Carl Schmitt and Ideology Critique (with some Weber, Nietzsche, and Foucault)

The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.

According to modern linguistic usage, the state is the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit.—Carl Schmitt (1932) The Concept of the Political, p. 19. (Translated by George Schwab.)

These are the first two sentences of Schmitt’s The Concept of Political. By the end of the work, we have come to recognize that there are different kinds of states not all of them in accord with the modern linguistic usage. But for Schmitt all states presuppose the political. The political, in turn, just is “the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.” (p. 29) This doesn’t mean the (modern) state is irrelevant because in the very next sentence Schmitt writes, “In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.” (pp. 29-30) In practice, however, it’s the sovereign (whoever/whomever/whatever it is) that decides (p. 38).

This is pretty familiar. Today, I want to unfold a strain of argument in Schmitt that is clearly indebted to Nietzsche and Weber, and that looks forward to Foucault. To introduce it, I quote a whole paragraph:

The [modern] state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies. The endeavor of a normal state consists above all in assuring total peace within the state and its territory. To create tranquility, security, and order and thereby establish the normal situation is the prerequisite for legal norms to be valid. Every norm presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation. (p. 46)

The state presupposes a collectivity that has constituted itself and, thereby, has constituted who are friends, who are, by definition, people who are willing to die for each other and willing to kill enemies. To some students this evokes Hobbes’ sovereign, except that Schmitt implicitly denies/removes the exception to the rule that is rather important to Hobbes, that is, that the individual maintains a natural right to refuse to participate in offensive war. Schmitt denies the individual this private judgment. But the more important deviation from Hobbes is that Schmitt rejects the existence of pre-political rights altogether.

As an aside, and before I get to that, it’s worth noting that Schmitt reanimates the language of classical civic virtue (civic) friendship (in the way familiar from Plato, Rousseau, and nineteenth century socialists) for his own distinct ends. He reminds his learned reader with a knowing nod to Republic Bk. V, 470 that he is not so far from Plato for whom real war (ungoverned by restraint, that is, when ius in bello is wholly absent) is restricted to natural enemies between Hellenes and Barbarians, that is, different peoples. And even if one thinks Schmitt is anachronistic here it’s an anachronism not uncommon in the nineteenth century.

Be that as may, it’s crucial to Schmitt’s approach is that the legal order is quite downstream from the political as the quoted passage reveals; to repeat, the state “creates peace…tranquility, security, and order” and, thereby, creates normalcy. Now, I think by ‘normalcy’ Schmitt means something like the conditions where common, robust expectations are reliable. This clearly presupposes something like Weber’s monopoly on violence (“peace…tranquility, security”) as well as the rationalization consequent to a rule-following bureaucracy (“order”).

That is, for Schmitt, the state produces normalcy. (This is why Foucault is in the title of today's post.) Only once normalcy is produced, legal norms can be valid. (Schmitt was a jurist so he is unlikely to have written this material casually.) So, to put it informally, legality is a downstream effect of state-produced normalcy.

So much for set up.

There are two connected important payoffs, for Schmitt, that allow him to engage in a kind of (Nietzschean) error theory of important social phenomena. First, it’s to tackle what he takes to be a pernicious (enlightenment/liberal) anthropology that denies human wickedness or (when he speaks in a more theological register) original sin. That man can be good — which on his view is formally inscribed in the presumption of innocence that is constitutive of legal practice — is itself the effect of normalcy. As Schmitt puts it, this “presupposes that a state exists which has created the external conditions of morality by producing a normal situation within which man can be good.” (p 64 n. 32)

To put the point in the previous paragraph slightly differently, one of the effects that normalcy generates is the condition of possibility in which moral agents can survive and thrive, and more subtly, institutions of justice (and perhaps science) can reliably ascribe goodness and badness as well as truth and falsity. But this ‘normal’ state of affairs does not license the inference that the conditions of morality obtain in the more existential context of group self-constitution and political combat with the enemy (which, as I have noted elsewhere, is governed for Schmitt by a kind of standpoint epistemology available only to the combatants-participants themselves). Schmitt wants to block the application of law to such combat as well as, and more importantly for present purposes, to deny the possibility of morality/goodness in war. (Not unlike Nietzsche, he thinks that the deployment of moral categories in war is a means by the weak try to subdue the strong and a cover for imperialist and genocidal projects.)

Second, he thinks that normalcy creates a kind of false consciousness that veils the political from even quite learned and sophisticated social agents. In fact, Schmitt clearly thinks that normalcy generates, perhaps necessarily, structural misperceptions of social reality (even if one has temporary access to successful empirical regularities of the status quo). (There are echoes of Plato’s cave analogy here.) His favorite example of this phenomenon, and he draws on Tocqueville in doing so, is that “nobody scented the revolution; it is incredible to see the security and unsuspiciousness with which these privileged spoke of the goodness, mildness, and innocence of the people when 1793 was already upon them-spectacle ridicule et terrible.” (p. 68)

The problem here is not that the aristocracy failed to predict their own downfall. Nor is the problem that the aristocracy had forgotten that their own class privilege was itself an effect of violence. Rather, it is that they were in the grip of all kinds of intellectual ideas that itself could only be possible as a deep downstream effect of ‘normalcy,’ which obscured from them the terror that people are capable against each other.

So, somewhat paradoxically, for Schmitt the conditions that allow for any group’s political dominance also contain the seeds of its downfall as this dominance produces normalcy over time, unless it has access to special revelation or finds a way to discern or hold on to the correct political anthropology that points to the truths of our existential condition even if ordinary life seems to falsify it.