Carl Schmitt: An Authoritarian Thinker for the 21st Century
Pedro Magalhães (U. Minho)
Assistant Professor at the School of Economics and Management of University of Minho. Author of The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy, published by Routledge. He has published different scientific articles in various international journals, such as the Journal of the History of Ideas, Historical Social Research and the Journal of Political Ideologies.
Around the turn of the century, a German jurist named Carl Schmitt became quite fashionable in European and American left-wing circles. Perhaps as a reaction to Francis Fukuyama’s (1989: 4) prophecies on the end of history and ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy,’ thinkers on the left turned to the writings of one of the fiercest critics of liberalism in interwar Europe to gain a critical perspective on current affairs in domestic and international politics. They were, I believe, well aware that they were flirting with a dangerous mind. Indeed, Schmitt was not merely a conservative enemy of liberalism, but one who embraced the totalitarian racism of Hitler without second thoughts or regrets. Still, in the post-Cold War context of triumphant (neo)liberalism, the promise of drawing on Schmitt to open up new avenues for a critical theory seemed to offset the risk of being entangled in the onerous legacy of Central European totalitarianism.
What left-wing thinkers were looking for in the writings of Carl Schmitt varied from case to case. Agamben (2005) used Schmitt to think through the antinomies of the rule of law; Mouffe (2000) drew on him for an agonistic renewal of contemporary democracies; Kalyvas (2008) read him as a theorist of extraordinary politics and popular foundings — and these are arguably just the most prominent names in a long list of Schmitt reinterpretations by theorists on the radical left. A few of these encounters with the notorious “crown jurist of the Third Reich” — as Waldemar Gurian, a former student and disciple, named Schmitt after breaking with him in 1934 — managed to refine Schmittian ideas and intuitions, making use of their potential to challenge liberal complacencies without either succumbing to or glossing over their authoritarian implications. Most of them failed in way or the other. In retrospect, however, this whole trend of left Schmittianism appears exhausted and outdated. Now, after more than one decade of democratic backsliding and rising authoritarian populism all over the globe, Schmitt’s relevance must be fundamentally reexamined.
The 2010s, to be sure, have not made Schmitt any less topical. However, to paraphrase the ancient saying, it would be imprudent to read him nowadays as the enemy of our enemy, whose ideas, if carefully parsed and domesticated, could turn into our own critical categories. The engagement with Schmitt on the left rested implicitly on the premise that the political context of the new century would be very different from the specific interwar context where Schmitt developed his main ideas. As the parallels between the present political situation and the interwar past become ever more striking, it is high time to read Schmitt again as an enemy. More precisely, one should reread him as an astute and articulate enemy of pluralist democracy.
In my recent book, I analyze Schmitt’s political thought as a neo-authoritarian and populist reinterpretation of modern democracy (Magalhães, 2020: chap. 2). It is my contention, there and elsewhere (Magalhães, 2022), that Schmitt’s interwar writings work out a desacralized variety of political absolutism that disentangles democracy from liberal values and merges it with the most extreme forms of modern authoritarian rule. Two books in Schmitt’s œuvre, Dictatorship (1921) and Constitutional Theory (1928), are particularly instructive in that regard. In these works, the German jurist argues that to acknowledge the immanent, this-worldly foundations of political authority in the modern age does not imply a surrender of the state to liberal principles. Quite on the contrary, reference to “the people” as the source of legitimacy allows for a maximally authoritarian interpretation of government, one in which the leader’s claim to personally represent the will of the people operates a full closure of democratic identity, eradicating dissent, indeterminacy and diversity. The authoritarian leader achieves this closure, according to Schmitt, by drawing on the “substances” of nation, race, ethnicity, class or religious confession, upon which, depending on the historical circumstances, the homogeneity of democracy would rest.
In the interwar years, Carl Schmitt brought European authoritarian thinking to the twentieth century, discarding the obsolete ideas of monarchic traditionalism and legitimism without hesitation. Well into the twenty-first century, the relevance of his theoretical endeavor persists insofar as authoritarian or “illiberal” readings of modern democracy continue to loom large. Reading Schmitt with a critical eye today, in sum, allows us to grasp the fundamental conceptual tools of far-right populism. And in doing so, it might help us elaborate a more robust defense of anti-authoritarian, pluralist democracy.
References
Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fukuyama, F. (1989). ‘The End of History?,’ The National Interest, Vol. 16, pp. 3–18.
Kalyvas, A. (2008). Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Magalhães, P. T. (2020). The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy: A Study on the Political Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, New York: Routledge.
Magalhães, P. T. (2022). ‘Promise and Failure: Nationalism in the Interwar Thought of Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 27, pp. 11–30
Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso.
