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

250 M. Dean
SS which followed his 1936 denunciation (Schwab 1996). In the book on
Hobbes, for example, it is not simply liberalism but ‘Jewish-liberalism’ that
exploits Hobbes’s crack between outer confession and inner faith in the writings
of Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn and above all Friedrich Julius Stahl (whom
he calls Stahl-Jolson, to recall his pre-Protestant Jewish status). Moreover, for
whatever purposes he might have imagined, Schmitt juxtaposes ‘Jewish’ to
‘German’ throughout the text. For example, Stahl’s wife is described as of
‘German descent’; and Robert Mohl is among ‘the German liberals’ (Schmitt
1996b: 75, 69). While Schmitt broadens his attack to also include the Roman
Catholic Church, ‘power-thirsty Presbyterian churches or sects’, Goethe, Kant,
and ‘secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians, freemasons, illuminates,
mystics, and pietists, all kinds of sectarians, the many “silent ones in the land” ’,
he still concludes with ‘above all here once again the shifting spirit of the
Jew’ (ibid.: 60; cf. Turner 1998). This does nothing to diminish the impression
of a thinker who would (unsuccessfully as it turned out) seek to obscure his
own deepening antipathy to Nazism by references which appeared to confirm
the latter’s anti-Semitic propaganda. Indeed, it is these intermediate groups –
above all the Jews – who exploit the crack left open by Hobbes’s political
agnosticism regarding private faith. They have slaughtered and feasted on the
Leviathan in the manner of the cabbalists: ‘That happened when the organizations
of individual freedom were used like knives by anti-individualistic
forces to cut up the leviathan and divide his flesh among themselves’ (Schmitt
1996b: 74).
Schmitt separates himself from us not by his critique of liberalism, whether
anti-liberal or not (Stephen Holmes 1993 and Leo Strauss 1996 have had, of
course, diametrically opposed views of the latter). It is his identification of the
core target of his attack with a particular social group which was contemporaneously
being savaged by Nazi propaganda, and then subjected to what Schmitt in
an apparent mea culpa would later call the ‘scelus infandum’ of Nazi extermination
techniques. 3 Schmitt (1996b: 26) cites Hobbes’s view of himself as revealing
his thoughts only in part, observing that he acted like someone who opens a
window for a moment and then closes it for fear of a storm. Schmitt’s own
Leviathan and his mythology are such a ‘window’. What we glimpse makes it
harder for us to appreciate the contribution of works like The Nomos of the
Earth or even his Leviathan, however necessary that might be today. Through
those windows we glimpse the storm that is no longer outside. We glimpse what
is perhaps a demonic possession by the image of Leviathan.
The figure of the Leviathan not only fuses Schmitt’s fears about domestic
order with his concerns for a world order dominated by British and American
sea- and air-powers and their ideologies and views of war. The critique of
Jewish liberalism of the 1930s would be connected with that of Anglo-Saxon
liberalism of the postwar period in that if the former struck the first cut into the
Leviathan from below, the latter will lance it from above.
From an international perspective, the system of Leviathans was undermined
around 1890 after the great imperial land grab of Africa and the Congo Confer-