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

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