The Cult of Carl Schmitt

         I          As a political thinker, the German philosopher Carl Schmitt was enamored of symbols and myths. His biographer has shown that during the 1930s Schmitt was convinced that providing National Socialism with a rational justification was self-contradictory and self-defeating. The alternative that was conceived by Schmitt, a conservative who was an eminent member of the Nazi Party, was to establish the Third Reich’s legitimacy by means of symbolism and imagery culled from the realms of religion and myth. Schmitt’s attraction to symbols and myths stemmed from his skepticism about the value of “concepts,” which he viewed only instrumentally, as Kampfbegriffe or weapons of struggle. As Schmitt explained, about reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, “we learn how concepts can become weapons.” “Every political concept,” he claimed, “is a polemical concept,” a statement that reflects the essential bellicosity of his thought. When it came to fathoming the mysteries of human existence, Schmitt insisted that the cognitive value of symbols and myths was far superior to the meager results of conceptual knowledge. This deep mistrust of reason was related to his veneration of “political theology,” which Schmitt introduced into the mainstream of modern political thought. Schmitt’s devaluation of secular knowledge was exemplified by his well-known dictum that “all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts,” an assertion that reflected his disdain for the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism. That disdain is what has given Schmitt’s thought new life in our own bleak and inflamed times.          Schmitt was born in 1888 and died in 1985. He was a constitutional theorist who wrote brilliant polemics against parliamentary democracy and on behalf of dictatorial rule. He played a prominent role in providing a pseudo-legal justification for the Nazi seizure of power and was a virulent anti-Semite. During the early 1920s, the myth that captured Schmitt’s imagination was the “myth of the nation,” a trope that Mussolini had refashioned into a core precept of Italian fascism. Schmitt explored this theme in 1923 in the concluding pages of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. His unabashedly enthusiastic treatment of unreason offers an important clue with respect to his future political allegiances. Echoing the phraseology of the proto-fascist and anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barrès, who died in that year, Schmitt extolled Mussolini’s March on Rome as a triumph of “national energy.” He thereby acknowledged fascism’s capacity to infuse modern politics with a vitality that was absent from the stolid proceduralism of political liberalism. Schmitt was present at the University of Munich in 1921 when Max Weber delivered his celebrated lecture on “Science as a Vocation.” Schmitt agreed wholeheartedly with Weber’s characterization of modernity as an “iron cage:” a world in which the corrosive powers of “rationalization” and “disenchantment” had precipitated a crisis of “meaninglessness.” Schmitt’s antidote to this malaise, and to the intellectual maturity of liberalism, was his “decisionism” — his reconceptualization of sovereignty as the right to decide on the “state of exception.” The ruler was the one, the only one, who had the power to decree a state of exception, and to enforce it. Schmitt attributed a cultural and even epistemological superiority to the “exception” as opposed to the “norm” and the “rule.” It was the antithesis of Weberian disenchantment. As Schmitt exulted, “In the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” In keeping with the discourse of political theology, Schmitt stressed the parallels between the “state of exception” in jurisprudence and the “miracle” in theology. Schmitt exalted the fascist coup as a historical and philosophical turning point in the struggle to surmount the straitjacket of rule-guided bourgeois “normativism,” a legacy of the Enlightenment that Kulturkritiker such as Nietzsche and Spengler deemed responsible for modernity’s precipitous descent into “nihilism.” For Schmitt, the March on Rome was the state of exception come to life. The scholarly nature of his treatise notwithstanding, Schmitt was unable to conceal his prodigious pro-fascist fervor. “Until now,” he wrote, “the democracy of mankind and parliamentarism has only once been contemptuously pushed aside through the conscious appeal to myth, and that was an example of the irrational power of the national myth. In his famous speech of October 1922 in Naples before the March on

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