131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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See James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen,
1982), 92.
12. [Tr.] Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), cited according to the English
translation by James Baillie, The Phenomenology of Mind (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1910), 366.
13. This is not merely a figure of speech. If a social nonentity is possible in society, then
it proves specifically that no social order exists. There can be no social order that
contains such a vacuum.
14. [Tr.] The importance of England as a model of capitalist development and bourgeois
society for Marx's theory can hardly be exaggerated, and it is neatly summed up by
Engels's answer in his Principles of Communism (1847) to the question, "How did the
proletariat arise?": "The Proletariat arose as a result of the industrial revolution which
unfolded in England in the latter half of the last (i.e., eighteenth) century and which has
repeated itself since then in all the civilized countries of the world" (Marx and Engels,
Selected Works, 81). Cf. Michael Evans, Karl Marx (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1976).
15. Condorcet's Tableau historique (1794) refutes Rousseau's thesis in Discours sur les
arts et sciences (1750) that knowledge and cultivation of the arts and science had led to
the degeneration of morals. In Condorcet's view, progress is identical with knowledge
and the struggle against superstition, priests, and error. Significantly, he identifies the
discovery of printing as the instrument that created a new tribunal of public opinion. In
the last epoch, Condorcet asked, could there not come a time when the well-being of the
populace would start to deteriorate, and when in contrast to the steady progress of all
previous ages there would be "a retrograde movement, at least a kind of movement
between good and evil" beyond which no further improvement is possible? Kingsley
Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London: Phoenix, 1962),
281ff.
16. [Tr.] In a conversation on May 12, 1982, Carl Schmitt emphasized the importance of
this last sentence for his understanding of contemporary politics and for the appreciation
of the dilemma he sought to clarify in this text. The liberal "system" is a dialectic, but it
only allows dictatorship in the form of education; this alone breaks into its discussion.
For Hegel, dialectics were a means for the analysis of society, but Marx transforms this
Gesellschatsanalyse into Klassenkampf. This struggle needs no education; rather it is a
war in which the enemy will be destroyed ("ein Krieg in dem die Feinde vernichtet
werden"). This transforms Hegelian philosophy into a political theology. About the last
sentence of this chapter Schmitt commented, "It is a matter of life and death. Marx
understood his enemy the bourgeois liberal—better than he understood himself.'' Schmitt
went on to quote Bruno Bauer: "Only the man who knows his prey better than it knows
itself can trap it." Cf. Carl Schmitt, "Die legale Weltrevolution: Politischer Mehrwert als
Präie auf juristische Legalität und Superlegalität," Der Staat, 3 (1978), 321–339.
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