About Schmitt
Book reviewed: Political Theology by Carl Schmitt
It is rarely a good sign when the foreword and introduction preceding a text are longer than the text itself. Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is an exception, which is quite apposite for a work whose very first sentence tackles the exceptional. Schmitt was one of the towering figures of German political thought in the 20th century, and Political Theology, one of his key works, is an excellent introduction to his ideas. As we seem to be living in an increasingly Schmittian world, both in terms of discourse and praxis, this is a text well worth exploring.
Political Theology contains four connected essays on the concept of sovereign power. The first essay, “Definition of Sovereignty,” sets the tone for what follows with its memorable opening sentence: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The exception is essentially any emergency situation that poses a serious threat to public order; the sovereign is the individual who decides there is an emergency and what should be done about it. Schmitt proceeds with a frontal attack on the modern constitutional order, which has expunged the exception and the sovereign from its conceptual framework. For Schmitt, a legal order that removes either one from the equation is untenable.
The exception is necessary not only because emergencies are part of the natural order, but also because one cannot define the norm if the exception doesn’t exist. The exception is more fascinating than the rule: “The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception.” The sovereign is necessary because the constitutional order is unable to deal with the exception on its own; in an emergency situation, the absence of a sovereign leaves the state rudderless.
Schmitt opposes the sovereign- and exception-free modern juridical system with a trenchant decisionism. As he writes, “[E]very legal order is based on a decision . . . [T]he legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm.” As mentioned, Schmitt’s sovereign makes two decisions: he decides what constitutes an exception and what to do about it. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and it is the sovereign who decides if a normal situation is actually present. The sovereign therefore guarantees the “situation in its totality.” Far from a one-size-fits-all system, Schmitt writes, “all law is situational law”; a legal order must be flexible enough to encompass any case that might come before it, even a case it cannot envision and for which it has no provisions. That a legal order must deal with situations for which it has no provisions is a paradox that only a sovereign can solve.
When the exception is decided upon, a strange borderline situation is created whereby the sovereign legislates outside the existing legal framework, but the legislation nevertheless has the force of law. For example, by infringing on various constitutional rights of the citizenry, state-of-emergency legislation is technically unlawful from the standpoint of the existing legal order, yet the government is making, applying, and enforcing law. As emergencies invariably arise, a legal order must have a provision to suspend itself to deal with the emergency. But the legal order cannot suspend itself; someone has to pull the trigger. That someone is Schmitt’s sovereign.
“The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision,” the second essay, is a baroque takedown of the jurists Hans Kelsen and Hugo Krabbe, two prominent representatives of what can be defined, at the risk of oversimplification, as liberal jurisprudence. Kelsen believed that law is an abstract system that applies itself uniformly in a non-personalistic manner; the legal order is conflated with the state, and the concept of sovereignty is negated. Krabbe went a step further by denying the state sovereignty and bestowing it upon law instead. Krabbe regarded the personalistic element in law as an anachronism, a relic of the absolutist age. No longer passed down by powerful personages, law now comes from the deep wells of human nature and man’s innate understanding of right and wrong. The implicit, and very optimistic, assumption is that man has reached a point where he can be counted upon to tell right from wrong, and no longer needs guidance from some overlord.
Schmitt militates against Kelsen, Krabbe, and their assumptions. When an exception arises, the existing legal order must be suspended to prevent societal collapse. If the existing legal order is conflated with the state, however, its suspension abrogates the state itself, with all the appropriate implications. Far from an abstract system, law must be made, applied, and enforced by someone; any legal order is, ipso facto, decisionistic. Schmitt regards Hobbes as the classical representative of decisionism and, casting a favorable eye on his statism, echoes the Hobbesian dictum that autoritas, non veritas facit legem (authority, not truth, makes law). When it comes to decisionism, Schmitt writes, “That it is the instance of competence that renders a decision makes the decision relative, and in certain circumstances absolute and independent of the correctness of its content.” In other words, it doesn’t matter whether a decision made by a sovereign is correct, as long as a decision is made. The sovereign is right because he makes a decision, not because he makes the right decision. If you find that problematic, so much the worse for you.
The third essay carries the name of the book, and it is here that we learn the meaning behind the title. Schmitt writes, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Politics cannot be divorced from metaphysics; the metaphysical outlook of an epoch reflects the political structure that it sees as appropriate for itself. Religious belief maps itself onto political structure. Consequently, the sovereign corresponds to God, and the exception to the miracle. Like God, the sovereign is the final instance of appeal; like a miracle that is sent by God, the exception is that rare event that can be only promulgated by a sovereign. While the theistically minded 17th and 18th centuries were dominated by the idea of the sole sovereign, the Enlightenment turned everything on its head. Thinkers such as Rousseau, who is something of Schmitt’s intellectual bête noire, gave both God and his miracles the boot, thus jettisoning the sovereign and the exception.
(As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that although the noxious effect of the Enlightenment is an especially popular hobbyhorse of many philosophical conservatives, who hold Enlightenment thinkers responsible for ridding the world of a supreme being and, therefore, moral standards, this view is not exclusive to the right. For instance, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who wouldn’t have had much to say to Schmitt on any given day, contended that Humanism had replaced God with man, leading to the replacement of culture by civilization and, ultimately, to the demise of both.)
By banishing God and the miracle, the deistic thinkers of the Enlightenment banished the sovereign and the exception from human affairs. Whereas the world order previously had a sovereign directing it, it is now left to run by itself. The decisionistic and personalistic element in sovereignty disappeared, the people were elevated to the role of the sovereign, and the traditional principle of legitimacy lost its validity. No prizes for figuring out what Schmitt thought about all that.
Finally, the fourth essay (“On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State”) is dedicated to Schmitt’s intellectual progenitors: Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and Donoso Cortés. The choice of three Catholics from non-Germanic countries is revealing (Schmitt himself was Catholic, though the relationship between him and the Church was complicated). Schmitt points out that every political idea hinges on a certain view of the nature of man — namely, on whether man is good or evil. The three thinkers under discussion all thought he was pretty bad. De Bonald, who gets the least amount of space, regarded man as too feeble intellectually to recognize truth and consequently in need of tradition to steer him. The ultramontane de Maistre did not distinguish between infallibility and sovereignty; the sovereign is good simply because he exists. Affirming his intellectual lineage with de Maistre, Schmitt points out that de Maistre believed the quality of a decision is less important than the existence of the decision. A man after Schmitt’s own heart, then.
Cortés, whose view of humanity through the dogma of Original Sin virtually made him a misanthrope, recognized that the traditional concept of legitimacy had gone the way of the dodo and argued that the only solution was a dictatorship. The dissolution of tradition (the expulsion of theology from politics) resulted in a society that was “paralyzed in a paradisiacal worldliness of immediate natural life and unproblematic concreteness.” Schmitt is in agreement. He sees modernity as intrinsically hostile to the political (more on Schmitt’s concept of the political later) and the modern state as little more than a huge industrial plant; the resulting world is a thoroughly depoliticized place. On that note, the work is concluded.
This year marks the centenary of the appearance of Political Theology. Far from having gone stale, the text has an almost vernal feel about it. The world has become Schmittian once again — if it has ever stopped being Schmittian in the first place. There are calls to make it more Schmittian still. The lead essay on Unherd I saw the other day propounded the need for European strongmen, a most Schmittian idea; and, sure enough, Schmitt’s name floated like a balloon towards the end of the piece. Sometimes the obsession with Schmitt verges on the absurd, as it does in an article arguing Schmitt’s worldview informs the “mindset of the Russian ruling elites” (to attribute an ideological mindset to Russia’s ruling elites and to think up a Svengali whispering sweet nothings into the ears of a decisionist leader like Putin is to forget that while Schmittian intellectuals need a sovereign, the sovereign has little need for intellectuals, Schmittian or otherwise — I am willing to bet Western commentators care about Dugin, Schmitt, and Ilyin a lot more than Putin does).
Schmitt’s name is currently in vogue for a couple of reasons. There is a growing sense that we are entering a paradigm where the state of emergency will increasingly be the norm. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the truckers’ protest in February 2022, he was channeling his inner Schmitt, though Canada’s feckless leader is unlikely to have heard of Schmitt, let alone to have read him. During the Covid crisis, authorities worldwide were applying the Schmittian concept of sovereignty, deciding both what constituted the exception and what they were to do about it. The ability of citizens in most liberal democracies to exercise their constitutional rights was severely circumscribed as they were told, among other things, under what conditions they could leave their homes — if, that is, they could leave them at all. There are fears — not unjustified, in my opinion — that now that a precedent has been set, state-of-emergency legislation will be cheerfully applied by governments to address climate change and any other situations deemed to present a security threat.
While it was only in 2020 that most Westerners were rudely introduced to the opening sentence of Political Theology, some thinkers had seen it coming. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben, an outspoken critic of the Italian government’s pandemic measures, has claimed for decades that the West has been living in a perpetual state of emergency (the post-9/11 security measures put in place by the Bush administration were a case in point). An argument is advanced, typically by thinkers inhabiting the political left, that the modern socioeconomic system requires the exception to be the norm if it is to avoid collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
The prevailing ideology and mainstream consensus are only too happy to write off Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty as a fetish of, and threat from, the right, something Schmitt’s own biography does much to encourage. The temptation to do so should be resisted. Central to Schmitt’s thinking is the concept of the political (used as a noun). Like Karl Marx, Schmitt saw liberalism and democracy as different concepts. He defined liberalism as a parliamentary system of representation that is individualistic and masks the influence of special interests. In a democracy, on the other hand, the ruler has a shared identity with those he rules. Determining a shared identity necessarily involves determining what, or whom, that identity excludes — to figure out who we are, we need to know who we are not. A friend-enemy distinction is therefore required. That distinction is the political.
The last two years have demonstrated that the political can be appropriated by anyone. Trudeau’s constant evocation of the far-right threat, whatever the context (from Covid vaccination to abortion rights), is an example of the application of the political from an agent of power far removed from the philosophical right. Trudeau’s ideological framework, such as it is, needs the presence of an enemy to reinforce itself. Just like his use of emergency legislation, this is very Schmittian. At the same time, Trudeau, who once professed to have a “level of admiration for China” because of the effectiveness of its one-party decisionism, is emblematic of the parliamentary liberalism Schmitt rejected. Trudeau received 32.6% of the vote in the last federal election, with a turnout of 62.3%, which means Canada’s two-bit sovereign enjoys the support of roughly one of out five Canadians. Trudeau’s legitimacy is not real but merely procedural, which is the antithesis of Schmitt’s democratic sovereign sharing a common identity with the people. Like other Western leaders throughout the pandemic, Trudeau has been very Schmittian, but his lack of real legitimacy makes him “unSchmittian.” Therein lies a contradiction.
Another reason for the resurgence of interest in Schmitt is the feeling that we are on the cusp of a new, post-liberal order. The present system is running into some heavy headwinds. As economic difficulties mount, the woke continue to reengineer society away with their idiotic belligerence, voices on the intellectual right call for a Caesar to lift society out of the morass, and the world veers from one emergency to another, our ancien régime seems to be on notice. Representative democracy is becoming an ever more ineffectual tool, something that has been reflected in the low voter turnout in many recent elections held in the West. The Western world has indeed become depoliticized — liberal but undemocratic. A huge industrial plant, in a word. The author of Political Theology wouldn’t have been surprised — Schmitt believed that a liberal order had to stop being liberal to survive in an emergency.
Schmittian thought comes with an advisory, and by now it should be clear what type of advisory I have in mind. The dangers of an ideology that advocates for an illiberal sovereign looking for enemies to designate are obvious — there is no guarantee the sovereign’s finger won’t be pointed at you. Schmittian ideas can lead one into some tenebrous labyrinths, and it certainly did with Schmitt. A top jurist of the Weimar Republic, whose integrity his legal work sought to protect, Schmitt joined the Nazi party in 1933, and the catalogue of his subsequent engagements is not especially glorious. Schmitt supported the Night of the Long Knives, arguing that Hitler was protecting the law (a curious take on extrajudicial butchery, for a jurist), and he was an active participant in a conference charmingly called “German Jurisprudence Against the Jewish Spirit.” Nor is the list exhausted there. Although he was let off the hook after the war, Schmitt’s reputation never recovered, and his own post-war intellectual activity did little to rehabilitate his name.
I suspect Schmitt was more supportive of Hitler as a political phenomenon than as a politician whose views he genuinely embraced. The Nazi regime embodied for Schmitt the concept of sovereignty he championed. This is consistent: once you start arguing that the existence of a decision is more important than its content, the identity of the decision maker becomes insignificant. In the final analysis, the Schmittian conception of political sovereignty can be used to bolster any political system that is willing to be decisionistic. Morality simply doesn’t enter it, as anyone unlucky enough to find himself on the wrong side of the friend-enemy divide will quickly realize. But what is one to make of an immoral system, and how can one reconcile it with Christian theism?
There is more to the antagonism between Schmitt and his liberal adversaries than questions of sovereign power or the friend-enemy distinction; the difference is at a metaphysical level. Hegel said that happy periods are history’s white pages. Liberalism seeks to write a history book composed entirely of white pages; Schmitt sees that as a load of wishful thinking. To be Schmittian is to live with History, to submit oneself to its inexorable forces. Liberalism contains a soupçon of utopianism; it aims to overcome History and conjures a world in which the wolf can lie next to the lamb. Schmitt would have scoffed at the very idea, not without reason. Outside of poetry, cold realism inevitably trumps the haziness of dreams, however lofty, and recent events appear to vindicate Schmitt. History might be back. Nevertheless, those welcoming its return with glee would do well to remember that History is fun only so long as it doesn’t knock on your door in the middle of the night or rain bombs on your roof.
A Balkan joke I’ve heard recently might better illustrate my point. Upon learning that a reviled sultan has died, a village explodes in joy and laughter. Only an old woman is crying. To the puzzled villagers she explains that when the late sultan’s grandfather died, she also laughed, but the heir turned out to be worse than his father. Then the heir died, and everyone rejoiced and laughed again, but the son turned out to be worse still. So now that he has died, she knows better than to laugh. The message is clear. However disagreeable aspects of the liberal order might be, don’t cheer for its demise. You never know what might come next, and not even a work as thought-provoking as Political Theology will be of much help here.
