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

From humanized war to intervention 65
into an archetypically liberal notion: the political basis of decisions to use force
that was characteristic of the jus publicum Europaeum is replaced by a legalistic
and moralistic account of the justification for force.
This is, I believe, a quite compelling argument, and it defines the task for
anyone who wishes to continue to use Just War notions in thinking about international
relations, which I do; effectively one must redraw the idea of the Just
War so that it neither reflects a lost medieval Christian order, nor fits into
contemporary, liberal, moral reasoning. This may seem to be a tall order, but I
believe it is actually much less difficult than one might imagine, because
Schmitt’s way of setting up the problem excludes or devalues a line of reasoning
that is the product neither of the respublica Christiana nor of contemporary liberalism,
a line of reasoning often termed ‘neo-Aristotelian’. Such reasoning
follows the Aristotelian injunction, summarized by Stephen Toulmin, that
‘sound moral judgment always respects the detailed circumstances of specific
kinds of cases’ (1990: 32). Along with Schmitt, neo-Aristotelianism is critical of
the search for universal legal and/or moral rules, and, again following Schmitt,
neo-Aristotelians associate this tendency with the characteristic moral theories
of liberalism, in particular Kantianism and utilitarianism. However, unlike
Schmitt, Toulmin at least locates the origin of this tendency not with the Anglo-
American thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but much earlier –
in fact, just at the point where Schmitt’s jus publicum Europaeum is first established,
in the early seventeenth century.
This is when, Toulmin argues, the moral insights of Renaissance humanism
and the classical world were put aside. Under the influence of Descartes and
Hobbes, along with many lesser talents, formal logic came to displace rhetoric,
general principles and abstract axioms were privileged over particular cases and
concrete diversity, and the establishment of rules (or ‘laws’) that were deemed
of permanent as opposed to transitory applicability came to be seen as the task
of the theorist. Toulmin suggests that at this time moral reasoning became
‘theory-centered’ rather than ‘practically-minded’ (1990: 34). Moral reasoning
became a matter of following a theoretically validated rule, rather than of
making a practical judgement, and was impoverished thereby, losing the
emphasis on cultivating the facility for the making of moral judgements which,
as Bernard Williams has maintained, was characteristic of older, pre-modern or
classical moral philosophies (1985, 1993). Toulmin and Williams are not, of
course, alone in holding this position; in recent years, there has been a revival of
interest in Greek moral theory, and, in particular, in the notion of the ‘virtues’ –
those qualities of mind that human beings can cultivate in order to enable them
to be more effective moral agents. (Anscombe 1958; Nussbaum 1993: Crisp
1996; Statman 1997).
Neo-Aristotelian thought places Just War theory in a new light; if we return
to the set of questions outlined on p. 57 we can see that they are actually not best
understood as comprising a set of rules that invite a yes/no answer, a tick in a
box. Rather, they invite the exercise of different kinds of political and moral
judgement. The existence of a ‘just cause’ for action calls for precisely the kind