Carl Schmitt seems to be experiencing a second life. The jurist of the Third Reich and famed twentieth century political theorist is now fodder for editorials in the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books. Authoritarian conservatives, amoral leftists and self-flagellating liberals have acknowledged, appropriated and claimed affinity to Schmitt’s work. He is invoked to apprehend crises as disparate as Brexit, the rise of Steve Bannon, identity politics, and the electoral successes of demagogues such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro. His influence is widespread. By today’s derided university metrics, he would receive posthumous congratulations. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) that supervises scholarly output would require a fresh order of reputational yardsticks: you might say he has gone far beyond demonstrating a “world-leading research impact.”
As electorates look towards authoritarian leaders and away from liberal pluralism, Schmitt suddenly appears prescient. This may be surprising: that he was a Nazi should be enough to preclude him from discussion. He argued, after all, that domestic paralysis, delay and indecision risked exploitation from extremist political actors, and then ended up aligning with them.
Yet his contemporary appeal is threefold. Firstly, he tries to demystify politics. To be political, in Schmitt’s retelling, is to be a truly meaningful person, one above frivolous moral, economic, and aesthetic identities. The political life is thus the essential life. Secondly, his apparent intellect and card-carrying Nazism provide an appalling and seductive framing that anticipates a disastrous era of totalitarian politics. This is why so many commentators are attracted to Schmitt today, despite his embroilment with National Socialism. Through him, they can perform moral disgust while claiming insight into a worrying future. Lastly, his mystique is intensified by the way he constructs his ideas. He uses pithy axioms about legal order and state decision-making that are as slippery as they are suggestive. You can do a lot with them. His outward suitability for the present is thus explicable: his thought promises meaningful political identity; he possesses second sight; his ideas and language are appealingly vague.
Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament is the latest in this trend towards Schmitt. Johnson has abused executive power by thwarting parliamentary business weeks earlier than usual and in doing so manufactured an ‘us and them’ narrative that figures his opponents as enemies of the public will. Commentators Gideon Rachman and Simon Schama have already had a conversation about Schmitt on Twitter. Johnson has made "a very Schmittian move," Rachman notes. "Indeed," Schama concurs, while Article 48 "made it possible to ignore the Reichstag" it was not before long Schmitt would "join the Nazis and applaud the burning of books by Jewish writers." Intellectual acknowledgement is paired with a note of foreboding. Citation of Schmitt is more common among the commentariat than among the leaders who allegedly act under his influence.
This brings us onto Schmitt’s two key ideas. First, the concept of the “sovereign.” Schmitt understands the sovereign to be the person, or body who has the ability to decide on what counts as the exceptional moment—such as the state of emergency. Then, there’s the friend-enemy distinction. For Schmitt, it is the dominant distinction in political life, one so profound it overwhelms all other considerations, be these economic, moral, or aesthetic. The political actor who clarifies her enemy thus understands herself. For Schmitt, this is exemplified by one group that is prepared to kill another group in conflict. Taken together, they speak nicely to Britain’s current political fortunes. Both elicit an image of macho posturing apposite for caricaturing the newest set of ruthless, unscrupulous strongmen, Johnson among them.
Johnson’s prorogation could be explained by the sovereign decision on the exception. But it is not that straightforward. Schmitt’s revelation of sovereignty has no prescribed rules. It is intangible until the point and unanticipated by its very nature. Johnson’s intentions to obtain a no-deal Brexit are, on the other hand, foreseeable and obvious. Schmitt’s ideas, aided by concrete-looking definitions and linguistic slippages, seek to be understood intuitively and instinctively, to be immediately visible. But there is an ambiguity in his thought. Schmitt’s virile heuristics thus function as empty line drawings, within which we paint current policies, cravings and sensibilities. We pick any colour: a dash of Erdoan, a lick of Xi Jinping, a blot of Salvini. In this instance the shade is Johnson.
There is a difference between applying and indulging Schmitt, and today, too many commentators do the latter. To apply Schmitt is to predict an incoming period of fascism, a methodological analogue for his critiques of Weimar that anticipated Nazi Germany. But to indulge in Schmitt is to sound a cry of warning without due consideration of the type of thought that is being recuperated — revolutionary, conservative, Catholic, fascist, imperialist, Eurocentric, anti-Semitic. Schmitt argued that when invoking the Leviathan symbol, you invoke every element of it. This multiplicity now pertains to him, and it is important we guard against misinterpretations so as to negotiate Schmitt as a critic of liberalism and the troubling, sustaining legacy of Schmitt as a symbol of intelligent fascism.
Schmitt has become a symbol, an improper name, his suffix form ‘Schmittian’ an unimpeachable tool for characterising the current political era. His may be a useful framing for thinking through authoritarianism and proto-fascism. Hannah Arendt’s work has likewise resurged in popularity. Penguin published a new edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism two years ago and it became a surprising fixture in airport bookshops. Like Arendt, Schmitt is a prevailing figure because elements of our world tend to vagueness and relativity. Johnson’s prorogation, for example, follows neither a practical nor moral rubric. It is a pure act of political wilfulness. Prescribing Schmitt, whose ideas seem fixed but can be transposed into innumerable iterations, makes sense. By citing him, we play a precarious game that extolls Schmitt’s thought while merely gesturing at his aberrations and varnishing his abstractions. The immediacy and ambiguity of his writings are the lure. And the trap of these empty line drawings?—you can colour them whichever way you want without much thought of the consequences.
Why journalists reviving Carl Schmitt are playing a precarious game
The political thinker and jurist of the Third Reich has become the symbol for our current era. But there's a fine line between citation and indulgence.
September 11, 2019
