Dialogues on Power and Space; Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation; On Schmitt and Space

Carl Schmitt. Federico Finchelstein and Andreas Kalyvas, eds. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015. vii and 110 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-7456-8869-5).

Carl Schmitt. Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, eds. Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2015. 114 pp., appendix, bibliography. $21.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-914386-56-8).

Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan. London, UK: Routledge, 2016. xi and 286 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $138.72 cloth (ISBN 978-1-138-00074-2).

European imperial historians used to say, not without a little hauteur, that the Atlantic was a European invention. If that might seem true from one end of the telescope, it is also true that Europe—as a single civilization pulled together by a shared religious tradition, a burgeoning capitalist market, emerging nation-states, and technoscientific ambitions—was invented by the peoples around the Atlantic world. In effect, the latter held up the looking glass for Europeans to see themselves as such. In his masterly book The Nomos of the Earth, the esteemed jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt ([1950] 2006) explained that the so-called heroic and extremely competitive epoch of European exploration and colonization of the Americas spawned a much needed jus publicum europaeum (a Eurocentric international order of public law) that quickly took on global dimensions.

This attempt to give juridical form to the friend–enemy dialectic provided the European nations in the early modern period with a behavioral code for resolving disputes among themselves, even as it left the wider Atlantic world beyond the so-called amity lines open to the free play of imperial force and untrammeled violence. In the mid-seventeenth century, the English philosopher Hobbes characterized the essence of this world by the proverb Homo homini lupus (the human is a wolf to the human). Europe's religious wars and its ruthless bad behavior around the Atlantic and Southeast Asia made Hobbesian theory a simple matter of fact.

In his “Dialogue on Power and Access to the Holder of Power,” which, along with “Dialogue on New Space,” makes up the volume Dialogues on Power and Space, Schmitt meditates on this Hobbesian theme. With nearly a dozen nations' current technological ability to annihilate humankind, power has taken the form of a frightening independent force, far beyond the parameters of normal human intercourse. Already at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in their intercivilizational encounters with native peoples of the Americas and elsewhere, Europeans regularly made a great display of firing off their guns to awe their new subjects into submission. The Hobbesian trade-off was supposed to be protection from their enemies and a pact of friendship. Of course, fear remained the foundation of colonial command.

Today, those noisy arquebuses have become deafening instruments of mass destruction. Even in Machiavelli's time, political philosophers sought to locate the origins of human power not in God or nature, but in humans themselves. As a consequence, Schmitt notes, humans became wholly alone amongst themselves. In his “Dialogue on Power,” he explains further, “The holder of power is set against the powerless, the mighty against the impotent—it's simply humans against humans” (p. 30). (While at the University of Bonn, Schmitt was attracted to political Catholicism as an alternative to the chaos of the Weimar Republic and found a still point in the juridical form of the Medieval Catholic Church.) As power was increasingly enhanced by science and technology, weaponry assumed a surplus value of its own. The atomic bomb surprised both its makers and the world by its spectacular effects. As never before, power, Schmitt claims, had assumed an objective grandeur of its own (p. 32). We know that humans are a notoriously weak species in the animal kingdom, and for that very reason, they have become exceedingly dangerous. Today's weapons of destruction suggest just how dangerous. Schmitt leaves us with this lapidary remark: “The reality of power greatly exceeds the reality of the human” (p. 47).

In their useful, well-researched overview of the German jurist's life and works, On Schmitt and Space, Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan observe that war for Schmitt is the natural horizon of politics, the “most extreme possibility [from which] human life derives its specific political tension” (p. 81). In both his “Dialogue on New Space” and his allusive, fairy-tale-like geohistory Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, power, everyday politics, and the foundational category of the political that underpins both, are all intricately entwined with space. Minca and Rowan cite this concise axiom of Schmitt's, which can be said to frame all of his thought: “There are neither spaceless political ideas nor, reciprocally, spaces without ideas or principles of space without ideas” (p. 74). This axiom also bolsters the binary stand-off between land and sea as an innervating principle for reading world history as a succession of spatial revolutions.

Schmitt is at his best when discussing the epochal shift of early modern European history, when the political balance between the terrestrial powers (continental Russia, Catholic France) and the maritime powers (in particular England) was tipped in favor of the latter. In Schmitt's lusty words, the shift occurred when England transformed itself from a nation of shepherds into a nation of sea-dogs (Land and Sea, pp. 71, 78). Performing a smart ideological exercise in political philosophy, he distills a complex set of ideas, situations, and events into two mythic elements—land and sea—that become absolute metaphors of distinct kinds of state orders and biopolitical life forms. He then uses this tensive dichotomy to explain a succession of “world-images” (“Dialogue on New Space,” p. 55) that epitomize significant structural changes in Atlantic and world history. Thus, Schmitt sums up the core of terrestrial existence in the house, which comes to stand for family, marriage, hereditary right, property, and peaceful dwelling; whereas maritime existence is symbolized by the ship, a technological vehicle that fosters sheer movement, striving, adventure, free trade, and openness to risk. Accompanying this house–ship face-off is the more acerbic rivalry between Catholicism and Protestantism and their opposing economic-political spirits.

In the late sixteenth century, Schmitt explains, Protestant England gradually detached itself from the European continent and embraced a maritime existence. The island became a ship and in a rather short period of time ruled the world's oceans. In Land and Sea, all of Schmitt's ideas come together in his account of how those who go down to ship and out to sea got the best of those who stayed home and toiled in their garden. The discovery of America gave way to a new thought-world and a spatial revolution of planetary proportions. Indeed, the very “structure of the concept of space itself [was] altered” (p. 49). A new fundamental order (or Nomos) was created, and this oceanic order—a “resituating of the image of the earth” (p. 60)—was “bound up with world-political alterations and with a new division of the earth” (p. 60). There were other such epochal shifts before and after this one, but the separation of land and sea enacted in the early modern period was by far the most momentous.

As Minca and Rowan and the editors of Land and Sea remind us, there is a great deal of ideological innuendo and spite to be teased out of the books reviewed here. After all, Schmitt wrote them during the bombardments of World War II, and, after promoting the rise of the Nazi party, had barely escaped a Nazi purge himself. Already in the mid-1930s he had wielded his pen to theorize Germany's need of a Führer. To win political favor, he argued that Jews were a rootless people who could not be integrated into the German Volk. As a jurist and conservative Catholic, there were a lot of things he did not like: political liberalism, juridical positivism, and Protestant countries like England and the United States. At one point in Land and Sea he says of the sixteenth-century English, “They all took part in the great business of loot. Hundreds and thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen at that time became ‘corsair capitalists’” (p. 40). Their national heroes—the Drakes, the Raleighs, the Morgans, and the Killigrews—were all predators. In their timely chapter “The Return of Carl Schmitt,” Minca and Rowan discuss the curious fact that on the continent both the political left and the right have hailed Schmitt as a central thinker of political philosophy, especially on such issues as the trials of liberalism, the crisis of political representation, postmodern law, decisionism, and the spatial implications of epochal revolutions. Minca and Rowan also provide a sweeping bibliography of secondary sources on Schmitt that suggests just how vital and controversial his return has been.

ORCiD

William Boelhower https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1700-465X