Schmitt-Political Theology I.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

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Foreword xxiii the State has ended by bringing about the mechanization of the anthropological understanding of human beings.” 41 It is the growing realization of the importance of depoliticization, what Max Weber had called the “demagification [Entzauberung] of the world,” that leads Schmitt in 1934 to note that his 1922 categories of juridical thinking had been too few. In the preface to the second edition, he writes: “I now distinguish between not two but three types of legal thinking; in addition to the normativist and the decisionist there is the institutional one”(PT, 2). He goes on to explain that whereas normativism thinks in terms of impersonal rules and decisionism thinks in terms of personal decisions, institutional thinking thinks in terms of organizations that transcend the personal sphere. Thus the state corresponds to normativism, political movements (Bewegungen) to decisionism, and the people (Volk) to institutionalism. 42 Institutionalism alone “leads to [a] pluralism ...devoid of sovereignty” (PT, 3). In fact, public law under Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany was both a “deteriorated ...normativism” and a “degenerate decisionism ...[a] formless mixture, unsuitable for any structure....”(PT, 3). Schmitt, with explicit reference to Max Weber, sees danger in the increasing sense of the State as “a huge industrial plant” (PT, 65). Increasingly this plant “runs by itself ...[and] the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty is lost” (PT, 48). For Schmitt, this is a developmental process. As he lays it out in the Barcelona lecture, the history of the last 500 years in the 41. Schmitt, Le Léviathan, 100. 42. In the fall of 1933 Schmitt publishes Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigliedrung des politischen Einheit [State, Movement, People: The Three Parts (Glied also means “limb”) of Political Unity] (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933). This book had an over-articulated sense of political society for some members of the Nazi Party and seems to have gotten him into trouble and led to the articles attacking him in the Gestapo organ Das schwarze Korps in 1936.
xxiv Tracy B. Strong West shows a common structure, even though as the controlling force has changed, so also has what constitutes evidence, as well as social elite. Thus in the sixteenth century the world was structured around an explicitly theological understanding with God and the Scriptures as foundational certainties; this was replaced in the next century by metaphysics and rational (“scientific”) research and in the eighteenth by ethical humanism, with its central notions of duty and virtue. In the nineteenth century economics comes to dominate (although Schmitt is seen as a man of the Right, he always took Marx completely seriously), and, finally, in the twentieth century technology is the order of the day. And this is at the core of his claim that ours is an age of “neutralisation and depoliticization”: whereas all previous eras had leaders and decision makers, the era of technology and technological progress has no need of individual persons. 43 It is to call attention to this progression that Schmitt starts chapter three of PT with the secondmost-famous sentence of the book: “The central concepts of modern state theory are all secularized theological concepts” 44 (PT, 36; trans. modified). What does this mean? Key here is Schmitt’s understanding of “secularized.” Schmitt, who had been a student of Max Weber, accepts the idea of the “demagification” or “disenchantment” of the world. To say that all concepts in modern state theory are sec- 43. This periodization can be found explicitly in the Barcelona address and is implicit in the first several pages of chapter three of PT; it is made explicit in shorter form in the 1934 preface to PT, 1–2. The stages are well discussed in Henning Ottmann, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und EntTotalisierungen: Carl Schmitts Theorie der Neuzeit,” in Carl Schmitt. Der Begriff des Politischen. Ein Kooperativer Kommentar, ed. Reinhard Mehring (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 156–69. 44. Schmitt, Politisches Theologie, 43. “Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe.” Translator George Schwab was faced with the difficult task of rendering prägnanten; it means “concise, succinct,” which is only partly caught by Schwab’s “significant.” I have gone (with thanks for a consultation to William Arctander O’Brien) for what I believe to be the meaning, rather than for a literal equivalent.
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