Abstract
Schmitt believed that Hobbes had offered an insightful analysis of the political during the Westphalian period, but that in the context of the twentieth century his diagnosis was no longer valid. Hobbes’s identification of political and state had become problematic; the primary task of the political is to provide protection in return for obedience, but the twentieth-century state was becoming increasingly incapable of performing such a role.
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Notes
C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1932] 1996), p. 29
G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 2000).
E. Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political: Carl Schmitt’s and Lenin’s Political Realism (London: Westport, 2001), p. 35.
C. Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), p. 50.
Schmitt refers us to books 6 and 8, Chapter 6B of Clausewitz’ On War. The quotation in the text is from C. Clausewitz, On War (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), p. 357.
Aron, R. Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (London: Routledge, 1983).
Aron, R. History and the Dialectic of Violence (London: Harper and Row, 1975).
Aron, R. Peace & War: A Theory of International Relations (New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
A discussion of Carl Schmitt and Karl Marx can be found in J.E. Dotti, ‘From Karl to Carl: Schmitt as a Reader of Marx’ in C. Mouffe (ed.) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 92–117.
Most stimulating discussions on norm and exception can be found in William E. Scheuerman, ‘The rule of law under siege: Carl Schmitt and the death of the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, 14 (1993) 265–80
E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2004)
D. Dyzenhaus, Constitution of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
R. Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998).
As argued by Jerry Z. Muller, for Schmitt ‘a normal state was one in which relations of enmity were directed outward, in which the “enemy” was foreign’. See J.Z. Muller ‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the radical conservative critique of liberal democracy in the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, 12 (1991) 695–715
In Theorie des Partisanen, Schmitt does not restate his view on the total state and on the distinction between the quantitative and qualitative senses of ‘total state’. On this issue, see Jerry Muller, who quotes from Schmitt’s article in the Europäische Revue of February 1933: ‘the total state [in the qualitative sense] is an especially strong state [...] Such a state allows no forces to arise within it which might be inimical to it, limit it, or fragment it [...] Such a state can distinguish friend from foe’, J.Z. Muller, op. cit., p. 712. See also J-W. Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003)
P. Caldwell, ‘Ernst Forsthoff and the legacy of radical conservative state theory in the Federal Republic of Germany’, History of Political Thought, 15 (1994) 615–41.
It is worth mentioning that the link between weak state and partisan guerrilla has been confirmed by empirical research. J. Fearon and D. Laitin summarize the finding of their empirical research on internal wars in the 1990s thus: ‘Decolonization from the 1940s through the 1970s gave birth to a large number of financially, bureaucratically and militarily weak states. These states have been at risk for civil violence for the whole period, almost entirely in the form of insurgency, or rural guer-rilla warfare [...] The conditions that favor insurgency [are] state weakness marked by poverty, a large population, and instability’. See J. Fearon and D. Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Review of Political Science, 97:1 (2003) 75–90
See G. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
L. Odysseos, ‘Crossing the Line? Carl Schmitt on the Spaceless Universalism of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror’, in L. Odysseos and F. Petito (eds) The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt (New York and London: Routledge, 2007) 124–43
G.L. Ulmen, ‘Partisan Warfare, Terrorism and the Problem of a New Nomos of the Earth’, in L. Odysseos and F. Petito (eds) The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt (New York and London: Routledge, 2007) 97–106
A. Behnke, ‘Terrorising the Political: 9/11 within the context of the Globalisation of Violence’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33:2 (2004) 279–312.
J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship(London: Verso, 1997).
See A. Jongman and A. Schmid, Political Terrorism (Amsterdam and Oxford: North Holland Publishing Co., 1988).
P. Wilkinson, Terrorism versus Democracy (London: Frank Cass, 2001).
R.D. Howard and R.L. Sawyer (eds) Terrorism and Counterterrorism (Guilford, Conn.: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004).
B. Cole and N. Gurr, The New Face of Terrorism (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000).
M. Crenshaw (ed.) Terrorism in Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
M. Crenshaw, ‘The Causes of Terrorism’, Comparative Politics, 139 (1981) 379–400.
W. Laqueur, The New Terrorism (London: Pheonix, 2001).
C. Townshend, Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
B. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998).
M. Wieviorka, The Making of Terrorism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 294.
B. Hoffman, op. cit., p. 41. See also P. Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 60.
On this issue see T. Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 14–16
C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), pp. 78–9.
For more on this issue, see Jerry Muller, who quotes from Schmitt’s article in the Europäische Revue of February 1933: ‘the total state [in the qualitative sense] is an especially strong state. [...] Such a state allows no forces to arise within it which might be inimical to it, limit it, or fragment it. [...] Such a state can distinguish friend from foe’, J.Z. Muller, ‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the radical conservative critique of liberal democracy in the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, 12 (1991), 695–715
J. Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
E. Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political (Westport, Conn.-London: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 120
P. Caldwell, ‘Ernst Forsthoff and the legacy of radical conservative state theory in the Federal Republic of Germany’, History of Political Thought, 15 (1994) 615–41.
Schmitt’s writings between 1937 and 1941 suggest that a possible answer to the question of a true political form that can replace the state is the Grossraum; see for example J. Kervegan, ‘Carl Schmitt and World Unity’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), op. cit., 54–74, especially pp. 62–4 and P. Stirk, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999) 357–74.
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© 2009 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2009). The Partisan, or the Man of Exception. In: Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234673_4
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