Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt was a German jurist and political theorist known for his influential works on political theory and international relations. He is particularly recognized for his concept of the "state of exception," which explores the suspension of legal norms in times of crisis. Schmitt's ideas have sparked significant debate and analysis in the fields of political philosophy and law.
8 Key excerpts on "Carl Schmitt"
eBook - ePubViolence
Thinking without Banisters
- Richard J. Bernstein(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...More recent discussants and critics include Jacob Taubes, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. One measure of any thinker’s significance is the stature of those who feel the need to confront, discuss, and criticize his work. By this criterion no one can seriously doubt the importance of Schmitt (as distinguished from what sometimes seems like a faddish fascination). The Political: The Friend/Enemy Distinction My aim in this essay is to ask and answer a straightforward question: What do we learn from Schmitt about enmity and violence? I am not simply asking what he explicitly says about these concepts – although this is where we must begin. I want to see where his thinking leads – what is entailed by the trains of thought that he pursues. My question is direct, but answering it requires pursuing a number of byways. These include exploring (1) precisely how we determine who is the enemy and who is the friend; (2) how we are to understand decision and its relation to political judgment in concrete life; and (3) the aporetic character of Schmitt’s “anti-humanism.” I will focus primarily on The Concept of the Political – although probing Schmitt’s claims will require ranging over his other writings published before and after this influential work. Schmitt tells us that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (Schmitt 1996a: 30). I agree with Schmitt, so I want to acknowledge from the outset that my discussion – insofar as it is political – has a polemical intent. But, as Schmitt also indicates, being polemical is not incompatible with being fair to one’s adversary. I want to follow the hermeneutical principle of trying to give a fair account of Schmitt’s views in order to have a serious encounter with his ideas. So let’s turn directly to the famous friend/enemy distinction as it is introduced in The Concept of the Political. This is not as straightforward as it seems...
eBook - ePubThe Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt
Law, Politics, Theology
- Matilda Arvidsson, Leila Brännström, Panu Minkkinen, Matilda Arvidsson, Leila Brännström, Panu Minkkinen(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Political community in Carl Schmitt's international legal thinking Markus Gunneflo DOI: 10.4324/9781315742243-5 Schmitt on the protection of political community in domestic law A distinctive feature of Carl Schmitt’s legal thinking is the pivotal role that he grants political community. Against the background of Schmitt’s particular conception of political community and the importance placed on its protection in a domestic law setting, this chapter highlights the role of political community in Schmitt’s international legal thinking. We may have little reason to study – and even less reason to follow – Schmitt’s assessment of the legacy of European international law, questions of self-defence, imperialism and partisan warfare, were it not for the fact that political community remains a significant force in international law. Accordingly, this chapter makes a case for the relevance of Schmitt’s thinking today, particularly for understanding questions related to the use of force in international affairs. Political community, for Schmitt, concerns the establishment of a ‘boundary that secures the existential survival of a particular way of life’ or Lebensform (Kennedy 2008 : xvi). This is a conception of political community premised on the friend-enemy distinction: The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy … The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. (Schmitt 2007a : 26) Both ‘union [ Verbindung ]’ and ‘association [ Assoziation ]’ signify the action of joining separate elements so as to form a whole or a body, or the condition resulting from such action. In his Three Types of Juristic Thought (Schmitt 2004) Schmitt commits himself to ‘concrete-order thinking’...
- Gavin Rae(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...This is most easily and directly achieved by quickly distinguishing between those who share the society’s fundamental values and those who do not. There is a sense in which Schmitt is aware that the friend–enemy dichotomy is, in reality, a problematic logical dichotomy, but, as a practical principle of action, it quickly allows the sovereign to determine how to classify the other politically, rallies the community (which it will be remembered is complex and diverse) around a common designation and thus principle of action, and, if the other is determined to be an immediate threat, points to the communal actions required to secure the continued existence of the community. Thus, while Derrida claims that there is a tension between the logical binary opposition between friend and enemy inherent to Schmitt’s conception of the political and the entwined nature of these categories in actual, concrete politics, Schmitt actually undermines the abstract–concrete division upon which Derrida’s critique depends by suggesting that the political decision emanates from and is determined by actual concrete conditions, specifically the actions of others, which, at times of existential crisis, demand immediate action to save the life of the community and that the determination of the nature of the crisis and the type of response required is most easily determined from a straightforward logical choice between two options: either the other is a friend or he is an enemy. With this, Schmitt seems to call into question the binary opposition between the concrete and the abstract that underpins Derrida’s critique and, in so doing, affirms the entwined relationship between both in a way that Derrida would no doubt appreciate. However, while Schmitt defines the political from the friend–enemy distinction, it is true that he rarely talks of friendship, instead focusing on the role of enmity. This creates an imbalance in his analysis...
- Qi Zheng(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...This distinction contains ‘the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.’ 20 So the political contains the possibility of leading to the conflict between the friend and the enemy. Schmitt’s definition of the political, therefore, fits neatly with the nature of the political activities in the founding and protecting moments of the politics of transition. There are many other theoretical resources that Schmitt can provide to further develop the details of the politics of transition. Due to the complexity of this politics, it is impossible to fully analyze the details here. For instance, what ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’ means is very complicated. (I deal with these issues later in this book.) Also, the brief discussion about Schmitt’s theory and the politics of transition has already revealed how Schmitt’s theory can be helpful for understanding the politics of transition. So it is unnecessary to further expand the discussion here. Instead, discussion of the details of the politics of transition that I draw from Schmitt’s theory is left to Chapter 2 and 3. 1.2 The strong critique of Schmitt in China Schmitt’s political theory has been subject to much criticism from Chinese scholars. Since there are two different but related charges under the category of the strong critique, I deal with these two charges separately. The first charge of the strong critique is related to the concern that there is a link between Schmitt’s theory and fascism. Xu Ben, for instance, argues that Schmitt’s political theory contains dangerous elements of fascism. 21 Xu uses the word ‘evil’ to describe the connection between them...
eBook - ePubCritical Border Studies
Broadening and Deepening the 'Lines in the Sand' Agenda
- Noel Parker, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Noel Parker, Nick Vaughan-Williams(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...He was also concerned with the nature of what he considered to be a truly ‘political’ community. A large part of his early work, but not only, is dedicated to these questions. The entire discussion on the formation of ‘the political’, together with his most celebrated definition of the relationship between ‘friend and enemy’, as developed mainly in The Concept of the Political [1927] are based on a very specific reading of what a political community is supposed to be. 12 Schmitt was indeed convinced that, with the separation between religion and politics implicit in the post-Westphalian order, the secularised state was deprived of any deep, ontological, legitimacy. However, if sovereignty was to be transferred to the people, as implicit in the constitution of the modern state, then a new concept of ‘the political’ had to be formulated in order to make this very ‘people’ act and feel like an actual community, a unified political community. An important part of his work is thus dedicated to the importance of unity for the national community, and in particular for the German people. 13 This condition of unity, however, must not be understood as a sort of return to some imagined origin, 14 quite the contrary; for Schmitt, with the triumph of secularisation and the disappearance of ‘the transcendental’ in politics and in the constitution of the state and of sovereign power, there was simply no original moment or event to be reconstituted in order to unify or reunify a political community. Rather, the question of unity had to be seen as a political strategy adopted in order to be able to identify, in concrete terms, who was a friend and who was an enemy – that is, to produce ‘the political’ in the Schmittian declination of this term. The border is, in many ways, a pillar in this definition of the political community, a border here deliberately conceived as both a metaphorical space and a physical ‘line in the sand’...
eBook - ePubThomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt
The Politics of Order and Myth
- Johan Tralau, Johan Tralau(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...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...
eBook - ePubCarl Schmitt and Leo Strauss
The Hidden Dialogue
- Heinrich Meier, J. Harvey Lomax(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...In taking his bearings by this general relationship, Schmitt defines “the distinction between friend and enemy” as “the specifically political distinction” (26 f.). Here “enemy”—and thus also “friend”—is always to be understood only as the public enemy (friend), “a totality of men that fights at least potentially, that is, has a real possibility of fighting, and stands in opposition to a corresponding totality” (29). Of the two elements of the friend-enemy mode of viewing things, the “enemy” element manifestly takes precedence, as is already shown by the fact that when Schmitt explains this viewpoint in detail, he actually speaks only of the meaning of “enemy” (cf. 27, 29, and 32 f.). One may say: every “totality of men” looks around for friends only—it has friends only—because it already has enemies; “the essence of political relationships [is] contained in reference to a concrete opposition” (30). “Enemy” therefore takes precedence over “friend,” because “the potential for a fight that exists in the region of the real” belongs “to the concept of the enemy”—and not already to the concept of the friend as such (33), and “man’s life” gains “its specifically political tension” from the potential for war, from the “dire emergency,” from the “most extreme possibility” (35). But the possibility of war does not merely constitute the political as such; war is not merely “the most extreme political measure”; war is the dire emergency not merely within an “autonomous” region—the region of the political—but for man simply, because war has and retains a “relationship to the real possibility of physical killing” (33); this orientation, which is constitutive of the political, shows that the political is fundamental and not a “relatively independent domain” alongside others. The political is the “authoritative” (39). It is in this sense that we are to understand the remark that the political is “not equivalent and analogous” to the moral, the aesthetic, the economic, etc...
eBook - ePubThe Concept of the Political
Expanded Edition
- Carl Schmitt, George Schwab(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...In taking his bearings by this general relationship, Schmitt defines “the distinction between friend and enemy” as “the specifically political distinction” (26f.; 26 f.). Here “enemy”—and thus also “friend”—is always to be understood only as the public enemy (friend), “a totality of men that fights at least potentially, that is, has a real possibility of fighting, and stands in opposition to a corresponding totality” (28; 29). Of the two elements of the friend-enemy mode of viewing things, the “enemy” element manifestly takes precedence, as is already shown by the fact that when Schmitt explains this viewpoint in detail, he actually speaks only of the meaning of “enemy” (cf. 26; 27, 28; 29, and 32f.; 32 f.). One may say: every “totality of men” looks around for friends only—it has friends only—because it already has enemies; “the essence of political relationships [is] contained in reference to a concrete opposition” (30 ; 30). “Enemy” therefore takes precedence over “friend,” because “the potential for a fight that exists in the region of the real” belongs “to the concept of the enemy”—and not already to the concept of the friend as such (33 ; 33), and “man's life” gains “its specifically political tension” from the potential for war, from the “dire emergency,” from the “most extreme possibility” (35 ; 35). But the possibility of war does not merely constitute the political as such; war is not merely “the most extreme political measure”; war is the dire emergency not merely within an “autonomous” region—the region of the political—but for man simply, because war has and retains a “relationship to the real possibility of physical killing” (33 ; 33); this orientation, which is constitutive for the political, shows that the political is fundamental and not a “relatively independent domain” alongside others. The political is the “authoritative” (39 ; 39)...
