The Stakes of the Political According to Carl Schmitt

Abstract

In this section I would like to bring to the fore the actuality of Schmitt and the relevance of his reflections on the political, which I take to be of crucial importance for an adequate understanding of our current predicament. It is my contention that, by allowing us to grasp the nature of the political, Schmitt can help us to visualize the shortcomings of the liberal framework that informs most political thinking nowadays. My starting point is that the political constitutes the blind spot of the dominant liberal framework that structures the “common sense” in our liberal democratic societies. This blind spot is responsible for our current incapacity to think in political terms, an incapacity that has led to the increasing dominance of a moral or juridical type of discourse. This dominance has proved to have very negative effects on the workings of democratic politics. If this trend is not reversed, the consequences can be disastrous. I first scrutinize the incapacity of liberal thought to understand the nature of the political and to acknowledge the irreducible character of antagonism, showing why this constitutes a real danger for the future of democracy. I then examine some topical issues and discuss how an approach inspired by Schmitt can enable us to see them in a completely different light. To avoid any misunderstanding, I want to stress that my aim is not to offer a history of political ideas or an exhaustive study of Schmitt, but rather to use him, sometimes against himself, as a source of inspiration to bring to the fore several shortcomings of current approaches in liberal democratic thinking.