The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

246 M. Dean
community which distributes land and resources. Nomos is, as he sharply puts it,
a ‘fence-word’ (Schmitt 2003: 75). We might add that for Schmitt, as for Foucault,
law, order and government have focused on what occurs within those
fences as a central paradigm throughout the history of what might be regarded as
Western thought. That paradigm was the household, or oikos, and the patriarchal
governance of the house and the members of the household.
For Foucault, appropriation belongs not to questions of government, even in
its broadest sense, but to the now displaced sphere of the largely repressive or
‘deductive’ power of sovereignty. Foucault in this sense retains appropriation
but limits its analytical value. In this regard, Foucault’s analyses reproduce the
genealogy he traces. If Schmitt’s nomos ties projects of ordering to appropriation,
Foucault’s genealogy traces an uncoupling of the concepts of sovereignty
and government and hence a liberal forgetting of appropriation. If we were to
extend Foucault’s genealogy of liberal and neo-liberal rationalities of government
to at least the 1990s, then I think we would find, from Schmitt’s perspective,
two impossible figures. One would be ‘governance’: an orientation without
order. The other would be the dream of an order without orientation: ‘globalization’.
Schmitt is above all a thinker concerned with humankind’s necessarily telluric
or earth-bound character; the philology of nomos reveals not the primacy
of appropriation but the concrete existence of human communities in their occupancy
of the earth and orientation on it. He contests liberalism in its many guises
but he attacks it through its base in the abstract, privatized individual who is not
simply a deterritorialized being but an uprooted and disoriented one. On a
broader scale, liberalism and socialism are a-topical formations whose ideal is
found nowhere or, even more strongly, in a not-place, a Utopia. Today’s utopias
are all speed, mobilities and networks, and wash humanity in the great oceanic
universality of globalization.
The elemental nomos 2
Mythology, I would suggest, shapes our attempts at understanding world order
but rarely has it done so with such intensity as in Schmitt. In the first few pages
of The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt’s thought is at its most telluric. The earth is
described as the ‘mother of law’. Within the ‘womb of her fecundity’ she contains
an inner measure of justice every farmer knows. What we find is Mother
Earth, the infinitely just earth, justissima tellus. Schmitt summarizes: ‘She contains
law within herself, as a reward for labor; she manifests law upon herself, as
fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order’
(2003: 42).
The mythology of the earth for Schmitt is that of a Lockean labourer who
mixes his labour with the earth and gains just reward. The earth is thereby
divided, lines are ‘engraved and embedded’, and finally delineated by ‘fences,
enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other constructs. Then, the orders and
orientations of human social life become apparent’ (ibid.: 42). Schmitt is con-