131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Dictatorship and Dialectical Development
It is indeed difficult to connect dialectical development and dictatorship, because dictatorship
seems to be an interruption of the continual series of development, a mechanical intervention
in organic evolution. Development and dictatorship seem to be mutually exclusive. The
unending process of a world spirit that develops itself in contradictions must also include
within itself even its own real contradiction, dictatorship, and thus rob it of its essence,
decision. Development goes on without a break and even interruptions must serve it as
negations so that it wil be pushed further. The essential point is that an exception never
comes from outside into the immanence of development. Hegel's philosophy, in any case,
was not concerned with dictatorship in the sense of a moral decision that interrupts the
process of development or discussion. Even the most contradictory things assert themselves
and will be incorporated in an encompassing development. The either/or of moral decision,
the decisive and deciding disjunction, has no place in this system. Even the diktat of a
dictator becomes a moment in the discussion and in the undisturbed development as it moves
further. Just as everything else, the diktat too will be assimilated by the peristalsis of the
world spirit. Hegel's philosophy contains no ethic that could provide a foundation for the
absolute distinction of good and evil. According to this philosophy, the good is what is
rational at the current station of the dialectical process and thereby what is real. Good is (I
accept here Christian Janentzky's pertinent formulation) "the current," in the sense of being a
correct dialectical knowledge and consciousness. If world history is also the world court, 5
then it is a process without a last instance and without a definitive, disjunctive judgment. Evil
is unreal and only conceivable insofar as something out-of-date can be thought, and thus
perhaps explicable as a false abstraction of reason, a passing confusion of a particularity
closed in upon itself.
Only within an at least theoretically small area—to overcome what is out-of-date or to
correct false appearances—would a dictatorship
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