Uses and Abuses of Carl Schmitt! Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen Carl Schmitt’s ideas were already a controversial topic in the US long before his works were translated into English. At least, so it is claimed by the latest generation of American Schmitt scholars, who have uncritically bought into a questionable German tradition? that since the 1950s has sought to checkmate Schmitt out of any legitimate political discourse.> 1. An earlier draft of this article was read at a conference devoted to “Carl Schmitt: Pensatore Politico del XX Secolo,” held in Rome, November 27, 2001. 2. _ Indicative of this German tradition is a 1987 symposium on Schmitt and the cri- tique of liberalism, where Karl Hansen acknowledged that, after WWII, Schmitt had been turned into an “object that symbolized the past to be overcome,” and that “to distance one- self from Schmitt was to distance oneself from National Socialism.” See Karl Hansen and Hans Lietzmann, eds., Carl Schmitt und die Liberalismuskritik (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1988). In the same symposium, Dieter Haselbach also articulated the view, wide- spread at that time within the German Leff, that Schmitt was the source for the neo-conser- vative political agenda and the “Reagan revolution,” and that his analyses of Weimar’s political and constitutional problems had become “a foil for criticizing emancipatory ten- dencies in American society.” For a devastating critique of the whole symposium, see Joseph Bendersky, “Carl Schmitt as Occasio,” in Telos 78 (Winter 1988-89), pp. 191-208. 3. According to Scheuerman, “Schmitt exerted a subterranean influence on postwar American political thought” and “helped determine the contours of political thinking in the United States [after] 1945.” See William E, Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 1 and 12. Emanuel Richter also claims that after WWII there was a “silent reception” of Schmitt’s ideas among German intellectuals who had been forced into exile by the Nazi regime —- a mysterious “talkative silence” resulting from their embarrassment at the prospect of having to confront openly Schmitt’s See Emanuel Richter, “Carl Schmitt: The Defective Guid- al Liberalism,” in Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 21, Nos, 5-6 (May 2000), pp. 1621-22. As Bendersky demonstrates, however, there is no evidence of any such influence on the émigré intellectuals in question: Friedrich Hayek, Hans Morgan- tau, Joseph Schumpeter and Leo Strauss. See Joseph W. Bendersky, “The Definitive and the Dubious: Carl Schmitt’s Influence on Conservative Political and Legal Theory in the US,” in this issue of Tetos.4 PAUL PICCONE AND GARY ULMEN The result has been the perpetuation of ostensibly false interpretations of his ideas as being terminally fascist, thus unintendedly inflating their rele- vance and distorting the real reasons they have attracted, and continue to attract, any attention. These prejudicial readings have succeeded in reversing what began in the 1970s as an objective reception of Schmitt in the US, and in turning the clock back to the years following WWII, when even the rare “mention of Schmitt’s name usually aroused such hostility that no objective discussion was possible.” This state of affairs results primarily from the difficulties managerial-liberal thought has had, and continues to have, with “coming to terms with a past” that is difficult to mainline into an otherwise discredited linear theory of history as inevita- ble progress and gradual emancipation. This ideological approach is needed to legitimate predominant rela- tions of domination (obtaining primarily among a ruling elite of experts, professionals, politicians, etc., and a well-administered citizenry) as being neutral and natural. Not only does this framework require automatic dis- missal of all other modes of political organization, but also discrediting ideas perceived to be their ideological foundations. The result is a series of distortions and misinterpretations, which instead of defending and strengthening American institutions as claimed, weaken and undermine them by systematically occluding their real nature, and redefining them in extraneous “republican” terms — terms abstracted from European politi- cal realities brought about by the French Revolution. It is paradoxical that a European thinker such as Schmitt, whose entire career was focused pri- marily on strictly European problems, provides some of the most power- ful conceptual tools to make sense of this peculiar predicament — including the idiosyncratic reaction to his ideas by managerial-liberal apologists, who see him as a major threat to the oxymoronic system they describe as liberal-democracy. Trapped within the metaphysical parameters of a unidirectional theory of history that can interpret radical differences only as deviations or pathologies, managerial-liberal thought confronts the 20th and now the 2st century through obsolete, historically-specific categories hyposta- tized to the level of universality. The result is the homogenization of his- tory and the elimination of particularity. When not dismissing it outright, such a de facto Manichean approach can deal with “the other” only as a 4. George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Politi- cal Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936 (1970), 2nd ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. vi.USES AND ABUSES OF CARL SCHMITT — 5 variation on the same, Thus, whenever otherness appears, it must either be persuaded back into full sameness or else summarily liquidated as evil. Despite all the rhetoric about openness through “undistorted communica- tion” and interminable dialogue, participation in discussions and delibera- tions is conditional on the prior acceptance of unchallengeable rules concerning a formal rationality and mode of discourse which automati- cally exclude all but those intellectuals and professionals fully initiated into the predominant jargon.> Consequently, confrontation with “the other” cannot result in any Hegelian transcendence, whereby development takes place by internalizing and thus coopting the opponent’s moment of truth, but freezes radically opposing positions into a stalemate that only perpetuates conflict ad infinitum — pending resolution by other means. It is never a matter of reintegrating the radical opponent’s counter-claims, but of either demanding capitulation or proceeding with outright rejection. Within such a dogmatic scientistic context pretending to be ideologi- cally neutral, history becomes straightjacketed as an ontogenetic recon- struction of the triumphal march of managerial-liberal thought. Particular categories developed within particular contexts to explain particular phe- nomena are automatically integrated within the predominant universalist framework to apply anywhere, anytime. The same happens with particular political ideologies. Thus, competing systems such as Nazism, fascism and communism — and now even Islamic integralism — are not only system- atically misinterpreted, but, like liberalism, also universalized as perma- nent threats to a managerial liberalism hypostatized as the natural outcome of evolution and, therefore, as normal and natural. This is why such politi- cal thinkers as Schmitt, whose work was always inextricably rooted in problematic historical contexts,° can still be perceived as an ideological threat, long after those concrete historical situations have faded into the past. Because for a time he was opportunistically embroiled in Nazi poli- tics, and the new American anti-Schmittians see Nazism and fascism not as closed chapters of 20th century history, but rather as permanent threats 5. See Nicholas Meriwether, “Discourse Ethics and the Problem of Oppression,” in Telos 119 (Spring 2001), pp. 99-114. As Schmitt never tired of emphasizing as part of his critique of universalism, political concepts are always answers to particular problems and make sense only in the specific context within which they are formulated. He even warned against the automatic transposition of concepts from one discipline to another: “The greatest and most egregious misunderstandings . . . can be explained by the erroneous transfer of a concept at home in one sphere . . . to other spheres of intellectual life.” See Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neu- tralizations and Depoliticizations (1929),” in Telos 96 (Summer 1993), pp. 134ff.