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38 | Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Carl Schmitt and the Present (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-16 10:00:05
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2026-06
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Content

In this episode, we discuss the infamous Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, with particular focus on his 1923 book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. We attempt to better understand the right-wing, Schmittian case against both liberal ‘parliamentarianism’ and ‘Marxist socialism’, while trying to discern his positive political vision. Doing so requires assessing his paradoxical claim that democracy and dictatorship are perfectly compatible, and his judgment that dictatorship is good, actually. We end by asking what the hell a ‘Left Schmittian’ is, asking what if anything he has to offer for leftist theory and practice today.

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References:

Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000)

Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Publishing, 2003)

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

Paul Bowman

Good stuff. Personally I was very disturbed that agreed with the Nazi a lot more than I thought I would. I think the critique of liberalism as trying to make political conflict disappear by a circular trick of ruling minority dissent out of hand and proclaiming the general interest, is bang on. But then the same applies to Schmitt's dictator and his link to the magically unified interest of the Volk . I do think the left has a bad habit of confounding ideology and politics, and that the dynamics of the latter necessarily appears in the form of the friend/enemy distinction. (But also that presents a black hole for politics to fall into, extreme factionalism, etc). Main oppositions: Schmitt mystifies and eternalises the class struggle (and to answer Gill's query, much of human history predates class society, so its ahistorical to say that class war is eternal). He mystifies by covering over the distinction between conflicts of class interest vs superstructural or contigent ideological conflicts (implicitly rejecting the basic two-level Marxist ontology of surface and depth - Schmitt is "positivist" in the sense of saying its all surface and there's no distinction between infrastructural and superstructural conflicts of interest).

Paul Bowman

Oh, last thing. Agree that the utopian strategy of advocating ending the class war in a purely "justice" frame, fails to fully break with the liberalism we're trying to overcome. That the pragmatic aspect of species-survival (i.e. ending the environmental catastrophe of endless growth through ever-increasing technical composition of capital = more & more stuff n energy use) is a necessary corrective. We're not advocating massive social upheaval just because we think it'd be "nice to have", but because we kinda have to do it or perish. Finally (god, I sound like one of those speakers from the floor in a Q&A who keeps coming up with one more final point, aargh!), I think there is a normative aspect to Schmitt's eternalisation of political conflict-generated "intensity", which I think is a kind of Nietzschean virtue ethics - "the more intense the fight, the greater the human virtue"