The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
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256 M. Dean<br />
which means that <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s imagery delivers a certain and highly dubious emotional<br />
charge. For all the no doubt magical intensity transferred to his book on<br />
Hobbes from its mythological analysis <strong>of</strong> the Hebrew bible, <strong>Schmitt</strong> cannot keep<br />
his interpretation <strong>of</strong> the failure <strong>of</strong> the political symbolism <strong>of</strong> the Leviathan free<br />
from bile directed towards all those clearly identified as the Leviathan’s inner<br />
enemies whom he perversely holds responsible for his own predicament in Nazi<br />
Germany, especially the Jews. And when St George lances the European territorial<br />
state as dragon, it becomes a story <strong>of</strong> the liberal Anglo-Saxon air- (and sea-)<br />
powers conducting a pest-extermination <strong>of</strong> the German people.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Nomos <strong>of</strong> the Earth – as indeed all <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s major works – is an important<br />
twentieth-century contribution to the critical history <strong>of</strong> liberal political and<br />
juridical reason. Among other things it continues the project <strong>of</strong> demonstrating<br />
the relation between reason and domination constitutive <strong>of</strong> the Enlightenment.<br />
In <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s view the state is one <strong>of</strong> the highest achievements <strong>of</strong> the Enlightenment<br />
because it puts an end to civil war. <strong>The</strong> system <strong>of</strong> states <strong>of</strong> the jus publicum<br />
Europaeum is an even higher achievement in that it puts an end to the<br />
medieval notions <strong>of</strong> just war and restricts war to formally conducted war<br />
between states conceived as equal sovereign persons. It is thus an essential civilizing<br />
project. He could thus be read as an instance <strong>of</strong> the kind <strong>of</strong> project the<br />
Frankfurt School, Norbert Elias and Foucault take up in their different ways.<br />
However, we need a critical apparatus with which to read <strong>Schmitt</strong> to gain the<br />
full benefit <strong>of</strong> his intellectual work and to recognize and combat the diabolic<br />
forces that possessed him – forces, it might be added, which were as much <strong>of</strong> his<br />
times as <strong>of</strong> the man.<br />
As Tracy B. Strong (1996: xxvii) suggested a decade ago, the reception <strong>of</strong><br />
<strong>Schmitt</strong> today poses the question <strong>of</strong> our responsibility <strong>of</strong> how to manage the<br />
intellectual terrain we are opening up. This is probably true for any political<br />
mythology <strong>of</strong> world order. <strong>The</strong> key question is not whether we are going to be<br />
morally and politically contaminated by a thinker who was also a Nazi but that<br />
<strong>of</strong> the hubris <strong>of</strong> world-order thinking. Perhaps we need to approach such political<br />
imaginings and poetics with a particular ethos which seeks intelligibility as<br />
it pr<strong>of</strong>esses and enacts a certain modesty and self-awareness. This, it would<br />
seem, is the only way we could both mobilize the facilitating role <strong>of</strong> myth and<br />
philology in rendering very complex processes <strong>of</strong> world order thinkable and<br />
politically actionable, while also being aware <strong>of</strong> the dangers and the diabolical<br />
forces which can be unleashed when we project a mythopoetics upon the earth.<br />
Such an ethos might lead us to ask how a critical history <strong>of</strong> liberal international<br />
reason can appropriate <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s insights without simultaneously<br />
expelling him from the order <strong>of</strong> legitimate European thinkers. It might lead us to<br />
ask how we can act towards <strong>Schmitt</strong> in a manner that does not reproduce his<br />
relation to those he accused <strong>of</strong> slaying and feasting on the great Leviathan from<br />
either within or without. If we cannot answer these questions by our own intellectual<br />
practice, then we have forfeited a major basis on which to interrogate the<br />
discussion <strong>of</strong> new world orders or disorders.