Who Was Carl Schmitt?

“As just another political theology—albeit an especially vulgar one—liberalism would, paradoxically, be put into contexts where it abandoned a commitment to rights for the sake of protecting itself.”

Author’s Note: This piece is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Liberalism and Liberal Rights: A Critical Legal Argument for Palgrave MacMillan. It has been adapted as a preview.

Introduction

Carl Schmitt is a complex figure. Although he was an undeniably evil man who supported a monstrously wicked regime, he writes so candidly and seductively it can feel impossible to resist the gravity of his insights. Born and raised a Roman Catholic, Schmitt later abandoned his faith but never ceased embodying a sharp and vindictive distaste for liberalism and its many hypocrisies and failings. These were expressed in a series of remarkable books—many very short—that state his case polemically and with the sort of force that only comes from genuine style. This does not mean he is correct of course, but it does make his arguments all the harder to dismiss since one cannot retreat into tirades about obfuscation and an unwillingness to follow a principle where it leads—even if it leads into darkness. He is also an increasingly important figure as by far the most intelligent and clear-eyed political thinker to have ever emerged on the far-right. With the advent of post-modern conservatism as a powerful and xenophobic movement, his thinking deserves serious attention from critics. As I have already discussed this association more here, in this piece I am going to focus more on analyzing Schmitt’s thought in itself to provide a more thorough critique.

Who Was Carl Schmitt?

Carl Schmitt was born in Germany in 1888 into a petite bourgeois family. While Schmitt himself later repudiated the Catholicism in which he was raised, the conception of human beings as sinful and fallen creatures never dissipated—nor did his tendency to elevate politics to theological levels. He volunteered for the German Army during the First World War, before teaching at various universities during the Weimar period. This was a time of immense political upheaval in the young German democracy, and Schmitt was exposed to the real possibility that liberalism would be defeated and destroyed by either Marxist-Socialists or their fascist competitors. Not coincidentally, this was a time when the young Schmitt—still in his 30’s—wrote his greatest and most polemical works: including Political Theology in 1922, the article “The Concept of the Political” in 1927, followed by a book of the same name in 1932. Of course, the Nazis did succeed in overthrowing liberalism in Germany: a fact which, depending on whom you listen to, Schmitt either welcomed or at least rapidly came to terms with. He swiftly joined the new regime, becoming known as the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich before he was ingloriously fired in 1936 for not being anti-Semitic enough. That’s not to say Schmitt didn’t give it the old college try, as his virulent comments on Judaism in 1938’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes proved. After the Second World War, he refused to apologize and continued to produce works critical of the emerging liberal international order. He died at the age of 96 in 1985, shortly before the end of the Cold War. For a commentator who witnessed almost the entirety of the dark 20th century, one wonders what he might have thought of the triumphalism which marked the post 1989 period.