his will. His type of domination remains inaccessible to the
Roman Catholic concept of nature. (RC, 10)
technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man." An Introduc-
tion to Metaphysics (1953), trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Anchor,
1961), p. 37. Lukacs was as positively obsessed with Russia (see Arato and Breines, The
Young Lukacs, p. 69) as Schmitt was negatively so obsessed, as we will see in Chapter 2.
67 Weber refers to the "machinery of the papacy" (ES, 809).
62 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
Schmitt, has a structural basis in fact and takes on many incarnations. Ratio-
nalization is merely a part of the same dualistic structure, a part that con-
fronts its opposite whether that opposite be a romantic valorization of na-
ture, Weber's emphasis on charisma, or even Daubler's elevation of soul:
"Though it sounds improbable [these dualisms] are completely in harmony
with the spirit of our age because their intellectual structure accords with a
reality. Their point of departure is actually a real cleavage and division: an
antithesis which calls for a synthesis" (RC, 9). The economic-technical ra-
tionalism of modernity, so entirely devoid of content, is interrelated with the
very opposite of that rationalism, which in its role as opposite has as little
valid pretense to "reality" as the rationality it opposes. One cannot ap-
prehend the whole by privileging one side as the superior or truer reality
over the other. Hence Schmitt's earlier skepticism of Daubler's ability to
formulate an articulate rational standpoint when he opposes a totalizing
rationality with an equally totalized spirituality.
Recasting the arguments of Political Romanticism, Schmitt sets out in Politi-
cal Form the typology of the "radical dualism" that governs "every sphere of
the contemporary epoch":
Its common ground is a concept of nature that has found its realization in a
world transformed by technology and industry. Nature appears today as the
polar antithesis of the mechanistic world of big cities whose stone, iron and
glass structures lie on the face of the earth like colossal Cubist creations. The
antithesis of this empire of technology is nature untouched by civilization,
wild and barbarian - a reservation into which "man with his affliction does not
set foot." (RC, 9-10)
Likewise, Lukacs points out that "nature is a social category" (HCC, 130),
reminding us that this untouched nature that supposedly exists outside the
realm of modern rationalization is itself an ideological construct that con-
forms with rationalization. Schmitt indicates the many variations that the
oppositions - of which technology/nature is just a single example - may
take: classicism/romanticism, abstract/concrete, form/content, objective/
subjective, rationality/irrationality, "mute practicality"/"rapturously over-
powering music," and so on - "A whole assortment of antitheses with which
to play!" (RC, 23).
In the preface to the second edition of Political Romanticism, published a
year after Political Form in 1924, Schmitt again identifies this theoretical
problem as "agreement in negation": "Negative commonalities of this sort
lead to unexpected and absurd associations" (PR, 6). The one that Schmitt
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 63
68 Schmitt goes so far as to suggest, in 1919, that the counterrevolutionaries were "real"
Catholics, something he retracts in 1922, when he acknowledges the apostasy of their
insistence on the evil of human nature; see PT, 57.
64 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
Typically less economically focused than his Marxist alter ego, Schmitt
attributes the relationship of the poles of the antinomies to more voluntaris-
tic sources. For his part, several years later in a discussion of history in the
"Neutralizations" essay, Schmitt describes how the nineteenth century was
"characterized by the seemingly impossible combination of aesthetic-
romantic and economic-technical tendencies," yet again demonstrates how
the two tendencies are in fact interrelated. Romanticism, according to
Schmitt, is
70 Cf. Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, pp. 149-54, 168-70.
66 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
71 In fact, years later Lukacs cites this passage of Schmitt's with approval: Lukacs remarks
that Schmitt "was entirely in the right about liberal neo-Kantianism, as indeed he was in
his sometimes ingenious polemic against liberal sociology. . . . He often saw clear through
the unsubstantiated dogmatism masquerading as strict epistemology by which neo-
Kantians converted justice into an autonomous, self-legitimizing area, on the pattern of its
epistemology or aesthetics" (The Destruction of Reason, pp. 6 5 2 - 4 ) .
72 Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense," in Philosophy and Truth: Selections
from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 18 jo's, trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Human-
ities Press, 1990), p. 179.
A N T I N O M I E S OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 67
aesthetically incorporated into the total effect of a work of art. In that case, the
contradictions and complexities are profound and mysterious only as long as
they are regarded with objective seriousness in the domain to which the
romanticized object belongs; whereas we should allow them to have only an
aesthetic effect on us. (PR, 16, emphasis added)
73 Theodor W. Adorno levels the same criticism against existentialism in The Jargon ofAuthen-
ticity (1964), trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press,
1973), p. 43. See also Habermas, "Dogmatism, Reason and Decision: On Theory and
Practice in Our Scientific Civilization" (1963), in Theory and Practice.
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 69
74 Cf. Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory, pp. 95, 104-5.
7O CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
almost every insoluble problem we perceive that the search for a solution
leads us to history" (HCC, 143). According to Lukacs, history points the way
to the overcoming of form and content, sheer rationality, and aestheticized
whim. In the next chapter, I show more elaborately that Schmitt, too, turns
explicitly to history as an answer to the entrenched dualisms of modernity.
But some remarks can be made here that bring together what I have
discussed in this chapter and that establish some themes that I treat in
subsequent ones.
In Political Romanticism, Schmitt identifies two different kinds of politi-
cally romantic conceptions of history that emerged in the nineteenth cen-
tury. The first is the revolutionary version that views history as the irresistible
universalizing of Enlightenment principles:
[For the Left] the unlimited community is essentially a revolutionary god that
eliminates all social and political barriers and proclaims the general brother-
hood of humanity as a whole. If the removal of all limits and the need for
totality were sufficient in itself to define the romantic, then there would be no
finer example of a romantic politics than the resolution of the National Con-
vention decreeing aid and fraternity to all peoples who request liberties. Such
a politique sansculotte abolishes all national boundaries and overwhelms the
politique blanches, the international policy of the Holy Alliance and the legiti-
mist status quo. (PR, 61, translation amended)
[History] is the conservative god who restores what the other has revolu-
tionized. It constitutes the general human community as the historically con-
cretized people, which becomes a sociological and historical reality by means
of this delimitation and acquires a capacity to produce a particular law and a
particular language as the expression of its individual national spirit. There-
fore, what a people is "organically" and what the Volksgeist signifies can be
ascertained only historically. In addition, here the people is not its own master,
as in Rousseau, but rather the result of historical development. The idea of an
arbitrary power over history is the real revolutionary idea. . . . [In com-
parison,] the unrestrained fanaticism of the Jacobin was "unhistorical"
thought. (PR, 62)
77 ES, 1399; and "Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions," p. 335.
78 See Weber's Biography, pp. 327, 636; Weber frequently attacked "Bakuninism" (ES, 988)
and apparently often invoked the image of the Grand Inquisitor ("Politics as a Vocation,"
p. 122).
79 See Herbert Marcuse, "Industrialization and Capitalism" in Max Weber and Sociology Today.
74 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
makes possible their political strategies. Recognizing that abstract and for-
mal theories of society and politics were relatively obsolete in the contempo-
rary incipient welfare-state fusing of state and society,80 Lukacs and Schmitt
sought to formulate theories that let concrete manifestations of social
existence - substances whose actualities were occluded by the generalized
categories of the nineteenth century - exert themselves in the context of the
emerging primacy of the political. Schmitt's solution is a top-down lending
of substance to the previously "neutral" state - be it through clerical sanc-
tion or, eventually, nationalist fervor. Lukacs's solution is bottom-up, "truly"
delivering to the proletariat - the content that transcends form and content
oppositions - the whole of society. Irrespective of the direction of the impe-
tus, the place for such elites as Lukacs and Schmitt themselves is essential to
these scenarios. Shut out by the laissez-faire and self-regulating ideologies of
the nineteenth century, a prominent place is now assured for intellectual-
political elites to facilitate the aforementioned transformation: one a fascist
fantasy, the other a communist one.
Thus, history is the facilitator of Schmitt's superpolitical theory and
Lukacs's supersocial theory, although they understand history somewhat
differently. Lukacs views this historical process as authored by humans but
without their awareness. Again, as we will see in Chapter 2, Schmitt more
and more supplants Weber's account of rationalization as a spillover of
Protestant anxiety with one that deems it the product of the conscious
choice of elites.81 Recall from Political Romanticism that Schmitt attributes
the development of the dualities of modernity to the efforts of Copernicus,
Descartes, and Kant; Lukacs treats them as subtle reflections of a socioeco-
nomic structure. For Schmitt modernity is the product of conscious deci-
sion on the part of elites who sought to free themselves from the sanction of
traditional authority. Having rendered themselves superfluous in the self-
regulating society of the nineteenth century that they themselves helped
construct, they now have the opportunity to intervene - again, consciously
and decisively - to reassert their role. Lukacs understands history as labor
coming to realize itself as the primary human condition soon to be consum-
mated. But the process of reification that makes all qualitative entities ap-
pear as quantitative ones blinds the proletariat to its own proximity to this
qualitatively preeminent activity, hence necessitating a vanguard party to
80 See Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, especially chap. 5, for an account of
this transformation.
81 Cf. ND, 132-9.
ANTINOMIES OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 75
spark their awareness.82 In Schmitt's theory, at first religious and then secu-
lar, it is the elites who formulate the rules and then dictate them to society.
This difference may account for the greater extent of Schmitt's complicity
with National Socialism a decade later than Lukacs's with Lenin and then
Stalin: Lukacs's task was merely to encourage the process of class
consciousness - no doubt with the indispensable help of the Communist
party - whereas Schmitt's was to aid in a total elite-driven reconfiguration of
state and society. It is the difference between awakening a will and generat-
ing it oneself.83
As we will see in the next chapter, the more Schmitt radicalizes his cri-
tique of technology and the more he seeks to resolve the problematic associ-
ated with it in the realm of starkly defined political action - action in the
sense of the counterrevolution and not the supposed passivity of the
romantics - the more he appears like the romantics he criticizes. In Political
Romanticism, he declares that one of the chief characteristics of the romantic
is a rebellion against the law of cause and effect and a concomitant aesthet-
icizing of the "opportune and the accidental"; a valorizing of occasio over
causa (16-17, 82-3). But, as we will see in Chapter 3, in his promotion of
the exception as a central category of political theory, a miracle-like monkey
wrench to be thrown into the works of the liberal-positivist machine, that
observation is an apt description of Schmitt himself. Schmitt also accuses
the romantics of intellectual sloth, as a result of their complacency in letting
the dualisms they recognize stand as theoretical categories: "Every clear
antithesis exercises a dangerous power of attraction over other distinctions
that are not as clear" (PR, 26). But Schmitt himself may settle for the
convenience of easily defined oppositions in place of the theoretical tracing
of them to their historical sociostructural sources that his theory pretends to
promise. The extremity of his thought may in fact be generated by precisely
the frustration that ensues from the intuition that he ought to move further
but cannot in fact do so - his own failures to work through and ground the
82 Lukacs's party elitism is expressed more explicitly in Tactics and Ethics (1919-21), trans.
M. McColgan, ed. R. Livingstone (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Lenin: A Study of
the Unity of His Thought (1924), trans. N.Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).
83 For an account of Lukacs's Communist career, his fall from favor soon after the publica-
tion of History and Class Consciousness, and his continued faithfulness to the party, see
Kadarkay, Georg Lukdcs: Life, Thought and Politics. On Schmitt's Weimar support for right-
wing authoritarians, his enrollment in the National Socialist Party when it came to power
in 1933, and his own fall from grace in 1936, consult Bernd Ruthers, Carl Schmitt imDritten
Reich: Wissenschaft als Zeitgeist-Verstdrkung? (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989).
76 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
84 On Schmitt's use of myth, see the last chapter of Parlamentarismus and Chapters 2 and 6 of
the present volume.
85 Cf. Arato and Breines, The Young Lukdcs, pp. 121, 143.
86 Lukacs, Soul and Form, e.g., pp. 71, 153.
A N T I N O M I E S OF T E C H N I C A L T H O U G H T 77
as the likelihood that one will "contract with diabolical powers." 87 I con-
clude in Chapter 2 that Schmitt's theory both demonstrates the capacity to
critique the language of the "satanic" that so pervasively accompanies the
relationship between politics and technology in Weimar, and itself lapses
into the abuse of that kind of language.
Schmitt and Lukacs, for their part, were not willing to absolve their
teacher of responsibility for generating the modern irrationality that they
themselves would put into practice. Long after his Weimar career, his subse-
quent affiliation with National Socialism, and toward the end of his lifelong
banishment from the academy in the Federal Republic of Germany, Schmitt
would offer a critique of the irrationalism that, according to him, necessarily
erupts within Weber's rationalization thesis:
After World War II, Lukacs, remaining behind the Iron Curtain, would also
criticize his former mentor, who, in struggling against irrationalism, only
"provided a bridge to a higher stage of it":
Max Weber banished irrationalism from his methodology and analysis of iso-
lated facts only in order to introduce it as the philosophical basis of his world-
87 See Weber, "Science as a Vocation," p. 148; and "Politics as a Vocation," p. 126. On the full
theoretical force of "demonic" and "diabolical" metaphors in Weber, see Harvey Gold-
man, Politics, Death and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
88 Schmitt, "Die Tyrannei der Werte," in Der Tyrannei der Werte, ed. Carl Schmitt et al.
(Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1979), p. 35.
78 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
view with a firmness hitherto unknown in Germany. Granted, even this elim-
ination of irrationalism from the methodology was not total. Just as Weber
relativized everything in sociology into rational types, so likewise his type of
non-hereditary leader who attains office as a result of "charisma" was purely
irrationalistic. That aside, however, imperialist neo-Kantianism really crossed
the bridge into irrationalist existentialism for the first time in [the "Vocation"
lectures].89
Schmitt and Lukacs had indeed effectively shown how Weber's stand of
"ethical responsibility" was untenable in the face of his own rationalization
thesis. It is still an open question whether this gives them license to tacitly
attribute to the "sins of the father" their own contributions to the "night-
mare" of "irrationalist existentialism" that was twentieth-century totalitaria-
nism, and in so doing forsake their own responsibility for such
contributions.
91 See Breuer, "The Illusion of Politics." Larmore, for instance, fails to ultimately
determine - except through appeals to the work of Karl-Heinz Bohrer (pp. 189-204) -
what, during moments of change and crisis, would definitively distinguish the "romantic
sensibility" that he defends from what, for instance, he terms the "notorious irrationalism"
of Nietzsche (p. 7). As we observe in the next chapter, the romanticism left rationally
unmediated by liberalism may serve as precisely the source of Nietzschean irrationality in
certain contexts.
92 See, for instance, Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke and the Dangers of Modernity: Modernity,
Politics and Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1994).
93 Cf. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, pp. 17, 31, 37, 180, 254; and Habermas, Theory and Practice.
94 See Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics.
80 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
respectively, The Morals of Modernity, pp. 2, 8; and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996], pp. 386-7).
However, both rely too extensively on a Kantian methodology that results in an under-
standing of empirical reality and its changing nature in terms of systems differentiation
and social complexity that replays much of the linear qualities of Weber's rationalization
thesis. Larmore ultimately confesses greater partiality for conceptions of history that
emphasize continuity over disrupture (p. 2), and ultimately for Kant over Hegel (pp. 14-
15); Habermas forswears the excesses of a "philosophy of history" (p. 287) and establishes
Kant as the central theoretical-intellectual figure of his work (chap. 1). The influence of
such notions of change in both authors can be traced to their engagements with the work
of systems theorist Niklas Luhmann: see Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity; and
Habermas and Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1971).
82 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
Their character also lay in a character that was not their own, and they too
sought to acquire their productivity in this way. Lacking all social and intellec-
tual stability, they succumbed to every power-complex in their vicinity that
made a claim to be taken as true reality. Thus lacking all moral scruples and
any sense of responsibility other than that of a zealous and servile functionary,
they could allow themselves to be used by any political system. (PR, 106)
That both Schmitt and Lukacs would misjudge the position and capabilities
of the intellectual in a context like this demonstrates the dangerous game
that is an attempt to overcome the technical/romantic categories of moder-
nity by endorsing a particular social or political movement. In future chap-
ters, I further trace out Schmitt's attempts at dissolving various incarnations
of these categories, as well as his journey - in a profound sense bound with
such attempts - toward his own disastrous political affiliation.
Therefore, having examined Schmitt's foray into dialectical analysis in
this chapter, in the next, I demonstrate how "the political" takes on increas-
ing importance in Schmitt's work, particularly with respect to issues men-
tioned earlier: history, elites, liberalism, and technology. In dealing with
these topics, Schmitt no longer so deliberately or frequently employs the
language of a critical rationality but reverts to the existential language of
myth that is reminiscent of Nietzsche.
MYTH AS ANTIDOTE TO THE "AGE OF
NEUTRALIZATIONS"
NIETZSCHE AND CULTURAL CONFLICT AS
RESPONSE TO TECHNOLOGY
See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
Two noteworthy examples from the literature are Reiner Schurmann, Heidegger on Being
and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and
Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
On the subject of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, see Richard Wolin, ed.,
The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). On Schmitt in the same
regard, see Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983); and Bernd Riithers, Carl Schmitt im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft als
Zeitgeist-Verstdrkung? (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989).
83
4 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
solution to, technology in three works spread out across his Weimar career:
his 1916 book-length commentary on Theodor Daubler's epic poem
"Northern Lights"; Roman Catholicism and Political Form, from 1923; and his
influential lecture of 1929, "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticiza-
tions."4 The critical-Hegelian moments of these works were discussed in
Chapter 1; here I wish to draw out their more existential moments.
Curiously, Schmitt very rarely mentioned Nietzsche in his work, and little
has been written on his debt to the philosopher.5 This is perhaps due to the
fact that the intellectual figure who most influenced Schmitt, Max Weber, is
widely acknowledged to be a devotee of Nietzsche's,6 and thus it is assumed
that any trace of Nietzsche in Schmitt's thought was simply passed on to him
from Weber.7 As this chapter demonstrates, there is a more direct link
Schmitt, TheodorDdublers "Nordlicht":Drei Studien ilber dieElemente, den Geist und die Aktualitdt
des Werkes (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991) is cited as N. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and
Political Form (1923), trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), hereafter referred
to as Political Form and cited as RC. "Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und En-
tpolitisierungen" appears in Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963)
and is cited as ND; the English quotations are from the translation by Matthias Konzett and
John P. McCormick, "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations," Telosg6 (summer
1993). On the persistence of the theme of the satanic in Schmitt's thought, see Lutz
Berthold, "Wer halt zur Zeit den Satan auf? - Zur Selbstglossierung Carl Schmitts,"
Leviathan: Zeitschrift fur Soziahvissenschaft 21:2 (1993); Gunter Meuter, "Der Katechon": Zu
Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994); and the
review of the latter by Stefan Breuer, "Der letzte Ritter der heiligen Johanna. Ein Anti-
Hobbes: Gunter Meuter legt die Fundamente von Carl Schmitts Zeitkritik frei," Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (Feb. 27, 1995).
The only notable exceptions are Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Asthetik des Schreckens: Die Pessi-
mistische Romantik und Ernst Jungers Fruhwerk (Munich: Hanser, 1978); and Reinhard
Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Zur Einfuhrung (Hamburg: Junius, 1992). On Nietzsche's influence
in Weimar more generally, see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). The major work to consult on Nietzsche's
thought as a whole is still Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(1950), (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); although a more recent study that
has gained a kind of interpretive hegemony is Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Litera-
ture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Of particular interest to students
of political and social theory are Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfigura-
tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political
Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); and Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and
the Politics of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
See Wolfgang Mommsen, "The Antinomian Structure of Max Weber's Thought," Current
Perspectives in Social Theory 4 (1983).
Works by Weber dealt with in this chapter are "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a
Vocation," both of which appear in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), trans. Talcott Parsons, (New York: Scribner's, 1958); and
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1920), ed. Guenther Roth and Claus
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 85
[T]he faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content
nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its
measure in human thought and human valuations - a "world of truth" that
can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little
reason. What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like
this - reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for
mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich
ambiguity. . . . That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be
one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do
research in your sense (you really mean, mechanistically?) - an interpretation
that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching and noth-
ing more - that is a crudity and naivete, assuming that it is not a mental illness,
an idiocy. . . . A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it,
might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of
the world, implying that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. This
thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who
nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine
of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground
floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless
world.10
10 Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p.
335-
11 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and, especially, On The Genealogy of Morals
(1887), in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1968), pp. 4 6 2 - 4 .
12 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in Basic Writings, p. 23; and On The Genealogy of
Morals, p. 528.
13 Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, p. 549.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954).
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 87
break with the church in the mid twenties, deems the technological, on the
contrary, im-Christian or at least anti-Catholic and, as we will see, deems
technology the Antichrist. Although their respective uses of this demonic
term seem at first glance diametrically at odds, ultimately there is a great
concurrence between the two critics.
Recall that in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, from 1923, Schmitt
claims that in the valueless rationality of economic-technical thought is
found the "fundamental antithesis to the political idea of Catholicism" (RC,
13). Attempting to retain some semblance of the rationality that Nietzsche
comes precariously close to jettisoning wholesale, Schmitt argues that be-
cause Catholicism is concerned with human beings as such, as opposed to as
universally lifeless matter, it is more rational than economic-technical think-
ing: "Everything that to modern economics is synonymous with objectivity,
honesty, and rationality is at variance with . . . the rationalism of the
Catholic Church that embraces ethically the psychological and sociological
nature of man" (RC, 13, translation amended). This rationalism is not
indifferent to what persons are or what they do, as are the "laws" of the
market and of science, according to Schmitt. Human activity, life in Nietz-
sche's sense, is its utmost concern: "Catholic argumentation is based on a
particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical
logic and whose substantive interest is the normative guidance of human life"
(RC, 12, emphasis added). Foreshadowing the issue of intellectual elites
that will be so important in his confrontation with technology, Schmitt
asserts that Catholicism maintains strict rules as to what people should do,
supposedly with an eye toward what is good. Economics and technology,
according to Schmitt, obscure this distinction, are indifferent to "life," and
thus arouse the "specific Catholic anxiety," spoken of in the last chapter,
that there is no longer a distinction between "a silk blouse and poison gas"
(RC, 14). It is this apparently autonomous, rationalized, inhuman, value-
neutral phenomenon that Schmitt likens to the Antichrist: Indeed "the
modern economic-technical apparatus arouses a similar fear and loathing"
(RC, 15).
Yet Schmitt recognizes not only something to be feared in the image of
the Antichrist; like Nietzsche, he acknowledges something that may in fact
be used against the malignant rationality of technology: "The mythical
power of this image is deeper and stronger than any economic calculation;
its aftereffects long endure" (RC, 3). A mythic figure such as the Antichrist
may be powerful enough to withstand and even triumph over economic-
technical rationality. Throughout the three works under consideration
here, Schmitt is not reluctant to resort to such mythic imagery himself. Even
88 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
He knows to imitate Christ and so makes himself resemble Christ, and thus
tricks everyone out of their souls. He presents himself as friendly, correct,
incorruptible and reasonable. All praise him as a blessing to mankind and say:
what a great and righteous man! . . . His concealed power lies in his imitation
of God. God created the world; the Antichrist renders it a forgery. . . . The
uncanny enchanter recreates the world in order to change the face of the
earth and make nature submissive. It serves him for whatever reason, for any
satisfaction - artistic whim, luxury, comfort. Those who allow themselves to be
deceived by him see only the fabulous effects. Nature appears overcome; the
age of security begins; all are provided for. (N, 61-2)
The analogy is clear. Just as the Antichrist seems to deliver salvation and
eternal peace, on the contrary, only to actually bring destruction and
despair, technology and commercialism promise a heaven on earth but
bring only a worse form of impoverishment and devastation, which may not
even be readily recognized as such. One of the characteristics of modern
technology is that it can mechanically reproduce virtually anything. Schmitt
plays on this theme of reproduction with the image of the Antichrist. If one
cannot distinguish between God and Satan, then what can be distinguished?
Everything becomes the same. Everything is neutralized. The Antichrist/
technology is described as "uncanny [unheimlich]" because of the epistemo-
logical uncertainty involved in deciphering precisely what it is. It simulates
the familiar and authentic, but is it? The very nature of what real is, is called
into question in the age of technology. According to Schmitt, "The confu-
sion becomes unspeakable"(N, 63). 18
In this sense, technology and science obfuscate as much as they clarify.
Just as Nietzsche pronounces that modern science with its evolutionary
theory cannot distinguish a human being from the "living slime" that re-
sides at the "bottom of the ocean,"19 Schmitt argues that it cannot tell the
difference between a man and an ape (N, 63). It even confuses the resurrec-
tion of the body with the invention of the airplane: "The crowning work of
the magnificent technology - man can fly, corporeal flight" (N, 63).
Myth has always a dramatic character. It conceives the world as a great drama -
as a struggle between divine and demonic forces, between light and darkness,
between the good and the evil. There is always a negative and a positive pole in
mythical thought and imagination. Even the political myths were incomplete
so long as they had not introduced demonic power. The process of deification
20 Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Philip
Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 238.
21 Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cum-
mings (New York: Continuum, 1989), pages xiii, 16, x, 4, respectively. See Jiirgen
Habermas's reworking of this thesis in "Dogmatism, Reason and Decision: On Theory and
Practice in Our Scientific Civilization" (1963), in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). See also Hans Blumenberg, Work On Myth (1979), trans.
Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
22 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 44.
23 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 96.
24 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 218.
25 Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in Their Nonmoral Sense" (1873), in Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 18 jo's, trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1990), p. 87.
MYTH AS ANTIDOTE gi
But Nietzsche's main focus is on scientific rationality as murderer of myths
and on the pressing necessity of creating new, non-rationally-scientific,
ones. This is most explicit in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy: "[M]yth was
annihilated [by] the progressing spirit of science" (106); "The un-
Dionysian . . . seeks to dissolve myth, it substitutes for a metaphysical com-
fort an earthly consonance, in fact a deus ex machina of its own, the god of
machines and crucibles" (109); "[m]yth, the necessary prerequisite of every
religion, is paralyzed everywhere" (111).
The "Dionysian," which Nietzsche identified retrospectively as the Anti-
christ,26 offers - at least in this early work - the promise of a nature undomi-
nated and a humanity not dehumanized by science: " [N] ot only is the union
between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated,
hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost
son, man."27
In Nietzschean terms, then, technology is a myth that inspires counter-
myth. Nietzsche identifies the myth of science with Christianity and resorts
to the myth of the Antichrist in response. Schmitt calls the myth of technol-
ogy itself the Antichrist and resorts, at least provisionally, to Roman Catholi-
cism as a response. Horkheimer and Adorno, for their part, note that En-
lightenment rationality itself is myth. Alternatively, Cassirer addresses the
fact that myth is deployed rationally in the age of Enlightenment. These are
important insights regarding both Nietzsche and Schmitt, for there are
certain implications in employing myth so consciously and strategically in
the "age of reason." Cassirer, although a renowned Kantian, comes very
close to the "dialectic of Enlightenment" thesis when he examines the
relationship of technology and twentieth-century political myth. Myth is no
longer a spontaneous and noncognitive outgrowth of culture but rather,
with modern totalitarian movements in mind, a strategically employed
technology:
Myth has always been described as the result of an unconscious activity and as
a free product of imagination. But [in the twentieth century,] we find myth
made according to plan. The new political myths do not grow up freely; they
26 Nietzsche, "An Attempt at Self-Criticism," written fifteen years after The Birth of Tragedy
and added to subsequent editions of it, p. 24. Here Nietzsche identifies his Zarathustra as
a "Dionysian monster." Because of the complexity - and perplexity - of Nietzsche's most
important work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), I have chosen not to deal with it here,
despite the fact that the work is filled with Christ/Antichrist images and allusions. But
again it is obviously not my goal here to provide anything close to a comprehensive
account of Nietzsche's thought.
27 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 37.
92 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
are not wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things
fabricated by very skillful artisans. It has been reserved for the twentieth cen-
tury, our own technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth
myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same
methods as any other modern weapon - as machine guns or airplanes. That is
a new thing - and a thing of crucial importance. 28
Yet the work of Horkheimer and Adorno and the insight of Cassirer
undeniably reveal something fundamental about the way that both Nietz-
sche and Schmitt are caught in the thrall of the technical rationality they
seek to escape. By deploying myth in such a strategic manner, they neces-
sarily succumb to the very instrumental rationality they wish to overcome. 291
return to this later.
28 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 282.
29 Manfred Frank examines the relationship of "the death of God" to pagan mythologizing
in Nietzsche; see Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen iiber die neue Mythologie (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1982). Reinhard Mehring argues that Schmitt's Weimar mythologizing is a
Nietzschean response to his own ultimately godless universe; see Carl Schmitt: Zur Ein-
fdhrung, pp. 49-50.
30 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1976); this English edition is a translation of the full-length German version of
Der Begriff des Politischen, published in 1932.
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 93
31 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 37; Weber also foreshadows the Schmittian thesis that
"Catholicism has to the present day looked upon Calvinism as its real opponent," p. 87.
32 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889), in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 541. The "injuries" that
Nietzsche claims liberalism causes to freedom are ones that Schmitt would similarly
criticize: "[T]hey make men small, cowardly, hedonistic . . . Liberalism: in other words,
herd animalization." Kaufmann's cautionary remarks against making too much of Nietz-
sche's "celebration" of war, however, should be taken seriously; see Nietzsche, pp. 386-90.
33 Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, p. 521.
94 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
[T] heir hatred of the Russian arose from their most deeply-rooted instincts
and manifested itself in the struggle within the First International. Conversely
everything in the Russian anarchist rose in revolt against the "German Jew"
(born in Trier) and against Engels. What continually provoked the anarchist
was their intellectualism. They had too much of "the idea"; too much "gray
matter." Bakunin can only utter the word "cervelle" with sibilant fury. Behind
this word he rightly suspected the claim to authority, discipline and hierarchy.
To him every type of cerebralism is hostile to life. . . . When Marx and Engels
34 Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," pp. 122-8. Weber also draws on Dostoyevsky and the
Grand Inquisitor.
M Y T H AS A N T I D O T E 95
are at pains to distinguish their true proletariat from the "rotten" rabble they
betray how strongly they are still influenced by traditional moral and West
European conceptions of education. They want to imbue their proletariat
with a social value. This is only possible with moral concepts. But here Bakunin
had the incredible courage to see the Lumpenproletariat as the harbinger of the
future and to appeal to the canaille. (RC, 36-7)
Schmitt claims that the antagonism between Marx and Engels, on the one
hand, and Bakunin, on the other, "sets the stage whereon the essence of the
present situation is clearly recognizable and Catholicism stands as a political
force" (RC, 38). Because of this division, Catholicism can make its political
choice regarding an enemy. Russia is so extreme in its contentlessness, in its
embrace of the technical, and so radical in its rebellion against form of any
kind, in its embrace of spiritual anarchy, that it is actually a form/content
counterforce worthy of Catholicism, the historical institution that for
Schmitt marries human substance with political or representative form.
Technology is the only standard that Russia can uphold, according to
Schmitt; it is the authorityless authority - "the machine has no tradition"
(RC, 22). The "paradoxical situation" has arisen that in Russia economic-
technical thinking has been taken up as a standard by "fanatics" who do not
believe in standards at all (RC, 27). "The fact that they met on Russian soil,
in the Russian Soviet Republic, has a profound justification in the history of
ideas. . . . [T]he alliance is no accident of world history" (RC, 38). Accord-
ing to Schmitt, despite Catholicism's past and present difficulties with liber-
alism or Western socialism, the Church must ally with them against the
Soviets. It must stand "on the side of the idea and West European civiliza-
tion" and against "the atheistic socialism of the Russian anarchist" (RC, 39,
emphasis added).
Once Schmitt fully develops his "concept of the political" and stops
speaking in terms of political Catholicism, four years later in 1929, he is in a
better position to explain why the meeting of economic-technical rationality
and fanatical anarchism in Russia is "no accident of world history" and why
European intellectuals, not just Catholic ones, need to be aware of this fact.
Six years later, in even more extreme Nietzschean language, he does so in
"The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations."
regard to good and evil is overwhelming" (ND, 130, emphasis added). And it
is interesting that in a work entitled Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche antici-
pates much of Schmitt's claims about Russia: its strength of will, this threat
to Europe, the uncertainty as to the exact nature of its threat, the necessity
of a new European elite to unite the continent in opposition to it, impend-
ing global conflict, and, explicitly, the return of politics, the return of what
Schmitt calls "the political":
The strength to will... is strongest and most amazing by far in that enormous
empire . . . in Russia. There the strength to will has long been accumulated
and stored up, there the will - uncertain whether as a will to negate or a will to
affirm - is waiting menacingly to be discharged. . . . It may take more than
Indian wars and complications in Asia to rid Europe of its greatest danger. . . .
I do not say this because I want it to happen: the opposite would rather be
more after my own heart - I mean such an increase in the menace of Russia
that Europe would have to resolve to become menacing, too, namely to ac-
quire one will by means of a new caste able to cast its goals millennia hence -
so the long-drawn-out comedy of its many splinter states as well as its dynastic
and democratic splinter wills would come to an end. The time for petty politics
is over: the very next century will bring the fight for dominion of the earth -
the compulsion to large-scale politics.35
141) . 3 6 Why the Soviet Union and its orientation toward technology poses a
threat to Germany, and equally important, why Germany must be actively
reminded of this fact by Schmitt himself is the result of particular historical
circumstances.
Just as in the nineteenth century, Europe reacted to the turbulence of the
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars with exhaustion, according to
Schmitt Europe in the twenties is predisposed toward the status quo in the
wake of the Great War of 1914. Yet while Europe remains fixated on things
as they are, according to Schmitt, Russia recognizes the changes that under-
lie historical circumstances and seeks to appropriate the moment: "[T]he
acquiescence of the restoration mood serves a rapid and undisturbed
development of new things and new circumstances whose sense and direc-
tion remain hidden beneath the restored facades. When the decisive mo-
ment arrives, the legitimating foreground vanishes like an empty phantom"
(ND, 131). Just as the Soviets stunned the European order with the Revolu-
tion of 1917, Schmitt intimates that they are again poised to shatter the
veneer of neutrality in League of Nations Europe in 1929. As Schmitt re-
marks, the impending confrontation between West and East is "the conse-
quence of European development over the last centuries" (A, 131)-
Schmitt follows with his theory of history in which technology plays a climac-
tic role.
According to Schmitt, the dynamic of modern Western history is driven
by the search for a neutral sphere completely free from conflict and con-
testation. In response to the strife of the religious civil wars, Europe since
the sixteenth century has sought in each successive century a different
fundamental organizing principle - a central sphere [Zentralgebiet] - that
might serve as the source of peace and agreement. Thus the controversial
central sphere of the sixteenth century, theology, was abandoned in the
36 Thus Schmitt is in agreement with Heidegger's later and more famous argument that the
"essence" of technology "is itself nothing technological," because it is not exclusively
concerned with machines and the concretely material manifestations of mechanical pro-
cesses as such ("The Question Concerning Technology" [1954], in The Question Concern-
ing Technology and Other Essays, p. 20). However, unlike Heidegger, and Nietzsche for that
matter, Schmitt does not trace the origins of the technicistic spirit back to ancient Greece:
Heidegger claims that "the limitless domination of modern technology in every corner of
this planet is only the late consequence of a very old technical interpretation of the world,
an interpretation usually called metaphysics." See 1941/42 lecture, quoted in Zimmer-
man, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, p. 166. Cf. Heidegger's tracing of Gestellback
to classical antiquity in "The Question Concerning Technology." For Schmitt, the technol-
ogy Heidegger describes is part of the thoroughly modern phenomenon of "neutraliza-
tion," without roots in a premodern past that happens to bear artificial fleurs du mal in
modernity.
98 CONFRONTATION WITH TECHNOLOGY
seventeenth for the more "neutral" sphere of metaphysics, which was itself
superseded in the eighteenth century by humanitarian ethics and morality.
According to Schmitt, the sphere of economics dominated the nineteenth
century, and as of 1929, at least provisionally, technology governs the twen-
tieth century. The European spirit [ Geist] could not remain perpetually in
any one of these neutral spheres, because the repressed human inclination
toward conflict - the political - inevitably returns to render the supposedly
objective sphere again controversial:
[I] t belongs to the dialectic of such a development that one creates a new
conflict area through the very shift of a central area. In this new area first
considered to be a neutral area the opposition of men and interests unfolds
itself immediately with new intensity. . . . European humanity always wanders
out of one conflict area into a neutral one, and the neutral area always be-
comes immediately a conflict area again and it becomes necessary to search
for a new neutral sphere. (ND, 138)
37 Recall from Chapter 1 that Schmitt's first critique of romanticism, Politische Romantik, was
published in 1919; see Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1985); hereafter PR.
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 99
They skipped all intermediary stages, which are characteristic of the thought
of the leading elites, and in their case a religion of miraculous and other-
worldly belief without intermediary turns into a religion of technical miracles,
human achievement and of the domination of nature. A magical religiosity
transforms into a likewise magical technicity. Thus the twentieth century ap-
pears at its beginning as the age not only of technology, but also of a religious
belief in technology. (ND, 134)
42 Contemporary liberals, such as Stephen Holmes, Charles Larmore, and even John Rawls,
seem to subscribe to a grand narrative of modernity quite similar to that set forward by
Schmitt in the "Neutralizations" essay. This is especially true with respect to the notions of
modernity's genesis in the religious civil wars and political liberalism as the immediate
solution to that particular crisis. See Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1993); Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993); Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and, more particularly, Larmore, The Morals
of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 12, 122, 143-4, 212
13. Schmitt, the chauvinistic Catholic, does not, as do these liberal theorists, rely so
exclusively on the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre as the preferred example of religious
fanaticism, at least not until the Third Reich when he needed to distance himself from his
earlier political Catholicism; see Schmitt, 'The Plight of European Jurisprudence"
(1944), trans. G. L. Ulmen, Telos 83 (spring 1990), p. 66. The problem with such metanar-
ratives in their liberal form is that they reinforce unhelpful ideological stereotypes with
respect to contemporary forms of political regression as the return or revival of older
forms of authoritarianism. In so doing, they invite an understanding of political crisis as a
replay of previous forms of pluralist confessional conflicts, for which similar or identical
remedies are suitable contemporary applications. Moreover, the manner in which heroes
and villains, or rather friends and enemies, are depicted in such narratives may serve to
confirm suspicions - either harbored by the likes of Schmitt or, for example, contempo-
rary poststructuralists - that the Enlightenment was not the victory of universal principles
but rather of particular cultural interests, namely, those of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
males. The main difference between the Schmittian and the liberal versions of this narra-
tive, besides obviously contradictory evaluations of its historical success, resides in the fact
that Schmitt conceived this course of history as entailing the possibility of radical breaks or
even of the process itself coming to a close. Liberals of either an optimistic Whiggish or a
negative or agnostic Weberian stripe quite often conceive of this course of history in terms
of a rationalization process that proceeds linearly into the indefinite future. A tension in
liberalism, especially in the authors mentioned here, is whether contemporary conflicts of
incommensurable worldviews reflect, in this vein, an increasing sociological likelihood as
the result of ever-greater societal subsystem complexity and differentiation, or rather a
transhistorical "fact" of modernity. See Holmes, "Differenzierung und Arbeitsteilung im
Denken des Liberalismus," in Soziale Differenzierung: Zur Geschichte einer Idee, ed., Niklas
Luhmann (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1985); and Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). As we will see in subsequent chapters,
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 1O1
For his part, Nietzsche admires wars of religion, because they demons-
trate that the general population has beliefs: "Religious war has signified the
greatest progress of the masses hitherto; for it proves that the mass has
begun to treat concepts with respect. Religious wars start only after the more
refined quarrels between sects have refined reason in general to the point
where even the mob becomes subtle and takes trifles seriously."43 In the
same work, he predicts and welcomes the coming of another such warlike
age.44
If the first problem with technology as a neutral sphere, according to
Schmitt, lies with the masses, the second one lies with the clerics themselves,
or more precisely the particular lack of clerics in the age of technology.
There can be no intellectual elite in a society governed by the technical
(ND, 139).45 The clerics thought they had good reason to push society
toward the technical, "for apparently there is nothing more neutral than
technology" (ND, 138). The "refreshingly factual" quality of technology, the
way it seemingly appeals in the same way to all people objectively, made it
appear to be "a sphere of peace, of understanding and of reconciliation"
(ND, 138). But the clerics encouraged their own extinction, because the
utter universality of technology requires no true intellectual elites or clerics
to guide its use. The early centuries of modernity opened up new pos-
sibilities for the "active elite" (ND, 132) of Europe who were no longer
bound by traditional sanction. They were able to interpret the central
spheres for the masses - they were able to create values for them, in the
Nietzschean sense - and as a result control them. But technology, according
there is also a tension in Schmitt's thought between historicist inclinations that are
attuned to dramatic historical change within modernity and a transhistorical privileging
of the purportedly eternal human propensity toward conflict. Chapter 6, in fact, demon-
strates more specifically how Schmitt came to view the crisis situation of Weimar in terms
of the religious civil wars of the sixteenth century and sought redress for the former in a
restructuring of the foundation of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Unlike
Holmes, Larmore, and Rawls, his solution is not to revive or recast liberal solutions
formulated during these crises but to devise an alternative that would preclude liberal
remedies.
43 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 192-3.
44 Ibid., p. 228.
45 In his emphasis on the importance of elites, Schmitt has much in common with the turn-
of-the-century Italian theorists of "elitism," Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pare to. Unlike
them, however, Schmitt is not sure whether "the class-conscious proletariat of the big
cities and the Russian masses estranged from Europe" (RC, 64) can actually be tamed by
elites. See Mosca, The Ruling Class (1896), trans. A. Livingston (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1939); and Pareto, The Mind and Society (1916), trans. A Livingston and A. Bongioro (New
York: Harcourt, Brace &Jovanovich, 1935). Weber was of course also concerned with the
relationship of elites and the masses; see "Science as a Vocation," p. 395.
1O2 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
Lights" in 1916, Schmitt notes the peculiar effect that the emergence of
technology has on Western intellectuals. Will it augment their power or
restrain it? Ultimately, what is it? Schmitt describes "the mood" that has
"taken control" of many of "the best minds of the day": a "distrust of the
world and every man"; a "feeling of eternal deception"; a doubt not unlike
that of "whether Christ and the Antichrist are distinguishable" (N, 70). In
the face of such indeterminacy, some aestheticize their incapacity to act; in
effect, they wallow in it: "[T]heir particular sickness is interesting to
them. . . . They want to see themselves described and want to hear them-
selves speaking about their doubt and to continue doubting because at
bottom they love their condition and give themselves to it in a resigned
manner in order not to be obliged to a deed. They do not want to use
power" (N, 70-1). Other intellectuals simply confuse the power of their
rhetoric with power itself: "It is a typical mistake of intellects of lesser rank to
infer from the violence of their affectivity the aesthetic and historical impor-
tance of its expression" (N, 66). They consider it indicative of their "ambi-
tion," "power," "libido," and "potency" (iV, 66).
In the "Neutralizations" piece thirteen years later, Schmitt retains this
attitude of disapproval toward the intellectuals who aestheticize their own
passivity or overestimate the potency of their "great words" (ND, 130). It is
to this effect that he starkly contrasts the technicity of the Soviet Union and
the neutrality of the European clerics who have abdicated their rightful
position of leadership because of a particular view of technology. Germany's
intellectual elite laments the utter contentlessness of technology and recog-
nizes that the culture of technology needs no elite to guide it. As a result,
instead of seeing the technicity of the Soviet Union for what it is, a demonic
opponent that must be confronted, they have collapsed into despair and
paralysis: "a German generation that complains about a soulless age of
technology in which the soul is helpless and unconscious," and the elite
thinks itself "powerless" (ND, 140). It is Schmitt's task to inform this genera-
tion that the age of neutralization that fosters their romantic pessimism "has
been carried to an end" (ND, 140). As the apparently self-anointed cleric of
postneutralization Europe, Schmitt seeks to make them aware of what tech-
nicity actually is and where it resides and prod them into taking a thor-
oughly "political" stance toward it.
In Political Form, Schmitt bristles at the suggestion by one of his intellec-
tual heroes, Georges Sorel, that Catholicism no longer has the capacity to
sustain such myths as the Antichrist (RC, 15). By the time of the "Neutraliza-
tions" piece, Schmitt may have come to see Sorel as correct, for he has
turned to more secularly mythic means to overcome the age of technol-
104 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
ogy.48 Indeed, Sorel is a kind of model for the type of cleric who can lead
Europe out of its exhaustion: "Sorel did not remain an engineer, but rather
became a cleric" (ND, 139). Yet Schmitt sees a generation of German intel-
lectuals who feel supplanted by engineers and technicians who know noth-
ing of culture, politics, and myth. The battle between Naturwissenschaft and
Geisteswissenschaft has been won by the former in the eyes of this generation,
which is content to retire and complain.
Nietzsche was most specific about the passivity encouraged by natural
science and mechanistic thinking. In one place he writes, "knowledge kills
action; action requires the veils of illusion," and he later identifies Socrates
as "the demonic power" that is the source of this kind of knowledge.49 As a
result of Platonic rationality, Nietzsche claims elsewhere, man "now places
his behavior under the control of abstractions."50 He often laments that
knowledge "enfeebles activity" and encourages the "avoiding of life and
action."51 In The Gay Science, he poses the question, even though science has
shown that it can "annihilate" goals of action, will it perhaps someday pro-
vide them?52 The literature and scholarship of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century are filled with examples of this kind of anxiety over the
possibility of action. Despite the obvious "action" that science and technol-
ogy make possible against nature, it is not construed by intellectuals as
meaningful action. On the contrary, as we observed in the first section, it is
action that deprives the world of meaning. Nietzsche, Schmitt, Lukacs, and
Heidegger perceive this type of activity as a kind of passivity.53
The intrinsic relationship between the passivity, or exhaustion, that Eu-
rope was experiencing and the process of neutralization that Schmitt
describes were already perceived before the war by Nietzsche, who defined
this exhaustion thus:
48 Sorel is central for Schmitt's treatment of "political myth" in The Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy (1923), trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); and "Die
politische Theorie des Mythos"(i923) in Positionen und Begrijfe im Kampf mit Weimar
Genf- Versailles: 1923-1939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), discussed in
the next chapter.
49 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, pp. 60, 82.
50 Nietzsche, "Truth and Lies," p. 84.
51 Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, p. 1.
52 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 82.
53 For a comparison of the fear of passivity in Schmitt and Heidegger, see Mehring, "Der
philosophische Fiihrer und der Kronjurist." In response to the supposed passive nihilism
of romanticism, Mehring describes how Schmitt and Heidegger take up an active nihilism
that is obsessed with the political leadership of intellectual elites.
MYTH AS ANTIDOTE 105
[T]he esteem for war and the pleasure in war diminish, while the comforts of
life are now desired just as ardently as warlike and athletic honors were for-
merly. But what is generally overlooked is that the ancient national energy and
national passion that became gloriously visible in war and warlike games have
now been transmuted into countless private passions and have merely become
less visible. Indeed, in times of "corruption" the power and force of the na-
tional energies that are expended are probably greater than ever and the
individual squanders them as lavishly as he could not have formerly when he
simply was not yet rich enough.54
as a negative model from which to forge their own conception of central Europe. See
Kracauer, "The Revolt of The Middle Classes" (1931), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays, ed., T. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 107-9,
115.
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 107
life."59 Schmitt accuses his Western colleagues of renouncing life, for any-
one who sees "in his enemy no more than empty mechanics is closer to
death than to life" (ND, 142). Schmitt finds the European intellectuals
indulgent in their passively aesthetic enrapture with the present and with
the status quo, in contrast to the Soviets who seek to ascetically overcome
the present and seize the future. Echoing Nietzsche, Schmitt declares, "All
new and great impulses, every revolution and every reformation, every new
elite comes out of asceticism and voluntary or involuntary poverty, whereby
poverty means above all renunciation of the status quo" (ND, 141).
The European intellectuals, however, see in such behavior a "nullity," a
"void," "nothingness," a will to "death" and not to life. But this is a poten-
tially fatal misrecognition. Soviet power, generated by technicity, Slavism,
anarchism, and asceticism, "grows silently and in the dark." It is alive and
should not be understood as "only a return to nothingness" (ND, 141). As
Nietzsche observed explicitly in a discussion of passivity, "the Russians . . .
have an advantage over us Westerners in dealing with life."60 Schmitt fears
that what is an advantage will become domination.
In the spirit of the closing paragraphs of Weber's "Politics as a Vocation"
essay, Schmitt challenges the German intellectual elite to forsake the com-
fort of their organic/mechanical, life/death dichotomies and their self-
indulgent obsession with the status quo and to instead define the West
culturally and politically in opposition to this satanic force that resides to
the east. If they choose to sit idly by and view Russia as a lifeless nothingness,
they will succumb to the identical fate of all previous ruling orders who
refused to see in burgeoning self-abnegating movements their own future
rulers. Like those who initially ridiculed and denounced the early Christians
or the radical Protestants, only to be swept away in the wave of their eventual
triumph, the German intellectual elite faces the prospect of being held
under the sway of the "this-worldly activism" (ND, 140) that grows more
powerful in Russia everyday. They would confirm Weber's great fear that
Germany would become a nation "without the opportunity of counting in
the arena of world politics - and also without the moral right to do so" (ES,
1462; translation amended). 61
theoretical category is again becoming an object of intense theoretical inquiry; see Neil
Brenner, "State Territorial Restructuring and the Production of Spatial Scale: Urban and
Regional Planning in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960-1990," Political Geography
15:1 (1996). Space is also becoming the subject of even more intense geopolitical con-
flict; see Stephen J. Del Rosso, Jr., "The Insecure State: Reflections on 'the State' and
'Security' in a Changing World," Daedalus 124:2 (spring 1995). Although the primacy of
political space is clearly presupposed in the "Neutralizations" essay, it is not until World
War II and the postwar years that Schmitt begins to theorize "territoriality," as such. See
his formulation of the Third Reich's "Monroe Doctrine" for Europe, his Grossraum thesis:
"Grossraum gegen Universalismus" (1939), in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampfmit Weimar
Genf- Versailles: 1923-1939. See also his postwar ruminations on land appropriation, as
elaborated in DerNomos derErde im Volkerrecht desjus Publicum Europaeum ([1950] Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1974), part of which appears in English as "Appropriation/
Distribution/Production: Toward a Proper Formulation of the Basic Questions of any
Social and Economic Order," trans. G. L. Ulmen, Telosqty (spring 1993). For an analysis of
the relationship of Schmitt's theory of "space" with that of Hannah Arendt, on the one
hand, and contemporary poststructuralism and Marxist geography, on the other, see John
Ely, "The Polis and 'The Political': Civic and Territorial Views of Association," Thesis Eleven
46 (August 1996).
HO CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
[I] t means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been
the rule. The church always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we
immoralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this, that the church
62 In Chapter 6,1 will explore Schmitt's own Weimar attempt to revive Hobbesian "fear" in
an authoritarian theoretical-political attempt to fortify the German state. In terms of the
present discussion of fear, see the classic essay, "Anxiety and Politics," of Schmitt's former
student and subsequently strident critic, Franz Neumann , included in Herbert Marcuse,
ed., The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory (New York:
Free Press, 1957).
63 For a comparison of the aporiai of Schmitt's "myth of the soil" and Heidegger's "mysticism
of Being," see Mehring, "Der philosophische Fiihrer und der Kronjurist," p. 362.
M Y T H AS A N T I D O T E 111
exists. . . . Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own
self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all its strength; the same
is true of power politics. A new creation in particular - the new Reich, for
example - needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel
itself necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary.64
64 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 488. Nietzsche celebrates the opposition of friends and
enemies in many places; see for example, The Gay Science, pp. 57-8, 107.
65 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 135.
66 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 386.
112 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
his notion of the political subject as embodied in clerics or elites and the
political enemy as manifested by Soviet Russia - indeed, the very notion of
"the political" itself- are all ungrounded occasions for Schmitt's own sub-
jective aesthetic consumption. His narrative concerning the elite- and
neutrality-driven course of modern European history, however fascinating
and ingenious, is ultimately no more compelling than the nineteenth-
century philosophies of history from which he explicitly attempts to dis-
tance it (ND, 132).
Likewise, characteristic of economic-technical thought, as Schmitt theor-
izes it, "the political" is itself devoid of any substantive content. The mean-
ing generated by conflict in "political activity" varies according to the chang-
ing configuration of the particular combatants. In a Schmittian sense,
therefore, political activity is precisely political romanticism. And despite the
fact that Schmitt may be more sensitive to the antinomies of modernity than
are the romantics and the neoromantics he criticizes, his own romanticism
would have far more lethal consequences than theirs, in large part as a
result of the centrality of the myth of the Antichrist to his approach.
Schmitt writes of Daubler's "Northern Lights": " [I] t contains elements of
such a strong apocalyptic mood that it could probably call forth a religious
epidemic" (N, 65). The same could easily be said of large portions of
Schmitt's own work, which, as we have seen, are often infused with a lan-
guage reminiscent of theology.67 Even in much of Schmitt's post-World
War II writings, he is preoccupied with the notion of the Katechon, a medi-
eval concept of the force, embodied either in an institution or a person, that
can hold off the coming of the Antichrist.68 Schmitt considers the tradition
of European jurisprudence and even himself in his "defense" of it against
positivist law as examples of a Katechon.69
As is apparent in every passage I have quoted from Nietzsche, he also
extensively employs the language of the sacred and the profane, frequently
centering on the notion of the Antichrist. However, Nietzsche often inter-
changes what is at one juncture sacred with what is at another profane in his
work. As we have seen, Nietzsche can identify his opponents as "advocates of
the devil," or as a "demonic force," and then describe himself in those very
terms. In his last days, as whatever was left of his sanity and his life slipped
away, he randomly identifies himself in his letters with Christ or the Anti-
67 See Schmitt, Political Theology, as well as Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung
jeder politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1970).
68 See Schmitt, DerNomos derErde.
69 See Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/4 7 (Cologne: Greven, 1950), p.
31-
M Y T H AS A N T I D O T E 113
christ. 70 The distinction had either lost its meaning for Nietzsche, or the
blurring of the distinction was indeed his purpose.
In terms of the analysis of myth just discussed, there are potentially
discomforting ramifications of this readiness to so quickly "name" one or
another historico-social phenomenon as demonic or divine. In the three
works by Schmitt I have examined in this chapter, he describes technology
or technicity in terms of the Antichrist or the satanic. But he also recognizes
that technology is a source of "unspeakable confusion": science and tech-
nology equate entities that ought not be equated, and technological re-
producibility raises the question of whether there is anything that is in fact
authentic. Particularly relevant here is Adorno's critique of existentialists
who utter "words that are sacred without sacred content"; 71 a critique that
reflects traditional Judaism's reluctance to represent the divine, lest the
profane be falsely worshipped:
70 See Selected Letters ofFriedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), e.g., pp. 344-5.
71 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will
(Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 9.
72 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 23; translation amended. See
Richard Wolin, "Reflections on Jewish Secular Messianism," in Labyrinths: Explorations in
the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 54.
73 See Schmitt, DerNomos der Erde, pp. 96, 131; and Ex Captivitate Salus, p. 75. Nietzsche's
attitude toward Christianity is of course more or less explicit.
74 Weber, "Science as a Vocation," p. 155.
114 CONFRONTATION W I T H TECHNOLOGY
late to keep him out of the despicable mischief that his faux religiosity
facilitated in the early thirties.75
As Ernst Fraenkel observed regarding Schmitt: "[W]hile writing still in
the name of political Catholicism [he] described the incongruity between
functional and substantial rationality with . . . acuteness and lucidity."76
Fraenkel proceeds to quote the passage from Political Form cited earlier,
where Schmitt describes the "specific Catholic anxiety" over economic-
technical rationality's indifference to the production of "a silk blouse or
poison gas." Fraenkel then remarks on Schmitt's conversion from theologi-
cally based yet still rational interrogation to the theoretically ungrounded
exaltation of myth:
This is not to imply that the only legitimate way to come to terms with the
deformations of modernity is through the intellectual means of traditional
religion. On the contrary, as expressed at the conclusion of the last chapter,
the theoretical approach of a broadly defined "critical theory" practiced by
other authors whom I draw on to criticize Schmitt (e. g., Adorno, Benjamin,
Horkheimer, Fraenkel, Neumann) certainly offers a more adequate meth-
odology.78 The more pressing point is, however, if one wishes to confront
75 For accounts of Schmitt's influence on theology, before and after the war, see the collec-
tion edited by Bernd Wacker, Die eigentlich katholische Verschdrfung. . . : Konfession, Theologie
undPolitik im Werk Carl Schmitts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994). Two studies that perhaps
too heavily emphasize Schmitt's faith, are Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss; and Andreas
Koenen, DerFall Carl Schmitt: Sein Aufsteigzum "Kronjuristen desDritten Reiches" (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftlichen Buchgesellschaft, 1995). See Joseph Bendersky, "Review: Andreas
Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt: Sein Aufsteig zum 'Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches,' and
Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue," Journal of Modern History
(1997). Meier, for instance, lumps together all of Schmitt's theological references from
across his career with no account of Schmitt's relationship to Catholicism at any particular
time, especially during his excommunication. See Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, e.g.,
pp. 19-20, 48, 68.
76 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory ofDictatorship (1941), trans, by E.
A. Shils (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 207.
77 Ibid., translation amended.
78 On the prospects for a critical social theory deriving from the efforts of some of these
authors, especially Adorno, see Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a
Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), particu-
larly the preface to the most recent edition.
MYTH AS A N T I D O T E 115
ity; one is necessarily beyond good and evil, or worse, one can no longer tell
the two apart. There is a danger that by demonizing something, something
else that is completely unworthy of such reverence may be necessarily sacra-
lized in response. The language of the Antichrist that is supposed to dissolve
the spirit of technology, on the contrary, further engenders that same "un-
speakable confusion" fostered by what Schmitt calls economic-technical
thought. His evoking the language of the Antichrist helped ensure that he
would not be remembered as the Katechon of the twentieth century, as he
would have liked, but rather as the Mephistopheles of Weimar Germany.85
When the philosophical existentialism of Nietzsche is transposed into the
political existentialism of Sorel or Schmitt, the normative end of addressing
the latent (and often not-so-latent) moments of domination concomitant
with modern, technical rationality becomes itself subsumed by the mytho-
logical, hence necessarily aesthetic, means of doing so. As Fraenkel puts it:
Sorel stripped the class struggle of its visionary goal and approved it as a
movement for its own sake. He transformed it into a myth because to him the
movement was everything and the goal was nothing. Thus Sorel became the
prophet of politics without ultimate goal - the advocate of action for the sake
of action. . . . Whoever believes that political action is nothing more than
acquiesence in the laws of social development will share the fate of Sorel. Like
Sorel he will pass from Syndicalism to VAction Fran$aise; like Mussolini, a disci-
ple of Sorel, he will shift from Socialism to Fascism; like Carl Schmitt, the
admirer of Sorel, he will desert political Catholicism for National Socialism, as
soon as he is convinced that integral nationalism is the order of the day.86
LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY'S
INFILTRATION OF POLITICS
EMERGENCY POWERS
The first line of Schmitt's Political Theology is perhaps the most famous
sentence, certainly one of the most infamous, in German political theory:
"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" [Souverdn ist, wer ilber den
Ausnahmezustand entscheidet] .1 And yet the full significance of this famous
sentence is often underestimated. In this chapter, I focus on (1) its signifi-
cance in the overall trajectory of Schmitt's Weimar work, and (2) its signifi-
cance for constitutional theories of emergency powers in general.
I will examine Schmitt's first major theoretical engagement with the issue
of emergency powers, in Die Diktatur from 1921,2 and explain how his
position, or at the very least his mode of presentation, changes in his second
effort on this subject, Political Theology, published only a year later. In the
earlier work, Schmitt describes the classical Roman institution of dictator-
ship as a theoretical-historical standard for emergency measures that pre-
serve a constitutional order in a time of dire crisis and also explicitly as the
appropriate conjunction of Technik and Politik. In classical dictatorship,
political technology is consigned only to the temporary exceptional mo-
Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty (1922), trans. George
Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), p. 5; hereafter PT. German references to the
work come from Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souverdnitdt (Munich:
Duncker & Humblot, 1934), here, p. 11.
Schmitt, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfdngen des modernen Souverdnitdtsgedankens bis zum pro-
letarischen Klassenkampf (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), hereafter D.
121
122 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
ment, and in this scheme the normal and rule-bound regular order is con-
sidered substantively correct by Schmitt and worthy of restoration. However,
in the latter work, Political Theology, the exceptional situation is that which
calls for the emergence of a potentially all-powerful sovereign who must not
only rescue a constitutional order from a particular political crisis but also
charismatically deliver it from its own constitutional procedures, pro-
cedures that Schmitt pejoratively deems technical and mechanical. The
question I want to pose and answer is, why does Schmitt in the span of a year
change his position in one work, in which a temporary dictatorship is pre-
sented as an appropriate use of functional rationality and a rule-bound
constitutional order is presented as something worth defending and restor-
ing, to the position in the second work, in which an unlimitedly powerful
sovereign is one who in a time of crisis restores existential substance to
constitutional orders that of necessity grow "torpid" through "mechanical
repetition?"3 Just as in Chapters 1 and 2 we observed Schmitt's transition
from a merely conservative cultural-political critic of technical rationality
and romantic irrationality to a more engaged radically reactionary one, in
this chapter we will begin to see the constitutional and institutional man-
ifestations of this latter orientation. The subject of emergency powers pro-
vides a promising thread with which to trace Schmitt's overall intellectual
trajectory in Weimar, because it is a central concern throughout his writings
of the period.
Dictatorship as Technology
Schmitt takes up DieDiktatur (Dictatorship) in the context of the extensive use
of emergency powers by the Weimar Republic's first president, Friedrich
Ebert, under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. Ebert used such mea-
sures against the forces that were besieging the republic on all sides in its
early years: right-wing and communist rebellion, as well as an overwhelming
economic crisis.4
Triumph of Hitler, ed. Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias, (London: Unwin & Allen,
1971). On the context of the book, Die Diktatur, more specifically, see Joseph Bendersky,
Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 30-1.
Under the rather broad powers provided for by Article 48, the directly elected Re-
ichsprdsident could compel, with armed force if required, an individual state or Land to
comply with federal law (par. 1); and could take "necessary measures" to restore or protect
"public order and safety" by suspending constitutional rights and by recourse to armed
force when it was "disturbed or endangered" (par. 2). The limits to the president's emer-
gency powers as enumerated within the article itself include the immediate informing of
the general parliamentary body, the Reichstag, of any emergency action, the Reichstag's right
to revoke such action (both par. 3), and a called-for statute to prescribe the exact details of
the president's authority (par. 5); from without the article itself, the countersignature of
the chancellor of the parliamentary government was required for all presidential measures
including those issued under Article 48 (Art. 50), and there existed a constitutional
provision for impeachment (Art. 43). The President could bypass such restrictions by
dissolving the Reichstag (Art. 28) or by colluding with the chancellor (and, as an aside, the
statute to circumscribe presidential emergency powers was never brought into being).
Social Democrat Ebert did not abuse the constitution in any of these ways during the
Republic's early period of crisis, as did conservative Paul von Hindenburg, in machination
with successive right-wing chancellors (Bruning, von Papen, and von Schleicher), during
the second and final period of crisis between 1929 and 1933 (see Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die
Auflosung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie
[Diisseldorf: Droste, 1984], and Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical
Modernity [New York: Hill & Wang, 1987]). I will deal with Schmitt's writings on presiden-
tial emergency powers and complicity with the right-wing constitutional usurpers during
this period in later sections of this chapter.
124 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
return to it through the functional nature of his activity and the time limit
placed on him. However, in the performance of his duty, the dictator knew
no right or wrong but only expedience: According to Schmitt, for the dicta-
tor, "a procedure can be either false or true, in that this determination is
self-contained by the fact that the measure taken is in a factually-technical
[sachtechnische] sense right, that is expedient" (D, 11). Normative or ethical
notions of wrong and right, legal and illegal, are not brought to bear in
dictatorship, only what is "in the factually-technical [sachtechnische] sense
harmful [to the regime], and thus false" (D, 12). The "peculiarity" of dic-
tatorship, according to Schmitt, lies in the fact that "everything is justified
that appears to be necessary for a concretely gained success" (D, xviii). The
particular "concrete situation [Lage der Sache]" calls for the particular kinds
of "tasks, powers, evaluations, empowerments, commissions and au-
thorities" to be taken up by the dictator (D, xviii). The specifics of a crisis -
an immediate end - generate the specific "means [Mittels]" to be employed
by the dictator, whereas the ultimate end is understood, a situation of status
quo ante:
A dictatorship therefore that does not have the purpose of making itself
superfluous is a random despotism. Achieving a concrete success however
means intervening in the causal path of events with means whose correctness
lies solely in their purposefulness and is exclusively dependent on a factual
connection to the causal event itself. Dictatorship hence suspends that by
which it is justified, the state of law, and imposes instead the rule of procedure
interested exclusively in bringing about a concrete success. . . . [a return to]
the state of law. (D, xvi)
not, according to their ideology, "definitive" for the Communists, but rather
"transitional" (D, xiv).
Schmitt notes that one might then see the communist theory of dictator-
ship as simply a modern incarnation of the classical institution: a negation
of parliamentary democracy without formal democratic justification (be-
cause the Communists are often a minority) and a replacement of the
personal dictator with a collective one (the party) (D, xiii). But this obscures
the truly fundamental transformation of the essence of the classical con-
cept: The communist institution employs technical means to create a new
situation; the classical institution employed them to restore a previously
existing one. This difference has important ramifications for the question of
just how limited a dictatorship can be if it is legitimated and bound by a
future situation as opposed to being legitimated by a previously existing
one.5 This difference also lays the groundwork for the theoretical-historical
distinction that governs the whole of Die Diktatur: the one between the
traditional concept of "commissarial dictatorship," which is bound by allot-
ted time, specified task, and the fact that it must restore a previously stand-
ing order; and "sovereign dictatorship," which is unlimited in any way and
may proceed to establish a completely new order. 6 I will return to these
issues in greater detail in subsequent sections.
So, if the Communists partially understand the essence of dictatorship,
liberals, to the extent that they pay any attention to the concept at all,
completely misapprehend it, according to Schmitt.7 Liberals have com-
Schmitt's one-time student, Otto Kirchheimer, criticizes the way socialists wrongly define
dictatorship and cites, problematically, Die Diktatur and Politische Theologie as equivalents;
see 'The Socialist and Bolshevik Theory of the State" (1928), in Politics, Law and Social
Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer, ed. F. S. Burin and K. L. Shell (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969), p. 6. He goes on to paraphrase Schmitt on the apparently com-
missarial yet actually sovereign nature of Bolshevik dictatorship (p. 15). As faithful as
Schmitt's leftist students often were to Schmitt's theory of dictatorship, their frequent
equating of the arguments of Die Diktatur and Politische Theologie have done as much to
obfuscate as to clarify the crucial issues involved (Kirchheimer repeats this equation in his
essay from 1944, "In Quest of Sovereignty," in the same volume, p. 191). On the specifics of
Schmitt's intellectual relationship to such leftist legal scholars as Kirchheimer and Franz
Neumann, see William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt
School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994); as well as Scheuerman, ed.,
The Rule ofLaw Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996).
On Schmitt's appropriation of the etymological-theoretical distinction from Jean Bodin,
and a general discussion of the thesis, see George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An
Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936 (Westport: Greenwood,
1989), pp. 30-1.
Interestingly, Schmitt's complaint from the twenties is still relevant today, as the "bourgeois
126 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
pletely forgotten its classical meaning and associate the idea and institution
solely with the kind described by Schmitt as "sovereign" dictatorship: "[A]
distinction is no longer maintained between dictatorship and Caesarism,
and the essential determination of the concept is marginalized . . . the
commissarial character of dictatorship" (D, xiii). Liberals deem a dictator to
be any single, individual ruling through a centralized administration with
little political constraint, often democratically acclaimed, and they equate it
unreflectively with authoritarianism, Caesarism, Bonapartism, military gov-
ernment, and even the papacy {D, xiii) . 8
But by corrupting the notion of this important technique for dealing with
emergencies and subsequently banishing it from constitutional concerns,
liberal constitutionalism leaves itself especially susceptible to emergencies.
Its blind faith in the technical apparatus of its standing constitutions and
the scientistic view of the regularity of nature encourages liberalism to
believe that it needs no technique for the extraordinary occurrence, be-
political literature" in English on dictatorship and emergency powers is paltry and out-
dated: Besides the classics by Watkins (The Failure of Constitutional Emergency Powers under the
German Republic) and Rossi ter {Constitutional Dictatorship), see most recently John E. Finn,
Constitutions in Crisis: Political Violence and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991); and Jules LoBel, "Emergency Powers and the Decline of Liberalism," Yak Law
Review 98 (1989). The most attention paid to constitutional dictatorship in the traditional
literature is by Schmitt's own former student, C. J. Friedrich; see "Dictatorship in Germany,"
Foreign Affairs 9:1 (1930); "The Development of Executive Power in Germany," American
Political Science Review 2 7 (1933); and Constitutional Reason of State: The Survival of the Constitu-
tional Order (Providence: Brown University Press, 1957). On Friedrich's intellectual debt to
Schmitt, see George Schwab, "Carl Schmitt: Through a Glass Darkly," Schmittiana -Eclectica
71-2 (1988): 7 2 - 4 . Itis still the Left that exhibits more interest in the concept of dictator-
ship: Two post-Marxists influenced by Schmitt who have written extensively on the subject
are Paul Hirst and Norberto Bobbio. See Hirst: "Carl Schmitt's Decisionism," Telos 72
(summer 1987); The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge, 1989); Representative
Democracy and Its Limits (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); "The State, Civil Society and the
Collapse of Soviet Communism," Economy and Society 20:2 (May 1991). See Bobbio, Which
Socialism? Marxism, Socialism and Democracy (1976), trans. Roger Griffin (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1987); The Future of Democracy: A Defense of the Rules of the Game
(1984), trans. Roger Griffin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Democracy
and Dictatorship: The Nature and the Limits of State Power (1985), trans. Peter Kenealy (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Schmitt's one-time student, leftist lawyer Franz Neumann, remarked in the fifties, "Strange
though it may seem, we do not possess any systematic study of dictatorship." He cites
Schmitt's DieDiktaturbut declares with no explanation that "his analysis is not acceptable."
See "Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship" (1954), in The Democratic and the Authoritarian
State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (New York: Free Press, 1957),
pp. 233, 254, n. 1. As I will argue, this conclusion can be drawn only by conflating too
dramatically the respective analyses of Die Diktatur with Political Theology.
EMERGENCY POWERS 127
Machiavelli, the modern writer who perhaps took the classical theory of
dictatorship most seriously.10
Dictatorship was a wise invention of the Roman Republic. The dictator was an
extraordinary Roman magistrate, who was introduced after the expulsion of
the kings, so that a strong power would be available in time of peril. His power
could not be curtailed by the authority of the consuls, the principle of col-
legiality, the veto of the people's Tribune, or the provocation of the people.
The dictator, who was appointed on petition of the Senate by the consuls, had
the task of eliminating the perilous crisis, which is the reason for his appoint-
ment, such as the direction of a war effort or the suppression of a re-
bellion. . . . The dictator was appointed for six months, although it was cus-
tomary for him to step down before the full duration of his tenure if he
successfully executed his assigned commission. He was not bound by law and
acted as a kind of king with unlimited authority over life and death. (D, 1-2)
Unlike the "sovereign" dictatorships of Caesar and Sulla, who used the
office to change the constitutional order so as to further their own grasping
at unlimited power, the classical notion was wholly commissarial (D, 3).
Schmitt observes how Machiavelli's Discorsi has been maligned as a
"cheap imitation" of Aristotle, Polybius, and especially Livy, whose history
serves as the ostensible occasion for Machiavelli's reflections (D, 6). How-
ever, Machiavelli's remarks on dictatorship are "independently interesting
and decidedly influential" (D, 6). More clearly than most, Machiavelli rec-
ognizes that the collegiality of republican government prevents such a re-
10 Schmitt's affinity with Machiavelli transcends the realm of the purely intellectual or
academic. Schmitt's biographer describes how Schmitt compared his post-World War II
banishment from the German university to the fate of the great Florentine, "who had to
endure similar ostracism despite . . . significant intellectual contributions. Schmitt even
referred to his house as San Casciano, the place where Machiavelli lived while in exile
after losing favor with the Medici family." See Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich,
p. 287. On the commonality between Schmitt and Machiavelli, and their respective
receptions, see Paul Hirst, "Carl Schmitt - Decisionism and Politics," Economy and Society
17:2 (May 1988); Dolf Sternberger, "Machiavelli's Principe und der Begriff des Pol-
itischen," in Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1980); and Heinrich Meier, 'The Philoso-
pher as Enemy: On Carl Schmitt's Glossarium," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 17:1-2
(1994)-
130 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
gime from making quick decisions, and he also recognizes that exceptional
circumstances require exceptional measures (D, 6). For Machiavelli, "the
dictator is not a tyrant, and dictatorship is not some form of absolute
domination but rather a republican constitution's proper means of protect-
ing liberty" (D, 6).
Schmitt suggests that Machiavelli inverts Aristotle's notion of normalcy in
formulating a concept of dictatorship: For Aristotle, the normal political
situation requires separating those who deliberate on the law from those
who execute it; for Machiavelli, the dictator is the one who both deliberates
on a measure and executes it (D, 7). But this collapsing of deliberation and
action does not render the dictator completely unlimited: "The dictator
cannot alter standing law, nor cancel it, nor make new law. The ordinary
authority obtains for Machiavelli as a kind of control on the dictator" {D, 7).
As such, dictatorship was a "constitutional institution" of the republic until,
by Machiavelli's account, the decemvirate endangered the republic by using
dictatorship to effect changes in the constitution (D, 7).
Thus, a dictator is not the equivalent of a prince in Machiavelli's theory,
according to Schmitt, but rather its opposite: The former uses unlimited
power in extraordinary circumstances to bring about the termination of his
power, whereas the latter uses unlimited power throughout an indefinite
duration of time to perpetuate this power {D, 7). Yet in the state-building
literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the distinction be-
tween the two is increasingly obscured (D, 7). But the comparison of a
prince and a dictator does raise the issue of what Schmitt calls, "the puzzle of
The Prince": How could Machiavelli author the liberty-espousing Discorsi as
well as the tyrant-advising II Principe (D, 7)? The solution to the puzzle, for
Schmitt, lies not with claims, still put forth today, that the latter book is a
"veiled attack on tyranny" or a manifestation of Machiavelli's "despaired
nationalism" but rather with the issue of "technicity [Technizitdt]": Ma-
chiavelli, like many Renaissance authors, was driven by "purely technical
interests"; his dominant problems were "technical problems" {D, 7-8). This
is borne out by the fact that "Machiavelli himself was most occupied by the
purely technical problems of military science" (D, 8). Thus, II Principe is the
technical handbook of principalities, the Discorsi of republicanism (D, 8).
Schmitt describes this Machiavellian spirit of technicity in a way that recalls
his critique of functional rationality from his cultural-political writings:
Out of this absolute technicity develops the indifference towards any further
political purpose in the same manner as an engineer can have a technical
interest in the production of a thing, without being the least interested in the
EMERGENCY POWERS 131
purpose that the product serves. Any political result - be it absolute domina-
tion by an individual or a democratic republic, the power of a prince or the
political liberty of a people - is performed as a mere task. The political power
organization and the technique [ Technik] of their maintenance and expan-
sion differ according to the various types of government, but always as some-
thing that can be brought about in a factually-technical [sachtechnische] man-
ner, in the way an artist fashions a work of art according to a rationalist
orientation. (D, 8-9)
As the practical task of early modern state builders becomes the expan-
sion of political power by prosecuting boundary-defining external war and
suppressing internal, religious civil war, the normatively unencumbered and
technically disposed executive becomes the model of political practice, a
model that still has contemporary ramifications as far as Schmitt is
concerned:
On Schmitt's appropriation of Hobbes, see Herfried Miinkler, "Carl Schmitt und Thomas
Hobbes," NeuePolitische Literatur 29 (1984); David Dyzenhaus, "'Now the Machine Runs
Itself: Carl Schmitt on Hobbes and Kelsen," Cardozo Law Review 16:1 (August 1994); and
my "Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the Revival of Hobbes
in Weimar and National-Socialist Germany," Political Theory 22:4 (November 1994).
EMERGENCY POWERS 133
tion of the origin of the modern state directly related to the problem of
dictatorship" (D, 10). 13
According to Schmitt, this process is radicalized as sovereignty becomes
increasingly defined as popular sovereignty, as authority derives not from a
specific and definite individual person, like an absolute monarch, but
rather from an amorphous and differentiated populace. As a result, emer-
gency action becomes more extreme, because it is soon carried out by an
elite whose actions are supposedly sanctioned by such "popular" sov-
ereignty. Concomitantly, there is a historical justification for the violent
destruction of an old order and the creation of a new one out of nothing.
Sovereign dictatorship becomes the power to perpetually suspend and
change political order in the name of an inaccessible "people" and an
eschatological notion of history. Schmitt's chief examples of this develop-
ment are the writings of the French revolutionary theorists, such as Mably
(D, 115-16) and especially Sieves (D, 143-5) an<^ m o r e immediately the
Bolsheviks.
13 For a recent interpretation of the early-modern reason of state literature, see Maurizio
Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of
Politics, 1250-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
134 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
book between, on the one hand, the body that decides that an exceptional
situation exists - in the Roman case, the Senate through the consuls - and,
on the other, the person who is appointed by them to decide what to do in
the concrete particulars of the emergency, the dictator himself or herself.
The two separate decisions, one taking place in the moment of normalcy,
the other in the moment of exception, are lumped together and yet hidden
behind the ostensible directness of Schmitt's opening statement in Political
Theology. Indeed, further on in the work Schmitt explicitly and deliberately
conflates the two decisions: The sovereign "decides whether there is an
extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it" (PT, 7,
emphasis added).
There is also no attempt in Political Theology at prescribing what a priori
time- or task-related limits might be imposed on a sovereign's action in the
exceptional situation; Schmitt suggests in fact that this is potentially
impossible:
The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be
characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state,
or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a
preformed law.
It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty,
that is, the whole question of sovereignty. The precise details of an emergency
cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a
case, especially when it is truly a matter of an extreme emergency and how it is
to be eliminated. The preconditions as well as the content of ajurisdictional
competence in such a case must necessarily be unlimited. (PT, 6-7).
implies some kind of lawmaking or lawgiving power that could change the
previous order or even create a new one.
Schmitt's attitude, however, toward the normal order itself changes from
Die Diktatur to Political Theology. Even though in Die Diktatur he chides the
liberal political order for its infiltration by natural-scientific thinking, and its
consequent blindness to both the possibility of the exception and to the
potential necessity of resorting to the institution of the dictator on such an
occasion, he never suggests that it would be impossible for that order to
become aware in such a way. In fact, one of the upshots of the bulk of the
book is precisely such an effort: a subtle call for the revival of the institution
of a commissarial dictatorship to preserve a republican, if not specifically
liberal, political order to which Schmitt does not seem at all opposed. But in
Political Theology, the normal, liberal political order is presented as being so
corrupted by science and technology that it is actually redeemed by the excep-
tion and the sovereign dictatorial action it calls for: "In the exception, the
power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become
torpid by repetition" (PT, 15). In Die Diktatur, sovereignty is the bearer of the
dangerous technicity and protoauthoritarianism that culminates with the
Jacobins and the Communists and endangers any substantively worthy con-
stitutional order; in Political Theology, sovereignty is that which is il-
legitimately suppressed by the mechanisms of constitutional orders, such as
the separation of powers: "[T]he development and practice of the liberal
constitutional state . . . attempts [sic] to repress the question of sovereignty
by a division and mutual control of competences" (PT, 11).
What accounts for the shift in Schmitt's position? One explanation may
concern his reception of Max Weber's theory of charisma. In the book
originally dedicated to Weber, Political Theology, does he make a theoretical-
political move reminiscent of the great sociologist? Weber shifted from a
detached, wary, and yet somewhat condescending analysis of charisma, at
the turn of the century, to an endorsement of it as a solution to the mechani-
zation brought on by bureaucratic politics. In parallel fashion, Schmitt
moves from a cautious analysis of the rise of the concept of sovereignty in
the reason of state literature, in Die Diktatur, to an endorsement of it as a
solution to the Weimar predicament, in Political Theology. The exception
changes from a purely functional-political problem for a regime to a kind of
moment of divine intervention likened to a miracle (PT, 36); Schmitt re-
marks with satisfaction that "the exception confounds the unity and order
of the rationalist scheme" (PT, 14).
Weber's definition of charisma at least remained consistent while his own
orientation toward it changed; Schmitt, however, sees sovereignty as tied to
136 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
14 A discussion of Schmitt and Weber that deals specifically with the relationship between
dictatorship and charisma is G. L. Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert: Eine Studie iiberMax Weber und
Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1991), pp. 390-400. Ulmen correctly
points out that Weber, unlike Schmitt, always associates dictatorship with charisma and
hence as a kind of Caesarism, whereas Schmitt, at least in Die Diktatur, recognizes and
emphasizes the purely functional nature of the classical notion of commissarial dictator-
ship. But as George Schwab observes, and as I will demonstrate more specifically in
subsequent sections, Schmitt moves increasingly toward the sovereign type of dictator
after the publication of the work; see Schwab, The Challenge of The Exception, pp. 40, 44.
EMERGENCY POWERS 137
then it is clear who the sovereign is. . . . All tendencies of modern constitu-
tional development point towards the eliminating of the sovereign in this
sense" (PT, 7). Fixation on the letter of the constitutional law to discern
"competence" will either create a vacuum if no relevant competence is
enumerated, or conflict should it not be clear.15 Neither is of course a de-
sirable state of affairs in the face of an emergency: "Who assumes authority
concerning those matters for which there are no positive stipulations . . . ?
In other words, Who is responsible for that for which competence has not
been anticipated?" (PT, 11). According to Schmitt's formulation, in all cases
of emergency, it would seem necessary to have recourse to a unitary institu-
tion with a monopoly on decisions, so that no such confusion or conflict
occurs. Because the likelihood of such an occurrence is great (especially in
the Weimar context), and because the same figure who acts on the excep-
tion must first declare that it exists, it would seemingly be best to have such a
person vigilant even during normal times. Thus, in violation of the main
principles of classical dictatorship, normalcy and exception are collapsed,
and ordinary rule of law is dangerously encroached on by exceptional
absolutism.
The second possible explanation for Schmitt's transformation may be
offered by the overall thrust of Die Diktaturitself'. Schmitt is distrustful of the
general historical trend wherein the concepts of sovereignty - increasingly
popular sovereignty - and emergency action are merged. Again, for Schmitt
this culminates in the theorists of the French Revolution, such as Mably and
Sieves. In Schmitt's view, they advocate a sovereign dictatorship that
destroys an old order and creates a new one not on the authority of a specific
constitutional document or legal charge but as the agent of such a vague
entity as the "people": "While the commissarial dictatorship is authorized by
a constituted organ and maintains a title in the standing constitution, the
sovereign dictator is derived only quoad execitium and directly out of the
formless pouvoir constituanf {D, 145).
In the conclusion of Die Diktatur, Schmitt returns to the issue of the
communist use of the term dictatorship, for he clearly sees the Communists
as the heirs of the French Revolution: a radical elite that will use violent
means in step with supposedly world-historical processes according to the
sanction of an anointed populace to which it can never really be held
accountable.
15 Later in Verfassungslehre, Schmitt discusses in great detail the dangers of literal constitu-
tional interpretation: Verfassungslehre (1928) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), pp.
26-7, 56, 110, 125, 146, 200.
138 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
[A] t least for the continental constitutional liberalism of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries the historical value of absolute monarchy lies in the
annihilation of the feudal and estatist powers and that through that it created
a sovereignty in the modern sense of state unity. So is this realized unity the
foundational presupposition of the revolutionary literature of the eighteenth
century? The tendency to isolate the individual and to abolish each social
group within the state and with that set the individual and the state directly
across from one another was emphasized in both the depiction of the theory
of legal despotism and that of the social contract. . . . [According to Con-
dorcet,] we live today no more in a time, in which there are within the state
powerful groups and classes; the puissante associations have vanished. . . . In
the years 1832 and 1848 - important dates for the development of the state of
siege into a significant legal institution - the question was asked whether the
political organization of the proletariat and their counter-effect did not in fact
create a whole new political situation and with that create new state and legal
concepts. (D, 203-4)
There are several possible conclusions to be drawn from this rather murky
paragraph: Because of the trajectory of history, perhaps the conjunction of
emergency powers and mass sociopolitical movements as embodied in the
revolutionary/counterrevolutionary moments of 1832 and 1848 ought not
to be severed, as a revival of the notion of commissarial emergency powers
would entail. Perhaps the return of powerful social groups threatening the
state in the form of working-class movements ought to be met by a political
response new and yet akin to the way that the absolute monarchs had earlier
neutralized or destroyed aristocratic and religious groups. Perhaps the pop-
ulist Soviet state, which can be directed to do almost anything by an all-
powerful, unaccountable, historically legitimated elite, should be engaged
by a similarly defined German state directed by a charismatically legitimated
president. These are conclusions implicitly suggested, not explicitly argued,
by the closing pages of Die Diktatur. Yet these pages serve as a signpost for his
subsequent book, Political Theology, and the rest of his Weimar work. Gone
from Schmitt's writings after Die Diktatur are the neo-Kantian attempts to
keep his authoritarian tendencies within a rule-of-law framework that
characterizes his earlier writings and governs the moderating impulses of
most of that book.
In Political Theology, as described earlier, Schmitt espouses a neo-
sovereignty embodied in the Reichsprdsident, encumbered not by constitu-
tional restraints but only by the demands of the political exception. The
president, as the personal embodiment of the popular will that cannot be
procedurally ascertained in a time of crisis, has the authority to act -
140 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
Schmitt, "Die Diktatur des Reichsprasident nach Art. 48 der Weimarer Verfassung"
(1924), appended to subsequent editions of Die Diktatur, and thus hereafter D2; Der Huter
der Verfassung (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1931), hereafter HV; and Legalitdt
und Legitimitdt (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1932), hereafter LL, from the reprint in
Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsdtze aus denjahren 1924-1954: Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958).
Ernst Fraenkel, for instance, describes the whole book as an attempt to "exploit" Article
48; see The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (1941), trans. E. A. Shils
(New York: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 213, n. 17. This does not prevent him from ex-
plicitly appropriating Schmitt's distinction between commissarial and sovereign dictator-
ship (p. 213, n. 4). To his credit though, Fraenkel is more sensitive than Schmitt evervtas
to the fact that an emergency can very easily be used as an occasion for a coup (p. 10).
Another of Schmitt's Leftist "students," Otto Kirchheimer, reminds us that modern emer-
gency powers are used more often than not to reintegrate the proletariat into the state
order; see "Weimar - and What Then?" (1930), in Politics, Law and Social Change, p. 42.
There is indeed vast historical precedence for this, as it should be pointed out that despite
the positive light in which I have presented the Roman institution of dictatorship, it was
quite often used as a tool by the Roman Senate to keep the plebeians at bay.
142 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
22 There is little scholarly consensus on the exact moment of Schmitt's conversion to sov-
ereign dictatorship. Renato Cristi, for instance, locates it already in the 1921 main text of
Die Diktatur, whereas Stanley L. Paulson dates it even after the 1924 "Article 48" essay:
Cristi, "Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Constituent Power," Canadian Journal of Law and
Jurisprudence 10:1 (1997); Paulson, "The Reich President and Weimar Constitutional
Politics: Aspects of the Schmitt-Kelsen Dispute on the 'Guardian of the Constitution'"
(paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Chicago, August 31-September 3, 1995).
EMERGENCY POWERS 143
cle 48 came to be, one thing was clear: Germany found itself in a wholly
abnormal crisis and therefore for the moment a one-time authority was
necessary which made possible decisive action" (D2, 258-9). Schmitt calls
for similar "abnormal" and "decisive" action but attempts to allay the fears of
those who might be concerned with the constitutional status of such action
with his final sentence: "That would be no constitutional alteration" (D2,
259). In other words, he is not calling for constitutionally abrogating action
characteristic of sovereign dictatorship on the part of the president, but
rather commissarial, constitution-preserving action. But of course his
harkening back to the crisis in which the constitution was founded and to
the preconstitutional constituting decision and not to the body of the con-
stitution itself implies a repetition of a sovereign act of founding to save the
constitution - in which the constitution may in fact be changed as long as
the preconstitutional will is not. This strategy of justifying presidential dic-
tatorial action on the basis of the preconstitutional sovereign will of the
people and not the principles embodied within the constitution itself be-
comes more pronounced after Schmitt formulates his constitutional theory
in the 1928 book of that name, Verfassungslehre, along precisely these lines,
and as he seeks a solution to the Weimar republic's most severe crisis, in his
books published in the wake of devastating economic depression and wide-
spread political unrest in the early thirties, Der Hu'ter der Verfassung and
Legalitdt und Legitimitdt.
Schmitt begins Der Hu'ter der Verfassung (Guardian of the Constitution) in
much the same way that he began his book on dictatorship exactly ten years
earlier. He blames nineteenth-century liberalism for bringing a crucial con-
stitutional institution into ill repute, and he draws on examples from classi-
cal Sparta and Rome to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of such a
concept and authority. But, whereas in Die Diktatur the example Schmitt is
attempting to revive is commissarial dictatorship, in Guardian it is the notion
of a defender of the constitution (HV, 7-9), and indeed the merging of the
two phenomena - emergency powers and the question of what charismatic
institution sovereignty lies in - is again just his strategy.23
By consistently appealing to emergency circumstances, Schmitt is able to
sufficiently discredit the Weimar judiciary to keep it from any potential role
in "guarding" the constitution: The judiciary presupposes norms, and a
guardian of the constitution may need to act beyond norms (HV, 19), and,
23 For a detailed account of this strategy, see Ingeborg Maus, Btirgerliche Rechtstheorie und
Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funktion und aktuellen Wirkungder Theorie Carl Schmitts (Munich: C.
H. Beck, 1980), pp. 127-31.
144 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
In his book-length essay from the following year, Legalitdt und Legitimitdt
(Legality and Legitimacy), Schmitt would continue this line of thought such
that it is almost impossible to recognize when he is talking about normal
constitutional operations and when he is talking about emergency ones; all
of the former have been subsumed in the latter. The oft-asserted existence
of a tension within the Weimar constitution that serves as the source for the
title of the book - "plebiscitary legitimacy" versus "statutory legality" (LL,
312) - is to be resolved in favor of the former. The grounds for this lie in the
historical necessity of a mass-democratic moment, what Schmitt calls "the
plebiscitary immediacy of the deciding people as legislator" (LL, 314). And
he cites the intellectual originator of this historical moment, Rousseau and
his "argument for immediate, plebiscitary, non-representative democracy"
(LL, 314). The president, as vessel for such "immediacy," takes on authority
similar to that of the traditional "extra-ordinary legislator," who may act
"against the law" (LL, 320). As we will see, John Locke's notion of executive
prerogative allows for political action that works explicitly against the law
and yet is still true to the constitutional order; but a legislator such as the
one Schmitt draws from Rousseau, as Schmitt himself explains in Die Dik-
tatur, acts against the constitution and may in fact found a new one.
According to Schmitt, in the person of the president,
the simple jurisprudential truth breaks through all normative fictions and
obscurities: norms are only valid for normal situations and the presupposed
normalcy of the situation is a legal positivist component of its "validity." But
the legislator of the normal situation is something different than the Action-
Commissar of the abnormal crisis who restores the normal situation of "se-
curity and order." If one views him as a "legislator" and his measures as "stat-
utes" then despite all such equalizations of differences the "legislative mea-
sures" of the Action-Commissar - as a direct result of their equalization with
"statutes" - destroy the system of legality of the parliamentary statutory state.
(LL, 321)27
Schmitt appears concerned that the distinction might be lost between law
made under normal legislative circumstances and measures issued by ex-
ecutive decree during emergency ones. His emphasis on the distinction
might allay the fears of those who worry about the latter alternative becom-
ing permanent. But his categories would make it impossible to remove such
a regime once in place by appeals to "normalcy." Thus it is Schmitt's equaliza-
tion of the normal and the exceptional that would intentionally "destroy"
the parliamentary state.
In a 1958 introduction to Legalitdt und Legitimitat, Schmitt claimed that
he had always - and particularly in that work - argued for commissarial
dictatorial authority for the president, because that is all that was granted to
him by the Weimar constitution.28 As we can see, by 1932 Schmitt had
moved so far away from this position that the distinction between sovereign
and commissarial dictatorship no longer had any meaning. In Die Diktatur,
he criticizes the Communists for underestimating and disparaging the im-
portance of the normal political order at the expense of the exceptional
one: "Whoever sees in the core of all law only [the possibility of its suspen-
sion] is not quite able himself to find an adequate concept of dictatorship
because for him every legal order is only latent or intermittent dictatorship"
(D, xvii). He thus aptly describes the Carl Schmitt of Political Theology and
after, the one who would attain such infamy for his subsequent Weimar and
post-Weimar career.29 But is there anything to be culled from Schmitt's
Weimar work on emergency powers that can help inform contemporary
reflections on the subject?
from the works that would follow it - especially Schmitt's next effort, Political
Theology - even if within Die Diktatur is found the germ of his subsequent
transformation. Through this we can observe perhaps more clearly than
before where, how, and even why a particularly brilliant Weimar conserva-
tive in fact became a Weimar fascist: To confront the malignant develop-
ment of popular sovereignty as revolutionary dictatorship in Soviet Russia
and state-threatening internal revolutionary groups, Schmitt resorts to a no-
less-malignant definition of sovereignty as expressed in a nationalist presi-
dential dictatorship. His role in undermining the Weimar constitution and
his subsequent political affiliation need no comment at this particular
juncture. 30
This is more or less consequential from the standpoint of the history of
political thought, but one might still ask what can this authoritarian
beserker - to employ the term with which Schmitt would often refer to
fanatics on the Left - offer anyone remotely interested in constitutional
democracy? There are several important points to be drawn from Schmitt's
Weimar work on emergency powers, particularly as they relate to the distinc-
tion between commissarial and sovereign dictatorships and to the infamous
first sentence of Political Theology that explodes that very distinction:
(a) Liberalism and the Decline of the Exception. According to Schmitt's ac-
count, as Enlightenment political thought falls increasingly under the thrall
of modern natural science, it comes to regard nature, and hence politi-
cal nature, as more of a regular phenomenon. Consequently, there is
deemed less need for the discretionary and prudential powers, long con-
ferred on judges and executives by traditional political theories, includ-
ing Aristotelianism and Scholasticism - discretion and prudence that
found their extreme example in the case of classical dictatorship. As the
functional necessity of such discretion apparently subsides in the Enlighten-
ment, the normative assessment of it becomes increasingly negative, and
30 On the subject of Schmitt's involvement with National Socialism, see Bernd Ruthers, Carl
Schmitt im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft als Zeitgeist-Verstdrkung? (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag,
1989); and my own remarks on the subject in Chapter 6 of this book.
EMERGENCY POWERS 149
'tis fit that the Laws themselves should in some Cases give way to the Executive
Power . . . that as much as may be, all the Members of the Society are to be
preserved . . . since many accidents may happen, wherein a strict and rigid
observation of the law may do harm. . . . [I] t is impossible to foresee, and so by
laws provide for, all Accidents and Necessities, that may concern the publick
. . . therefore there is a latitude left to the Executive power, to do many things
of choice, which the laws do not prescribe.32
31 Another of Schmitt's students, historian Reinhart Koselleck, traces the historical decline of
attention to the "contingent" in the Enlightenment, in Futures Past: On the Semantics ofHis-
torical Time (1979), trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 119-25.
32 John Locke, "The Second Treatise on Government," XIV, 159, 15-19, in Two Treatises on
Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 375. Or,
as he defines it more succinctly later in the text: "Prerogative being nothing, but a Power
in the hands of the Prince to provide for the publick good, in such Cases, which depend-
ing upon unforeseen and uncertain Occurrences, certain and unalterable Laws could not
safely direct, whatsoever shall be done manifestly for the good of the people" (XIII, 158,
15-20; p. 373).
33 See Baron de Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. A. M.
Cohler, B. C. Miller, and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xi,
6. As Bernard Manin observes, "One of Montesquieu's most important innovations was
precisely to do away with any notion of a discretionary power in his definition of the three
governmental functions." See "Checks, Balances, and Boundaries: The Separation of
Powers in the Constitutional Debate of 1787," in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed.
Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 41, n. 51.
150 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
34 After all, the framers of the United States Constitution of 1787 are perhaps the
most famous practitioners of separation of powers and of checks and balances. In
the essays defending the Constitution, collected as The Federalist Papers (New York:
Mentor, 1961), it is interesting to observe the contrast between the papers written
by James Madison, the liberal technician who seeks to account for all possibilities by
enumerating them or building them into the constitutional mechanism, and those by
Alexander Hamilton, the proponent of political prerogative who seeks to keep open the
possibility of exceptional circumstances. In his study of parliamentarism, Schmitt, not
surprisingly, criticizes the Madisonian Federalist Papers and praises the Hamiltonian ones
(40,45).
35 Koselleck demonstrates how this trend was expressed in eighteenth-century historiogra-
phy, particularly in the work of von Archenholtz and Montesquieu. The power and
presence of Zufall the chance or accidental occurrence - was increasingly subordinated
in favor of "general causes." Consistent with Schmitt's thesis, this process was completed
in the nineteenth century when "chance, or the accidental, was completely done away
with" as a legitimate factor to be considered in the writing of history; see Futures Past, pp.
119-25. As we observed in Chapters 1 and 2, however, the fascination with the accidental
or the contingent did not disappear in modernity but became the preoccupation of many
kinds of romantics.
EMERGENCY POWERS 151
36 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1985), p. 92. Schmitt's "secularization" thesis that modern political concepts
are detheologized premodern ones has generated quite a literature; see Karl Lowith,
Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); and Schmitt's response to
Blumenberg, in Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von derErledigungjederpolitischen Theologie
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970).
37 Manin, "Checks, Balances, and Boundaries," p. 41. Albert Dicey even went as far as to
define the rule of law exclusively as the opposite not only of "arbitrariness" but also "of
prerogative, or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of the government." A. C.
Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution ([1915] Indianapolis: Liberty
Classics, 1982), p. 120. A somewhat more nuanced definition of the rule of law is offered
by Gerald F. Gaus, "Public Reason and the Rule of Law," in The Rule ofLaw, ed. Ian Shapiro
(Nomos 36) (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
38 Without recourse to specifically enumerated, constitutionally legitimated emergency
provisions to address a large-scale political rebellion in the American Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln was forced to stretch the traditional means of suspending habeas corpus far
beyond reasonable limits, putting himself in the position of being called a tyrant, in his
sincere attempt to preserve the republic. Constitutional enabling provisions would pre-
vent a legitimately acting executor from running the risk of compromising his or her
legitimacy at a time when it is most important. On these issues, see R. J. Sharpe, The Law of
Habeas Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of
Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Another case in point from the American context is Franklin Roosevelt's well-known
and perhaps over-extended appeal to the "general welfare" clause of the preamble of the
U. S. Constitution as justification in dealing with the economic emergency of the Great
Depression. A far-fetched justification for emergency measures may in some respect
compromise a constitution at the very moment when it is most threatened, should the
appeal be successfully challenged as illegal and in fact illegitimate. The respective "suc-
cesses" of the two emergency actors in these two examples should not be taken at face
value as proof of the efficacy of not having constitutional emergency provisions; the
political proficiency of the respective political leaders and the "prudence" that is allegedly
characteristic of the American populace surely cannot be counted on in all circumstances
of crisis. Blind faith in the inevitable emergence of true "statesmen," and the acquiesence
152 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
rogative may then provide the opportunity to those like Schmitt who would
use this particular liberal deficiency as a ruse to scrap the whole legal order.
In this sense, Schmitt's deciding sovereign can be seen as the violent return
of the prerogative repressed by scientistic liberalism.39
(b) Disengaging Sovereignty from Emergency Powers. Put most crudely, sov-
ereignty concerns self-defined political entities that, through noncoercive
procedures, such as constitutional conventions, transfer a political will into
a constitution that allows for further expression of that will through formally
correct laws, and even change of that will through emendations to the
constitution itself. Constitutional mechanisms, such as parliamentary pro-
cedure and separation of powers, are not meant to thwart, stymie, or retard
the political will of a populace but rather to ensure that this will does not
behave self-destructively through rash demands and abuse of numerical
minorities.40 An emergency provision should be seen as one such mecha-
nism among many constitutional provisions. It therefore has no privileged
link, neither direct nor exclusive, with the "original" political will, a link that
Schmitt so dramatically asserts in Political Theology. Furthermore, in a con-
stitution with a proper scheme for separating powers, no branch, whether
explicitly responsible for emergency activity or not, has an independent
claim on sovereignty. As we will see in later chapters, the separation of
powers as well as parliamentary deliberation and judicial review are precisely
the kinds of liberal principles that Schmitt works so hard to discredit and
destroy, in his political theory after 1921. Using Schmitt against himself, the
refreshingly technical quality of classical dictatorship should be brought to
bear in considerations on modern emergency powers and not the substan-
tively existential quality of sovereign dictatorship. As Schmitt demonstrates
in Die Diktatur, the Roman Republic was not reduced to a mere technocracy
(c) Who Decides on the Exception? Who Acts on It? Besides the sovereignty/
exception dichotomy, there is another distinction that is deliberately obfus-
cated by the first sentence of Political Theology: the previously mentioned
41 The U. S. Constitution seemingly identifies the document itself, and thereby the sov-
ereign popular will manifested within it, with the institution of the president. In a way that
it does not for any other representative of any other governmental branch, the Constitu-
tion dictates the inaugural oath for the president and concludes it with the declaration
that he or she will "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States"
(Art. II, sec. 1, par. 8). But this is certainly an added precautionary measure against the
branch that is the most likely institutional threat to the Constitution rather than any
substantively existential equating of the document to the office itself. Ironically, the
Weimar constitution contained an oath for the Reichsprdsident that less explicitly identified
the institution as a "guardian" of the constitution in the existential Schmittian sense than
does the U. S. Constitution's oath (Weimar Article 42 requires only "observance" of the
constitution by the president). The Basic Law of the German Federal Republic also
enumerates an oath for its president (Art. 56), whose role is, however, more ceremonial
than that of the U. S. or the Weimar president.
The French constitution of 1958 is perhaps a more problematic example of the
relative identity of the executive to constitutionally expressed popular sovereignty be-
cause its definition of the presidency was clearly framed with the charismatic Charles
DeGaulle in mind. Article 5 declares that the president "shall see that the constitution is
observed,. . . shall ensure the proper functioning" of the government and "the continuity
of the state," as well as serve as, among other things, the "guarantor of national indepen-
dence." But surely these clauses can be interpreted as statements regarding the functional
efficacy of the president's performance of these duties rather than as pronouncements of
his or her personal identification with the constitution, the government, the state, and the
nation.
154 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
42 I am indebted to Bernard Manin specifically for the use of the term and the conceptual
ramifications of "external authorization."
43 Article 16 of the French constitution allows for the president's initiative in emergency
circumstances after he or she first "officially consults" with representatives of the other
governmental branches. The postwar German constitution - which does not have a spe-
cific article that deals with emergencies but rather disperses such provisions throughout
the constitution (no doubt in reaction to the "fate" of the singular Article 48 in Weimar) -
generally gives emergency initiative to the "federal government" or cabinet (and hence de
facto to the chancellor, whose office and person is seldom mentioned explicitly in these
provisions) provided that there is either consultation with the Bundestag or the Bundesrat,
or a power of revocation residing with either of those bodies (e. g., Art. 35: natural
disasters - revocation by Bundesrat; Art. 37: federal coercion of individual Lander to
comply with federal law - consent of Bundesrat; Art. 81, pars. 1 and 2; the so-called
legislative emergency, in which the government in conjunction with the Bundesrat over-
rules the Bundestag on a law; Art. 87a, par. 4: use of armed forces against insurgents -
revocation of Bundestag and Bundesrat; Art 91, par. 2: appropriation of local police forces
by the federal government - rescinding by Bundesrat. Only the complicated Art. 115a
employs a clear-cut authorization: The "state of defense" is requested by the chancellor
and then determined by Bundestag and Bundesrat). The general point is whether the
determinate quality of an act of authorization by one body over another is superior to the
EMERGENCY POWERS 155
Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Green-
wood, 1996), hereafter referred to as Political Form and cited as RC
Schmitt, Diegeistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus ([1923] Berlin: Duncker 8c
Humblot, 1969); translated by Ellen Kennedy as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). References are to this edition, cited hereafter as Parlamen-
tarismus or P.
157
158 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
I will draw on Benjamin's "Artwork in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1936),
translated by Harry Zohn as 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968); and Habermas's Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); hereafter STPS. On the controversial intellectual
relationship of these theorists and Schmitt, see Ellen Kennedy, "Carl Schmitt and the
Frankfurt School," Telos 71 (spring 1987); Norbert Bolz, "Charism and Souveranitat: Carl
Schmitt und Walter Benjamim im Schatten Max Webers," in DerFurst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt
und dieFolgen, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983); and Samuel Weber, "Tak-
ing Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt," Diacritics 22:3-4 (fall/
winter 1992). Another important work that draws extensively on Parlamentarismus is Rein-
hart Koselleck's Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
([1959] Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). On many of these issues and intellectual
cross-comparisons, see Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, 'The Historicist Critique: Carl
Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and Jurgen Habermas," in Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
REPRESENTATION 159
From the standpoint of the political idea of Catholicism the essence of the
Roman-Catholic complexio oppositorum lies in a specific, formal superiority over
the matter of human life in a way no other imperium has ever known. It has
succeeded in constituting a sustaining configuration of historical and social
reality that, despite its formal character, retains its concrete existence at once
vital and yet rational to the nth degree. This formal character of Roman
Catholicism is based on the strict realization of the principle of representa-
tion. In its particularity this becomes most clear in its antithesis to the
economic-technical thinking dominant today. (RC, 8)
4 Cf. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
l6o LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
Schmitt cites the Council of Trent's pronouncement that "man" is not evil to this effect
here and also in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty (1922), trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 57; hereafter PT.
REPRESENTATION l6l
less, something trivial, cannot be represented. Some such thing lacks the
intensified kind of being capable of such an existence - of elevation into
public being. Words such as greatness, nobility, majesty, glory, worthiness and
honor come close to capturing the special nature of an intensified being that
is capable of being represented.6
This notion of prior-ity, the idea that something is made present through
representation, is not merely neo-Scholastic gibberish for Schmitt but some-
thing that sets "substantive" representation apart from what he regards as its
modern vulgarizations. As we know from Chapter 1, Schmitt interprets
Russian radicalism as a revolt against form in the highest sense - a revolt
against the very notion of an "Idea." This has ramifications for the Soviets'
conception of representation that seeks to eliminate the "idea" lurking
within traditional substantive theories:
The Soviets' positivistic fear that material reality may be more than just
material is aroused by a Catholicism, according to Schmitt, that is the only
institution left that maintains the position within a rational scheme that there
is more to material reality than what is positively apparent. For Schmitt,
Catholic representation is able to maintain the claim that material reality,
especially as manifested in human life, is more than quantitatively ap-
prehended material, without at the same time slipping into the romantic
and irrationalist random ascription of transcendent meaning to particular
objects discussed earlier. He criticizes what Max Weber calls "disenchant-
ment" without immediately elevating a notion of "enchantment": Through
a "juridical" or "institutional" rationality, the Church asserts that life is not
mere matter, while at the same time "knowingly and magnificently succeed-
ing in overcoming Dionysian cults, ecstasies, [etc.]" (RC, 23). This "juridi-
cal" rationality that navigates between positivism and irrationality is ex-
emplified by the Catholic institution of offices:
6 Schmitt, Verfassungslehre ([1928] Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), p. 209; hereafter V
REPRESENTATION 163
The Pope is not the Prophet but the Vicar of Christ. Such a ceremonial
function precludes all the fanatical excesses of an unbridled prophetism. The
fact that the office is made independent of charisma signifies that the priest
upholds a position which appears to be completely apart from his concrete
personality. Nevertheless he is not the functionary and commissar of republi-
can thinking. (RC, 14)
Weber had recognized that the offices of the Catholic Church were not
sources of what Schmitt calls "the fanatical excess" associated with charisma:
"[T]he bishop, the priest and the preacher are in fact no longer, as in early
Christian times, carriers of a purely personal charisma, which offers other-
worldly sacred values under the personal mandate of a master."7 But Weber
proceeds to suggest that "they have become officials in the service of a
functional purpose, a purpose which in the present day 'church' appears at
once impersonalized and ideologically sanctified" (ES, 959). In response,
Schmitt wishes to maintain that the Catholic "juridical" theory of offices falls
between the poles of irrational devotion to the concrete personality of the
priest, on the one hand, and the recognition of the purely formal function of
the office, on the other. Such an office is not impersonalized in the hyperra-
tional way that Weber claims, nor is it yet an expression of romantic irra-
tionality.8 Priestly office is not purely formal or functional because of its
connection to what might be seen, at least by Schmitt while still a Catholic,
as a reason that human life can never be deemed "mere matter": "God
become man in historical reality" (RC, 19). As Schmitt writes, "In contradis-
tinction to the modern official [the priest's] position is not impersonal
because his office is part of an unbroken chain linked with the personal
mandate and concrete person of Christ" (RC, 14) .9 Jesus Christ is the sym-
bol of the divinity within humanity, the "dignity" that transcends sheer
biology.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1920), ed. Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 959; cf. p. 1141;
hereafter ES.
Schmitt does not consider whether Weber's other categories, such as "traditional authority"
or the "routinization of charisma," would be appropriate for what Schmitt describes as the
'juridical" quality of Catholic representation; see ES, 226-40, 246-54.
Hanna Pitkin describes the medieval concept of representation in similar terms: "[I]ts real
expansion begins in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when the Pope and the
cardinals are often said to represent the persons of Christ and the Aposdes. The connota-
tion is still neither of delegation nor of agency; the church leaders are seen as the embodi-
ment and image of Christ and the Apostles, and occupy their place per successionem." The
Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 241-2.
164 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
Schmitt asserts that the juridical, the essence of law, lies not in proba-
bility, as it does in the Weberian definition (ES, 32) - a prediction about the
causal functioning of government action - but rather in the maintenance of
something superior to mere precision.10 As such, "the Church is the con-
summate bearer of the juridical spirit and the true heir of Roman jurispru-
dence" (RC, 18). In Catholic judicial thinking, there must be an inherent
dignity in the process of governance that for Schmitt is absent in modern
politics. Because the human being is the most important example of the
transcendence of materiality, anything of worth must be represented "per-
sonally" by a human being:
10 I will deal with Schmitt's critique of Weber's sociological jurisprudence in greater detail in
Chapter 5.
REPRESENTATION 165
abstract concepts such as "authority," and indeed Schmitt does not suggest
that only conservative "ideas" like this one are capable of being truly repre-
sented: "God or 'the people' in democratic ideology or abstract ideas like
freedom and equality can all conceivably constitute a representation"; only
"production and consumption" are excluded from the theory (RC, 21).
If one grants to Schmitt the point that multinational corporations as the
representatives of economic forces have less "dignity" than the Catholic
Church as the representative ofJesus Christ and the whole of humanity, he
still seems to glide over a major important difference between modern and
medieval concepts of representation. One does not need Habermas to
point out that medieval representation is more elitist, and perhaps even less
substantive in some sense, because it takes place "not for but 'before the
people."11 It is a public representation to them: "Representation in the
sense in which the members of a national assembly represent a nation or a
lawyer represents his clients had nothing to do with this publicity of repre-
sentation" (STPS, 7). But Schmitt maintains that the people are not any less
important nor in anyway demeaned by the medieval scheme of representa-
tion: "Not only do the representative [i.e., the Church] and the person
represented [i.e., Christ, "authority," or humanity] require a personal value,
so also does the third party whom they address [i.e., the people]. One
cannot represent oneself to automatons and machines anymore than they
can represent or be represented" (RC, 21). The third party and its impor-
tance are indispensable to medieval representation, because without them
there would be no "publicity of representation" as Habermas puts it. Ac-
cording to the medieval scheme, a noble or the Church without the public
to acknowledge and recognize it does not exist; it is not real. For Schmitt,
this form of publicity is as important to representation as is the human
substance of both what is being represented and its personal embodiment
in a worthy representative. Schmitt would later confirm, in Verfassungslehre
how important this notion of publicity is to his theory of representation:
The people is a concept that only exists in the public sphere. The people
appears only in a public, indeed, it first produces the public. The people and a
public are established together; there is no people without a public and vice
versa. It is especially through its presence that the people produces the public.
Only the present people actually assembled is a people that establishes a
public. (V, 243)
Representation can only proceed in the public sphere. There is no representa-
tion which takes place in secret or in camera. . . . A Parliament only has a
representative character as long as it is believed that its proper activity is a
public affair. Secret sessions, secret agreements and consultations of some
committee or other can be very significant and important, but they can never
have a representative character. (V, 208)
This contrast between public and private, the floor and the committees
in Parliament, will return in Parlamentarismus, but it has broader ramifica-
tions for Schmitt in Political Form. The form of publicity just described is
endangered with the transformation of the medieval conception of pub-
licity into the liberal economic one: "The tendency of the economic to
perpetuate civil law means in effect a limitation ofjuridical form. Public life
is expected to govern itself. It should be governed by public opinion, the
opinion of private individuals. Public opinion in turn should be governed by
a privately owned free press. Nothing in this system is representative; every-
thing is a private matter" (RC, 28). In what was earlier identified as a
consciously Catholic reply to Weber's "Protestant Ethic" thesis, then,
Schmitt asserts that it is Protestantism that privatizes politics and hence
extracts the representative element from politics:
Historically considered "privatization" has its origin in religion. The first right
of the individual in the sense of the bourgeois social order was freedom of
religion. In the historical evolution of the catalogue of liberties - freedom of
belief and conscience, freedom of association and assembly, freedom of trade
and commerce - it is the fountainhead and first principle. But whatever place
is assigned to religion it always and everywhere manifests its capacity to absorb
and absolutize. If religion is a private matter it also follows that privacy is
revered. The two are inseparable. Private property is thus revered precisely
because it is a private matter. (RC, 28)
sense. The result is a society devoid of fully substantive figures; roles become
economic-technical functions.12 As their moral conflict with the ancien
regime fades, figures like the intellectual and the merchant become for-
mally empty, as they more and more assume the role of caretakers of the
"iron cage":
What then is the status of the modern institution that is charged with the
responsibility of representing, parliament, if "the Catholic Church is the
sole surviving contemporary example of the medieval capacity to create
representative figures" (RC, 19)? In Political Form, Schmitt does not totally
ignore or even explicitly denounce parliament. Indeed, he admits that even
though "one can observe how the understanding of every type of representa-
tion disappears with the spread of economic thinking," with respect to
parliament's "hypothetical and theoretical basis," the contemporary parlia-
mentary system "at least includes the idea of representation" (RC, 25). But
as he explains what the parliamentary system's ideal is, it becomes clear that
Schmitt still has in mind something closer to the medieval model and not
what today would be considered representation.
Of course this is precisely the somewhat distorted image of the nineteenth-century bour-
geois public sphere that Habermas attempts to rehabilitate in Structural Transformation,
although, as we will see in the discussion of Parlamentarismus, he agrees with Schmitt's
assessment of what became of that public sphere in the twentieth century. For criticisms of
Habermas's reconstruction of the reality of the public sphere, see Oskar Negt and Alex-
ander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian
Public Sphere (1972), trans. P. Labanyi, J. O. Daniel and A. Oksiloff (Minneapolis: Min-
nesota University Press, 1993), as well as the numerous excellent contributions to
Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
l68 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the
work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond
the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduc-
tion detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making
many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique exis-
tence. . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any
number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense.13
13 Benjamin, "The Artwork in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," pp. 221, 224.
14 Habermas, too, emphasizes a growing quantification of representation in the transition
170 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
Benjamin, however, unlike his associate on the Right, was pleased by the
modern disintegration of the aura, because he saw in it a source of egalitar-
ian emancipation. The previously distant and removed auratic object of art
is brought to "the beholder or listener in his own particular situation." 15
Schmitt dismisses the numerous parallel bases for defending the modern
political practice of representation as more egalitarian: the benefits of inter-
est aggregation, and governmental accountability, to name only two. But it
would be plethoric and uninteresting to simply suggest that Schmitt is, in
this or other respects, "conservative"; how radical he is in his conservatism is
a more important issue and one that becomes more apparent in the follow-
ing sections.
Parliament is not the main object of concern for Schmitt in Political Form.
As we have seen in both this chapter and previous ones, in this work he
targets modern economic-technical thought in general. I now turn to Parla-
mentarismus and show how Schmitt traces the effects of technological-
economic thought on the institution of parliament, and how he tacitly
compares the reality of modern representative government with the medi-
eval Catholic ideal of representation. The practical solution suggested by his
critique, however, is not the revival of a traditional scheme of political
authority but something much closer to the other target of Benjamin's
thesis, the modern fascist aestheticization of politics.
from nineteenth- to twentieth-century parliamentarism: "To the extent that social repro-
duction still depends on consumption decisions and the exercise of political power on
voting decisions made by private citizens there exists an interest in influencing them - in
the case of the former, with the aim of increasing sales; in the case of the latter, of
increasing formally this or that party's share of voters or, informally, to give greater weight
to the pressure of specific organizations" (STPS, 176). However, as I will discuss later,
Habermas links this growing quantification to a process of neofeudal group representa-
tion under mass democracy and does not contrast the two as Schmitt does here.
15 Benjamin, "The Artwork," p. 221.
16 Since its original publication, the book has been particularly popular among leftist
scholars. It has a singularly prominent place in the writings of Franz Neumann, a student
of Schmitt who attended Schmitt's seminars in 1931, and Otto Kirchheimer, for whom
Schmitt served as dissertation director; see the essays collected in Social Democracy and the
Rule ofLaw: Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, ed. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin,
1987). It has not lost its influence in the present wave of "Left-Schmittianism"; see
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); Richard Bellamy and
REPRESENTATION 171
Peter Baehr, "Carl Schmitt and the Contradictions of Liberal Democracy," European Jour-
nal of Political Research 23 (February 1993); Bernard Manin, "The Metamorphoses of
Representative Government," Economy and Society 23:2 (May 1994); and Bill Scheuerman,
"Is Parliamentarism in Crisis?: A Response to Carl Schmitt," Theory and Society 24:1 (Febru-
ary 1995). The originality of Schmitt's treatise is sometimes exaggerated, as it is clear that
he derived significant portions of his thesis from the classic volume by Mosei Ostrogoski,
Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties ([1902] New York: Haskell, 1970).
17 It is somewhat surprising that perhaps the foremost contemporary Schmitt scholar in
Germany and even the world, Reinhard Mehring, misses Schmitt's "foundational" cri-
tique and focuses exclusively on the "anachronistic" critique in Parlamentarismus; see
Mehring, "Liberalism as a 'Metaphysical System': The Methodological Structure of Carl
Schmitt's Critique of Political Rationalism," Canadian Journal ofLaw andJurisprudence 10:1
(January 1997).
18 For reasons that will become apparent, I choose to deal with the work's specific sections in
the order in which they appear in the most common edition, and not in the chronological
order in which they were written.
172 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
19 Schmitt is not particularly accurate in his assessment of parliamentary theory and its
relationship with truth, especially as it is expressed in the work of the very authors he cites:
Burke, Bentham, Guizot, and Mill (P, 2). Bernard Manin shows that Schmitt has mis-
construed or distorted the intellectual-historical facts. All of these advocates of parliamen-
tarism as well as most other founders of modern representative theory made room quite
early on for such elements as interest, negotiation, and even party. See Manin, Principles of
Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Schmitt's
misreading/misrepresentation of Guizot, see Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 184-6. As for the nineteenth-
century historical reality that Schmitt idealizes, see Scheuerman, "Is Parliamentarism in
Crisis?" For an account of some of Schmitt's other distortions of liberalism in Parlamen-
tarismus and elsewhere, see Stephen Holmes, "Schmitt: The Debility of Liberalism," in The
Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 57-60.
REPRESENTATION 173
not concerned with discovering what is rationally correct, but with calculat-
ing particular interests and the chances of winning and with carrying these
through according to one's own interest" (P, 5-6).
Schmitt employs the argument that parliamentary government has be-
come an exercise in mere form at the expense of crucial content, in the same
way that he criticized economics, technology, and positivism, in Political
Form:
The fact is, however, as we will see, Schmitt will argue against parliamentar-
ism on the grounds of principle and efficiency; ultimately parliament does
not run "reasonably well" (P, 4).
174 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
Again, Schmitt is careful to give his critique a specific time frame in the
second edition's preface. For instance, he assures us that it has only been
since the nineteenth century that "every single vote was registered and an
arithmetical majority was calculated." As a result, "quite elementary truths
have thus been lost and are apparently unknown in contemporary political
theory" (P, 16). But why does Schmitt feel the need to assert time and again
in the preface that he is not inherently antagonistic to parliamentarism
generally, and government by open discussion specifically? Why does he
repeatedly emphasize that it is the perverted, social-technical, overly quan-
titative form of parliamentarism and the tainted, negotiation-soiled form of
discussion that have accompanied the rise of mass parties that he actually
abhors and wishes to abandon?
Perhaps a passage from Thoma's commentary on the first edition that
surmises Schmitt's unstated political preferences holds the key: "I would
hazard to guess, but not assert, that behind these ultimately rather sinister
observations there stands the unexpressed personal conviction of the au-
thor that an alliance between a nationalistic dictator and the Catholic
Church could be the real solution and achieve a definitive restoration of
order, discipline, and hierarchy."20 Given the admiration that Schmitt ex-
presses for Roman Catholicism politically in the work discussed earlier,21
combined with his political affiliations before, during, and after the collapse
of the republic, Thoma's is far from an unfeasible suggestion. Either
Schmitt felt that Thoma had hit too close to the mark and had exposed
Schmitt's antiparliamentary inclinations, or Schmitt felt he had to defend
his true beliefs. We will decide which possibility is most likely when we
examine the main body of the text, in the next sections. However, in the
preface itself, Schmitt makes only one direct response to Thoma's claim:
"The utterly fantastic political aims that Thoma imputes to me at the end of
his review I may surely be allowed to pass over in silence" (P, 1).
In any case, after legitimately or fraudulently displaying his intellectual-
political pedigree as a good classical parliamentarian throughout most of
the second edition's preface, Schmitt closes his preface with a passage that
brings together most of the themes discussed so far: his disdain for the
quantitative and the technical; his desire for a truer, or what he now calls
more 'Vital" form of representation; his abandonment of a parliamentarism
20 Thoma, "On the Ideology of Parliamentarism" (1925), translated by Ellen Kennedy and
included as an appendix to her edition of Parlamentarismus (P, 82).
21 Although, as I pointed out, Schmitt goes to great lengths to show that some form of
authoritarianism need not be the only, or even most likely, political ally for the Catholic
Church.
REPRESENTATION 175
that has supposedly only recently been corrupted; and one theme that has
yet to be fully discussed, but is raised by the Thoma quote - Schmitt's
flirtation with dictatorial or plebiscitary democracy:
The will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better
through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an obvious and
unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus that has been
constructed with such meticulousness in the lastfiftyyears. The stronger the
power of democratic feeling, the more certain is the awareness that democracy
is something other than a registration system for secret ballots. Compared to a
democracy that is direct, not only in the technical sense but also in the vital sense,
parliament appears [to be] an artificial machinery, produced by liberal reason-
ing, while dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not only can produce the accla-
mation of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic sub-
stance and power. (P, 16-17, emphases added)
ES, 1128-30; even as late as the "Politics as a Vocation" lecture, Weber associates charisma
with and not against the party "machine"; see From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 103, 105-6.
REPRESENTATION 177
The speeches of the deputies today are no longer personal professions, still
less attempts to win over opponents. They are official statements addressed to
the country. . . . After representatives of all parties have spoken once or twice
in turn, the Reichstag debate is closed. The speeches are submitted beforehand
to a party caucus, or at least agreed upon in all essentials. The caucus also
determines who will speak for the party. The parties have experts for every
issue, just like the bureaucracy. (ES, 1412)
Weber's part with this likelihood.25 Weber recognized the drawbacks in-
volved with a plebiscitarily elected president - the most competent person is
most often not selected for the office, for instance - but compared to rule by
bureaucrats, he deemed it a far more "responsible" mode of government
(ES, 1415). Although he understood that "pure" Caesarist democracy was
ideally incompatible with parliamentarism (ES, 1452), Weber did not pro-
pose it as a substitution for parliament: "Whether we hate or love parliamen-
tary politics - we cannot eliminate it" (ES, 1408). Its functions in maintain-
ing order during intervals of presidential succession (ES, 1457), training
potential leaders (ES, 1417), supervising budgetary matters (ES, 1454), and
attempting to keep the "authoritarian" bureaucracy at bay (ES, 1453) are
too valuable to abandon even within a presidential system, according to
Weber. Schmitt, however, would later criticize such justifications for parlia-
ment as rather slim (^341) and suggest that plebiscitarianism itself rules
out the necessity of parliament-trained leadership:
25 See Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, pp. 332-89, for a full account of Weber's
views.
26 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Wiley, 1975), p-
REPRESENTATION 179
27 Weber, "The President of the Reich" (1919), in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman
and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 307.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 305.
l8o LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
preface: "[T]he institution itself has lost its moral and intellectual founda-
tion and only remains standing through sheer mechanical perseverance as
an empty apparatus" (P, 21). Parliament is indeed spoken of as having been
infected by a technological influence and as being a substanceless form, but,
in declaring that parliament has lost its moral and theoretical foundation,
Schmitt obviously implies that it indeed had one at some point. He embarks
on a mission to recover this moral-intellectual foundation. By shifting away
from the "tactical" and the "technical" (P, 27), he hopes "to find the ulti-
mate core of the institution of modern parliament" (P, 20). But when he
does indeed find this foundation, he does not necessarily vindicate a vir-
tuous parliament of the past; nor is he as neutral as he claims to be when he
states that his aim is neither to "confirm nor refute" the intellectual founda-
tions of parliamentarism. Schmitt's mission is neither of the rescue nor of
the reconnaissance sort; it is a mission, so to speak, to search and destroy.
Schmitt argues that a transformation has taken place that threatens the
efficacy and legitimacy of parliamentary government: "[T]he form and con-
tent of authority, publicity, and representation are [now] essentially
different" (P, 25). The question is whether the transformation that Schmitt
is ultimately concerned to criticize is the one from nineteenth-century
laissez-faire liberalism to twentieth-century mass-party, state-interventionist
liberalism or, in light of Political Form, the transformation from more tradi-
tional politics of "authority, publicity and representation," pure and simple,
to any kind of progressive Enlightenment political model.
In chapter 2 of Parlamentarismus, Schmitt again locates the foundation of
the parliamentary system in the principle of government by discussion, but
he does not employ friendly rhetoric toward it, as he does in the 1926
preface and in the introduction to the first edition. Parliament, writes
Schmitt, is based on
But, invoking von Mohl, Schmitt asserts that the system collapses if such
"particles of reason" do not in fact collect in parliament. If the discussion
taking place in parliament is insufficiently informed, then any outcome of
this discussion would be incomplete, faulty, and not "truthful."
REPRESENTATION l8l
Normally one only discusses the economic line of reasoning that social har-
mony and the maximization of wealth follow from the free economic competi-
tion of individuals, from freedom of contract, freedom of trade, free enter-
prise. But all this is only an application of a general liberal principle. It is
exactly the same: that the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of
opinion and that competition will produce harmony. (P, 35)
Like the market, like supply and demand, which cannot produce a norma-
tive outcome, discussion cannot produce truth; it can only generate more
discussion: Truth "becomes a mere function of the eternal competition of
opinions" {P, 35). In spite of his earlier expressions of admiration for parlia-
mentarism's pursuit of truth, Schmitt here demonstrates his belief that truth
and discussion have nothing at all to do with each other. How can an
"unending conversation" {P, 36) generate the truth? "In contrast to the
truth, [government by discussion] means renouncing a definite result" (P,
35). Previously in the work, Schmitt implied that parliamentary discussion
can produce only a defective outcome; here he declares that it generates no
outcome at all. Moreover, he does not claim here that this is a late develop-
ment of parliamentarism, as he does in the 1926 preface and the 1923
introduction; here the defect is an original element of the very theory itself.
A year earlier, in Political Theology, Schmitt described what his intellectual
heroes thought about government by discussion: "Catholic political philoso-
phers such as Maistre, Bonald, and Donoso-Cortes . . . would have con-
sidered everlasting conversation a product of a gruesomely comic fantasy,
for what characterized their counterrevolutionary political philosophy was
the recognition that their times needed a decision" (PT, 53). The opposi-
tion between discussion and decision will prove crucial to Schmitt's conclu-
sion in Parlamentarismus.
In his return to the theoretical foundations of parliamentarism, Schmitt
finds not only an ultimately vapid normative justification for government by
discussion (the futile pursuit of truth) but an inherently technical justifica-
tion as well (discussion as "technique"). He is again able to argue on two
levels: (1) the techniques developed through the parliamentary system
(namely, government by discussion, as well as publicity, and division of
powers) no longer properly perform their allotted tasks; and (2) such tech-
niques were destined to fail since their inception - they could never perform
the tasks assigned.
l82 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
One has become accustomed to seeing parliament as only a part of the state's
functions, one part that is set against the others (executive and courts). Nev-
ertheless, parliament should not be just a part of this balance, but precisely
because it is the legislative, parliament should itself be balanced. This depends
on a way of thinking that creates multiplicity everywhere so that an equi-
librium created from the imminent dynamics of a system of negotiations
replaces absolute unity. First through this process can the legislative itself be
balanced and mediated either in a bicameral system or through federalism;
but even within a single chamber the balancing of outlooks and opinions
functions as a consequence of this special kind of rationalism. (P, 40-1)
31 Schmitt never actually demonstrates the philosophical links among government by discus-
sion, publicity, and separation of powers. The fact is that they probably developed much
more independently of each other than Schmitt would have it. For a summary of the
theoretical pitfalls involved in equating liberal political practices and those of the market,
see Bernard Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," Political Theory 15:3 (Au-
gust 1987).
32 On Schmitt as an unacknowledged conduit from Weber to Luhmann, see Cohen and
Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, pp. 323-5. For a Luhmannian critique of Schmitt,
see Thomas Vesting, Politische Einheitsbildung und technische Realisation: Ueber die Expansion
der Technik und die Grenzen der Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990).
184 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
The idea of modern parliamentarism, the demand for checks, and the belief
in openness and publicity were born in the struggle against the secret politics
of absolute princes. The popular sense of freedom and justice was outraged by
arcane practices that decided the fate of nations in secret resolutions. But how
harmless and idyllic are the objects of cabinet politics in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries compared with the fate that is at stake today and which is
the subject of all manner of secrets. (P, 50)
REPRESENTATION 185
Schmitt has again reverted to speaking about the principles that parliament
has "lost," but he has said enough about these principles throughout most
of the 1923 text to let the reader know what he thinks about those princi-
ples even before the time when they were in fact "lost."33
What about the obvious flaws in Schmitt's argument? Besides his distor-
tion of the intellectual origins of parliamentarism's principles, what about
such claims that parliamentary discussion degenerates into "endless discus-
sion?" Surely Schmitt knows that nearly every modern parliament has in-
stituted, and every theoretical advocate of parliamentarism has justified,
devices that bring discussion to a necessary conclusion. Schmitt invites re-
torts like this so that he can further illustrate the contradictions within
liberal parliamentarism. For instance, he describes how parliament is
founded on the Rechtsstaat tradition, which promotes the primacy of "law
which is general and already promulgated, universally binding without ex-
ception, and valid in principle for all times" over "personal order which
varies case to case according to particular concrete circumstances" (/J 42).
He implies that any encroachment on the flow of discussion is, according to
parliamentarism's own theory, an invasion on the pursuit of truth by naked
power - a hypocritical act and a reversion to what Locke called, "the way of
beasts" (P, 49). In order to interrupt parliamentary procedure, an arbitrary
force is required - exactly what parliamentary procedure is established
against. For Schmitt, liberal parliamentarism on its own terms cannot ren-
der truth when it allows discussion to perpetuate, nor can truth be guaran-
teed when discussion is arbitrarily brought to a close.
This emphasis on impersonal law over personal authority is another
34 Peter Carl Caldwell astutely points out how Schmitt uses bureaucratic words like Beau-
ftragte to describe parliamentary representation, in Verfassungslehre, so as to implicitly
distinguish it from more substantive notions of the concept; see Popular Sovereignty and the
Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism
(Durham, N. C: Duke University Press, 1997). Larmore detects Schmitt's juxtaposition of
notions of Identifizierung (identification) and Identitdt (identity) in Parlamentarismus that
emphasizes the lack of substance in liberal parliamentary representation; see The Morals of
Modernity, pp. 178-9.
REPRESENTATION 187
Something that serves only private concerns and interests can indeed be
tended to; it can find its agents, advocates and exponents, but is not repre-
sented in the special sense of the term. It is already either actually present or it
is brought to attention by commissars, delegates or agents. In representation
by contract, a higher mode of being becomes concrete. The idea of represen-
tation lies in the fact that as a political unit, an existing people has a higher
and more intensified kind of being as opposed to the natural presence of
groups of individuals who just happen to live together. When the meaning of
this special nature of political existence lapses and people give priority to
other kinds of being, then also lapses the comprehension of a concept such as
representation. (V, 210) 35
The various nations or social and economic groups who organize themselves
"democratically" have the same subject, "the people," only in the abstract. In
concrete the masses are sociologically and psychologically heterogeneous. A
democracy can be militarist or pacifist, absolutist or liberal, centralized or
decentralized, progressive or reactionary, and again different at different
times without ceasing to be a democracy. . . . [And] they can never reach an
absolute, direct, identity that is actually present at every moment. A distance
always remains between real equality and the results of identification. The will
of the people is of course always identical with the will of the people, whether
the decision comes from the yes or no of millions of voting papers, or from a
single individual who has the will of the people even without a ballot, or from
the people acclaiming in some way. Everything depends on how the will of the
people is formed. {P, 25-7)
Does the inevitable "distance" between the people and the representative
mean that democracy will necessarily be betrayed? Schmitt's answer is
seemingly pessimistic: "Democracy seems fated then to destroy itself in the
problem of the formulation of the will" (P, 28). However, the references to
the "yes and no of millions of people," the "single individual who has the will
of the people," and the notion of acclaiming foreshadow Schmitt's actual
REPRESENTATION 189
response. He asks the alarming question that, read in light of the book as a
whole, rings out as an affirmative declaration: Might not a Caesarist dictator-
ship be more technically efficient and more substantively democratic than
parliamentarism?
[I]n spite of all its coincidence with democratic ideas and all the connections
it has to them, parliamentarism is not democracy any more than it is realized
in the practical perspective of expediency. If for practical and technical rea-
sons the representatives of the people can decide instead of the people them-
selves, then certainly a single trusted representative could also decide in the
name of the same people. Without ceasing to be democratic, the argument
would justify an an unparliamentary Caesarism. (P, 34)
37 Kennedy renders the word Technizitdt here as "technocracy." I think that this is appropri-
ate in this context, because Schmitt had yet to distinguish between Technik (technology)
and Technizitdt (technicity) in Parlamentarismus, as he later would in "Das Zeitalter der
Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen" (1929), in which "technicity" is more or less
the opposite of "technocracy." See Chapters 1 and 2 of the present volume for a discussion
of "technicity" and "technology."
REPRESENTATION igi
Out of the depths of a genuine life instinct, not out of reason or pragmatism,
springs the great enthusiasm, the great moral decision and the great
myth. . . . From the perspective of this philosophy, the bourgeois ideal of
peaceful agreement, an ongoing and prosperous business that has advantages
for everyone, becomes the monstrosity of cowardly intellectualism. Discussing,
bargaining, parliamentary proceedings, appear a betrayal of myth and the
enormous enthusiasm on which everything depends. Against the mercantilist
image of balance there appears another vision, the warlike image of a bloody,
definitive, destructive, decisive battle. . . . [T]here is no greater danger than
professional politics and participation in parliamentary business. These wear
down great enthusiasm into chatter and intrigue and kill the genuine instincts
and intuitions that produce a moral decision. . . . Every rationalist interpreta-
tion falsifies the immediacy of life. . . . In contrast, the revolutionary use of
force by the masses is an expression of the immediate life, often wild and
barbaric, but never systematically horrible or inhuman. . . . [I]n the place of
L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
Although Schmitt indicates that Sorel was correct in announcing that the
rational politics of liberalism had been supplanted by the irrationalist poli-
tics of myth, he identifies a shortcoming in Sorel's prophecy. Sorel adhered
to a transnational notion of myth: the working class as the agent of violent
revolution. But the mythic politics that succeeded in the early twentieth
century were predominantly nationalist. As the myth of the direct use of
force "migrated from west to the east" it accumulated "strong nationalist
elements," such that the ultimate impetus of the Bolshevik revolution was
the fact that "Russia again could be Russian, Moscow again the capital, and
the Europeanized upper classes who held their own land in contempt could
be exterminated. Proletarian use of force had made Russia Muscovite again.
In the mouth of an international Marxist [like Lenin] that is remarkable
praise, for it shows that the energy of nationalism is greater than the myth of
class conflict" (P, 75). The victory of Italian fascism only confirms for
Schmitt that the myth of the nation is stronger than the myth of the working
class {P, 75).
What is Schmitt's own view of the politics of myth he describes? In these
passages, it is hard to tell whether he speaks with his own voice or is simply
summarizing the arguments of these radical theorists. Is his silence regard-
ing the validity of the attacks on liberalism to be construed as his purely
analytical summation of a particular state of affairs or as an expression of
affirmation or approval? Although it cannot be said definitively whether
Schmitt approves of the depiction of liberalism offered by the mythologists
of anarchism or socialism - Proudhon, Bakunin, Sorel, Lenin - it is difficult
to imagine that he did not recount their opinions with a certain satisfaction.
Indeed, Schmitt wittingly or unwittingly implicates himself in these expres-
sions by introducing into the discussion of the mythic "opposition to parlia-
mentary constitutionalism" the figure of Juan Donoso Cortes, who Schmitt
admits was a powerful influence on his own thought. 38 There are two kinds
of contemporary political mythologies, according to Schmitt:
tor, whom he attempted to laugh off. Today it is easy to see that both were their
own real opponents and that everything else was only a provisional half-
measure. {P, 69-70)
All the Spaniard's thoughts were focused on the great battle, the terrible
catastrophe that lay ahead, which only the metaphysical cowardice of discur-
sive liberalism could deny was coming. . . . For Donoso-Cortes radical social-
ism was something enormous, greater than liberal moderation, because it
went back to ultimate problems and gave a decisive answer to radical
questions - because it had a theology. (P, 69-70)
On the basis of what we know from Chapter 2 regarding his attitude toward
the Soviet Union in Political Form and the "Neutralizations" essay, these exact
same words can be applied to Schmitt.
Another important question pertaining to the final two chapters ofParla-
mentarismus is, what is the significance of Schmitt's distinction between class-
based myth and nationalist myth for his own theoretical purposes? Why is
there a discussion of myth at all in a book on parliamentarism? Schmitt has
undressed the European parliament as a normative and technical failure
and intimated a possible alternative political solution, plebiscitary
democracy. It might be said that the second manifestation of the politics of
myth - the myth of the nation - dovetails nicely with Schmitt's practical
intimation.
In this regard, it is interesting to note how Schmitt speaks of Mussolini's
victory in Italy: "The meaning in intellectual history of this example is
especially great because national enthusiasm on Italian soil has until now
been based on a democratic and constitutional parliamentary tradition and
has appeared to be completely dominated by the ideology of Anglo-Saxon
liberalism" {P, 76). The politics of Weimar Germany was often said to have
been dominated by "Anglo-Saxon liberalism," and the "national enthusi-
194 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
[A] man who unites the confidence of the entire people beyond the limits and
the framework of party organizations and party bureaucracies, not as a party
man but a man with the full confidence of all the people. A Reich presidential
election that genuinely takes account of this meaning . . . would be more
important than any of the frequent elections that take place in a democratic
state. It would be a splendid proclamation by the German people and would
have the irresistibility that is associated with such acclamations. (V, 350)
The whole German people is presupposed as a unity, that is ready for action
spontaneously, not first inhibited by social group organizations. It can express
its will at a crucial moment over and above pluralistic divisions, returning to
unity and exerting itself. The constitution looks to provide the President, in
particular, the authority to bind himself immediately with this whole political
will of the German people, and thereby act as guardian and defender of
constitutional unity and the wholeness of the German people. 39
43 Regarding the many influences on Habermas's Structural Transformation work, few com-
mentators have detected Benjamin's; a notable exception is Richard Wolin, Labyrinths:
Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
!995)>PP- i 7 ~ l 8 -
REPRESENTATION ig7
To the degree to which philosophical and literary works and works of art in
general were produced for the market and distributed through it, these cul-
tural products became . . . commodities [and] in principle generally accessi-
ble. They no longer remained components of the Church's and the court's
publicity of representation; that is precisely what was meant by the loss of their
aura of extraordinariness and by the profaning of their once sacramental
character. The private people for whom the cultural product became available
as a commodity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on
their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize it,
and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could
assert its authority. (STPS, 36-7, emphasis added)
44 Cf. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, as well as the contributions to Habermas
and the Public Sphere.
198 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
but conversely political functions are taken over by societal powers. (STPS,
231)
consent into political pressure or, on the basis of this toleration, to neutralize
political counterpressure. . . . Today occasions for identification have to be
created - the public sphere has to be "made," it is not "there" anymore. . . .
The immediate effect of publicity is not exhausted by the decommercialized
wooing effect of an aura of good will that produces a readiness to assent.
Beyond influencing consumer decisions this publicity is now also useful for
exerting political pressure because it mobilizes a potential of inarticulate
readiness to assent that, if need be, can be translated into a plebiscitarily
defined acclamation. (STPS, 200-1)
The phrase with which Habermas concludes this quote bespeaks the high
stakes involved in the refeudalization of society, a characterization that is in
fact ultimately metaphorical. The regressive result of a politics in which the
population is conditioned in advance to "plebiscitarily acclaim" previously
arranged policy decisions is as characteristic of the regime that obtained in
Germany between the Weimar and Bonn republics as of those two regimes
themselves. When refeudalization is distinguished by the policy outputs of
large-scale, semipublicized private industry and semiprivatized bureaucracy,
under the direction of competing mass-media-deploying parties, the regime
may be classified as Fordist; when it is directed by a centralized, unaccount-
able state with a monopoly on mass media the regime is fascist. The latter
type of regime is barely mentioned by name in Structural Transformation,
although the affinities between it and the socioeconomic arrangements in
the Federal Republic are more than implied by the narrative ellipsis be-
tween accounts of Weimar and the BRD.45 Moreover, the book that is gener-
ally recognized as the most perceptive diagnosis of the ills of Fordist "neo-
feudalism" and the most insidious prescription for a fascist solution,
Parlamentarismus, is cited only once (STPS, 204). 46
45 Although such affinities are often loudly proclaimed today as the welfare state suffers what
may be a terminal crisis, one should not underestimate the radically provocative nature of
Habermas's intimations - set forth in a slightly circumspect manner - during the glory
days of the Sozialstaat in the Federal Republic of Germany. On the other hand, Margaret
Somers interrogates some of the more conventional presuppositions of Habermas's thesis
in her two-part article, "What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public
Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation," Sociological Theory 13:2
(1995); and "Narrating and Naturalizing Anglo-American Citizenship Theory: The Place
of Political Culture and the Public Sphere," Sociological Theory 13:3 (1996).
46 This absence that suggests a presence has perhaps as much to do with Habermas's critique
of the Federal Republic as it does with any attempt to disguise his intellectual debt to
Schmitt. On the latter charge, see Kennedy, "Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School"; and
the response by Ulrich JL PreuB, "The Critique of German Liberalism," Telos 71 (spring
1987).
2OO LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
Thus, the immanent possibility of, and implicit call for, plebiscitarianism
suggested by Schmitt's account in Parlamentarismus is not necessarily alto-
gether incompatible in a sociostructural manner with the kind of medieval
practices of representation elucidated in Political Form. Although Schmitt
may apparently lament the demise of representation by estates, he is clearly
not a Catholic "natural law" or stdndische theorist like, for instance, Otto von
Gierke, who might see in twentieth-century pluralism a positively valued
neofeudalism.50 As I discuss more extensively in Chapters 5 and 6, Schmitt
abhors pluralism.51 He even explicitly equates pluralism and feudalism,
denouncing both socioeconomic arrangements: "In conjunction with the
pluralist system, the polyacracy of the general economy would become in-
creasingly splintered and recreate the situation of the medieval estate sys-
tem, within which the German state had already once disappeared" (HV,
110). He claimed that Weimar's proportional voting arrangement engen-
is a concept of the immediate present and actual presence. For this reason it
entails also as a positive stipulation, an unconditional identity between the
leader and the led. Both the continual and inviolable contact between leader
and led and the mutual trust lie in identity. Only identity prevents the Fuhrer's
power from being tyrannical or capricious.54
54 Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreiliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg: Hans-
eatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934), p. 42.
204 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
review charging that Schmitt favored a dictatorship, further bears this out. I
suggest that once Schmitt was confronted with an articulate response to the
extremist implications of his critique, he, to some extent, simply backed off
from his original assertions.55 Certainly, after the economic and political
stabilization of Weimar in 1924, Schmitt may simply have become more
optimistic about the prospects of parliamentary government in Germany,
and this might be reflected in the 1926 preface. But Schmitt himself makes
no reference to any change in historical conditions in the 1926 edition that
would have persuaded him to change his mind or temper his tone. On the
contrary, he seems singularly occupied with Thoma's assertions.
More to the point, however, the contrast between medieval Catholic
representation and liberal parliamentary representation proves to be some-
thing of a false opposition. The technocratic deficiencies that he accentu-
ates in the latter actually produce sociopolitical results reminiscent of the
kind of "publicity of display" that is characteristic of the former. It is the
appropriation of the multiplicitous "feudal" aspects of the mass-party wel-
fare state and the unification and centralization of them under the banner
of nationally legitimated executive authority that become Schmitt's goal.
The personally displayed quality of medieval representation embedded in
the naturalized authority of ecclesiastical, manorial, civic, and courtly in-
stitutions dispersed among prenational provinces is something qualitatively
different from the re-presentation that must be technologically reproduced
within a unitary presidential regime that manufactures a nation ready for
confrontation with other similarly constructed nations. 56
Schmitt, therefore, ought not to be understood as an ordinary conserva-
tive. He is not fundamentally backward-looking in his orientation, despite
his vast knowledge and deft manipulation of history. He is, rather, driven
principally by the political present and is in fact an avowed historicist. 57 But
his authoritarian strategy should attune the contemporary reader to the fact
that regressive movements that would only bring about new and worse
forms of oppression will cloak themselves in the less offensive garb of "tradi-
55 Therefore, Paul Gottfried's suggestion that Schmitt "was entirely open about discussing
the defects of [Weimar] parliamentary government and about why he thought it was
doomed" is somewhat misleading; see his Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (Westport: Green-
wood, 1990), p. 58.
56 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Na-
tionalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since
1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
57 Schmitt was apparendy fond of saying, "An historical truth is true only once"; see George
Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt
between 1921 and 1936 (Westport: Greenwood, 1989), p. 27.
REPRESENTATION 205
1 Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. George
Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); English renderings are from this edition,
which will be cited as PT. Any German references are to Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur
Lehre von der Souverdnitdt (Munich: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1934), the second edition of the
work, and the one on which the English translation is based.
2 Of these I will specifically deal with Verfassungslehre ([1928] Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
1989), hereafter V; Der Hitter der Verfassung (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1931),
hereafter HV; and Legalitdt und Legitimitdt (Munich: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1932), hereafter
LL, from the reprint in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsdtzeaus denjahren 1924-1954: Materialien zu
einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1958).
2O6
LAW 2O7
ber's sociology of law and comes to focus on the legal theory of Hans Kelsen.
According to Schmitt, liberal legal theory avoids the reality ofjurisprudence
by denying the existence of "gaps" within the law and consequently demotes
judges to the status of mere vending machines that mechanically dispense
the law, without intellectual reflection or active contribution. It also leaves
the legal theorist inadequately equipped to analyze law at the level of appli-
cation. On the constitutional level, this theoretical shortcoming on the part
of liberal jurisprudence manifests itself in the avoidance of the phenome-
non of "the exception" - as explained in Chapter 3, the political circum-
stance that cannot be foreseen in extant constitutional provisions. Just as
judges must exercise prudence in adjudicating "gaps," a "sovereign" - a
mutually identified people and executive - must be allowed the prudence to
"decide" on the exception. After evaluating such assertions, in the later
sections of the chapter, I examine and critically assess Schmitt's own Weimar
attempt to formulate a more "substantive" notion ofjurisprudential practice
and constitutional democracy than that of the Kelsenian liberalism he crit-
icizes. More specifically than I could in the chapter on emergency powers, I
will attempt to confront the Schmittian constitutional democracy that he
offers as an alternative to the so-called empty, mechanical formalism of the
liberal variety. I will ask whether Schmitt assails the abstractness of positivist
jurisprudence because it allows concrete political reality to elude theoreti-
cal analysis or because it acts as a normative obstruction to his designs for a
new form of concrete domination adequate to the twentieth-century state/
society relationship.
3 Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline ofInterpretive Sociology (1920), ed. Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); hereafter ES.
2O8 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
4 G. L. Ulmen, Politische Mehrwert: Eine Studie uberMax Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: VCH
Acta humaniora, 1991), pp. 178, 20-1.
5 See Schwab, introduction to PT, p. xv, n. 11.
LAW 209
"content": (1) Legal validity in the textual sense is the normative meaning
attributed to a verbal pattern that has the form of a legal proposition with
correct logic; (2) empirical validity is based on the probability that people
will obey the law (ES, 311). Neither definition makes any judgments as to
the relative ethical substance of the law because the sociological point of
view requires only the perspective of "legal technology" (ES, 717). One
claims that law is valid because it is semantically logical, the other because it
is obeyed.6
In Political Theology, Schmitt's target is precisely this latter legal state of
affairs described by Weber, one that is strictly "oriented toward calculability
and governed by the ideal of frictionless functioning," or "utility" and "tech-
nicity" (PT, 28). Schmitt argues that every emphasis or concern with "form"
as such in terms of jurisprudence is not particularly unhealthy (contents
need forms to be realized). But the peculiar situation of modernity that
encourages what he calls in Political Form "the antithesis of empty form and
formless matter" results in a jurisprudence that has ultimately become form
for form's sake.
As the distinction between technological rationality and the juristic, rep-
resentational rationality of Catholicism in Political Form rests on the question
of personal embodiment, so, too, does the opposition between positivist
jurisprudence and what he calls "decisionism" (as well as his theories of
sovereignty and democracy, as we will see). According to Schmitt's concep-
tion, only a person, not a system, as in the formalist scheme ofjurisprudence
whose "interest is essentially material and impersonal" (PT, 35), can decide
how to enforce or realize the law. Purely formal jurisprudence endangers
the "personality" of judges, their ability to engage in the concrete particu-
larity of a given case by confining them to the mechanical application of a
pregiven statute. For Schmitt, between the law and concrete reality, there
will always be a gap that must be mediated by a judge.
Weber describes an attitude very close to that of Schmitt regarding the
On the implications of Weber's sociology of law for legal and political theory, see Johannes
Winckelmann, Legitimitdt und Legalitdt im Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie (Tubingen: J. C. B.
Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1952). The legacy of analyzing law exclusively in terms of social
expediency is carried on in the German postwar context most notably by Niklas Luhmann;
see A Sociological Theory ofLaw (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). On the successive
theoretical rebellions in Germany and the United States against formalist jurisprudence,
see Christian Joerges, "On the Context of German-American Debates over Sociological
Jurisprudence and Legal Criticism: A History of Transatlantic Misunderstandings and
Missed Opportunities," in European Yearbook in the Sociology of Law, ed. A. Febbrajo and D.
Nelken (Brussels: Giuffre, 1993).
21O LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
The idea of a "law without gaps" is, of course, under vigorous attack. The
conception of the modern judge as an automaton into which legal documents
and fees are stuffed at the top in order that it may spill forth the verdict at the
bottom along with the reasons, read mechanically from codified paragraphs -
this conception is angrily rejected, perhaps because a certain approximation
of this type would precisely be implied by a consistent bureaucratization of
justice. (ES, 979)7
[T] he judge is doing more than merely placing his seal upon norms which
would already have been binding by consensual understanding and agree-
ment. His decision in individual cases always produces consequences which,
acting beyond the scope of the case, influence the selection of those rules
which are to survive as law. . . . [T]he sources of 'judicial" decision are not at
first constituted by general "norms of decision" that would simply be "applied"
to concrete cases, except where the decision relates to certain formal ques-
tions preliminary to the decision of the case itself. The situation is the very
opposite: in so far as the judge allows the coercive guaranty to enter in a
particular case for ever so concrete reasons, he creates, at least under certain
circumstances, the empirical validity of a general norm as "law," simply be-
cause his maxim acquires significance beyond the particular case. (ES, 758,
emphasis added)
Yet Weber notes that judges themselves, in their own "subjective beliefs,"
refuse to see themselves as "creators" of the law, and in fact understand
themselves only as "mouthpieces" for already-existing law (ES, 894). But in
reality this "creation" of law becomes more prevalent under the conditions
of an expanding welfare state in the early twentieth century (ES, 882-9). I*1
the service of wide-scale state intervention into particular spheres of society,
more discretion becomes exercised by bureaucratic administrators and judi-
7 The particular "attack" on, or "rejection" of, this position Weber is referring to is that of
Hermann Kantorowicz (a. k. a., Gnaeus Flavius), Der Kampf um die Rechtswissenschaft
(Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1906).
LAW 211
cial officers in implementing broadly defined social policy.8 The contradic-
tion in the ideology of abstract formalism versus the reality of increased con-
crete specification becomes central to Schmitt's Weimar jurisprudence, as
we will see. Why Schmitt feels compelled to plead a seemingly desperate
case against the automatic adjudication of gapless law and the tyranny of the
separation of powers at the very moment that they were being eclipsed by
sociopolitical reality will be a crucial question.
In his earliest work on the law, Schmitt, in accord with the methodologi-
cal mode of procedure I laid out in Part One, attempted to mediate be-
tween the Weberian categories of the judge as creator ex nihilo of the law,
on the one hand, and as mere automaton, on the other. In much the same
way that he attempts to show in PoliticalForm that the Catholic conception of
offices falls between Weber's classifications of functionality and charisma, in
Gesetz und Urteil {Law and Judgment), of 1912, he attempts to show that "the
judge is neither a legislator nor the mouthpiece of the law."9 Weber declares
that a pure fact-oriented, case-to-case, judge-as-law-creator mode of jurispru-
dence could never be rational (ES, 787), and in his early work Schmitt
attempts to mediate between the irrational position of sheer judicial pre-
rogative and the hyperrational position of legal formalism.
In a move reminiscent of many kinds of neo-Kantian reappraisals of the
deficiencies inherent in the sharp subjective/objective distinction inherited
from Kantian rationality, Schmitt adopts a reformed-subjectivist stance in
his early work.10 According to Schmitt, whatever a community ofjudges in a
particular culture could be expected to agree on in a specific case ought to
fail to recognize that the conception of personality and its connection with
formal authority arose from a specific juristic interest, namely, an especially
14 On the subject of legal positivism in Weimar, see Peter C. Caldwell, "Legal Positivism and
Weimar Democracy," American Journal of Jurisprudence 39:1 (spring 1995); and in the
German context generally, see Dieter Grimm, "Methode als Machtfaktor," in Recht und
Staat der burgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987); and Ernst-Wolfgang
Bockenforde, Gesetz und gesetzgebende Gewalt: Von den Anfdngen der deutschen Staatsrechtslehre
bis zur Hohe des staatsrechtlichen Positivismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1981). On
Kelsen's neo-Kantianism in particular, see Stanley L. Paulson, "The Neo-Kantian Dimen-
sion of Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 12 (1992).
1 5 Kelsen, Das Problem der Souverdnitdt und die Theorie des Vb'lkerrechts: Beitrdge zu einer Reinen
Rechtslehre ([1920] Aalen: Scientia, 1981), p. 120.
LAW 215
clear awareness of what the essence of the legal decision entails. Such a deci-
sion in the broadest sense belongs to every legal perception. Every legal
thought brings a legal idea, which in its purity can never become reality, into
another aggregate condition and adds an element that cannot be derived
either from the content of the legal idea or from the content of a general
positive legal norm that is to be applied. (PT, 30)
For Schmitt, Kelsen disregards the problem of the very "realization of that
law" (PT, 21) and refuses to see that, as Weber pointed out, judges must
contribute a part of themselves into every decision in order to adjudicate.
Thus Schmitt's critique of legal positivism is both descriptive and -
ironically, given his aversion to normativism - normative: The positivists,
according to Schmitt, do not recognize the factual reality of the actual
activity ofjudges and do not realize that this is precisely what judges ought to
be doing in a jurisprudential sense when adjudicating.
The legal positivists further demonstrate their flight from the personal
with their insistence on separating politics or sociology from jurisprudence.
According to Schmitt, Kelsen seeks to preserve the "purity" of the norms to
be expressed in the law by renouncing any interest in sociological or politi-
cal reality (PT, 15, 21). 16 In Kelsen's scheme, "the highest competence
cannot be traceable to a person or to a socio-psychological power complex
but only to the sovereign order in the unity of the system of norms. For
juristic consideration there are neither real nor fictitious persons, only
points of ascription" (PT, 19). Because of this, in Verfassungslehre five years
later, Schmitt accuses Kelsenian legal positivism of constructing "the empty
shell of liberalism," by "compressing all expressions of the life of the state
into a series of prescriptions, and transferring all state activity into actions
performed within precisely articulated and in principle limited spheres of
competence" (V, 41). Echoing Weber's description of legal formalism,
Schmitt recounts the fantasy of the nature of the constitution in the positi-
vists' scheme: "It is pretended first, that the constitution is nothing but a
system of legal norms and prescriptions; second that this system is a closed
one; and third, that it is 'sovereign' - i. e., that it can never be interfered
with, or indeed even influenced, for any reasons or necessities of political
16 See Kelsen, Der soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegrijf: Kritische Untersuchung des Ver-
hdltnisses von Staat und Recht ([1922] Aalen: Scientia, 1981), and Grenzen zwischen juris-
tischerund soziologischerMethode (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1911). See also
Stanley L. Paulson, "Kelsen's Legal Theory: The Final Round," Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies 12 (1992).
2l6 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
existence" (V, 131). 17 We will see that Schmitt argues that a constitution
must be more than a collection of multitiered forms; that it must be open to
external expressions of concrete reality, such as the exception; and that the
piece of paper or the collection of norms that is the written constitution is
not itself truly "sovereign" but must, on the contrary, allow for its own
suspension when "the necessities of political existence" call for the stepping
forth of the person who - ambiguously - either is or represents the popular
sovereign.
Yet, by Kelsen's own account, his conception of "norm" is purely formal,
composed of "nodal points" rather than human decision makers:
A norm is valid qua legal norm only because it was arrived at in a certain way -
created according to a certain rule, issued or set according to a specific
method. The law is only valid as positive law, that is, only a law that has been
issued or set. In this necessary requirement of being issued or set, and in what
it assures us, namely, that the validity of the law will be independent of morality
and comparable systems of norms - therein lies the positivity of laws.18
The norm is traced back through the constitutional system to a basic norm
or "basic rule," which itself is based on "the will" of a constitutional majority,
the only moment of human contact in the system. 19 Hence, the "norms" for
which Kelsen's jurisprudence is named are founded insincerely, according
to Schmitt. Kelsen's system seeks to be impersonal but grounds itself on a
personal moment of will, whose memory it subsequently represses through
its procedural apparatus. Because the moment of popular will is mediated
quantitatively through majoritarianism, it grasps only the mathematical im-
mediacy of a people and is hence insubstantial. These norms lack substance;
they are "mechanical" in the sense that their contents shift in accord with a
corresponding change in the results of parliamentary elections, and as such
function as part of what Schmitt deems a "mathematical mythology" (PT,
20, translation amended). Although it feigns indifference to such political
or social matters as elections, legal positivism, through the famous separa-
17 As Judith Shklar explains, "The idea of treating law as a self-contained system of norms
that is 'there,' identifiable without any reference to the content, aim, and development of
the rules that compose it, is the very essence of formalism. . . . It consists . . . of treating
law as an isolated block of concepts that have no relevant characteristics or functions apart
from their possible validity or invalidity within a hypothetical system." Legalism: Law,
Morals and Political Trials (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 3 3 - 4 .
18 Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, trans. B. L. Paulson and S. L. Paulson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 56.
19 Ibid. On this issue, see Joseph Raz, "The Purity of the Pure Theory," in Essays on Kelsen, ed.
R. Tur and W. Twining (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
LAW 217
tion of law and morality, is willing to accept that whatever is legislated on the
basis of these elections is necessarily correct, that is, right.20 Legal positivism
is famous for seeming to be indifferent to what the law says as opposed to the
fact that it says it. Consequently, it is often backed into the corner of admit-
ting that were a law passed through the proper legislative channels that
called for the most heinous of actions, that law would by definition be valid.
Kelsen admits that the majority principle is vaguely "mechanical"21 but
insists that it is a better political manifestation of democracy than the quasi-
metaphysical, semireligious, and inherently dangerous substantive model
that Schmitt would endorse. 22
By defining validity solely in terms of quantitative majorities, however,
Kelsen leaves himself and his theory open to charges of moral
substancelessness - from the Left as well as the Right. As Habermas observes,
what is called "normativist" is actually empty of norms in any meaningful
sense: "The assumption . . . which sprang up with legal positivism and . . .
social-scientific functionalism [was] that normative validity claims could be
withdrawn, without any noteworthy consequences for the stability of the
legal system."23 But for Schmitt, the consequences for the legal system are
devastatingly "noteworthy," not only morally but practically. In fact in Politi-
cal Theology, Schmitt is actually less concerned with the ethical source of legal
positivism's laws as with the practical application, or rather nonapplication,
of those laws.
Even if the norms reflected in a formalist scheme of jurisprudence were
to have some ethical resonance, Schmitt demonstrates that the system
would nevertheless rob these norms of their substance in the process of
application. Through their indifference and even hostility to certain funda-
mental means of applying the law, jurists like Kelsen and Krabbe so radically
subvert the relationship between the substance of a law and its practice that
they render the values in question substantial in name only. Krabbe's state-
ment, as quoted by Schmitt, that "the state reveals itself only in the making
of law. . . . [It] does not manifest itself in applying laws" (PT, 23), begs the
20 This position is most forcefully put forth by Anglo-American legal positivism: see H. L. A.
Hart, "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals" (1958), in Essays in Jurisprudence
and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
21 Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert derDemokratie ([1920] Aalen: Scientia, 1981), p. 9.
22 Ibid., pp. 99-100. Later Kelsen would turn the tables on Schmitt, suggesting that it is his
jurisprudence that, in delivering law over to the whims of executive authority, is in fact
"mechanical"; see "Wer soil der Hiiter der Verfassung sein?" Die Justiz 6 (1930/31):
59!"2.
23 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society,
trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 269.
2l8 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
question of how the norms these laws are supposed to reflect become real-
ized. The values are not infused into society or politics but remain embed-
ded, in Kelsen's phrase, "wholly in the formalism of law."24 But as Schmitt
would declare most bluntly a decade later, in Legalitdt und Legitimitdt, "no
norm, neither higher nor lower, interprets and administers, protects nor
defends itself; no normative validity makes itself valid; and there is also . . .
no hierarchy of norms but rather only a hierarchy of men and instances"
(LL, 311). This betrays his nostalgia for the concrete domination of persons
over persons that is characteristic of traditional politics and part and parcel
of his developing neoauthoritarianism, as much as it conveys his concern
for jurisprudential praxis. I will return to this crucial issue later.
As a consequence of its excessive formalism, then, legal positivism can be
judged equally guilty of the charge of "empty form" that we have already
witnessed Schmitt level against technological and economic thought. In
fact, these supposed shortcomings, like those identified with parliamentar-
ism, are a result of the infiltration of the law with precisely these technically
rational influences, as opposed to substantively rational ones. 25 And al-
though Schmitt is quick to emphasize the positivist, valueless quality of a
normativist jurisprudence invaded by the technical, he is simultaneously
careful to distance his own decisionism from any link with positivism. Recall
the two kinds of legal formalism that Weber describes in Economy and Society.
Once removed from the realm of traditional religiocultural practices, the
first mode of formal jurisprudence, which centers on the ritual act, such as a
dance, a song, or affixing a seal, is just as empty of substance as the second
mode of jurisprudence, which centers on formally abstract rules, because
the former is no longer embedded in a particular cultural framework.
Schmitt's "decision" is similarly unconstrained and is therefore potentially
as "substanceless" as Kelsen's positivist formalism. In fact, Habermas asserts
that Schmitt and Kelsen are opposite sides of the same coin and that ulti-
mately their positions are mutually interchangeable: There is a concrete will
24 Quoted in Rupert Emerson, State and Sovereignty in Modern Germany (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1928), p. 170.
25 In a discussion of Weber's sociology of law, Habermas describes how what has been
inextricably linked in Schmitt's thought to technology in earlier chapters, bureaucratiza-
tion and excessive economic thinking - overly formalistic rationality - is identified as
precisely the cause of the draining of morality from the law: "[T]he rationalization of law
makes possible . . . both the institutionalization of purposive rational economic and
administrative action and the detachment of subsystems of purposive rational action from
their moral-practical foundations." Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 243.
LAW 219
The legal interest in the decision as such should not be mixed up with this
kind of calculability. It is rooted in the character of the normative and is
derived from the necessity of judging a concrete fact concretely even though
what is given as a standard for the judgment is only a legal principle in its
general universality. Thus a transformation takes place every time. . . . [T]he
legal idea cannot translate itself independently. (PT, 31)
We find Schmitt again searching for the means of mediating the form
and content that is often artificially posited as separate in Enlightenment
thought and that renders particularly difficult the task of jurisprudence.
Indeed, Schmitt attributes Kelsen's inability to conceive of the proper rela-
26 See Habermas, "Dogmatism, Reason, and Decision: On Theory and Practice in Our
Scientific Civilization," in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press,
1973), pp. 253-82; and Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 265. On the latent
decisionism of legal positivism, see also Horst Dreier, Rechtskhre, Staatssoziologie und
Demokratietheorie bei Hans Kelsen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1986), p. 196.
27 See Kelsen, Das Problem der Souverdnitdt, pp. 8-9.
22O LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
28 In the sequel to Political Theology, published almost half a century later, Schmitt re-
emphasized the need for substances to be embodied in forms, only now adding the
friend/enemy language of his late-Weimar "concept of the political" thesis and his Na-
tional Socialist "concrete orders" doctrine: "A conflict is always a struggle between organi-
zations and institutions in terms of concrete orders, a battle between 'competent au-
thorities,' not between substances. Substances first need to find a form, they must
organize themselves, in some way, before they can confront one another as agents capable
of a battle; as parties belligerantes" Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder
politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), p. 106. Cf. Schmitt, The Concept of
the Political (1932), trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1976); and Ueber die drei Arten des rechtsxvissenschaftlichen Denkens (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1934).
29 See also, G. L. Ulmen, 'The Sociology of the State: Carl Schmitt and Max Weber," State,
Culture and Society 1 (1985).
30 Schmitt, Der Wert des Staates, p. 79.
LAW 221
But the nature of the decision becomes something much more radical by
1922 and Political Theology, as does his criticism of Kelsen.
As in Parlamentarismus, it is not enough for Schmitt to simply illustrate the
theoretical shortcomings in some aspect of liberalism's political philosophy;
he seems compelled further to demonstrate that liberalism not only does
not live up to its principles in practice but often betrays them outright. For
instance, he observes that the attempt on the part of normativist jurispru-
dence to banish subjectivity from the adjudication of the law allows room for
as much subjective judgment as was ever possible before:
Judges may be formally restricted by all the ironclad norms in the world, but
at the moment of judgment there is always at least a slight leeway in how
they apply the norms. Thus does subjectivity rear its supposedly suppressed
head. The reliance on the scientific method ignores the personal, the hu-
man element, only to ultimately undermine precisely that scientific project.
In their revulsion to arbitrariness, the formalists sought to eliminate the
state from jurisprudential concerns, just as they wished to eliminate the
personal, subjective, decision from such matters, and, according to Schmitt,
were equally unsuccessful in each endeavor. Kelsen sought to subsume the
state under the law, in Schmitt's paraphrase, declaring that it is "neither the
creator nor the source of the legal order. . . . [T] he state is nothing else but
the legal order itself" (PT, 19). 31 Under this formulation, the state would
seem inhibited to act, but act it must - albeit with the formalists' collective
head turned the other way - if the judicial system is to function at all. And in
this manner does Kelsen's formalism serve as an ideology that belies the
deformalization of law that is brought about by state activity in the new era
of interventionism:
[W] hoever takes the trouble of examining the public law literature of positive
jurisprudence for its basic concepts and arguments will see that the state
31 On Schmitt's exaggeration of Kelsen's position on this point and in general, see David
Dyzenhaus, "'Now the Machine Runs Itself: Carl Schmitt on Hobbes and Kelsen," Car-
dozo Law Review 16:1 (August 1994): 11; and Peter C. Caldwell, "Legal Positivism and
Weimar Democracy."
222 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
32 David Dyzenhaus criticizes later incarnations of legal positivism for a similar nonchalance
LAW 223
The decisionistic or personal element not only asserts itself with regard to
the everyday workings of the law; the other component of Schmitt's theory
of sovereignty, the exception, is the true occasion for the decision and the
defining moment for "whoever [wer]" is sovereign. As it turns out, the
notion of the exception, like the decision, has been clouded for Schmitt by
the emphasis on natural-scientific methods and technological thought in
the age of "intense commercial activity."
regarding state application of law. Postwar legal positivists' attempt to preserve the "pu-
rity" of their "primary rules" of jurisprudence by being quite indulgent toward vast lati-
tudes of discretion in the application of the law at a "secondary" level. Any semblance of
determinacy - even according to the most highly formal criteria - is lost as bureaucracies
freely apply law in innumerable ways at the "lower" level of quite diverse social realities.
See Dyzenhaus, "The Legitimacy of Legality," University ofToronto Law Journal 46 (1994).
Thus is borne out Schmitt's charge that the "sheer rationality" of positivism at the high
level of theory collapses into arbitrary irrationality at the practical level of application.
Dyzenhaus also suggests that Schmitt would have predicted the liberal nowpositivist at-
tempt, exemplified by the work of Ronald Dworkin, at taking back the content-generating
power for the constitutional judiciary. See "The Legitimacy of Legality" as well as,
Dyzenhaus, "'Now the Machine Runs Itself,'" pp. 5, 17; Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977) and Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1986). See also Gerald Frug, "The Ideology of Bureaucracy in
American Law," Harvard Law Review 97 (1984), on how the gapless conception of law itself
spawns discretion in adjudication.
33 Hannah Arendt, addressing a slightly different form of positivism, noted how the applica-
tion of scientific and statistical methods did not demonstrate the existence of natural-
scientific laws at work in human endeavors but rather ensured that these would be the
only manifestations of reality considered worthy of reflection; see The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 42-3.
224 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
excluded as impure" (PT, 21). Yet Schmitt assures the reader that his con-
flict with positivist jurisprudence over the exception is not one of "radical
spiritualism" versus "radical materialism" (PT, 42); for such dichotomies are
themselves indications of a rationality that has been shrunken hideously. As
he emphasizes in Political Form, one need not argue with economic or tech-
nological rationality from an irrational, sentimental, or purely spiritual
standpoint but rather from the position of a more sophisticated rationality.
Schmitt's sociological-jurisprudential method has as its goal not the
denigration of science but the achievement of a more fully "scientific result"
OPT, 45)- 34
Schmitt in effect asks, how "positive" can positivism be if it ignores what it
is supposedly concerned with, namely, the "fact?" In this case, the fact is that
there will always, and inevitably, be an unforeseen or unexpected occur-
rence that can never be predicted or for which accounts or plans can never
be made: The exception "cannot be circumscribed factually and made to
conform to a preformed law. . . . [I]t defies general codification" (PT, 6,
13). How rational or scientific can Enlightenment rationality be if it ignores
such a facet of concrete reality, if it is too afraid to, as it were, face the facts of
life? "A philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception
and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree"
(PT, 15).35 Schmitt claims that this abstract universal application of form is
generated by a natural-scientific rationality.
34 Schmitt's student Leo Strauss, with whom I will deal in the next chapter, makes this same
move in his own criticism of positivist political science: Political philosophy as defined by
Strauss is not superior to positivist political science because it is less scientific but because it
is "scientific" in "the original meaning of the term"; see "What Is Political Philosophy?" in
What is Political Philosophy ? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
p. 14. The other comparison to make with Schmitt on this general critique of positivism is
with Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno. Just as Schmitt detects the unreflected rejection
by Enlightenment thinking of anything that defies its system as "metaphysics," "theology,"
or "impure," Horkheimer and Adorno observe, "to the Enlightenment, that which does
not reduce to numbers and ultimately, to the one becomes illusion; modern positivism
writes it off as literature." Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. John Cummings (New
York: Continuum, 1989), p. 7. Their critique of the "totalitarianism" of the Enlighten-
ment does not, however, involve the valorization of what defies the totality but rather an
understanding of the dialectical relationship between the two. As I demonstrated in Part
One, this is something Schmitt himself attempts before ultimately lapsing into an irra-
tional privileging of "unconquered" nature, either as "the political" or, here, "the
exception."
35 According to Shklar's description, "abstract formalists" like Kelsen seem to be inten-
tionally eliminating the possibility of an exception, by endeavoring "to find a set of
categories so totally devoid of any specific content as to be applicable to all social institu-
tions from the most primitive to the most overdeveloped." Legalism, p. 84.
LAW 225
Schmitt's source for the rationality to counter that of the natural sci-
ences, in Political Theology, is not exclusively or even primarily Roman
Catholicism, as in Political Form, but rather Thomas Hobbes. For Schmitt,
Hobbes is the "classic representative" of the "decisionist" theory of sov-
ereignty: Hobbes "advanced a decisive argument that connected . . . deci-
sionism with personalism and rejected all attempts to substitute an ab-
stractly valid order for a concrete sovereignty of the state" (PT, 33). But
there is an inherent tension - a tension that runs through all of his work - in
Schmitt's choosing as an alternative to the natural-scientific influence on
modern law a figure who is himself so closely associated with the triumph of
Enlightenment rationality: "Hobbes remained personalistic and postulated
an ultimate concrete deciding instance. . . . [H]e also heightened his state,
the Leviathan, into an immense person. . . . This he did despite his nomi-
nalism and natural-scientific approach and his reduction of the individual
to an atom. For him [personalism] was . . . a methodical and systematic
postulate of his juristic thinking" (PT, 47). I will further elaborate on the
relationship between Hobbes and Schmitt in Chapter 6. Suffice it to say
here that Schmitt's "Hobbesian moment," when personalism stood over and
above natural science, was not to last. 36 Throughout the age of absolutism in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of the personal ruler
held sway, until Rousseau and the succeeding century of mass democracy
ensured that the natural-scientific overwhelmed the personalistic: Accord-
ing to Schmitt, since the French Revolution,
Schmitt sees this shift to the quantitative at the root of Kelsen's conception
"of democracy as the expression of a relativistic and impersonal scientism"
36 In his Leviathan book of 1938, which I will discuss in Chapter 6, Schmitt again identifies
Hobbes not only as the apex of decisionism and political thought itself but also the
beginning of the end. There, the eventual downfall of the Leviathan state is attributed to
its creator himself and to his succumbing to the influence of science and technology.
226 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
(PT, 49). The norms embodied in the laws of one geographically demar-
cated area within one nation, whose residents elected the legislators of
those laws, are as "right" to Kelsen as are some different norms legislated in
some other geographical area. As was clear in the analysis of Parlamen-
tarismus, in having values determined by any number of territorial divisions
and mere numerical majorities, the quantitative element strips those values
of any substance. Kelsen is perhaps most famous for his discussion of
whether it is correct for the majority of the people to decide between Christ
and Barabbas. It is perhaps due to Schmitt's misunderstanding of Kelsen's
taking the affirmative position on this question that Schmitt maintains that
Kelsen "openly reveals the mathematical and natural-scientific character of
his thinking" (PT, 42).
Exactly how does this natural-scientifically tainted constitutionalism
hamper the ability to deal with the exception? As we know from Chapter 3,
according to Schmitt, any attempt to define the exception or to describe
what circumstances might constitute an exceptional case is a hindrance on
the ability to manage it when it in fact arises to threaten a regime. For
Schmitt, it is ridiculous to make plans or provisions for what one could not
possibly foresee (PT, 6-7). This could easily be taken as a call for a perpetual
state of "emergency," in which an authoritarian regime is required to stand
guard at every moment for the possibility of the sudden appearance of the
exception.37 Any limit, legal or otherwise, to this government's functioning
would jeopardize its vigil and would necessarily require suspension. Schmitt
seemingly attempts to allay such fears. Just as the exceptional case by defini-
tion cannot be predicted, by definition neither can it exist at all times.
Because of this, the exception can be good for the legal order, for it confirms
its existence. There can be no "exceptional" situation without a normal one.
"The exception appears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal
prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm
demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied
and which is subjected to its regulations" (PT, 6-7). Schmitt asserts that the
rule, in effect, defines the exception and that the exception, in turn, draws
attention to the rule, hence, ostensibly restoring confidence in the impor-
tance and primacy of the norm-bound regular situation.38
37 See George Schwab's note on the difference between an "exception" and an "emergency,"
PT, 5, n. 1.
38 As Ulmen explains the initial thrust of the argument, "a constitution without gaps neces-
sarily presupposes a normative Utopia wherein there is no exception. By definition the
LAW 227
Schmitt goes on, however, to suggest that the normal situation actually
owes its legitimate existence, on the contrary, to the exception:
The exception can be more important . . . than the rule, not because of a
romantic irony for the paradox, but because the seriousness of an insight goes
deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats
itself. The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves noth-
ing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but its existence,
which derives only from the exception. (PT, 15, emphasis added)
norm precludes the exception, whereas the exception presupposes the norm and is
bound by its definition. The exception cannot decide for the exception; it can only decide
for the norm." Politische Mehrwert, p. 244.
39 Caldwell discusses the importance of Kantian "causality" for Kelsen's legal theory in
Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law.
228 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
regime from the confusion over who has authority, when the provisions
made for an emergency prove inadequate, will lead to the destruction of
such a government. Either the emergency itself or the strife it causes within
the government will ensure that result. According to Schmitt, this is nature's
political rebellion and revenge.
If it seems that the exception warrants more than analytical treatment,
this is only because Schmitt presents it as something more than an analytical
category. Of course both teachers and students of Schmitt have demon-
strated the heuristic utility of focusing on the extreme case. As Weber re-
marks, "for the purpose of theoretical speculation, extreme examples are
the most useful" (ES, 334). And despite his renunciation of the influence of
Schmitt on his work, Franz Neumann suggests that "the study o f . . . emer-
gency situations will yield valuable hints as to where political power actually
resides in 'normal' periods."41 However, to ground a theory of sovereignty
and constitutionalism on the primacy of exceptional situations is to invert
and narrow the priorities of political and legal science. 42 Kelsen suggests
that Schmitt's approach does just that, reducing the Weimar constitution to
the emergency provisions of Article 48; Ingeborg Maus is slightly more
generous in noting that Schmitt's radical appeals to popular sovereignty
and exceptional situations reduce the constitution to the preamble and
Article 48. 43 These issues bring us directly to Schmitt's interpretation of the
Weimar constitution and his attempt to "save" it from the technical, me-
chanical, mathematical influences he associates with Kelsen's positivistic
liberalism.
41 Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed.
Herbert Marcuse (New York: Free Press, 1957), p. 17.
42 See Bernard Manin, "Elections, Elites and Democracy," in Principles ofRepresentative Govern-
ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for a critique of Schmitt along these
lines.
43 See Kelsen, "Wer soil der Huter der Verfassung sein?" See also Ingeborg Maus, Burgerliche
Rechtstheorie und Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funktion und aktuellen Wirkung der Theorie Carl
Schmitts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), p. 121.
23O LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
The state does not have a constitution, the "according to which" the stately will
develops and functions, but rather the state is the constitution, in other words,
the essential, at hand, situation, a status of unity and order. The state would
cease to exist if this constitution, that is this unity and order, ceases. The
constitution is its "soul," its concrete life and individual existence. (V, 4, em-
phasis added)
The unity of the German Reich is not based in any of the 181 Articles [of the
constitution] and their validity, but rather on the political existence of the
German people. The will of the German people, thus something existential,
grounds the political and constitutional unity despite all systemic contradic-
tions, structural insufficiencies, and nebulous constitutional statutes. The
Weimar constitution is valid because the German people has "given it to itself."
precondition of constitutive power. What does not politically exist can also
not consciously decide. With this fundamental procedure, in which a peo-
ple act with political consciousness, political existence is presupposed and is
the act by which to distinguish the people who create a constitution from
the constitution of a state itself" (V, 50).
Does a popular unity make the constitution that merely confirms the
prior political existence, or is this "political being" brought together as a
unity or, at least, to a higher level of unity by the very act of constitution
making?44 Schmitt does not elaborate on this procedure but rather intro-
duces his recently developed, polemical element of "the political" to define
what the state-constitution-people configuration is not. It is not something
that can be turned against itself or that can be self-negating, and this collec-
tively personal presence that cannot logically account for the ambiguity of
its own existence is nevertheless to account for the ambiguities of a real-
world legal-constitutional order:
The political decision, that means the constitution, can not be turned against
its subject and supercede its existence. Next to and over the constitution does
this will remain. Every real constitutional conflict, one that concerns the foun-
dations of the political comprehensive decision itself, can thereby be decided
only by the constitutional power. And every gap in the constitution - in con-
trast to constitutional-legislative obscurities and differences of opinion in
detail - is filled by an act of constitutional power; it decides every unforeseen
case whose decision concerns the foundational political decision. (V, 77)
44 See Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law, for an analysis
of the circular reasoning of Schmitt's account of constitutional origins.
45 Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law; and Dyzenhaus,
Truth's Revenge: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), respectively.
46 Recent attempts at reconciling ostensibly opposed democratic and constitutional impera-
LAW 233
Why Schmitt does not promote a positive nationalist vision akin to other
Weimar conservatives that revolves around Teutonic folklore, Wagner, or
the Black Forest is not readily apparent. Whether his early Catholicism
prevented him from adopting such primarily nineteenth-century, Prussian-
hegemony myths, or whether such allusions came under the purview of what
he had previously denounced as "political romanticism" is not clear.47 But
his refrain from such cultural vulgarities puts Schmitt in the awkward the-
oretical position of accusing liberal constitutionalism of neutrality and con-
tentlessness, when his own nationalism is rather agnostic on what specifi-
cally makes up the content of the state-constitution-people unity. This
refrain also ultimately pushes him, as we will see, into political vulgarity. The
political, the postulation of an enemy, a Volk that is not one's own Volk, serves
to distract from the discomfort, the "unspeakable confusion" mentioned in
Chapter 2, of not knowing exactly what oneself, one's culture, or one's
historical predicament is in modernity, in the age of technology. But, as we
will see, the automatic formulation of an other to arrive at self-identification
and thereby to forge meaning is as mechanical as anything in Kelsen's legal
theory.48
Schmitts," in Complexio Oppositorum: Ueber Carl Schmitt, ed. Helmut Quaritsch (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1988). On the disturbing revival of "political" constitutionalism in
contemporary Eastern Europe, see Ulrich K. PreuB, "Umrisse einer neuen konstitu-
tionellen Form des Politischen," in Revolution, Fortschritt und Verfassung (Frankfurt a. M.:
Fischer, 1994).
49 In Ulrich PreuB's words, for Schmitt the popular will "slumbers as a latent potential in the
constitution." "Political Order and Democracy: Carl Schmitt and His Influence," in Social
System, Rationality and Revolution, ed. L. Nowak and M. Paprzycki (Rodopi: Poznan Studies
in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 33 [1993]), p. 17.
LAW 235
quently mean that it provides the legal means for the abolition of its own
legality, let alone the legitimate means for the destruction of its own legit-
imacy" {LL, 311). Majoritarianism, the ground rule of Kelsenian liberalism,
makes for some rather unpleasant political results, according to Schmitt.
The "neutral compromise of a value-free functionalism" that is Weimar
constitutional law, for Schmitt, witnesses "the remarkable result that the
fundamental bourgeois-constitutional principles of universal freedom and
right of property have the 'inferior' legality of only 51 % of the votes while
the rights of the religious societies and officials (through better representa-
tion, the trade unions as well) have the 'superior' legality of 67%" {LL,
311). Whoever has greater numerical weight in the legislature, through
votes or influence, has the greater legal power, regardless of what they
espouse.
Part II, section 13 of Verfassungslehre, "The Constitutional Concept of
Statute," describes how the parliament must be held in tow if mere majority-
generated, legislative statutes are not to undermine the legal substance of
the constitution (^139). The legislative administrators in the Reichstagwere
to be kept from striking back at the entity that granted them authority in the
first place, the originary democratic will {V, 143-6). As Neumann points
out, Schmitt is able to speak in the cautionary language of the American
constitutional practice of "inherent limitations upon the amending power,"
wherein extramajoritarian measures are required to alter a constitutional
core that is above mere statutes.50 But Maus demonstrates how this gives
Schmitt recourse to denounce all socially progressive change as unconstitu-
tional, because such provisions were not part of the original decision of the
constitution.51 Moreover, Schmitt's appeal to the presidency to combat
such legislative movement gives his constitutionalism not merely a conser-
vatively reactive but an energetically reactionary character. The parliament
may not act substantively against the original constitutional will, whereas the
president may act unlimitedly in supposed accord with it.
The Schmittian distinction between Verfassung and Verfassungsgesetz -
ultimately a distinction between spirit and letter of the law, however much
Schmitt would object to such a reduction - although seemingly rather ab-
stract, has dramatic institutional ramifications. This dichotomy can be
played out in many ways by Schmitt. For instance, when he declares, in
Verfassungslehre, that "the modern constitution rests on a combining and
50 See Neumann, "The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society" (1937), in The
Democratic and the Authoritarian State, pp. 5 3 - 4 .
51 Maus, Burgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus, p. 107.
236 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
52 PreuB, "The Critique of German Liberalism," Telos 71 (spring 1987): 99, emphasis added.
On this issue, see also PreuB, "Zum 95. Geburtstag von Carl Schmitt: Die latente Diktatur
in Verfassungsstaat," Tageszeitung (Jul. 12, 1983); and "Aktuelle Probleme einer linken
Verfassungstheorie," Prokla: Zeitschrift fur politische Oekonomie und sozialistishe Politik
(December 1985).
53 Consult the assessments of Schmitt's appraisal of the constitution's supposedly "com-
promised" character by his Weimar students: see Kirchheimer, "Weimar - and What
Then?" (1930), in Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer, ed. F. S.
Burin and K. L. Shell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 53-4; and
Neumann, "The Changing Function of Law," p. 50.
LAW 237
54 Holmes argues that Schmitt's account here is quite accurate and expresses exactly why the
separation of powers is effective; see 'The Constitution of Sovereignty in Jean Bodin," in
Passions and Constraint.
238 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
mentioned democratic basis that the state is an indivisible unity" {HV, 145).
This transhistorical, ontological definition is nevertheless incompatible with
the claim that a separation of powers would be appropriate at any point in
time. And as we have observed in previous chapters, when Schmitt resorts to
the transhistorical, he concomitantly resorts to a call for concrete domina-
tion as well, and this is the crux of the crisis works from the early thirties: a
revival of personal domination of a concrete people embodied in a thereby
legitimate president versus the abstract domination of impersonal, merely
legal statutes. Hence, Verfassungsgesetz versus Verfassung, and Reichstag versus
Reichsprdsident mean legality versus legitimacy.
In Legalitdt und Legitimitat, Schmitt is explicit from the outset that ab-
stract, impersonal domination has replaced domination by concrete per-
sons. He laments that power is wielded by "governing statutes" and no
longer by "men, authorities or magistrates" {LL, 264). "More correctly," he
adds, "the statutes do not govern, they are valid only as norms. Generally
there is no longer domination and sheer power [at all]. Whoever exercises
power and domination does so only 'on the basis of statutes' or 'in the name
of statutes.' He does not according to the situation make valid law valid"
{LL, 264). The absence of the personal element in applying the law that was
evident in Schmitt's early responses to Weber and most dramatically in
Political Theology are still apparent here but are now shaded a different hue.
There was a quasi-normative element in the early works regarding the posi-
tion of what is "human" in legal adjudication and an expressed desire to be
more honest about the personal will - collective will in a people or individ-
ual will in a judge or executive - than is the Kelsenian jurisprudence that
would hide the fact that it requires the personal for its own undertakings. In
Legalitdt und Legitimitat; the strategy is again much more pragmatic. As
Schmitt states on the very first page, "the contemporary domestic-state crisis
of Germany" lies with the "whole problematic of the concept of legality"
{LL, 263, emphasis added). This reminds us that to Schmitt's mind Ger-
many has an external state crisis as well and that the source of, as well as the
solution to, both state crises is in fact the same:
the source: class myth in the external form of the Soviet Union and in the
internal form of domestic parties;
the solution: a nationalist president.
Today the normative fiction of a closed legal system moves in striking and
emphatic opposition to a real, present and lawful will; that is today the decisive
opposition, not that of monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy or democracy, which
for the most part only obscure and mislead. In this we find the essence of our
state in a transformation, one which can be characterized for the present
moment as a "turn to the total state" with its unavoidable tendency toward
"planning" (as opposed to the previous century's tendency toward "freedom")
which seems today typically as the turn toward the administrative state . . . [in
which all aspects of government] are viewed as instruments. (LL, 266)
55 Schmitt again took up the issue of legality after the war, retaining his critique but ostensi-
bly refraining from his earlier-proposed authoritarian solution; see "Das Problem der
Legalitat" (1950), in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsdtze. For a different approach to a similar
problematic, see Ulrich K. PreuB, Legalitdt und Pluralismus: Beitrdge zum Verfassungsrecht der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973).
240 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
The essential presuppositions and the specific pathos of the legalistic statutory
conception are revealed as such. . . . The illusion develops that all is conceiv-
able, that a legal way and legal methods are open to radical and revolutionary
attempts, goals and movements, that they can achieve their goal without vio-
lence and overthrow, through a procedure that functions at the same time in
an orderly and fully "value-neutral" fashion. (LL, 270)
I will deal with this more elaborately in the next chapter's discussion of
pluralism and the state in Schmitt's theory, but here it helps emphasize the
mechanization and indeed mathematicization of the state that functions
under the positivist conception of the constitution or, as Schmitt at his most
adjectival describes it, "an absolutely 'neutral,' value and quality-free, con-
tentless, formalistic, functionalistic, conception of legality" (LL, 280).
By emphasizing mathematics and functionality, Schmitt makes the ex-
pression "Herrschaft des Gesetzes," which could legitimately signify "rule of
law," instead read "domination by statute." He ridicules the formulation
that was uncontroversial to the Weimar document's framers: "law = statute;
statute = the concurrence of the people's representatives according to state
rules" {LL, 276), by semantically divorcing the people's representatives
56 Schmitt, "Die Wendung zum totalen Staat" (1931), in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampfmit
Weimar- Genf Versailles: 19231939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940). An
account of this state of affairs that, in contrast to Schmitt's, seeks to preserve rather than
dispense with the democratic elements of a state-society relationship under welfare-state
conditions is Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde, "Die Bedeutung der Unterscheidung von
Staat und Gesellschaft im demokratischen Sozialstaat der Gegenwart" (1972), in Recht,
Staat, Freiheit: Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und Verfassungsgeschichte (Frankfurt
a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991).
LAW 241
[C] ertainly 66% is quantitatively more than 51%, but the concrete problem of
the constitution remains unapproached. The constitutionally theoretical
question aims at something else, namely, the central magnitude of the statu-
tory state, the legislator, the concept of statute and their legality. . . . Quan-
tification [of majorities] which are thought of as only quantitative qualifica-
tions could be in a negative sense a practical means of checking; however they
constitute neither a generally positive principle of fairness or reasonableness,
nor a specific constitutional viewpoint, nor are they particularly democratic.
{LL, 294-5)
So rare in fact that there has never been an authority like it - one that
combines perfect wisdom with perfect benevolence. And unless one's con-
244 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
57 Weber, for instance, well understood the limitations of plebiscites; see ES, 1455. Holmes
argues that the Madisonian scheme of limitations on democracy is actually more "democra-
tic" than the pure or direct theories of democracy associated with Rousseau and Jefferson;
see "Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy," in Passions and Constraint.
58 PreuB writes, "a democracy of the people actually assembled, acclaiming and complain-
ing, one directly identified with itself. . . . is an absurdly radical concept that expresses
nothing more than the people's powerlessness, whose acclamation only serves as the basis
of legitimation for an otherwise illegitimate political elite." "The German Critique of
Liberalism," p. 109; and also Legalitdt und Pluralismus. Despite Schmitt's rhetoric regard-
ing substantive democracy, we should not forget that - apropos of Chapter 4 - Schmitt's
"substantive" democracy is ineffectual democracy; and - apropos of Chapter 2 - it is the
formation of a European elite that is his main concern. As Kirchheimer remarked of his
Doktorvater along these lines, Schmitt's valorization of a politically diffuse popular sub-
stance, on the one hand, and his rejection of abstract norms of validity, on the other, leave
democracy either "unrealized or unjustified." See Kirchheimer and Nathan Leites, "Re-
marks on Carl Schmitt's Legalitdt und Legitimitdt,n in Politics, Law and Social Change, p. 186.
59 See "Politics as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed., H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 103.
60 Ibid., p. 113.
LAW 245
parties into the single office of the Reichsprdsident entails the proletarianiza-
tion of the nation as a whole - a soulless mass democracy. 61
Even taken on its own terms, Schmitt's theory of democracy is again open
to the criticism that it is as morally contentless as the Kelsenian liberalism it
criticizes. 62 Just as Kelsen cannot account for the moral substance of the
norms produced at the end of the constitutional process, Schmitt cannot
account for the moral substance of the will at the outset of his theory of
constitutionalism, except with the empty criteria of "the political":
Every existing political unity has its value and "existential justification" not in
the Tightness or usefulness of norms but solely in its existence as such. That
which exists as a political form, considered juridically, has value because it
exists. From this alone originates its "right to self-preservation," the presup-
position of any further consideration. It seeks ultimately to maintain its exis-
tence "in suo essepreserverare" It protects "its existence, its integrity, its security,
and its constitution" - all existential values. (V, 73)
61 A process that was already occurring and to which Schmitt-like fascist alternatives were a
response. See Siegfried Kracauer on "the proletarianization of the middle class" in his
analysis of the circle around the journal Die Tat, which included Schmitt: 'The Revolt of
the Middle Classes" (1931), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed., Thomas Y Levin
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 122.
62 Habermas and Maus both point out the "pseudopositivism" of Schmitt's antipositivism;
see "Dogmatism, Reason and Decision," and Burgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus, re-
spectively. See also Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Entscheidung: Eine Untersuchung ilber
Ernst Jilnger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1990).
246 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
63 See Scheuerman, Between the Exception and the Norm, pp. 71-80, 126-33. Scheuerman also
notes how Schmitt's refusal to engage in the anachronistic nostalgia for nineteenth-
century market capitalism, in marked contrast to one of his most influential devotees,
Friedrich Hayek, demonstrates that Schmitt is more theoretically sensitive to actual social
structures and industrial transformations. But it also illustrates exactly how he is more
politically dangerous through his willingness to abandon the normative liberal principles
to which Hayekian neoconservatives insist on clinging as they attempt to revive the sup-
posedly "free" market; see "The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,"
Constellations 4:2 (October 1997).
64 Cf. the essays by Friedrich Pollock of 1941: "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limita-
tions" and "Is National Socialism a New Order?" both reprinted in The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). On
the social-theoretical deficiencies and yet pervasive influence of Pollock's thesis, see
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation ofMarx's Critical Theory
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 90-120.
65 Through such a strategy did Schmitt acquire the title: "Lenin of the Bourgeoisie." Kra-
cauer points out in his analysis of the Tat circle how fascists like Schmitt generally practice
a bad-faith orientation toward liberalism: "The manic need to harass and chase liberalism
into the remote recesses allows one to conclude indisputably that this is, in psychoanalytic
terms, something like a symptom of repression. People pursue liberalism with such hatred
because it is something they discover within themselves. And indeed Die Tat unconsciously
contains so much of it that it spews forth from all sides. It will not allow itself to be hidden:
the liberalism turned away at the front gate is always graciously invited to enter through
the back door. And even if it slips in under a different name, there is no way to mistake it.
Its presence within a realm of thought hostile to it is, however, just further evidence of the
latter's powerlessness. . . . Thus, if Die Tat on the one hand is advocating a state that arises
through organic growth, yet on the other hand wants to achieve a kind of socialism by
means of a planned economy, it is aiming at something that is simply impossible. It throws
reason out of the temple of the Yolk's state and simultaneously invites it into the offices of
LAW 247
tion of twentieth-century socioeconomic realities into a more "stable" - that
is, reactionary - orientation by denouncing the residual ideology of the last
century's Kantian idealism is what drives the ever-escalating war between
Schmittian concreteness and Kelsenian abstractness throughout his Weimar
development.66
But if Schmitt accepts the twentieth-century necessity of state interven-
tion into society and the economy, how will he keep his state from interven-
ing in the manner that induces the development of what he characterizes in
pejoratively technical terms as the "total quantitative state?" How will he
theorize state intervention into society, state manipulation of socioeco-
nomic forces, such that the state retains its status as a "total qualitative state,"
more specifically, an exception-executing, presidential, sovereign state that
replaces the also situation-specific, legislative, welfare state and regulates
economic equilibrium instead of social inequality?67
To do so, he must purge every residue of liberal normativity, even that
which remains - in perhaps contradictory manner - as ethical justification
for the liberal Sozialstaat that supersedes the liberal Rechtsstaat, and replace
it with other criteria for state activity. At the base of Schmitt's new Staatslehre,
I will argue in the next chapter, is the attempt to replace the liberal princi-
ples of freedom or equality with the element of fear. Thus, Schmitt seeks to
formulate a mode of abstract domination that functions as if it were con-
crete domination but does not, as the latter so often does, require the state
to overextend itself into society and necessarily make available its tech-
niques and instruments of domination to partisans within society. Fear,
mythic fear, is the abstract entity that acts as if it were concrete repression,
that is, that keeps citizens, or in Schmitt's neo-Hobbesian terms, subjects, at
bay without touching them bodily on a regular basis. This strategy of state
restraint is guided not by normative, liberal principles of privacy or personal
the state economy. This is not one but two movements, and they are going in opposite
directions. The first, the primary movement, is the reaction against liberalism; the second,
which aims at a planned economy that can be realized only by means of rational organiza-
tion, marks the appearance of the principle of reason, which is all too reductively desig-
nated 'liberalist.'" "The Revolt of the Middle Classes," pp. 119, 122-3.
66 Ernst Fraenkel detected this strategy in Schmitt's jurisprudence; he notes how Schmitt
"stole from Hegel the tendency to use 'concreteness' as a weapon against 'abstraction.'
According to Hegel the principle of reason must be conceived as concrete in order that
true freedom may come to rule. Hegel characterizes the school of thought which clings to
abstraction as liberalism and emphasizes that the concrete is always victorious against the
abstract and that the abstract always becomes bankrupt against the concrete." The Dual
State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (1941), trans. E. A. Shils (New York: Oc-
tagon Books, 1969), p. 143.
67 See Schmitt's Unabhdngig der Richter: Gleichheit vor dem Gesetz und Gewdhrleistung des Pri-
vateigentums nach der Weimarer Verfassung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1926).
248 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
68 See Schmitt, Staat, Bewegnung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg:
Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934).
THE STATE
In this chapter, I discuss why Schmitt felt the need to emphasize this
supposed distinction or opposition in the work of the great seventeenth-
century English political theorist, particularly in his famous Concept of the
Political As Hobbes remarked, "The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear"
i Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), p. 34.
249
25O LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
(I, 14) ,2 and Schmitt recognizes something vital, substantive, and funda-
mentally human in Hobbes's grounding of the state in the fear of death. On
the eve of Weimar's collapse, Schmitt, with the intellectual aid of a young
admirer named Leo Strauss, sought to retrieve this primal source of political
order and free it from the elements that Hobbes himself had found neces-
sary to employ to construct a state on this foundation: natural science and
technology. Schmitt and Strauss saw in these latter elements the very cause
of the breakdown or the "neutralization" of what they were intended to help
build, the modern state. The particular sociopolitical situation of Weimar -
violence exercised by private groups, a widespread perception of technol-
ogy as a "runaway" phenomenon, and so on - rendered it a critical moment
to reintroduce the issue of fear and the issue of science and consequently to
reformulate Hobbes and the intellectual foundation of the state. I suggest,
however, that the issues of fear, violence, technology, and the state could not
be so easily distinguished within Hobbes's thought, and, in light of the
emergence of National Socialism, Schmitt felt compelled in The Leviathan in
The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes either to qualify significantly or abandon
completely this approach to Hobbes - in retrospect, an approach with
ominous implications.3
2 All references to Hobbes are from the English version of Leviathan, with book and chapter
citations appearing bracketed within the text.
3 This chapter differs from the studies by Strauss disciples, such as Heinrich Meier, Carl
Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995); and Susan Shell, "Meier on Strauss and Schmitt," Review of Politics
53:1 (winter 1991); as well as from that of Strauss critic John Gunnell, "Strauss before
Straussianism: The Weimar Conversation," Review of Politics 52:1 (winter 1990), in that my
interest is primarily with Schmitt as participant and with Hobbes as subject of this
"dialogue."
4 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1976). References are to the 1932 edition, cited as CP Schmitt's thesis was
originally put forth in an article of the same title in 1927, and subsequently in a new version
of the book in 1933. See Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, on the differences among the
editions.
T H E STATE 251
Insofar as it is not derived from other criteria, the antithesis of friend and
enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses:
good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere,
and so on. In any event it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new
domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any
combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these. (CP, 26)
The language of "friend" and "enemy" is quite prevalent in Leviathan, for instance, "when
either [a group of people] have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an
enemy, is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their
interests dissolve, and fall again into a war among themselves" (II, 17, emphasis added).
The existence of such phenomena as the "balance of power" is often used to counter
Hobbes's equation of the realm of international relations with the "state of nature."
252 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
all legitimate and normative illusions with which men like to deceive them-
selves regarding political realities in periods of untroubled security vanish. If
within the state there are organized parties capable of according their mem-
bers more protection than the state, then the latter becomes at best an annex
of such parties, and the individual citizen knows whom he has to obey. (CP, 52)
This is quite an apt description of Weimar Germany during its crisis years.
Schmitt sees in the context of Hobbes's thought a parallel with his own and,
relatedly, a parallel in their projects. In Leviathan, Hobbes sought "to instill
in man again 'the mutual relation between Protection and Obedience'"
(CP, 52) and so forestall the strife and chaos that arises when armed autono-
mous groups confront each other. This is not far removed from Schmitt's
own intentions.8 The "exceptional" situation of civil war reveals normally
concealed political realities, such as human behavior in a "state of nature":
"In it, states exist among themselves in a condition of continual danger, and
their acting subjects are evil for precisely the same reasons as animals who
are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy)" (CP, 59).
Therefore, argues Schmitt, all "genuine" political theories, that is, those
that have observed the normally concealed "political realities," presuppose
"man to be evil," meaning "dangerous and dynamic" (CP, 61).
7 Schmitt's debt to Hobbes is touched on in many commentaries; see Helmut Rumpf, Carl
Schmitt und Thomas Hobbes: Ideelle Beziehungen und aktuelle Bedeutung mit einer Abhandlung
liber: DieFriihschriften Carl Schmitts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1972); Joseph Bendersky,
Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); David J.
Levy, "The Relevance of Carl Schmitt," The World and I (March 1987); Herfried Munkler,
"Carl Schmitt und Thomas Hobbes," Neue Politische Literatur 29 (1984); George Schwab,
The Challenge of the Exception (Westport: Greenwood, 1989); Paul Edward Gottfried, Carl
Schmitt: Politics and Theory (Westport: Greenwood, 1990); Stephen Holmes, "Carl Schmitt:
The Debility of Liberalism," in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Andrew Barash, "Hobbes, Carl Schmitt et les apories du
decisionnisme politique," Les Temps Modernes (August-September 1993); Gershon Weiler,
From Absolutism to Totalitarianism: Carl Schmitt on Thomas Hobbes (Durango: Hrllowbrook
Press, 1994). On the place of Schmitt's thesis in Western political thought in general, see
Bernard Willms, "Politics as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political and the Tradi-
tion of European Political Thought," History of European Ideas 13:4 (1991).
8 As Meier perceptively notes, Schmitt's argument comes to focus more on civil war and an
impending decline of liberalism in the 1932 book, revised in the midst of Weimar's most
dramatic period of crisis, than he did in the 1927 essay, which was written during the
relative calm of the Republic's middle period of the mid twenties. See Carl Schmitt and Leo
Strauss, pp. 21-5.
THE STATE 253
Schmitt thus shares with Hobbes not only a similar historical context but
a similar outlook on humanity as well. What are the ramifications of this?
This particular outlook on humanity offers the way out of the problems of
the state of nature, civil war, or impending civil war. Regarding the "gen-
uine" political philosophers who take the view that the human being is
essentially dangerous, Schmitt writes, "their realism can frighten men in
need of security" (CP, 65, emphasis added). This is precisely the point.
Schmitt recognizes, as did Hobbes, that by frightening people one can best
"instill" in them that principle, "the cogito ergo sum of the state," protego ergo
obligo [protection therefore obedience] (CP, 52). In other words, fear is the
source of political order. Human beings once confronted with the prospect
of their own dangerousness will be terrified into the arms of authority.
Thus, "For Hobbes, truly a powerful and systematic political thinker, the
pessimistic conception of man is the elementary presupposition of a specific
system of political thought" (CP, 65). But "systematic" does not mean for
Schmitt "scientific" or "technical." Technology has helped foster the liberal
conception of man that assumes that with wealth and abundance human-
ity's dangerousness can be ameliorated, and hence blinds humanity to the
eternal reality of "the political" (CP, 61). Technology, according to Schmitt,
as we know from Chapter 2, has facilitated the "neutralization" of the state
and the European order of states, again concealing the nature of "the
political." Schmitt chides Eduard Spranger for taking "too technical" a
perspective on human nature, for viewing it in light of "the tactical manip-
ulation of instinctive drives" (CP, 59). Hobbes's insight, on the contrary, is
neither "the product of a frightful and disquieting fantasy nor of a philoso-
phy based on free competition by a bourgeois society in its first stage . . . but
is the fundamental presupposition of a specific political philosophy" (CP,
65). Schmitt's task then is to elaborate on Hobbes's view of humanity and
revive the fear that is characteristic of man's natural condition in three ways:
(1) by demonstrating the substantive affinity between his concept of the
political and Hobbes's state of nature, (2) by making clear the ever-present
possibility of a return to that situation in the form of civil war, and (3) by
convincing individuals - partisans and nonpartisans alike - that only a state
with a monopoly on decisions regarding what is "political" can guarantee
peace and security. He must do all of this while avoiding the elements of
natural science and technology, often associated with Hobbes, that under-
mined this project in the first place.9
9 Ingeborg Maus detects the opposition between "terror" and "technocratic rationality" in
Schmitt's state theory; see Bilrgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funktion und
254 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
aktuellen Wirkung der Theorie Carl Schmitts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), p. 125.
Pasquale Pasquino, "Hobbes: Natural Right, Absolutism, and Political Obligation," Ap-
proches Cognitives Du Social 90158 (September 1990): 9.
Ibid.
T H E STATE 255
the pluralist theories of the early twentieth century a justification for just
such behavior (CP, 52) and, like Hobbes, evaluates the outcome as state
vulnerability both domestically and with regard to foreign powers:
a plurality of moral ties and duties, a "plurality of loyalties" through which the
pluralist division becomes increasingly stronger and more destabilizing, and
the solidity of a political unity becomes increasingly endangered. . . . [This]
12 See Eve Rosenhaft, "Working-Class Life and Working-Class Politics: Communists, Nazis,
and the State Battle for the Streets of Berlin 1928-1932," in Social Change and Political
Development in Weimar Germany, ed. Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1981), pp. 207-40, for a compelling account of this state of affairs.
256 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
destroys respect for the constitution and transforms the basis of the constitu-
tion into an uncertain terrain embattled from many sides.13
If the state becomes a pluralist party state, its unity can be maintained only as
long as two or more parties recognize common premises. The unity then lies
in the particular authority of a constitution recognized by all parties whereby
the common basis must unequivocally be respected. The ethic of the state
then becomes the ethic of the constitution. The stability, singularity of mean-
ing, and authority of the constitution can then form a truly real unity. But if
the constitution becomes nothing more than the mere rules of the game and
its ethic degenerates into one of fair play then the unity is ultimately what the
pluralists would make of it - merely a conglomerate of the changing appropri-
ations by heterogeneous groups.14
13 Schmitt, "Die Wendung zum totalen Staat" (1931), in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampfmit
Weimar- Genf- Versailles: 19231939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), pp.
156-7.
14 Schmitt, "Staatsethik und pluralistisher Staat" (1930), in Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 144-
5-
15 Pasquale Pasquino, "Hobbes On the Natural Condition of Mankind" (part 1 of the En-
glish manuscript of 'Thomas Hobbes: la rationalite de 1' obeissance a la loi, La pensee
politique [spring 1994]), p. 3. Setting aside the view that the state of nature is a mere
intellectual enterprise, Pasquino prefers to employ the term "subtraction" to describe it
rather than "abstraction," for the state of nature is for Hobbes a stripping away from the
empirical world rather than the product of imagination. There is of course the famous
THE STATE 257
passage in which Hobbes asserts how close the "natural condition" really is to contempo-
rary reality, by reminding his readers that they arm themselves when traveling, bolt their
doors at night, and lock their chests even when at home (I, 13).
16 Pasquino, "Hobbes on the Natural Condition," p. 6.
17 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p.
125.
258 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
18 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cummings (New
York: Continuum, 1989); Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1946) and Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Philip
Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); and Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans.
Robert Wallace, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
19 Leo Strauss's "Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begrijf des Politischen" was originally
published in Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67:6 (August-September 1932).
An English translation by E. M. Sinclair appears in the English edition of The Concept of the
Political. Therefore, I will also cite Strauss's essay as CP.
T H E STATE 259
Fear is not only alarm and flight, but also distrust, suspicion, caution, care lest
one fear. Now it is not death in itself that can be avoided, but only death by
violence, which is the greatest of possible evils. For life itself can be of such
misery that death comes to be ranked with the good. In the final instance what
is of primary concern is ensuring the continuance of life in the sense of
ensuring defense against other men. Concern with self-protection is the fun-
damental consideration, the one most fully in accord with the human situa-
tion. . . . The fear of death, the fear of death by violence, is [for Hobbes] the
source of all right, the primary basis of natural right.20
Since we understand by 'culture' above all the culture of human nature, the
presupposition of culture is, above all, human nature, and since man is by
nature an animal sociale, the human nature underlying culture is the natural
living together of men, i.e., the mode in which man - prior to culture -
behaves towards other men. The term for the natural living together thus
20 Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965), p.
92.
21 Schmitt, "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations" (1929), trans. Matthias
Konzett and John P. McCormick, Telos 96 (Summer 1993).
L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
understood is the status naturalis. One may therefore say, the foundation of
culture is the status naturalis. (CP, 87)
Liberalism has not killed the political, but merely killed understanding of the
political, and sincerity regarding the political. To clear the obfuscation of
reality which liberalism has caused, the political must be brought out and
shown to be completely undeniable. Liberalism is responsible for having
covered over the political, and the political must once again be brought to
light, if the question of the state is to be put in full seriousness. (CP, 82~3)22
Strauss and Schmitt agree that liberalism has put the state into crisis by
"obfuscating" the political, that the specter of the state of nature must be
made apparent - with all the fear that accompanies it - and that "a different
system" must be made the basis of the state "that does not negate the
political, but brings the political into full recognition" (CP, 83). However, it
is on the question of how to found this "different system" that the student
challenges the master. The figure of Hobbes again proves central to the
disagreement.
On the issue of how one cultivates nature - how the state is founded or
how culture is developed - Strauss identifies two ways of proceeding. The
first "means culture develops the natural disposition; it is careful cultivation
of nature - whether of the soil or of the human mind; in this it obeys the
22 Several years later, in 1939, Walter Benjamin observed that one of the effects of
technology - which Schmitt and Strauss in these works associate explicidy with liberalism -
is to render a person "no longer capable of telling his proven friend from his mortal
enemy." "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken, 1968), p. 168. Whether Benjamin, who was quite familiar with Schmitt's work,
is here explicitly alluding to "the political" is not clear.
THE STATE 261
indications that nature itself gives" (CP, 86). Strauss identifies the second
kind of cultivation with Bacon: "[CJulture is not so much faithful cultivation
of nature as a harsh and cunning fight against nature" (CP, 87). This sec-
ond, "specifically modern conception of nature" can also be located in
Hobbes, according to Strauss, a conception that associates culture with "a
disciplining of human will, as the opposite of the status naturalis" (CP, 87). In
terms of human nature, this means that Hobbes not only held the "pessimis-
tic" view of humanity as "dangerous" and "dynamic" that Schmitt earlier
identifies but simultaneously a view of humanity as educable, prudent, and
capable of self-control for the sake of rational self-interest. This view fuels
the "autonomy" theory of society and gives it the justification for demanding
some degree of the subjectivity addressed in the previous section and, more-
over, the justification for holding leverage against the state. Citizens must be
allowed to rule themselves in some sense, and society must be allowed to
remain free of the state to some degree. The first view of cultivation with
regard to human nature put forth by Strauss would, on the contrary, in line
with the empirical reality of the state of nature, deem humanity as "morally
depraved" and simply and unequivocally in "need of being ruled" (CP, 97).
The first definition would hence rule out any "autonomy" or "subjectivity"
for individuals, society, or culture, which instead must be kept under the
tight control of the state. Strauss faults Schmitt, following Hobbes, for not
being truly and exclusively pessimistic, for not identifying this more extreme
dangerousness of humanity.
In his book on Spinoza, Strauss explained how the "disciplining of hu-
man will," the second and less pessimistic type of cultivation of human
nature prescribed by Hobbes, necessarily requires the domination of nature
in general: "Physics," which Strauss identifies explicitly with "technology,"
Instead of adopting the first kind of cultivation that "obeys the indica-
tions that nature itself gives" (which observes human beings in the state of
nature, recognizes them as incapable of ruling themselves, and governs
them accordingly), Hobbes opts for the other kind of cultivation that even-
tually distracts human beings from their own nature by the conquest of
outer nature, by providing for their potential happiness with the promise of
a commodious life. The direct domination of humanity, suggested by "an-
thropology," is more "natural" than the direct domination of external na-
ture, for the latter, relying more explicitly on "physics," is actually "the harsh
and cunning fight against nature" described earlier. According to Strauss,
Hobbes chooses "physics" over "anthropology," and hence ultimately "tech-
nology" over "political philosophy." Hobbes employs technology to neutral-
ize precisely those characteristics that make humans dangerous, that create
the likelihood of violent death, and emphasizes that characteristic that
makes man capable of improvement, namely, reason:
Reason, the provident outlook on the future, thus justifies the striving after
power, possessions, gain, wealth, since these provide the means to gratify the
underlying desire for pleasures of the senses. Reason does not justify, but
indeed refutes, all striving after reputation, honor, fame: in a word and that
word used in the sense applied by Hobbes, vanity. . . . The legitimate striving
after pleasure is sublated into striving after power. What is condemned is the
striving after reputation. Philosophy (or more accurately physics as distinct
from anthropology) is to be understood as arising from the striving after
power: scientia propterpotentiam. Its aim is cultivation, the cultivation of nature.
What nature offers to man without supplementary activity on the part of man
is sufficient for no more than a life of penury. So that life may become more
comfortable, human exertion is required, and the regulation of unregulated
nature. . . . The purpose pursued by science is conquest over nature.24
but not unjustly" (CP, 88). It is precisely the reservation of such a right -
subjectively determined by an individual's reason - regarding how and
when and in what capacity one's life can be employed, that becomes a
powerful weapon against the state. The normative consequences of
Hobbes's grant of subjectivity (however narrow) to individuals for the ques-
tion of what is right retains no real force, according to Strauss. Subjective
freedom is maintained "at the price of the meaning of human life, for . . .
when man abandons the task of raising the question regarding what is right,
and when man abandons this question, he abandons his humanity" (CP,
101). Schmitt, to the extent that he models himself on Hobbes, betrays the
fact that he is "under the spell" of the liberalism he criticizes. He defines his
"political" as beyond objective normative standards, by defining it as if it
were neutral (CP, 103). Schmitt's depiction of "the political" is hence re-
duced to a subjective interpretation characteristic of "the individualistic-
liberal society" he wishes to replace (CP, 102). According to Strauss,
Schmitt's project, as it stands, is hence "provisional," for it is "forced to make
use of liberal elements" (CP, 83). Schmitt's critique "is detained on the
plane created by liberalism. . . . [H]is critique of liberalism takes place
within the horizon of liberalism" (CP, 104-5). 25 Unlike liberals, Schmitt
advocates direct rule by the state over the lives of individuals; however, his
view is much like liberalism's to the extent that he offers no account of the
substance of that domination or the ends to which it is put besides the
preservation of the lives of individuals. But at this point in his career, Strauss
himself is less than fully forthcoming on what would be the substance of
such nonliberal state rule. 26
25 Strauss's assessment that Schmitt's project remains "within the horizon of liberalism" is
sometimes exaggerated in an attempt to defend Schmitt's Weimar work from charges of
latent Nazism. Yet just because Schmitt's work is not latently Nazi does not mean that it is
not authoritarian or antiliberal. Strauss's comments can be seen to emphasize the point
that Schmitt's theoretical shortcomings in his attack on liberalism are not for lack of
trying; the intent and the attempt are quite apparent.
26 In Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Meier suggests that Schmitt covertly sought the substance of
such a prospective nonliberal regime in theology. This seems to be an unlikely possibility
in Schmitt's case at this particular point given the diminished role of religion in his
thought after his excommunication in 1926, something of which Meier makes no note. As
I discussed in Chapters 1,2, and 4, Roman Catholicism did serve as a potential source of
political authority for the Schmitt of the early twenties. There is also reason to question
Meier's claim that Strauss had already turned to classical philosophy as a substantively
normative standpoint before his emigration. See Volker Reinecke and Jonathan Uhlaner,
"The Problem of Leo Strauss: Religion, Philosophy and Politics," Graduate Faculty Philoso-
phy Journal 16:1 (1992). However, as I will argue, to whatever extent Meier's claim is
correct about the two authors' respective moral resuppositions, the result of the positive
264 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
isolates Hobbes's thought from the forces of neutralization that will under-
mine it: Once one adequately understands the basis of politics as fear of
violent death, a fear based not on a somewhat dangerous, yet improvable
and educable human nature but simply on an infinitely dangerous human
nature, one no longer has any need for science. Once one corrects the
mistakes of Hobbes's liberal successors, who take up the tasks of allowing
citizens to rule themselves by providing them with the products of the
conquest of nature and allaying their fears by showing them the orderliness
of nature, one can set up a state more in accord with the natural condition
of humanity, more in accord with "the political." The logical outcome of
Strauss's turning of Schmitt's view of humanity to one that views it simply as
in need of "being ruled" is a theory of state that consistently instills in
citizens the fear of the "human situation" by constantly reminding them of
its proximity. If this is to be achieved without technology, without the appa-
ratus of physical domination, something else must hold sway.28
The myth of the state - the Leviathan, the horrible sea monster after
which Hobbes named his greatest work on the state - must invoke in a
uniform and controlled manner the terror that each citizen felt individually
and overwhelmingly in the state of nature. Myth is the element that can
maintain the state's separation from society while keeping it in check. Thus,
for the state to keep from integrating too extensively into society and hence
weakening itself in the manner discussed in the previous chapter, myth must
hold sway.29 Despite the mythic title of Leviathan, Hobbes was to emphasize
myth more heavily in his later writings. In his commentary on Hobbes's
Behemoth, Stephen Holmes describes how Hobbes came to realize that "the
ultimate source of political authority is not coercion of the body, but captiva-
tion of the mind."30 It is to this issue in Hobbes that Strauss's work points
and to which Schmitt himself turns in his later work on Hobbes, although,
as we will see, his attitude toward the project as a whole has become signifi-
cantly less sanguine.
28 For a more detailed account of the relationship of Strauss's book on Hobbes to Schmitt's
Weimar project, see my "Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the
Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany," Political Theory 22:4
(November 1994): 631-6.
29 It is interesting that the two historians of modern myth who do deal with Hobbes at all,
Cassirer and Blumenberg, focus solely on the myth of the state of nature and not that of
the Leviathan.
30 Stephen Holmes, introduction, to Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. xi. Cf. George Kateb, "Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics,"
Political Theory 17:3 (August 1989).
266 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
31 See Schmitt, "Der MiBbrauch der Legalitat," Tdgliche Rundschau (Jul. 19, 1932).
32 Schmitt was either completely silent about, or actively involved in, Hans Kelsen's expul-
sion from the Law Faculty at Cologne. Kelsen was decisive in securing Schmitt's own
position there only months before. See Klaus Gunther, "Hans Kelsen (1881-1973): Das
nuchterne Pathos der Demokratie," in StreitbareJuristen:EineAndere Tradition, ed. Thomas
Blanke et al. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1988), p. 367; Frank Golczewski, Kolner Univer-
sitdtslehrer und der Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Bohlau, 1988), p. 117; and Hans Meyer,
EinDeutscher aufWiderruf: Erinnerungen, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 144.
33 See, for instance, Schmitt, "Das Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich,"
Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung 38 (1933); Staat, Bewegnung, Volk: Die Dreigleiderung der politischen
Einheit (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934); and Ueber der drei Arten des Re-
chtsxvissenschaftlichen Denkens (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934).
THE STATE 267
the absurdly horrifying title "The Fiihrer Protects the Law."34 This is really
all that needs to be said about Carl Schmitt the man and his involvement
with National Socialism. But there is actually more: Tantalized by the favors
of such power-wielding party dignitaries as Hermann Goring and Hans
Frank, Schmitt accepted the position of chief counselor of Prussia and
sought to become the preeminent architect of National Socialist law.35
But by 1936, Schmitt's academic rivals were able to use his unorthodox
National Socialism, his past connection with political Catholicism, his ear-
lier close associations with Jews, and his previous denunciations of the party
to arouse the suspicions of the SS.36 Apparendy fearing for his life as a result
of the ensuing investigation, he unofficially retired, maintaining his posi-
tion in Berlin but choosing to publish essays exclusively focused on issues in
the less controversial realm of international affairs.37
It is a curiosity of the postwar German intellectual scene that Schmitt is
remembered as the legal theorist of National Socialism, when he actually
failed in his attempt to attain such a status. Others ultimately better served
National Socialism in this capacity than Schmitt and still managed to inte-
grate themselves rather easily into the academic milieu of the Federal Re-
public after the war by undergoing the "de-Nazification" process that
Schmitt himself spurned. 38 This refusal to publicly recant his devotion to
34 Schmitt, "Der Fiihrer schiitzt das Recht," in Positionen und Begriffe. To whatever extent this
is a "defense" of Schmitt, he more explicitly condones eliminating the paramilitary threats
to Hitler's power than the execution of civilians murdered during the purge.
35 On the fierce competition to become the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich," see Peter C.
Caldwell, "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter,
and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1933-1937/' Cardozo Law Review 16:2
(December 1994); and Bernd Ruthers, Entartetes Recht: Rechtslehren und Kronjuristen im
Dritten Reich (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988).
36 Raphael Gross critically examines the exact extent of Schmitt's fall from grace with the
party, in "Politische Polykratie 1936: Die legendenumwobene SD-Akte Carl Schmitt," Tel
Aviver Jahrbuch far deutsche Geschichte 23 (1994).
37 Schmitt's English and German biographies chronicle his involvement with National So-
cialism; see Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich; and Paul Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine
Biographie (Berlin: Propylaen, 1993). However, there are dissenters against Bendersky's
and Noack's presentations; see, Stephen Holmes, "Review: Theorist for the Reich," American
Political Science Review 77:4 (December 1983); and Bernd Ruthers, "Wer war Carl Schmitt?
Bausteine zu einer Biographie," Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 27 (July 1994). See also
Ruthers, Carl Schmitt im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft als Zeitgeist-Verstdrkung? (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1989). A balanced and accessible account of Schmitt's life and career is offered by
Manfred H. Wiegandt, 'The Alleged Unaccountability of the Academic: A Biographical
Sketch of Carl Schmitt," Cardozo Law Review 16 (1995).
38 Ulrich K. PreuB makes this point quite articulately; see "Political Order and Democracy:
Carl Schmitt and His Influence," in Social System, Rationality and Revolution, ed. L. Nowak
and M. Paprzycki (Rodopi: Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the
268 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
the Third Reich may account for both his identification as the preeminent
Nazi lawyer, by his critics, and as one of the very few authentic intellectual
figures in his generation, by both his devotees and even some of his
detractors.39
A related issue that ought to be addressed even more carefully than that
of Schmitt's Nazism is his anti-Semitism. There are two main interpreta-
tions, with hard-liners on both sides. The first claims that Schmitt's work was
always anti-Semitic and that his antipathy to Jews simply became more ex-
plicit when he joined the Nazis. The second claims that Schmitt only oppor-
tunistically took up anti-Semitism initially to ingratiate himself with, and
later to protect himself from, the party.40 What cannot be challenged is the
fact of Schmitt's active anti-Semitism in the Third Reich: most notoriously
exemplified by his organizing and hosting a conference called "German
Jurisprudence at War with the Jewish Spirit," in 1936.41
The problem with the first argument asserting Schmitt's Weimar anti-
Semitism is that there is little or no textual evidence to support it. On the
basis of what I have presented in this book, during the late teens and most of
the twenties, Schmitt seems to be most personally preoccupied by Protes-
tantism and most politically preoccupied by socialism. Indeed, rather than
characterize the latter as part of some 'Jewish conspiracy" in the manner of
many right-wing anti-Semites, Schmitt rather idiosyncratically identifies so-
cialism's external manifestation in the Soviet Union with secularized East-
ern Orthodox Christianity!42 Whether he identified German socialism with
Humanities 33 [1993]), p. 15. Reinhard Mehring lists Otto Koellreutter, Werner Best,
and Reinhard Hohn as examples of those who "better served National Socialism ideologi-
cally." See Carl Schmitt: ZurEinfuhrung (Hamburg: Junius, 1992), p. 103.
39 As Jiirgen Habermas has recently suggested; see "Das Bedurfnis nach deutschen Kon-
tinuitaten," Die Zeit (Dec. 3, 1993). See also Theo Rasehorn, "Der Kleinbiirger als pol-
itischer Ideologe: Zur Entmythologisierung von Carl Schmitt," Die Neue Gesellschaft,
Frankfurter Hefte (1986).
40 As representatives of these two respective positions, see Holmes, "Carl Schmitt: The
Debility of Liberalism," p. 50; and Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich, pp. 281-2.
41 Schmitt, "Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jiidischen Geist,"
Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung 20 (Oct. 15, 1936). See Holmes, "Carl Schmitt: The Debility of
Liberalism," pp. 38-9; and Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception, pp. 135-6, for accounts
of Schmitt's vitriolic attacks on Jewish lawyers at this conference.
42 Recall the discussions of PoliticalForm in Chapters 2 and 4: Schmitt considers Dostoyevsky
as much as Trotsky as the source of Soviet Russia's dangerousness, and he squarely and
singularly places the blame for the corruption of public order at the expense of private
belief on Protestants, an indictment he will transfer over to Jews in his National Socialist
work, as we will observe. See Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), trans. G. L.
Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), respectively, pp. 27, 32, 36 and 10,11, 20, 28;
hereafter cited as RC, and referred to as Political Form.
THE STATE 269
Jews is certainly not explicit in his writings, whereas the call for Western
socialists, liberals, and conservatives -Jews and non-Jews alike - to unite as
Europeans against the Soviet threat in the East is in fact explicit. 43
Moreover, it was the Protestant establishment in Germany, not Jews, who
in Schmitt's experience had kept him out of the better law schools. There
are indeed traces of resentment against Protestants whose prejudice con-
fined, in Schmitt's own estimation, the greatest legal mind in Germany to a
position in a business school.44 Did Schmitt's excommunication by the
Catholic Church in 1926 change his theological orientation such that Juda-
ism replaced Protestantism as his cultural bete noire'? Perhaps, but if so it does
not manifest itself in the texts written between 1926 and 1933.45
Furthermore, at a time when anti-Semitism was rather freely expressed,
particularly on the Right, and especially by his own acquaintances, such as
Catholics like Hugo Ball and Protestants like Werner Sombart and Wilhelm
Stapel, why did Schmitt refrain from participating in such displays if he in
fact hated Jews during the twenties?46 A final observation against the "life-
long anti-Semitism" thesis is the apparent fact that Schmitt's attacks on Jews
after 1933 seem to begin and then intensify only as he himself comes under
increasing assault from enemies within the party, particularly the SS.47
On the other hand, the problem with the "opportunistic anti-Semitism"
thesis is the fact that after the war Schmitt did not give up the fear and
43 iJC, 36-9.
44 On Schmitt's career at the Handelshochschule Berlin, see Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie,
pp. 97-102; and Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theoristfor the Reich, pp. 107-8. Schmitt probably
would not have attained even this position without the help of liberal lawyer Moritz Julius
Bonn, who was a Jew.
45 I would like to refrain as much as possible from psychologizing about Schmitt, as he has
been the subject of some rather bizarre analyses along these lines. An example that
focuses extensively on anti-Semitism is the work of Nicolaus Sombart, which is, however,
problematic in its vulgar deployment of psychoanalysis and its questionable establishment
of Schmitt, a paranoid post-Kulturkampf Catholic, as the paradigmatic example of the
"German man" in a Germany still dominated in no small way by Prussia. See Die deutschen
Manner und ihre Feinde: Carl Schmitt - ein deutsches Schicksal zxvischen Mdnnerbund und Ma-
triarchatsmythos (Munich: Hanser, 1991), and Jugend in Berlin, 1933-43: ein Bericht (Frank-
furt a. M.: Fischer, 1991). On the predicament of Catholics in a unified Germany, see
Helen Lovell Evans, The German Center Party, 1870-1933: A Study in Political Catholicism
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1981). Sombart is also unhelpful in determining
Schmitt's attitude toward Jews before 1933.
46 On the importance of Christianity in promoting anti-Semitism in Germany, see Central
European History 27:3 (August 1994), Symposium: Christian Religion and Anti-Semitism in
Modern German History.
47 A claim made most strongly by Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theoristfor the Reich, pp. 2 81 - 2; and
Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception, pp. 135-6; but not necessarily refuted by Ruthers,
Carl Schmitt im Dritten Reich, pp. 81-95. See also, Gross, "Politische Polykratie, 1936."
27O LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
hatred of the Jews that he expressed for purportedly cosmetic reasons un-
der National Socialism. His diary, written well after he would any longer
need to abide by a party line, is filled with anti-Semitic expressions, perhaps
the most unnerving of which reads as follows: 'Verily, the assimilated Jew is
the true enemy."48 There is some evidence that Schmitt's postwar attitude
toward Jews stems from his perception that his former students, many of
whom fled Germany because they were Jews, had betrayed him by encourag-
ing his fall from grace with the Nazis, by disseminating within the Reich
information unfavorable to him. Apparently, materials were smuggled into,
and distributed throughout, Germany that depicted Schmitt as a former
Nazi critic, a still-faithful Catholic, a Hobbesian, and a Jew lover - again, all
qualities incompatible with orthodox National Socialism.49 That Schmitt
managed to hold a grudge against people who threatened his career and
supposed security while he endorsed a regime that threatened their very
existence speaks as much about Schmitt's hubris as it does about his anti-
Semitism. Nevertheless, the fact that he left behind as his final thoughts on
the Jewish question the despicable sentiments expressed in his postwar diary
and not instead some attempt at an apology for, or at least a retraction of, his
National Socialist words and deeds ultimately necessitates classifying him as
an anti-Semite and a figure who must be held to some degree culpable in
the Third Reich's destruction of European Jewry.
48 Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufaeichnungen derjahre 194 751 (Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 18.
See the discussions of the anti-Semitism of this volume by Mehring, in Carl Schmitt: Zur
Einfuhrung, and Heinrich Meier, "The Philosopher as Enemy: On Carl Schmitt's Glos-
sarium," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 17:1-2 (1994). Raphael Gross analyzes the
relationship of anti-Semitism to Schmitt's post-Weimar work in "Carl Schmitts 'Nomos'
und die 'Juden,'" Merkur47:5 (May 1993).
49 The main figures include Waldemar Gurian and Otto Kirchheimer, who smuggled litera-
ture subversive to the regime under Schmitt's auspices, thus embarrassing their former
teacher. See Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich, pp. 223-6; and Manfred Lauer-
man, "Exkurs Carl Schmitt 1936," in Die Autonomie des Politischen: Carl Schmitts Kampfum
einen beschddigten Begriff, ed. Hans-Georg Flickinger (Wein: VCH Acta humaniora, 1990).
50 Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines pol-
itischen Symbols ([1938] Cologne: Klett-Cotta, 1982). English renderings are from the
translation by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas
Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), cited hereaf-
ter as L. Schmitt had originally formulated much of the argument of the book, particu-
THE STATE 271
[The Leviathan is] the deus mortalis . . . who, because of the fright that his
power evokes, imposes peace on everyone. (L, 19)
The starting point of Hobbes' construction of the state is fear of the state of
nature; the goal and terminus is the security of the civil, the stately condi-
tion. . . . The terror of the state of nature drives anguished individuals to
come together; their fear rises to an extreme; a spark of reason flashes and
suddenly there stands in front of them a new god. (L, 31)
Fear brings atomized individuals together [and] a consensus emerges about
the necessity of submitting to the strongest power. (L, 33)
Schmitt observes that for Hobbes there are three images of this strongest
power, three Leviathans, in the book of that name: the mythical monster,
the representative person, and the machine (L, 19). Schmitt's thesis is that
Leviathan as mythical monster, or even as representative person - images
that can sufficiently keep humanity peaceably in awe - historically becomes
superseded by Leviathan the machine, which is eventually viewed as a mere
tool to be used by various groups of citizens (L, 35). In other words, Schmitt
admits that the Weimar attempt to completely divorce the "mechanistic"
from the "vital" in Hobbes has proven to be historically impossible. In the
Leviathan book, we still find Schmitt defending Hobbes against those who
would interpret him "superficially" as strictly a "rationalist, mechanist, sen-
sualist, individualist" {L, 11). However, Schmitt is more forthright in admit-
ting that these elements, particularly the mechanistic, are present (L, 19),
even if they did not initially dominate Hobbes's theory as a whole. 51
larly its emphasis on technology, in an article from 1936, "The State as Mechanism in
Hobbes and Descartes" ("Der Staat als Mechanismus bei Hobbes und Descartes," Archiv
fur Rechts und Sozialphilosophie 39 [1937]), included as an appendix to the Greenwood
edition of Schmitt's Der Leviathan.
51 Both Schmitt and Strauss completely abandon the attempt to divorce the "human" from
272 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
According to Schmitt, Hobbes did not intend his Leviathan state to serve
as the merely sum/aggregate of all the individual wills of the state of nature
but as something that transcends such merely mechanical or mathematical
formulations, which would, in the end, simply render it a machine. Drawing
on his theory of representation, as elaborated in Chapter 4, Schmitt empha-
sizes how Hobbes intends the Leviathan to be a personally embodied
"sovereign-representative" whose wholeness is greater than the particulars
he represents; and drawing on his theory of myth, as examined in Chapters
2 and 4, he emphasizes how Hobbes presents the Leviathan as a mythic
monster that will keep subjects in a peacefully stupefied state.52 The book is
the historical account of how the mechanical component of the Hobbesian
trinity wins out over the other two and the political consequences of such a
victory: "[T]he Leviathan becomes none other than a huge machine, a
gigantic mechanism in the service of ensuring the physical protection of the
governed" {L, 35). Yet ultimately, Schmitt suggests, the tool cannot perform
even this particular task.53
The "neutralization" of Hobbes's state, argues Schmitt - referring to one
of the few Weimar works explicitly mentioned in Der Leviathan -begins, with
good reason, as a response to the wars of religion but leads inevitably to "the
basic neutralization of every truth" (L, 43). Not only religious but metaphys-
ical, juristic, and political considerations eventually come to mean nothing
to the "clean" and "exact" workings of the state mechanism, in "a logical
the "scientific" Hobbes in their treatments of the philosopher after World War II. In 1953,
Strauss portrays Hobbes as the bearer of the latter formally profane element: "The man
who was the first to draw the consequences for natural right from this momentous change
["the emergence of modern science, of nonteleological natural science"] was Thomas
Hobbes. . . . To Hobbes we must turn if we desire to understand the specific character of
modern natural right." Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1953), p- 166; see also pp. 170-4. In 1965, Schmitt remarks that Hobbes inaugu-
rates "a process of gradual neutralization that culminates finally in the methodical athe-
ism and 'value-free' science concomitant with the scientific, the technical and the indus-
trial age." "Die vollendete Reformation: Bemerkungen und Hinweise zu neuen Leviathan
Interpretationen," Der Staat: Zeitschrift fur Staatslehre, offentliches Recht und Ver-
fassungsgeschichte 4:1(1965): 61.
52 Despite frequent allusions to some of his most important Weimar works, Schmitt never
cites many of them explicitly in Der Leviathan. For instance, according to Ernst Fraenkel,
Schmitt had prevented the reprinting of Political Form under the Third Reich; see Ernst
Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, trans. E. A. Shils (New
York: Octagon Books, 1969). The possible significance of this treatment of his Weimar
work will be discussed later.
53 On the extrarationalistic or neotheological underpinnings of Hobbesian authority, see
Tracy Strong, "How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,"
Critical Inquiry 20:1 (autumn 1993).
T H E STATE 273
individual freedom
is ensured by
public peace and sovereign power
54 See Holmes, "The Debility of Liberalism," pp. 50-3, for an extensive discussion of the
gratuitous anti-Semitism expressed in the book, particularly Schmitt's professed disgust at
Hobbes's choice of mythic symbol: a monster from the Jewish tradition. What goes un-
acknowledged in most treatments of anti-Semitism in the book is its explicit anti-Christian
standpoint, whose significance I will discuss later in the chapter.
274 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
Thus, the dangerous subjectivity that was the concern of Schmitt in his
reformulation of Hobbes, in The Concept of the Political, is historically given a
place of primacy over the state that was founded precisely to keep it in
check. The fact that Hobbes allowed subjective, private freedom of belief
and the choice to disobey the sovereign over the deployment of one's life is
subsequently exploited into a subversion of the objective state: "What is of
significance is the seed planted by Hobbes regarding his reservation about
private belief and his distinction between inner belief and outer confession.
As it unfolded, it became an irresistible and all governing conviction" (L,
59)-55
As the subjectivities proliferated and gained in power, they demanded of
the state objectivity - objectivity toward its own existence - whose logical
result is the complete neutrality of the state. According to Schmitt, Kant is
guilty of finally sapping the state of any substantive content of its own, of
disentangling the "organism" from the "mechanism"; but in Hobbes, these
elements were all together, and hence the Leviathan state, in this awesome
totality, was potentially mythical (L, 41). After Kant, the reigning image for
jurisprudence is no longer a personal judge pronouncing decisions but a
mechanism dispensing rules: "The legislator humanus becomes a machina
legislatoria' (L, 65). Because the government has no moral content, neither
do the laws it thereby produces: "For technically represented neutrality the
laws of the state must become independent from substantive content, in-
cluding religious tenets or legal justifications and propriety, and should be
accorded validity only as the result of the positive determinations of the
state's decision-making apparatus in the form of commands" (L, 44). The
purely formal legal positivism that Hobbes unequivocally founds in
Leviathan (L, 67), which Weber so perspicaciously analyzes in "Sociology of
Law" (L, 66) and which Kelsen, whom Schmitt no longer mentions, most
famously practices in the first part of this century, becomes lethally
dangerous without the myth that Hobbes also deployed to undergird it. It
ultimately places itself at the disposal of tyranny:
55 As Reinhart Koselleck, himself a student of Schmitt, explains it, the slightest trace of
subjectivity that Hobbes granted to his citizens as compensation for giving up the "natural
right" of the state of nature, later takes its revenge on the state itself: 'The State created a
new order, but then - in genuinely historic fashion - fell prey to that order. As evident in
Hobbes, the moral inner space that had been excised from the State and reserved for man
as a human being meant (even rudimentarily) a source of unrest. . . . The authority of
conscience remained an unconquered remnant of the state of nature, protruding into
the formally perfected State." Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Patho-
genesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 38-9.
T H E STATE 275
state by nonneutral forces who would "seize" the apparatus of "state will-
formation" for themselves, "without themselves ceasing to be social and
non-state entities."56 He even described such a seizing of the state in terms
of the dethroning of the Leviathan: "When the 'mortal god' falls from his
throne and the kingdom of objective reason and civil society becomes 'a
great gang of thieves,' then the parties slaughter the powerful Leviathan
and slice pieces from the flesh of his body.'" 57 As we know from these
Weimar writings on pluralism, Schmitt notes that a state that is integrated
into every facet of society is hardly a state at all but rather a quantitative total
state. A state worthy of the name, for Schmitt, must stand over and above
society, governing it, no doubt firmly and vigilantly, as a separate entity - as a
qualitative total state.58 His emphasis on the mechanical or technological
character of the modern state, on nearly every page of the text of Der
Leviathan, and his account of how the "subjective," "indirect," and "social"
forces demythify and commandeer the machine for themselves draw atten-
tion to these texts that he apparently feels he cannot cite under the present
regime. But the suggestion is that Schmitt's "qualitative" fascism, one
steeped in the early-modern state-building/mythmaking project of Hobbes
and Machiavelli, could have better navigated the choice between the unor-
dered terror of the state of nature and the overly ordered terror of the
mechanistic state than did the "quantitative" fascism of National Socialism:
"Considering the Leviathan as a great command mechanism of just or
unjust states would ultimately be the same as 'discriminating' between just
and unjust machines. . . . [Machiavelli's work] The Prince . . . still rings as
very humane in comparison to the commands that are made in conformity
to the consummate impartiality of the technically perfect machine" (L,
50) .59
56 Schmitt, Der Hitter der Verfassung (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1931), p. 73.
57 Schmitt, "Staatsethik und pluralistisher Staat," pp. 28-9.
58 See Schmitt, "Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in Deutschland" (January 1933), in
Positionen und Begriffe. For a cogent analysis of the distinction, which is often ignored or
misunderstood in the literature, see Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and
Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 204, 237, 239. A study of authori-
tarianism that draws on the distinction is Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
59 One need not adhere to the interpretive methods of the school affiliated with Leo Strauss
to find evidence of this reading of Schmitt's critique of the National Socialist regime. The
method that Strauss discusses in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
1952) and practices throughout his postwar writings is perhaps most appropriately
discerned under conditions of political tyranny like those that governed in the Third
Reich. Schmitt speaks several times of Hobbes's resorting to "esoteric coverups" (e.g., L,
26), and Schmitt himself deploys them: by furtively referring to his early analysis of
T H E STATE 277
It is the liberal state and the seizure and destruction of its machine by
parties encouraged by pluralism that Schmitt ostensibly criticizes in Der
Leviathan: "The institutions and concepts of liberalism, on which the positi-
vist statute state rested, became weapons and power positions in the hands
of the most illiberal forces. In this fashion, party pluralism has perpetrated
the destruction of the state by using methods inherent in the liberal statu-
tory state" (L, 74, translation amended). 60 But his implicit allusions, if not
explicit references, to his quantitative/qualitative total-state distinction and
his surprising restraint from praising National Socialism for overcoming the
historical dilemma of the liberal state leave one to wonder whether the
former is not an equally relevant target of his critique:
Hobbes in Political Theology only by mentioning the year of its original publication {L, 44);
by drawing on his own friend/enemy thesis only through an explication of Hobbes (Chap.
3); and by drawing attention to his conspicuously uncited essays on the qualitative versus
quantitative total state in a footnote in which he remarks that "total" can have multiple
meanings (L, 76, n. 7). What is clear is that the standpoint of this critique is not a quasi-
liberal one, as Schmitt would later claim (see "Die vollendete Reformation") but an
alternatively fascist one. In this vein, perhaps Schmitt's invocation of Machiavelli's Prince
emphasizes not the fact that both it and Schmitt's Der Leviathan were written under
conditions of exile, one external and the other internal, but rather that they are both
ambiguous attempts to somewhat undermine, while garnering favor from, the reigning
powers that punished their authors, through both subtle criticism and ostensible advice
about more effective governance.
60 In order to demonstrate that the Weimar distinction between "law" and "statute" in
Schmitt's thought, discussed in the previous chapter, is still significant for Schmitt here in
Der Leviathan, I translate Gesetzesstaat as "statute state" rather than "law state," as does
Schwab.
278 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
Schmitt refuses to acknowledge that the other moment within his fascist
project besides neoabsolutism, namely, myth, may contribute to the abuses
of the state in his day.61 Schmitt insists, for instance, on distinguishing the
myths preferred by Hobbes and himself to the nineteenth-century-style ones
characteristic of Nietzsche (L, 5). I discussed in Chapter 2 the affinities
between Schmitt's neoabsolutist and Nietzsche's Lebensphilosophische myths.
However, as far as Schmitt is concerned, myth as such is not the problem.
The aspect of myth in Hobbes could have kept the elements of society from
becoming autonomous and from making demands against the state; ac-
cording to Schmitt, it could have ruled not through the apparatuses of
technical efficiency but by "captivating minds": "No clear chain of thought
can withstand the force of genuine, mythical images" (L, 81). Hobbes erred
in his choice of myth not in his deployment of it. The biblical image of the
Leviathan itself already anticipates its disenchantment and instrumental
operationalization by indirect, subjective, social forces. In both Jewish and
Christian lore, the Leviathan monster is defeated by the triumphant re-
ligiously devout: The Jews feast on Leviathan's flesh; the Christians lure it in
on a cross-shaped hook (L, 7-9). The religious prophecy of the subduing of
the Leviathan by ideologically fanatical particularist groups would be
fulfilled in the twentieth century:
Schmitt begins the work with the question of "whether the Leviathan with-
stood the test of being the politico-mythical image battling the Judeo-
Christian destruction of natural unity, and whether he was equal to the
61 For a more reliable account than Schmitt's of developments within early-modern state
theory, see Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation
of the Language of Politics, 1250-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
THE STATE 279
severity and malice of such a battle" (L, 11). The answer is clearly no; the
image of the Leviathan was an insufficiently strong myth to combat the
historical forces of technologically equipped pluralism: "The image of an
all-powerful animal taken from the Hebrew Bible that had been rendered
harmless would not convey an intelligible symbol for a totality produced by
modern technology" (L, 82). By constituting his Leviathan with an even
partly machinelike character, Hobbes was fulfilling the prophecy of its
demise by providing the means whereby it would be demystified as a mere
tool for whoever was strong enough to exploit the subjective right to self-
defense into a ploy to seize the machine. In this way, Hobbes was a flawed
mythmaker: "With the image of the Leviathan did he only approximate a
myth" (L, 126). Thus the awesome, multitude-embodying, sea king that
adorns the frontispiece of Hobbes's 1651 edition of the work is reduced to
the "failure [Fehlschlag]" that Schmitt's title suggests.
62 Hans Kelsen, "Wer soil der Huter der Verfassung sein?" Diejustiz 6 (1930/31).
28o LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
his formulation still begs the question of how to secure state protection and
how to prevent the state from becoming the agent of a particular social
interest once the subjective right to protection is abolished.
Thus, the stance of Hobbesian neutrality that Schmitt maintains
throughout the twenties and thirties turns out to be somewhat misleading.
An important difference between the "state of nature" and the "friend/
enemy" distinction is that in the former, despite some occasional references
by Hobbes to families or professions, there are no friends and hence no
antagonistic groupings. The abstract individualism of Hobbes's "war of all
against all" points up his ultimate agnosticism regarding the respective
combatants in the English Civil War: Leviathan was written, for the most
part, in support of the king but was easily converted by Hobbes into a
justification for Cromwell.63 Schmitt had much stronger preferences re-
garding the participants in Weimar's near-civil war. It did matter to him, for
instance, that the Social Democrats not gain victory, let alone the Commu-
nists. Groups who would be the "enemies" of these groups would necessarily
be, according to Schmitt's "concept of the political," better "friends" of the
state. Should these "friends" gain control of the state, it would be appropri-
ate for them to suppress the enemies of that state. This is in fact what the
National Socialists did, albeit more ruthlessly than Schmitt could have imag-
ined. To this effect, Schmitt's theory encouraged, as much as it forewarned
against, the seizure of the Leviathan state by radically "subjective" social
forces.
In fact, the potentially lethal results of such a seizure are compounded by
Schmitt's theoretical tampering with the Hobbesian formula of protego ergo
obligo. Had Hobbes originally formulated the state in the way Schmitt and
Strauss wished in 1932 - by not granting to the individual the subjective right
of self-protection, even for the sake of better ensuring that individual's life -
the logic of the Leviathan would have broken down. It is only the retention
of some of that subjectivity regarding self-preservation that rules completely
in the state of nature that encourages "Hobbesian man" to make a compact
and submit to the state. Schmitt was correct to recognize, in Der Leviathan,
that the state was, in away, ultimately the product of the age of technology; it
was an instrument, a tool. It served as a means to something else, namely,
security and stability, preservation and peace. 64 The state itself could not,
63 See Hobbes, "A Review, and Conclusion," in Leviathan; as well as Quentin Skinner, "Con-
quest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy," in The Interreg-
num, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), on the dating of the book.
64 As Perry Anderson rightly observes regarding both Schmitt's and Michael Oakeshott's
T H E STATE 28l
without most unfortunate results, be what he, and Strauss for that matter,
wanted: the embodiment of these things, and not the means to them. Such a
formulation is as dangerous as it is incoherent. The state could not be
expected to absorb all of the right to self-preservation from the state of
nature and at the same time guarantee it. The radical subjectivity, the
dangerous right to 'judge," accruing to the state as it does in Schmitt's and
Strauss's interpretation of Hobbes, only increases that subjectivity's volatility
exponentially. Schmitt briefly reconsiders the economy of fear that governs
the Hobbesian pact; that is, the total fear of the state of nature exchanged
for only qualified fear of the sovereign Leviathan might not in fact result in
such a peaceful outcome: "Hobbes' theory of state would certainly have
been a peculiar philosophy of state if its entire chain of thought had con-
sisted in propelling poor human beings from the utter fear of the state of
nature only into the similarly total fear of a domination by a Moloch or a
Golem" (L, 71). He immediately dismisses the traditional Lockean-liberal
objections to such logic and suggests that such a pact made to a non-
technologically tainted sovereign would solve that problem. Formulated
nontechnologically, or in terms of the Weimar project pursued with Strauss,
this means not granting the right to resist and not granting the technologi-
cal means to threaten the state through unrestricted commerce in civil
society, and substituting in place of this direct rule, concrete domination. A
state founded on "unconditional obedience" {L, 53) would prevent one of
the "subjective" social groups from seizing it. But the state is already by
definition the "strongest" power within the state of nature, and hence sub-
mission to this "new god" settles the liberal objections of neither Kelsen nor,
for that matter, Locke:
I desire to know what kind of Government that is, and how much better it is
than the State of Nature, where one Man commanding a multitude, has
Liberty to be Judge in his own Case, and may do to all his Subjects whatever he
pleases, without the least liberty to anyone to question or controle those who
Execute his Pleasure? And in whatsoever he doth, whether led by Reason,
Mistake or Passion, must be submitted to? Much better it is in the State of
Nature wherein Men are not bound to submit to the unjust will of another.65
views of Hobbes, "It would be difficult to think of a more incongruous authority for any
'non-instrumental'. . . understanding of the state. The pact of civil association between
individuals in Leviathan is supremely an instrument to secure common ends - the aims of
security and prosperity, 'mutual peace' and 'commodious living.'" "The Intransigent
Right at the End of the Century," London Review of Books (Sept. 24, 1992), p. 7, emphasis
added.
65 Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, II, 13, 19-27.
282 L I B E R A L I S M AS T E C H N O L O G Y
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Filhrer cult, forces to its
knees, has its counterpart in the violence of an apparatus which is pressed into
the production of ritual values. . . . All efforts to render politics aesthetic
culminate in one thing: war. . . . "Fiat ars - pereat mundus," says Fascism, and
. . . expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that
has been changed by technology. . . . Mankind ['s] self-alienation has reached
66 On the subject of Schmitt's perception of his precarious position in the Reich after his fall
from favor with the regime, see Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich, 263-4; and
Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception, p. 142; a more skeptical view is offered by Ruthers,
Carl Schmitt im Dritten Reich.
67 On Heidegger's "faith" in the NSDAP, see Richard Wolin, " 'Over the Line': Reflections on
Heidegger and National Socialism," in Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 124, 127.
THE STATE 283
such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic plea-
sure of the first order.68
As 1932 became 1933, how did Strauss and Schmitt expect to revive that
primal substance, that link to myth, the fear of violent death? Did they not
realize, as did Benjamin, that "an apparatus" would be needed to change
"sense perception" by "technology" and "press into production" such "ritual
values?"69
In a later discussion of Hobbes, Strauss disparages the concept of "phan-
tasmagoria," to which the world is reduced under a certain reductionist
interpretation of Hobbes.70 But if phantasmagoria can be described, ac-
cording to Susan Buck-Morss, as "an appearance of reality that tricks the
senses through technical manipulation," as a "technoaesthetics" that serves
as "a means of social control," this is precisely what Hobbes had in mind for
his Leviathan.71 The Leviathan is intended as a phantasmagoria; the tech-
nology and the myth are for Hobbes intrinsically linked from the start.
Schmitt might have paid better attention to the opening lines of Hobbes's
introduction to Leviathan, in which he describes how humans can manufac-
ture a political machine, the state, in the way that "God" created a natural
machine, the human being. 72 And it is this technical construction that
that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificial life? . . .
Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For
by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in Latine
CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man."
73 According to Buck-Morss, phantasmagoria have "the effect of anaesthetizing the organ-
ism, not through numbing, but through flooding the senses. These simulated sensoria
alter consciousness, much like a drug, but they do so through sensory distraction rather
than chemical alteration, and - most significantly - their effects are experienced collec-
tively rather than individually" (p. 23). We must not forget that Hobbes intended his
automaton, his man-monster-machine to be a "visible Power to keep them in awe" (II, 17,
emphasis added), in other words, a sense-induced distraction of the masses.
74 See particularly the first two essays of Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment:
"The Concept of Enlightenment," and "Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment." Although
Blumenberg recognizes the intrinsic relationship between myth and Enlightenment ra-
tionality, in Work on Myth, Cassirer, a renowned Kantian, insists on their distinction.
However, Cassirer comes very close to acknowledging the "dialectic of enlightenment"
when he remarks on the "strategic," "technical," and "artificial" quality of myth in relation-
ship to modern technology and politics - what he calls "the technique of political myth."
Symbol, Myth and Culture, pp. 235-7.
75 As noted earlier, Benjamin claimed that, "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate
in one thing: war." Furthermore, as Michael Geyer reminds us, in terms that recall Ben-
jamin and Schmitt, "war" was indeed the essence of National Socialism: "The direction of
the Third Reich was toward war. War was essential to regain the 'autonomy of the political'
and to recenter the stage by giving politics at least the appearance of purposeful and
unified action which it otherwise lacks. In the counterrevolutionary Third Reich, war,
THE STATE 285
victorious war, was meant to achieve more than that. War not only happened to be Hitler's
main and ultimate goal in the creation of a new German society, it also made the Third
Reich an 'exceptional state.' War permits the 'autonomy of the political' to reach its
extreme in the age of imperialism. In an 'exceptional state' war is neither simply the
predatory instinct of special interests, nor the manifestation of atavistic sentiments.
Rather, war is fought to create and recreate a society and a state which 'habitually lives on
war.' War recenters state and society in combat, domination, and direct exploitation."
"The State in National Socialist Germany," in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in
History and Theory, ed. Charles Bright and Susan Harding (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1984), p. 198.
In 1933, Schmitt sought to overcome the state of nature, the friend/enemy distinc-
tion, in domestic politics so that the state could take part in these in the realm in which,
according to Schmitt, they could never be overcome, the realm of international relations.
Thus, for Schmitt, war had to be suppressed at home in order to prepare for it abroad,
specifically against the Soviet Union. National Socialism, therefore, defies Schmitt's own
"concept of the political" by as vigorously making war at home as on foreign soil, by
maintaining, in Geyer's words, "an escalating system of domestic terror and violence
abroad." Geyer, "The Stigma of Violence: Nationalism and War in Twentieth Century
Germany," German Studies Review (winter 1992): 97.
76 Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice ofNational Socialism, 1933-1944 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1944), p. xii. Schmitt understands Behemoth exclusively as a symbol of
religious fanaticism and revolution (L, 21).
286 LIBERALISM AS T E C H N O L O G Y
hands of his enemies" (L, 82). This is what becomes of Hobbes, whose state
was commandeered by the social forces it was designed to keep at bay; to the
participants in the state of nature, whose fate at the hands of the "new god"
they effectively create may be far worse than their precarious natural free-
dom; and to Schmitt himself, whose vainglorious attempt to institute his
qualitative total state under the auspices of the National Socialist party myth
in the end compelled him to submit to the party's will within the domain of
its quantitative total state.
Thus, Schmitt's and Strauss's Weimar attempt to supplant liberalism by
reinterpreting Hobbes is a catastrophic failure in two ways. First, they tam-
per with one Hobbesian formula, the protection/obedience relationship,
that had already been improved by the liberalism that succeeded Hobbes.
Second, they experiment with another Hobbesian formula, the myth/
technology relationship, to which post-Hobbesian liberalism continues to
be oblivious. In both cases, they render the reformulation more dangerous
than the original supposedly unstable proposition, and the historical reality
with which it corresponds is undeniably disastrous.
77 See the so-called autobiographical preface, included in Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Re-
ligion, p. 30.
T H E STATE 287
78 In a review of Heinrich Meier's Schmitt and Strauss, Paul Gottfried describes how Meier
and other Straussians attempt to artificially separate Strauss's Weimar views from those of
Schmitt. See "Schmitt and Strauss," Telos 96 (summer 1993). Meier himself admits that
"both seem to agree in their political positions or in fact agree in their political critique of
a common opponent [liberalism]." Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, p. 43. And other
admirers of Strauss leave open the question of how much, if at all, Strauss changed his
mind after emigrating. As Volker Reinecke and Jonathan Uhlaner remark, "Leaving Eu-
rope behind, Strauss began to rearrange his attitude toward philosophy. He abandoned
none of the positions with which he had worked for over a decade, but transformed their
coordination." 'The Problem of Leo Strauss: Religion, Philosophy and Politics," p. 196.
There is of course the assessment of young Strauss's political predilections that Hannah
Arendt conveyed to her biographer; see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love
of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 98, 169. Such commentators as
Stephen Holmes and Shadia Drury have recently elucidated the postwar esoteric writing
method deployed by Strauss whereby a "philosopher" does not overdy and immediately
reveal what he or she means for fear of political consequences. The content of these
supposedly unbearable truths are, among others, the moral anarchy of a universe absent
of the divine, the illegitimacy of all national borders, the ultimate amorality of political
action and the brute reality of the strong over the weak. Strauss invokes classical standards
of truth, beauty, and justice to keep these "terrible" truths from the ears of the vulgar
masses, who would purportedly otherwise run amok, and instead preserves them in the
hands of "philosophers," who prudently and strategically put them at the service of politi-
cians in order to moderate their potential tyranny. Hence, Strauss appropriated Schmitt's
call for rule by an intellectual elite by turning to the Platonic model of rule by philosopher
kings. See Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1988); and Holmes, "Strauss: Truth for Philosophers Alone," in The Anatomy of
Antiliberalism.
Just as Plato and Xenophon portray a Socrates who only too late learned the mortal
dangers of speaking so blatantly about the amoral truths of the political, Strauss tried to
change his tune before the damage to philosophers, such as himself, in the twentieth
century became irreparable. Learning from the mistakes of his mentor, Strauss subse-
quently sought to textually conceal nihilistic political "truths" within his nearly impenetra-
ble ruminations on the "right" and the "good" in classical philosophy rather than, like
Schmitt, easily putting such dangerous truths at the disposal of the practitioners of politi-
cal tyranny. Although Strauss would indeed become an inspiration to right-wing intellec-
tuals and Republican party think-tankers in the United States, his new philosophical
approach attempted to make political engagement better serve the philosopher rather than
the politician. See Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy ? and Other Studies.
288 LIBERALISM AS TECHNOLOGY
with a political philosophy that now sounds painfully close to the ideology
that would very soon make "war" on Jews, Benjamin, rather, was one of its
most brilliant critics and ultimately became one of the millions of its victims
seven years later.79
Schmitt himself later attempted to justify his collaboration with National
Socialism by appealing to the Hobbesian standard of "obedience for protec-
tion": He merely offered allegiance to a new regime that he assumed would
in turn protect him.80 It is almost fitting, then, that this "Hobbesian" who
sought to theorize into oblivion the "protection" component of the
"protection/obedience" formula, may have come rather close several times
during the Third Reich to paying with his life for making that unforgivable
political choice.81 Instead, Schmitt lived well into his nineties, claiming
until the end that he was simply misconstrued. Fond of comparing himself
with the likes of Machiavelli and Hobbes, who were discredited in their
times and immediately after their deaths for their particular political en-
dorsements, Schmitt often repeated the concluding lines of Der Leviathan, 82
which referred as much in his mind to "that lonely philosopher from Mal-
mesbury" (L, 82) as to that perhaps even more lonely philosopher from
Plettenberg:
Today we grasp the undiminished force of his polemics, understand the intrin-
sic honesty of his thinking, and admire the imperturbable spirit who fearlessly
thought through man's existential anguish, and as a true champion, destroyed
the murky distinctions of indirect powers. To us he is a true teacher of a great
political experience; lonely as every pioneer; misunderstood as is everyone
79 On Benjamin's aborted attempt to flee the Nazis and his subsequent suicide as a response
to his fear of being captured by them, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative
Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free
Press, 1977), pp. 162-3. Despite the existential flavor of the early Benjamin's engage-
ment with Schmitt's work, it did not lean so precariously toward political authoritarianism
as did Strauss's treatment of Schmitt's thesis. See Benjamin's letter to Schmitt, in Ben-
jamin's Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1. ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Scheppenhauser (Frankfurt
a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974). On Benjamin and Schmitt, see Michael Rumpf, "Radikale The-
ologie: Benjamins Beziehung zu Carl Schmitt," in Walter Benjamin - Zeitgenosse derModerne,
ed. Peter Gebhardt et al. (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1976); Norbert Bolz, "Charism and Sou-
veranitat: Carl Schmitt und Walter Benjamin im Schatten Max Webers," in DerFurst dieser
Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983); and
Samuel Weber, "Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt," Diacri-
tics 22:3-4 (fall/winter 1992).
80 Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich, p. 204.
81 Ibid., pp. 230-42.
82 See G. L. Ulmen, "Anthropological Theology/Theological Anthropology," Telos 93 (Fall
1992): 73, n. 15.
T H E STATE 289
whose political thought does not gain acceptance among his own people;
unrewarded, as one who opened a gate through which others marched on;
and yet in the immortal community of the great scholars of the ages, "a sole
retriever of an ancient prudence." Across the centuries we reach out to him:
Now you do not teach in vain, Thomas Hobbes! (L, 86)
Ill
293
294 L I B E R A L I S M AND F A S C I S M
Law as concrete order must not be separated from its history. True law is not
imposed; it arises from unintentional elements. It reveals itself in the concrete
form of jurisprudence, through which it becomes conscious of its develop-
ment. For Savigny, the jurisprudential concept of the positive is bound to a
particular type of "source" protected by jurists. Law emerges from this
"source" in a specific way, as something not merely legislated but given. The
later positivism knows no origin and has no home. It recognizes only causes or
basic norms. It seeks to be the opposite of "unintended" law. Its ultimate goal
is control and calculability. (PJ, 56-7)
See Schmitt, Gesetz und Urteil: Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis ([1912]
Munich: C. H. Beck, 1969).
See Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985),
pp. 61-2.
EPILOGUE AND SUMMARY 295
6 See Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Volkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum ([1950] Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1974); Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Cologne:
Greven, 1950), and, most outrageously, the preface to the 1963 edition of Der Begriff des
Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot),
pp. 13, 14-16.
296 LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
7 Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und politischeForm (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), p. 16. See
Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood,
199 6 )-
EPILOGUE AND SUMMARY 297
In the successive chapters of this book, I have shown how Schmitt consis-
tently opts for the mythic, what he would call in 1944 the "theological," over
the technically rational, because his attempt to ground a rationality that is
neither of these poles ultimately fails. Chapter 3 attempts to explain why he
shifts from the moderate position suggesting the constitutionally bound
Roman dictatorship as a model for emergency powers, in Dictatorship, to the
extreme position of the charismatically imbued and constitutionally un-
limited figure of the "sovereign," in Political Theology, only a year later. I
demonstrate in Chapter 4 how Schmitt, after undertaking a painstakingly
careful analysis of the technification of the principles and practices of lib-
eral representative government, in Parlamentarismus, ultimately endorses
the politics of nationalist myth. After finding the liberal representative
scheme lacking in comparison with the medieval model, he neither offers
the latter as an alternative nor suggests how the former could be made more
"substantive." Instead he destroys the very idea of representation by endors-
ing a plebiscitary leader who "embodies" the nation as a whole. In Chapter
5,1 suggest that what begins as a probing analytical observation on Schmitt's
part - specifically, that a liberal legal theory and constitutional law overly
influenced by modern natural science is insufficiently attentive to the possi-
bility of contingency, indeterminacy, the exception - lapses into an aesthet-
icization of that exception as an extrarational force. The decisive judgment
required to adjudicate a particular case or the sovereign power needed to
address the exceptional situation become the triumph of executive action
over the paralyzing equilibrium of liberal constitutional mechanisms.
In Chapter 6, we observed Schmitt's response to the merging of the state
and civil society in twentieth-century welfare-state Germany. For the state to
re-attain its sovereignty and free itself from the greedy hands of the social
forces who increasingly make demands of it, and who become more and
more dangerous to each other and to the state itself, the state must instill
fear in its citizens. In Hobbesian fashion it must first arouse citizens' bound-
less fear of each other - the myth of the state of nature - and replace it with
the tempered fear of the state - the myth of the Leviathan. Because Schmitt
perceives the twentieth-century crisis of state and society as attributable to
Hobbes's granting citizens limited subjective freedom - to be expressed in
science and commerce - Schmitt seeks to revive Hobbes's mythic state
without the reliance on individual freedom, science, and technology.
In fact it might be argued, as Schmitt reveals most tellingly in Der
Leviathan, his perfect state combines myth and technical rationality, in such a
way that he expects to overcome the opposition. If one could marry the
thoroughly positivist and, as Schmitt identifies it, "mechanistic" equation of
positive command and law, as Hobbes does, with a myth that would ward off
EPILOGUE AND SUMMARY 299
8 Siegfried Kracauer and Herbert Marcuse criticize the stunted dialectics practiced by theo-
rists, such as Schmitt, that come very close to ascertaining the nature of the abstract and
concrete modes of domination in modernity only to place those dialectics in the service of a
more violent, concrete, and mythic domination. See Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament"
(1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. T. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995); and Marcuse, "The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian
View of the State" (1934), in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
9 An oudook that he did not abandon even later in his life; see Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen:
Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963).
3OO LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
Thus, Schmitt the avowed historicist is an odd one indeed, for his is a
historicism that excludes theorists themmselves as intellectual elites and
potential makers of history from being determined by their own historical
moment. In this particular sense, Schmitt's historicism is more like that
associated with existentialism - like that of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who
see the changes that history inscribes on "Being" but not on their being -
than the Hegelianism within which I have often situated him. Whether
inspiring his only slightly less-enlightened fellow elites in the "Neutraliza-
tions" essay to confront the Eastern menace, or planning the revival of the
Leviathan state, Schmitt's is the mind that stands outside of history. Al-
though he is adamant, throughout his Weimar writings, in his claim that
modern history is driven by elites, he makes no attempt to explain how they
know exactly what they purportedly know. Confidence in such knowledge
certainly inflates the expectations concerning what such a mind that stands
outside of history can achieve when intervening actively in history. The folly
of such intellectual-political bravado is all too well documented throughout
the history of the twentieth century. If this way of thinking does not make for
theoretical rigor or desirable political success, it makes for even less as a
potentially viable source for democratic theory. In a certain way, the kind of
elitism professed by Schmitt as well as the aestheticization to which he
frequently resorts - aestheticization of conflict, of the exception, of execu-
tive power, and so on - are the unconquered remnants of the primal will to
domination that is never fully exorcised from his thought.10
In the Introduction, I claimed that I would not criticize Schmitt from a
standpoint outside of his own thought. I did not want to conclude that he
was "wrong" simply on the basis of the fact that he happened not to be a
liberal or a leftist. However, according to the "Plight of European Jurispru-
dence" lecture of 1944, a kind of liberalism is all that Schmitt ever really
wanted for his jurisprudence:
In this light, critics have pointed out the regressive-infantile quality - in the Freudian
sense - of, for instance, the friend/enemy distinction; see, T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 131-2;
and J. Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936), pp. 125-6.
EPILOGUE AND SUMMARY 3OI
means that we maintain a dignity which today in Europe is more critical than
at any other time and in any other part of the world. (PJ, 67).
1 See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1987). After
Strauss's emigration, his philosophical-political task became the search for an alternative
source by which to temper the "corrosive" modern influences of science and technology.
Since myth promulgated in the modern manner by Strauss's Weimar influences, Schmitt,
and, of course, Martin Heidegger, proved so disastrous, Strauss turns to the ancients and
the more sublime mythmaking of the likes of Plato as a resource. See Luc Ferry, The New
Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, trans. F. Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990). Strauss attempts to rein in the abstract, formal, and dynamic workings of the
market and technological progress by appeals to the "natural law" of the ancient Greeks
and the Judeo-Christian fathers: "law" that is passed off as "truth" to the many but regarded
by the few as "salutary myth." See the essays included in Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical
Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
302
CONCLUSION 303
can party, through the person of policy advisor William Kristol, an acknowl-
edged "Straussian."2
Yet accompanying the Straussian appeal to "traditional values," voiced by
Bloom in the academy and Kristol in the broader popular culture, is a
market-centered, futuristic, technoeconomic ideology of progress and
"freedom" perhaps best represented by the views of the incumbent Speaker
of the House, Newt Gingrich,3 but in no small degree inspired by Austrian
political economist and Schmitt devotee Friedrich Hayek.4 The seemingly
incompatible conjunction of "traditional" values and technological deter-
minism is now the dominant motif of the conservative agenda in the United
States. Just as in the Federal Republic of Germany, members of the right
who had previously valorized technology in ecstatic positive or negative
tones came to treat it after the war as a sober fact to which all demands for
emancipatory policy must capitulate,5 the American Right now combines
market-oriented technoeconomic progress with an active promotion of po-
tentially regressive cultural policies.6
A third component of contemporary conservatism in the United States,
foreign policy, has not solidified into a coherent ideology since the end of
the Cold War. Yet two competing options - a nationalist, anti-immigrant,
isolationist one, characteristic of perennial Republican presidential candi-
Kristol is one of the new "young conservatives" featured in James Atlas, 'The Countercoun-
terculture," New York Times Magazine (Feb. 12,1995). See also, Jacob Weisberg, "The Family
Way: How Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Bill Kristol Made Tormenting Liberals a
Home Industry," New Yorker (Oct. 21 and 28, 1996). Consult the discussion in the New York
Times by Brent Staples of Strauss's contemporary political influence: "Undemocratic Vistas:
The Sinister Vogue of Leo Strauss," New York Times (Nov. 28, 1994); as well as Richard
Bernstein, "A Very Unlikely Villain (or Hero)," New York Times (Jan. 29, 1995); and also the
response to these pieces by Laurence Berns, "Correcting the Record on Leo Strauss," PS:
Political Science and Politics 28:4 (December 1995). Strauss's daughter, Jenny Strauss Clay,
defends her father against Staples's charges of a surreptitious anti-Enlightenment bias by
citing passages from her father's work; the sincerity of these passages, however, Strauss's
own hermeneutic method would question (New York Times [Nov. 30, 1994]).
On the technofuturist aspects of Gingrich's political agenda, see Hendrik Hertzberg,
"Marxism: The Sequel," New Yorker 70:49 (1995).
See Bill Scheuerman, 'The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,"
Constellations 4:2 (October 1997) on the full extent of Hayek's debt to, and admiration for,
Schmitt; as well as Renato Cristi, "Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law," CanadianJournal
of Political Science 17:3 (19 84).
The best example is the work of Schmitt protege Ernst ForsthofF; see Peter C. Caldwell,
"Ernst Forsthoff and the Legacy of Radical Conservative State Theory in the Federal Re-
public of Germany," History of Political Thought 15:4 (1994).
For an analysis of these issues in the German context, see the essays included in Jiirgen
Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, trans. S. Weber
Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
304 LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
7 See Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72:3 (Summer 1993).
Consult the responses to Huntington's somewhat sinister thesis by Fouad Ajami, Kishore
Mahbubani, Robert Bartley, Lin Binyan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick in the following issue,
Foreign Affairs 72:4 (September/October 1993), as well as the full-length version of the
thesis, Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996).
8 See HansJ. Morgenthau, "Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography," in Truth and Trag-
edy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau, ed. Kenneth Thompson and Robert Myers (New
Brunswick: Transaction, 1984); Stanley Hoffmann, 'The Case of Dr. Kissinger," New York
Review of Books (Dec. 6, 1979), pp. 14-18, 21-5, 27-9; and Alfons Sollner, "German
Conservatism in America: Morgenthau's Political Realism," Telos 72 (summer 1987).
9 On the future of neoconservatism's relationship to liberalism, see Mark Gerson, The Neocon-
sewative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
1995); on its past, see Charles W. Dunn andj. David Woodward, The Conservative Tradition in
America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right
Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Hough ton Mifflin, 1996).
CONCLUSION 305
See Michael Walzer, "What's Going On?: Notes on the Right Turn," Dissent (winter 1996).
Rawls declares pluralism a "fact," in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), pp. 56-7; and Charles Larmore declares the inevitability of "reasonable
disagreement" to be a "truth," something that can be expected to occur "naturally," in The
Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 153, 12. These
may indeed be correct assessments, but they ought not to be accepted dogmatically as an
unquestioned and unquestionable sociological given, as they so often are in much of
liberal political theory. On the Kantian roots of notions of value pluralism, or as he
refashions it, "reasonable disagreement," see Larmore, The Morals ofModernity, pp. 28-34.
As noted in Chapter 1, it is this Kantian origin that decidedly influenced Weber's thinking
on pluralism. The rationalization thesis has been reconstructed and updated by the
differentiation theory best represented by the highly influential work of Niklas Luhmann;
see e.g., Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Sophisticated versions of a "complexity" approach to contemporary democracy include
Bernhard Peters, Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993);
Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University,
306 LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
1992); James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and
Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
13 The oft-ignored interrelationship between the social-philosophical systems theory of a
Luhmann and the political-philosophical liberal theory of a Rawls is reflected in Stephen
Holmes, "Differenzierung und Arbeitsteilung im Denken des Liberalismus," in Soziale
Differenzierung: Zur Geschichte einer Idee, ed. Niklas Luhmann (Opladen: Westdeutscher,
1985); and Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge; Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1987).
14 Of which Jiirgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996) is something of a culminating
moment.
15 A recent attempt at navigating new historical waters from a liberal standpoint is Stephen
Holmes, "Liberalism for a World of Ethnic Passions and Decaying States," Social Research
61:3 (fall 1994). It would be something of a mistake for leftists to dismiss the possibility of
liberalism's ability to adapt to the changing circumstances for the state in the interna-
tional realm, as does Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1996).
Holmes explains the manner in which liberalism previously adapted to the realities and
responsibilities of the welfare state, in Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal
Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Unfortunately, Wallerstein's is a
move reminiscent of the kind made by many socialist and social-democratic intellectuals
in the midst of the last transformation from laissez-faire to welfare-state arrangements.
This rendered liberalism vulnerable to historicizing assaults by the likes of Schmitt and
often rendered leftists with impoverished institutional and principled resources in for-
mulating their own political strategies. This tendency is characteristic of the early works of
Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, a tendency that they later sought to redress in
their postemigration work. See Bill Scheuerman, ed., The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected
Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996)-
CONCLUSION 307
brought back together and transcended in a way that both resolves the
problems inherent in its Weberian incarnation and inoculates it against
appropriation and exploitation by the forces of reaction. 16 As explained
earlier, especially in Chapter 1, Weberian liberalism is vulnerable to manip-
ulation on two counts: Subjectively, it provides for little common ground
among the many value differences within modernity and may even encour-
age irrational responses to the ostensibly incommensurable nature of such
value pluralism; objectively, it provides for the viability of no effectual prac-
tice by which the processes of modern rationalization may be brought under
the control of conscious, rational, human choice and activity. The still gen-
erally widespread dissatisfaction with the Rawlsian solution to contemporary
pluralism and the manner in which "complexity" is often unreflectively
invoked as a social-scientific fact today in a way that seems only to confirm
the inevitability of things as they are, suggest that these Weberian problems
have yet to be resolved.17 As witnessed earlier, their lack of resolution in the
Weimar Republic facilitated irrefutably disastrous results. 18
16 This is one of the explicit goals of Habermas's Between Facts and Norms. Whether the work is
successful in this regard is the subject of debate; for different conclusions, see David M.
Rasmussen, "How Is Valid Law Possible?: A Review of Faktizitdt und Geltung by Jiirgen
Habermas," Philosophy and Social Criticism 20:4 (1994); and James Bohman, "Complexity,
Pluralism and the Constitutional State: On Habermas' Faktizitdt und Geltung," Law and
Society Review 28 (November 1994).
17 Two strikingly Schmittian critiques of Rawlsian pluralism, the first of which draws on
Schmitt explicitly and the second that does not mention his name, are Chantal Mouffe,
The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the
Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1993). On the limits of
"complexity" as a progressive social theoretical category, see Thomas McCarthy, "Com-
plexity and Democracy: Or the Seducements of Systems Theory," and Hans Joas, "The
Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism," both in Communicative Action,
ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
18 David Dyzenhaus, in particular, has rightfully identified the Weberian character of recent
debates over liberalism and diversity, and the Schmittian threat that looms over the
results; see "The Legitimacy of Legality," University of Toronto Law Journal 46 (1996); and
"Liberalism after the Fall: Schmitt, Rawls and the Problem ofJustification," Philosophy and
Social Criticism 22:3 (1996). In the latter piece, Dyzenhaus discerns how Schmitt deline-
ates the manner in which liberals, when under criticism, will waver between value-
affirming, rights-based and value-neutral, rules-based positions - between concrete sub-
stance and abstract form - and describes how Schmitt would alternately set his sights on
each one in an equally devastating manner. Another progressive theorist, Charles Lar-
more, disagrees with judgments like Dyzenhaus's regarding the actual perspicacity of
Schmitt's critique of liberalism; see Larmore, "Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberal
Democracy," in The Morals of Modernity. Perhaps precisely because Larmore is somewhat
less sensitive to the Weberian antinomial dilemma of contemporary liberalism, he under-
estimates the full force of Schmitt's critique. Larmore explicitly defends the viability of a
balance between romantic, subjective dispositions within society and an objective, recon-
3 o8 LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
structed notion of formal liberalism in politics, a balance that cannot be sustained in times
of crisis like that of Weimar. Moreover, Larmore's conception of a "political liberalism,"
which he shares with Rawls, is to some extent guilty of the charge of wavering between
value-affirming and value-neutral positions that Dyzenhaus extracts from Schmitt. On the
one hand, Larmore seeks to defend liberalism against charges of normative emptiness by
recasting it in terms that render it "minimally moral" (p. 145); conversely, he seeks to
rescue the latest expression of Rawlsian liberalism, in Political Liberalism, from affirming, in
a potentially dogmatic manner, pluralism as a valuehy asserting instead the fact of "reason-
able disagreement" (p. 153). It remains less than clear how Larmore's "minimally moral"
conception of liberalism would be sufficiently "thick" to ensure a normative content that
would satisfy liberal critics of Aristotelian, civic-republican or communitarian stripes.
More important, Larmore's opting for a descriptive account of "reasonable disagreement"
over a normative preference for pluralism degenerates into a merely semantical distinction
when reasonable disagreement ceases to be "reasonable" in a qualitatively changing and
crisis-ridden social reality. There seems to be a lack of the kind of sociological guidelines
in Larmore's account that would prevent "political liberalism" from, as Schmitt claimed,
on the one hand, veering toward moral bankruptcy, on the other, veering toward a
Hobbesian/Weberian battle of warring gods and value stances. As discussed earlier, espe-
cially in Part One, if history is actually constituted by a kind of change more dynamic than
that described in theories of rationalization, differentiation, increasing complexity, and
ever-more-likely disagreement - all presupposed by contemporary liberalism - then the
arguments of Schmitt, and Lukacs for that matter (notwithstanding the excesses of their
own proposed solutions), against the propensity toward philosophical insufficiency, social
instability, and latent political authoritarianism found in Weber's thought are still to a
significant degree valid against contemporary liberal pluralism. The opposition of a plu-
rality of incommensurable value stances, on the one hand, and a social reality determined
by an irresistibly unfolding process of rationalization, on the other, becomes unstable
when reality suddenly comes to be seen as potentially under the immediate control of
human activity, and particular groups view themselves as the legitimate agents of such
change and go about attempting to accelerate it through regressively irrational, instead of
progressively rational, means.
19 For a critique of the cynical abuse of multiculturalism and for a serious attempt to
articulate a progressive vision of it, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal
Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). On the exploitation of
the theme of "globalization," see Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, "Globalization and
the Future of the Nation-State," Economy and Society 24:3 (1995); and Frances Fox Piven, "Is
It Global Economics or Neo-Laissez-Faire?" New Left Review 213 (September/October
1995). The racist and xenophobic strategy of exaggerating the dangers of multiculturalism
is fairly transparent. However, globalization is deployed less uniformly: as an unassailable
reality that must be accepted by proponents of market capitalism, on the one hand, and as
a sinister phenomenon that must be resisted by protectionist nationalists, on the other.
CONCLUSION 309
hand, supranational schemes by the United Nations, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the like - quite frequently communi-
cated in unmistakably anti-Semitic terms - and, on the other, sub- or trans-
national groups like emigrant workers, ethnic minorities, gender coalitions,
and so on, who are often unfairly labeled as "particularist" or "special"
interests, is again a powerful tool of conservative rhetoric.
Moreover, the oft-referred-to diminishing of state capabilities associated
with recent worldwide socioeconomic changes 20 cannot be interpreted as
insurance against the severity of abusive state power, as recent events in
Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia attest.21 Simply because the first transfor-
mation of state and society in this century served to inflate the power of the
state, despite sly protestations to the contrary by the likes of Schmitt, this
does not mean that a new vulnerability of the state will not elicit violent
retrenchist or consolidationist state activity, particularly if legitimated by the
new nationalist, xenophobic, and "our patria first" mentality so rampant
around the globe today.22 At the risk of descending into what might be
perceived as hysterical, naive, or simply foolish conjecture in these conclud-
ing reflections, I believe that recent trends, both popular (e.g., the social
phenomena mentioned earlier) and academic (witness les affaires Heideg-
See Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); as well as Daedalus 124:2 (spring 1995),
special issue: "What Future for the State?"
On these questions, see Peter Anderson, The Global Politics of Power, Justice and Death
(London: Routledge, 1996); and Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A
Global Perspective (London: Sage, 1996).
Perhaps a reliable indication that the sovereignty of the state must be diminishing is the
degree to which the contemporary Right, in genuine "owl of Minerva" fashion, attacks it
as "totalitarian." There is good reason to be wary of those who rhetorically beat the car-
cass of the decaying state but who would be happy to resuscitate it and employ it as a
weapon against their enemies should they be successful in seizing hold of it. This is an
issue about which we can learn much from Schmitt, as long as we keep in mind, in light of
Chapters 5 and 6, that Schmitt's own solution involved making the state into the tool of a
preferred particularist interest. Schmitt depicted the "quantitative total state" of liberal
democracy as weak in order to supplant it with his supposedly strong, authoritarian
"qualitative total state." Contemporary rightist critics of the liberal democratic state invoke
descriptive and normative claims regarding the supposedly strong and coercive total-
itarian nature of such regimes. What they would do with such a state should they have
more influence over its operation remains an open but crucial question. On the new
nationalisms, see Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994); Rogers Brubaker, "Nationhood and the
National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutional Account,"
Theory and Society 23:1 (February 1994); and Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global
View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press,
31O LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
ger, de Man, Schmitt, etc.) render such risks worthy and such cautionary
remarks valid.23
The prevailing notions of "pluralism," whether in its existential warring-
gods, Weberian manifestation or its more mundane American post-World
War II variety, are rightfully challenged today for their insensitivity to con-
crete cultural, economic, or gender-based specificity.24 But the advocates of
identity and difference qua concrete otherness ought not to leave wholly
unexamined their own potential essentializing of themselves or others in
their challenges to traditional pluralism. When both sides foreclose the
possibility of commonality and mutual rational exchange, they conse-
quently leave the public sphere vulnerable to those who would seek to
enforce a stable and unifying order from above and who would exploit
concrete otherness, not on behalf of those unjustly marginalized or ban-
ished from the redistributive picture but rather in a strategy aimed at naked
political gain. Although I cannot elaborate here, the movement to take into
account diversity, difference, and the attempt to practice a multiculturalism
that appreciates concrete otherness does not necessarily preclude, as some
critics on both sides would suggest, universality, consensual agreement, and
the possibility of fully democratic legitimacy.25
23 On the popular and the academic trends, respectively, see Mabel Berezin, "Fascism/
Antiliberalism: Some New Thoughts on an Old Idea," Department of Sociology, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, unpublished manuscript, 1996; and the essays in Richard Wolin,
Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1995). In general, see Walter Laquer, Fascism: Past, Present and Future (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
24 See William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996). Poststructuralists celebrate the multiplicity of the supposedly permanently in-
scribed identities of the social world that in their understanding liberals barely tolerate
and in fact attempt to coercively coordinate into orderly sociopolitical arrangements. On
the drawbacks inherent in such criticisms of liberalism, see George Kateb, "Notes on
Pluralism," Social Research 61:3 (fall 1994).
25 In particular, the dialogue between feminists of a critical-theoretic inclination, such as
Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, and those of a more poststructuralist/postmodernist
perspective, such as Iris Marion Young, has generated perhaps the most clarifying and
potentially most fruitful theoretical results. The former defend universalistic Enlighten-
ment principles from a standpoint that has for some time extensively worked through its
deficiencies, whereas the latter pursues a more particularist agenda, but nevertheless with
a quite serious commitment to democracy, as such. See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self
(New York: Routledge, 1992); Benhabib, "In Defense of Universalism -Yet Again!" New
German Critique 62 (spring/summer 1992); Nancy Fraser, "Recognition or Redistribu-
tion?: A Critical Reading of Iris Youngs Justice and the Politics of Difference," Journal ofPolitical
Philosophy 3:2 (June 1995); Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Rethinking Key Concepts of a "Postsocial-
ist" Age (London: Roudedge, 1996); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Young, "Comments on Seyla Benhabib,
CONCLUSION 311
Turning to the other side of the Weberian dilemma, that of the "objec-
tive" social reality of increasing rationalization, we will recall from Chapter 2
how both Schmitt and Heidegger pointed out the "anxiety" over "mastery"
engendered by modern technology. As we may observe today, such
pathologies do not always manifest themselves in the highly aestheticized
manner that they did in Weimar Germany. For instance, Daniel Bell's influ-
ential considerations on technology from the seventies that foreshadow
contemporary conservative rhetoric are a more sober yet ultimately no more
theoretically rigorous case in point: His technological determinism that
posits an apparently autonomously generated technology leads him to call
for the revival of a Protestant ethic-like asceticism with which to conform to
it.26 An appropriate engagement with technology ought not lapse into a
neoconservative fatalism that suggests we must resign ourselves and the
possibilities for sociopolitical justice to irresistible technological
imperatives - the contemporary manifestation of the passivity that Schmitt
so despised in Weimar.27 Nor is it to will oneself or one's culture beyond this
position by seizing hold of the instruments of technology in some mythical,
supratechnological political project, such as Soviet Communism, or as
demonstrated in this work, the authoritarian national- or continental-
conflict theory that Schmitt so vigorously championed in the twenties and
Situating the Self," New German Critique 62 (spring/summer 1992). See also Fraser's com-
ments on Benhabib, "False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,"
Praxis International 11:2 (July 1991).
There is at least some cause for optimism on the sociological level as well, as the work
of Yasemin Soysal demonstrates that in contemporary practices of social membership in
Europe, "universalist" or "particularist" claims are not opted for by, for instance, emigrant
workers, in an either/or fashion, but are intermingled in novel, potentially emancipatory
strategies; see Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational
Membership in Europe (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994). The lesson to be
learned from both Schmitt's efforts and the virulent new nationalisms from around the
globe is that multiculturalism is not politically dangerous as a democratic discursive or
institutional practice but rather as an object for cynical co-opting by power consolidating
elites.
26 See Daniel Bell, The Coming ofPost-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1972), and The
Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Bell even suggests the
return to traditional religion; see Bell, 'The Return of the Sacred?" in The Winding Passage
(New York: Basic Books, 1980).
27 For an analysis of this position taken up by Schmitt's own students after the war, see Claus
Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1984). Studies of "technocracy" concerned with Schmitt's influence in the postwar Ger-
man context are Ingeborg Maus, Burgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funk-
tion und aktuellen Wirkung der Theorie Carl Schmitts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980); and
Thomas Vesting, Politische Einheitsbildung und technische Realisation: Ueber die Expansion der
Technik und die Grenzen der Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990).
312 LIBERALISM AND FASCISM
Schmitt, Carl. Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen. Tubingen: J. C. B.
Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1914.
"Die Sichtbarkeit der Kirche: Eine scholastische Erwagung." Summa: Eine Viertel-
jahresschrift (1917).
"Die Tyrannei der Werte." In Der Tyrannei der Werte. Edited by Carl Schmitt et al.
Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1979.
"Diktatur und Belagerungszustand: Eine staatsrechtliche Studie." Zeitschrift fur die
gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 38 (1917).
Politische Romantik. Munich: Duncker 8c Humblot, 1925.
Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus. Munich: Duncker &
Humblot, 1926.
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344 INDEX