Benedetto Fontana*
Today we live in the age of liberal triumphalism and capitalist globalization. The end of history and the end of politics are everywhere announced and celebrated. Writers from Fukuyama1 to Huntington,2 theorists from Bobbio to Held, have taken up the theme of structural transformation, democratization, the increasing importance of international institutions, and the consequent decline of the state.3
Academics, politicians,4 and "public intellectuals" are heralding the advent of a novus ordo seclorum, both national and international, in which traditional notions of politics, conflict, and citizenship will be redefined, and in which new behavioral patterns and habits are being formed. A conference devoted to the thought of Carl Schmitt is therefore a welcome corrective.
It is welcome because the moralism and the resulting depoliticization of state and society are not merely instances of infantile vanity and smug selfcongratulation, but also because they reflect the underlying tendencies and assumptions of liberal capitalism that Schmitt’s thought tried to uncover. Of course, Marx and Engels, in their day, also sought to uncover the material and power structures that underlay the liberal ideology of natural right, constitutionalism, and representative government.
Thus, the papers presented by Jorge Dotti5 and Stathis Gourgouris,6 exploring the relation, and points of contact, between Marxist and Schmittian thought, are not only interesting and enlightening in their own right, but are also politically and intellectually valuable for engaging and challenging the contemporary Weltanschauung of liberal and capitalist thought.
To Schmitt, Marxism adumbrates two related, sometimes contradictory, tendencies.
On one hand, it suggests a theory of historical development in which the internal contradictions of capitalism lead to its supersession into a superior socio-political order. This is its "scientific," deterministic, and economistic side. Politically, in the West, this view contributed to the integration of the working class into the liberal and parliamentary state. Here Marxism is seen as the mirror image of liberal thought. By its privileging of the private and the economic, and in its concern with wages, workplace conditions, and social welfare policies, reformist socialism is merely the further elaboration of the liberal emphasis on private life, property rights, and ethical and cultural considerations (such as individualistic rationality, natural rights, etc.).
As such, rather than challenging the hegemony of the liberal conception of the world, this type of Marxism may be seen as its natural and logical result.
At the political level, Western socialists accepted and played the liberal parliamentary game. Yet Schmitt realized that Marxism contained elements enabling it to transcend its merely class and economic content -- it contained the germs of what he understood to be a fundamental and radical critique of liberal thought and liberal society.
Both of these papers show that he found these elements in Sorel and in the notions of dictatorship elaborated in the East by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Sorel, in his emphasis on the myth of the general strike, and Lenin, in his coup d’état of October 1917, pointed to an antiliberal understanding of politics.
Liberals saw politics in two contradictory ways: either as the result of rational discussion and open debate, or as the result of competing private interests ultimately leading to bargaining, alliance formation, and coalition building. In either case--whether as a rational and open debate or as the clash of opposing and interfering interests--political liberalism leads to the supremacy of parliament and of its political parties.
Here, too, liberalism presents the state and politics as mere mechanisms, as instruments necessary in maintaining a "neutral" and objective order. For Schmitt, revolutionary Marxism and the Sorellian idea of myth recapture a notion that political liberalism both negates and covers up. In both cases (Sorel and Lenin), the recovery of the political was made possible by moving away from the rationalistic and abstract categories originating in the Enlightenment (humanity, rule of law, rights of man, the proletariat as the universal class). Both exposed the neutral, rational, and universal pretensions not only of liberal thought, but also of reformist socialist ideology.
In this sense, both liberalism and Western (reformist) Marxism are the natural descendants of Enlightenment rationalist thought. Liberalism talks about the "equality of all men" and the natural rights guaranteed to them by natural law. Although Marx attacks these notions as mere ideological mystifications that veil social inequality and economic domination, he nevertheless looks forward to a future communism that inaugurates a classless society of universal emancipation.
At the same time, both liberalism and Western Marxism privilege the social over the political, and the private over the public—indeed, the social is reduced to the economic. The typical liberal distinction between state and society is reproduced in Marxian thought, where the former is seen as the mere outgrowth or epiphenomenon of the latter.
Liberalism, as the ideology of the dominant bourgeois groups and of the established system of state formations, especially evinces the overriding tendency to see politics and the state as the process by which legislation is constitutionally enacted and subsequently administered through elaborate legal-bureaucratic mechanisms. The state is the means by which the multiple groups that together define society--cultural, religious, economic, and educational—can compete and further their particular private interests. In other words, the state enables these social groups to act within the private sphere and, at the same time, to deny the political character of their activities--thus the obvious and intimate connection between liberalism and parliamentarism.7
The supremacy of the private sphere leads inevitably to parliamentary deliberation and discussion. Both the private sphere and parliament entail the subordination of politics to the social, economic, and cultural spheres. To the extent that parliamentary representation mirrors the multiplicity of private activities that take place within the overall society, parliamentary government implies the domestication of politics and the state.
Thus, liberalism and Marxism share a concern with the private, economic aspects of life and culture.
They both understand and analyze politics in terms of society and the economy.
Yet, while liberalism sees such a condition as a natural and normal conclusion, Marxism sees it simply as a stage of historical development which must be transcended and overcome.
Schmitt sees the rise of liberalism and parliamentarism as occurring within the transitional stage between the absolutist state of the seventeenth century and the mass or total state of the twentieth century. Such a period is characterized by the emergence of the people or masses as a political force in history.
In the Anglo-American world, the intervention of the masses into the political world, became a matter of finding mechanisms by which to integrate them into an already existing institutional order, while in Europe such mass intervention challenged the very foundations of the various anciens régimes. In the latter circumstances, sovereignty thus becomes problematic. It becomes complicated, and is rendered unstable and unpredictable, by the mass mobilization of people and the concomitant transformation of the power equation and equilibrium in state and society.
In addition, while democratization in the Anglo-American states meant the channeling and control of the masses through various institutional devices already established by the prevailing liberal order, in Europe, democratization meant the interpenetration of the political and social elements of state and society. In the latter case, politics was no longer confined and delimited by the structural boundaries of the state, because "state and society penetrate[d] each other."8
It is this very interpenetration of the political and the social that Schmitt seeks to address. He shares with nineteenth-century liberals an antipathy toward the people/masses, regarding them as sources of instability, anarchy, and decline.
Technological and industrial innovations have produced new methods of mass mobilization and mass propaganda, which, to Schmitt and liberals, have intensified and accelerated the political and social dangers threatening the viability and durability of the social order.
Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, and his concomitant analysis of the Marxist-Leninist notion of dictatorship, issues directly from these inherently conservative concerns. As he sees it, liberal politics, since it is based on parliamentary government and interest group competition or compromise, is not equipped to deal with the political democratization and the mass politics that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Both communism and Sorel’s vision of proletarian mass action put themselves in stark opposition to what Schmitt called the "liberal illusion" of the reconcilability of interests, compromise, and constitutional and parliamentary democracy. In addition, both see life as an existential struggle with an other. As such, the function of consciousness or knowledge is not to lead to discussion or to debate, but rather to action, and to the overcoming of the class enemy.
It is myth or ideology that galvanizes the consciousness of the masses, organizes their social reality, and moves them to act.
In Schmitt’s thought, the political is understood in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy. Such a notion harks back to the political theory and practice of the ancient world. In the first book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates is trying to arrive at a concept of justice, Polemarchus offers a definition in terms of the friend/enemy dichotomy. Polemarchus says that justice is "doing good to friends and harm to enemies."9 Such a notion, moreover, complements and elaborates Thrasymachus’s definition of justice as "the interest of the stronger."10
Both presuppose a concept of the political defined by opposition and conflict.askelnote
Political thought in the ancient world was dominated by the problem of the struggle between the masses (the demos) and the rich and powerful (the dynatoi [Dynacorp?] ). In Plato’s Republic, for example, the polis is never seen as a unified totality or unity, but rather is envisioned as torn asunder by the struggle for power between the rich and the poor.11 The polis is, in reality, "two cities," or two factions: democracy and oligarchy.
Moreover, for both Plato and Aristotle, the struggle between these two cities creates the political and social prerequisites for the emergence of tyranny. Variants of such a construction, of course, can be traced from the ancients to Machiavelli, to Montesquieu, to Madison and Hamilton, and up to the Marxists and the theorists of elitism (Mosca, Michels, and Schumpeter).
However, unlike the Marxist and ancient antinomy which assigns the opposing antagonists a class content, Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy does not define what the political "is"--for in itself it has no content or substance. What Schmitt’s dichotomy does is define the "limits" or boundaries of existence or life.12 As Schmitt notes, "[t]he distinction of friend and enemy signifies the outer limits of an association or dissociation."13
In a stable state the political in this sense is latent, unseen, mere potential. But if and when the state monopoly over the means of coercion breaks down, and its authority and legitimacy begin to unravel, the political is realized as civil strife and civil war. According to Schmitt:
"War is just the extreme realization of enmity. It need not be a common occurrence, nor something normal, neither must it be an ideal or something to be longed for; but it must persist as a real possibility, if the concept of an enemy is to retain meaning."14 Such a statement is strikingly similar to the characterization of proletarian revolution described by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire, where he contrasts the development and direction of the proletarian revolution to those of the bourgeois revolution. Marx writes:
Proletarian revolutions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course . . . seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them . . . until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!15 The notion that class struggle is not necessarily open war and violent conflict was stated, of course, in the 1848 Manifesto, where Marx and Engels proclaimed the enmity of successive historical classes, which "stood in constant opposition to one another," and which "carried on [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight."16
War, whether international or domestic, must be "a real possibility" -- that is, the distinction between friend and enemy creates a permanent state of war in the Hobbesian sense.17
It is in this sense that, to Schmitt, the political is always the exception: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."18 Hence, the sovereign is not to be understood as a legitimating formula, but rather as a concrete and determinate actor with the power to make and enforce a political decision.
The sovereign is neither an abstract conception nor a legal/constitutional rule. In fact, it is contingent, dependent upon the vicissitudes of conflict and struggle, and thus is always outside the legal/constitutional order of the state.
In effect, the sovereign creates the very possibility for law and order by determining the conditions that define ordinary and normal politics--that is, he decides what the exception is.
As Schmitt writes: "For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists."19
The state, therefore, whose essence is the political defined by the friend/enemy antithesis, for both Marx and Schmitt, is characterized as the product of conflict and struggle. It is reduced to the executive--that is, to the executive function of organizing and wielding the coercive power of the community (whether the community is defined in terms of the people/nation, as in Schmitt, or in terms of the proletarian class, as in Marx) against the external enemy.
But if the political is the exception, and if the political also is discovered in the friend/enemy distinction, Schmitt translates the notion of class struggle—which in Marx is the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, condition of historical and social movement— into the defining (and universal) characteristic of the political by stripping it of its class (economic) content.
By discarding the class nature of conflict, Schmitt redirects it toward the international and national levels, and thus goes back to Hegel and to the nineteenth-century theorists of Realpolitik and Machtpolitik. It is now the nation-state, rather than the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, that is both protagonist and antagonist of political conflict. In the words of Benedetto Croce, Hegel and Marx "reasserted the nature of the State and of politics in terms of authority and of a struggle for power (the power of nations or the power classes, as the case may be)."20
Both Schmitt and the Marxists, therefore, seem to have a mirror image of their respective concepts of war between friends and enemies. Paradoxically, however, each is attempting to demystify, and to uncover, what each considers to be ideological and mythological formulations regarding the nature of the state and of political conflict.
Yet, Schmitt’s notion of the political as the exception is precisely the Bolshevik intervention in the historical process. Unlike the views of Kautsky and Bernstein, the revolution is not passively waited upon because it is the product of historical development (either as the result of the Hegelian dialectic, or as the result of the objective laws of economic rationality); rather, it is forced, it is brought into being by will and decision, against the laws of historical development--Gramsci first greeted the Bolshevik revolution as the "revolution against Capital."21
It is in this sense that Lenin’s dictatorship of the party may be seen as a sovereign dictatorship that created an entirely new political order.
On the other hand, the very existence of conditions making possible the coming of dictatorship indicates that the state and society are riven by factional strife and class conflict, such that normal politics, conducted within the normal constitutional order, are breaking down. This, of course, describes the situation obtained in the late republic of ancient Rome. And this also describes the political trajectory of the Weimar Republic.
In both cases, the civitas and the state, capable of maintaining and guaranteeing peace, security, and predictability, ceased to exist, and the political condition of the anarchic war of all against all that characterized the external international order was introduced inside state and society.22 As a solution, therefore, Schmitt proposed to oppose the red dictatorship of the left with the black dictatorship of the right.
Schmitt understood, along with the communists, that we are dealing here with two kinds of "exception": the commissarial and the sovereign. The first was used in the first years of the Weimar Republic against the communists by the Social Democratic Party leadership to preserve the constitutional order. One is commissioned to use extralegal and extraconstitutional methods to restore legality and the constitutional order. The other, on its own initiative, breaks the legal order in order to create a new one. The first is grounded in the constitution; the other is groundless and emerges ex nihilo (legally and morally speaking) because it wills the new order.23
In Weimar Germany, the commissarial or constitutional dictatorship exercised by the Reich president was transformed, in the very attempt to preserve the system, into the sovereign dictatorship of the Nazis, which ultimately destroyed the system and established a new order.
In Marxism, moreover, the original vision of the Marxian dictatorship as a temporary and transient device subordinated to the will of the proletariat was transmogrified by Leninism into a permanent dictatorship of the party.
For Schmitt, the political as the exception, and the political as adumbrating the friend/enemy dichotomy, are brought together in the notion of the sovereign dictatorship. While dictatorship relates to the breakdown of order, or to the lack of order altogether (that is, the exception), sovereignty for Schmitt is related to democracy and to the people.
Modernity signals not merely the movement of sovereign power away from the monarch to the people, but also the constitution of the people as historical agent, as the constituent power that establishes the social order. The sovereign, Hobbes says, is the mortal god.24
But since the people constitute themselves as sovereign in opposition to an other, equally sovereign people, and notwithstanding the emphasis on unity and solidarity, Schmitt’s political theology ultimately evinces features that are fundamentally polytheistic. For the people as a political unity can only exist in opposition to another political entity: indeed, the unity of both is established through this very opposition.
In effect, the people as sovereign can only be maintained as such through the constitution of the people as other, and thus through the potential or the possibility of war.
* Benedetto Fontana teaches Political Philosophy and American Political Thought at Baruch College, City University of New York. I would like to thank Doris L. Suarez and Dante Germino for their kind and helpful comments.
askelnote [The link chosen for "opposition and conflict" was simply the first up at Google. I blame Serendipity as is my usual practice.]
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1 Francis Fukuyama, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN (1992).
2 Samuel P. Huntington, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER (1996).
3 See COSMOPOLITAN DEMOCRACY: A NEW AGENDA FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER (Daniele Archibugi & David Held eds., 1995).
4 See, e.g., Slavoj Zizek, Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism, LONDON REV. OF BOOKS 3, 5-7 (1999) (reviewing JOHN KEANE, VACLAV HAVEL: A POLITICAL TRAGEDY IN SIX ACTS (1999)).
5 Jorge Dotti, Schmitt Reads Marx, 21 CARDOZO L. REV. 1473 (2000).
6 Stathis Gourgouris, The Concept of the Mythical (Schmitt and Sorel), 21 CARDOZO L. REV. 1487 (2000).
7 See Paul Hirst, Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism, 72 TELOS 15-16 (1987); Mark Lilla, The Enemy of Liberalism, N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS, May 15, 1997.
8 CARL SCHMITT, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL 22 (George Schwab trans., 1996).
9 PLATO, REPUBLIC 331 E-336 A (Conford trans., 1948).
10 Id. at 336 B-347 E.
11 Id. at 550 C.
12 See Ellen Kennedy, Hostis Not Inimicus: Toward a Theory of the Public in the Work of Carl Schmitt, in LAW AS POLITICS 92, 92-108 (David Dyzenhaus ed., 1998).
13 Id. at 100.
14 Id. at 101.
15 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in THE MARX-ENGELS READER 594, 597-98 (Robert C. Tucker ed., 1978).
16 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in THE MARX-ENGELS READER, supra note 15, at 473-74.
17 It is instructive to compare these statements from Schmitt and Marx to those of Hobbes, in which he identifies the state of nature with the state of war: For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or in the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known . . . . So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. THOMAS HOBBES, LEVIATHAN pt. I, ch. 13 (1996).
18 CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY 5 (1985) (George Schwab trans., 1985). 19 Id. at 13.
20 BENEDETTO CROCE, ETICA E POLITICA 181 (1931). Croce, like Schmitt, sees Marx as the theorist of power and of political realism. He sees Marx as returning to the "best traditions of Italian political science, thanks to the firm assertion of the principle of force, of struggle, of power, and of satirical and biting opposition to the anti-historical and democratic insipidity of natural law doctrine--the so-called ideals of 1789." BENEDETTO CROCE, MATERIALISMO STORICO ED ECONOMIA MARXISTICA xii-xiii (1918).
21 Antonio Gramsci, La Rivoluzione contro il Capitale, in SCRITTI GIOVANILI 1914- 1918, at 149-53 (Giulio Einaudi ed., 1975).
22 For a discussion of the relation between the normal or ordinary politics obtaining inside or within the political order and that obtaining outside its limits or boundaries, see Benedetto Fontana, Tacitus on Empire and Republic, in XIV HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT 1, 27-40 (1993). See also the analysis in NORBERTO BOBBIO, DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP 158-61 (Peter Kennealy trans., 1989).
23 For an incisive analysis, see John P. McCormick, The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers, 10 CANADIAN J. LAW & JURISPRUDENCE 1, 163-87 (1997).
[ From his resume: PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997) 352 + xii. [Chinese edition forthcoming from Hua Xia Publishing].
Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (monograph in progress; contracted with Cambridge University Press).
Machiavellian Democracy: Popular Control of Contingency and Elites (monograph in progress).]
24 HOBBES, supra note 17, at pt. II, ch. 17. |
