The Crisis of Liberal Democracy Poli 110DA 04

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The Crisis of Liberal DemocracyPoli 110DA 04

• The enemy is not merely any competitor.

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Carl Schmitt

• 1888-1985
• Major German intellectual before and after WWII
• Joined Nazi party in 1933
• Attacked in Das Schwartze Korps, but was
  protected by Göring
• Captured by US in 1945, relaeased in 1946
• Rejected all attempts at de-nazification
• Articulated tension between liberalism and
  democracy
• Defended Reichs anti-Semitic policies
• Argued for the importance of undivided authority
• Defended politics as a separate sphere of human
  action

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• Schmitts thought Nazism
• Contacting and expanding the horizons of
  political thought after the War

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• The concept of the state presupposes the concept
  of the political. (19)
• The state is a political entity, but what is the
  political? What is the relationship between the
  political and the state?
• The political, not politics

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• It is widely acknowledged, if only tacitly, that
  the political is a distinct sphere of human
  activity
• Distinct from other spheres (religious, cultural,
  economic, legal, scientific, etc.) (23)

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• Spheres of human thought and activity have their
  own criteria which express themselves in a
  characteristic way.
• Moral Good/evil
• Economic Profitable/unprofitable
• Aesthetic Beautiful/ugly (26)
• When you speak in these terms, you are talking
  about the relevant sphere of human activity

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• The specific political distinction to which
  political actions and motives can be reduced is
  that between friend and enemy. (26)
• A criterion, not an exhaustive description of all
  political content

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• The enemy is not merely any competitor or just
  any partner of a conflict in general. He is also
  not the private adversary whom one hates. An
  enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one
  fighting collectivity of people confronts a
  similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the
  public enemy... (28)

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• The friend/enemy distinction does not necessarily
  depend on those of other spheres of life.
• Thus, the enemy need not be evil, ugly,
  irrational, etc.
• Nonetheless, since this distinction is the
  strongest and most intense of any distinction,
  it often draws upon others for its support. (27)
• Thus, the enemy is often perceived as ugly, evil,
  barbaric, etc. whether or not this is in fact the
  case.

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• Thus, the political enemy need not be morally
  evil or aesthetically ugly he need not appear as
  an economic competitor, and it may even be
  advantageous to engage with him in business
  transactions. (27)
• Politics is an issue of neither morality nor
  rational self-interest.

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• The enemy is the other, the stranger and it is
  sufficient for his nature that he is, in a
  specially intense way, something different and
  alien, so that in extreme cases conflicts with
  him are possible. These can neither be decided
  by a previously determined general norm nor by
  the judgment of a disinterested and therefore
  neutral third party. (27)
• The distinction is particular

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• Only the actual participants can correctly
  recognize, understand, and judge the concrete
  situation and settle the extreme case of
  conflict. Each participant collectivity is in
  a position to judge whether the adversary intends
  to negate his opponents way of life and
  therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to
  preserve ones own form of existence. (27
  emphasis mine)

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• The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the
  utmost degree of intensity of a union or
  separation. (26)
• For to the enemy concept belongs the ever
  present possibility of combat.... Combat does
  not mean competition, nor does it mean pure
  intellectual controversy nor symbolic
  wrestlings... (33)
• This is not a metaphor

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• The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive
  their real meaning precisely because they refer
  to the real possibility of physical killing. War
  follows from enmity. War is the existential
  negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme
  consequence of enmity. It does not have to be
  common, normal, something ideal, or desirable.
  But it must nonetheless remain a real possibility
  for as long as the concept of the enemy remains
  valid. (33)

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• Only in real combat is revealed the most extreme
  consequence of the political grouping of friend
  an enemy. From this most extreme possibility
  human life derives its specifically political
  tension.
• Politics is the friend/enemy distinction, and the
  resultant possibility of war.

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• A world in which the possibility of war is
  utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe,
  would be a world without the distinction of
  friend and enemy and hence a world without
  politics. It is conceivable that such a world
  might contain many very interesting antitheses
  and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of
  every kind, but there would not be a meaningful
  antithesis whereby men could be required to
  sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and
  kill other human beings. (35)

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• There exists no rational purpose, no norm no
  matter how true, no program no matter how
  exemplary, no social ideal no matter how
  beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could
  justify men in killing each other for this
  reason. If such physical destruction of human
  life is not motivated by an existential threat to
  ones own way of life, then it cannot be
  justified. (49)

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• Any difference, economic, religious,
  philosophical, etc., can become the focus of
  enmity, but at that moment it leaves its original
  sphere and enters the political
• The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially
  so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical
  antithesis at precisely the moment at which it
  become political, pushes aside its original
  criteria and motives, and subordinates them to
  the conditions and conclusions of the political
  situation at hand. (38)

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• The grouping is always political which orients
  itself toward this most extreme possibility.
  This grouping is therefore always the decisive
  human grouping, the political entity. If such an
  entity exists at all, it is always the decisive
  entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the
  decision about the critical situation, even if it
  is the exception, must always necessarily reside
  there. (38)

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• To the state as an essentially political entity
  belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility
  in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the
  ability to fight him with the power emanating
  from the entity. (45)