Political Theory and Political Theology: The Second Wave of Carl Schmitt in English

Political Theory

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 1998, Pages 830-854

  Mccormick, John P ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84998183750     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591798026006006     Document Type: Review

References (107)

1. For recent critical accounts of the seriousness, dangerousness, and pervasiveness of Schmitt's influence in various contemporary literatures, see the foreword by Tracy B. Strong, “Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt,” included in one of the works under review in this essay, The Concept of the Political, and Mark Lilla, “The Enemy of Liberalism,” New York Review of Books, May 15, 1997.
2. See the tides published in 1985 by Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, Thomas McCarthy, general editor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): Political Romanticism (1919), translated by Guy Oakes; Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), translated by George Schwab;
3. and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), translated by Ellen Kennedy.
4. Schwab's superb translation of The Concept of the Political is a reissue of the edition published by Rutgers University Press in 1976. Other periods of Schmitt's oeuvre soon to be represented in English are his committed National Socialist phase, and his post-World War II career: Joseph Bendersky is presently translating Über die drei Arten des Rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934)
5. and G. L. Ulmen, Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950; reprint, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974).
6. Adherents to this view include Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1992);
7. Lutz Berthold, “Wer hält zur Zeit den Satan auf?—Zur Selbstglossierung Carl Schmitts,” Leviathan: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 21, no. 2 (1993);
8. Bernd Wacker, ed., Die eigentlich katholische Verschärfung…: Konfession, Theologie und Politik im Werk Carl Schmitts (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1994);
9. Günter Meuter, “Der Katechon”: Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994);
10. Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt: Sein Aufstieg zum “Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches” (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichen Buchgesellschaft, 1995); as well as several of the essays included in Jacob Taubes, ed., Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, Band I: Der Fürst dieser Welt, Carl Schmitt und die Folgen (München: Fink, 1985), especially, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “Politische Theorie und politische Theologie: Bemerkungen zu ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältnis.” For critical appraisals of this view, see the review of Meuter by Stefan Breuer, “Der letzte Ritter der heiligen Johanna.
11. Ein Anti-Hobbes: Günter Meuter legt die Fundamente von Carl Schmitts Zeitkritik frei,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 27, 1995
12. and Joseph Bendersky's review of Koenen and Meier in the Journal of Modern History (1997).
13. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5/1920), trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).
14. G. L. Ulmen's fine introduction to Roman Catholicism explores Schmitt's relationship with Weber. See also Ulmen's larger study, Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie über Max Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1991).
15. On the place of liberalism, capitalism, and romanticism in Schmitt's Weimar thought as a whole, see John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 21, 20, 12, 14, 18–19.
16. See, for example, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1920), ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1399
17. and “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 335.
18. Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 3, 33, 35, 4, 3, 32.
19. See Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 122–8. Weber also draws upon Dostoyevsky and the Grand Inquisitor.
20. Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 27, 36, 36–7, 38, 39.
21. See Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1930), trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965)
22. and Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors (1935), trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
23. Schmitt was excommunicated by the Church in 1926 because of the complexities of his marital situation, and apparently grew quite bitter toward Catholicism in the late Weimar Republic, publicly feuding with representatives of the more moderate Catholic Center Party. His antipathy reached its peak under National Socialism, as he is quoted to have said in 1938: “If the Pope excommunicates a nation so therefore does he only excommunicate himself.” After the war, for perhaps strategic reasons, Schmitt re-embraced Catholicism once his excommunication was lifted, remarking years later, “I am as Catholic as the tree is green, but have my own ideas on it”; and elsewhere, even more provocatively, “I am Catholic not only by confession, but rather also by historical extraction—if I may be allowed to say so, racially.” See Helmut Quaritsch, Positionen und Begriffe Carl Schmitts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 33–4;
24. and Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Zur Einführung, 169, n. 113. However, this still leaves open the question of the motivation of his theories between 1926 and 1950, a period in which he produced the majority of his most influential works.
25. Drury reads Strauss's commentary on Schmitt this way without any references to any religious motifs in the text. See Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 93 (one of the works under review in this essay).
26. See, for example, Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 19–20, 48, 68 (one of the works under review in this essay).
27. More refined in their assessment of Strauss's changing motivations at the time are Volker Reinecke and Jonathan Uhlaner, “The Problem of Leo Strauss: Religion, Philosophy and Politics,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 16, no. 1 (1992): 193–4.
28. The Concept of the Political, 55 (one of the works under review in this article), 54.
29. Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 17.
30. The Concept of the Political, 25–6, 65.
31. See John P. McCormick, “Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (November 1994).
32. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 93.
33. An excellent analysis of the aestheticization of politics in Weber, Georg Lukács, and Schmitt, as well, is Stefan Breuer, “The Illusion of Politics: Politics and Rationalization in Max Weber and Georg Lukács,” New German Critique 26 (Summer 1982).
34. When Meier in fact bothers to demonstrate sensitivity to context, his efforts yield a genuine contribution to the understanding of Schmitt: Meier carefully elucidates the differences among the 1927, 1932, and 1933 editions of The Concept of the Political and demonstrates how Schmitt's argument comes to focus less exclusively on international conflict and more on civil war and an impending decline of liberalism in the 1932 book, revised in the midst of Weimar's most dramatic period of crisis. See Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 21–5.
35. The 1927 essay was written during the relative calm of the Republic's middle period in the mid-twenties, which afforded Schmitt the luxury of fixating on the threat of the Soviet Union. However, lest Schmitt's audience forget the magnitude that he considers the Soviet threat to be, he appends to the 1932 edition an essay that begins with the line, “We in Central Europe live under the eyes of the Russians.…” See Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” (1929), trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, Telos 96 (Summer 1993): 130.
36. Hobbes, Leviathan, book II, chap. 17 (punctuation and spelling updated).
37. See The Concept of the Political, 22–4
38. and especially, “Staatsethik und pluralistisher Staat” (1930);
39. “Die Wendung zum totalen Staat” in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar—Genf—Versailles: 1923–1939 (1931;
40. reprint, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940); and Der Hüter der Verfassung (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1931)
41. portions of which are translated in Jerry Z. Muller, ed., Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
42. See Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1928).
43. See Schmitt, “Der Mißbrauch der Legalität,” Tägliche Rundschau, July 19, 1932.
44. See Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 76–86, 107–10.
45. Or as Lomax renders it, “a need of dominion”; Strauss, “Comments on Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political,” in The Concept of the Political, 100.
46. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
47. See Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 9, 57, 61, 73.
48. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 92.
49. See Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, 88–92
50. and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, for example, pp. 2–3, 9, 16, 19–21, 23, 28.
51. Although one must ask whether the following later essay on Hobbes is yet another reevaluation: “On the Basis of Hobbes's Political Philosophy,” in Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (1954; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
52. Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 166, 170–4.
53. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 57, 183, n. 10.
54. See, for instance, “Das Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich,” Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung 38 (1933);
55. Staat, Bewegnung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933); and Über die drei Arten des Rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens.
56. Schwab's account of Schmitt's transition from Weimar authoritarian to National Socialist in the introduction to The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (one of the works under review in this essay) is largely in accord with two standard English and German biographies of Schmitt: see Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)
57. and Paul Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Propyläen, 1993).
58. However, there are dissenters against Bendersky's and Noack's presentations: see Stephen Holmes, “Review: Theorist for the Reich,” American Political Science Review 77, no. 4 (December 1983)
59. and Bernd Rüthers, “Wer war Carl Schmitt? Bausteine zu einer Biographie,” Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 27 (July 1994).
60. See Schmitt, “Die vollendete Reformation: Bemerkungen und Hinweise zu neuen Leviathan Interpretationen,” Der Staat: Zeitschrift für Staatslehre, öffentliches Recht und Verfassungsgeschichte 4, no. 1 (1965).
61. See Stephen Holmes, “Carl Schmitt: The Debility of Liberalism,” in his The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 50.
62. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 41–2, 73.
63. On the other hand, Schmitt's Leviathan is filled with the most despicable sort of anti-Semitism that identifies Jews as the source of all that is wrong with modernity, particularly the destruction of the European state. In 1938, Schmitt blames Jews for the privileging of privacy and the distinction between the inner and outer self that he in 1923 had accused Protestants of fostering in a manner that ultimately undermines Western politics. In his introduction to Leviathan, Schwab argues with some persuasiveness that Schmitt's National Socialist anti-Semitism was at the core opportunistically careerist and then strategically defensive. See Introduction, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, xiii, xvii. However, the pervasiveness of disgusting diatribes against Jews in his postwar diaries raises serious questions about the viability of such a defense: see Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–51 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991)—especially p. 18.
64. Schwab has conveyed to me the fact that later in life Schmitt regretted and recanted his earlier anti-Semitism to anyone who would listen in private conversations. Until this is documented sufficiently, however, there is no appropriate designation for Schmitt other than that of anti-Semite. For a more elaborate examination of these issues than can be undertaken here, see McCormick, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism, 268–70.
65. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 7–9.
66. See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952).
67. For example, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 26, 44, 76, n. 7.
68. Hans Kelsen, “Wer soll der Hüter der Verfassung sein?” Die Justiz 6 (1930/31).
69. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 88, 89–90.
70. See Donoso-Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation: Vier Aufsätze (Köln: Greven, 1950);
71. Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Köln: Greven, 1950); and Der Nomos der Erde.
72. Daniel Goldhagen's recent book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1996), provides more evidence of the traditional Christian churches' complicity with National Socialism but, unfortunately, in many instances comes close to reducing Nazism and the Holocaust exclusively to some such sources.
73. Several classic “Frankfurt School” analyses of Schmitt and fascism are still worthwhile points of departure for a contemporary interrogation of these questions: Siegfried Kracauer, “Revolt of the Middle Classes,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (1931; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995);
74. Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (1934; reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1968);
75. and Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York: Harper & Row, 1944).
76. See Susan Shell, “Meier on Strauss and Schmitt,” Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (Winter 1991).
77. See Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, especially pp. 3, 179, n. 3, 180, n. 4.
78. Reinecke and Uhlaner observe that Strauss did not change his philosophical presuppositions upon emigration but “merely transformed their coordination.” See “The Problem of Leo Strauss,” 196.
79. Note the assessment of Strauss's political predilections that Arendt conveyed to her biographer: see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 98, 169.
80. See also Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988).
81. See Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 49, 51, 48.
82. In one of the most arresting parts of the book, Drury sets out what she takes to be the many theoretical similarities between Strauss and Heidegger. See Leo Strauss and the American Right, 73–8.
83. For a contrary view, see Steven B. Smith, “Destruktion or Recovery? Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger,” The Review of Metaphysics 202 (December 1997).
84. Drury ignores one especially interesting link between Strauss and Heidegger: It is the privileged place of the fear of violent death in Strauss's early political philosophy that might lead one to view these works as the first explicit politicization of the significance of anxiety over death in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. It is the “violent” quality of death in Strauss's efforts that brings an other into proximity with a being and thus raises the question of the social and political in Schmitt's sense of the terms. In this Germanization of Hobbes, social being-in-the-world is mortal danger arbitrarily posed by others; political being-in-the-world is mortal danger ordered and organized by some specific set of beings against another set. Strauss may have been the first to undertake “that very special mixture of Schmitt and Heidegger” that Habermas identifies as the core of post-war conservatism. See Jürgen Habermas, “Carl Schmitt in the Political Intellectual History of the Federal Republic,” in Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Rendall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 107. Drury does not even begin to approach raising and answering such potentially explosive questions.
85. See the essays included in Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11.
86. See Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?
87. On these concerns, see the exchange between Strauss and Alexander Kojeve in Strauss, On Tyranny (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963).
88. Of whom the late Allan Bloom is only the most famous example: see Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
89. Besides Meier, see Laurence Berns, “Correcting the Record on Leo Strauss,” PS: Political Science and Politics 28, no. 4 (December 1995)
90. and Shell, “Meier on Schmitt and Strauss.”
91. for a contrasting view, see John G. Gunnell, “Strauss Before Straussianism: Reason, Revelation and Nature,” in Leo Strauss Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker.
92. Strauss describes his own “powerful prejudice” against classical philosophy at the time, although perhaps fudging the date of when he ultimately overcame this prejudice, in the “Preface to the English Translation” of Spinoza's Critique of Religion, 31.
93. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, xii, 91.
94. See Hans J. Morgenthau, “Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography,” in Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau, ed. Kenneth Thompson and Robert Myers (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984);
95. Alfons Söllner, “German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau's Political Realism,” Telos 72 (Summer 1987);
96. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Case of Dr. Kissinger,” New York Review of Books, December 6, 1979, 14–18, 21–5, 27–9;
97. and J. Douglas English, “Identity and the State: Sovereignty in the Thought of Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau,” Paper presented at the Northeastern Political Science Association Meeting, Providence (November 1994).
98. For a recent example of the use to which Schmittian friend/enemy-obsessed international relations theory can be put, see Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993)
99. and the full-length version, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
100. See Renato Cristi, “Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 17, no. 3 (1984);
101. David Dyzenhaus, “The Puzzle of Neo-Conservatism,” Policy Review (Spring 1987);
102. and Bill Scheuerman, “The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations 4, no. 2 (October 1997).
103. On the past and future of neoconservatism's relationship to liberalism, see Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995);
104. John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
105. Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996);
106. and Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard, The Conservative Tradition in America (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
107. See Michael Walzer, “What's Going On? Notes on the Right Turn,” Dissent (Winter 1996).