Liberalism and the Negation of the Political

On the Performativity of Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism

I’ve spent some time recently reading the work of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, partly triggered by my reflections on the rise of libertarian authoritarianism. In his writings, Schmitt argues for a conception of the political and a theory of sovereignty that constitutes the core of a radical critique of individualism and liberalism. I’ve become convinced that the way liberal democracy is nowadays criticized in intellectual circles and attacked in the daily democratic practices of Western countries has a strong Schmittian flavor, even if barely any reference to Schmitt is made by opponents of liberalism. By “strong Schmittian flavor,” I mean essentially two things. First, many critics of liberal democracy implicitly appeal to views about the sources of authority and political legitimacy that largely overlap with the very particular way Schmitt conceptualizes the political. Second, the way politics is practiced by populist leaders partly reflects Schmitt’s conceptualization. My intuition is that, in an intriguing performative trick, populist leaders and intellectual critics of liberalism are progressively transforming the political culture of Western democracies into something that more and more reflects the characteristics of what Schmitt calls “the political.” I want to expand on this intuition in this essay.

The Triumph of Death, Peter Bruegel the Elder (1562)

I rely here mainly on two sets of Schmitt’s writings that have been translated into English: Political Theology and The Concept of the Political.[1] The former develops a personalistic theory of sovereignty that, to summarize, grounds sovereignty into the effective ability of a political leader to determine when a polity falls in a state of exception and what to do when the exception prevails. As Schmitt puts it at the beginning of the text, “[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception.”[2] The latter develops Schmitt’s relatively well-known thesis that the political is constituted by the distinction between “friends” and “enemies.” Schmitt argues that, as the liberal state progressively embraces the whole society, equating the state with the political became erroneous. The political is an independent and autonomous sphere of human activity characterized by the friend-enemy distinction that cannot be reduced to the religious, the economic, or the cultural, all belonging to the domain of influence of the democratic “total state.” As the state merged with society, the false impression arose that everything, and hence, nothing, is political, while actually, the friend-enemy distinction characterizes an irreducible and constitutive aspect of human life. At the bottom, the nature of the political is tied to the possibility of war:

“A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings… The phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics.”[3]

The eighth and last chapter of The Concept of the Political develops a critique of liberal individualism that, broadly, attacks liberalism for negating the political in the Schmittian sense:[4]

“The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consistent individualism, leads necessarily to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces and forms of state and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics. As a result, there exists a liberal policy in the form of a political antithesis against state, church, or other institutions which restrict individual freedom. There exists a liberal policy of trade, church, and education, but absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”

Schmitt more specifically points out liberalism’s inability to account for political demands that cannot be made compatible with individuals’ interests and freedom, starting with the demand of sacrificing one’s life for the common good:

“All liberal pathos turns against repression and lack of freedom. Every encroachment, every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competition is called repression and is eo ipso something evil. What this liberalism admits of state, government, and politics is confined to securing the conditions for liberty and eliminating infringement on freedom.”[5]

It follows that from a liberal perspective, politics is either reduced to market competition or ethical conversation. Justification must be made in terms of efficiency, goodness, or fairness but cannot proceed on genuinely political terms. The rest falls into the domain of illegitimate repression and is condemned.

Schmitt seems to identify a liberal philosophy of history that he locates in particular in Benjamin Constant’s treatise De l’esprit de conquête. It takes the form of a series of antitheses: freedom against feudalism, reason against force, technology against politics, economy against state… Schmitt finds in Constant’s account the idea of an irrepressible movement from an age of war to a civilized age where politics cedes the way to industry and peaceful commerce.

Schmitt sees this philosophy of history as a delusion. The various antitheses are untenable insofar as the economic can also be a realm of deception and exploitation. More importantly, you cannot get rid of the political as economic or moral antagonisms are themselves likely to become political. Economics and morality can become instruments of, rather than substitutes to the political. Liberalism is guilty of falsely assuming “depoliticization,” i.e., a world where the possibility of agonistic conflicts that can end in a war is replaced by peaceful competition and deliberation.

Interestingly, though Schmitt’s conception of the political contributes to a critique of liberalism, it has at times received a favorable echo in some liberal circles. Raymond Aron was in particular notoriously attracted by Schmitt’s account and developed in the 1950s a concept of le politique as an autonomous domain of human life that bears resemblance with Schmitt’s.[6] Aron’s 1930s writings display Schmittian elements, especially about the distinction between liberalism and democracy and the totalitarian tendencies of the latter. His 1938 essay “Democratic States and Totalitarian States” exhibits a deep sensitivity to the political nature, in the Schmittian sense, of the agonistic conflict between liberal democracies and totalitarian regimes. But the comparison stops at this point. While Schmitt saw democracy and liberalism as fundamentally incompatible, Aron argued for the opposite. If Aron always emphasized the agonistic and conflictual character of the political as a domain of human life, he also insisted on the possibility of reconciliation within a constitutional and pluralistic order.

A critical discussion of Schmitt’s conception of the political and critique of liberalism is well beyond my point here. I want however to insist on the performative aspect I briefly mentioned at the beginning. At least up to a point, by guiding our choices and actions, our beliefs contribute to constructing the very reality they are about. In some rare extreme cases, they can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, as in the standard example of the bank run. More generally, what we believe to be true has an indirect causal influence on the world, even if in the end our beliefs may still be proven wrong. We can argue infinitely about whether the political is constituted by the friend-enemy distinction. If enough persons, among the elites as well as the rest of the citizens, are convinced that politics is about nothing else than unsolvable radical conflicts of values that cannot be adjudicated by rational and legal means, it is highly likely that the political order will progressively turn into a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Schmitt may be proven right as the liberal public political culture is slowly decaying under the assault of populist leaders (from the inside) and autocrats (from the outside). At some point, liberals may have no choice but “to demonstrate the same virtues” as illiberal enemies, to quote Aron’s 1938 essay. If and when this happens, Schmitt will have been fully vindicated.

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[1] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922 [2006]). Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab, Enlarged edition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1932 [2007]). The latter also features the 1929 essay “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.”

[2] Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 5.

[3] Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 35.

[4] Ibid., p. 70.

[5] Ibid., p. 71.

[6] See for instance Iain Stewart, Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 155-9.