New APPS

Nothing new to say about Schmitt here, but I think there is something to be said for clarifying in what ways Schmitt is not ‘Schmittian’ in some senses that influence some people. This issue came up in a teaching context recently and I think refers to a widespread tendency, which I believe can be tackled without hopefully falling into assault and battery on a straw man in order to clarify what is distinctive about Schmitt’s contribution.

The issue is of defining Carl Schmitt as a ‘decisionist’ who regards the question of who exercises sovereignty as arbitrary, as a question which begins and ends with the question who has the force to exercise sovereignty, with no regard for the legitimation of that sovereignty. This is severely one- sided, but does have some basis in some things Schmitt said, particularly in Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, and Crisis in Parliamentary Democracy. The opening of Political Theology and a slightly later in the text quotation from Kierkegaard, with related discussion, is where decisionistic Schmitt seems most apparent. 

 So clearly there is some sympathy in Schmitt for the idea that sovereignty rests with whoever has the power to exercise it rather than any attempt at making arguments for who does or does not merit exercise of sovereignty. There is more to this than a ‘post-modern’ critique of foundations of sovereignty, of any method of determining sovereignty.

Schmitt is not indifferent on the issue of who it is that exercises sovereignty, and is not celebrating pure force, pure arbitrariness, or anything else that might put him outside the sphere of arguments about just or lawful claims to exercise governmental or lawmaking powers. It is perhaps saying the obvious to say that Schmitt has a preference with regard to who makes laws and runs government, but sometimes saying the obvious is important when a one-sided reading gets into circulation, when an idea of what a thinker says detached from full engagement with the relevant texts is too much influencing the views of students and those in general beginning to approach Schmitt’s contribution.

The preference in Schmitt is for a conservative government rooted in tradition with regard to the actions of government and the making of laws. The making of laws should not be an arbitrary event for Schmitt, even if some might be led to think he does advocate arbitrariness of that kind because he might appear to advocate arbitrariness with regard to who exercises sovereignty.

Law ideally for Schmitt comes from unreflective tradition, which has a starting point in the emergence of human communities dividing land in the process of forming community and participating in the emergence of an agricultural economy. Law making as a reflective deliberate political activity is no more than second best for Schmitt, though he does suggest that state laws are better grounded when coming from an assembly rather than the edicts of a monarch. This is maybe more to do with the sense that law properly speaking emerges from social consensus better captured by an assembly of some kind, rather than the head of of government acting alone.The model  assembly for Schmitt is a medieval gathering of estates rather than a directly elected national assembly.

In the preference for order, tradition, custom, and authority with some respect for law and constitutionalism when rooted in tradition, Schmitt can be placed with Edmund Burke, who he does refer to approvingly on occasion, along with some conservative thinkers of that time, and slightly later, not so well in the Anglophone world, such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortés. Burke is famous, in part, as the critic of the French Revolution, and that is where the distance between Schmitt and unrestrained decisonism is most clear.

The idea of decisionism and the arbitrary violence of sovereignty in the misleading view of Schmitt is one of absolute dictatorship, but this is particularly what Schmitt deplores. In his view, developed early on in On Dictatorship, there is an classical form of dictatorship, which can be seen in the origin of the word itself, in the Roman republican allowance for special powers to be given to a ‘dictator’ for six months in war.

Schmitt recognised that the powers of the dictator were stretched by the later military-political leaders and the Emperors, approaching the idea of absolute authority, though the idea of one person completely above law and restraint was never completely implemented. The French Revolution, in its Jacobin-Committee of Public Safety phase, was an attempt to reach an unrestrained sovereignty. This is not something to be welcomed, but is rather an negative consequence of the breakdown of Medieval ideas of sovereignty as kingship restrained by church, law, tradition and custom. 

The need to decide on the sovereign in the state of exception is itself an outcome of the replace of traditional authority by liberal ideas of positive law, representative assemblies, and parliamentary procedure, which lack foundation or coherence and reduce law to a series of administrative edicts disguised as universally applicable laws. The growth of the administrative state out of the liberal tendency towards multiplying disguised administrative edicts makes an authoritarian state more not less likely. Such a state may be inevitable, but should be embedded in tradition and plurality of institutions with their own valid orders of customary law, rather than a totalitarian dictator.

Schmitt’s appalling decision to take the leading role in the association of Nazi jurists from 1933 to 1936 should not obscure his preference for a kind of traditionalist authoritarianism based on a plurality of social orders rather than unlimited totalitarianism, or any kind of racial theory. Schmitt’s opportunism in relation to the Nazi regime should not give the impression that he was indifferent to had sovereignty.

On the whole Schmitt should be read through Burke or Aquinas, rather than Rorty or Lyotard, or maybe through J.R.R. Tolkein rather than Thomas Pynchon. We should not overlook or excuse his support for Hitlerism (in contrast of course to Tolkein’s condemnation), or general sympathies for ultraconservative authoritarianism, but we should not confuse his position with moral nihilism or a belief in pure power as an end in itself, or as a play with arbitrariness po-mo version of such positions.