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The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

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This edition of Carl Schmitt's _Der Begriff des Politischens_ is translated by George Schwab and contains several interesting writings on Schmitt and his thought. In addition to _The Concept of the Political_ proper, this book also contains a "Foreward" by Tracy B. Strong, an "Introduction" by George Schwab, and ends with a series of notes on the book by Leo Strauss. Carl Schmitt was a legal scholar and political theorist during the time of the Third Reich who was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition. While unfortunately Schmitt joined the Nazi party, this should not prevent one from reading his otherwise important works which have much to say about the political and provide trenchant critiques of liberalism. Schmitt can be rightfully considered as one of the conservative revolutionaries, including such figures as Junger, Spengler, and Heidegger, who opposed liberalism in the period before the Second World War. Schmitt's writings were an important influence on Heidegger in particular, but have also seen a resurgence in their importance among the New Right and the Left as well. Schmitt was influenced by such political thinkers as Machiavelli, Hegel, and Hobbes, but also by Catholic counter-revolutionaries such as de Maistre and Donoso Cortes. This book lays out the essential details of his thought.

In _The Concept of the Political_, a book which profoundly criticizes liberalism, Schmitt essentially argues that the political must be understood in terms of the "friend-enemy" distinction. Schmitt explains how the state presupposes the concept of the political. In searching for a definition of the political, Schmitt explains how the state has become an absolute, total state in the twentieth century in contrast to the neutral, noninterventionist state of the nineteenth century. According to Schmitt, the political may be understood in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy, much as morality can be understood in terms of the distinction between good and evil, aesthetics in terms of the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, economics in terms of the distinction between the profitable and the unprofitable. This distinction between friend-enemy provides the groundwork upon which Schmitt builds his concept of the political. Schmitt distinguishes the idea of the "enemy" from that understood in the private-individualistic sense as the competitor or partner in conflict in general as that of the private adversary. Schmitt offers an interesting interpretation of the dictum of Christ to "love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44, Luke 6:27) as indicating only the private enemy and not the political enemy. As proof of this, Schmitt offers the fact that Christians have not surrendered to the Muslims throughout the many centuries of conflict between the two groups. Schmitt also argues against pacifism claiming that eventually pacifism will be pushed into a "war against all war", leading ultimately to great destruction. Schmitt considers the case of the League of Nations and the reparations forced upon Germany and argues that rather than serving as a preventive against war the League of Nations has opened up new possibilities for war. Underlying all of this is the notion of the political. In addition, Schmitt contrasts "authoritarian" and "anarchistic" theories, arguing that the central difference between them is the view of human nature as fundamentally evil or good, respectively. Schmitt brings to the fore the thoughts of both Machiavelli and Hobbes on this point. Schmitt also contrasts the political to the economic, arguing against economic liberalism. Schmitt calls attention to the thinking of Fichte and Hegel, whose thought was subverted by Karl Marx. Schmitt also emphasizes the Catholic counter-revolutionaries who represented the forces of reaction such as de Maistre and Donoso Cortes. Schmitt brings out the contrast between the ideas of "freedom" and "progress" and those of "feudalism" and "reaction". Finally, Schmitt argues that a final war waged to expand economic power or a war to rid the world of war, while promoted as non-political or even anti-political will ultimately open up new ground for the friend-enemy distinction to be made yet again.

This book provides an excellent translation of one of Schmitt's most important works. The groundwork for the political understood as the friend-enemy distinction is laid out by Schmitt here. Schmitt's thinking continues to be important to many today, despite his apparent encounter with the dark side and his involvement with the Nazi regime. Schmitt would live the rest of his life in relative obscurity although he would continue to write and teach. While Schmitt disavowed his Nazi past, he also adamantly opposed the denazification procedures inflicted on Germany by the Allies. This book provides an excellent introduction to his political thought.

The other reviews of this book already give the potential reader a good insight into what they are buying, and so I will comment on a fascinating conceptual tension within the book. Like all political realists (or so Schmitt would claim), Schmitt begins his theorizing from the empirical fact that "man is a dangerous and dynamic being". Schmitt allows that the nature of man may not be evil, but man's nature is inarguably problematic. Schmitt then inquires as to how man's problematic nature reveals itself conceptually. His answer is the enemy recognition. We know man is evil because he is prone to locating in the stranger, the other (that person or group who holds inimical aesthetic, religious, ethical beliefs), a potential source of violent conflict. A tension (there are many in the book!) then materializes when Schmitt speaks of the necessity of the state to make the proper enemy recognition if peace and security are to be maintained. It is of course a perilous folly if the state fails to make the proper enemy recognition (see Hindenburg's 1933 alliance with Hitler, Neville Chamberlain's appeasement, and Stalin's secret pact with Hitler for three failed enemy recognitions before WWII). But how does the state make the proper enemy recognition, and not simply needlessly multiply conflict in order to root out the enemy? Thus, the Soviet archives tell us that Stalin erroneously viewed the West as a threat (particularly a rebuilt Germany) after WWII, and so seized Eastern Europe as a buffer zone. The tension of the enemy recognition is that it is the source of all of our troubles, but yet it must be made when necessary. Sounds like the stuff of which politics is made...

Others have described the book quite well, so I simply wanted to add a corrective to Mr. Dermeval's review, which criticized Schmitt's analysis as being crudely bipolar relative to Weber. While I agree that Weber's analysis is superlative, it does not in fact contradict Schmitt's theory at all. Schmitt views "the political" as a particular process that pervades human life to varying degrees, depending upon the particular degree of friend/enemy antagonism that is involved in a given social situation. Obviously, not every judgment that involves some aspect of the political rises to the highest point of friend/enemy antagonism. Battles over health care rights, for example, are inherently less "political" in Schmittian terms than is an outright war. The health care conflict is resolved with more rational and bureaucratic elements -- for example, determining which approach will likely be lowest in total cost. Schmitt's theory takes full account of this varying intensity of the political in social life; in fact it is premised on it.

It is thus a mistake to think that the "friend/enemy" distinction is fully manifested in every judgment made by a state. Many (if not most) such judgments are apolitical decisions made on generally rational grounds, consistent with Weber's description of the state. On Schmitt's theory, such particular rational judgments are not truly (i.e. distinctively) political, even though made by a political entity. Such judgments *become* political to the extent they involve one group seizing advantage over another group, rather than a purely rational technical analysis based on accepted criteria.

In her introduction Tracey Strong writes that "liberals are horrified at Schmitt because he offends against one the deepest premises of liberalism; politics is necessary but should not become serious" (p. xxvi). The observation is, I think, a perceptive one. John Rawls, for example, attempted to give structure to a political liberalism by excising some many of the principles by which, in Schmitt's analysis, the friend-enemy relation is to be defined. In The Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt presents an argument against the then emerging dominance of liberalism.

First, Schmitt disputes the identification of Liberalism with Democracy they are, for Schmitt antithetical. In a representative passage Schmitt to a significant degree the turn to the individual in political theory is the death of the state and political sovereignty:

"An individualism in which anyone other than the free individual himself were to decide upon the substance and dimension of his freedom would be only an empty phrase. For the individual as such there is no enemy with whom he must enter into a life-and-death struggle if he personally does not want to. To compel him to fight against his will is, from the viewpoint of the private individual, lack of freedom and repression. All liberal pathos turns against repression and lack of freedom. Every encroachment, every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competition is called repression and is eo ipso something evil. What this liberalism still admits of state, government, and politics is confined to securing the conditions for liberty and eliminating infringements on freedom (p. 71)."

Earlier Schmitt (p. 53) makes the claim that the "political world is a pluriverse, not a universe." In other words, conflict in the political order is a given; liberalism far from removing conflict exacerbates it because of its failure to address the interests of any of the plurality of multitude of "friend-enemy" relationships (it should be remembered that Schmitt was writing in the midst of the conflicts in the Weimar Republic). Hence liberalism is an unhelpful phenomenon that is not genuinely democratic for, if it were, it would takes sides and identify its friends and enemies and represent its friends only (there are I think traces of Stanley Fish's "Boutique Multiculturalism" here with his criticism of Locke and reference to Hobbes - Schmitt is a highly Hobbesian thinker - ). It is also, as the previous quote makes clear for Schmitt, a cancerous ideology (or rather an unnegotiating absence of ideology) that strips ther state of sovereignty or call upon a state's citizenship. Schmitt's philosophy is a provocative one and does grate somewhat in its generally unsystematic presentation. However, it is also an important one that still exposes some of the problems with which liberalism must face - and I would consider myself a cautious defender. There is a danger that given his Nazi membership that he is not taken seriously in political philosophy. It is true that ideas have legs - when questioned at the end of the war Schmitt was accused in interview that his philosophy had created the intellectual credibility that enabled the Nazi war crimes to be committed - and therefore I do think that Schmitt's thought, particularly in Political Theology, should be read in biographical and historical context.

The Concept of the Political is an important piece of political theory that still deserves to be read even though it is now over 70 years after its first publication. As with the University of Chicago Press' publication of Political Theology this edition is greatly aided by a succinct yet informative introduction by Tracey Strong.

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Casper Denck - author of "The Nicodemist' blog.

One of the few books on politics/philosophy worth reading. Deals with the internal conflicts of the so-called "rational" state.

My only objection is the inclusion of Strauss, which is an insult to anyone capable of understanding Schmitt's original text.

Re: "Good ideas, but very densely written" - did you even read the book? It is one of the only examples of clear writing and thinking on politics that we have today. Don't seek secondary academic writing on the book - it uniformly lacks clarity, as the topic of Schmitt's writing is (by nature? or nurture?) foreign to academics.

Schmitt's "Concept of the Political" is one of the most famous as well as notorious books of political theory. The so-called "Crown-Attorney of the Third Reich" (Gurian) develops in this brief Essay the idea, that the Concept of the Political is the differentiation between foe and friend. States should classify people as well as other states as friend or foe, because only this asures homogenity (in innerstate matters) and security (in foreign policies). Allthough this radical alternative has often been misunderstood (Schmitt does not say, that politics always operates in this binary mode), Schmitt is fascinated by the ideology of Mussolini as well as Hitler and the NSdAP. Vice versa, the Nazis showed interests in the international lawyer: His homogenity-desiderate corresponded with their plans to exterminate "Jews". With Schmitts "Concept of the Political" these extermination-ideas were based to a "philosophical background". That led critical scholars to characterize this book as a "political, not philosophical existentialism".

Since other reviewers have more than adequately summarized the contents of Carl Schmitt's magnum opus, I will not offer yet another precis. Rather, my intent is to attempt a preliminary case for the proposition that George W. Bush, recently President of the United States, embodies what Schmitt extolled as "the political," i.e., the once-for-all identification of friend and enemy, and "the most intense and extreme antagonism" vis-a-vis that enemy so identified and labeled.
While I recognize this is a topic best pursued in a doctoral dissertation or a specialist's scholarly monograph, let me simply offer a couple of ideas that merit further discussion:
1. Early in his presidency, Bush identified Iraq's Saddam Hussein as America's primary antagonist, and the greatest threat to American liberties. Bush apparently was willing to expend great amounts of money and effort, to manufacture evidence, and to distort whatever evidence was in fact uncovered, all with a view to demonizing Saddam. The tragic events of Sept. 11, the work of Islamic fanatics belonging to al-Qaeda acting under the direction of Osama bin Laden, were conflated with whatever evils Saddam had perpetrated on his own people or on others, to the point many believed the two entities--Iraq and al-Qaeda--were one and the same; and that Saddam and bin Laden were cohorts in crime. (Subsequently, we learned al-Qaeda never had a foothold in Iraq while Saddam was in power!) As America's current military adventures in Iraq attest, Bush pursued Saddam with "the most intense and extreme antagonism," invading his country, toppling his government, and finally capturing and executing Saddam himself, leaving a power vacuum that led to a low-grade Iraqi civil war that only now is beginning to play itself out. All of this happened while al-Qaeda continued to exist elsewhere, primarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in the Arabian peninsula. (It was only under Pres. Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was finally brought to justice--although to his credit, Bush grudgingly congratulated Pres. Obama and the brave SEALs who carried out this surgically precise strike.) Bush refused to be bothered by facts or arguments tending to show that he had misidentified the "true enemy" and the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 disaster, or that Bush's (and America's) military efforts in Iraq were not only misguided, but in fact strengthened al-Qaeda's hand.
This is totally in line with Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction as being the core of "the political." Once the enemy has been determined, he or she "must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence." That the "enemy" may be chimerical never really enters into the discussion for Bush or for Schmitt, because by definition this "enemy" DOES threaten one's form of existence--that's what makes him/her/it the "enemy.
2. Bush famously called himself "the Decider," bragging that he reached this type of decision alone and on his own, relying solely on his own instincts of right, wrong, and what was expedient for the moment. His disdain of the opinions of others as collected in books, articles, and the collective wisdom of his Cabinet and advisers, is well-known. Schmitt himself was just as (in)famous for the same type of reasoning, writing in Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) of the impotence of liberal democracies who insist on debating such crucial questions before acting. In a much-quoted passage, Schmitt writes that just as a "liberal" is a person incapable of taking his own side in an argument, he is also one who, "if asked 'Christ or Barabbas?' [responds] with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a committee of investigation."

Intellectually, Carl Schmitt and George W. Bush had little if anything in common. Schmitt was a brilliant jurist, well-read, capable of formulating complex political and philosophical ideas with a degree of sophistication and clarity that is rare among political philosophers from this, or indeed from any era. George W. Bush never met a book he wanted to read, bragged that he never got better than a "C" while a student at Yale, and was infamous for his verbal gaffes and howlers; as well as for some political ideas that went absolutely nowhere, such as his plan for privatization of Social Security. Yet Bush, to my mind at least, embodies Carl Schmitt's idea of the "political" more than any American leader since Richard M. Nixon. Those who extol Schmitt as the prophet of a new age would do well to examine Bush's presidency very closely--Bush was Schmitt as President. Ideas do have consequences. Are these the consequences we want from our political processes? I can't answer that question, but it must be asked.

If on the one hand, Schmitt's book does contain some brilliant insights - especially in its last pages, where it criticizes liberalism as an inconsistent form of political doctrine - on the other, it seems to me, when all is said and done, the meditation fails its main purpose, which is to show something about the essence of politics.

Because the essence of the political is indeed present in the Freund/Feind situations, but these are only two extreme possibilities of political alterity, which, however, do not exhaust the political field. A profounder and more challenging approach to the notion of the political is that of Max Weber in "Politik als Beruf/The Vocation and Profession of Politics" (1921) and Hans Morgenthau in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946) / Politics among Nations (1948). Their depth resides in their approach via the notion of power. The exercise of power over fellow beings is the true rub of politics. How well did the North-American founding fathers grasp it too!

Schmitt's extreme polarity, to me, is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan with new garb. And I was quite glad to see evidences in favor of this guess: in the original version of Der Begriff des Politischen, published in 1927 at the Archiv Journal, Schmitt states that Hobbes is the -only- truly systematic political thinker. This compliment was diluted for the text's final version, published in 1932, in which Hobbes appears as "a truly systematic thinker".

Schmitt and Hobbes stand together in their view of man as a power-seeking creature by nature, a hostage of passions and egotism. So far, as the basic generalization, no problem. But then Schmitt goes on to repeat the same faux pas of Hobbes' Leviathan in regard to the solution identified for this condition. Hobbes fell in the trap of proposing the symbolic figure of the pact, by which individuals sacrifice their aspirations in the name of the king, who, in exchange, shall protect them against hostilities from abroad and promote well-being. This, of course, for a political context quite different from the XXth century. In any case, Hobbes' politico-theological thought has little or no room for internal dissent. At the end, in his view, human `reason' and the Scriptures converge; Schmitt agrees with him.

Here are the two implicit errors I see in Hobbes' view of the `Pact'. Firstly, the implicit expectation that humans will be able to sacrifice their passions and ambitions with a view to order and peace, as if they were free. And they are not. Whatever the political system, their desire for power will make itself felt and seek satisfaction. The second implicit error is the expectation that the king will be neutral and can be trusted - once more, the Founding Fathers are called to the scene, the Federalist 51 being their top gem. What guarantees do we have about the king? Is he not a human being just like the others, power-seeking, a hostage to his passions?

The flaw of Hobbes' `philosophy', then, is that its solution does not solve the problem it identifies. What Hobbes does is merely to raise - suspend - project - in a word: procrastinate - the state of nature onto the international arena, without changing its supposed essence. One would then have - if premises were truly followed - communities under pact from within, and without inner dissent, at war against all the others. Thus the logical extension - and here is Schmitt's insight, perhaps unconsciously: within the body politic, in the case the state, there could then only be friends and foes to the will of this body's head. And among the other bodies politic, as they interact, there could also be only friends/allies and foes.

"The Concept of the Political", by Carl Schmitt, is a theorhetical tract wherein Schmitt lays the groundwork for a criticism of current 'liberal' political theory (liberal in the technical sense of the term, i.e. as concerned with the preservation of human freedom as the sovreign good of political society, as opposed to the word's conventional use as an adjective describing adherents of the various species of Leftist ideology; note as well that here we mean 'negative freedom', not 'positive freedom', in Isaiah Berlin's scheme). His reflections are somewhat disjointed, but fortunately the notes on this text penned by the great and sadly passed away Leo Strauss are appended at the end of the book. This provides a useful synthesis and critique of Schmitt's work; essentially, Strauss argues that Schmitt is criticizing liberalism from a concealed moral point of view, under the guise of the supposed necessities of politics as a function of human nature; however, what Schmitt never comes out and says is that the 'ethics' and 'morality' of liberalism, that he says he is disregarding in favor of cold-eyed necessity, is in fact just one of a plurality of possible ethical systems, and that there is an alternative ethical vision available that does in fact embrace politics as struggle between friends and enemies as valuable in itself, which is a step further than Schmitt takes the analysis, seeing the political and its allegedly unpalatable characteristics as a matter of pure necessity. Strauss never says so, but the antithesis his analysis sets up is strikingly similar to the godlike Friererich Nietzsche's notions of 'master morality' and 'slave morality'. Read this book, especially Strauss' epitome of it, alongside 'Beyond Good and Evil', 'On the Geneology of Morals', 'The Anti-Christ', and 'Twilight of the Idols', for a look at a positive formulation of what Schmitt merely hints at. Also good for further info on Nietzsche's political philosophy would be 'Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism' by Bruce Dettweiler; 'Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker', by Keith Ansell-Pearson; and 'Nietzsche and the Political', by Daniel W. Conway.

N.B. - Schmitt disgraced himself as a man for all eternity by his willing association with the satanic forces of the Third Reich. In no way should this be a reason for you to avoid this book. He repetedly denounces totalitarinism in it as different from his own ideas; likewise, do not allow the old canard that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi to keep you from reading him - this is an out-and-out lie, as Walter Kaufman proved half a century ago in his "Nietzsche: Philospoher, Psychologist, and Anti-Christ". Friederich Nietzsche would not have deigned to so much as urinate on Adolf Hitler if he found the Furher on fire. In any case, even if the charges against Nietzsche were true, it would still constitute an ad hominem attack, which has no rational vlaue whatsoever (the same goes for Schmitt). Ad hominems, in case you are wondering, consist of attempts to discredit ideas by discrediting their thinkers - e.g. 'elimination of affirmitive action is a mistake because white conservatives are racists and black conservatives are Uncle Toms'. I'm sure you've heard similar fallacies before. Neither man's ideas necessarily leads to Nazism or any other form of totalitarianism - people who oppose them just want you to think so. Read it, and ponder it, if you want a glimpse of a radically different way of thinking about politics.

I read the German edition of this book. It's eerily simple to read. The space that Schmitt carves out here for the political seems to be a good idea: the political is essentially the field of tension between enemy and friend. Most political problems can be cast in these terms, but Schmitt does not go far enough. Unlike Hegel, there is no issue (Ding) between the enemy and friend. Yes, of course there are always oppositions, but the issue between the two parties is enormously important. Perhaps Schmitt would only say that the issue implies a party (even a third party) which cannot be impartial and so is only aligning itself. I don't buy this. I think it is enormously important for sides in a political conflict to look at what the issue at hand is, e.g., a land dispute, and then to work from there. According to Schmitt's view, there's nothing to do other than to maintain the opposition until defeat or victory. That is too limited an approach.