Carl Schmitt

How would he be similar to bookchin? Wasn't bookchin an anarchist and Schmitt a National Socialist?

Read Agamben's Homo Sacer.

I had a feeling someone was going to post that, but I figured since I was asking someone to voluntarily speak about someone else's ideas instead of a professor to elaborate on their own it wouldn't matter to anyone. Guess I was wrong.

Concept of the Political and Nomos of the Earth are great too. He points out that part of your identity is formed by opposition to an enemy. Liberals ignore this, but it also means that you shouldn't wage total wars to completely annihilate your enemy. A war should be waged to end the risk posed by an enemy. A war's end should be peace with the enemy. In this sense, despite his Nazi affiliation, he's most definitely against a "final solution" that would completely eradicate the Jews.

He likes the idea of the treaty of Westphalia which sets certain rules for waging war, recognizing their aggressor in a pragmatic way (we fight now but later we make peace). Liberals want to believe in the notion of a world without wars and getting triggered by the idea of having rules for war which they see as a contradictory and inhumane but this is where Schmitt gets real clever.

When you abandon the notion of having rules for war, you end up with wars for human rights or "just wars" so to speak. Liberals now wage their wars with the idea that they're actually starting a war against war. It's subtle but instead of saying, my enemy wants to advance its power and claims and one day we shall make peace, Liberals end up saying, all war is injustifiable, if you start a war, we have to attack you because what you are doing is 100% wrong objectively (and we're in the right position to judge). In other words, they become wars based on "human rights." So if a nation wants to wage war (in its own interests), that's wrong, but in turn a nation can wage war justly in the name of international justice/rights.

This is wholly contradictory because to wage a war for humanity, your "enemy" is still human, so part of that humanity. So how can a human be an enemy to humanity? You end up implying that your enemy is not human and wage an inhuman war in the name of humanity. From your nice desire for perpetual peace you end up engaging in perpetual war. When you wage war in the name of morality you end up implicitly making your enemy inhuman.

This is in part why he's taking up by left-wing thinkers like Agamben (who is great btw, regardless of your political stance). Because he shows how Liberals are in many ways hypocrites and not truly left-wing and do not approach the goals they claim to want.

Also, I strongly disagree with those who associate Schmitt with neo-cons. That's not him at all.

Schmidt wasn't a committed national socialist, he was a ambitious professional jurist living through times of radical political change. His Weimar era writings are proposals for saving the Weimar republic, his nazi era writings are about dismantling weimar. He had lots of rivals within the party and ended up marginalised and with no real connection to power. His actual personal beliefs where more catholic conservative in nature. He's simmilar to bookchin in the sense he came to embrace a model which rejects the sovereign state.

Nice post

I'm not sure I agree with the comparison to Bookchin but you're right about the rest.

He did sort of write against the Nazis during Weimar, so it's possible to play up his association with them as mere opportunism but I don't think it was entirely. He realized there was a problem with liberal democracies, with parliamentary representation but he also knew that societies are now too complex to really have a form of direct democracy. It's true he didn't end up having a lot of influence with the Nazis and I think he even kind of felt bad for the Jewish persecution after the war(where his Catholicism really comes out, and the don't eliminate your enemies thing) but still resisted re-integration and never admitted culpability for associating with the Nazis and always felt that the way Germany was treated after the war was hypocritical and unjust. Basically he never ended up a Liberal but you can't accuse him of being a monster in any way.

> Also, I strongly disagree with those who associate Schmitt with neo-cons. That's not him at all.

I can see how Schmitt can be drawn on by neoconservatives in a rhetorical attempt to justify their positions, but, like almost every other major thinker associated with the neocons (Leo Strauss, Fukuyama, and others) who themselves are not really neocons, I agree that Schmitt would never approve of neoconservative policies and actions.

The hypocrisy and cynicism behind liberal wars for human rights gets a good treatment from a left socialist perspective in Perry Anderson's recent American Foreign Policy and its Thinkers.

yes