Living in Carl Schmitt’s World
If we’re not careful, we could end up vindicating the prophet of friend vs. enemy politics
If you study the history of political philosophy carefully, you eventually notice a strange slipperiness about whether certain thinkers are sketching the way the world is or drawing a picture of how the thinker would like it to be.
Is the philosopher giving us a description—or an aspiration?
Consider the example of “realism” in international relations. Realism’s champions claim it is a theory about how the world is: States behave rationally in pursuit of their interests. Yet even a cursory study of history shows us that many states have behaved in ways that are contrary to their interests—or rather, that those in charge (from autocrats to democratic publics) sometimes operate from a deeply irrational understanding of their own interests and/or how best to pursue them. So is the theory a description of how the world is? Or is it a normative account of how the world should be?
This slipperiness has been much on my mind lately, because of the figure of Carl Schmitt, the brilliant legal theorist who became a devoted Nazi eager to lend his talents to Adolf Hitler’s political project. Schmitt is known as one of history’s most incisive critics of liberalism, claiming it denies the distinction that lies at the foundation of all politics—the distinction between friends and enemies—in favor of a vision of watery universal peace secured by interminable meetings in which hard differences are denied in favor of endless, indecisive discussion.
But as Leo Strauss pointed out in a justly famous review of The Concept of the Political, the book in which Schmitt developed this indictment of liberalism, Schmitt oscillates between treating the friend-enemy distinction as an undeniable fact about politics that liberalism denies at its peril and viewing it as a normative ideal he aimed to defend in the face of a liberal threat to stamp it out (with supposedly dire consequences for the world).
The reason I’ve been pondering Strauss’ critique of Schmitt isn’t just that I recently completed a chapter for my forthcoming book that deals with it. It’s far more because, watching the news, especially through the lens of social media (which is how most people now learn about current events), shows us a spectacle of a world breaking apart into warring factions of friends and enemies. And this leaves me wondering: Does this development vindicate Schmitt’s claim that the friend-enemy distinction is foundational for politics? Or does it demonstrate, instead, that increasing numbers of people around the world are embracing a normative ideal of tribal solidarity and enmity?
At the risk of sounding like I’m a wishy-washy centrist in all things, I think the honest answer to these questions is both/and. That might be analytically unsatisfying, but at least it leaves some space for hope in the face of the powerful centrifugal forces working to tribalize us.
