Carl Schmitt: State and Society by William Rasch

Author:William Rasch [Rasch, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781786611703
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto Publishers
Published: 2019-07-22T23:00:00+00:00

Commerce seems here directed by the invisible hand that ideally distributes wealth, quite unevenly to be sure, but apparently to everyone’s mutual, if coerced, satisfaction.

Read with a more critical eye, Constant’s casual remarks might also confirm Schmitt’s link between trade (Tauschen) and deception (Täuschen) in the passage I cited to close the section on Franz Oppenheimer of the previous chapter. The pathos of the self-pitying German may be for some unbearable, but Schmitt alludes here to what he felt to be the type of moral and economic warfare exercised by the victorious allies after World War I, a type of warfare that placed Germany, just as it places all economically weak or colonized subjects, in a double bind. It is unlawful and immoral to break the peace through violence, even when peace is but a subterfuge under which economic warfare is in fact being waged, a claim Schmitt often made. To close this section, allow me to repeat a part and then complete the passage on the deception and exploitation that is endemic to an uncontrolled civil sphere.

Exchange by no means precludes the possibility that one of the contractors experiences a disadvantage and that a system of mutual contracts finally deteriorates into a system of the worst exploitation and repression. When the exploited and repressed attempt to defend themselves in such a situation, they cannot do so by economic means. Evidently, the possessor of economic power would consider every attempt to change its power position by extra-economic means as violence and crime, and will seek methods to hinder this. That ideal construction of a society based on exchange and mutual contracts and, eo ipso, peaceful and just is thereby eliminated. Unfortunately, also, usurers and extortioners appeal to the inviolability of contracts and to the sentence pacta sunt servanda. The domain of exchange has its narrow limits and its specific categories, and not all things possess an exchange value. No matter how large the financial bribe may be, there is no money equivalent for political freedom and political independence. (Schmitt 2007, 77–78)

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