The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt

Author:Carl Schmitt [Schmitt, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780226738840
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

The complete inventory of this system of antitheses and their possible combinations is contained in the 1814 treatise by Benjamin Constant. He maintains that we are in an age which must necessarily replace the age of wars, just as the age of wars had necessarily to precede it. Then follows the characterization of both ages: the one aims at winning the goods of life by peaceful exchange (obtenir de gré à gré), the other by war and repression. This is the impulsion sauvage, the other, on the contrary, le calcul civilisé. Since war and conquest are not procuring amenities and comforts, wars are thereby no longer useful, and the victorious war is also bad business for the victor. Moreover, the enormous development of modern war technology (Constant cites particularly the artillery upon which the technological superiority of the Napoleonic armies rested primarily) made senseless everything which had previously been considered in war heroic, glorious, personal courage, and delight in fighting. According to Constant's conclusion, war has lost every usefulness as well as every attraction; l'homme n'est plus entraîné à s'y livrer, ni par intérêt, ni par passion. In the past, the warring nations had subjugated the trading peoples; today it is the other way round.

The extraordinarily intricate coalition of economy, freedom, technology, ethics, and parliamentarianism has long ago finished off its old enemy: the residues of the absolute state and a feudal aristocracy; and with the disappearance of the enemy it has lost its original meaning. Now new groupings and coalitions appear. Economy is no longer eo ipso freedom; technology does not serve comforts only, but just as much the production of dangerous weapons and instruments. Progress no longer produces eo ipso the humanitarian and moral perfection which was considered progress in the eighteenth century. A technological rationalization can be the opposite of an economic rationalization. Nevertheless, Europe's spiritual atmosphere continues to remain until this very day under the spell of this nineteenth-century historical interpretation. Until recently its formulas and concepts retained a force which appeared to survive the death of its old adversary.

[Schmitt's Note]

The best example of this polarity of state and society is contained in the theses of Franz Oppenheimer. He declares his aim to be the destruction of the state. His liberalism is so radical that he no longer permits the state to be even an armed office guard. The destruction is effected by advancing a value and passion-ridden definition. The concept of state should be determined by political means, the concept of society (in essence nonpolitical) by economic means. But the qualifications by which political and economic means are then defined are nothing more than typical expressions of that pathos against politics and state. They swing in the polarity of ethics and economics and unveil polemical antitheses in which is mirrored the nineteenth-century German polemical tension of state and society, politics and economy. The economic way is declared to be reciprocity of production and consumption, therefore mutuality, equality, justice, and freedom, and finally nothing less than the spiritual union of fellowship, brotherliness, and justice.

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