The Paradox of the Political: Carl Schmitt's Autonomous Account of Politics

Abstract

Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political advances an understanding of the political in which the political is assessed in terms of the autonomy of the friend-and-enemy distinction. This article questions the autonomous foundations of Schmitt's concept of the political. Ultimately, Schmitt's desire to establish the autonomous nature of the political, allowing the specifically political antithesis to achieve mastery over all other forms of discourse, is replete with paradox. Whilst Schmitt endeavours to establish the autonomy of the political—where the political is free from interference from other domains—it is argued that his account of the political is highly dependent on the state. More critically, Schmitt's depiction of the political as autonomous is a strategic manoeuvre to establish the autonomy of the domain of the political vis-à-vis other conceptual domains.

Notes

Notes

1. Jürgen Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Randall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Habermas notes that, unlike Heidegger, Schmitt did not renounce his involvement with the Third Reich: “In Carl Schmitt's case things were different. He refused to undergo a de-Nazification process, so that he—an exception even among the heavily compromised jurists—was not granted permission to return to the university, even later on” (109).

2. Heller articulates the political in Arendtian terms, an ethic of free participation in the public sphere. Her concept of the political stresses the concretisation of freedom rather than the concretisation of friends and enemies. Agnes Heller, “The Concept of the Political Revisited,” in Political Theory Today, ed. David Held (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 340.

3. Crawford B. Macpherson, “Hobbes's Bourgeois Man,” in Hobbes Studies, ed. K. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 171.

4. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 19; subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.

5. I reject outright the suggestion that you can separate the metaphorical or symbolic conceptual order from a concrete conceptual order. All concepts are dependent upon a metaphorical or symbolic landscape. Schmitt's desire to define the political autonomously—without reliance upon other distinctions—must necessarily involve the deployment of metaphor. In fact, Schmitt's choice of antithesis for the definition of the concept of the political is highly metaphorical. Friends and enemies are not just concepts plucked from an objective realm but refer to an intersubjective domain in which people possess pre-established knowledge about its normative operation. Schmitt's friend and enemy distinction is pure metaphor, since friend and enemy denote the existential domain of the political.

6. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 368.

7. Ibid., 364.

8. Seán Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (London: Palgrave, 2006).

9. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 1982), 30–31.

10. Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 69.