If we are going to talk about Carl Schmitt, it is worth noting that we in the West have lived de facto in a continuous State of Exception since 2001. In the case of some western polities, de jure.
Wars have been going on since before that, but the normal legal regime in the West was overturned starting around 2001 and the state of emergency never really stopped.
I have to disagree, it was certainly much earlier than 2001. I don't believe it happened quickly, or during one key period, more like a gradual process with a few signature events. For example, Monroe Doctrine was a good one. Another one, was Wilson's weird belief he could just force a League of Nations both on Europeans and the US Legislature. Teddy Roosevelt taking donor funds to win the presidency, then fighting to limit money influence in politics. Plenty of similarly signal events happened, really. 2001 was not particularly unique. I think getting involved in Indochina involved very similar "breaches of established norms".
In all honesty, nothing new really happened, it's a tale as old as time itself: "Inter arma enim silent lēgēs," or when weapons start talking, the laws stay silent - rough translation. Or even earlier, we have the Siege of Melos with the famous "the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" - from the "The Melian Dialogue".
My favorite author on politics (writing in the book with highly uninformative title "Congress: The Electoral Connection," made an observation exactly opposite of Schmitt: the role of party leaders is to dampen excessive partisanship and create an environment where you could do mutually beneficial politics--that actually does stuff--without making undue noise that cause friction (not quite in these words, thus nobody seems to have actually read them). He attributed the development of this system to the relatively successful and peaceful politics in United States for much of 20th century and foresaw the rise of modern telecommunication technology as the harbinger of its destruction. That was back in 1970s, and he saw a particular threat to its survival in, again prophetically, the rise of C-SPAN (to those unfamiliar with US politics, Newt Gingrich and the "New" Republicans used it in 1980s to make noise that sharply delineated who their "enemies" were.)
I think there's a lot that can be synthesized by looking at Schmitt and Mayhew together, of how political institutions are built and maintained and the role of leaders in a stable polity should be. Alas, Schmitt has won that debate, it seems.
What a delight. I regret that I have but one "heart" to grant it.
I did wonder, though, why you chose to go all the way back to the squabbles among the early Roman Christians rather than to the much more recent horrors of the 30 Years War -- the event in Europe that I take to have been the final nail in the coffin of explicitly sectarian Christian intermural warfare?
"That is to say that, whereas politics in Schmitt's view should be just the responsibility of the State, other groups could play a political role if they organized themselves to do so."
I would argue, instead, that what is most unique about Schmitt's conception of friend/enemy is that the political (for Schmitt) is no longer determined by the State, but on the contrary the concept of the state now presupposes the concept of the political.
It seems for Schmitt that the political no longer belongs to the "proper" place of the state and, as you mentioned. is instead defined by the autonomy and specificity/intensity of the friend-enemy distinction. And it is largely the degree of intensity which implies this distinction. In other words the quantitative augmentation of the intensity of an opposition results in a qualitative transformation--politicization. Schmitt seems to introduce this idea of potentiality as a defining factor of the concept of the political.
It also may be the case that with Schmitt's displacement of the state's monopoly on politics
there is no longer an objective structure to mark the line between political and non-political--everything is merely not yet politicized.
There are tradeoffs between freedom and security, and between freedom and properity. Personal sacrifice made for the common good can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. I think everyone recognizes this in one form or another.
What, then, are we as a nation to be for? For balance? For practical decision-making? Schmitt's philosophy was possibly the least successful political philosophy of all time, judging by the Nazi experience. We seem to be having a similar experiene with the current western leadership . I'm looking forward to next week's edition of this substack!
" Put bluntly, nobody has ever gone out to die for Liberalism, for lower property taxes, fewer regulations"
No Taxation Without Representation/Boston Tea Party (Tea was the fancy latte of that era). Shays' Rebellion. The fights in the UK against fencing. Hell, even the Civil Right movement could be depicted as "fewer regulations".
This essay could have stopped at the point where professional politicians, divorced from the desires of the represented, started making Enemies of each other.
The rest is unimportant since it is the class-based break that ultimately matters.
Nor am I the least bit impressed with the attack on the general historical philosophy of Liberalism.
Freedom of Speech is liberal. Freedom of Religion is Liberal. Freedom in general is liberal.
I don't consider the present self-depicting Liberal ideologues to be actual Liberals any more than the Democratic Party is really about Democracy.
"No Taxation Without Representation/Boston Tea Party (Tea was the fancy latte of that era). Shays' Rebellion. The fights in the UK against fencing. Hell, even the Civil Right movement could be depicted as "fewer regulations""
Those are not examples of liberalism principles but of deep democratic desires combined with the rage against appropriating private and commons assets by the powerful. That is all that it is.
Apparently you don't consider consent or fairness or individual rights to be liberal.
Yet that is the historical underpinning of liberalism as well as being its literal definition.
Oxford Languages/Google definition
noun: liberalism
1. willingness to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; openness to new ideas.
2. a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Encyclopedia Brittanica
liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.”
When was the consent of the population sought when attacking Iraq in 2003? or when not implementing universal medicare in the US? The government in the US has always been in the hands of plutocracy, and was design as such:
"On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”"
However the reality of implementation, the ideas remain the same.
Nor is "actual" democracy necessarily better. It seems clear you haven't actually looked at how Athenian democracy worked. Hint: it wasn't perfect either.
US and European democracy is skewing heavily towards elite classes - but that isn't the real question. The real question is if this swing is permanent or if it will swing back.
In the United States, it has before.
I make no promises this time around but it is equally false to say it cannot happen.
Nor is your statement about "powerful states", very true. The US wants to overthrow Putin - he's not going to get overthrown. Clearly the wannabe hegemon US cannot do what it wants in this case.
You start with recognzing Schmitt's central question of "Who is my enemy". At the end of your wrting it appears that you consider that question irrelevant.
"Immigration is harmful" is not a political statment in Schmitt's view. "Immigration is harmful to us" or "immigration is benefical for us" are political statements.
Likewise “Feminism Hurts Both Men and Women” does not address Schmitts central question. Schmitts does not accept a global "we" for which benefit is sought. "Feminism (within our group) is bad for us" or "feminism is good for us" is a political statment.
Schmitt's contribution is that groups with different interests exists, and that these groups persue their interests. "Right" and "Left" are names that are presently assigned to such groups (or collections of groups). Any of these groups might consider it to be of tactical benefit to hide who benefits from any political measure, but Schmitt's view is that any political measure harms some group(s) and benefits others., essentially is only made to fight an enemy. If you think that Schmitt has a point then nothing is gained by a discussion that does not address who is harmed and who benefits from any polical act.
Your (or maybe Robinson's) examples of political argumemnts do not address Schmitt's central question and are therefore at best a discussion with a straw man.
If we are going to talk about Carl Schmitt, it is worth noting that we in the West have lived de facto in a continuous State of Exception since 2001. In the case of some western polities, de jure.
Where the US in particular is concerned, you will find this premise thoroughly explored in Aaron Good's "American Exception"
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Exception/Aaron-Good/9781510769137
Note to self: steal this book.
1999 maybe, with the attack on Serbia and removal of Kosovo from its control?
Wars have been going on since before that, but the normal legal regime in the West was overturned starting around 2001 and the state of emergency never really stopped.
I have to disagree, it was certainly much earlier than 2001. I don't believe it happened quickly, or during one key period, more like a gradual process with a few signature events. For example, Monroe Doctrine was a good one. Another one, was Wilson's weird belief he could just force a League of Nations both on Europeans and the US Legislature. Teddy Roosevelt taking donor funds to win the presidency, then fighting to limit money influence in politics. Plenty of similarly signal events happened, really. 2001 was not particularly unique. I think getting involved in Indochina involved very similar "breaches of established norms".
In all honesty, nothing new really happened, it's a tale as old as time itself: "Inter arma enim silent lēgēs," or when weapons start talking, the laws stay silent - rough translation. Or even earlier, we have the Siege of Melos with the famous "the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" - from the "The Melian Dialogue".
If we have been in a constant State of Exception since the days of the Athenian Assembly, then the gist of your comment is that law is meaningless.
Haven't really thought about it at length, but off the top of my head, I would say there are only a few practical “permanent laws”:
1) International agreements last as long as everyone involved considers them preferable to the alternative.
2) Whoever happens to control the means of producing the most violence, in a specific period of time, has the biggest control over setting the rules.
3) A state is sovereign, when it has the monopoly on legal violence within its territory.
Pointing out that no political arrangement is truly permanent is something different from Carl Schmitt's State of Exception.
My favorite author on politics (writing in the book with highly uninformative title "Congress: The Electoral Connection," made an observation exactly opposite of Schmitt: the role of party leaders is to dampen excessive partisanship and create an environment where you could do mutually beneficial politics--that actually does stuff--without making undue noise that cause friction (not quite in these words, thus nobody seems to have actually read them). He attributed the development of this system to the relatively successful and peaceful politics in United States for much of 20th century and foresaw the rise of modern telecommunication technology as the harbinger of its destruction. That was back in 1970s, and he saw a particular threat to its survival in, again prophetically, the rise of C-SPAN (to those unfamiliar with US politics, Newt Gingrich and the "New" Republicans used it in 1980s to make noise that sharply delineated who their "enemies" were.)
I think there's a lot that can be synthesized by looking at Schmitt and Mayhew together, of how political institutions are built and maintained and the role of leaders in a stable polity should be. Alas, Schmitt has won that debate, it seems.
What a delight. I regret that I have but one "heart" to grant it.
I did wonder, though, why you chose to go all the way back to the squabbles among the early Roman Christians rather than to the much more recent horrors of the 30 Years War -- the event in Europe that I take to have been the final nail in the coffin of explicitly sectarian Christian intermural warfare?
"That is to say that, whereas politics in Schmitt's view should be just the responsibility of the State, other groups could play a political role if they organized themselves to do so."
I would argue, instead, that what is most unique about Schmitt's conception of friend/enemy is that the political (for Schmitt) is no longer determined by the State, but on the contrary the concept of the state now presupposes the concept of the political.
It seems for Schmitt that the political no longer belongs to the "proper" place of the state and, as you mentioned. is instead defined by the autonomy and specificity/intensity of the friend-enemy distinction. And it is largely the degree of intensity which implies this distinction. In other words the quantitative augmentation of the intensity of an opposition results in a qualitative transformation--politicization. Schmitt seems to introduce this idea of potentiality as a defining factor of the concept of the political.
It also may be the case that with Schmitt's displacement of the state's monopoly on politics
there is no longer an objective structure to mark the line between political and non-political--everything is merely not yet politicized.
There are tradeoffs between freedom and security, and between freedom and properity. Personal sacrifice made for the common good can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. I think everyone recognizes this in one form or another.
What, then, are we as a nation to be for? For balance? For practical decision-making? Schmitt's philosophy was possibly the least successful political philosophy of all time, judging by the Nazi experience. We seem to be having a similar experiene with the current western leadership . I'm looking forward to next week's edition of this substack!
" Put bluntly, nobody has ever gone out to die for Liberalism, for lower property taxes, fewer regulations"
No Taxation Without Representation/Boston Tea Party (Tea was the fancy latte of that era). Shays' Rebellion. The fights in the UK against fencing. Hell, even the Civil Right movement could be depicted as "fewer regulations".
This essay could have stopped at the point where professional politicians, divorced from the desires of the represented, started making Enemies of each other.
The rest is unimportant since it is the class-based break that ultimately matters.
Nor am I the least bit impressed with the attack on the general historical philosophy of Liberalism.
Freedom of Speech is liberal. Freedom of Religion is Liberal. Freedom in general is liberal.
I don't consider the present self-depicting Liberal ideologues to be actual Liberals any more than the Democratic Party is really about Democracy.
They're all about power. period.
"No Taxation Without Representation/Boston Tea Party (Tea was the fancy latte of that era). Shays' Rebellion. The fights in the UK against fencing. Hell, even the Civil Right movement could be depicted as "fewer regulations""
Those are not examples of liberalism principles but of deep democratic desires combined with the rage against appropriating private and commons assets by the powerful. That is all that it is.
Apparently you don't consider consent or fairness or individual rights to be liberal.
Yet that is the historical underpinning of liberalism as well as being its literal definition.
Oxford Languages/Google definition
noun: liberalism
1. willingness to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; openness to new ideas.
2. a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Encyclopedia Brittanica
liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.”
When was the consent of the population sought when attacking Iraq in 2003? or when not implementing universal medicare in the US? The government in the US has always been in the hands of plutocracy, and was design as such:
"On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”"
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
Whatever the US is or is not - the definition of what Liberalism is remains the same.
Nor am I the least bit impressed with your attempt to deflect from admission of error.
If you have actual democracy, you will have some of the aspects of touted to be under the umbrella of liberalism.
The only freedom we see is for the well off ones, and for the powerful states to do what they want.
Liberalism is an idea. Democracy is an idea.
However the reality of implementation, the ideas remain the same.
Nor is "actual" democracy necessarily better. It seems clear you haven't actually looked at how Athenian democracy worked. Hint: it wasn't perfect either.
US and European democracy is skewing heavily towards elite classes - but that isn't the real question. The real question is if this swing is permanent or if it will swing back.
In the United States, it has before.
I make no promises this time around but it is equally false to say it cannot happen.
Nor is your statement about "powerful states", very true. The US wants to overthrow Putin - he's not going to get overthrown. Clearly the wannabe hegemon US cannot do what it wants in this case.
You start with recognzing Schmitt's central question of "Who is my enemy". At the end of your wrting it appears that you consider that question irrelevant.
"Immigration is harmful" is not a political statment in Schmitt's view. "Immigration is harmful to us" or "immigration is benefical for us" are political statements.
Likewise “Feminism Hurts Both Men and Women” does not address Schmitts central question. Schmitts does not accept a global "we" for which benefit is sought. "Feminism (within our group) is bad for us" or "feminism is good for us" is a political statment.
Schmitt's contribution is that groups with different interests exists, and that these groups persue their interests. "Right" and "Left" are names that are presently assigned to such groups (or collections of groups). Any of these groups might consider it to be of tactical benefit to hide who benefits from any political measure, but Schmitt's view is that any political measure harms some group(s) and benefits others., essentially is only made to fight an enemy. If you think that Schmitt has a point then nothing is gained by a discussion that does not address who is harmed and who benefits from any polical act.
Your (or maybe Robinson's) examples of political argumemnts do not address Schmitt's central question and are therefore at best a discussion with a straw man.
My opinion of Schmitt went up a few notches by reading this.