The Concept of Southern Politics

[Macrobius]

The proposed topic for this thread is a discussion of Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, which has surfaced in several discussions, including this one:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=27719

However, rather than simply discuss the book, I propose we apply it, by asking is there, in Schmitt's sense or otherwise, a specifically Southern Politics -- that is, does the Political, as practiced in 20th century America, have any reference at all, in Schmitt's sense or otherwise, to the unreconstructed South?

Now, there can be no question beyond quibbling that there is a unique Southern style to Politics, and there are specifically Southern *Interest Groups* (to use one term that Schmitt says does *not* constitute what he means by politics). However, I am not talking about regional differences, in the context of a greater whole, but the sort of separateness that does our could form a political actor in the sovereign sense -- in other words, what is the position today, politically, of the South.

First off, one must say something about the relevance of Schmitt at all to the question -- why drag him in? In reading Schmitt (in English translation as I do not read German) I am struck by the distance of his Tradition to mine, yet also the relevance to our existential situation. The German academic tradition, besides pointing back to pan-European tradition, in which Poles like Copernicus or Germans like Leibnitz and Wolff are integrated into the literary and philosophical world, is also heir to that peculiarly German development that runs from Kant through Hegel ... omitting much I don't know ... down to Weber. This world, steeping in the values of post-Reich (1808; cf. University of Berlin, founded 1809) and post-Napoleonic continental Europe, is the core of what eventually became the antithesis of the South -- the post-Revolutionary world of Prussia and the American North, in contrast to the lingering Feudalism of the Southern Plantations. The terrible, swift sword of modernity took a mere two generations to travel from Waterloo to Appomattox.

It is important to understand what that means. In those 70 years we pass from a world lit by whale oil to our modern electric one. Atoms, cells as constitutive of life and not merely organelles of plants -- the discovery of the facts of life, in the form of the female ovum and cellular mitosis, much less chromosome division, were not securely established on scientific grounds until towards the end of our period -- evolution; Liberalism and Conservatism, Socialism and Communism, Anarchism too -- all these first emerge in this period. So too do 'Liberal Democracies' and the particular political mechanisms we use today, also much of the Law. Some scholars (notably, J.C.D. Clarke) have contested the existence of even the Industrial Revolution before this period, assigning the critical period to 1830 or even 1840, and the successful resolution -- if it was that -- of the crises of 1848, in the proletarian Revolution of that year. By 1865, or 1876 anyway, America was a unified nation-scale 'Democracy' for the first time. Britain, likewise by 1867.

In other words, our technological, political, and social landscape is entirely alien to the world that was the antebellum South. Our world is a product of less than 200 years -- maybe seven long or ten short generations at most. Whatever it has to do with White, European, or English-American -- or Southern -- is mostly a matter of what parts of the past it has retained, what *few* parts.

Schmitt, is part of the new fabric, not the old. At Gettysburg, the *other* speaker (the Governor of Massachusetts, in fact) was America's first Ph.D. -- the Ph.D. being a new degree, only available at the new German universities. There were, at that time, few Southern Ph.D.s, and none with teaching positions. The sort of university that engendered the *modern* world arrived in the South (and I include Maryland in that), with Johns Hopkins, in the Reconstruction era. Thus, it took two generations for the new Positive Science of Europe to 'go native' in the American South.

I mention this fact about the new universities, as Dr. Thomas Fleming, of the Rockford Institute, editor of Chronicles Magazine and a prominent member of the (near secessionist) League of the South, frequently mentions Basil Gildersleeve, a Greek scholar, as a role model -- Southern, classical, academic what's not to like? Here we have a confederate soldier, trained in the classical tradition (with a Ph.D. of course), riding off to war quoting Goethe to his fellow fighting chevaliers, and steeped in Romanticism and the newer German school-Philosophy, who afterwards accepts a teaching position at Johns Hopkins and further introduces the new Greek scholarship of his beloved Goettingen.

I mention this fact, to highlight that while Schmitt is 'foreign' to my Tradition in the old sense, he is quite at home in my and our *new* world -- a world, however, without a place for the South. Schmitt and Gildersleeve are emissaries, whatever their family connections, of the *new* world -- the world of Prussian Statism, the very model of the modern major academic.

Now, I contend that both the Weberian analysis of Schmitt or the new Greek scholarship of Gildersleeve are quite un-Southern in their primary inspiration. And yet -- who can contest the relevance of Gildersleeve for Southern Greek scholarship? And indeed who can contest the relevance of Schmitt for Southern Politics? Both, by their very modernity, are of the essence of the plight of the South.

Indeed, one has only to read this thread

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=28052

to see how easily Southern regionalism can be brought into service of the Neo-Con dominated Republican party -- an anti-Clinton, anti-Democratic screed cleverly woven with interesting tidbits of American history. However sympathetic one might be towards the airing of the latter, the former sticks out as irrelevant.

It is clear what Southronism has *become* -- service of Lincoln's Empire of Modern Man. Which is to say, Schmitt's student Leo Strauss, through his 'puppies' the Neo-Cons, is posthumous master of the South, even in its most wistful longings for self-determination.

To see an occupation so powerful (i.e., the philosophical influence of the German 'Research' University), that the entire political spectrum, from the most prominent paleoconservative Southerner with any political influence at all to -- one can hardly imagine a liberal academic not paying more than lip service to the University -- thus, the entire political spectrum, indeed all conceivable 'reality' is quite modern. Which is to say, that the South has no part of the Political, at least the modern polity. Is that a damn shame or just Auld Lang Syne?

Gildersleeve is the very limit of our (Southern, anyway) Revolt Against the Modern World. Even Mises, when he rues the 'defeat of Goettingen by Berlin' -- i.e., the Liberal Revolution overmastered, ultimately, by the Prussian State -- is moving towards the Conservative limit. Many Southerners, to be sure, are Libertarian supporters of Ron Paul.

So there you have the South's poltical choices -- paleoconservative Goettingen, Libertarian Goettingen, or, for a change, Yankee Berlin with a side-order of Strauss. May I have more collard greens with my Goettingen please, sir?

Well, since the menu is so fixed, and the cooking so Southern, let's begin with Strauss, as our appetizer.

[Macrobius]

Bound with Concept of the Political, Chicago edition -- which must be as close to official as anything Straussian gets -- are Strauss's Notes on this work, as also the prior essay The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929). These, in 35 paragraphs, summarize Strauss' view of his teacher's best known essay. Curiously, he spends more time on the latter than the former. Our program will be to consider Strauss, then the earlier essay, then Concept, then circle back to Schmitt's Political Theology. There are important points to be made in all these works.

As I have noted, Schmitt's tradition is foreign to me -- but facts of occupation are existential facts, and I cannot avoid the foreignness of the German academic tradition and its concerns. I can only see it through my own Tradition's eyes -- an issue well-discussed by Alasdair MacIntyre, esp. in his Whose Justice, Which Rationality?. Indeed, the question of -- what is Virtue? What role does it play in Politics? is always a central concern, one to which we will return time and again.

But, to whet our appetite, here is Strauss' conclusion -- a chilling one, I might add:



[35] We said [par. 14 above] that Schmitt undertakes the critique of liberalism in a liberal world; and we meant thereby that his critique of liberalism occurs in the horizon of liberalism; his unliberal tendency is restrained by the still unvanquished "systematics of liberal thought." The critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism. In such a horizon Hobbes completed the foundation of liberalism. A radical critique of liberalism is thus possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes. To show what can be learned from Schmitt in order to achieve that urgent task was therefore the principal intention of our notes.


So Strauss' project, so successful in the Neocons and their Southern strategy (which is a big portion of the plans actual success, politically), is to destroy an enemy he calls Liberalism -- which is to say, both the Classical Liberalism (of Mises and Paul), and the modern reflexes of the Left-Liberals, as from the Kennedys to the Clintonistas. Men will only fear death, so the American public must be convinced -- by deceit if necessary -- that it is in danger. Terror must be arranged, and elections won. There is an Empire to build. Thus, the battle against the modern world (against Liberalism) ... is to be put into the service of extending that world to every backwater country on earth. The Political, for the South, is to be this politics, *this* Empire, and no other. Certainly, not one of their (to Strauss -- our -- to us) own choosing.

Now, when Strauss writes the above, he has spent many paragraphs explaining to us that Schmitt has both an exoteric meaning -- his polemic stance -- and an esoteric one, which Strauss wrenches from his words. Thus, we cannot take him (Schmitt) literally, if we wish to understand him. This, and various other hints, suggest to us a need to be attentive to several things as we read Schmitt (and also Strauss) --

1. There are hints and references to Satanism or at least Luciferianism -- are they related to Schmitt's or Strauss' real project?

2. What are we to make of Strauss' references to the esoteric? To his constitutive role assigned to deceit?

3. What are we to make of Schmitt's self-description, during the time of Nazi rule, as Benito Cereno, in reference to Melville's short story about black slaves who take over a ship, forcing the captain, Cereno, to aid them, while he must dissimulate his plans to undermine the slave rebellion in order himself to survive long enough to crush it -- during which he steers a ship with a Death's Head and the ironic motto, 'Follow the Leader'.

4. And finally, of course, what conclusions are to be drawn from Schmitt's temporary support of National Socialism, and what relation do those conclusions have to Southern Politics.

Thus, we see many intertwined and connected issues, relating to illuminism, modernism, freemasonry, as well as the bearing of those things on the plight of the South.

To ignore these themes, in Strauss and Schmitt, is to fail to understand the relation of the South and the Political today.

[Roland]

Sorry I didn't notice these posts earlier. You've raised some interesting questions, and I'll try to deal with them before school begins.

Just a few brief points, though.

It seems to me that you've become a little too concerned with Schmitt's political orientation and conflated that with the concept of the political.

With regard to your tradition, it seems to me that you're closer than you think to Schmitt. You've mastered the method of the historicist, which is so integral to Schmitt and MacIntyre's respective projects.

With regard to Schmitt's esotericism, I believe it is well know that Schmitt was the first to advocate an esoteric reading of politically controversial authors in history; this method was later appropriated by Strauss with somewhat bizarre results.

I understand that there is a relatively new book out, edited by a Strauss acolyte, which reproduces and analyzes a purportedly esoteric exchange between Schmitt and Strauss through the mail.

[Macrobius]

Some of the discussion on this thread

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=28992 [post 63 et supra]

is converging here.

[Macrobius]

Sorry I didn't notice these posts earlier. You've raised some interesting questions, and I'll try to deal with them before school begins.

Just a few brief points, though.

It seems to me that you've become a little too concerned with Schmitt's political orientation and conflated that with the concept of the political.


If you are still around, could you elaborate? Strauss at least would identify his 'political' as polemic, and related to his existential position as an individual -- and Schmitt was in the 'belly of the beast' three times he says, something that may have informed his analysis.


With regard to your tradition, it seems to me that you're closer than you think to Schmitt. You've mastered the method of the historicist, which is so integral to Schmitt and MacIntyre's respective projects.


I don't know about mastery. I use historicist arguments with conscious irony. I take the primary meaning of 'history' to be the classical meaning -- researches into the truth of some matter, using evidence and observation. Seeing for oneself what is the truth of the matter. This is, more or less, what we mean by Science whenever experimentation is impractical, as in the distant past or far reaches of the cosmos, i.e., Natural History is the classical subject most like our Positive Science.

History as continuous, mythic story-telling, as in the 'history of ideas' is something that certainly appealed to me early on, and that I have had to study of necessity, since I have found that in polemic I invariably run up against a brick wall if I do not address the audience's concern -- yes that sounds convincing, but what will it do to the STORY? There are even people who take a rather Popperesque view that Science mean making up nontrivial consistent stories, rather than demonstration from evident fact and axiomatic truths.

So, filling in the WHAT IF is part of the work of convincing. The job's not over until the audience understands if or how the story is going to change -- since they decide mostly one whether they like the STORY, and change channels if they don't.


With regard to Schmitt's esotericism, I believe it is well know that Schmitt was the first to advocate an esoteric reading of politically controversial authors in history; this method was later appropriated by Strauss with somewhat bizarre results.


I believe the bizarreness is traceable to, specifically, Strauss' treatment of esotericism as a *method* of concealing meaning (that is, he mimicked esoteric discourse, without divining what the talk was *about* -- which is acting, imitating, or strictly, hypocrisy). This is in contrast to all other esoteric traditions I have seen, which center on conveying something quite specific, if rather ineffable. There is certainly a similarity among the esoteric cores of different cultures, as if there were a common source or some other source of similarity involved. Not to say there are no 'schools' and things to fight over and heresies and differences of opinions and what not -- only that the content is uniform, and the transmission of the content is a process.

Strauss, by way of contrast, seems to focus on the esoteric *text* as something to be penetrated -- this may be a form of research, but it is not participation in a or the Tradition. He takes, even in his identification of a classical Tradition, concealed Philosophy -- in terms of Evola or Guenon (say) this is already 'degenerate'.

However, we must understand what or if Strauss is esoteric, and what the content he conveys, if we are to understand Strauss at all, and we must understand Strauss and his followers if we are to understand our political situation, existentially -- this is true for the nation generally, but the South specifically, as some large segment of its population has thrown in with the Straussians, and now continues their policies, after they have jumped or been flung.


I understand that there is a relatively new book out, edited by a Strauss acolyte, which reproduces and analyzes a purportedly esoteric exchange between Schmitt and Strauss through the mail.

From your description, I have no great hope it will throw much light on anything. Might be interesting if someone reviewed it, though.

[Roland]

I'll try to respond in the next few days.

From your description, I have no great hope it will throw much light on anything. Might be interesting if someone reviewed it, though.

I took a look at it a few days ago. It consists of 3 letters Strauss sent to Schmitt. As I understand it, Schmitt never responded to any of them, but the Straussian author of the book interprets the changes Schmitt made to his Concept as influenced by Strauss' letters.

[Macrobius]

I'll try to respond in the next few days.



I took a look at it a few days ago. It consists of 3 letters Strauss sent to Schmitt. As I understand it, Schmitt never responded to any of them, but the Straussian author of the book interprets the changes Schmitt made to his Concept as influenced by Strauss' letters.

For those who have not seen the book, the most commonly available edition is published with a short commentary by Strauss at the end. Presumably he takes that into account.

[Roland]

Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Paperback) (http://www.amazon.com/Carl-Schmitt-Leo-Strauss-Dialogue/dp/0226518884/ref=pd_bbs_sr_10/102-6084767-9945750?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190213626&sr=8-10)

Book Description

Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, The Concept of the Political, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of Concept that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers.

Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reason­and ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives.

“Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books

I always construed The Concept as an essentially secular formulation. All of Schmitt's work for the following 40 years would be secular.

[Roland]

I'm sorry, I am having trouble keeping up with you and Thomas. I'll probably have to do some necromancing later on this semester. This response is hopelessly incomplete and only partially coherent. Hopefully clarity will emerge from the following discussion.
But, to whet our appetite, here is Strauss' conclusion -- a chilling one, I might add:
Yes, one counts among the many labels attributed to Schmitt "20th century Hobbes." So it would therefore seem that Schmitt denies any telos to man, either as an individual or as part of a political entity. In this sense, virtue, justice and natural law would be irrelevant to politics for Schmitt. To restrain the size of this discussion, we can pragmatically assume that this is simply a result of Schmitt operating within a secular politics separated from a comprehensive metaphysical holism. If need be, we can return to this topic as it seems to be popping up elsewhere across the forum.


Strauss contends that, because Schmitt exists within the horizon of liberalism, his critique is essentially liberal: "The affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral." This could be true if he who affirms the political is really nothing more than a 20th century Hobbesian. Indeed, one could conceive of Schmitt as affirming an ahistorical right to life - as Strauss does.



But Schmitt read Hobbes esoterically - not in the sense of Hobbes as possessor of some ahistorical God-like knowledge - but rather against the normative liberal readings of the day. For Schmitt, Hobbes was a man of his times, and his earlier works thus concern themselves with concrete political and juridical problems emerging from ruptures occurring in the spatial and theological assumptions of 17th century Europe. In Hobbes' concrete writings, the state of nature is not some “spaceless utopia,” but rather a conceptualization of the existential human conflict of the epoch. The Behemoth, as enemy of Hobbes' Leviathan, was a reflection of the creedal civil wars in Europe and the “atrocities committed by Spanish Catholics in the Kingdom of the Incas.” In addition to the cleft in Christian theology and the anthropological oddities of the New World, the drawing of amity lines on the globe further destabilized unifying juridical and ethical assumptions of Europe. Indeed, if these principles were universal metaphysical truisms, then why did they not hold across amity lines? With the emergence of these new realities, the implementation of a universalizing jurisprudence and politics became all the more dangerous. A Catholic jurisprudence in a continent cleaved by the reformation would do little to promote stability, and the extension of humanistic concepts to the entire world would be incapable of capturing the vicissitudes of a political pluriverse. It is for these reasons that Hobbes opted for the maxim homo homini lupus over Bacon's humanistic homo homini deus. With Hobbes' maxim there emerges a much more stable concept of equity than that of the humanist, which dialectically presupposes the inhuman and, by that fact, total war and annihilation.“Only when man appeared to be the absolute embodiment of absolute humanity did the other side of this concept appear in the form of a new enemy: inhuman” - Der Nomos der Erde



In Schmitt's reading of Hobbes, these concrete issues are the focus of his philosophy; however, Schmitt does concede that Hobbes became more enamored with concepts than he did with concrete life.

Thus, we can see that Schmitt's habitation of the horizon of liberalism is far more complicated than Strauss' brief notes on the Concept intimate. In relation to the tumult of Weimar Germany, it seems obvious that Schmitt drew pragmatic historical analogies to his situation in order to restrain the inevitable flood of permanent revolution. These analogies are not without merit, since similar ruptures in the spatial, philosophical, ethical, and theological assumptions of the time destabilized once again in the early 20th century. However, it must be said that this need for normalcy (which anyone with knowledge of Schmitt's biography must concede to be at least personally rational) ultimately concluded in an uneasy alliance with bourgeois liberalism against Eurocommunism. In this sense, Schmitt failed politically, but this is a result of his self-estrangement from the metaphysical whole his political theology once inhabited.
1. There are hints and references to Satanism or at least Luciferianism -- are they related to Schmitt's or Strauss' real project?
I don't know much about Strauss' work; I read Natural Right as a an academic text, so I didn't count paragraphs.

Schmitt himself didn't engage in esoteric writing until after 1933, so it is problematic to assign to him a conscious esoteric intent in The Concept. In any case, Schmitt's alliance with traditional Catholicism was trangible and genuine. In fact, most of Schmitt's work – even the explicitly secular texts – concern themselves explicitly or tacitly with restraining the political manifestation of the anti-Christ. I know you're familiar with the concept of the restrainer or Katechon; Schmitt was heavily influenced by Tertullian, and envisioned a revival of traditional Catholicism – or at least conservative policy friendly to that ideology – as a necessary condition for the establishment of a modern Katechon against Bolshevik and liberal U.S. Universalism.
3. What are we to make of Schmitt's self-description, during the time of Nazi rule, as Benito Cereno, in reference to Melville's short story about black slaves who take over a ship, forcing the captain, Cereno, to aid them, while he must dissimulate his plans to undermine the slave rebellion in order himself to survive long enough to crush it -- during which he steers a ship with a Death's Head and the ironic motto, 'Follow the Leader'.
Benito Cereno is Schmitt, the Nazis are the Negros. Schmitt published a pamphlet in which he reached all the way back to Heraclitus to locate precedent for the defense of the legality of Hitler's assumption of power. While ostensibly presented in the insipid, for-the-masses newspeak of National Socialism, the text tacitly underminds the legitimacy of Hitler's power. Instead of assigning political power to the people, Schmitt inserts the concept of “movement” [revolutionary party] which monopolizes political decision. Here we see Schmitt's illicit analogy between Leninist legitimacy and putative Nazi legality.

Indeed as you pointed out, thrice Schmitt was in the belly of the leviathan (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?p=312471#post312471)– his second stint began in 1933.
4. And finally, of course, what conclusions are to be drawn from Schmitt's temporary support of National Socialism, and what relation do those conclusions have to Southern Politics.
Could you define Southern Politics first? I see you have started to above.
Thus, we see many intertwined and connected issues, relating to illuminism, modernism, freemasonry, as well as the bearing of those things on the plight of the South.
To ignore these themes, in Strauss and Schmitt, is to fail to understand the relation of the South and the Political today.
This is what I meant by your concern with Schmitt's politics rather than his theory of the political. The only connection between Schmitt and freemasonry that I ever came across was indirect and quite obvious: De Maistre's association with, and interest in, freemasonry..

[Macrobius]

Could you define Southern Politics first? I see you have started to above.


Let's start with a quote from Spengler, which is always fun:


The sentiments, the popular aim, the abstract ideals that characterize all genuine party politics, dissolve and are supplanted by private politics, the unchecked will-to-power of the... few. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application of concepts. For us, too - let there be no mistake about it - the age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half a century old, and it has had no successor.


Quoted from here: http://home.comcast.net/~reillyjones/spengler.html

Referenced in this post: http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=447316&postcount=48

We see a reflection of current politics in the distant projections, current in Romanticism (significant name!) and down to Spengler's time, in which the German Gothic is contrasted with the Roman. The Germans down through Spengler's generation were enamoured of Roman and Hellenistic Civilisation -- the Apollonian -- were educated in Gymnasia. Yet, it was precisely the most Roman elements remaining in society, the Ancien Regime, the Catholic, the Plantations and Serfs, that the upsurge of German and Teutonic peoples, self conscious of their kinship, that marked the significant politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Spengler's Faustian, far from being the distant Goth of a millennium preceding, is a proxy for the German of the previous century, standing among the ruins of the Napoleonic wars, and the more distant wars of Religion.

My construction of the 'Southern Political' will, necessarily, make reference to Whiteness, which in addition to the discussion just linked, I have also elaborated two other places:


http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=28992&page=6

and generally here:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=29429

To summarise, since that is a lot of posts:

1. If we are to refer to a specifically Southern Politics, it must be in reference to the existential situation of the Southern peoples, specifically, Southern Whites. (a political frame that included the interests of Northerners, or Blacks, or Jews in the South, would merely make the South itself a central domain of conflict, a territory, arena, or horizon, rather than an actor or set of actors to whom a political motive might be applied).

2. The domain of Southern Politics might be expanded to include Blacks (but not other groups). After all, Blacks and Whites at one time lived in the same households in the South. This arrangement is unique, and Black-White relations in the South and North have likewise had a uniqueness that defies generalisation. The subsequent regimes of Separatism and of migration to the North and re-migration back to the South are, of course, potential competitors to a construction of Southern Politics that includes both Blacks and Whites, to the exclusion of all others.

3. The inclusion of new multi-cultural participants would, largely, be a denial of any uniquely Southern politics at all. It would be similar to including Visigoths in the Roman Political. The period in which this calculation became necessary was the period, precisely, in which the Roman Empire ceased to exist in areas where the affirmation had to be made. The Visigoths tried very hard to be Romans in the propositional and legal senses of Romanitas. The ultimate failure of the Visigothic and Ostrogothic assimilation and successor kingdoms led to even more barbarism than the Gothic represented. The Roman People survived the demise of their own state (as also in the Sultanate of Rum, in a state of Dhimmitude). However, it was precisely that they were no longer sovereign, and in that sense only part of the Political landscape, not themselves in a position to contest the Political as it was imposed on them, that we do not count the following phases of politics as Roman.

Therefore, in positing a Southern Political, I am proceeding from two axioms: first, the Southern is defined by and with reference to the White (and thus by contrast, with reference to White-Black relations, that is, Racialism properly speaking). As multiculturalist and Malungeon Frank Sweet succintly says 'Slavery is irrelevant; racialism itself is the explanatory paradigm.'

http://backintyme.com/essays/

This is true, to recapitulate a historical fact, because there was no concurrence of Race and Slavery in the South. The period in which Slavery was constructed and the period in which White Rule was constructed were never concurrent. There was a gap of 10 to 30 years between the end of Slavery and the start of Jim Crow, and the critical transition period is Reconstruction. At this focal time, the Republicans and Blacks were the legislators, in and for the South. It is the era of Scalawags and Carpetbaggers, and of course of the first Klan. The pan-American construction of White Rule is post-Wilson, and looks backwards to this period to draw conclusions, but its reflectiveness attempts to expand White Politics to include European immigrants to the Northern urban areas, and its specific goal is to replace pro-Germanism, common at that time in the North, with a construction of White American more amenable to Wartime propaganda. It is difficult to paint that project as, in any but the most cynical sense, a project of racial unity.

This is in contrast to the real life of Southern Folk (and American Folk generally), who are self-organising when given the chance, and still retain some folk-culture, to the extent education and television and the barren existence of office live haven't yet beat this cultural heritage out of them. For this purpose, non-urban and non-media-centric life is certainly superior.

Where is Southern folk-consciousness today? The greater part is engaged with post-Wallace politics -- after Nixon's successful capture of Law and Order, and Reagan's promise of cultural conservatism. Today, that has devolved in an Empire Loyalism and militarism, tinged with various sorts of religiosity.

ADDED: Thus my second axiom is that White culture is co-extensive with the inherited culture usually identified that way, in folk memory. This is not arbitrary and up for grabs, as a proposition to be debated, or negotiated about. It is possible that Whites are ceasing to be White in this sense, through the interference of PC, multi-culturalism, propaganda, and so forth. However, until such time as its memory is buried and a matter for historians only, we shall take it as some determinate thing, to be accepted or rejected, and a potential identity for phenotypical Whites, both in the South and North.

APPENDIX: Since Fade, on occidentaldissent, has come out in favour of the One Drop Rule and in particular the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, I think it important to note the timing of the One Drop Rule in terms of the Southern Political.

http://blog.occidentaldissent.com/2007/06/25/the-american-racialist-tradition/


The second item of information revealed by the above chart is that the number of cases (and, presumably, uncertainty as to where you were with regards to the endogamous color line) peaked three times. The first peak was in the decade of the Fugitive Slave Act. A free northerner was more likely to be taken into slavery if he or she was found to be Black. The second peak was in the 1910-19 decade, the nadir of the Jim Crow era by most measures. This was the decade when the one-drop rule was first adopted as state law. Tennessee led the parade by adopting a one-drop statute in 1910.44 It was followed by Louisiana in the same year, Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923, Virginia in 1924, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Oklahoma in 1931.45 During this same period, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their old blood fraction statutes de juris but amended these fractions (1/16, 1/32) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto.45 One suspects that instability of color line positioning in this decade was caused by resistance to the initial introduction of the one-drop rule as statutory law.47 The final peak was in the decade of the 1940s.


Legal history of the Rule, in website cited above: http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=15

Thus, the assertion that the One Drop Rule is post-Wilson, and that Jim Crow was a 20th century phenomenon in the South (with 19th century Abolitionist antecedents) is verifiable and probably incontestable. Someone who supports Jim Crow is not an unreconstructed Southerner, but a post-Constructed Wilsonian and Progressive. The 'tradition' Fade is pimping has much more to do with Emerson, Melville, the Pierpont, and the New England Transcendentalists, Unitarians, and Abolitionists, not to mention Lincoln, than anything Southern. Germanic race-purity doctrine, as a continental import, spread North to South, and took from 1830 to 1930 to do so.

[Thomas777]

Let's start with a quote from Spengler, which is always fun:



Quoted from here: http://home.comcast.net/~reillyjones/spengler.html

Referenced in this post: http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=447316&postcount=48

We see a reflection of current politics in the distant projections, current in Romanticism (significant name!) and down to Spengler's time, in which the German Gothic is contrasted with the Roman. The Germans down through Spengler's generation were enamoured of Roman and Hellenistic Civilisation -- the Apollonian -- were educated in Gymnasia. Yet, it was precisely the most Roman elements remaining in society, the Ancien Regime, the Catholic, the Plantations and Serfs, that the upsurge of German and Teutonic peoples, self conscious of their kinship, that marked the significant politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Spengler's Faustian, far from being the distant Goth of a millennium preceding, is a proxy for the German of the previous century, standing among the ruins of the Napoleonic wars, and the more distant wars of Religion.


Interesting points.

Congruent with your account, John Farrenkopf's biography of Spengler posits the Apollonian "Prime Symbol" as the sensuously-present individual body, juxtaposed with the Faustian counterpart of infinite space.

I think that the significance of this as per Heidegger and his peculiar relationship to the Romantic in general and National Socialism specifically should be noted. I'll have to think on this more before I elaborate.

[Macrobius]

Thanks Thomas, I look forward to your elaboration.

Having established the domain of the Southern as the racial, I should also note the connection to the question of the citizen. Here, I have noted how critical, for understanding both the American politics and the Baconian background to Hobbes (and thus Schmitt and Strauss), is the work of philosopher Harvey Wheeler:

http://www.constitution.org/hwheeler/hwheeler.htm

As the relevant essay is not in HTML, I also link a google cache transcription to HTML:

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:azlCdTRYtpAJ:www.constitution.org/hwheeler/constbasis.rtf+constitution.org+wheeler+bacon+post-nati&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&client=firefox-a

citing again for convenience the relevant passage:


America: James Wilson translated double majesty into the dual national and State sovereignties of federalism. Republicanization of the corporation of the crown, a la James Harrington, led to the Separation of Powers. Separating law enforcing from law writing insured both and validated Separation of Powers.

When rebels make war and lose it is called a civil war; when they win it is called a revolution. The mid seventeenth-century Civil Wars produced Britain's only republican experience. America's eighteenth-century rebels drew on Calvin's Case to justify their rebellion. When they pulled off their own successful revolution, a war of independence, their theorists applied the republican doctrines of Britain's seventeenth-century Civil War theorists to republicanize the successor to the crown they had destroyed. Calvin's Case was the constitutional model they used in bifurcating sovereignty into a republican crown as central government and autonomous colonies as member states. That is how America's great contribution to political theory, federalism, was first invented. A Civil War of her own would be required to perfect that invention.


Thus, as Schmitt says in his Political Theology 'Sovereign is he who decides on the exception'. -- that is, decides like Dubya's 'I am the decider'. L'etat, c'est moi.

And what is it that is decided? In Filmer's patriarchia, we already have the key formulation: 1. Peace and War 2. Life and Death 3. Law. These are and always have been, the marks of Sovereignty. And chief among the questions of life and death are who shall have the sovereign's protect -- who is the Citizen, the person who is not Out-law -- and thus the centrality of Race and Racialism for American and Southern politics, for that is the arena most contentious in this area.

To summarise, then, we have a nexus of issues -- immigration, who is the citizen, the Post-Nati case, Federalism and the status of the states vis-a-vis the Central and Consolidated Government, ironically itself called the Federal, all of which tend towards the same point, the decision who is to be citizen, and who is not.

This question of citizenship has bedeviled the English people for some time. They were fated, through most of the middle ages, to live as outlaws in their own land. Their struggle against the Tudors and Stuarts, to the extent it was a racial struggle against a foreign occupation, rather than an internal matter, lasted some centuries. No sooner than they managed to determine their own form of government, in 1688, did they (they being Whigs) face an oligarchy within, and Tory rebellions without, followed by a new threat from Neo-Tory [this time, pro-Hanoverian] Empire Loyalists, who threatened to undo that very revolution. We thus arrive at 1776 in Revolutionary Virginia, in a very precarious situation for the English people, not to mention more generally the the other immigrants from the British Isles. Jefferson, fending off Henry's desire for a dictatorship, not to mention the efforts of Washington, Madison, and Monroe, bought two generations' breathing space, before the final collapse of 1865.

In this context of mortal struggle were forged our notions of who deserves to live and who to die, to be protected as a citizen of the state, and where sovereignty lies. The onset of Prussianism, in both Schmitt's Germany and in Sherman's march, have parallels, though they played out differently, with a much milder kulturkampf in Germany (perhaps due to the more overtly Catholic population, compared to the American South). And it certainly wasn't true of the South, as Schmitt says [PT, p. 11] 'The controversy concerning whether the individual German states were sovereign according to the constitution of 1871 was a matter of minor political significance.'

To re-iterate the connectedness: the modern Immigration reflex of Race parallels earlier ones, but the arena, the central domain, is now held by a spent conceptual inanity, the One Drop Rule, perversely applied as a principle of political patronage, that is, of interest group politics. The sense of national outrage can be traced to the sacrilege, of making a matter of life and death, the salus populi such an object of mockery. Only one who truly despises and hates the citizens, that is, one's own people, can acquiesce to such a construction. The principle involved is one of inversion -- of karmic punishment, or moral retribution (for race slavery), applied on a societal and indiscriminate scale.

And the final mockery is that the notion itself (that race, in the words of the essay quoted in the above post, is primary, and slavery a social construct) -- that notion is entirely fabricated by the Abolitionists themselves. Jim Crow and Abolition were born together, in the American Northeast. To the Southerner of the era, slavery was the fact, and race the social construct (and therefore, slavery was natural). For the Abolitionist, Race is Natural, and Slavery the deduction. Yet, it is within this framework (of Jim Crow and Racialism) that Americans today find themselves trapped, as within the horizon imposed by Lincoln and the Abolitionists, at sword point.

To step outside this horizon we must, as Strauss indeed told us in the commentary on Concept of the Political, go back to Hobbes. But more than that -- Strauss really has no feel for this thing, being an English matter, and Schmitt, for all his Hobbesian scholarship seems also to have missed it -- we must go back to Bacon and Coke. Jefferson, as a partisan of Coke, certainly did. And that perhaps is why Jefferson, on the world's stage, is a greater man than Schmitt. He and Schmitt were on to the same thing, but the results of their respective work in jurisprudence, in their differences, are quite telling.

We must start with the principles of auctoritas and postestas, authority and power. In terms of Roman Imperium, these are easy to understand -- as military orders. Auctoritas is the power to issue an order, and potestas to carry it out. This is speaking, within the Legal Order, of the constitutional discharge of power conferred on officers of the state. The exception is a crisis of authority -- no one is competent, in such a crisis, to issue the orders that must be issued for the general welfare (or to decide which of several conflicting approaches is *the* approach). Bacon, unique among the jurists of his age, stumbled on to the 'power of the exception'. This is what Schmitt found, and learned so well, in Bacon's student Hobbes.

If government is, in fact, a form of pia fraus -- that is, a fraud we knowingly ask to be perpetrated on us, so that we might in submitting to the illusion in fact attain a security that doesn't really, in the sense of Natural Science, exist -- then there is no possible source of authority for such exceptional actions, as deciding the case of the Post Nati. One is constrained -- specifically, in Bacon's discovery, the lawyers charged with pretending to find law where in fact there is none are constrained -- only by what can be accepted, plausibly, by the potent political actors. In the last analysis, and long run, this means what is acceptable to the people, in their actual moral, or customary, status, and as a dominant whole.

Outside the sharp boundaries of actual positive law, lies a penumbra of potential law, a dynamic realm of might-have-beens that, given the right maneuvers, might be captured at the next crisis. This form of Baconian progress, played so skillfully and with death as consequence for every misstep, is the essence of the Parliamentary battle -- a battle with no legal foundation whatsoever, in point of actual fact, but successfully prosecuted, and the model for Jefferson's Revolution. The consequence of Bacon's strategy -- Civil War within a generation, of Jefferson's within two. In both cases, the will to pervert the constitution, by any means achievable in fact, wrenched the existing structure so far out of its norm of operation, that in fact only military struggle could decide, in the end, the outcome. The most dangerous game, indeed.

The duality of Theology and Politics that Schmitt sees and comments on, is in English Law enshrined in a real duality -- Civil Law is Roman and Ecclesiastical Law manquee, while Common Law is the customary Law of the non-Roman, non-French elements of the population, as dispensed by their French and Latinate overlords. The reversal by which Common Law, the Law of French Domination, is turned into Common Law, the bulwark of the English People, is a bit of legal leger de main accomplished by the likes of Coke and Bacon. This reversal is not unlike the current conversion of Jim Crow, as a legal bulwark of the White Race, into Political Correctness, a tool for its overthrow.

Such bifurcations and reversals arise in pairs, usually among the same people, as contrasting archetypes. In America, the pair was Abolitionism and Racialism, with each side punishing the other, while sharing an essentially identical worldview. An earlier episode is the struggle of Loyalist Commoner against Radical Commoner. In both cases, there is a new and emergent strain (the English Protestant, the Northern Racialist) and a violent counter reaction -- the Puritan or the Abolitionist. Our history focuses on the more colourful member of the pair, especially if the radicals are victorious and write the post-revolutionary propaganda, but the reactive type is always a reaction *to* the more conservative predecessor, who represents a half-step perhaps, towards the final revolution.

Yet, it is crucial to understand the sequence: first comes the Racial consciousness that there is a White Race, and *then* comes the horror that slavery, interpreted in terms of the new doctrine, is abhorrent. After that comes the military struggle, implied by the new consciousness, which mixes horror upon horror, as the Abolitionist struggles with his inner racial sense, and his bedazed opponent.

It is only in this derivative sense, that we can say Bacon's unleashing of the parliamentary struggle (under the tutelage of the more canny and conservative Coke), or White Racialism as found in the North, are the penultimate causes of society-scale political struggle, in the form of warfare.

REFERENCES ADDED:

James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774)

http://www.founding.com/library/lbody.cfm?id=204&parent=61

Notice his frequent citation of Calvin's Case and Bacon generally, as well as Richard Hooker, whose Ecclesiastical Polity, Book 1 (of 8), it cited extensively in his three volume post-Revolutionary lecture series, covering all of Law for first year students.

Wilson's Lectures on Law (1791) http://www.constitution.org/jwilson/jwilson.htm

Short summary of Wilson's works and historical importance: http://blog.mises.org/archives/006546.asp

Wilson, of course, represents Federalism, as one aspect, the more Baconian, of the Revolution. Jefferson represents the more conservative Cokian version. Neither are well-described by post bellum social constructions or Law. It neglects, however, to point out that he is author of the majority opinion of Chisholm v. Georgia (with Jay concurring), which was the direct occasion of the Eleventh Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisholm_v._Georgia This is of course, from a constitutional perspective and our topic, not unimportant.

[Thomas777]

Thanks Thomas, I look forward to your elaboration.


Its sort of a difficult question to pose and answer intelligibly. I think its fairly obvious that Romantic Nationalism generally, and to a lesser extent National Socialism, did away with the business of attempting to reconcile the inherent idiosyncracies of Enlightenment epistemological models of Politics.

Dasein, however conceptually elusive, seems to abolish rational contradictions in favor of evocative, sensuous, experiences that are temporally contingent and fundamentally irrational. How does this relate to Nationalism as expressed in the 20th century? I'm not entirely sure. What I do believe is that presenting Romantic Nationalism as merely a reactionary font of industrial mass-politics is improper...Heidegger was, first and foremost, an Aristotlean and post-War interpretations of his oeuvre have been colored by Derrida's ideological lens.

Mutuality of mind/aesthetic agreement seems to be made possible (not precluded) by Dasein.

[Roland]

First, I want to say that you have quite admirably transposed your ideas into something like a Schmittian idiom. It works well.

I don't want to continue to play the role of Schmitt apologist, but insofar as any of this is at all relevant to clarifying the concept of southern politics, it must be done, for it seems that you hinge your description of American (And therefore southern) politics on a critical reading of Schmitt's concept of the political, and concept of sovereignty; after all, that was the proposed topic of this thread. I gather that, in partial agreement with Strauss, you feel it sufficient to treat Bacon and Hobbes as representative of the salient aspects of Schmitt's political ideas. This is not sufficient; but I'm not sure we need another two pages of prolix expository essays on Schmitt's thought, so I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not we should cover these issues:

Schmitt's “decisionism” as formulated in opposition to the universal rationalism of Hobbes and Bacon
Schmitt's decisionism as nevertheless partially Hobbesian; and this is a result of a duality in Schmitt's reading of Hobbes – one that I have discussed in this thread. There is a personalistic, existential - concrete element – and a universalistic, natural-scientific element. The former aspect is supplemented by Schmitt's readings of De Maistre, Cortes, and Kierkegaard.
The difference between what you describe as “potential law” and Schmitt's concepts of sovereign decision and dictatorship.
Schmitt's various and sometimes conflicting definitions of legitimacy (vs. legality). (This flows into a concept of tradition, which, I think, might be important)
Schmitt's relationship to Romanticism (and therefore Spengler, Nietzsche etc.)If these issues are covered in detail, we can then resolve the question as to whether or not Schmitt's tradition is compatible – or at least coherent – in terms of you definition of Southern Politics. I have no reason to doubt your historical scholarship (if for no other reason than my own is severely limited); thus, the only aspect of this discussion I can comment on concerns whether or not you've applied Schmittian concepts properly - or at all.

Edit:
In light of your further elaboration of Southern politics, in which the sphere of the political is reached through the unity of the (not explicitly recognized) racial, we can now clarify Schmitt's relationship to National Socialism. Without question, Schmitt's brief affinity for National Socialism regarded the political maneuvering that occurred - ostensibly - on behalf of the German nation; Schmitt was not particularly enamored by the explicit affirmation of the racial (re: Abolitionists) as grounds for political unity (though Julien Freund indicates that Schmitt briefly entertained this concept after he abandoned Catholicism). We can further flesh this out with a discussion of Schmitt's relationship to Historicism and De Maistre's providence.

[Thomas777]

Its sort of a difficult question to pose and answer intelligibly. I think its fairly obvious that Romantic Nationalism generally, and to a lesser extent National Socialism, did away with the business of attempting to reconcile the inherent idiosyncracies of Enlightenment epistemological models of Politics.

Dasein, however conceptually elusive, seems to abolish rational contradictions in favor of evocative, sensuous, experiences that are temporally contingent and fundamentally irrational. How does this relate to Nationalism as expressed in the 20th century? I'm not entirely sure. What I do believe is that presenting Romantic Nationalism as merely a reactionary font of industrial mass-politics is improper...Heidegger was, first and foremost, an Aristotlean and post-War interpretations of his oeuvre have been colored by Derrida's ideological lens.

Mutuality of mind/aesthetic agreement seems to be made possible (not precluded) by Dasein.

I shifted discussion of Heidegger to its own thread so as not to hijack yours: http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=29919

Roland knows quite a bit about Junger and his relationship to Heidegger, and he was kind enough to add his $.02.

If you want to weigh in with your thoughts, its always appreciated.

[Macrobius]

It seems to be time to focus on the topic -- I've tried broad strokes to see what is interesting and what is not, and I think the central interest for the discussion is to focus narrowly on the one work by Schmitt, as we have discussed the tangential issues -- Strauss, Political Theology, Depoliticisation here and in a half dozen other threads.

So, I have identified the central domain of Southern (and indeed contemporary American) politics, in the construction of and struggle over Race, with its reflexes in immigration, affirmative action, white nationalism and allied movements, and so forth. I am sensible that I have not yet addressed Thomas' specific concern about Nationalism.

First, I want to say that you have quite admirably transposed your ideas into something like a Schmittian idiom. It works well.


I think Southern politics is a good test for Schmitt. I do not believe it is entirely reducible to regional interests or even the homogeneous of its dominant group. On the other hand, it would be challenging to define what is peculiar about 'Southern Politics' as actively contesting sovereignty of the Federal Government in fact, although this is the stated long term objective of the League of the South, as I understand Mr Hill's statements, and presumably of the csagov.org site.



...
I gather that, in partial agreement with Strauss, you feel it sufficient to treat Bacon and Hobbes as representative of the salient aspects of Schmitt's political ideas. This is not sufficient...


I find it hard to compare them, because I get a sense of Bacon and Hobbes as belonging to the same people I do, and I am not sure that either Schmitt or Strauss are catching all the nuances. Certainly, I am disinclined to apply Schmitt's continental theories, especially any concerning Westphalia or the phases of historical development on the continent, directly to Anglo-American political experience. There is a unity to the latter development that does not easily fit the paradigms offered of the former.


Schmitt's “decisionism” as formulated in opposition to the universal rationalism of Hobbes and Bacon


I certainly take your point here. More broadly, I see a disjuncture between political theories more traditional than Hobbes or Bacon, who are something of the vanguard, and Schmitt's point-like decider (as I commented, this reminds me of the abstract rational judge of Kant or at least of Rawl's reconstruction of Kantianism -- within the horizon, still, of Liberalism, as Strauss puts it).

How would one extend Schmitt's notion of Sovereignty down to the family level? It seems to me that the theatre of the Nation-State, with its warlike polemic, is not the only theatre of political life. What about the forum or the household? Perhaps we are making a Liberal assumption here, that private and public life are distinguishable absolutely, rather than being part of an ordered continuum from the 'small platoon' of the family through larger and larger scopes of social intercourse.

Schmitt gives us an experimentum crucis of the supreme case, and denominates that the entire polis -- but on what justification. I propose to examine his essay at length, but would like to highlight this -- the fractal nature of the political if you will -- as the part I see the least amenable to his claims. Sovereignty has analogues at all levels, but the supreme level is atypical of all the rest.


Schmitt's decisionism as nevertheless partially Hobbesian; and this is a result of a duality in Schmitt's reading of Hobbes – one that I have discussed in this thread. There is a personalistic, existential - concrete element – and a universalistic, natural-scientific element. The former aspect is supplemented by Schmitt's readings of De Maistre, Cortes, and Kierkegaard.


The question of essentialism vs. existentialism is crucial, for anyone working in the positivist tradition. It arises as forcefully for Aquinas, in his attempt to fit Aristotelianism into a Platonic, Dialectic framework, as it does for us moderns, who must reconcile the hyper-Aristotelianism of Comte, with its immanent and teleological essences, pluralism, Socialism, and other characteristic symptoms.


The difference between what you describe as “potential law” and Schmitt's concepts of sovereign decision and dictatorship.


Here I am attempting to elaborate some reflections on Harvey Wheeler's discussion of Bacon. I'll try to amplify this, though it may not be a central point.


Schmitt's various and sometimes conflicting definitions of legitimacy (vs. legality). (This flows into a concept of tradition, which, I think, might be important)


From my standpoint, 'Tradition' in the large is not just any 'handing down' from one generation to another, but specific handing down of an esoteric content, commonly known as 'Revelation'. 'Holy Tradition' is thus an objective term, refering to a single, unitary reality, which is attested in all societies. It is with reference to this objective that I claim Christianity is true and Holy Tradition valid. This may or may not coincide with anything Schmitt would mean by the term 'Tradition'. In the English-American experience, and especially in the context of legal education and Liberalism as it emerged in Scotland, this term would certainly be coloured by Hooker's discussion of Law and the Ecclesiastical Polity, i.e. Church politics as National politics.

It is essential, in discussing all Anglo-American politics, to understand the centrality, in the critical period of 1688 to 1776 (and before and after), of religion. This is rather different from the continental, which becomes 'secularised' after 1648. On the contrary, after 1688, English and American Whiggery, i.e., the vanguard and revolutionary party, ultimately both Federalist and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, who are two halves of a Whig schism, is defined with reference to Protestantism and its maintenance in the central political domain.


Schmitt's relationship to Romanticism (and therefore Spengler, Nietzsche etc.)[/LIST]


I would appreciate your elaboration of this. I see Romanticism as, primarily, a post-Jacobite attempt to construct an alternative, on non-religious (and ultimately Germanic-Racial) grounds, Conservatism. I read Disraeli and Scott as key figures in transmuting High and Dry Anglicanism into mass movements of public sentiment, discernible in Evangelicalism and the Oxford Movement both, that maintain or 'conserve' the earlier modes. These earlier modes were Jacobitism proper, the non-Jurors, and a bizarre sect called Hutchinsonianism that is little regarded, but was very important in the 18th century, especially in the Scottish Episcopal (non-Presbyterian) Church, but also highly influential in England and America. It can be recognized by a tendency to denigrate the Athanasian Creed from a High Church perspective -- this criterion helps us identify certain arch-Tories, such as Samuel Seabury (first bishop of the Episcopal Church), and Jonathan Boucher, as Hutchinsonians.


If these issues are covered in detail, we can then resolve the question as to whether or not Schmitt's tradition is compatible – or at least coherent – in terms of you definition of Southern Politics.... [T]he only aspect of this discussion I can comment on concerns whether or not you've applied Schmittian concepts properly - or at all.


I use Schmitt, as other historical authors, somewhat at face value. After all, they wrote books to convince us of their viewpoint. Although I welcome correction if I simply misunderstand them, in the end, there is a burden on the author to make his ideas intelligible, and as such we may take them up, test them for what they are worth, and apply them. I welcome your guidance however as I would not care to misrepresent Schmitt's ideas, or substitute my own.

You are correct I have not engaged Schmitt so far -- and indeed as I have hinted I have substantial criticism of his ideas, and see Southern Politics as a case where they may not so easily be applied. On the other hand, considering his essay may lead to insights in the topic of this forum.


Edit:
In light of your further elaboration of Southern politics, in which the sphere of the political is reached through the unity of the (not explicitly recognized) racial, we can now clarify Schmitt's relationship to National Socialism. Without question, Schmitt's brief affinity for National Socialism regarded the political maneuvering that occurred - ostensibly - on behalf of the German nation; Schmitt was not particularly enamored by the explicit affirmation of the racial (re: Abolitionists) as grounds for political unity (though Julien Freund indicates that Schmitt briefly entertained this concept after he abandoned Catholicism). We can further flesh this out with a discussion of Schmitt's relationship to Historicism and De Maistre's providence.

I look forward to your contribution here, if you have time. It should now be clear, from my other threads, that the framework in which I am working has three phases of 'racial consciousness' (or ethnic, or political, if you like). In the first stage, the primary contrast in the South is of Englishman and Negro as co-ordinate ethnicities. After 1688 and the Glorious Revolution, it is one in which the Negro 'plays' the role of Irish Catholic, of the inferior element in a political Ascendancy. In this period, the characteristic mode of expression is of the 'White Man' -- but as yet there is no 'White Race'. The final stage, starting in the Ohio valley and spreading southwards mostly along the Mississippi waterway, and only just beginning to penetrate the border states as of the 1850s and 1860, is the explicitly racialist consciousness of the Abolitionists, who recoil in horror at Slavery -- which indeed is Race Slavery for the first time -- and adopt Separtism and Apartheid as the logical consequence of their new racial anschaung.

In this context, we have the central domain of politics shifting from the religious to the racial in two giant leaps -- following somewhat the continental paradigm, but at a much later date, and in a very peculiar way.

Ultimately, the central issue of Southern politics, is that a war was fought by the Racialists to impose a Race-regime on the traditional, slave-based society of the South. They succeeded, and the new domain has become, for both the South and America as a whole, the arena of the White Race. Racism and Liberalism, in America, are co-aeval.

[Macrobius]

Going forward I propose a series of eight posts, corresponding to discussion of the eight sections of the essay under consideration. Before discussing the first part, however, I would like to notice a quote from the 4th:


A valid meaning is here attached to the word sovereignty, just as to the term entity. Both do not at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person's life or that a centralized system should destroy every other organization or corporation.

Schmitt of course is thinking of Totalitarianism, but really we do not need to be 'Totalitarian' to have an all-embracing notion of the political. If man is a 'social animal' (a zoon politikon, really), then surely 'the political' must indeed pervade his life, be of the essence of it. This is my first criticism of Schmitt's notion -- that it made in the teeth of the Aristotelianism he otherwise embraces.

Perhaps, in his pursuit of the 'essence' of the political (the specific difference that characterizes it) -- he has defined not politics but sovereignty?


If, in fact, the economic, cultural, or religious counterforces are so strong that they are in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility from their viewpoint, then these forces have in fact become the new substance of the political entity.


Now, here I rather agree with him -- and the religious was in such a position in 18th century Anglo-America. Our Westphalia is 1832 or 1865, not 1648, as on the continent.

Anyway....

In the first section, Schmitt is primarily concerned to distinguish the State from Politics. 'The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.' In explanation, in his note: 'The development can be traced from the absolute state of the eighteenth century via the neutral (noninterventionist) state of the nineteenth to the total state of the twentieth.' In this latter phrase, we see that he is speaking of German and continental history, not Anglo-American. Although we speak of the absolutism of the Stuarts, this was milder in America and never the 'despotic absolutism' of the Catholic states of Europe.

The central issue of our present day is 'Poltical Correctness' -- the pervasive sense that the political (that is, issues of Race and Patriarchy) must pervade the social. So perhaps we have reached the 'total state' that Schmitt experienced a century ago. Still, it is not the State and Society that have penetrated each other, but gradual extension of Racialism into the Social domain, either in the older Jim Crow form or the newer Affirmative Action and its reflexes, which pre-suppose a Racialist framework (albeit a reversed one).

If we are to regard Schmitt's analysis at all, we have something that has 'taken over' politics and itself become the decisive point, in the decisive domain. It is towards the enforcement of 'political correctness' that the whole apparatus of the State is being directed, but this is just consequence.

As for the 'Southern' -- it is partly aligned with this force (in so far as it makes central the Racialism of Jim Crow, the sovereign war-making power used to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, and the centrality of religion, still, only this time in a neo-evangelical protestantism rooted in the Romantic era). Alongside this, are a number of 'older central domains' -- the old English identity, attachment to 'Anglo-Normans' or 'Anglo-Celtic society', identification with the Confederacy and its political and sovereign challenge to the Consolidated Government, which then as now was Racialist in inspiration (and thus more aligned with the new-think of Calhoun's 1848-9 speeches, or the Texas Resolutions, than with the older currents of the East Coast and Deep South).

[Roland]

It seems to be time to focus on the topic -- I've tried broad strokes to see what is interesting and what is not, and I think the central interest for the discussion is to focus narrowly on the one work by Schmitt, as we have discussed the tangential issues -- Strauss, Political Theology, Depoliticisation here and in a half dozen other threads.

Your oblique approach to the subject confused me at first, but in the end I think it was a good idea. I think we should retain reference to other works by Schmitt, especially those that concern sovereignty and dictatorship, because it's difficult to speak of Southern Politics without reference to the Civil War, and therefore sovereignty. I think the Strauss references should be dropped, though, because there is scant evidence that Schmitt upheld any of Strauss' doctrines.

So, I have identified the central domain of Southern (and indeed contemporary American) politics, in the construction of and struggle over Race, with its reflexes in immigration, affirmative action, white nationalism and allied movements, and so forth. I am sensible that I have not yet addressed Thomas' specific concern about Nationalism.

As per the content of politics espoused by many of the founding fathers, a specifically liberal-economic interpretation of the duality of civil society and state seems to predominate. Indeed, in Jefferson we see the genesis of American universalism based on the axiom "as little politics as possible, as much economics as possible." In this case politics is devalued, and thereby, the political is dominated by economic interest. The maxim "whose economy, his region" reigns. How important this is to an analysis of Southern Politics is debatable, but I think we might as well keep it in mind.

How would one extend Schmitt's notion of Sovereignty down to the family level? It seems to me that the theatre of the Nation-State, with its warlike polemic, is not the only theatre of political life. What about the forum or the household? Perhaps we are making a Liberal assumption here, that private and public life are distinguishable absolutely, rather than being part of an ordered continuum from the 'small platoon' of the family through larger and larger scopes of social intercourse.

These are excellent questions/points. In the preface to the second edition of Political Theology, Schmitt introduces a third concept of jurisprudence to the two originally presented in the first edition. In the preface, Schmitt refers to "institutional" jurisprudence; later, this label will transform into "concrete-order" thinking. As you've astutely pointed out, Schmitt assumes the dualism of state and civil-society, of the political nation-state and apolitical society. Schmitt introduces concrete-order thinking to correct this oversight and situate his two works historically. Indeed, The Concept and Political Theology are both products of the Weimar era - an era wherein that duality was affirmed.



Concrete-order thinking focuses on the traditional social/institutional structures underlying law. In his constitutional analysis of the 3rd Reich, Schmitt maintains that society (and therefore the family) remain apolitical; however, in his analysis of other types of law, Schmitt does not presume this division. For instance, Schmitt identifies in the decisionism of Jean Bodin an adherence to concrete-order thinking:"Bodin's theory of sovereignty remains encompassed within traditional order thinking, it retains the family, Stand, and other legitimate orders and institutions, and the sovereign is a legitimate authority, namely the legitimate king." - On the Three Types of Juristic Though, 61
On Schmitt's mature account of sovereignty, then, a coherent and functional decisionism can only be elaborated in terms of a concept of he who decides qua sovereign embedded in a specific tradition/concrete-order.

The question of essentialism vs. existentialism is crucial, for anyone working in the positivist tradition. It arises as forcefully for Aquinas, in his attempt to fit Aristotelianism into a Platonic, Dialectic framework, as it does for us moderns, who must reconcile the hyper-Aristotelianism of Comte, with its immanent and teleological essences, pluralism, Socialism, and other characteristic symptoms.

Existentialism is a component of Schmitt's concept of sovereignty.

If we consider a constitution as strictly normative in the way that Jefferson and the founding fathers did; that is, as a system of laws designed in such a way that jurisprudence and governance become objective sciences in themselves - in that they are nothing but the application of laws - then certain existential issues arise. Schmitt argues both through historical example and reference to the pressing issues of Weimar politics, that there are certain truths or laws consistent with the constitution or order underlying that constitution, that nevertheless cannot be expressed in the constitution itself. The existence of these truths reveal a certain species of self-referential paradox that arises from an order posited on strict normativism: can the constitution contain prescriptions that allow for its own self-destruction or the destruction of the order that posited it? Consider, for example, that the Nazi party of America was, through all avenues of legality, elected into power. Such a party is obviously unconstitutional and quite prepared to eliminate the constitution, and yet its power is entirely consistent with system of laws embedded in the constitution.

Schmitt argues that such an unforeseeable existential intrusion into a well-functioning normative system requires the emergence of an indivisible, subjective element: the sovereign. The sovereign must decide whether or not such legal acquisition of power is, in fact, legitimately in the spirit of the political order that founded the constitution. For Schmitt, the necessity of such a sovereign reveals that normativism presupposes sovereign decision, and that the sovereign decision presupposes some concrete order or tradition. A well-functioning government would be aware of these issues.

In Political Theology, Schmitt secularizes Kierkegaard's theological decisionism and merges it with Hobbes' positivism. The question of whether something is good because God commands it or commanded by God because it is good was of importance to the Protestant Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was therefore specifically concerned with Kant's normative ethics in that they were, like the American constitution, supposed to be a consistent system of laws. Kierkegaard considers whether or not such an ethical system would be consistent with Protestant theology; obviously it was not. The story of Abraham provides a key for Kierkegaard, for in it, God erupts into the sphere of the ethical, and teleologically suspends the ethical by commanding Abraham to kill Isaac.

Analogously, Schmitt saw in the sovereign decision a non-legal, but nevertheless legitimate teleological suspension of the constitutional. The legitimacy would derive from the concrete-order, which included the tradition that the sovereign inhabited, as well as the unforeseeable issues presented by the eruption of the existential situation.

From my standpoint, 'Tradition' in the large is not just any 'handing down' from one generation to another, but specific handing down of an esoteric content, commonly known as 'Revelation'. 'Holy Tradition' is thus an objective term, refering to a single, unitary reality, which is attested in all societies.

Schmitt, I believe, considered Natural Law to be knowable to all people and cultures throughout time - regardless of their knowledge of scripture; however, he still believed that there could be variations in posited law, as well as the nature of concrete-orders. This owes to his association with Catholicism.

I would appreciate your elaboration of this. I see Romanticism as, primarily, a post-Jacobite attempt to construct an alternative, on non-religious (and ultimately Germanic-Racial) grounds, Conservatism. I read Disraeli and Scott as key figures in transmuting High and Dry Anglicanism into mass movements of public sentiment, discernible in Evangelicalism and the Oxford Movement both, that maintain or 'conserve' the earlier modes. These earlier modes were Jacobitism proper, the non-Jurors, and a bizarre sect called Hutchinsonianism that is little regarded, but was very important in the 18th century, especially in the Scottish Episcopal (non-Presbyterian) Church, but also highly influential in England and America. It can be recognized by a tendency to denigrate the Athanasian Creed from a High Church perspective -- this criterion helps us identify certain arch-Tories, such as Samuel Seabury (first bishop of the Episcopal Church), and Jonathan Boucher, as Hutchinsonians.

I partially elaborated Schmitt's understanding of Romanticism here (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=312458&postcount=4) and here (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=313540&postcount=8) in the context of this thread (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21039). Schmitt draws heavily on Kierkegaard for his critique. These posts need to be supplemented by reference to the Romantic elements in Schmitt's thought, as well as the Romantic elements in modern liberal thought.

I use Schmitt, as other historical authors, somewhat at face value. After all, they wrote books to convince us of their viewpoint. Although I welcome correction if I simply misunderstand them, in the end, there is a burden on the author to make his ideas intelligible, and as such we may take them up, test them for what they are worth, and apply them. I welcome your guidance however as I would not care to misrepresent Schmitt's ideas, or substitute my own.

I must admit this is a little perplexing coming from you. I assumed the main reason that I was participating in this thread was because you claimed not to inhabit Schmitt's tradition. I, on the other hand, have gone to great lengths to understand his tradition. I assumed that I would supplement the parts that were familiar to you (positivism, authoritarian liberalism, classicism) with the more Germanic parts (existentialism, Romanticism, German Communitarianism). I have no doubt that your comprehension level far surpasses mine, so I thought this would be the extent of my involvement.

I look forward to your contribution here, if you have time. It should now be clear, from my other threads, that the framework in which I am working has three phases of 'racial consciousness' (or ethnic, or political, if you like). In the first stage, the primary contrast in the South is of Englishman and Negro as co-ordinate ethnicities. After 1688 and the Glorious Revolution, it is one in which the Negro 'plays' the role of Irish Catholic, of the inferior element in a political Ascendancy. In this period, the characteristic mode of expression is of the 'White Man' -- but as yet there is no 'White Race'. The final stage, starting in the Ohio valley and spreading southwards mostly along the Mississippi waterway, and only just beginning to penetrate the border states as of the 1850s and 1860, is the explicitly racialist consciousness of the Abolitionists, who recoil in horror at Slavery -- which indeed is Race Slavery for the first time -- and adopt Separtism and Apartheid as the logical consequence of their new racial anschaung.

In this context, we have the central domain of politics shifting from the religious to the racial in two giant leaps -- following somewhat the continental paradigm, but at a much later date, and in a very peculiar way.

Ultimately, the central issue of Southern politics, is that a war was fought by the Racialists to impose a Race-regime on the traditional, slave-based society of the South. They succeeded, and the new domain has become, for both the South and America as a whole, the arena of the White Race. Racism and Liberalism, in America, are co-aeval.

I think we covered some of this last night in the Shoutbox. I'll try to present a coherent post on the topic in the future; I think I can orchestrate it in such a way that it responds to your second post (the one above this post).

[Ravenheart]

Schmitt, I believe, considered Natural Law to be knowable to all people and cultures throughout time - regardless of their knowledge of scripture; however, he still believed that there could be variations in posited law, as well as the nature of concrete-orders. This owes to his association with Catholicism.

Such a position is indeed in line with Biblical scripture (Romans 2);

"12All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)"

Natural law is written in the heart of men.

[Roland]

I forgot to mention in my tangent on existentialism the existential/non-rational element that Schmitt imputes to the political. This certainly should be covered at some point.

[Macrobius]

I forgot to mention in my tangent on existentialism the existential/non-rational element that Schmitt imputes to the political. This certainly should be covered at some point.

Thanks for the link to the Romanticism thread, which I had missed, and your comments -- I'll try to give a substantive reply this weekend. I'll also try to start or find a 'books' thread, where participants in this subforum can post book recommendations.

It is interesting that he was putting existentialism and Catholicism together (maybe not harmoniously). That is a theme Maritain picked up on later, in reference to the 'Third Scholastic' that got going mid-20th century. I wonder if there were any connections. Etienne Gilson, Maritain, and of course Coplestone were de rigeur when I was in High School.

[Macrobius]

This weekend I would like to answer Roland's post and start the discussion on section 2 (Friend and Enemy). Perhaps we can keep discussion on each section open for a week before moving on -- not to proscribe other discussion, but to re-assure stragglers (like myself!) that their comments are welcome and timely.

In any event, before hitting those two points, I would like to, in a very broad sense, touch upon the place of 'The Southern' in Western politics generally. Setting aside all the stories that are told, with polemic intent, in history books, if we look at self-accounts of 'The West' over the millennium or so, we observe two salient features:

1. Most writers after the event are simply and completely obsessed with the fall of the Western Empire as *the* fulcrum event in Western History -- the cataclysm dividing Ancient from Medieval-Modern, say. The West's self-identity is the self-conscious Christian State that recovered from that event, and its survivours, heirs and assigns.

2. Only in the past hundred years or so has the Fall of the West ceased to be a determining factor in flow of historical events.

To this last one might add a minor point: the 'no longer matters' happened first in the Anglo-American sphere, about a century before it spread to the continent. The theoreticians of the Economic-Technical perspective that, only in retrospect, we call the Enlightenment.

In other words, in Anglo-America, the 18th century, with a 25 year extension in either direction, is the first modern century, whereas in (Schmitt's) Europe, it is the 19th, and that especially after Napoleonic wars. In other words, for Europe, the modern world is no older than Marx. For Anglo-America, including Ireland and Scotland in that somewhat unsatisfactory term, it is about as old as Swift. This means that both Anglo-America and Europe look back to the generation of Smith and Hume, and through them, to Frances Hutchenson, whom Smith allegedly cribbed and Hume overthrew, through the lenses of economists or of Kant.

First of all, we need a broad view of history to see why these two salient points in fact matter, or rather at first matter but then don't. If we consider the Hellenistic culture generally in its maximum extent, it is easy to see why 'The Dark Ages' and 'The Modern World' stand out. Hellenism, as opposed to the Hellenes who formed its hearth-culture, extended to the entire northern land mass, with economic (trade artifact) influence from Ireland to Japan. In other words, only the East Asian civilisations of China, India (mostly), and to a lesser extent Japan, were excepted.

This 'maximum extent' (of civilised White influence, if you like) was only extended outside the original Hellenistic boundaries on three occasions -- the Roman conquest of the Gauls and Northern Africa or Carthage, the post-Dark Age Christianisation of the Germanic and Slavic tribes, and the early modern spread of White, Hellenistic, European, Christian civilisation to the New World. The previous wave ceases to be important when it is overtaken by a later one in the same area. Finally of course, we have a fourth wave, of technological-economic civilisation to the East Asian core and to the Indian subcontinent.

Hellenistic civilisation has been cross-cut by two major divisions, which somewhat correlate. The first is the tendency to 'lose' periodically those portions that are more eastern, semitic, and Persian. Thus, the Muslim areas can really be treated as confined to the Hellenistic sphere -- with Muslim expansion in Africa and India being relatively recent, and a precursor to Western, Hellenistic expansion generally. The spread of 'technological culture' has overrun those areas entirely.

The second opposition is well stated by Tertullian: 'What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?' This is the root of the 'Science vs. Relgion' conflict that so mesmerises American and Southern politics. Pagan metaphysics vs. Christian theology -- and politics is, for Aristotle or at least the Stoic-Aristotelian scholastic synthesis in the West, post-Physics and thus Metaphysics. Thus, we arrive at MacIntyre's 'Two Traditions' of Augustinian and Aristotelian, as the major tension, not between arbitrary traditions, but *within* the Hellenistic Basin, which is now the World Basin.

It is no accident that the two major syntheses of Jerusalem and Athens, Aquinas and the 'Liberal' Scottish tradition, have been the basis for world-expanding civilisations. Aquinas summarises a response to Muslim iconoclasm, in the form of Averroism, and builds on the 'Germanic' civilisation of the Late Middle Ages -- it is the first flush of what Spengler calls Faustian. Hume and Smith, in creating the 'Liberal', are really pro-Liberals, leaving aside the ironic use that term must have, in the context of Western Civilisation. 'Natural Law' theory has always been subversive of the Roman legal order, as indeed 'Common Law' has been. But the smoke and mirrors need not blind us to the political reality, which is the expansion of culture on a Hellenistic basis -- and thus a spread of the Conflict of Jerusalem and Athens -- to global scale.

What is Southern Civilisation? There is a tendency, in American politics, to treat the New World as a blank slate. There is a certain charm in taking folk culture, in a certain setting, as a given -- the folk have no memory of historical events other than their own. This is the Liberal view of Southern Politics -- it posits a relativist culture, on a par with any other culture, and answerable only to its individual self-identity. But in the broader picture of Civilisation, Southern Culture is an articulated part of a world movement. In one sense, it is conquered, and in another, it is technologically supreme, with its sons flying sorties over Iraq, distant Mesopotamia, reigning sovereignty from the skies, as we speak. What paradox is this?

The question of politics, of what or who shall be supreme and sovereign in the political arena that is specifically Southern, has a dual aspect because the modern world has overtaken the South. The older enframing of the question asks how the South relates to post-Roman Western Civilisation. In that regard, the specifically Southern is certainly part of the Lost Cause, which is to say, simply, the older world. The newer context is of course what role do Southerners play, in existential fact, in the technological and economic World Empire?

Behind both these questions are the rather deeper, metaphysical ones, -- what *do* Jerusalem and Athens have to do with one another? And what *is* the modern world about? Roughly, these come down to, should the South listen to Hume, Smith, and Jefferson still? Has Liberalism as it attempted to embody those ideas panned out? On what basis might we oppose Liberalism, if it hasn't? These questions have much scope and interest, both from a critico-intellectual point, and ultimately from an existential and political view.

[Macrobius]

For those who find it easier to follow a debate if the polemics are highlighted. My post above addresses the question, 'What are the victory conditions in Southern Politics?' -- it is not enough to ask who is Sovereign, but one must ask also, 'of what'?

In particular, I have an eye to three edge cases of 'Southern Triumph'. First, if sovereignty is to be construed as having the biggest stick and using it --

1. Would black savages ruling Southern territory count as 'Southern Politics'?

I don't think many members of this forum would say yes. I would give that reason that Blacks in America are only marginally part of Hellenistic civilisation (even less so than Black Muslims in Europe and Africa). Their strongest point of attachment is Christianity. This would be a case in which the civilisation was expelled from its territory, not a case in which its politics took a particular tern.

2. Would rule by atheistic (or at least non- or anti-Christian) but White Hellenists count?

This is Fade's preferred scenario. I do not think it counts as a desired outcome by any previous generation of Southerners. It amounts to, at most, the triumph of Athens over Jerusalem, if that can happen at this late stage of essentially Hellenistic civilisation. I suspect it would be mere savagery, like the previous scenario, only without even the influence of Christian Blacks. It would test the thesis that White tribalism, of a pagan sort, can be comparable to Ancient Greece -- I think that wishful thinking, in the modern world, and vastly dangerous.

One has to ask, in this scenario, if rule by White Marxists is equally acceptable? This was more or less achieved in the Soviet Union, depending on the rather quixotic assessment required of the Whiteness of Jews (and by implication, a parallel assessment for the Southern case). Again, my suspicion is that to the extent this scenario is real, it is pro-Marxist, as indeed all Modernism has a Marxist, Socialist tinge. 'Liberalism' is a transitional phase to the full-blown economic and technological product.

3. Would rule by Bible-thumping Zionist Christian Whites count?

This is close to reality, in a way that #2 isn't. It amounts to a triumph of Jerusalem over Athens, which makes Zionism vs. Muslim, i.e., a semitic battle to the death in the Hellenistic basin, the primary political agenda. I count this as 'Southern Victory' condition, but only marginally.

In reality, I would prefer to limit 'victory conditions' (and thus sovereignty as being at all interesting) to the White, Christian, European-American, Hellenistic side, neither driving Jerusalem nor Athens to extinction as facets of Western culture. This may be old fashioned of me, but destroying the People is not the same as ruling over them, and I think we might be permitted to insist on survival as a pre-requisite for any sort of 'victory'.

[Macrobius]

So we have come around, as the previous posts hint, to discussing a set of distinctions: friend vs. enemy, the social vs. the political, and public vs. private. I have a number of bones to pick here with Schmitt. First, as I hinted above, whether his notion of sovereignty truly takes into account the multilevel, almost fractal, nature of human society. His construction of 'Sovereignty' (as the central existential fact of Politics) rests upon the friend/enemy distinction as constitutive of politics. This latter, in turn, rests on public enemy, which is not, he says, the private enemy. Ultimately, the edifice stands or falls on 'public' and 'private'.

A few points of criticism:

-- 'private' and 'public' are given novel construction here, and concede to Liberalism a point that should be contested. The original of publicus and privatus is a class distinction, between Commoner (not the Roman Mob, but the enfranchised, perhaps even ingenuous Citizen who is one of the Populus, and therefore a member of the poor but honourable half of the S.P.Q.R.) and the Aristocrat. Private Law is the harsh law of the Plantation master, the Dominus, whipping his slave boy. Public Law is the law of the People in Town. This has nothing to do with echthros vs. polemios, so the distinction is false as constructed.

-- the enemy of the State, in a certain period of Rome, is indeed the enemy of the People, but this is when the Republic is in the grips of interest groups, and does not define politics as a whole -- it belongs inescapably to the sub-Gracchan (as Spengler calls it) and Caesarian period.

-- the locus of economics is, for most of Western history, the productive household. The economical is not a new phase of history, but what Schmitt points out is that at a certain point -- the modern point I call it -- the household shifts from the legacy homestead to the modern office and factory. 'Economic' life is a communal life in which households and families are no longer congruent. The 'private house' lives on, as a discarded relic of the Aristocratic era, more and more uncertain of its role or fate in the existential whole, which is Office Life, School Life, and Factory Life.

-- Marxists argue that the Proletarian must overwhelm both the Public and the (relic of) the Private. This provides a problematic tertium quid for the basic public/private distinction. The assimilation of the Public to the Mob *is* Modernism, Liberalism, Socialism, and Marxism. To assume Marxism in a critique of it self-contradictory. It denies from the very beginning the Jeffersonian Public, or even the Private Bourgeoisie, both of which are real historical facts in American history.

-- Politics is an Aristotelian word, and has primary reference to the City-State, to politeia. In Constantine's time, the Republic, as a Christian Empire, is politeuma -- and the Emperor's Household, the Ecumenical sphere, is Economicus to the Emperor's Dominus. This is, for most of history, what the Res Publica of the Roman People was, including the late Roman Anglo-Latins of Southern Virginia -- to tip my political hand a bit.

To assimilate 'politics' and 'republic' to the Westphalian Nation-State, even by way of distinction but always with an eye to answering 'What is the State' as object of the distinction, is to step into the Stoic notion of the World State, which is where Natural Law rules -- very Scottish, this step. The Nation-State is just the Stoic Cosmopolitan State (or the Republic of Letters, or the Scientific Community) cut down to Westphalian size, a World divided (between Protestant, German princes and Catholic ones). Even that step, false as it was, is obsolete in the modern Socialist (and Nationalist) sense. Lincoln and Bismark's Nation-State are not Shakespeare's 'This England' nor are they even Marlborough's and Nelson's Britain nor it's First Empire, rent on these shores in bloody Revolution, though they are much closer to the latter.

Friend vs. Foe is indeed constitutive, but it begs the question: Who *we* are (and what is the object of sovereignty). If 'we' means 'we Liberals' -- then a critique of Liberalism along polemic lines is paradoxical. Yet, we are Liberals -- what else do you call children of the Enlightenment? We Scots? We Socialists? We Whites? The White Racialists won the War against the White Racists. There is nothing specifically Southern about that! The Northern Public defeated the Southern Private -- so that makes the South the White Public's enemy. No luck that way! You cannot define a Politics of Us vs. Them, where Us is Our Own Enemy by assumption.

Finally, about Society. Schmitt was a student of Weber, a sociologist, working in a field defined by Comte, Sociology. This use of the word 'society' is novel. Formerly, socii were one's cousins, by extension to the State, the word means 'allies' -- allied tribes, as the Latins were to the Romans. Society could mean one's circle of friends, good society, high society, or it could mean an alliance of nations. It could not mean: Socialism, Society vs. Politics, Sociology. This requires the extension of the Social to a particular alliance, the alliance presumed among the Proles, in the construction of Comte's Society of Man, with its Religion of Man. We are better discarding the whole notion, but if we must have it, we should remember the sequence of 7 metasciences that goes with it (in the Aristotelian, Stoic order of them of course). See my longer post on Liberty and Liberalism.

Societas is thus similar to Comitas, comity, in that good society and comity are what one seeks in friends, companions, cousins and allies. Surely it is Society, not Politics, that defines one's friends! I conclude that what Schmitt has done is given a novel construction to the word 'politics', by making it to mean what the novel, Positivist, use of Society meant, the venue of de-politicised struggle, or 'friendly' economic competition. But this is not a critique of Liberalism -- rather, its assumption.

Translating what Schmitt has said into the older vocabulary (to use MacIntyre's procedure for Traditions), we see that Schmitt is saying 'Politics is the subject dependent on the distinction of the Social vs. the non-Social'.

[Macrobius]

Finally, until next week, unless there are responses and I have time this weekend to answer them, the promised response to Roland:

...I think we should retain reference to other works by Schmitt, especially those that concern sovereignty and dictatorship, because it's difficult to speak of Southern Politics without reference to the Civil War, and therefore sovereignty. I think the Strauss references should be dropped, though, because there is scant evidence that Schmitt upheld any of Strauss' doctrines.

That's fine. We will save Strauss to the very end, if there is anything left to say at that point. :)


As per the content of politics espoused by many of the founding fathers, a specifically liberal-economic interpretation of the duality of civil society and state seems to predominate. Indeed, in Jefferson we see the genesis of American universalism based on the axiom "as little politics as possible, as much economics as possible." In this case politics is devalued, and thereby, the political is dominated by economic interest. The maxim "whose economy, his region" reigns. How important this is to an analysis of Southern Politics is debatable, but I think we might as well keep it in mind.

Important for Schmitt: the 'owner' of a productive resource is simply he who decides to what end and how it shall be employed. This is the economical-household decision, and is just as constituent of the Polity as anything else, and formerly made by the Householder, the Dominus, whose exercise was patriarchal sovereignty. Again, why must the Politicus be the ultimate Statesman only? Schmitt is too narrow -- deciding occurs at all levels -- and too general. The Politicus is in the genus of Decider, and so deciding cannot be his Specific difference!


These are excellent questions/points. In the preface to the second edition of Political Theology, Schmitt introduces a third concept of jurisprudence to the two originally presented in the first edition.


I found Political Theology a compelling and interesting work, along with the other essay in Concept -- hence my dithering over which to discuss first.


In the preface, Schmitt refers to "institutional" jurisprudence; later, this label will transform into "concrete-order" thinking.


I have (independently) posited something similar, in my 'Jurisdiction theory of Truth' thread -- at least institutional continuity of 'venue' as the key to understanding how Polities can survive constitutional, territorial, and demographic change -- all of which are problematic for us vs. them theory, except constitutional (form of government) change, which is the least drastic.


As you've astutely pointed out, Schmitt assumes the dualism of state and civil-society, of the political nation-state and apolitical society. Schmitt introduces concrete-order thinking to correct this oversight and situate his two works historically. Indeed, The Concept and Political Theology are both products of the Weimar era - an era wherein that duality was affirmed.


I am certainly interested in the concrete order and not fond of the utopian side of rationalism. It is not clear to me that Hobbes is so very Rationalist, by this measure, BTW. Rationalism, as in managerial planning in a technocracy, may be a projection backwards. Socialist Planners love to find antecedents for themselves in History. Largely, I find these references illusory and vain.


Concrete-order thinking focuses on the traditional social/institutional structures underlying law.


I see such venues as important points of reference for the less intellectual among us -- the habit of obedience tends to adhere to institutions and rituals. This provides a level of continuity that can even jump cross ethnic lines, or migrate from place to place, if the 'institution' and 'ritual' is not too tied up in a particular local. I argue that such venues are connected to Law -- essentially, the attachment of Law and procedure to a particular court, which may find its continuity in a corporate person/parson, of course, later a corporation of more than one person. But behind the Corporation is the older Curia (as also with Parliament and the King's Council/Counsel).


In his constitutional analysis of the 3rd Reich, Schmitt maintains that society (and therefore the family) remain apolitical; however, in his analysis of other types of law, Schmitt does not presume this division. For instance, Schmitt identifies in the decisionism of Jean Bodin an adherence to concrete-order thinking:"Bodin's theory of sovereignty remains encompassed within traditional order thinking, it retains the family, Stand, and other legitimate orders and institutions, and the sovereign is a legitimate authority, namely the legitimate king." - On the Three Types of Juristic Though, 61
On Schmitt's mature account of sovereignty, then, a coherent and functional decisionism can only be elaborated in terms of a concept of he who decides qua sovereign embedded in a specific tradition/concrete-order.


Three Types is on the short list -- but does he correlate these with Comte's Three Stages?


Existentialism is a component of Schmitt's concept of sovereignty.


I think this will happen in any Aristotelian-Augustinian dialectic. I have already cited Maritain's conflation of Existentialism and Aquinas. My reference to MacIntyre is also explicit here.


If we consider a constitution as strictly normative in the way that Jefferson and the founding fathers did; that is, as a system of laws designed in such a way that jurisprudence and governance become objective sciences in themselves - in that they are nothing but the application of laws - then certain existential issues arise.


I'm not sure Jefferson, as a follower of Coke, was purely what you say. Honestly, that sounds more like Federalism with its Mayflower Compact and Covenanteer background. Jefferson was well-acquainted with Equity Law and its history in the Bacon-Coke era. Jefferson is a rationalist and the natural law rhetoric is there, but I don't think that's *all* of Jefferson. It might be all of Adams or Hamilton, though. 'Federalist' contains the word 'Covenant' for a very specific, historical reason, that has to do with Presbyterianism. Jefferson was strongly influenced by this, but not himself 'of' it, so to speak. His political effectiveness seems to have been the ability to synthesise his mother's side -- Anglican gentry -- with his Father's, rugged frontiersman and Yeoman, in a political context (Parson's Cause) that pitted Presbyterians and Baptist/Quakers against Anglicans.

BTW, if what I have to say about Bacon confuses you, just go read Harvey Wheeler instead. 90% of what I say is just re-iterating his points. I have a few additions in regard to Hobbes and Strauss (and by reference to Schmitt), but they are minor additions. The centrality of the Post Nati case, Wilson's importance in using it to frame the Constitution, and the Bacon vs. Coke rivalry, are all key background to the American Revolution.


Schmitt argues both through historical example and reference to the pressing issues of Weimar politics, that there are certain truths or laws consistent with the constitution or order underlying that constitution, that nevertheless cannot be expressed in the constitution itself.


Jefferson's baggage, in this case, would be Whig polemic about what the constitution was. In their case, the central polemic was arguing the justness of William of Orange's intervention in the Glorious Revolution. Macaulay wrote a three volume history called 'History of England'. It covered exactly 5 years of English history. No prizes for guessing which 5. It is really all that matters in the Whig Interpretation.


The existence of these truths reveal a certain species of self-referential paradox that arises from an order posited on strict normativism: can the constitution contain prescriptions that allow for its own self-destruction or the destruction of the order that posited it? Consider, for example, that the Nazi party of America was, through all avenues of legality, elected into power. Such a party is obviously unconstitutional and quite prepared to eliminate the constitution, and yet its power is entirely consistent with system of laws embedded in the constitution.


Well, to a certain extent I would say it doesn't matter, since if you go against the salus populi you will be ignored anyway. I argue that the polemical scene for such fantasies is invariably party propaganda, whether of British Whigs or Nazis or Marxists. It is possible for a constitutional order to dissolve into anarchy. All sane people realise this is bad, like a pandemic disease. Human nature does not let such states long persist however, as Man is indeed a social animal, and God sees that the sword is not given in vain, not even to usurpers, tyrants, and would-be anarchists.


Schmitt argues that such an unforeseeable existential intrusion into a well-functioning normative system requires the emergence of an indivisible, subjective element: the sovereign. The sovereign must decide whether or not such legal acquisition of power is, in fact, legitimately in the spirit of the political order that founded the constitution. For Schmitt, the necessity of such a sovereign reveals that normativism presupposes sovereign decision, and that the sovereign decision presupposes some concrete order or tradition. A well-functioning government would be aware of these issues.


He is on solid ground, from a Traditionalist and Conservative perspective. Normativism is, I think, not something you can find back in the 17th or 18th century. I think it is more the rule-based theories of the 19th. I would like to see this argued at least -- I do not find the Rationalist barren, utopian thinkers.


In Political Theology, Schmitt secularizes Kierkegaard's theological decisionism and merges it with Hobbes' positivism. The question of whether something is good because God commands it or commanded by God because it is good was of importance to the Protestant Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was therefore specifically concerned with Kant's normative ethics in that they were, like the American constitution, supposed to be a consistent system of laws. Kierkegaard considers whether or not such an ethical system would be consistent with Protestant theology; obviously it was not. The story of Abraham provides a key for Kierkegaard, for in it, God erupts into the sphere of the ethical, and teleologically suspends the ethical by commanding Abraham to kill Isaac.


I would guess Comte's schema of the Sciences (and Sociology's place in it, as the culmination of the Ethical and Moral), would be important here. The older view has Physics (all of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology) as the domain of the professional Doctor, the Ethical as the domain of the Lawyer, and the Metaphysical as the domain of the Theologian. Thus, society has articulated professional scientists to cover all the Positivist subjects, and has no need of Sociologists. The invention of the Social sphere, and implication of a need for Sociologists to elucidate Society's Laws, is a 19th century novelty.

It is certainly curious to see such a Comtian, Positivist view injected with decisionism (which I suspect is Hobbes showing through).


Analogously, Schmitt saw in the sovereign decision a non-legal, but nevertheless legitimate teleological suspension of the constitutional. The legitimacy would derive from the concrete-order, which included the tradition that the sovereign inhabited, as well as the unforeseeable issues presented by the eruption of the existential situation.


I'm not sure this differs so much from Bacon's view of Equity Law, as reflected in Hobbes. Equity is seen (invented) as the singular act of sovereign, as opposed to the rule-based approximate sovereign will of Law and its (imperial) constitutions.


Schmitt, I believe, considered Natural Law to be knowable to all people and cultures throughout time - regardless of their knowledge of scripture; however, he still believed that there could be variations in posited law, as well as the nature of concrete-orders. This owes to his association with Catholicism.


Natural Law theory is a big topic. My standard observation is that Roman Law posits a Natural Law inferior to both Law-of-Nations (gentile Law, tribal Law, Common Law), which is in turn inferior to Civil or Municipal Law. The use of Natural Law acts, in the western, Catholic, Tradition, to invert this schema, which is implicit in Canon Law, and eventually it gets used to overthrow Catholic hegemony. The crucial move is made by importing Stoic theories of Natural Law, and positing a superior Cosmopolitan State (of rationalist intellectuals) in opposition to that of the Empire or the Church. This latter, 'academia' as we now call it, is the breeding ground of the modern world.


I partially elaborated Schmitt's understanding of Romanticism here (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=312458&postcount=4) and here (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=313540&postcount=8) in the context of this thread (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21039). Schmitt draws heavily on Kierkegaard for his critique. These posts need to be supplemented by reference to the Romantic elements in Schmitt's thought, as well as the Romantic elements in modern liberal thought.


I will read with interest!



I must admit this is a little perplexing coming from you. I assumed the main reason that I was participating in this thread was because you claimed not to inhabit Schmitt's tradition. I, on the other hand, have gone to great lengths to understand his tradition. I assumed that I would supplement the parts that were familiar to you (positivism, authoritarian liberalism, classicism) with the more Germanic parts (existentialism, Romanticism, German Communitarianism). I have no doubt that your comprehension level far surpasses mine, so I thought this would be the extent of my involvement.


Thanks -- I see those as important contributions. What I meant is that we have a situation like that outlined by MacIntyre, in which translation between two Traditions is called for (though I reserve the right to relate the Continental and Insular traditions!) In this case, there are two levels of analysis -- one in which there are two, relatively true, accounts. But behind that is 'ultimate Truth' -- which I take to be not Metaphysics but Theology -- and in that sense there is not a pluralism of relative truths, in the Positivist sense, at all.

[Roland]

You've provided much food for thought here; I definitely don't want to forget about this thread, but I can't see myself putting too much time into it for a while. Perhaps Thomas might be able to weigh in?

I have put myself on hiatus from the Schmitt obsession until at least thanksgiving - perhaps over that break I will contribute something here.

[Roland]

I didn't forget this thread. I'll try to respond soon.

[Roland]

In other words, in Anglo-America, the 18th century, with a 25 year extension in either direction, is the first modern century, whereas in (Schmitt's) Europe, it is the 19th, and that especially after Napoleonic wars. In other words, for Europe, the modern world is no older than Marx.

Could you elaborate a little more here?

This may be old fashioned of me, but destroying the People is not the same as ruling over them, and I think we might be permitted to insist on survival as a pre-requisite for any sort of 'victory'.

Agreed. I believe you referred to this as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

-- 'private' and 'public' are given novel construction here, and concede to Liberalism a point that should be contested. The original of publicus and privatus is a class distinction, between Commoner (not the Roman Mob, but the enfranchised, perhaps even ingenuous Citizen who is one of the Populus, and therefore a member of the poor but honourable half of the S.P.Q.R.) and the Aristocrat. Private Law is the harsh law of the Plantation master, the Dominus, whipping his slave boy. Public Law is the law of the People in Town. This has nothing to do with echthros vs. polemios, so the distinction is false as constructed.

The distinction between internal and external enmity is not a juristic or classist distinction but rather a relationship of groups to other groups, and groups to their members, respectively.

...assimilate 'politics' and 'republic' to the Westphalian Nation-State

I'm not sure Schmitt does this. Could you elaborate?

Friend vs. Foe is indeed constitutive, but it begs the question: Who *we* are (and what is the object of sovereignty). If 'we' means 'we Liberals' -- then a critique of Liberalism along polemic lines is paradoxical. Yet, we are Liberals -- what else do you call children of the Enlightenment? We Scots? We Socialists? We Whites? The White Racialists won the War against the White Racists. There is nothing specifically Southern about that! The Northern Public defeated the Southern Private -- so that makes the South the White Public's enemy. No luck that way! You cannot define a Politics of Us vs. Them, where Us is Our Own Enemy by assumption.

To be political is just to be in a specific dispositional state toward another group. The content of the political is not relevant in the essay. What is important is that in a special sense, "we" or "us" presupposes a "them." Schmitt doesn't do much philosophy here; he leaves that to Hegel.

The point you've made here about the supposition of a "we liberals" is, in some sense, the point that Schmitt attempts to drive home in the Concept and elsewhere: that the nature and assumptions of liberalism preclude a recognition of an "us" and therefore a "them." The actual political unities in liberal society - and we can be sure that there are more than one - hide their enmity in moral or economic language.

Finally, about Society. Schmitt was a student of Weber, a sociologist, working in a field defined by Comte, Sociology. This use of the word 'society' is novel. Formerly, socii were one's cousins, by extension to the State, the word means 'allies' -- allied tribes, as the Latins were to the Romans. Society could mean one's circle of friends, good society, high society, or it could mean an alliance of nations. It could not mean: Socialism, Society vs. Politics, Sociology. This requires the extension of the Social to a particular alliance, the alliance presumed among the Proles, in the construction of Comte's Society of Man, with its Religion of Man. We are better discarding the whole notion, but if we must have it, we should remember the sequence of 7 metasciences that goes with it (in the Aristotelian, Stoic order of them of course). See my longer post on Liberty and Liberalism.

I read that post a long time ago, I'll read it again soon. I'm not so sure Schmitt assumes a sociological perspective explicitly, though his approach to jurisprudence is empirical and historical.

Societas is thus similar to Comitas, comity, in that good society and comity are what one seeks in friends, companions, cousins and allies. Surely it is Society, not Politics, that defines one's friends! I conclude that what Schmitt has done is given a novel construction to the word 'politics', by making it to mean what the novel, Positivist, use of Society meant, the venue of de-politicised struggle, or 'friendly' economic competition. But this is not a critique of Liberalism -- rather, its assumption.

You make good points here. Community/political unity provide the order necessary to elevate to the political, i.e., political unity is a necessary condition for the dialectic of friend/enemy to emerge. I don't think Schmitt intends enmity to define friendship, though some people seem to read him this way.

Conceptual analysis is far more difficult than the early analytical philosophers supposed; without underlying agreement - commensurable axioms - we can't discuss anything. I've seen Schmitt's conceptual analysis interpreted in terms of ordinary language philosophy, but this doesn't seem right.

Schmitt's concept is historical, but presupposes an underlying agreement: that in the west there are certain identifiable continuities. Beyond these continuities are variations: the differences in posited law, ethics, and non-Christian doctrine. As of yet, we have not identified any mechanism underlying these variations, so we therefore ascribe them to the inner cogitations and behaviors of actors and groups. At the boundaries of these groupings, there emerge incommensurable claims for which no foreseeable resolution or compromise can arise, this is the possible sphere of the political. This is my own understanding of Schmitt's assumption, but I am no longer certain (thanks to this discussion :)) that this is the case. Indeed, it turns out that Schmitt's relationship to Hegel is much closer than I assumed.




Schmitt deploys Hegel's analytic (dialectic) of individual consciousness against German political History and receives in return what he would have called a "radical conceptualization." Schmitt doesn't believe he has arrived at an essence or form of the political, rather, he believes that he has arrived at an essential truth about current human spirit. The concept is merely a useful fiction helpful in identifying a current trend in the world spirit. Schmitt isn't elaborating on our ordinary use of the term "political;" indeed, people generally employ a definite article in relation to "political" as a property, e.g., "the political aspect of" etc. What Schmitt does is different.In so far as it is the other’s action, each aims at the destruction and death of the other. But in this there is implicated also the second kind of action, self-activity; for the former implies that it risks its own life. The relation of both self-consciousnesses is in this way so constituted that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth, and make this a fact both in the case of the other and in their own case as well. And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. In the same way each must aim at the death of the other, as it risks its own life thereby; for that other is to it of no more worth than itself; the other’s reality is presented to the former as an external other, as outside itself; it must cancel that externality. The other is a purely existent consciousness and entangled in manifold ways; it must view its otherness as pure existence for itself or as absolute negation. - Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel, Φ 187. http://hegel.marxists.org/works/ph/phba.htm



This passage illustrates, perhaps only analogically, what Schmitt saw as essential in a "political pluriverse." Consciousness of one's own group as radically "other" is a negation (in some sense) of the other.

Important for Schmitt: the 'owner' of a productive resource is simply he who decides to what end and how it shall be employed. This is the economical-household decision, and is just as constituent of the Polity as anything else, and formerly made by the Householder, the Dominus, whose exercise was patriarchal sovereignty. Again, why must the Politicus be the ultimate Statesman only? Schmitt is too narrow -- deciding occurs at all levels -- and too general. The Politicus is in the genus of Decider, and so deciding cannot be his Specific difference!

This is an interesting point. I've never really thought about broadening the scope of Schmitt's decisionism. However, I don't think it should be extended to oikonomos, nor do I think Schmitt would have thought it appropriate to extend it to that sphere. Schmitt was concerned with nomos only insofar as it pertained to the first juristic act - the act of land appropriation. This act is often overtly political in that it involves appropriation from some other group. The political decision might be in the the genus of the decider - and thereby existent in the household - but Schmitt isn't here concerned with essences. What would be important for Schmitt is that the Dominus would be sovereign iff he decided on public enmity, i.e. if he decided on the content of the political across many households.

(I'm not sure if this makes sense since I don't really know how to incorporate Schmitt's theory into a classical taxonomy.)

I have (independently) posited something similar, in my 'Jurisdiction theory of Truth' thread -- at least institutional continuity of 'venue' as the key to understanding how Polities can survive constitutional, territorial, and demographic change -- all of which are problematic for us vs. them theory, except constitutional (form of government) change, which is the least drastic.

I remember the thread, and I'll return to it later. This issue also holds importance for me independent of the forum and this discussion too, so I hope we can discuss it at length.

The problem you mention - the survival of polities through constitutional, territorial, demographic, and technological change - is central to our discussion here. Schmitt's theory hinges on a metaphysics of history and change that is, contra my initial impressions of you, completely different from your approach to history. In the future we can discuss the telluric nature of the southern aristocracy, and whether or not such a caste is historically possible now or even in the late 19th century.

Three Types is on the short list -- but does he correlate these with Comte's Three Stages?

No. The three types are the three types of jurisprudence in existence at the time (on the continent). I'm no sure how he would evaluate other advances in jurisprudence, such as those advanced by Hart and Dworkin, but I imagine both would be grouped with Kelsen.

Well, to a certain extent I would say it doesn't matter, since if you go against the salus populi you will be ignored anyway. I argue that the polemical scene for such fantasies is invariably party propaganda, whether of British Whigs or Nazis or Marxists. It is possible for a constitutional order to dissolve into anarchy. All sane people realise this is bad, like a pandemic disease. Human nature does not let such states long persist however, as Man is indeed a social animal, and God sees that the sword is not given in vain, not even to usurpers, tyrants, and would-be anarchists.

But just such an event occurred in Weimar Germany. It isn't propaganda, it's empirical fact. This is an essential element of Schmitt's critique of democratic liberalism: that the people can freely decide against the minimum natural law of liberalism.

I would guess Comte's schema of the Sciences (and Sociology's place in it, as the culmination of the Ethical and Moral), would be important here. The older view has Physics (all of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology) as the domain of the professional Doctor, the Ethical as the domain of the Lawyer, and the Metaphysical as the domain of the Theologian. Thus, society has articulated professional scientists to cover all the Positivist subjects, and has no need of Sociologists. The invention of the Social sphere, and implication of a need for Sociologists to elucidate Society's Laws, is a 19th century novelty.

It is certainly curious to see such a Comtian, Positivist view injected with decisionism (which I suspect is Hobbes showing through).

Kierkegaard's spheres are existential spheres that correspond to a concept of individual "becoming." The concept is polemical and diametrically opposed to Hegel's concept of becoming. Schmitt was attracted to its decisionistic logic and the implied critique of political Romanticism and therefore liberalism.

Kierkegaard was a contemporary of Comte, though much of his writing antedates Comte's. In any case, there isn't much parity between K's stages on life's way (Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious) and Comte's historical stages. Schmitt's understanding of history seems to be, however, in some ways influenced by Comte, but far more so by Hegel. His method of political theology is not teleological, though, for it simply identifies conceptual (memetic) artifacts in political theory.

I'm not sure this differs so much from Bacon's view of Equity Law, as reflected in Hobbes. Equity is seen (invented) as the singular act of sovereign, as opposed to the rule-based approximate sovereign will of Law and its (imperial) constitutions.

Equity emerges from the chancellery and is infused with or influenced by canon law. Thus, even in it's early state of independence from common law, Equity presupposed a decision calculus; Schmitt's sovereign does not. His decision is only (unconsciously) framed by the concrete order.

Thanks -- I see those as important contributions. What I meant is that we have a situation like that outlined by MacIntyre, in which translation between two Traditions is called for (though I reserve the right to relate the Continental and Insular traditions!) In this case, there are two levels of analysis -- one in which there are two, relatively true, accounts. But behind that is 'ultimate Truth' -- which I take to be not Metaphysics but Theology -- and in that sense there is not a pluralism of relative truths, in the Positivist sense, at all.

I agree with these terms.

I've missed some of your points in the other posts, and for this I apologize. I threw this together sort of haphazardly, but I think we can get the thread back on track this way.

[Macrobius]

I was going to wait until Thanksgiving break to continue this thread, but Roland PM'd me and said he is available to continue the discussion now.

In re-inaugurating this thread, I would like to start with a quote from Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics:


In the age of the earliest and crucial unfolding of Western philosophy among the Greeks, who first raised the authentic question of the essent as such in its entirety, the essent was called physis.


This is, of course, the basis for our terms Physics, Physicist, Physician, and the general subject of Physics in the broad, Aristotelian sense of Biology and related sciences.

Continuing ...


The basic Greek word for the essent is customarily translated as "nature." This derives from the Latin translation, natura, which properly means "to be born", "birth." [b]But with this translation the original meaning of the Greek word physis is thrust aside, the actual philosophical force of the Greek word is destroyed. This is true not only of the Latin translation of this word but of all other Roman translations of the Greek philosophical language. What happened in this translation from the Greek into Latin is not accidental or harmless; it marks the first stage in the process by which we cut ourselves off from the original essence of Greek philosophy. The Roman translation was taken over by Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages. And the Christian Middle ages were prolonged in modern philosophy, which, moving in the conceptual world of the Middle Ages, coined these representations and terms by means of which we still try to understand the beginnings of Western philosophy....

But now let us skip over the whole process of deformation and decay and attempt to regain the unimpaired strength of language and words....


Here then, in capsule summary, is the whole doctrine of the Greek Revival and, implicitly, of the Gothic. We must understand the origin of this doctrine and its influence on the ante bellum South, in order to properly understand how the Southern Political relates to the world of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger, and to frame properly the interplay of the Concept of the Political in the two contexts, for it is not at all negligible.

Natural Law, and in particular the construction of Aquinas and his successors in the Latin West, is framed in precisely the terms Heidegger is condemning. This frame extends, as I will demonstrate in a thread to be posted perhaps next week -- I am finishing a re-read of MacIntyre's book on Justice in preparation for it -- to Federalism and the construction of the early American Republic, which is to say its design, not necessarily its execution.

The Greek Revival is known in America primarily as a fashion, which arrived from Europe, in the 1820s. It influenced architecture, and was connected to Romantic enthusiasm for the 'Greek' revolt -- think of Byron dying on the shores of Greece. In Germany, in the (new) universities, there was a sudden post-Napoleonic flowering of philology which was channeled in a particular anti-Latinate, anti-Roman direction. First, philology had hitherto been a simple synonym for grammar, that is, the teaching of Latin and Greek.

What is novel about the 1820s is a sudden invention of a pagan past, a neo-Hellenism. The word Hellenismos is paradoxical, because the ending -ist and -ism implies, not a Greek, but a speaker of Greek, which is to say a Persian or Jew in the 'Hellenistic era' who was somewhat assimilated to Hellenic culture. In the Middle Ages, Hellenic and Greek were synonyms for pagan, as in, 'In Christ there is no Jew or Greek' -- Christians are the true Israel, and Jews and Pagans are not part of it. The fact that 'Greek' also mean the language is amusing -- it leads to a sort of pun, 'I speak pagan.' But it is no more confusing than our use of 'English' to refer to both a language and our ab-original nationality. We speak English, but are no longer English. The Greek-speaking Romans were Romans, but spoke 'Pagan'.

Thus, we must understand that the European powers in the 1820s invented the notion of 'Greek' and 'Greece' as pagans. (There was debate about this in the 'Greek' National Assembly -- the pro-Russian,i.e., Orthodox party lost, and the pro-English, i.e., Secularising party, won. The People were to be Hellenes, not Romanoi.)

The Romantic reconstruction of Europe's, well, Greece's, pagan past formed a sort of lingua franca for academics from the time of Byron to the time of Heidegger. After Heidegger, of course, the German universities were destroyed, and a sort of diaspora of German academics (and Scientists) began.

Freud tells us that when a fairytale or dream begins, 'Once upon a time, there was a King, a Queen, and a Prince' we are to understand that, once upon a time, there was a Mother, a Father, and a little boy. That is, the storyline has reference to reality, as a sort of archetype of it. When German academics say, once, there was a pristine, racially pure, pagan, strong, and healthy Greek civilisation, but the essence of it was corrupted by evil Latin speakers -- we are to understand not a remote happening in the 4th or 1st centuries B.C., but something much more archetypal for the German academic -- their foundation myth, as it were, the rebirth of the Gothic, the Teutonic, and the Pagan at the beginning of uniquely German academic tradition. Spengler's mythologisations have this character as well, in part. His 'Faustian' culture is not only the coming of the Gothic, but the coming of Goethe -- the connection being Dr Faustus -- in counterpoise to the Apollonian (Greek as pagan, MacIntyre's Aristotelian, Homeric, and Periclean tradition), and Magian (MacIntyre's Augustinian).

The story, of course, is two fold: the evil Latins are the Roman Catholics, in German historical memory, and the French invaders of the Napoleanic era. In both cases, Germans self-consciously faced off against Romance culture. Co-opting Romance is the the theme -- Romantic had meant German tribes living rag-tag in the Roman area, with Roman culture being superior, but decadent, and German culture being wholesome and morally superior. Thus, the story reads -- 'Once upon a time there was the ancien regime...'

Not long ago, in a Greece far away, but right here, in Germany, in my great-grandfather's lifetime. The assertion that spreads is that German philology is every bit as primal as Latin and Greek, that Greek is a closer cousin to Gothic than Latin, and both are superior to it -- thus Greek Classics are primary, and Latinate culture secondary. That the Greek Classics, philosophy, and religion (paganism) were deformed by contact with Roman [read French, Catholic] culture, and especially with Christianity. As Jung notes, in Nietzsche it may be Dionysios who is named, but it is the racial memory of Wotan who is reborn and invoked. Heidegger continues to project on Greece, as a pure racial ideal, the contemporary German concerns.

That is, we may deconstruct the ravings of academics as so many proofs that, in the recent past, there was a cataclysm in which Classical, Christian, civilisation was destroyed, and a new barbarism took its place. (Reread the opening paragraphs of After Virtue). In America and the American South, this period was the Revolutionary period, and of course the War of Secession and, more catastrophic, 'Reconstruction'.

To understand the reception of 'Romantic Teutonism' into the ante bellum South -- the chief vector was the writings of Scott and other 'Gothic' writers in the pre-Victorian and Victorian eras, and his appropriation of the Chivalric tradition and re-articulation of it in (covertly) modern political terms, as Conservatism -- we must understand the discontinuity in Greek teaching that occurred, at the latest, in the 1830s.

Classical Education means (using Freud's dictum) the educational system of the abandoned ancien regime. Nothing so grandiose as an educational vision, simply a common everyday experience under one type of government that ceased to be available, despite the Founders' intentions, under another. It is difficult to legislate cultural continuity. Primarily, Classical Education means the government-mandated educational system of post-Reformation Britain, i.e., the system that resulted in practice from the dissolution of the monasteries, or as we might say today, The Destruction of the School System by the Henrician State.

This destruction, euphemistically called 'The English Renascence', after a period of neglect was restored to the education of some 400 to 1000 persons a year, approximately the needs of the English Church, Legal system, and Medical profession, together with the demand for ad hoc education of Nobles, to the extent those continued to function. The course of education involved the 'eight grades' of grammar school that we remember today (in England, this evolved further into six forms -- six numbered ones and a variety of named ones that don't increment the count.) In its older American (and English) incarnation, the pivot was the introduction of Greek late in 'Fourth Grade'. The grammars and texts are known, but no longer available in print -- nor have they been microfilmed and placed on the internet, though that may inadvertantly happen one day.

The scope and sequence of Greek authors was maintained, unbroken, until Americans educated overseas in the new German universities returned to teaching positions created in the vast build-out of American colleges in the Early Republic. Denominations like Methodist and Presbyterian had been frustrated by state established religion, with its implied control of the education system. As soon as (the Christian) religion was disestablished, the dissident, sectarian denominations were free to fund and construct colleges and universities. The number of these grew 10-fold between 1800 and 1820. However, whatever the intentions of the denominations that funded them, they immediately succumbed to the training of their faculty -- the very best scholarship available in European universities, which was the German ones. The new foundations were ill-adapted (and maybe even disinclined) to preserve, earnestly, Anglo-Tory Classical Education. The latest fashions in Biblical Criticism, or Schleiermacher's theology, were far more interesting to their faculty than maintaining traditions of a discredited regime that they themselves had previously opposed. In short, the expectation of continuity between the pre and post revolutionary period is simply ill-founded.

The 'Ivy League' universities held out, but mostly by compromise. The 'classics' were reformed, and the influences felt, though the complete uprooting of old traditions was not complete, even by 1900, though mostly accomplished in the 1870s. I once asked several lists of Latin and Greek academics if they knew even the contents (much less had access to the text) of the 'major' and 'minor' Greek anthologies used in the second half of pre-1830 'elementary' education. No one on any list expressed curiosity, though one fellow expressed an opinion that his lack of interest was justified, because he was sure they were inferior to the new German scholarship that replaced them.

So much, then, for the Greek Revival, which coincides exactly with the introduction of racialism in the North, and the secularisation of American denominational colleges, together with the uprooting of Christian (and Catholic) culture in the West -- effectively, a program of de-Romanisation (and de-Hellenisation, in fact) carried out simultaneously in the entire arena of European civilisation, including its New World holdings and the outpost of Byzantine [and French] culture in Russia, from 1776 to 1917.

We must understand then what portion of this does and does not have reference to the South. The South, as one of the last outposts of Anglo-Latin civilisation, and post-Roman Western civilisation generally, is not simple to read. Many of the large plantation owners were more connected to the Merchantile, Whig classes who had newly come to power in the 1700s (Belloc points out that these were often large landholders who managed a remarkable accumulation of Land Wealth, and a subsequent Oligarchy, via favouritism in the distriubution of Church lands from the Dissolution era.)

This does not completely fit the South, since landholders in Ireland (mostly protestant Anglicans but occasionally Catholics) and Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants all had a remarkable, but not English, influence on the American South. There is, in particular, little sense of a 'Southern Nation' before the traumatic and ethnogenetic experience of the War and Reconstruction.

The last of the late Roman or sub-Roman (Norman) feudal aristocracy, and authentic chivalric tradition, often exists side by side with the romantic adoption of that same tradition -- modulated by a particular sentiment or emotionalism that is absent in Feudalism itself. Disraeli noted a similar phenomenon (and encouraged it) in his real construction of a politically potent Conservative party -- read the Coningsby novels or Kirk's The Conservative Mind. It is clear that the adoption of Romanticism by Whigs is the core of 'Conservatism' -- a romantic sense that one is somehow 'conserving' and participating in what one has, in political fact, just stolen.

There is rather a difference between an authentic Sioux Indian doing an ancestral dance, and a rich Sioux-Indian admirer purchasing Sioux artifacts for his home museum and dressing up as a Sioux warrior. That both such elements existed side by side in the ante bellum South make matters more complex -- the latter may be said to 'cherish' the Tradition, but only the former has it authentically, as his own. It is certainly possible to admire another culture so much that, despite the nation of one's birth, one immigrates and assimilates. But there is an air of the amateur about much Southern chivalry -- which provides the opening for what should be legitimate critique of hypocrisy, but in fact is represented as 'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.' Precisely. One usually doesn't about what is not one's own.

Anglo-Latin culture, then, is the culture of Wessex, the west midlands, the up country of the American South, historically of the Tidewater and Coastal plains, and of Maritime and Upper Canada. In all areas, it went into recession under the pressure of immigration, and ensnarement in various political issues (secularisation or dis-establishment, racialism) that obscured its historic traditions and suggested substituting foreign imports or the fetishes of its coalition partners. The resulting hypocrisy undermined its moral claims to continuity anyway, and a lack of interest among its descendants (and an ever-present fear of reprisal or political side-lining for adhering to a 'Lost Cause' -- the ultimate Anglo-Saxon taunt of trial by combat) has led to its near extinction. The stories of one's enemies or conquerors are not, themselves, a Tradition of one's People, but merely about them. News is interesting indeed, but the value of it is given partly by its Source.

[Macrobius]

Could you elaborate a little more here?


I mean, that in Anglo-America, the influence of the Faustian culture arising in Germany was a foreign influence, detectable in certain literati and architectural fads, but not a native development of moment. The Anglosphere was deeply engaged with its own modernisation program, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, the conservative defence of protestant culture, and the eventual neutralisation of that culture at the hands of radicals and liberals (in the 1832 reforms). America is peculiar, because the ideology of 1776 is backwards looking -- an attempt to restore the original radical Whig intent of 1688 -- and simultaneously effective at marginalising and neutralising whole swaths of the political spectrum, in the face of the neo-Tory co-opting of the Whig Oligarchy, under George III.


The distinction between internal and external enmity is not a juristic or classist distinction but rather a relationship of groups to other groups, and groups to their members, respectively.

...

I'm not sure Schmitt does this. Could you elaborate?



I don't mean he holds specifically the Westphalian theory of the Nation-State. I mean, he makes the presumption that the scope of politics is the national scope, and that scope is, historically, the institutional scope delineated in the modern Nation-State. He does not appear to be concerned either with ethnos or the household.


To be political is just to be in a specific dispositional state toward another group. The content of the political is not relevant in the essay. What is important is that in a special sense, "we" or "us" presupposes a "them." Schmitt doesn't do much philosophy here; he leaves that to Hegel.

The point you've made here about the supposition of a "we liberals" is, in some sense, the point that Schmitt attempts to drive home in the Concept and elsewhere: that the nature and assumptions of liberalism preclude a recognition of an "us" and therefore a "them." The actual political unities in liberal society - and we can be sure that there are more than one - hide their enmity in moral or economic language.


It is not just 'liberalism' that does this. To free ourself of it, a much more radical critique is required than Schmitt appears to undertake. For example, to speak of 'society' at all is to step into the modern, liberal world. The old meaning of society is a set of 'cousins' (socii) and the Social Wars in Rome were between the Romans and the (other) Latins. Latins had inferior status to 'ingenuous' Romans until Caracalla (ca. A.D. 200), if I recall.

To conceive of 'society' as capable of 'civil' war is already to confound the polis or more abstractly civitas with a multi-ethnic alliance over which one city has imperium. That is, the notion of society, and hence of Sociology as the science of it, builds in Liberalism from the get go. As a worker in Comte's vinyard, unless he would renounce his modern liberalism, Schmitt can at best rise to the status of 'conflicted' -- to be a combatant on the other side already requires a critique his academic training and history did not fit him for (but his theological training may have, with qualification).

Classically and *to the whole world before liberalism* a Social War is a war among allies (or between classes, in the Marxian spin), and a Civil War is among qualified Citizens, with Politics the prize. If the boundary of the Social is the new friend/enemy boundary, and internal political struggles are depoliticised, the result is much the same for Schmitt as for the liberals -- he has excluded private enmity from the domain of the political, which is to say he has vindicated (or tried to vindicate) the construction of multi-ethnic society. Us to a Roman meant 'us citizens' and not every ethnic Roman in Rome was a citizen, fewer still were political citizens in the sense of having the franchise -- ingenuous (in-clan) citizens alone, and few others.


I read that post a long time ago, I'll read it again soon. I'm not so sure Schmitt assumes a sociological perspective explicitly, though his approach to jurisprudence is empirical and historical.


I would like this elaborated -- Comte > Weber > Schmitt is a direct line of influence, non? What part of this heritage would you say now, after reconsideration, he rejected. I see the terminology of Positivism in very identiable form popping up everywhere (Relativism, Evolution, The Three Phases, 'Legal Positivism', ... list goes on). Naturally, I am inclined to see him as a faithful disciple, working the same field, unless particular qualifications can be offered.


You make good points here. Community/political unity provide the order necessary to elevate to the political, i.e., political unity is a necessary condition for the dialectic of friend/enemy to emerge. I don't think Schmitt intends enmity to define friendship, though some people seem to read him this way.


Aquinas approach is to state that Natural Law and Revealed Law both define the pre-conditions for friendship, or amity. If you steal from someone, murder him, commit adultery with his wife, or are jealous of his goods and well-being, you can hardly be called a friend. Thus, the friend distinction, grounded in person-person relations ('private friendship' if you will) is the Natural Law basis of the, ahem, social order -- to slip from Aquinas' diction to Marx's faster than a speeding Jesuit.

This gives the Augustinian-Aristotelian hybrid tradition an external characterisation of friendship, that does indeed define the politics, and that in terms of Natural Law. This, of course, is the precise starting point of Liberalism as well -- and the reason that Liberalism and a pagan revival are such strange bedfellows. For every 'nice' Liberal we have a Nietzsche who wants to turn to 'not nice' pagan -- and can do this without really radically de-constructing Liberalism.


Conceptual analysis is far more difficult than the early analytical philosophers supposed; without underlying agreement - commensurable axioms - we can't discuss anything. I've seen Schmitt's conceptual analysis interpreted in terms of ordinary language philosophy, but this doesn't seem right.


I think 'ordinary language' and 'common sense' are not so far apart -- both smack of an Anglo concern foreign to Schmitt's tradition. I am not qualified, however, to comment on English influences on the German, but can at best note them from afar, or by their internal reflexes in American academia as I have experienced it myself.

I think the frame for evaluating this is MacIntyre's theory, which I believe you have in the background anyway, as do I:


Schmitt's concept is historical, but presupposes an underlying agreement: that in the west there are certain identifiable continuities. Beyond these continuities are variations: the differences in posited law, ethics, and non-Christian doctrine. As of yet, we have not identified any mechanism underlying these variations, so we therefore ascribe them to the inner cogitations and behaviors of actors and groups. At the boundaries of these groupings, there emerge incommensurable claims for which no foreseeable resolution or compromise can arise, this is the possible sphere of the political. This is my own understanding of Schmitt's assumption, but I am no longer certain (thanks to this discussion :)) that this is the case. Indeed, it turns out that Schmitt's relationship to Hegel is much closer than I assumed.


I think anyone working in the Liberal tradition, even against it, would feel the lack of force to the Natural Law presuppositions I mention above. Certainly, when the ancien regime was destroyed, a certain wholeness of 'society' was lost -- which gets pushed as an afterthought, by historical fantasy, back to gesellschaft vs. gemeinschaft, the kulturkampf, and 'the two cultures' or even 'the two societies'. See Himmelfarb (and Daniel Patrick Moynihan), for the real life, political, and Neo-Con construction of this.

This leads to all sorts of bizarre posited chimerae, more numerous than Meinong's, such as 'civil society' or 'community' -- even MacIntyre's 'communitarian' is suspect I think, though clearly he must be far more aware of the historical position he is in that most of his academic fellows.

Classically, community is just a name for the Commons, as in Commonwealth, which is to say, The Republic -- and we are right back at the single polity. Classicism makes a clean sweep of the whole household of bastard social forms, and puts us face to face with our fellow man, be he virtuous or vicious, friend or foe to us.


Schmitt deploys Hegel's analytic (dialectic) of individual consciousness against German political History and receives in return what he would have called a "radical conceptualization." Schmitt doesn't believe he has arrived at an essence or form of the political, rather, he believes that he has arrived at an essential truth about current human spirit. The concept is merely a useful fiction helpful in identifying a current trend in the world spirit. Schmitt isn't elaborating on our ordinary use of the term "political;" indeed, people generally employ a definite article in relation to "political" as a property, e.g., "the political aspect of" etc. What Schmitt does is different.

[Hegel Quotation omitted]

This passage illustrates, perhaps only analogically, what Schmitt saw as essential in a "political pluriverse." Consciousness of one's own group as radically "other" is a negation (in some sense) of the other.


I understand the Heracleitan insight here, which can even be felt in Plato (I am so unfamiliar with Hegel as to not really get the point you are trying to make). I tend to see social relativism, 'political pluriverse' and so forth as Comtian, not Hegelian, though there may be an influence there I am unaware of.


This is an interesting point. I've never really thought about broadening the scope of Schmitt's decisionism. However, I don't think it should be extended to oikonomos, nor do I think Schmitt would have thought it appropriate to extend it to that sphere.


There is a double problem associated with the 'economic'. First, we have Hume's proto-liberal and subversive depoliticisation of Economics (and Smith's which some have said is just Hutcheson restated), which bore such strange fruit in the Anglo world and German, in the following century. Second, we have again a refusal to engage the 'private' sphere of the household -- as if multi-racial 'households' on the scale of plantations are non-political! Indeed, they are practically polities in their own right. It is only the household-family of the post bellum (and Yankee at that) bourgeoisie, which has gradually supplanted the extended family or clan, the single-family (yeoman) farm with its field hands, and the economic production of the gentry, the estate, cottage-industry, and the village, all replaced by their modern, liberal, technological forms.

In fact, it is probably best to ignore families altogether in Liberal society, and look for workplace interactions as *the* typical social interaction. It is firms and their serfs that are constitutive of post-industrial feudalism, not family 'households'. Athens we claim to be, but it is Sparta we have become. The Enemy is the hive-enemy -- the raiding corporation, the terrorist, not the private enemies of ethnos. If your children are not your own, but the Public School systems, why fight or even pay for them? Why not breed and drop them on the, ahem, Social Welfare, system? But surely this is a foreseeable consequence of 'Prussianism'.

All that is precisely why I think Schmitt is missing the bulk of the analysis -- the political on the national scale is buttressed by the 'small platoons' and I would add various divisions as well. The liberal cartoon of 'families' and 'individuals' who 'vote' for the national government, or occasionally man the barricades in defiance of it, are but 10% of the political. I have many more friends and enemies at work than either at home or on either side of the Rio Grande (or the internet!), even if the national-scale reflex of the political system in which I am daily enmeshed has implications for the latter friend/foe distinction.

School-Work-The Media are (for boomers at least), the sum of society. National politics and 'private' life at home are side shows. There is no greater condemnation of Liberalism than that! (Yet Schmitt side-steps it, lambasting only 'economics' -- without delineating the perversion of it into our modern 'social and economic system').


Schmitt was concerned with nomos only insofar as it pertained to the first juristic act - the act of land appropriation. This act is often overtly political in that it involves appropriation from some other group. The political decision might be in the the genus of the decider - and thereby existent in the household - but Schmitt isn't here concerned with essences. What would be important for Schmitt is that the Dominus would be sovereign iff he decided on public enmity, i.e. if he decided on the content of the political across many households.


Again, I think you are assuming racially homogeneous, i.e. multiracial but segregated, rather than the multiracial household, composed indeed of partly segregated, partly non-segregated, families. Was Mammy a member of the family? Was one's body-slave? If *all* one's non-related friends and playmates as a child were black, did that influence one's outlook on life? This is an extreme, but clearly this is exactly what the patriarchal Dominus (and his wife, the Domina!) of the plantation were -- sovereign over a set of families, all coordinated in an estate or household, i.e., the economic unit.


(I'm not sure if this makes sense since I don't really know how to incorporate Schmitt's theory into a classical taxonomy.)


My criticism is merely that Schmitt only allows nation-scale decisions to be 'politics' -- when in fact firm-scale, plantation-scale, and even family-scale ('private') decisions are rolled up into the political situation requiring sovereignty. Friendship is, at least in Aquinas' view, the underlying factor in Natural Law, and that as amity, not non-hostility among tribes. The primary meaning of 'friend' is someone for whose good you care, which is exactly inverted by moving it off to the way-distance, as 'a country that isn't going to attack me'.


The problem you mention - the survival of polities through constitutional, territorial, demographic, and technological change - is central to our discussion here. Schmitt's theory hinges on a metaphysics of history and change that is, contra my initial impressions of you, completely different from your approach to history. In the future we can discuss the telluric nature of the southern aristocracy, and whether or not such a caste is historically possible now or even in the late 19th century.


But just such an event occurred in Weimar Germany. It isn't propaganda, it's empirical fact. This is an essential element of Schmitt's critique of democratic liberalism: that the people can freely decide against the minimum natural law of liberalism.


The 'minimum natural law' of Liberalism is, as I have hinted, just a reflex in the modern world of Aquinas' synthesis. (To be more precise, this is what the rationalism of the Enlightenment bequeathed to Liberalism, which is always and everywhere a post Enlightenment phenomenon -- since a disjuncture between Liberalism as it existed in the ancien regime and Catholicism was a necessary precondition for the emergence of a non-theological (at least, non-Papist) Liberalism.


Kierkegaard's spheres are existential spheres that correspond to a concept of individual "becoming." The concept is polemical and diametrically opposed to Hegel's concept of becoming. Schmitt was attracted to its decisionistic logic and the implied critique of political Romanticism and therefore liberalism.

Kierkegaard was a contemporary of Comte, though much of his writing antedates Comte's. In any case, there isn't much parity between K's stages on life's way (Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious) and Comte's historical stages. Schmitt's understanding of history seems to be, however, in some ways influenced by Comte, but far more so by Hegel. His method of political theology is not teleological, though, for it simply identifies conceptual (memetic) artifacts in political theory.


One should also bear in mind the Aristotelian (and hence Comtian) sense of becoming, or genesis (coming to be). There are three kinds: motion or change, 'alteration' [changes to accidental qualities], and growth/diminution. 'Alteration' is the Aristotelian version of 'Evolution' -- whereas the German schools mostly had a notion of 'development' which implies both an unfolding (normal growth or change), and also 'evolution'. Comte's Aristotelianism ends up connected to slogans: Relativism, Pluralism, Evolution, and of course Positive Science ['science' having polemical stance against 'dialectic']. Positive Science is presented as the term of the progression, 'Religious Explanation', 'Metaphysical Explanation', 'Scientific Explanation'. The step from Aristotle to Comte is the last one, and is what is connected with 'Positive' -- i.e., integrating the empiricism and to a lesser extent rationalism of the Enlightenment into an otherwise Aristotelian framework.


Equity emerges from the chancellery and is infused with or influenced by canon law. Thus, even in it's early state of independence from common law, Equity presupposed a decision calculus; Schmitt's sovereign does not. His decision is only (unconsciously) framed by the concrete order.

[Macrobius]

Cross-linking an interesting article:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33370

[Roland]

thanks for the link. I will try to respond to your posts by the end of break.

[Roland]

Edit: Sorry this took so long.

I don't mean he holds specifically the Westphalian theory of the Nation-State. I mean, he makes the presumption that the scope of politics is the national scope, and that scope is, historically, the institutional scope delineated in the modern Nation-State. He does not appear to be concerned either with ethnos or the household.
Your first point, that “Schmitt makes the presumption that the scope of politics is the national scope” is true, but only as a historical contingency. Your second statement is incorrect. Schmitt's Weimar texts – The Concept of the Political, Political Theology, Constitutional Theory, Legality and Legitimacy, and The
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy – are not historical studies. Schmitt's political concept is defined in terms of sufficient conditions: if group X is willing to kill and be killed in order to sustain its way of life, or further some end, then group X is political. That the Nation-State is the scope of the political is a matter of circumstance; indeed, between the 17th and 20th centuries, western peoples organized themselves politically according to the Nation-State.

In The Nomos of the Earth Schmitt draws a distinction between the political organization of Ancient Greece, the Respublica Christiana, that of the Christian middle ages, the jus Publicum Europaeum, and the 20th century, with the last two being the age wherein the scope of the political was defined by the Nation-State. In other words, Schmitt recognizes the difference of extension that the political can take, depending on the order and epoch in question. Any prescriptive advice that he offers, say, in Die Diktatur or Political Theology, or elsewhere, is provisional.



Remember how Schmitt vainly understood his project:“I am the last conscious representative of the jus Publicum Europaeum, its last teacher and student in an existential sense and I have experienced it as Benito Cereno did the voyage of the pirate ship.”


It is not just 'liberalism' that does this. To free ourself of it, a much more radical critique is required than Schmitt appears to undertake. For example, to speak of 'society' at all is to step into the modern, liberal world. The old meaning of society is a set of 'cousins' (socii) and the Social Wars in Rome were between the Romans and the (other) Latins. Latins had inferior status to 'ingenuous' Romans until Caracalla (ca. A.D. 200), if I recall.
To conceive of 'society' as capable of 'civil' war is already to confound the polis or more abstractly civitas with a multi-ethnic alliance over which one city has imperium.
I don’t see how this follows. An ethnically homogenous populace is capable of civil war - especially in the 20th century, which has been the age of individual ideology and pluralism. Schmitt arguing that German society is capable of civil war is not identical to a prescriptive argument that society ought to be a multi-ethnic Nation-State.

Schmitt would probably give you the entirety of the classical lexicon, but in so doing, the social reality of the 20th century would not thereby change.

That is, the notion of society, and hence of Sociology as the science of it, builds in Liberalism from the get go. As a worker in Comte's vinyard, unless he would renounce his modern liberalism, Schmitt can at best rise to the status of 'conflicted' -- to be a combatant on the other side already requires a critique his academic training and history did not fit him for (but his theological training may have, with qualification).
These are fair statements. I would submit the title ‘conflicted nihilist’ or, by his own standards, ‘political romantic’.

Classically and *to the whole world before liberalism* a Social War is a war among allies (or between classes, in the Marxian spin), and a Civil War is among qualified Citizens, with Politics the prize. If the boundary of the Social is the new friend/enemy boundary, and internal political struggles are depoliticised, the result is much the same for Schmitt as for the liberals -- he has excluded private enmity from the domain of the political, which is to say he has vindicated (or tried to vindicate) the construction of multi-ethnic society. Us to a Roman meant 'us citizens' and not every ethnic Roman in Rome was a citizen, fewer still were political citizens in the sense of having the franchise -- ingenuous (in-clan) citizens alone, and few others.
Schmitt’s account isn’t normative, it is diagnostic or descriptive. Though the politicization of the Social is lamented in between the lines of his books, he rarely submits constructive solutions.

Internal political struggle – struggle between equals – is the ground for real enmity and the recognition of a justus hostis; but in the 20th century, and particularly in the Weimar Republic, such ground does not exist. Though the radical parties of the Weimar Republic operated under the ostensive neutrality of the law, their conflicts were Social and their enmity was absolute – the other was the criminal and the private enemy, to be hated, punished and eliminated.



Schmitt quotes Hegel’s analysis of modern politics in Natural Law:“This war is not a war of families against families, but between peoples, and hatred becomes thereby undifferentiated and freed from all particular personality”


I would like this elaborated -- Comte > Weber > Schmitt is a direct line of influence, non? What part of this heritage would you say now, after reconsideration, he rejected. I see the terminology of Positivism in very identiable form popping up everywhere (Relativism, Evolution, The Three Phases, 'Legal Positivism', ... list goes on). Naturally, I am inclined to see him as a faithful disciple, working the same field, unless particular qualifications can be offered
The Hobbes revolution in Germany began with the work of sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, and there is substantial evidence of his influence on Schmitt’s work. Schmitt takes some of his lexicon (Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft) and some observations on Hobbes from Tönnies. However, though Schmitt studied under Weber, he seems to have repudiated much of Weber’s political and moral insight – particularly, the emphasis on positivism in Law and Politics.

Legal Positivism was a product of the 19th century, but its impact was felt in the 20th century. Hans Kelsen was its most famous and lucid defender on the continent; his efforts eventually produced the United Nations, as well as the philosophy of HLA Hart, who, in turn, inaugurated American Analytical Legal Positivism. Schmitt was, without question, the most obstinate and vocal opponent of this intellectual tradition, and he explored various counter-methods, including the ‘sociology of concepts’ employed in Political Theology and the paper on Neutralization and de-politicization. However, Schmitt eventually arrived at “concrete-order thinking”, which turned out to be a more successful approach to the study of Law and Politics.

There are very few elements of actual, Weberian sociology in his texts, despite his language; certain books, such as The Tyranny of Values, criticize Weber’s approach to politics. In my opinion, Schmitt was a sociologist insofar as Machiavelli and Hobbes were sociologists.
I think anyone working in the Liberal tradition, even against it, would feel the lack of force to the Natural Law presuppositions I mention above. Certainly, when the ancien regime was destroyed, a certain wholeness of 'society' was lost -- which gets pushed as an afterthought, by historical fantasy, back to gesellschaft vs. gemeinschaft, the kulturkampf, and 'the two cultures' or even 'the two societies'. See Himmelfarb (and Daniel Patrick Moynihan), for the real life, political, and Neo-Con construction of this.
In trying to define German Civil Law in terms of some distinct, identifiable German tradition, Schmitt called upon the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft antithesis. Whether or not this distinction holds truth is a question that I’m not prepared to answer, but it seems that there may be some functional value to it. Over a century before Schmitt identified the tradition of communitarian or gemeinschaft thinking in Germany, Friedrich Carl von Savigny declared the existence of a similar tradition – so Schmitt’s analysis was not without historical precedent. Schmitt, however, was not of the Historical school, and he explicitly states that he is not advocating a return to Savigny; thus, his advocacy of an authoritarian gemeinschaft approach is based on the arguments he levels against the liberal-Legal Positivist paradigm of politics and jurisprudence.

This leads to all sorts of bizarre posited chimerae, more numerous than Meinong's, such as 'civil society' or 'community' -- even MacIntyre's 'communitarian' is suspect I think, though clearly he must be far more aware of the historical position he is in that most of his academic fellows.
Our discussion of this particular topic was destroyed at the Lyceum. It’s sufficient to recap that MacIntyre is not in the tradition of gemeinschaft or communitarianism.

I think you’ve made a good point here, though. Schmitt was excellent at diagnosing the malaise of 20th century politics, but, like other contemporary German intellectuals, he was ineffective at providing anything beyond temporary, pragmatic solutions to immanent crises.
Classically, community is just a name for the Commons, as in Commonwealth, which is to say, The Republic -- and we are right back at the single polity. Classicism makes a clean sweep of the whole household of bastard social forms, and puts us face to face with our fellow man, be he virtuous or vicious, friend or foe to us.
I understand the Heracleitan insight here, which can even be felt in Plato (I am so unfamiliar with Hegel as to not really get the point you are trying to make). I tend to see social relativism, 'political pluriverse' and so forth as Comtian, not Hegelian, though there may be an influence there I am unaware of.
Either Schmitt’s lexicon - which combines, among other things, Sociology, Restorationist/counterrevolutionary thought, Hegelianism, and German Civil Law Jurisprudence - accurately categorizes human phenomenon that is not within the scope of Classical thought, or it does not. Unless we address this directly, we’ll continue to talk at cross-purposes.

On Schmitt’s model, pluralism emerges in substantial form with the Reformation; later historical developments – Marxism, social-Darwinism and Racialism etc. – divide man from man and group from group. On the modern account, the conflict between these groups is to be circumvented by mechanism, bureaucracy and absolute sovereignty. Now, if the Classical model confronted and dealt with an analogous, substantial, concrete plurality, then Schmitt’s analysis is irrelevant or useless; however, if the Classical model was a model for a homogenous political unit quite unlike anything known to the modern world, then Schmitt’s model is relevant and useful. I’m inclined to accept a sort of balance between the two; between Schmitt and MacIntyre, that is.

There is a double problem associated with the 'economic'. First, we have Hume's proto-liberal and subversive depoliticisation of Economics (and Smith's which some have said is just Hutcheson restated), which bore such strange fruit in the Anglo world and German, in the following century. Second, we have again a refusal to engage the 'private' sphere of the household -- as if multi-racial 'households' on the scale of plantations are non-political! Indeed, they are practically polities in their own right. It is only the household-family of the post bellum (and Yankee at that) bourgeoisie, which has gradually supplanted the extended family or clan, the single-family (yeoman) farm with its field hands, and the economic production of the gentry, the estate, cottage-industry, and the village, all replaced by their modern, liberal, technological forms.
I understand the argument here, but I don’t see how the recognition of plantations as estates/individual political entities couldn’t be worked into Schmitt’s concept of the political. In my limited readings of Schmitt, he says very little about the nature of Southern – or even American – politics (The Nomos of the Earth deals with America’s position in a global world, not with its internal structure.) In his correspondence with Ernst Jünger, however, Schmitt betrays a strong affinity for de Toqueville – especially Democracy in America, and it’s prophetic ending. Though Schmitt didn’t identify with Toqueville’s liberal politics, he did accept the providential understanding of the liberal revolutions in America and France expressed in Democracy. However, I believe that Schmitt’s perspective on providence was more pessimistic than de Toqueville’s, and more in the tradition of de Maistre.

Toqueville recognized that Aristocracy was telluric in nature – bound to the earth. But the New World, and therefore America, was a sphere of freedom for the lower and ostracized classes of the old world. Property and land appropriation were contingencies of free owners, not tradition-bound rights. Skipping over a host of other historical novelties, which also complicate the juridical and concrete existence of traditional, Aristocratic estates, the essence of such providential thinking is that an Aristocratic model is historically outmoded and irrelevant – there is only room for nostalgic longing (which Schmitt was excellent at).

Whether or not this was Schmitt’s exact perspective on America, I can’t say. I’ll try to do some more research and get a hold of his untranslated texts.

In fact, it is probably best to ignore families altogether in Liberal society, and look for workplace interactions as *the* typical social interaction. It is firms and their serfs that are constitutive of post-industrial feudalism, not family 'households'. Athens we claim to be, but it is Sparta we have become. The Enemy is the hive-enemy -- the raiding corporation, the terrorist, not the private enemies of ethnos. If your children are not your own, but the Public School systems, why fight or even pay for them? Why not breed and drop them on the, ahem, Social Welfare, system? But surely this is a foreseeable consequence of 'Prussianism'.
I detect nothing approaching this sort of perspective in Schmitt’s work. The Ethic of State approach comes closest, but in abstract, the essence of that position is unity, not dissociated, atomistic postmodern liberalism.

All that is precisely why I think Schmitt is missing the bulk of the analysis -- the political on the national scale is buttressed by the 'small platoons' and I would add various divisions as well. The liberal cartoon of 'families' and 'individuals' who 'vote' for the national government, or occasionally man the barricades in defiance of it, are but 10% of the political. I have many more friends and enemies at work than either at home or on either side of the Rio Grande (or the internet!), even if the national-scale reflex of the political system in which I am daily enmeshed has implications for the latter friend/foe distinction.
The fact that you “have more friends and enemies at work than either at home or on either side of the Rio Grande” is the essential political problem of modernity, and the crux of Schmitt’s criticism of liberal pluralism.

School-Work-The Media are (for boomers at least), the sum of society. National politics and 'private' life at home are side shows. There is no greater condemnation of Liberalism than that! (Yet Schmitt side-steps it, lambasting only 'economics' -- without delineating the perversion of it into our modern 'social and economic system').
This is an ethical question, and one that Schmitt is for the most part silent on. Insofar as Schmitt submits any sort of cultural critique – other than that which is latent in his political polemics – Political Romanticism represents an interesting and well-thought criticism of Liberal culture.

I think the essence of this discussion hinges on whether saying yes to the Classical tradition is, in and of itself, a sufficient solution to the problems of contemporary society. Dramatic changes in spatial perspective - temporally, geographically, technologically and socially - have opened up new areas previously unknown to the old approaches in Jurisprudence, Theology and Ethics. A trivial example would be the advent of the railroad, which produced Torts in our common law; a more profound example would be the fact that the lord of the manor can no longer raise his drawbridge upon confrontation with the enemy. Even our discussion’s venue is significant. Over the centuries, political discussion has moved from the streets of the polity to the Lyceum, to the coffee shop, and now to internet Phora.

The power afforded to man by these new perspectives, coupled with our ballooning population, draws into question the relevance of old, traditional models. This uncertainty led men like Schmitt, Heidegger and Jünger to dwell on the possibility of harmony between modernity and tradition; though the route taken ultimately led to the slaughter of WW2, the uncertainty hasn’t vanished. Indeed, Schmitt spent the remaining years of his life, secluded in his own “San Casciano”, pondering this uncertainty, and wondering whether the anarchy of the liberal world order would permit the “peacemakers to inherit the Earth.”

[Roland]

Presented below is a collection of select quotes from Alasdair MacIntyre's dual review of Daniel Bell's Communitarianism and its Critics, and Stephen Holmes' The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. I present this in order to illuminate the distinction between MacIntyre's Classical approach - which is, at least in spirit, close to Macrobius' approach - and Schmitt's Nationalist approach (1920 - 1934), which encompasses the text in question. However, in illuminating the difference between Schmitt's Ethic of State period and MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelianism, there emerges a relationship (perhaps only superficial) between MacIntyre's pragmatic, preservational attitude, and Schmitt's post-nationalist phase (1939-1980).

We approached this question in a thread on the Lyceum. Thomas and Macrobius posted some thoughtful comments on the issue (I don't suppose Macrobius saved that thread?).




Selections:Communitarianism has become a fashionable topic. Where, not long ago, most effective criticisms of liberalism were advanced from a Marxist standpoint, they are now often framed in terms of some communitarian alternative. It is worth remembering that from the early 1840s onwards the recently coined adjectives 'communitarian', 'communitive' and 'communist' were all used in much the same way, until the first two fell into disuse, while 'communist' continued to be applied to holders of a wide range of views until about 1920.

It was a prophetic exaggeration when in 1848 Marx and Engels declared that the spectre of communism was haunting Europe. But the spectre of contemporary communitarianism haunts only liberal periodicals and university departments of philosophy and political science. Yet even this raises questions: what is it about communitarianism that liberal intellectuals find threatening? Is some vulnerability of liberalism disclosed not so much by communitarian criticism, as by liberal reactions to it? One difficulty in answering such questions is that the label 'communitarian' has been affixed to too many significantly different views. (I have myself strenuously disowned this label, but to little effect)...

...[F]rom the point of view of modern liberalism such [non-liberal] criticisms must appear not so much a version of the authoritarian threat as deeply unrealistic and utopian. One might, then, have expected them to be ignored. Instead they surprisingly often evoke spluttering outrage. One expression of such outrage is Stephen Holme's The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, a work of liberal agitprop rather than of serious theory, whose dust jacket (with its endorsements from a variety of distinguished liberal theorists) is among its valuable features, for it shows that Holmes does not merely splutter on his own behalf. Homes has three main targets: the writings of myself, of the late Christopher Lasch and of Roberto Unger. A plain reader of these writings would have had to notice that, although all three of us are at odds with liberalism, and although each of us shares some premises with each of the others, we differ notably in our aims, in some of the most important premises from which we argue, and in the positive positions which we assert. Holmes, however, takes what is crucial about us to be our shared enmity to standard liberalism. He invents not just a category, but a tradition of anti-liberalism, notes that earlier enemies of liberalism in this grabbag holdall have included such figures as De Maistre and Carl Schmitt, and by so doing, as Richard A. Posner puts it in his dust jacket endorsement, 'exposes its roots in the soil that nourished Fascism'. The implied history is even more dubious than the arguments.

...I have attempted to distinguish rival traditions of morality and moral enquiry, to ask in what kind of social setting each is at home, and to understand in what type of local community the virtues might flourish, and how the politics of such local community puts it at odds with the dominant social, political and economic order. For each of us the critique of liberalism has been essential to something else.

...Holmes is not the first to use the label 'communitarian' too widely, and, like others who have done so, his use of it misleads him. Consider one small, but instructive example. In a list of what he takes to be the 'contradictions' of After Virtue, Holmes says of me that '[h]e pillories the modern figure of "the therapist", while presenting himself as the self-accredited therapist for his entire society'. But not only have I never offered remedies for the condition of liberal modernity, it has been part of my case that there are no remedies. The problem is not to reform the dominant order, but to find ways for local communities to survive by sustaining a life of the common good against the disintegrating forces of the nation-state and the market.

Holmes thus conducts a set of mock-battles, not against the real positions of Lasch or Unger or myself, let alone against those of Taylor or Walzer, but against phantoms of his own, and not only his own imagining. But why is contemporary liberal theorizing thus haunted by phantoms? Here I can make only a suggestion. Is it that such theorizing is now informed by an imperfectly suppressed consciousness of its own irrelevance? In liberal periodicals and among university teachers the battles of the concepts proceed, with liberals continually announcing victories over some new set of enemies or dissidents. But in the social and political order at large the ugly realities of money and power are increasingly badly masked by the games played with the concepts of utility, rights and contract. The spectre haunting contemporary liberal theorists is not communitarianism, but their own irrelevance.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Presented below is a collection of select quotes from Alasdair MacIntyre's dual review of Daniel Bell's Communitarianism and its Critics, and Stephen Holmes' The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. I present this in order to illuminate the distinction between MacIntyre's Classical approach - which is, at least in spirit, close to Macrobius' approach - and Schmitt's Nationalist approach (1920 - 1934), which encompasses the text in question. However, in illuminating the difference between Schmitt's Ethic of State period and MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelianism, there emerges a relationship (perhaps only superficial) between MacIntyre's pragmatic, preservational attitude, and Schmitt's post-nationalist phase (1939-1980).

We approached this question in a thread on the Lyceum. Thomas and Macrobius posted some thoughtful comments on the issue (I don't suppose Macrobius saved that thread?).




Selections:Communitarianism has become a fashionable topic. Where, not long ago, most effective criticisms of liberalism were advanced from a Marxist standpoint, they are now often framed in terms of some communitarian alternative. It is worth remembering that from the early 1840s onwards the recently coined adjectives 'communitarian', 'communitive' and 'communist' were all used in much the same way, until the first two fell into disuse, while 'communist' continued to be applied to holders of a wide range of views until about 1920.

It was a prophetic exaggeration when in 1848 Marx and Engels declared that the spectre of communism was haunting Europe. But the spectre of contemporary communitarianism haunts only liberal periodicals and university departments of philosophy and political science. Yet even this raises questions: what is it about communitarianism that liberal intellectuals find threatening? Is some vulnerability of liberalism disclosed not so much by communitarian criticism, as by liberal reactions to it? One difficulty in answering such questions is that the label 'communitarian' has been affixed to too many significantly different views. (I have myself strenuously disowned this label, but to little effect)...

...[F]rom the point of view of modern liberalism such [non-liberal] criticisms must appear not so much a version of the authoritarian threat as deeply unrealistic and utopian. One might, then, have expected them to be ignored. Instead they surprisingly often evoke spluttering outrage. One expression of such outrage is Stephen Holme's The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, a work of liberal agitprop rather than of serious theory, whose dust jacket (with its endorsements from a variety of distinguished liberal theorists) is among its valuable features, for it shows that Holmes does not merely splutter on his own behalf. Homes has three main targets: the writings of myself, of the late Christopher Lasch and of Roberto Unger. A plain reader of these writings would have had to notice that, although all three of us are at odds with liberalism, and although each of us shares some premises with each of the others, we differ notably in our aims, in some of the most important premises from which we argue, and in the positive positions which we assert. Holmes, however, takes what is crucial about us to be our shared enmity to standard liberalism. He invents not just a category, but a tradition of anti-liberalism, notes that earlier enemies of liberalism in this grabbag holdall have included such figures as De Maistre and Carl Schmitt, and by so doing, as Richard A. Posner puts it in his dust jacket endorsement, 'exposes its roots in the soil that nourished Fascism'. The implied history is even more dubious than the arguments.

...I have attempted to distinguish rival traditions of morality and moral enquiry, to ask in what kind of social setting each is at home, and to understand in what type of local community the virtues might flourish, and how the politics of such local community puts it at odds with the dominant social, political and economic order. For each of us the critique of liberalism has been essential to something else.

...Holmes is not the first to use the label 'communitarian' too widely, and, like others who have done so, his use of it misleads him. Consider one small, but instructive example. In a list of what he takes to be the 'contradictions' of After Virtue, Holmes says of me that '[h]e pillories the modern figure of "the therapist", while presenting himself as the self-accredited therapist for his entire society'. But not only have I never offered remedies for the condition of liberal modernity, it has been part of my case that there are no remedies. The problem is not to reform the dominant order, but to find ways for local communities to survive by sustaining a life of the common good against the disintegrating forces of the nation-state and the market.

Holmes thus conducts a set of mock-battles, not against the real positions of Lasch or Unger or myself, let alone against those of Taylor or Walzer, but against phantoms of his own, and not only his own imagining. But why is contemporary liberal theorizing thus haunted by phantoms? Here I can make only a suggestion. Is it that such theorizing is now informed by an imperfectly suppressed consciousness of its own irrelevance? In liberal periodicals and among university teachers the battles of the concepts proceed, with liberals continually announcing victories over some new set of enemies or dissidents. But in the social and political order at large the ugly realities of money and power are increasingly badly masked by the games played with the concepts of utility, rights and contract. The spectre haunting contemporary liberal theorists is not communitarianism, but their own irrelevance.





Thank you Roland for this excerpt! It's excellent. Liberalism is walking on air and needs to find enemies to define itself...
But MacIntyre's solution at the community level is no solution. There is only one serious alternative or palliative to liberalism and the disintegrating forces he mentions, and this is military dictatorship.

[Kim Jong Tha Illest]

Thank you Roland for this excerpt! It's excellent. Liberalism is walking on air and needs to find enemies to define itself...
But MacIntyre's solution at the community level is no solution. There is only one serious alternative or palliative to liberalism and the disintegrating forces he mentions, and this is military dictatorship.

All military dictatorships claim to inculcate the virtues, but few actually do in practice. Certain communities and community-based movements have at least some success in doing so. Keep in mind that your average military dictator is an uneducated hick who, in another timestream, is enthusiastically cheering his favorite NASCAR driver. While the ideal polis is long out of reach, I find Macintyre's suggestion for salvaging at least some of its inheritance to be far more worthwhile than starry-eyed dreams of using the arsenal of democracy for good.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

All military dictatorships claim to inculcate the virtues, but few actually do in practice. Certain communities and community-based movements have at least some success in doing so. Keep in mind that your average military dictator is an uneducated hick who, in another timestream, is enthusiastically cheering his favorite NASCAR driver. While the ideal polis is long out of reach, I find Macintyre's suggestion for salvaging at least some of its inheritance to be far more worthwhile than starry-eyed dreams of using the arsenal of democracy for good.

How would this inheritance defend itself from the disintegrating forces you mention?

[Kim Jong Tha Illest]

How would this inheritance defend itself from the disintegrating forces you mention?

By force of arms if necessary. Military dictatorships hardly have a monopoly on the use of violence.

[Roland]

Thank you Roland for this excerpt! It's excellent. Liberalism is walking on air and needs to find enemies to define itself...
But MacIntyre's solution at the community level is no solution. There is only one serious alternative or palliative to liberalism and the disintegrating forces he mentions, and this is military dictatorship.

Interesting that you mention this alternative, for I posted the MacIntyre excerpt in order to highlight the difference between German communitarianism, which is identified with Hegel and the Prussian civil service state, and Latinate/neo-Thomist communalism. Carl Schmitt defended a Hegelian "Ethic of state," positing as the first political good a duty toward unity in the Nation of Germany, which would in turn entail the suppression of radical sectarian political parties such as the NSDAP and the Communist Party. His solution to the conflict of liberalism was to consolidate state power in the hands of a single representative of Germany who commanded the loyalty of the military: Hindenburg. In Schmitt's terminology, this is called a "commisarial dictatorship", not a military dictatorship, which connotes absolute and unrestrained power in the hands of the military.