131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Irrationalist Theories of the Direct Use of Force
1. [Tr.] Isaac Deutscher provides a vivid description of the Bolshevists in the October
revolution in The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press,
1970); on Cromwell and the Levellers see Christopher Hill, God's Englishman (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970).
2. [Tr.] Engels in Anti-Dühring (1877–78) already suggests a "dictatorship of the
proletariat," but Lenin gave the idea its definitive practical statement. See V. I. Lenin,
Lenin's Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship (Glasgow:
Socialist Labour Press, 1920). The relationship between art and politics in the Soviet
union's first years was much more complicated than Schmitt's reference to a Proletkult
allows, but there was nevertheless a deliberate mesh of the two in the years after the
revolution. Alexander Rodschenko and Warwara Stepanowa's Producer's Manifesto
(Moscow, 1921) gives some indication of the tone and political content of contemporary
Soviet art: "The task of the Constructivist group is to give a communist expression to
material, constructive work." The manifesto continues with an affirmation of
communism based on historical materialism as the only basis for science and concludes
with the slogans of the constructivists, among them: ''Down with art, long live
technique." Cited according to the text in Tendenzen der Zwanziger Jahre, 15.
Europäische Kunstaustellung, Berlin, 1977 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1977),
102–103. But Schmitt seems to refer here to the increased preoccupation of art in the
1920s with the lives and surroundings of workers and objects from the everyday world
of the working class. The 1977 Berlin catalogue is an excellent source of images
characteristic of this tendency, but see also David Mellor's Germany: The New
Photography, 1927–33 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain Publiaations, 1978) for
the development and adaptation of the art of proletarian culture in Germany.
3. [Tr.] Enrico Ferri appears in Michels's Sociologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen
Demokratie (Leipzig: Alfred Kronen Verlag, 1926) and Storia critica del Movimento
Socialista Italiano (Florence: Societa an Editrice "La Voce," 1926) as an example of the
new type Of political leader. A professor of law, Ferri became the leader of the Italian
Socialist party in 1893; after 1922 he joined the Fascists and was made a senator by
Mussolini, He was the author of an influential study of positivism: Socialismo e scienza
positivista: Darwin, Spencer, Marx (1894) and a definitive text on criminal law,
Sociologia Criminale (1900). Ferri's Die revolutionäre Methode (Leipzig: Hirschfeld,
1907–10) was translated with an introduction by Michels.
4. Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (Paris: Études sur le Devenir social, 1919);
the fourth edition is cited here. Sorel's Réflexions was first published in 1906 in the
journal Mouvement socialist. [English translation by T. E. Hulme with an introduction
by Edward Shils, Reflections on Violence (New York: Collier Books, 1972). —tr.]
5. In Germany Sorel is still scarcely known today (1926), and while innumerable texts
have been translated into German in recent years, Sorel has been ignored—perhaps
because of the "endless conversation." Wyndham Lewis is perfectly correct to say that
"Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought" (The Art of Being Ruled,
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