Carl Schmitt and the clash of

civilizations: the missing context

ALEX SCHULMAN
Department of Political Science, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
ABSTRACT Scholarship on Carl Schmitt tends either to contextualize obsessively
his Weimar-era work to convict or exonerate vis-a`-vis fascism, or effectively
decontextualize it in the service of buttressing contemporary political theoretical
projects. While both approaches have produced interesting work, this paper argues
that both have missed key elements. An important and hitherto largely unexamined
context for Schmitts enduring series of interwar writings was the widespread
European concern over the threat posed to Western civilization by Bolshevism. This is
shownby analysingSchmitts texts fromthe period bothinternally, andcomparatively
with other inuential contemporary writers, who also predicted a European
Bolshevik clash of civilizations as the conceptual order of future politics.
Introduction
Schmitt understood that his only alternative was Hobbesian obedience in exchange for
political protection . . . Is there any other more plausible explanation for Schmitts
unreserved capitulation to Nazi ideology, which even led him to adopt anti-Semitic views he
did not espouse before the Nazi takeover?
1
In any case, we need not dwell any further on this.
(Carl Schmitt, abruptly ending his discussion of the Volkssturm units and Werewolf
child-soldiers mobilized at the end of Second World War)
2
In the contemporary proliferation of works on Carl Schmitts political and legal
theory one can detect a fewcommon pathways. The current relevance is often said
specicallyto be the broad emergency powers claimed by the Bush Administration
after the 9/11 attacks to prosecute its war on terror
3
andmore generallyto be the
possibility of opening up liberal constitutionalism to its aporiae, inconsistencies and
inadequacies. The recovery of Schmitt, as proclaimed by one of its most dedicated
journals, could combat the regression to a na ve conformist liberalismbrought about
by the pollution of communication theory and the obsessive left-liberal pursuit of
egalitarianism as a super-legal norm.
4
Here Schmitts work is a pharmakon, both
poison and remedy, ambivalent in itself, and used to tease out the ambiguities and
Journal of Political Ideologies (June 2012),
17(2), 147167
ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/12/02014721 q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2012.676854
antinomies of liberalism.
5
Constitutional liberalism is said to be unable, now as in
Weimar, to handle the politicaland Schmitts enemy-based conception of
the political has not stopped sectors of the left from recommending a more
Schmittian approach. Schmitt allow[s] us to acknowledgeand therefore be in a
better position to try to negotiatean important paradox inscribed in the very nature
of liberal democracy, that is, the neglect of aspect[s] of democratic politics that
liberalism tends to evacuate.
6
Sometimes this has taken a mere sort of know thy
enemy tone: here is the lefts chance tolearn fromits opponents and thereby regaina
vitality it has lost since retreating into academia.
7
But as has been the case with Heidegger and philosophy, anyone who considers
Schmitt a fascinating political theorist with much of relevance to say to our
agesomeone who asks hard questions and points to aspects of political life too
uncomfortable to ignore
8
must, one way or another, enquire into his
relationship with Nazism. To that end, a number of excellent works have been
produced exploring, often in minute detail, the genealogy of Schmitts intellectual
relationship(s) with the Weimar and the then Hitler regime.
9
There is an important
contextual element missing though. In this essay I will argue that Schmitts
intellectual relationship to fascism must itself be read in the context of, and as
intertwined with, his intellectual relationship to Bolshevismthat is, the
specically political form of Marxism Schmitt describes as developing in the
Soviet Union after the First World War.
To be sure, Schmitt scholars have not altogether ignored Schmitts ample
commentary on MarxismLeninism and the Soviet Union.
10
Typically, however,
the focus is on either Schmitts critique of Marxismas a totalizing philosophy where
economics trumps politics, or on issues of an internal enemy, the Communist
Party (KPD) in Weimar Germany. Both concerns are certainly present; but I argue
that his alarm about Bolshevism took place on a grander scale. To read Schmitts
decision in favour of Nazi legitimacy following the collapse of the Weimar
Republic as simply a national application of his legal theory misses this broader
contextual element. His thoughts about Bolshevism often take the form of asides
and even footnotes, but they are no less telling for being so presented. An off-the-bat
caveat: viewing fascist sympathies and/or ideology as simply a reaction to the
international communist revolution many feared Lenin had set in motion in 1917
has been usedeven somewhat recently, as in the German historikerstreit
11
to
explain Nazi atrocities, or at least relativize them to an uncomfortable degree. My
response to this is that rst, I simply seek here to expose a too-obscured element in
Schmitt scholarship, rather than add to the by-now lengthy bibliography of
moralizing, one way or another, about him. But second, one does not automatically
relativize Nazi atrocities by accepting that support for fascism in the 1920s and
1930s, including fascisms series of alliances with otherwise anti- or at least non-
fascist institutions (like churches) and intellectuals (like Schmitt), was intimately
tied to what was then a common assumption: the future of Europe was to be a clash
of civilizations between Bolshevism and the West.
This should also then suggest a wider present-day context than the Guantanamo
crisis. For example Louiza Odysseos asks:
alex schulman
148
whether, and how, the War on Terror functions according to a [Schmittian] dialectic: the
creation of unity in the Western world, which is threatened and needs securing, and which
excludes those whose assumed fundamentalist tendencies motivate them to act against
freedom.
12
The question of having, or perceiving that one has, an enemy that has declared war
not merely against ones policies or control of resources but against ones entire
way of life, clearly frames ones treatment of that enemy. Schmitts pre-eminent
contemporary heirmore so than critical legal theory or radical democrats like
Chantal Mouffemay be Samuel P. Huntington, who years before 11 September
2001 argued that the future promised a global Kulturkampf between Islam and
the peoples it borders, and that the decadent fruits of liberalism, sounding
something like they did in the days of Oswald Spenglerproblems of moral
decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the Westcould prevent the US
and its European Allies from prevailing.
13
Schmitt, too, had mourned the future of
a civilization in which value neutrality . . . is pushed to the point of system
suicide.
14
And when Mouffe, for example, praises Schmitts theory as
an important warning for those who believe that the process of globalization is
laying the basis for worldwide democratization and cosmopolitan citizenship, she
is making a similar warning to Huntingtons.
15
Welcome back Oswald Spengler, neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri disdainfully wrote of Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations thesisand the
latter did blandly reference Spengler as a historian of civilizations (as opposed to a
fascist philosopher).
16
Perhaps the oddity is actually that it took so long for
Spengler to be welcomed back, with Schmitt and Heidegger now solidly
rehabilitated. Shall Spenglerian remain an insult, when Schmittian or
Heideggerian are, in critical theory, now not only respectable but also run-of-
the-mill?
17
In what follows I will examine Schmitts scattered, but still cohesive,
thoughts on the development of MarxismLeninism and its adoption as state
ideology by the Soviet Union. It will tie these into his conception of the political
as it played out in Europe in the modern age, and argue that his critique of
liberalism and embrace of fascism sought justication not only in the legal
dilemmas of a single state, Germany, but also in the existential struggles he saw
unfolding for European civilization as a whole.
From Marx to Mongolia
A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe . . .
(Oswald Spengler)
In the 1926 Introduction to The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Carl
Schmitt suggests that it is a sign of the weakness of parliamentary democracy that
the most convincing reason people can give for supporting it is its preferability to
Bolshevism.
18
Schmitt is known for criticizing parliamentarianism as a
purposeless fetish for discussion and deliberation, a perpetual deferral of the
true decision-al fruits of a more existentially attuned agonism. Here, though, he
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
149
surmises, when he asks himself What did parliamentarianism mean to these
German liberals and democrats struggling against the imperial political system?
(i.e. Max Weber), that it was precisely the emergence of strong leadership, rather
than perpetual deliberation itself, that had been the plan. Essentially and most
importantly it was a means for selecting political leaders, a certain way to
overcome political dilettantism and to admit the best and most able to political
leadership, the very political dilettantism Schmitt saw in the 19th-century
romanticism, but that has now infected the bureaucraticconstitutional republic.
Whether parliament actually possess the capacity to build a political elite, he
now argues, has since become very questionable and politics, far from being the
concern of an elite, has become the despised business of a rather dubious class of
persons.
19
Webers wrestling with the problems of modern legitimacy hovers as a
consistent eminence grise over Schmitts most enduring works; it is no accident
that the spectres of Lenin and Trotsky haunted Webers Politics as a Vocation
lecture.
20
There Weber describes two political growths as peculiar to the
Occidentthe constitutional state and also the demagogue. Soon one will be
at war with the other, in the sort of Weltanschauung clash during which, Weber
admits, there is little to do but choose sides. The professional politician, no
longer in the personalistic service of a dynast, is described as unique to the West.
This character makes politics his life, in an internal sense, either seeking power
for its own sake or nourish[ing] his inner balance and self-feeling by the
consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a cause.
21
In an
atmosphere of wartime ination where bulwarks of bourgeois order such as
property and monetary stability were threatened, Weber surmises that the era of a
new, dangerous sort of professional politician awaits among those strata who by
virtue of their propertylessness stand entirely outside . . . the economic order of a
given society.
22
Only a rm taming of the soul (not particularly well-specied)
will prevent the vocational politician from becoming one of the political
dilettantes Weber sees at the head of the Soviet dictatorship. Weber foresees in
the Bolshevik or Spartacist adventurer a ruthless proponent of the ethic of
ultimate ends, one who suddenly turns into a chiliastic prophet, and whose
premiums consist of the satisfying of hatred and the craving for revenge . . . the
opponents must be slandered and accused of heresy.
23
The eastern menace haunted Weber even as a young scholar. His 1895 lecture
on The Nation State and Economic Policy in Germany spoke a Darwinian
language of ethno-cultural conictone whose focus on comparative birth rates
(the sombre gravity of the population problem) makes it recognizable even in
terms of contemporary European political discourse. The Social Darwinian
language of competition, adaptation and selection does not hide Webers warning
that it is precisely not the more advanced group that wins out in this sort of
Kulturkampfit is a large number of children, not gradual extinction, that
follows hard on the heels of a low standard of living. Weber foresaw the victory
of less developed types and the disappearance of ne owers of intellectual and
emotional life following a geographically destined clash between Germans and
alex schulman
150
Slavs. He recommends closing the frontier, and using state policy to facilitate
German colonization in the east.
24
Pessimism infuses these parts of the lecture; it
is less about the ability of German culture to advance and adapt than it is about the
sheer numerical pressures coming from outside. This same pessimism about
Germanys long-term chances versus the multiplying Slavs was a key factor
motivating Germanys militarily aggressive policies between 1914 and 1945.
The German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg mourned to his son on
the eve of the First World War that there was little reason to plant new trees on
their estate, since in a few years the Russians would be here anyway; a later
communique laments, The future belongs to Russia which grows and grows, and
thrusts on us a heavier and heavier nightmare.
25
Webers lecture holds out the possibility that the correctly trained vocational
politician could reconcile defeated Germany to parliamentary liberalism. For what
other decent alternative to Bolshevik dilettantism could there be? But Schmitt will
have none of it. Though a reasonable political organization in the 19th century,
parliamentary liberalism was fast becoming an anachronism: the development of
modern mass democracy has made argumentative public discussion an empty
formality. To Schmitt, a belief in parliamentarism, in government by discussion,
belongs to the intellectual world of liberalism. It does not belong to democracy.
We are at the tail-end of an epochal shift from dynastic to democratic
legitimacy.
26
If, in a mass-democratic age, the only legitimating criteria of a
parliamentary process should change from an institution of evident truth into a
simply practical technical means, then it only has to be shown . . . that things
could be otherwise and parliament is then nished.
27
The replacement of
19th-century elite liberalism by 20th-century mass democracy awaits its
correspondingly new political forms. One was developing to the east.
Bolshevism interests Schmitt in that it has transformed the 19th-century
philosophy of Marxism into an authentically 20th-century political movement.
Schmitt allows that Bolshevik and fascist claims to embody a genuine form of
democracy are legitimate: these forms are certainly antiliberal but not
necessarily antidemocratic.
28
Indeed, they are more authentically democratic
than were their origins in Marxism, which was essentially a mirror image of
contemporaneous post-Enlightenment liberalism; Schmitt reverses the estimation
of anyone who has sought to reclaim a democratic Marx from the Bolsheviks.
Marx remained trapped in classical, and therefore bourgeois, political economy
and within the rationalist faith of the Enlightenmentbut with Lenin and
Trotskys embedding of this philosophy in an expansionist state, Marxism has
become an intellectual instrument for what is really no longer a rationalist
impulse.
29
By positing an undifferentiated humanity as its subject, Marxism was,
like liberalism, anti-political; politics therein becomes devalued . . . something
insignicant . . . insubstantial to the degree that such an indifferent equality is
taken seriously. Marx was only a schoolmaster and remained trapped in an
intellectual exaggeration of West European bourgeois education,
30
an education
the radical socialists of the 20th centurytheorists of violence such as Sorel;
institutionalizers of violence such as Leninincreasingly renounce.
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
151
Schmitt agrees with the communists and their fellow travellers that the
Bolshevik (or, mutatis mutandis, fascist) dictatorship is more authentically
democratic than the Western liberal democracies, though not for the reasons given
by communisms philosophical defenders. Again, this is because liberal
democracy is something of an oxymoron for Schmitt. Eventually either the
adjective or the noun must win out: democracy and liberalism could be allied to
each other for a time, just as socialism and democracy have been allied; but as
soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements.
To a true modern mass democracy parliament will invariably appear as an
inconceivable and outmoded institution, a debating parlour wherein discussion
by independent representatives has no autonomous justication for its existence,
even less so because the belief in discussion is not democratic but originally
liberal.
31
Liberalism fails because it seeks to universalize itself; real democracy
knows that group struggle is unavoidable. Liberalism is based on an abstract
universal equality that can never be achieved, while democracy implies a selective
equality that tends to be the default mode of organization anyway: the principle
that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally, requiring
rst homogeneity and second . . . elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.
32
Whereas in the past this principle has exercised itself in various formshierarchy
of character in the Aristotelian polis, difference of religion in the Middle Ages,
etc.its signature modern organizational principle is the national unit.
A funny thing happened to Marxism on the way to the Finland Station: it
became allied with nationalism. We in Central Europe live under the eye of the
Russians, Schmitt announces in the very rst line of his lecture,The Age of
Neutralizations and Depoliticizations. Their vitality is enough to seize our
knowledge and technology as weapons, but such vitality owes more than a little to
the fact that They have realized the union of Socialism and Slavism. While we
in Europe still live in a period of exhaustion . . . on Russian soil . . . a state arose
which, despite its distant theoretical claims to be an intermediate stage in the
process of eliminating the state, is more intensely statist than any ruled by the
absolute princes.
33
So it is the Bolsheviks who founded National Socialismonly
later to be appropriated defensively as the Prussian socialism of Spengler or the
National Bolshevism of Goebbels.
The idea that in becoming Bolshevism, Marxism, originally a dyed-in-the-wool
19th-century European metaphysics, has also become frighteningly other,
unsettles Schmitt. Perhaps Marxism has arisen so unrestrainedly on Russian
soil, Schmitt ventures, because proletarian thought there had been utterly free of
all the constrictions of Western European tradition and from all the moral and
educational notions with which Marx and Engels themselves still quite obviously
lived. When Marxism migrated from the west to the east . . . there it seized a
myth for itself that no longer grew purely out of the instinct for class conict, but
contained strong national elements, breathing new life into the Russian hatred
for the complication, articiality, and intellectualism of Western European
civilization.
34
Schmitt sees the move that the Soviets have made from Marxism to
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Bolshevism as a warning to the West about what a modern politics must do to
retain its energies, something that as yet only Mussolini correctly grasped:
It must grasp this struggle as a life instinct, without academic construction, and as the creator
of a powerful myth in which it alone would nd the courage for a decisive battle . . . the
energy of nationalism is greater than the myth of class conict . . . wherever it comes to an
open confrontation of the two myths, such as in Italy, the national myth has until today
always been victorious. Italian Fascism depicted its communist enemy with a horric face,
the Mongolian face of Bolshevism; this has made a stronger impact and has evoked more
powerful emotions than the socialist image of the bourgeois.
35
Whether Schmitt at this point unequivocally admires the Italian jettisoning of
parliamentary liberalism or not, he certainly admires its legitimation tactic:
countering the energy of Bolshevism with the energy of a racially framed
anti-Bolshevism. Indeed, this is a standby of his most famous Weimar-era works,
albeit one that is somewhat hidden.
Crusaders
It is in The Concept of the Political that Schmitt draws his famous description of
the political as the friendenemy distinction. Though enemy status here need
not imply personal hatredindeed it all may be curiously unemotionalthe
friendenemy distinction denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or
separation, of an association or dissociation. Schmitt is not overly specic about
the content of this drawing of borders. The political enemy need not be morally
evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor. He is
nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufcient for his nature that he is, in
a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the
extreme case conicts with himare possible.
36
Schmitt does not deny that friend
enemy distinctions might be made on moral, aesthetic or economic linesbut if
that occurs to the extent that violent death is admitted as a possibility, then the
distinction has simply ipped over from being whatever it was to being political.
This is, as unsympathetic commentators have pointed out, something of a
tautology.
37
Schmitt places death at the centre of political theory not only because death for
him is existentially and conceptually richer than deliberation; it is also because
real citizens of real states will be called on to ght and die for entities larger than
themselves, just as they were in the First World War. Knowing better than the
post-Kantian dreamers who thought they had outlawed war following the end of
that conict, Schmitt supposes it will happen again sooner or later. What would the
contours be? By Schmitts theory they could be anything, of course, since many
dimensions of human identity have led to violent struggle over the years and have
thus become, on his terms, political. But content-wise, Schmitt seems to have at
least seriously entertained the common interwar European viewpointby no
means limited to the German radical right, though it found its most intense
expressions therethat the next totalizing struggle would be between the Soviet
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
153
Union and some understanding of the West. And on close examination Schmitts
writing contains not only a description of a coming civilizational clash between
Bolshevism and the rest of Europe, but also a sort of moral enthusiasm for it.
Schmitts enemy concept is not limited to the immediate and plausible. But in
the factual sphere, what likely enemy formed the Schmittian adversary who
intends to negate his opponents way of life and therefore must be repulsed or
fought in order to preserve ones form of existence?
38
Perhaps some on the
German radical right would have emphasized an internal Jewish enemy, but
internationally, the only plausible answer is Soviet Russia, armed with both
powerful ethnic nationalism and an expansionist ideology. Whereas Western
liberals were presiding over a rotting 19th-century corpse, the ideal of the political
state is still real . . . it has received new energies and new life in the Soviet
Union.
39
Ever since Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin . . . a
new concrete-enemy concept, namely that of the international class enemy has
taken hold, and the USSRs legitimating philosophy transformed itself . . . as
well as everything else, legality and illegality, the state, even the compromise with
the enemy, into a weapon of this battle.
40
Bolshevism does not recognize
liberalisms rules, and the liberal states do the world no favours by failing to place
themselves, and everyone else, on this new continuum of friends and enemies.
Touring the most intense emergences of the friend/enemy conception in the
modern era, Schmitt cites the anti-Catholicism of Cromwells England, the
ecrasez linfame of Voltaire and the philosophes, and the German nationalist
response to the Napoleonic Wars; he then cites as their true contemporary
equivalent Lenins annihilating sentences against bourgeois and western
capitalism.
41
Schmitt reads Kulturkampf into the birth pangs of MarxismLeninism,
discovering a spectre that would haunt Europe long after Marxs dreams of a
universal proletariat and fading-away of the state were falsied. Thus, Schmitts
gloss on the development of Marxism: [Marx and Engels] hatred of the Russian
arose from their most deeply rooted instincts and manifested itself in the struggle
within the First International. Conversely, everything in the Russian anarchist rose
in revolt against the German Jew (born in Trier) and against Engels. What
continually provoked Bakunin was their intellectualism.
42
But the struggle has
resolved itself and Bakunins untamed barbarian instinct won the day.
Bolshevism united the life forces of two spectres in a manner that, to Schmitt, is no
coincidence:
Since the nineteenth century, there have been in Europe two great masses opposed to West
European tradition and education, two great streams crowding their banks: the class
conscious proletariat of the big cities and the Russian masses estranged from Europe. From
the standpoint of traditional West European culture, both are barbarians . . . The fact that
they met on Russian soil, in the Russian Soviet Republic, has a profound justication in the
history of ideas.
43
This analysis links Schmitt to other branches of the Weimar radical-right
intelligentsia. It was a position he kept to in his post-war writings, ostensibly more
alex schulman
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detached analyses of the history of international order(s). In Theory of the Partisan
(1st German ed. 1963) he still looks back to Leninism as a new theory of absolute
war and absolute enmity, and cites Maistres fear of an academic Pugachev, the
dangerous alliance of Western intellect and Russian rebellion that Lenin and
Trotsky lived out.
44
Spengler, too, was not yet a full-edged fascist sympathizer when he referred to
Those young Russians of the days before 1914dirty, pale, exalted, moping in
corners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even
when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry or womens education,
naming them modern equivalents to the Jews and early Christians of the
Hellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement
and secret fear.
45
And Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book was named
Das Dritte Reich (1923) a decade in advance, also made much of the cultural, as
opposed to or in addition to the political and economic, aspects of the Marxist
challenge. This Marx was a Jew, a stranger in Europe who nevertheless dared to
meddle in the affairs of European peoples . . . Marx is only comprehensible
through his Jewish origins. He sought not merely economic upheaval but a
Nietzschean ressentiment-fueled slave-revolt: Against a background of sinister
passion there ame through his words the res of hate, retaliation and revenge. As
the Jew that he was, national feeling was incomprehensible to [Marx] and as the
rationalist that he was, national feeling was for him out of date. Marx ignored
the upper strata of Europe because he did not belong to them and had no clue to the
values that they had created through the centuries and had handed on as a precious
heritage to their children
46
a lamentation on Kulturkampf quite similar to that
made earlier by Nietzsche concerning the perpetual world-historical struggle
Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome, which had most recently replayed
itself as the assault of democrats and socialists against the ner sentiments of the
ancien regime.
47
Moeller also afrms that Bolshevism, instead of being seen as a Westernizing
ideology imposed on recalcitrant Slav peasants, should rather be seen as an
authentic volk-ization of its by-then outmoded Marxist interpretation. It was even
a rebuke to Tsarist Westernization. Whereas Germany had decided in favour of
western parliamentarism, shrinking back from eastern terror-dictatorship at the
post-1918 moment of decision:
The Russian bowed his head in patient acceptance of the severe militarism of a new
autocracy. He had shaken off the bureaucrats and police of the Tsars autocracy which
smacked of St. Petersburg and the West, and which had come to seem foreign and hostile.
But he welcomed the autocracy of socialism; he had asked for it; he accepted it, Bolshevism
is Russian, and could be nothing else.
48
Moeller hopes that Germany, whose above-mentioned decision was simply for
the lesser of two evils (the disintegrating atmosphere of liberalism, which spreads
moral disease amongst nations
49
), could pioneer a third way. Moeller was more
nationalist than either Spengler or Schmitt, yet at the end of his tract he implies
that he equates thinking about Germany with thinking about Europe, and that such
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
155
thinking must begin by drawing a line against Asia. His cultural hopes are
closed to them because they possess an innity of their own, which is not ours,
which turns its face towards Asia, away from the west. The German who
understands this works not only for his nation but also for his civilization: he is
ghting for the cause of Europe, for every European inuence that radiates from
Germany as the centre of Europe . . . The shadow of Africa falls across Europe. It
is our task to be guardians of the threshold of values.
50
German nationalists also thought they had good reason to be angry with the
French, the most enthusiastic imposers of the Versailles settlement and the patron
of the new border states to Germanys south and east. Schmitts comments on
FrancoGerman relations are very interesting when viewed in the above light. In a
footnote Schmitt objects to the practice of calling the payments which armed
France imposes on disarmed Germany not tribute, but reparations. The latter
appears to be more juristic, more legal, more peaceful, less polemical and more
apolitical than tribute. But Schmitt nds that reparation is more highly
charged and therefore also political because this term is used politically to
condemn juristically and even morally the vanquished enemy. The imposed
payments have the effect of disqualifying and subjugating him not only legally but
also morally. He goes on to compare this question of terminology with a similar
one of old, when a German prince enquired as to whether payments made to the
Turkish sultan were pension or tribute.
51
Arguing that even universalistic
religions adhere, in extremis, to his concept of the political, Schmitt observes that
attempts to nd perpetual peace within Christendom were always matched by a
war-like attitude toward those outside it: Never in the thousand-year struggle
between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than
defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks
52
so love thy enemy
could be at once a moral, but not a political, principle. A footnote here quotes
Platos argument that real war only occurred between Hellenes and barbarians.
Schmitts accusation is that the Western victors of 1918 have not only
mistreated Germany, they have also turned Germans into Turks. A similar reading
should be given to his seemingly offhand remark on Pufendorfs placing allegedly
cannibalistic Indians outside the realm of humanity: As civilization progresses
and morality rises, even less harmless things than devouring human esh could
perhaps qualify as deserving to be outlawed in such a manner. Maybe one day it
will be enough if a people were unable to pay its debts.
53
Insolvent Germany is
being treated as if it were an alien civilization; and this at a time when European
unity in the face of potential Bolshevik aggression was necessary. Schmitt predicts
that a mix of high-minded Wilsonianism and actual British or French
vindictiveness post-First World War leads to the worst of all possible worlds,
one where The solemn declaration of outlawing war does not abolish the friend
enemy distinction, but, on the contrary, opens new possibilities by giving an
international hostis declaration new content and new vigour.
54
But even worse,
the hostis declaration is being applied to the wrong party: it is the Soviet Union,
and not Germany, that emerged from 1918 the true international outlaw
Europes Young Turks, as it were.
alex schulman
156
After 1945, under interrogation by the Allies for serving the Nazi regime, Schmitt
claimed that he had not sought to achieve but diagnosed totalitarianism. One can
question the honesty of anything said under such circumstances, but more
interesting is his subsequent thought on what could have led himto such a diagnosis,
even pre-1933: This total dictatorship was actually something new. Hitlers
method was new. There was only one parallel, Lenins Bolshevik dictatorship.
The important point as it relates to Schmitts intellectual complicity in the Nazi
takeover is his views as to what type of German political organization, surrounded
by what sort of European political organization, would best be able to prevail in a
shooting Kulturkampf with Bolshevism. Again, this marks Schmitt as having
concerns broadly similar to Weimars (and then Hitlers) reactionary intelligen-
tsiaalso broadly similar to wide swaths of interwar thinkers and politicians.
Clash of civilizations
A common spiritual enemy can also produce the most remarkable agreements . . .
55
[It is] among Catholics that the image of the Antichrist is still alive.
56
Compare, for example, two contemporaries from each end of the ideological
spectrum confronting Schmitt: Winston Churchill and Leon Trotsky. As late as
1937, in his book Great Contemporaries, the former, while expressing only a
muted, guarded worry about Adolf Hitlerbut also admiration for the courage,
the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy,
conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred his
path
57
was still full-throttle against the Bolsheviks, textually eviscerating the
by-then fugitive Trotsky. The struggle with the latter remained the true
Weltanschauungskrieg: and the hounded Trotsky is found pathetically supplicat-
ing England, France and Germany to admit him to the civilization it has been
and still isthe object of his life to destroy.
58
We are now more apt to think of his
later, similar anti-Nazi polemics, but at this point Churchills fulminations against
Soviet communism show every mark of a man who has discovered his existential
Schmittian enemy. The writings of a Lenin or Trotsky represent:
a drill book prepared in a scientic spirit for destroying all existing institutions . . . the mask
of hatreds never before manifested among men. No faith need be, indeed may be, kept with
non-Communists . . . once the apparatus of power is in the hands of the Brotherhood, all
opposition, all contrary opinions must be extinguished by death . . . The absolute rule of a
self-chosen priesthood according to the dogmas it has learned by rote is to be imposed upon
mankind without mitigation progressively forever.
59
In Bolshevism, Churchill nds No trace of compassion, no sense of human
kinship, no apprehension of the spiritual, a worldview decidedly removed from
the ordinary affections and sentiments of human nature.
60
Spengler too sees no
reciprocal comprehension, no communication, no charity in Russian Bolshe-
vism.
61
These complaints echo Schmitts more dispassionate reckoning with a
democracy that demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
157
keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity.
62
Also
like Schmitt, Churchill paints a picture of a dangerous ideology made even bleaker
by its geographical foreignness: a vast process of Asian liquefaction.
63
These may have been Churchills wilderness years, but the apocalyptic attitude
was shared across broad swaths of the British political spectrum. Edgar Vincent, or
Lord DAubernon, British ambassador to Germany in the early Weimar period
among other government postings, likened the Soviet threat to Britains world
position to a cataclysm equalled only by the fall of the Roman Empire.
64
DAubernon wrote a book about the 1920 Polish defeat of the Red Army called
The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World (1931). In it he compares Marshall
Pilsudskis stopping of the Red Armys advance at Warsaw with, in turn, Charles
Martels defeat of expansionist Islam at Tours, the Greek triumph at Salamis, and
the Christian victory over Ottoman forces at Lepanto.
65
Warsaw1920 was a battle
not less decisive than Sedan and the Marne in its inuence on the culture of the
world, on its science, religion and political development. If anything, its terms
were far more those of a clash of civilizations than the Western Front in the First
World War: The civilizations in conict were radically different, the objectives
and methods of the combatants were violently opposed; it was in no sense an inter-
tribal squabble, but rather a trial of arms between two fundamentally divergent
systems.
66
By implication, it was more the bloodshed on the Marne that signied
an inter-tribal squabble. The description of the battle (whose outcome, unlike
Martels victory at Tours, would soon be reversed) is in a Gibbonian register:
Had Pilsudski and Weygand failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the
battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a disastrous reverse, but the
very existence of Western civilization would have been imperilled. The Battle of Tours
saved our ancestors . . . from the yoke of the Koran; it is probable that the Battle of Warsaw
preserved Central and part of Western Europe from a more subversive dangerthe fanatical
tyranny of the Soviet.
67
But the most recent comparison, albeit one looking back centuries to the very
beginnings of Europes world ascension, would be Lepanto, after which Europe
might well have been overrun by barbarous hordes from Asia Minor and reduced
to the sterile nakedness of all the lands which fell under the devastating rule of the
Ottoman Sultans.
68
The enmities following on the First World War, DAubernon
pleads, risk preventing a similar European unity in the face of a new existential,
annihilatory threat.
Trotsky, for his part, echoes Churchills rhetoric on the other side, an ex-Red
Army commissar pushed to advocating European unity against what he comes to
see as the existential enemy to civilizationin this case, fascism. The Soviet
United States of Europe, he exclaims, that is the only correct slogan which points
the way out of the splintering of Europe, which threatens not only Germany but all
of Europe with complete economic and cultural decline.
69
For Trotsky the
proletarian unication of Europe is now less an iron lawof historical development
than a very important weapon in the struggle against the abomination of fascist
chauvinism, an aspect of the defense of culture before barbarism.
70
Fascism
alex schulman
158
broke the boundaries of materialist analysis: it was a crusade, a stranger, more
fantastic, more discordant one than the peasant crusades of the Middle Ages.
71
Trotskys diagnosis as Weimar collapsed is rather close to Schmitts in outlook:
Isnt the conclusion self-evident that, faced with difculties and tasks too great for it, the
democratic regime is losing control? . . . when vital interests collide, ries and cannons
come to the center of the stage instead of treaty provisions . . . Some may regret this, bitterly
reproach the extremist parties for their inclination toward violence, hope for a better future.
But facts are facts. The wires of democracy cannot take too high a social voltage. Such are,
however, the voltages of our time.
72
What is more, Trotsky criticizes the Stalinist USSR for lacking the political
impetus to join Western Europe in an anti-fascist crusade. Here, too, his criticism
is a cousin to Schmitts on liberalism: in the opportunistic bureaucracy of
Stalins Thermidor, the apparatus has converted political leadership into
administrative command.
73
Both gures were prophetic, in their own waywhile Trotsky did not live to see
an alliance between the USSR and the West defeat Nazism, Churchill did live to
see and shape the contours of the renovated Western Alliance, with a rehabilitated
Germany, that once again made Soviet communism its existential enemy.
The baseline point, however, is that portents of a coming Weltanschauungskrieg
form an unavoidable intellectual context for political thought of the Weimar years,
and the context is not only Germanys internal disorders. Such concerns stayed
with Schmitt, though they were adapted to changing political needs, as his
relationship with the Nazi regime developed.
Take Schmitts The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), an
exegetical work that veers in oddly tangential directions given the subject,
concerning Schmitts historiography of European culture war. The villain is
Jewry; unsurprisingly, perhaps, if Schmitt was in part trying to re-ingratiate
himself with the regime. Still, the content of the prosecution ranges beyond the
familiar material of Nazi propaganda. It develops in Schmitts iconoclastic riff on
Hobbes title beast. The Leviathan monster becomes symbolic of Jewish fearan
image of heathenish vitality and fertility, the great Pan that Jewish hatred and
Jewish feelings of superiority have transformed into a monster
74
to be then
transformed by ressentiment into a cultural-sphere slave revolt. No longer are we
in the realm of cold raison detat analysis: here modernitys political trajectory is
explained via the machinations of secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians,
freemasons, illuminates, mystics and pietists, all kinds of sectarians . . . and,
above all, the restless spirit of the Jew who knew how to exploit the situation best
until the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition was turned
upside down.
75
Representative among the responsible intellectuals, moving past
Hobbes, was Spinoza, the Jewish philosopher who pushed this incipient form
[i.e. the modern contractual state] to the limit of its development until the opposite
was reached and the leviathans vitality was sapped from within and life began to
drain out of him.
76
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
159
That Schmitts newfound anti-Semitism in the Leviathan book takes the form of
an aggressive historiography of culture war marks iteven if the bigotrys content
was wholly opportunisticas a logical development from his earlier, more
apparently realist works. The most available context to a man of Schmitts
background was indeed a famous confessional Kulturkampf, Bismarcks; though
the anti-Jewish purchase of Schmitts experiences stemming from a Catholic,
petty-bourgeois and provincial background in an age of PrussianProtestant-
nationalist ascendancy are not self-evident.
77
Now Schmitt describes the
formation of the national-bureaucratic state in modern Germany as a product of
Jewish cultural inltration:
Since the Congress of Vienna, the rst generation of emancipated younger Jews broke into
the mainstream of European nations . . . penetrated the Prussian state and the Evangelical
church. The Christian baptismal sacrament provided him with not only a ticket of entry into
society, as was the case with the young Heine, but with an identity card that admitted him to
the sanctuary of the still respectable German state. From high governmental positions he was
able to confuse ideologically and paralyze spiritually the core of this commonwealth,
kingship, nobility, and the Evangelical church . . . castrating a leviathan that had been full of
vitality.
78
Later in the book the story of Jewish cultural inltration fades away, and the more
obvious sense of European religious war returns, with contemporary develop-
ments redolent of the struggle that the English nation waged against the papal
churchs and the Jesuits claim to world hegemony . . . the world historical
struggle that Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Roman Catholics waged against each
other.
79
Following on his friendenemy historiography in The Concept of the Political,
Schmitt suggests that contemporary geopolitics remains an echo, conscious or not,
of the friendenemy decisions made by Oliver Cromwell:
Some sober sentences and disconnected phrases of the poor Florentine humanist served to
give the world the moralistic horror picture: Machiavellism For more than a century it
remained an effective summons to battle waged by the Evangelical north against all Catholic
powers, especially against Spain and France. The experiences of the World War
(19141918) waged against Germany have shown that the propagandistic striking force of
this image is also useful against other powers. By gathering moral energies that permit
themselves to be mobilized in the struggle against Machiavellism, the shapers of
Anglo-Saxon world propaganda and American President Wilson were able to stage a modern
crusade of democracy and direct it at Germany.
80
Commentators have long debated the signicance of Roman Catholicism in
Schmitts work. For our purposes here, the sincerity of Schmitts religious beliefs
is not as important as his view of the position of Catholic Church as a player, by
turns aggressive and defensive, in European Kulturkampfone much longer and
wider than the specic Bismarckian battle that gives us the name. Schmitt says at
the beginning of Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) that Cromwells
demonic rage was inherited, via the Enlightenment and Voltaires ecrasez
linfame, by liberal rationalism. Since the 18th century, the argumentation has
alex schulman
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become ever more rationalistic or humanitarian, utilitarian and shallow; still, it is
the lingering fear of the incomprehensible political power of Roman Catholicism
that has driven Western modernity.
81
Schmitt looks to Roman Catholicism as a potential political saviour, he says,
because it stands as an antithesis to the economictechnical thinking dominant
today, the thinking he sees as central to both Marxism and liberalism.
82
This
sounds remarkably similar to later defences of fascist nationalism as a bulwark
against the various tyrannies of both Western liberalism (equated to American-
or Jewish-capitalist dominance) and Eastern Bolshevism (equated to Russian or
Jewish-communist dominance). The difference, of course, is that Schmitt sees in
the Roman church a trans-national entity that could potentially unite Europe, not
only Germany, and thus ght a clash of civilizations more like the medieval ones
in which Europe eventually prevailed. (This European focus may help explain why
Schmitt was, unlike many otherwise like-minded countrymen, unenthusiastic at
the prospect of war in 1914).
83
Catholicism stands as a third option between
liberalism and his other early bogeyman, political romanticism, potentially
overcoming the dichotomy between a rationalisticmechanistic world of human
labor and a romanticvirginal state of nature, both of which are totally foreign to
the Roman Catholic concept of nature. In Catholic eyes:
human labor and organic development, nature and reason, are one . . . Just as the Tridentine
Creed knows little of Protestant rupture of nature and grace, so Roman Catholicism
understands little of the dualisms of nature and spirit, nature and intellect, nature and art,
nature and machine, and their varying pathos.
84
Catholicism may thus be an inoculation against fascism even as it agrees with
portions of the fascist critique of liberalism. Even within Christendom, Schmitt
nds that Catholicism had a good record of ghting on the reasonable side of
cultural conict, going back to the Middle Ages when it suppressed superstition
and sorcery and magnicently succeeded in overcoming Dionysian cults,
ecstasies, and the dangers of submerging reason in meditation.
85
One thinks of
Thomas Manns novelistic likening of Germanys Nazi period to possession by an
evil sorcerer. It is as an intervention in Webers political typology that Schmitt
praises the Pope as one who precludes all the fanatical excesses of an unbridled
prophetism, a gure independent of charisma and not the functionary and
commissar of republican thinking.
86
Recall Schmitts gloss on the cultural
conict that drove the early development of Marxism above: it now makes perfect
sense that he ends the book by praising the Catholic Churchs position in
that remote skirmish with Bakunin, where the Catholic concept of humanity
stood on the side of the Idea and West European civilization, closer to Mazzini
than to the atheistic socialism of the Russian anarchist.
87
So Schmitts vision of Catholicism points a way not only to victory in
Kulturkampf, but also to the potential repudiation of Kulturkampf as a mode of
political relationship. If Schmitt values the papal imperial order of the Middle
Ages, this is partially because he sees in it a civilization that could manage internal
conict without descending into Civil War. Indeed, as Schmitt suggests in
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
161
The Nomos of the Earth (1950), European civilization since the decline of the
Middle Ages has in some sense enacted a never-ending Civil War, one that has
simply shufed its actors on and off the stage (Cromwell vs. Spain, the
philosophes vs. the old regime, liberalism vs. nationalism and/or Bolshevism)
without ever reaching denouement or peace. There were wars among Christian
princes throughout the Middle Ages of course, but they were bracketed wars,
conicts that were distinguished from wars against non-Christian princes and
peoples and that thus did not negate the unity of the respublica Christiana.
Schmitt makes much of the Holy Roman Emperors status as katechon
restrainerthe decisive historical concept of medieval order and continuity.
Restraint being thus presupposed, the papal imperial power struggle differed
essentially from the later problem of the relation between church and state, a type
of conict more clearly reected in the vituperations of a Cromwell, Voltaire or
Lenin:
The medieval struggle between emperor and pope was not a struggle between two societates,
whether one understands societas in terms of a society or a community; it was not a conict
. . . similar to a Bismarckian Kulturkampf or to a French laicization of the state; nally, it
was not a civil war similar to the one between white and red, in the sense of a socialist class
struggle . . . Neither for an emperor, who had a pope installed and removed in Rome, nor for
a Pope in Rome, who released the vassals of an emperor or a king from their oath of
allegiance, was the unity of the respublica Christiana ever brought into question.
88
Surveying a wrecked Europe, Schmitt has little hope that its place in the new world
order will be anything other than spectator-cum-canvas to the triumphant
periphery, the two victorious superpowers, both recognizably European but also
recognizably other. As Schmitt writes, the axis of power that had created the
concept of war in European international law became unhinged, as power in the
East and in the West came to dominate European states no longer certain of
themselves.
89
As Bolshevism was now vindicated by victory rather than mired in
revolutionary chaos, 1945 was even more a repudiation of Europes place in the
world than the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Whereas European conferences in
preceding centuries had determined the spatial order of the earth, at the Paris Peace
Conference, for the rst time, the reverse was the case: the world determined the
spatial order of Europe. But (and note the hyphenation) then The European
Asiatic Great Power, the Soviet Union, was absent.
90
Not so in 1945: the Red Army had not only reversed the 1920 victories of
Viscount DAubernons heroic Poles, but they had also reversed the eastward
Wanderlust of Teutonic peoples, the rejuvenation of which Hitler described as
his bedrock foreign policy goal as early as Mein Kampf. As the Cold War settled
into a global standoff with Germans on either side, Schmitts thoughts about what
had happened to bring Europe to such a pass became obfuscatory, undermining his
above-quoted self-conception as observer but not enthusiast. His Theory of the
Partisan, a typically erudite and wide-ranging examination of conceptions of
guerrilla warfare since the resistances occasioned by Napoleonic occupation, is
especially remarkable for what it does not say. (Here I return to the abrupt silence
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adduced in the epigraph.) Partisan warfare, theoretically mobilizing the whole
population against a total enemy, takes humanity into the realm of another, real
enmity, which intensies through terror and counter-terror until it ends in
extermination.
91
He still gives Russia a central role, referencing Tolstoys
mythmaking about 1812 and comparing it with Stalins linking of communist
fervour to nationalism during the Second World War; and he says it was Lenin
who transformed the revolutionary partisan into a signicant feature of national
and international civil war.
92
Strikingly, Schmitt claims that Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with
no concept of partisan warfare.
93
In fact not only the SS police and extermination
units in conquered territory, but also the Wehrmacht at the front, had orders to
shoot all Soviet political commissars immediately as irreconcilable enemies.
Elements of this infamous commissar order agreed almost verbatim with
Schmitts previous estimation of Bolshevism. Among its rationalizations was that
In the battle against Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles of
humanity or international law is not to be counted on. And the originators of
barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. Even a general
later implicated in the 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler told his troops that the war
against Russia was the old battle of Germanic against Slavic peoples . . . the
defence of European culture against MoscoviteAsiatic inundation, and the
repelling of Jewish Bolshevism.
94
After the war Schmitt praised the limited
warfare of the post-Congress of Vienna era as against the brutality of religious
and factional wars, which by nature are wars of annihilation wherein the enemy is
treated as a criminal and a pirate, comparing the latter with colonial wars . . .
pursued against wild peoples.
95
But Schmitt only views the apocalyptic nature
of Nazi policy in Operation Barbarossa through a dark mirror: the 19441945
Volkssturm, he reports in the lectures only reference to the totalization of warfare
in the east, were treated as soldiers and taken as POWs by the Western powers,
but simply shot by the Red Army.
96
One need not ignore the now well-established terroristic and genocidal record of
Leninism to see here a rather callous exercise in blaming the victim. Whatever his
knowledge of the actual documentary record, it is highly implausible that Schmitt
was unaware of the type of warfare the Nazis had brought to the east. The goal was
to establish Germany as an empire of agriculture colonies in the breadbasket of the
Western Soviet Union, murdering, enslaving or expelling (to beyond the Urals) the
existing populationHitler made frequent comparisons to the European conquest
of North America.
97
After the war Schmitt described European international
law as based on the great land-appropriations of the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries
and now coming to an end; it had been preceded by the so-called
Volkerwanderung, which was not so much a migration of peoples as a series of
great land-appropriations. Such land-appropriations could either proceed within
a given order of international law or uproot an existing spatial order and establish
a new nomos of the whole spatial sphere of neighbouring peoples.
98
This was written less than a decade after an actual instantiation of a war of
extermination (described by its architects in the language of Volkerwanderung);
carl schmitt and the clash of civilizations
163
what is more, it was the kind of total ideological war Schmitts imagination had
attributed to a future of Wilsonianism and/or Leninism. Recent scholarship has
enabled us to see a fuller picture than the one previously dominated by a focus on
the Jewish Holocaust. If the German war against the USSR had gone as planned,
a historian writes, thirty million civilians would have been starved in its rst
winter, and tens of millions more expelled, killed, assimilated, or expelled
thereafter. As many non-Jews as Jews were killed in the East (and about 80% of
Jews killed in the Holocaust were from Poland or the ex-Soviet Union), largely
through starving Soviet POWs and civilians and shooting Polish civilians.
99
One
hundred times as many Poles died in the Warsaw uprising as did French in the
concurrent liberation of Paris, a snapshot of the bigger picture where losses on the
eastern front were nearly nine times those in the west. Total casualty estimates
differ, especially due to decades of Soviet secrecy and shifting propaganda needs,
but a recent consensus is something like 27 million total dead, up to 14 million of
whom were civilians.
100
Schmitts insightful and disturbing writings on the
domestic and international political will endure, but here it is his silence that
speaks volumes.
Notes and References
1. R. Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 1998), p. 11.
2. C. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L.
Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007), pp. 3839.
3. For example, G. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
4. P. Piccone and G. Ulmen, Introduction to Carl Schmitt, TELOS, 72 (1987), pp. 3, 5.
5. L. S. Bishai and A. Behnke, War, violence and the displacement of the political, in L. Odysseos and
F. Petito (Eds) The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of
Global Order, Chapter 6 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 107.
6. C. Mouffe, Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy, in D. Dyzenhaus (Ed.) Law as Politics:
Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 15960.
7. Piccone and Ulmen, op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 6.
8. P. Hirst, Carl Schmitts Decisionism, TELOS, 72 (1987), p. 16.
9. See in particular G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso,
2000) and E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004).
10. Scholarly references to the place of Bolshevism in Schmitts theories are not uncommon, but they are
generally scattered and unsystematized. A proper estimation of the importance of Marxism and
Leninism/Bolshevism in Schmitts theory is suggested by John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of
Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 190192, and in John P. McCormick, The dilemmas of dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and
constitutional emergency powers, in Dyzenhaus, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 21, 227228, 230, in the latter of
which McCormick concludes, The strategy of formulating a neo-absolutist presidency that can fortify
Germany in withstanding the Soviet threat becomes central to his Weimar work. P. Gottfrieds Carl
Schmitt: Politics and Theory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 8990; D. Kellys The State of the
Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz
Neumann (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 212216; and Kennedy, op. cit.,
Ref. 9, also reference, albeit briey, a concern with Leninism. Balakrishnans intellectual biography (see
especially Balakrishnan, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 18, 20, 61) is also good here.
11. Cited from R. J. Evans, In Hitlers Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the
Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). For debate on the controversial interpretation, made most
alex schulman
164
famously by right-leaning German historians, that Nazi atrocities can be explained as reactions to earlier,
and parallel Soviet ones see the essays in P. Baldwin (Ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and
the Historians Debate (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990); J. Knowlton and T. Cates (Ed. and Trans.),
Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning
the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993); and F. Furet and
E. Nolte, Fascism and Communism, trans. Katherine Golsan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
2001).
12. L. Odysseos, Crossing the line? Carl Schmitt on the spaceless universalism of cosmopolitanism and the
War on Terror, Chapter 7 in Odysseos and Petito (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 129.
13. S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996), p. 304. John P. McCormick, again, has tantalized us with this sort of an interpretation but
not really eshed it out. In his introduction to the journal Telos reproduction of Schmitts 1929 lecture
The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations [Carl Schmitt, The age of neutralizations and
depoliticizations, TELOS, 96 (1993), pp. 130142], McCormick refers to Samuel Huntingtons then-
current The clash of civilizations? essay in the rst paragraph saying that Already in 1929 Carl Schmitt
outlined a similar analysis of the clash of cultures (p. 119), and surmises, Schmitts lecture might even be
an indirect source of Huntingtons thesis, since there may be a clear line from Schmitt, via Hans
Morgenthau (p. 120) to Huntington.
14. C. Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, Jeffrey Seitzer (Ed. and. Trans.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), p. 48.
15. Mouffe, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 163.
16. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin
Press, 2004), p. 34.
17. For an attack on the historiography of Schmitt as readable within the Weimar radical right, see J. Bendersky,
Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolution and Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg, TELOS, 72 (1987),
pp. 2742, 97107. For older examples of this association, few of which talk about Schmitt in too much
detail, see G. L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), pp. 280293; W. Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 19181933 (New York:
Putnam, 1974), pp. 78109; or K. D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and
Consequences of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg (Harmondsworth: Penguin University Books,
1973), pp. 185, 317. More recent cogent defences of the association between Schmitt and the likes of
Spengler, Junger, Moeller van den Bruck and others include J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology,
Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984) and R. Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 103122.
18. C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1988), pp. 23.
19. Ibid., p. 4.
20. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (Ed. and Trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946), pp. 77128. For the inuence of Webers Vocation lectures on Schmitt see
Balakrishnan, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 21. More generally see the relevant sections of Kelly, op. cit., Ref. 10, and
A. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
21. Gerth and Mills, op. cit., Ref. 20, pp. 80, 8384.
22. Ibid., p. 86.
23. Ibid., pp. 91, 115, 119, 122, 125.
24. M. Weber, in P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Eds), Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 514.
25. D. C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), Chapters 3 and 5;
quotes on pp. 64, 83.
26. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 30.
27. Ibid., pp. 6, 8.
28. Ibid., p. 16.
29. Ibid., pp. 52, 6364.
30. Ibid., pp. 12, 70.
31. Ibid., p. 15.
32. Ibid., p. 9. His example here, probably not chosen randomly, is Turkeys ethnic cleansing of its Greek
population.
33. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 130131.
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34. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 18, pp. 6566, 74.
35. Ibid., pp. 71, 75.
36. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1996), pp. 2627.
37. Ibid., p. 48. Mark Lilla seems to me correct in saying that Schmitt does not arrive at this view inductively
by surveying the bloody record of political history. He is making an anthropological assumption about
human nature that is meant to reveal the true lessons of history. M. Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals
in Politics (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001), p. 58.
38. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 36, p. 27.
39. Ibid., p. 40n.
40. Ibid., p. 63.
41. Ibid., pp. 6768.
42. C. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G.L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1996), p. 36.
43. Ibid., pp. 3738.
44. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 4959.
45. O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. C. F. Atkinson (NewYork: Knopf, 1928), Vol. 2, p. 193.
46. A. Moeller van den Bruck, Germanys Third Empire, trans. E.O. Lorimer (London: G. Allen and Unwin,
1934), pp. 4344.
47. See F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, W. Kaufmann (Ed. and Trans.) (New York:
Random House, 1967), First Essay, Section 16.
48. Moeller van den Bruck, op. cit., Ref. 46, pp. 29, 72.
49. Ibid., p. 76.
50. Ibid., pp. 263264.
51. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 36, p. 31.
52. Ibid., p. 29.
53. Ibid., pp. 5455n. For the cannibalism accusation as a dividing line between warring European empires and
indigenous people see also C. Schmitt, Land and Sea, trans. Simona Draghici (Washington, DC: Plutarch
Press, 1997), p. 40: One kind of abuse was missing, though, the one which they would hurl at the Indians.
Among themselves, the Christian Europeans did not accuse each other of cannibalism.
54. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 36, p. 51.
55. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 75.
56. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 42, p. 15.
57. W. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (New York: Putnam, 1937), p. 228.
58. Ibid., p. 167.
59. Ibid., p. 169.
60. Ibid., p. 170.
61. Spengler, op. cit., Ref. 45, Vol. 2, p. 193.
62. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 9.
63. Churchill, op. cit., Ref. 57, p. 173. Schmitt at one point says of the Bolsheviks, this is . . . the old Jacobin
argument (Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 29), but the Asiatic aspect of their revolution is emphasized in
Schmitt too, albeit with a bit more sympathetic interest than is the case with Churchill.
64. Quoted in P. Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 17811997 (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf,
2008), p. 333.
65. E. Vincent [Lord DAubernon], The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World: Warsaw, 1920 (Westport, CT:
Gibson Press, 1977), pp. 811.
66. Ibid., pp. 78.
67. Ibid., p. 9.
68. Ibid., p. 1.
69. L. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathnder Press, 1971), p. 71.
Emphasis added.
70. Ibid., pp. 72, 264.
71. Ibid., pp. 59, 265266.
72. Ibid., pp. 267268.
73. Ibid., pp. 274275.
74. C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: The Meaning and Failure of a Political
Symbol, trans. G. Schwab and E. Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 89.
75. Ibid., p. 60.
76. Ibid., p. 57.
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77. Cited from Balakrishnan, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 1112, 5.
78. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 74, pp. 6970.
79. Ibid., pp. 8384.
80. Ibid., pp. 84.
81. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 42, p. 3.
82. Ibid., p. 8.
83. Balakrishnan, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 16.
84. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. 1011.
85. Ibid., p. 14.
86. Ibid., p. 14.
87. Ibid., p. 39.
88. C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L.
Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), pp. 5962.
89. Ibid., p. 280.
90. Ibid., pp. 240241.
91. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 11.
92. Ibid., pp. 12, 49.
93. Ibid., p. 33.
94. See C. Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Knopf, 2007),
pp. 2526; M. Mazower, Hitlers Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008),
pp. 142ff.; see more generally O. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 194145: German Troops and the
Barbarization of Warfare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
95. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 88, p. 142.
96. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 3839.
97. T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), Chapter 5;
A. Schulman, Testing ideology against neorealism in Hitlers drive to the East, Comparative Strategy,
25 (JanuaryMarch 2006), pp. 3354.
98. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 88, pp. 8082.
99. Snyder, op. cit., Ref. 97, pp. ixx.
100. Mazower, op. cit., Ref. 94, p. 3; N. Davies, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 19391945
(New York: Viking, 2007), pp. 364368.
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