Abstract
‘In the beginning was the State and the State was with the Political and the State was the Political’: this was the received truth of the Gospel according to Westphalian political thought, or at least, so Carl Schmitt claimed. He challenged such truth with his famous remark that ‘the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’.1 But if political and state do not coincide, what is the political? As ‘one seldom finds a clear definition of the political’,2 Schmitt set himself the task of filling this lacuna. He formulated the following definition, often referred to as ‘the friend/ enemy principle’:
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. [&] The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.3
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Notes
C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1932 ]), p. 19.
‘In diesem Mileu hat man aus einer vorsichtigen, ersten Absteckung eines Begriffsfeldes ein primitives Schlagwort gemacht, eine sogenannte Freund-Feind-Theorie, die man nur vom Hörensagen kennt und der Gegenpartei in die Schuhe schiebt’, in C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien, 7th edn (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963), p. 16.
In this book I make reference to the original German text, C. Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, [1963] 1975)
F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1924] 1957).
C. Schmitt, ‘Zu Friedrich Meineckes “Idee der Staatsräson”’, Archiv für Sozialwissenshaft und Sozialpolitick, 56:1 (1926) 226–34
C. Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994).
C.J. Friedrich, Tradition & Authority (London: Pall Mall Press, 1972), p. 21.
E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
N. Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 29.
H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 19.
Thucydides’ ‘The History of the Grecian War’, translated by Thomas Hobbes, in W. Molesworth (ed.) The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. VIII (London: John Bonn, 1843), p. 348.
The lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1948 are published in H. Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1954).
Quoted by B. Arditi, ‘On the Political: Schmitt contra Schmitt’, Telos, 142 (2008) 7–28
L. Strauss, op. cit., p. 92, fn. 2. A most interesting discussion of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss can be found in H. Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Nomos is a very complex concept in Schmitt. It is defined in C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), pp. 67–79.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. xiii.
C. Schmitt, ‘The Visibility of the Church: A Scholastic Consideration’, in the Appendix of C. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 56.
A helpful discussion of jus publicum europaeum and nomos can be found in J.P. Burgess, ‘The Evolution of European Union Law and Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Nomos of Europe’, in L. Odysseos and F. Petito (eds) The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt, (London, Routledge, 2007) 185–201.
D. Dyzenhaus, ‘Putting the State Back in Credit’, in C. Mouffe (ed.) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999) 75–91
As Schmitt puts it,’ state and revolution, Leviathan and Behemoth are actually or potentially always present’, C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 35.
There are excellent studies of the historical and intellectual context of Schmitt’s texts. Among the most illuminating are: E. Kennedy, Constitutional failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004)
G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 2000)
J-W. Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 155–6.
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© 2009 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2009). Introduction. In: Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234673_1
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