Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt

The Politics of Order and Myth

Johan Tralau, Johan Tralau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Thomas Hobbes, the English 17 th century philosopher, and Carl Schmitt, Hitler's 'crown jurist', a political thinker and author of an enigmatic book on Hobbes, are increasingly relevant today for two reasons. First, they address the problem of political order, so important when we witness failed states, the privatisation of war, and the rise of political violence that does not derive from the state. Secondly, they are both crucial sources for the use of mythology in politics; moreover, they address the key issue of our time, namely, the relation between politics and religion. This collection of important new essays addresses Hobbes and Schmitt as political thinkers, their importance for present-day politics and society, their conceptions of myth and politics, and Schmitt's use of Hobbes in (and some say against) the Third Reich. When myth, violence and revelation re-emerge as political forces, it is important to understand Hobbes's and Schmitt's answers to the problems of their time – and to those of ours.

This book was based on a special issue of the Critical Review of International Socialand Political Philosophy.

Introduction: Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and three conceptions of politics

Johan Tralau

Statsvetenskapliga institutionen, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

In this introduction, the author argues that Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt can help us rediscover the foundations of politics and political thought. In the years since World War II, the prevailing paradigm of politics has largely centred on the redistribution of resources. Hobbes and Schmitt, by contrast, help us appreciate two other conceptions of politics. Firstly, these thinkers averred that it is the problem of order – not redistribution – which is the fundamental concern for any society. Secondly, both were acutely aware of the role played by myth: that is, how shared ideas – sometimes created for this very purpose – serve to promote order, social cohesion, and law-abiding behaviour. The author also argues, finally, that normative theory and the social sciences in general have often neglected these two conceptions of politics.

Few people would dispute the fact that Thomas Hobbes belongs to the canon of very important political thinkers. The chaotic state of nature and the social contract constituting political obligation are, among other Hobbesian things, indisputedly part of our political and philosophical heritage – the sort of intellectual luggage we carry around whether we like it or not. Carl Schmitt’s role in that canon of political thought is more of a disputed matter, primarily because of his involvement in National Socialism during the first years of Hitler’s reign. However, as a legal scholar, Schmitt was a star even before 1933, and his fascinating work on sovereignty, on the law of peoples, and on other topics, such as literature, spans decades after 1945. Of course, Schmitt has always been important in Germany, though in some cases only in a negative way, as a counter-example or as the model of what political theory should not be. And in many parts of Europe, such as Italy, Schmitt was very much à la mode in the 1980s (especially, perhaps ironically, on the intellectual left), a fashion that then travelled westwards to Anglo-Saxon academia. By now at least one thing appears to be clear. Fashion or not, the question needs to be addressed whether Carl Schmitt’s work – warts, disturbing questions and all – is so fecund and original as to make him a candidate for the canon of political thought. At the very least, regardless of what we think of their answers, both Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt truly address fundamental questions. At a time when we face not only failed states, failed interventions, and failed wars, but also a renaissance of religion and revelation as a political force, we must confront and understand their sometimes disconcerting answers to the problems of their epochs – problems that have increasingly become those of our time, too.

In the following, it will be argued that one reason why these thinkers are important is that despite perennial or recent interest in them, they actually provide a perspective that is quite different from that of the lion’s share of contemporary political thought.

Three conceptions of politics: distribution, order, myth

Let us briefly look at the history of recent Western political thought as just that: history. Future historians will perhaps consider the period between 1945 and, say, the 1990s as a historical parenthesis during which the problem of distributive justice over-shadowed other concerns in political thought. An influential – maybe even the – definition of politics in that epoch stated that politics was ‘the authoritative allocation of values for a society’ (Easton 1965, p. 50), that is, that it was essentially concerned with the distribution of goods. Given the tremendous growth of the financial commitment of the state to redistribution on the one hand and the conflict with a global empire that had total redistribution inscribed on its banners on the other hand, this preoccupation is not surprising. For sure, distributive justice was an important concern, and it is and always will be important. But to a large extent, political science, and even more so political philosophy, regarded redistribution of goods as the principal topic. It is no mere coincidence that the most influential thinker of Anglo-Saxon academic political theory during that period, John Rawls, set the agenda for the revival of normative inquiry precisely by addressing the question of who has and gets what as the essential problem of politics. Again, the overriding question was how the distribution of goods in a society could be justified. Political theory usually feels obliged to address the problems of its own time; arguably, however, it sometimes overlooks some of these problems precisely because of the way in which it perceives this obligation. As we shall see, if the issue of distribution of goods is an important conception of politics, there are at least two more conceptions that are, at the very least, as important.

Now, it takes little perspicacity to see that the distribution of goods is not the main preoccupation of thinkers such as Hobbes and Schmitt. Not that material well-being has ever been considered completely irrelevant. In the seventeenth century, distribution and taxes were important political problems, problems that could make a monarch lose his throne. And in Weimar Germany, sometimes labelled the ‘first modern welfare state’, ‘den första moderna välfärdsstaten’ (Englund 2007, p. 6), the challenge of revolution and socialism made this issue perhaps even more pressing. But for Hobbes and Schmitt, the over-arching, perhaps overwhelming concern is the problem of war versus order. Politics is, then, primarily about controlling violence and maintaining order in the face of forces that undermine social cohesion and political authority.

To be sure, this was no foreign topic to latter-day social theorists either. Max Weber’s famous definition of the state is precisely about this: the monopoly on violence is the essential property of the state.¹ There are good reasons to be, in some sense, a traditionalist in this respect: order as the problem of politics is arguably more fundamental than the distribution of goods. All political communities, from archaic tribes to the complex societies of our time, have by necessity addressed and found solutions to the problem of order; but not all of them have redistributed material goods.² Order is thus essential to any society. Now, for modern societies, such an order-orientated perspective highlights the repressive functions of the state: the police and the military. It could be argued that the perspective of order and violence is still under-represented not only in the social sciences – the sole exception being international relations – but also in contemporary political philosophy. Moreover, it could be argued that recent developments, such as the rise of terrorism, violent political protests against ‘globalisation’, and the recurrent breakdown of order and social cohesion in many economically disadvantaged parts of the world, especially Africa, should inspire us to reorientate our inquiries toward the problem of order.

For obvious reasons, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, it has already become a commonplace that exporting democracy to countries ruled by authoritarian regimes is, to say the least, neither an easy task nor perhaps always a very good idea. But it is also important to point out that many areas in the world – ‘countries’, perhaps, though not necessarily regarded in that way by all of their inhabitants, who may consider themselves part of an ethnic or religious group more than anything else – that have not been able to adopt either modern institutions such as the state, nor universalist ideas such as the rule of law or human rights, have had their own ways of maintaining order and avoiding chaos and anarchy. The clan structures of Somalia have, for instance, proved remarkably immune to ideals and institutions pertaining to the state. However, areas over which the state has little or no control do not necessarily descend into chaos (though surely sometimes so), for pre-state models of political order may serve them well – not in the realm of impartiality and universalist moral ideas, perhaps, but as enforcers of some kind of social peace and stability. The archaic law of retaliation and revenge is precisely that, a law, a general norm governing human conduct. Yet when political institutions other than the state are destroyed, the complex societal pattern of power and norms conducive to order will no longer serve that purpose.

This kind of consideration focuses on how order is – to use a currently fashionable metaphor – ‘negotiated’, more specifically, on how and which social forces control violence, be it the repressive functions of the state or other, societal forces. Again, this could be, indeed has been, considered to be the problem of politics. Weber’s definition of politics betrays such a perspective, and Hobbes’s and Schmitt’s work are indubitably very important contributions to that tradition. For Hobbes, the fundamental problem is, famously, that ‘Nature [has made] men apt to invade, and destroy one another’,³ a problem that can only be solved by a sovereign wielding absolute power over them. And Schmitt, of course, says that a political community is not even political if it does not prohibit private revenge and retaliation, that is, maintain its monopoly on the political, at least in times of war (Schmitt 1991, p. 48). What is important is order, then; other concerns are secondary.⁴

Of course, in Hobbes there is a sort of tension between the view that order is paramount on the one hand and his contractual account of the legitimacy of the state on the other hand. Yet for Hobbes there is no contradiction. True, ‘no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author’ (Hobbes 2005, ch. xvi, p. 129; 1994, §6), that is, only ‘consent’ can create an obligation to obey the law. But for Hobbes, it takes precious little for consent to have been given: yielding to an invading army when otherwise facing death constitutes consent to obey its sovereign (Harrison 2003, pp. 106, 110–118, cf. 126–127). So man must be the ‘Author’ of the laws for them to bind him; however, given Hobbes’s implosive conception of consent, ‘every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth’ (Hobbes 2005, ch. xviii, p. 141; 1994, §6). Surely, many people disagree with this implication, and we should not underestimate the anarchist potential in Hobbes’s doctrine.

We will return to the intriguing tension between order and consent later in this introduction as well as in subsequent chapters. But once again, this problem highlights Hobbes’s own great concern, perhaps for himself the raison d’être of his work: the problem of order.

Now, it is easy to see that during recent decades this kind of questions – in Hobbes’s case, most importantly, the question why citizens are to be considered obliged to obey the law – have been much less frequently asked or even regarded as interesting than the issue of distributive justice (an exception is Pateman 1985). Moreover, it could be pointed out that Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty – ‘Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet’ [sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception] (Schmitt 1996, p. 13) – allows us to ask a different kind of question than those toward which Easton’s definition of politics will direct us. When considering a state like Turkey, Schmitt’s obsession with power and the state of emergency leads us away from the everyday parliamentary business of politics and highlights the role of the exception: in this case, the ‘hidden’ sovereign, the ‘deep state’ of the secularist elite in the military and the judiciary, that will bring the ordinary to an end and usurp power once the people’s representatives deviate too much from the ‘real’ sovereign’s will. Again, the perspective of order and the state of exception can be constructive and important for normative and empirical purposes, and Schmitt’s own crypto-normative abuses of it do not change that. In the light of the history of Turkish military and, repeatedly in recent years, judiciary coups d’état, we would be ill-advised to follow Easton’s focus on ‘allocation of values’ and disregard Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as control over the exception and the state of emergency.

From order to myth

However, if order is the principal problem of politics, then it is also necessary to look beyond the institution responsible for controlling violence and maintaining order, that is, the state. If order is the fundamental concern for any political community, then it cannot keep violence and civil unrest at bay only by means of the police, the judiciary, and the military. The fabric of society is more fragile and at the same time more robust than that. According to a very old tradition in political thought, political communities need not only people policing them, but also a common ethos for which to strive. In short, they need what could be called a myth. ‘Myth’ is often used in a derogatory fashion in the sense of something false, fictitious, perhaps even misleading that manipulates people. Yet the early history of the word suggests another possibility and a different path: in classical Greek, mythos is often used in a neutral way, in the sense of ‘account’.⁵ In the following, I will use it to refer to a set of ideas that is created for political purposes, that gives meaning to the world and provides people and communities with common beliefs and values. Of course, shared morality can be of the utmost importance for maintaining order: norms and social control may be more important for social stability than the police. In remote areas in modern states, the state, represented by the police, may be hours away without order ever really being jeopardised. So there are obviously other prerequisites for political order, pertaining not to guns, but to ideas and socially enforced norms. Consequently, in the history of political thought, this is an old topic, and it has often been held that shared norms can only be created if citizens are guided by a myth. Maintaining or creating an account of the world that secures the survival of society and order can thus appear to be a task of utmost importance. This is the point of the ‘noble lie’ in Plato: the myth of the citizens being autochthonous, born out of the earth of the land, is a conception that Plato lets Socrates ridicule elsewhere (Menexenos 237b). However, in the Republic, Socrates says that it is necessary to create such a myth to the effect that the earth itself has made the different classes of society different from each other, for only if people believe in this myth will they be able to respect the laws of the ideal state and be governed for the good of themselves and the whole (415a). So the myth may not be true – it is, indeed, presented as false by Plato – yet it is a prerequisite for order to prevail.

However, the conception of politics as the necessity of a political myth does not hinge on the ‘myth’ being considered to be false or manipulative by its author. The myth providing a sense of a common purpose and a shared vision can be considered to be true in some sense. In Aischylos’ tragic trilogy Oresteia, the hero Orestes is persecuted by avenger goddesses since he has murdered his own mother, who had killed his father; yet this comes to an end when Athena establishes the Areopag in Athens, which acquits Orestes and is henceforth responsible for prosecuting murderers. This is a good example of an aetiological myth of the authority of the state, that is, an account that justifies an institution by explaining its origins and purpose. Interestingly, the end of the Oresteia not only stresses the importance of the formal institution, the court, but also that of the common moral vision created by the mythic event: henceforth, the Athenians are to be united in their love and hatred, ‘hate with one will [or ‘heart’]’ (stygein miai phreni, in Eumenides, verse 986). The abuses of the project of creating a common ethos, particularly during the twentieth century, are obvious, yet the idea of a myth as the foundation of political order remains. In fact, this kind of myth-making never ceased to be an element in political thought or in politics. In Le contrat social, Rousseau sketched a ‘religion civile’ necessary for the obedience of the citizens, a religion that included such dogmas as that of life after death and ‘le châtiment des méchants’ (Book IV, ch. 8, p. 335, cf. pp. 329–336).

It could be argued that myth-making has been very important in modern states, too. The hegemonic position of the Social Democrats in Sweden has, for example, been explained by the party’s early strategy of leaving the Marxist proletarian identity behind. In a rural country whose industrialisation was belated yet quick, it was important to attract and include white-collar workers and farmers. It was, then, necessary for the Social Democrats to create a different kind of identity, a common ethos based not on the proletariat, but on a conception of the unity of all Swedes as workers. The project of formulating or creating this myth was not innocent: it was an essential element in the re-fashioning of the state and originated in the insight that the industrial workers were too few to constitute a solid base of power (Svensson 199...