The Cosmopolitan Machine
Use of the term ‘establishment’ to refer to a political bloc or grouping was recently brought back into vogue by populist movements in North America and Europe. It designates the alignment of disparate constituencies such that they act in the manner of a unified whole. These constituencies (mainstream media outlets, the corporate sector, celebrities, etc.) do appear to be bound together, in recent years, by a set of common concerns or common commitments. Two of these include ‘cosmopolitanism’ (especially freedom of movement and migration) and technologization. For instance, those who oppose restrictions on migration also tend to be those who support free trade because they believe technological advancements have made massive unemployment inevitable. It is common to see these two particular commitments going hand-in-hand.
Schmitt made observations in the late 1930’s that read as massively prescient today. These observations are found in his treatise Leviathan in der Staatslebre des Thomas Hobbes (The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes) (1938), in which the theories of Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan (1651) are criticised. Schmitt pays particular attention to Hobbes’ use of the symbol of the leviathan, the great fish from the Book of Job, and his transformation of that symbol into the figure of the sovereign or ‘mortal god’ depicted as a great man with many people inside.
Hobbes’ great innovation, as Schmitt saw it, was to view his leviathan — the state — as a machine. The third chapter of Schmitt’s book begins with a discussion of the concept of machine or ‘mechanism’ as it appears in Hobbes, and the need to distinguish Hobbes’ concept from that of thinkers after the industrial revolution. Hobbes’ idea of mechanism is more akin to the way the physical sciences of seventeenth century viewed the operations of the universe — more like those of a clock than those of an engine or computer. In the midst of this focus on ‘mechanisms,’ Schmitt inserts a passing discussion of debates over cosmopolitanism and technology in his own time. It is a passage worthy of commentary, and appears as follows:
That contemporary cosmopolitans comprehend the state to be a technical apparatus can be understood by apprehending the fact that the “milieu” of the metropolis activates their fantasies about the technical and extrapolating the conception of the state from their visionary conception. With the incredible development of the technical means of disseminating communication, information, and weaponry, the power of the state’s command mechanism grew in a manner that was astonishing. One can thus believe that the power of a modern state in comparison with that of ancient communities is proportionately much greater and more intensive, as, for example, is the range and piercing power of modem artillery in comparison with the effectiveness of a crossbow or a siege machine, or the speed of today’s means of transportation in comparison with horses and sailboats. The exact functioning and the inner precision of modern technology appear to be independent qualities-independent of all religious, metaphysical, juristic, or political considerations or aims. This is obvious to everyone. How futile and fuzzy are theological, juristic, or similar arguments. How “clean” and “exact” is the machine in comparison! Consequently, the value of the state is said to reside in the fact that it is a well functioning, big machine, the machina machinarum. Western liberal democrats agree with Bolshevist Marxists that the state is an apparatus that the most varied political constellations can use as a technically neutral instrument. By extension, therefore, the machine, as all of technology, is independent of every political goal and conviction and assumes a value-and-truth neutrality of a technical instrument. It is in this vein that the neutralization process has taken place since the seventeenth century, a logical process that culminates in a general technologization.
It is a very interesting line of reasoning! Schmitt is arguing that Hobbes was part of a generation that was able to conceptualize the ‘mechanism’ as a metaphysical concept, and following from that metaphysical conception came the concrete and steel, the machines and technologies of modern industrial society.
The important distinction in this passage though is between the state as a “technically neutral instrument” (how liberals and Marxists view the state), and a conception of the state that might have “religious, metaphysical, juristic, or political considerations or aims.” The liberal state can be viewed as an object or assembly of objects that function, ultimately, at the service of individuals. The ‘Bolshevist Marxist’ conception of the state-as-instrument is best expressed by a chapter title in Vladimir Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917), as “an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class.” In short, the state itself has no values, and is an inanimate object (a highly useful inanimate object) to be put at the disposal of individuals or groups with varied aims and interests.
This central question, that of whether or not the state itself should have values or whether it should be an value-free mechanism is not anachronistic today. To cite just a couple of examples, a candidate for the Conservative party in Canada was criticized for a proposal that immigrants to Canada take a “values test,” and the criticism of a remark by Trump administration advisor Steven Bannon that a country was “more than an economy” and rather a “civic society” — which was taken to indicate a suspicion of immigrants, even when they are economically successful. What is unstated in these criticisms (what can be described as the so-called ‘establishment’ position) is what Schmitt described as a link between cosmopolitanism and the value-free state as a mechanism.
