Friend or enemy? Reading Schmitt politically

neoThe debates concerning a ‘crisis’ in social theory in recent years have been partly generated by those socialists for whom old certainties now appear naive and the theoretical foundations of a socialist approach to history and society obliterated. In this context some have looked to new approaches discourse theory, poststructuralism, deconstruction, rational choice theory, to name but a few – for a way out of the crisis. My interest in this article is with none of these. Instead I am concerned with the process of ‘unlearning’ that has occurred whilst the breaking with the past foundations of socialist theory has taken place: specifically, astute political and theoretical judgements made by socialists of the past generation that have been forgotten. The judgement at issue is that Carl Schmitt was a fascist.1 This has been forgotten in the attempt to utilize some of Schmitt’s more challenging theoretical work as part of the rethinking of socialist theory. For Schmitt is being offered to us as one way of thinking ourselves out of the theoretical crisis confronting us. We are told that ‘the left can only learn from Carl Schmitt’;2 that Schmitt’s ‘genuine analysis’ ‘enlightens US’;3 that ‘we can learn a great deal’ from Schmitt’s critique of Parliamentary democracy;4 and that, for liberals, Schmitt can offer the basis for a rethinking of liberalism.5 The crisis, then, has reached a point where fascists are being used as the basis for a revitalized and rejuvenated socialist political theory. It should be stated from the outset that Schmitt is being offered to us not because of his fascist politics but despite it. This is done on the assumption that his fascist politics is somehow unconnected to the profound theoretical in sights he is said to provide on a range of issues – the nature of the political, the importance of constitutional legality, and the possible contradictory tendencies of democracy and liberalism. The implication is that these in sights are far more telling than any the Left, especially the Marxist Left, has produced. In one sense it is the ambiguous status of socialist political theory in general, and Marxist political theory in particular, that lies at the heart of the discussion. Writing in Telos, the journal which has played a major role in making Schmitt’s work available to a wider audience, Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen claim that ‘most Marxists, neo-Marxists and liberals in this century have plodded along without a political theory strictu sensu‘. In such a situation Marxists have either underwritten some of the worst barbarities of the twentieth century or have come to embrace the most naive features of traditional liberalism in the guise of post-Marxism. In this context Schmitt’s thought ‘may well turn out to be the antidote’ needed.6 Piccone and Ulmen express here the central issue at the heart of the current appropriation of Schmitt. On the one hand lies the necessity of developing a critical theory of liberal democracy, which Marx-ism is said to have failed to do – in effect: Schmitt is being turned to as a means of ‘filling the gap left by the non-existent Marxist theory of democracy’, as Habermas puts it.7 On the other hand, sensitive to the fact that those who have moved out of Marxism have often done so only to embrace a liberal pluralism indistinguishable from a range of mainstream liberal writers and thus lacking any real radical force, Schmitt’s critique of liberalism’s key presuppositions and central institutions is also being appropriated. […]


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