Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 - 7 April 1985) was a German political theorist, theologist and member of the German Nazi Party.

Carl Schmitt during his school years (1904)

Publications

The Dictatorship

In this essay, he wrote about the ideas of the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was how Germany was often called between World War I and World War II. He liked the fact that there was a president because he thought that it was useful, while he thought that many other parts of the constitution were not useful. He believed the position of president was useful because the constitution let him break the rules and laws in case of emergency. This situation was called the state of exception.

Schmitt believed that having a powerful president that could decide to rule as he wanted in emergencies was better than having to go through the trouble of getting the legislature to agree on how to do things at a time when there is a need to decide things quickly. Schmitt admitted that he was praising what most people would call a dictator, but he explained that dictators are not always bad. He explained that since the law of most places allows somebody to break the law in some special situations, then most places involve dictatorship in one way or another, and so dictatorship is not as bad and unusual as people say. He wrote more about this idea: he put into words that there is a difference between a person using violence because the government allowed that person to do so, and a group of people using violence for political purposes without permission from the law because they are angry with something in society.

Schmitt also saw a difference between breaking the law in order to defend that law, and breaking the law in order to create a new or better law. This is how he explained why Hitler had so much power: Hitler used the power of the state of exception to break the law, and created new laws to replace the ones he broke, and these new laws gave him more power. Whenever the state of exception was going to end, Hitler declared it again, and so his power never ended.

Political Theology

Schmitt wrote more about the idea of the state of exception. In this essay, he wrote how he believed that the person or group of people that really hold sovereignty (the power to rule how they want) in a country is who has the ability to declare the state of exception and break the law with permission of the system. This would be something that would only happen when there was a big emergency and the normal process of law would not be convenient, but Schmitt was responding to other writers of his time, that believed that the person with power was the person that the law said had power, in all cases, without exceptions.

The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

Schmitt later wrote a paper called The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy in which he wrote how he disagreed with liberalism and democracy. He believed that liberalism and democracy were mistaken, because these ideas imagine that politicians decide how to do things with logic and trying to solve issues, while Schmitt thought that in reality the results of politics are decided by a few powerful people that want to help their own interests first, and then tell others what to do without always listening to logic or fairness.

He thought that liberalism is wrong in other ways. First, he thought that unlike what liberalism says, in real governments power is not separated as clearly as liberalism wants. Second, he believed that democracy was an incorrect idea: democracy says that the opinion of everyone counts equally in deciding how to manage a country, but Schmitt says that in reality there has to be some people with more power telling other people with less power what to do.

The Concept of the Political

In this book, Schmitt writes about what it means for something to be "political". He believed that when we say something is political, it means that that thing makes us think of who is our friend and who is our enemy. Importantly, Schmitt said that it cannot be the friend or the enemy of one person in particular; it has to be the friend or enemy of many people. This is because if every person was allowed to decide who is a friend and who is an enemy, then every person would believe that they had the right to be violent against who they thought to be their enemy, and this would be bad for society as everyone would soon come up with a reason to be violent.

Schmitt came up with this idea of friend and enemy, which he calls the friend-enemy distinction, because he saw how in other situations we also divide things into two opposites: when we talk about money, we think of things that make money and things that lose money; when we think about beauty, we think about things that look good and things that look bad; when we think about religion, we think about things that God likes and things that God doesn't like; and so on. However, unlike those other situations, he thought that the things that are political are more important, because of what makes the enemy an enemy and what makes a friend a friend: an enemy is somebody that would kill you or end your way of life if he or she got angry enough at you, while a friend is somebody that will protect you and help you fight back. Since we care more about our life and friends than we care about other things, then the things that are political are more important.

Other things that Schmitt says are that being a friend or an enemy has nothing to do with other opinions we have of them, like being beautiful or ugly, honest or liars, etc; a person can be beautiful and honest but still be an enemy, or a person can be ugly and bad, but be our friend. These things don't make someone a friend or an enemy by themselves, but we almost always associate these descriptions with friends and enemies. The enemy, as well, can be someone that is part of your same country, or someone that belongs to another country. He also thought that there were times when we get along more with the enemy and times when we get along less; fighting and killing your enemy only happens in very extreme cases. The more a thing makes us realize we don't get along with our enemies, the more political it is. However, Schmitt thought that all ideas are political in some way, and that political leaders use these ideas to inspire their followers and create a sense of identity. Schmitt thought, though, that we should determine who our enemies not so much in terms of our moral positions, but instead based on the enemy's ability to hurt to the country.

Schmitt argues that the reason why the Nazis were so violent and had so much control over the lives of the Germans was because they convinced everyone that they were being attacked by many enemies, like Jewish people and communists, and that these enemies were extremely dangerous, and that the Nazi party was, in turn, the friend of the Germans.

Political Romanticism

In this book, Schmitt writes about how he thinks how some people, called romantic conservatives, that want to go back to having kings and nobles are silly, because the world has changed too much since those times for those ideas to be good again. Instead of a king, we should have a dictator, thought Schmitt. Some writers have criticized this book because they say that Schmitt doesn't care about what people want, and instead thinks of people as stupid and impulsive, who do not really know what they want or what is best for them, and so need someone to rule them to show them what is good and what is bad, and more importantly, someone that will tell them who is good and who is bad.

The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes

In this book, Schmitt gives his thoughts on the famous idea of the Leviathan, created by Thomas Hobbes.

Thomas Hobbes thought that people were born evil, and that without a government they would behave like monsters. To represent this evil, he mentioned Leviathan, a monster from judeo-christian mythology, which these people usually drew as a gigantic evil sea snake, or sometimes as a gigantic evil fish. Hobbes, however, thought that if Leviathan was a real creature, it would be a gigantic and evil person, because in his view, real people can be as powerful and evil as imaginary monsters. Also, only a very powerful person, like the gigantic man, could stop the evil that people want to do to others when there is no government. Schmitt found this very interesting, and points out how it is contradictory how for many people around the world, sea snakes are good creatures, while for Abrahamic peoples, like the ones that created the myth of Leviathan, this animal is evil.

Schmitt disagrees with Hobbes because Hobbes thought that the government is something created by a powerful person to bring order to society, and once created, it continues to bring order, and that what makes a government special is the people that control it; Schmitt believed that this was wrong, because a government is more important and even more special than the people that control it. Schmitt comments how it is a modern (and bad) thing to see the government as just the result of the people controlling it, and that this view leads people to think that the government is only about making boring decisions instead of about representing the people, using power and protecting the nation.

Schmitt also disagrees with Hobbes when it comes to his opinion on miracles. When Hobbes was alive, people thought that kings were blessed and that the kings could do miracles (meaning, use magic granted to them by God). Hobbes thought that if a person didn't believe in these miracles, that was all good, but he or she should keep this opinion private, and that his or her public opinion should be whatever the government believed to be true about the king's miracles, or else it would bring chaos because they would openly question the power of the king. Schmitt does not agree with this. Firstly, because having a personal opinion is something a liberal would do, and Schmitt hated liberalism. Secondly, Schmiit thought that you have to let the government decide what is true, because if not you end up with a society that is liberal and pluralist, and Schmitt hated those ideas. He hated them because he thought that if you welcome different ways of thinking, you create a society where nobody shares an identity, as everyone does their own thing, and he thought this was bad. However, even though he disagrees with Hobbes, Schmitt still likes him as a writer.

The Nomos of the Earth

In this book Schmitt writes about his view on the origin of the eurocentric world order, that is to say, he tries to explain why, at the time of writing the book, Europe was the most powerful region in the world, and why it had been so for centuries. He believed it all started when Europe discovered the Americas in 1492, which gave Europeans great power, resources and wealth. Schmitt also writes about the identity of Europe and its role in making civilization better. Among these improvements, he believes one of the most important is the fact that Europeans made war a conflict between countries, and not against the countries' people. This made it so that the people of the countries at war were treated better than when this was not the case. Schmitt liked that Europe's greatest achievement was its way of organizing countries, which led to the modern way of living, which Schmitt liked. However, he also writes why he thinks Europe became worse during the 19th century, and why he thought the world needed a new order. Something he mentioned was how some countries of the Americas, mainly the United States, were becoming just as powerful and important as the countries in Europe, and that these American countries would become more important over time. In particular, he thought the United States would be the only country capable of solving the problems that the world faced at the time.

Hamlet or Hecuba

Schmitt writes about his thoughts about the theater play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. He thinks that it is a very interesting story because it talks about the Queen of England, at a time where it was not good to talk about her, and for talking about the figure of the avenger. Schmitt argues that the story was used to combine politics with myth, and that politics in general has many aspects of myths and stories that make it more intense.

Theory of the Partisan

He wrote this after giving two lectures in 1962. He wrote about how he thought that the way people go to war had changed. He looked at many famous military leaders like Napoleon, and saw how in addition to soldiers, there was now a new type of warrior called the partisan or the guerrilla. Partisans don't fight normally, like a soldier would do, but instead stay hidden most of the time and attack the enemy where they are not expecting an attack, using tactics that are not common, and that often rely on making the enemy feel scared and unsafe at all times.

Schmitt thought this is very interesting because it made him rethink his work The Concept of the Political, as the partisan is an enemy that cannot be easily seen or fought in the way that he previously thought. Schmitt thought that partians were worse than normal soldiers because of the way they carried out violence, and thought that governments who wanted to fight partisans had to use the tactics of the partisans against them, even if it meant doing bad things. Schmitt saw how many people around the world became partisans to free their countries from colonial domination, but he thought that these partisans were barbaric. And so, he believed that being a partisan had less to do with how you fight a war and more to do with why you fight a war.