Vimothy just DMed me this article.
To those familiar with his most famous writings, it may seem that Carl Schmitt is an enemy of liberalism. In texts such as The Concept of the Political (1932) and Legality and Legitimacy (1932), Schmitt critiqued the Weimar Republic and the liberal tradition, the weaknesses of which Weimar...
americanaffairsjournal.org
This is worth reading. The author manages to acknowledge Schmitt's criticisms of liberalism whilst also picking holes in them and slapping him about for being a slimy Nazi trying wriggle off the hook.
Schmitt’s work can never be read in abstraction from politics, as Zeitlin reminds us. In Concept of the Political, Schmitt insists that “all political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning.” Something “polemical” is not merely a controversial topic, but a question of such intensity that it creates a state of “polemos” (war). Schmitt defines the political as that which has to do with the distinction between “friend and enemy,” which brings conflict to the “utmost degree of intensity,” i.e., to war. “Political concepts” for Schmitt are not merely concepts about the political (and thus about friendship and enmity, and thus the possibility of war). They are political. Or—what is only another way of saying the same thing—they are “polemical” (participating in a particular war) and not “polemological” (describing war as such). Political concepts, Schmitt claims, “are focused on a specific conflict and bound to a concrete situation.” They do not reveal enduring truths about human nature. Rather they serve the rhetorical strategies that, for the moment, appear convenient to one party as it attacks another. All political ideas, therefore, are “incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combatted, refuted or negated” by them. One must therefore ask what polemical intent there was behind Schmitt’s claim that all political concepts have political intent—and what enemy this claim was meant to negate.
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Liberalism, Schmitt claimed, fails to recognize “the objective nature and autonomy” of politics. Liberals therefore imagine that friendship and enmity, like aesthetic and moral values, can be accommodated in the sort of polytheism that Weber described. Here Schmitt broke with Weber, or radicalized Weber’s pessimism, to insist that liberals do not understand that what makes political values different from other sorts of values is their dangerous intensity. Uniting us to other people in a group of friends opposed to some enemy, political value-setting leads us to the extreme possibility of violent conflict.
This misunderstanding on the part of liberalism may seem to make liberals naïve, and their preferred form of government uniquely exposed to the unrecognized perils of political disagreement. But precisely because liberals cannot imagine that there is a distinct area of politics, separate from morality and other kinds of values, they transform political conflicts into moral ones. Unable to see their enemies simply as enemies (with no moral valuations involved), liberals imagine them as evildoers who must be eliminated. Liberals’ moralized political struggles are not only hypocritical (liberals do not admit that they are even doing politics) but also “unusually intense and inhuman.”
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“Tyranny of Values” is an almost grotesquely self-serving text. Applied to the specific situation of postwar Germany, Schmitt’s historical and psychological accounts of “values” imply that the West German government should not suppress former Nazis on the grounds of their having antidemocratic and anti-liberal values. One may find this implication questionable, the West German government’s policies justified, and Schmitt’s rhetorical tactics contemptible. Nevertheless, if we keep these issues in mind, we can find that “Tyranny of Values” offers enduring insights on liberalism and its enemies.
Perhaps the most important of these is that liberalism is for losers. It is those who are weak, in a minority, or for whatever reason unable to impose their values on others who appeal to liberal principles of value-neutrality, a separation of private and public life, equal rights, etc. If they ever have the opportunity to wield power (that is, if they ever stop being losers), they are likely to abandon liberal principles. It was only when he could see himself as a victim of the state’s value-based agenda that Schmitt could see the appeal of the liberal neutralizations he had once despised. This seems rather bad news for liberalism. Its apparent friends are in fact powerless losers who turn to liberal principles for lack of an alternative.