The following critique of Carl Schmitt was originally published in our latest print issue of New Polity. To read essays like these, subscribe today.
To speak of “peace” and “politics” in the same breath feels oxymoronic. “Politics” has come to mean the bitter negotiation of disagreements, the thing to be avoided at the dinner table, and mankind’s favorite warm-up exercise before running to war. Peace, for its part, seems synonymous with the absence of politics. Politics is about conflict; peace is about harmony and repose. To search for “peace” rarely means to run for mayor; it means to abjure the political, to abandon the fight which is the social life of men in favor of the company of little children and squirrels. Hippies talk about peace. Serious men talk about politics.
The rising temperature of our feverish “official politics” gives weight to the belief that violence (both its repression and its use) belongs to politics’ eternal essence. Indeed, in Christian intellectual circles, the acknowledgment that politics means “getting your hands dirty” has come as a breath of fresh air, as a hearty sort of realism. Rather than decry politics as contentious, Christians are now to encourage each other to enter into the proto-war of political power and turn its fundamentally violent aspect toward Christian goals. Practically, this position inspires young Christians to take up internships in Washington, DC.
Carl Schmitt is a thinker fit for this, our age of great contention—as he was fit for his own. It may seem odd that an intellectual who was working to justify Adolf Hitler’s Germany should inspire a new generation of Christians; but the apostle Paul's advice that we test everything and keep what is good overcomes the embarrassing association. What is “good” in Schmitt is not his party allegiance any more than what is “good” in Marx is his atheism. Rather, Schmitt’s definition of politics as being essentially about the friend-enemy distinction resonates with a Christian people who increasingly feel the weight of their enemies. His resolute description of de facto power (rather than liberalism’s self-referential “rule of law”) as the foundation of order resonates with a Christian people who can no longer pretend that any neutral—merely procedural—political field exists.
Liberalism, in Schmitt's thought, is the myth that politics has to do with ideal forms and offices—that is, with rights, with checks and balances, with a closed legal order and constitutions [1] —rather than with the power by which we are obliged to follow this constitution and not another: the power that establishes checked and balanced institutions and that can suspend them, the power of enforcement by which rights such as “the right to free speech” become active in the world, not mere postulates. What is primary on this view is the power to establish a political order (be it liberal or otherwise) in the first place. This power declares those who are outside the order to be the enemy. It is the power, for instance, which grants everyone “the right to free speech” except those who use their speech to deny “the right to free speech.” These enemies, who are placed outside the political order, are the real object of politics; the one who can believably distinguish them as enemies and rally others in war against them is, de facto, the true political leader. Politics is war.
One can see why a Christian might be inspired by Schmitt’s description. Supposedly ideal forms (like “the right to privacy”), supposedly neutral forms (like the public square), and supposedly non-ideological institutions (like the Supreme Court) are, as we constantly see, tools used to attack and demean Christianity and its vision for the political order. It turns out that, far from coexisting within the neutral space of politics, Christians are excluded from it. And after reading Schmitt, the idea that Christian ends can be reached by negotiating for fair outcomes from officially “neutral” political institutions appears, frankly, pathetic. Schmitt is a solvent, dissolving our lingering liberal childishness. Christians must actually wield the power necessary to win the war: declare evil men “enemies,” found institutions, enforce order, and direct citizens toward good ends. Christians must lead.
But Carl Schmitt was wrong to locate the essence of the political in the capacity to declare the friend-enemy distinction. Theologically, he argues that something essential to man—his political nature—is contingent upon an effect of his fall: namely, enmity. In order to maintain his definition, Schmitt must either deny that politics is natural to man as a part of God’s “very good” creation (and hold, therefore, that it emerges only within the contingent realm of sin), or he must contend that the fall was complete: that our natures are totally depraved, rendering whatever form politics may have had before sin meaningless to our situation. Either way, for Schmitt, our present-day politics have no meaningful relation to the politics of Eden or the politics of the saints. [2] As he explains: “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.” [3]
Defining politics as x, and then showing how all instances of things called “politics” that don't include x aren’t really political is hardly profound—unless one makes an extremely convincing case for the first premise. Schmitt does not. His assertive confidence aside, there is nothing to justify the reduction of “politics” to the capacity to decide the friend-enemy distinction. For instance, we assert that the essence of the political is the capacity of one person to lead another into virtue within a power difference that obtains between them. Schmitt would say that such an activity is not truly “political” unless it is open to “the real possibility of physical killing,” which “as an ever present possibility ... is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior.” [4] Obviously, by his own definition, he would be correct, and there would be nothing “political” about leading others into virtue—but it is precisely his definition which is at issue. What makes his definition better than ours?
Self-fulfilling prophecies
Schmitt does claim to give evidence for his assertion, but the evidence always proves circular. He says:
[A]ll political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result (which manifests itself in war or revolution) is a friend-enemy grouping, and they turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions when this situation disappears. Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on, are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term. [5]
Schmitt looks at early 20th-century Europe, which really was organized into competitive, warring nation-states, defined as monopolies on legitimate violence in fundamental and constitutive opposition to other, rival sovereigns. He then lists the words which, within these nation-states, are generally taken to be “political” words. He finds that these words all contain a polemical meaning. Obviously, which words appear “political” is predetermined by one’s definition and theory of politics—which, both for Schmitt and in the actual praxis of the European nations gearing up for war, involved a Hobbesian presumption of violence.
Schmitt is here, in fact, following the method of Hobbes, who asserted at the outset of his Leviathan that political science is nothing else than working out the meanings of definitions:
it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us, nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is, but attained by industry, first in apt imposing of names, and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another, and so to syllogisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it men call science. [6]
We could make our own list of words associated with our theory of politics as “the capacity of one person to lead another into virtue in and through a power difference that obtains between them,” and it would include some words that appear polemical, and others that do not: “war, education, architectural planning, liturgy, and distribution” would be, by our definition, political acts. This is not to deny the possibility that one could, with some strain, link every one of these concepts with “the possibility of physical killing,” saying, for instance, that every architectural code is a negation and exclusion of other possible codes, and thus an instance of the friend-enemy distinction. But this would in no way prove that these concepts are political by virtue of their relationship to physical killing, any more than cycling’s relationship to health proves that cycling is an essentially medical activity. And even to the members of liberal states (states constituted by an idea of sovereignty which takes rivalry and violence as fundamental), it is unlikely that only those words that negate an enemy would appear as political: would “infrastructure,” “taxation,” or “community” really remain incomprehensible concepts, removed from politics, by virtue of having no clear enemy in sight? If words are to be our measure, Schmitt has left a good many political words out, raising the suspicion that the words have been selected to prove the theory, rather than the theory being evidenced by a real commonality among the words.
Who is my enemy?
Schmitt tries to hold together two propositions: First, that the true object of politics is “public enemy,” as opposed to the private one. This "public enemy" is described as a “fighting collectivity.” Second, that the political sphere depends on “the real possibility of physical killing,” which “as an ever present possibility ... is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior.” [7]
But “physical killing” is always personal. One cannot maintain a private-public distinction when one is bashing another man’s skull with the butt of a gun or flying a drone into his apartment. At the moment of killing, the public enemy is the personal enemy, because killing is done by men, and not by states or “organized political entities”—no matter that one kills in their name or under their flag. States, as theoretical constructs, must motivate and license men to kill: and without this absorption of the theoretically “public enemy” into the “private adversary whom one hates” (and private hatred is an apolitical emotion, according to Schmitt), states are powerless.
But this would imply that in order for there to be a real possibility of physical killing (i.e. politics) there must be a disavowal of politics, which (according to Schmitt) is essentially concerned with the enemy defined as a “collectivity.” The climax of politics would also be the eclipse of politics, because “the enemy is solely the public enemy,” and physical killing “privatizes” the public. [8]
Schmitt uses this assertion to circumvent the implications of Christ’s command to “love your enemies.” Having asserted that the political can only be the public, Schmitt reads the commandment as essentially apolitical: “The often quoted ‘Love your enemies’ (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads ‘diligite inimicos vestros’ [Greek: ἐχθρῶν, echthrous] and not diligite hostes vestros. No mention is made of the political enemy.” [9]
Schmitt’s exegesis depends entirely on the idea that echthrous are exclusively private adversaries, objects of personal rancor, but never political enemies and objects of war. This is not how the word is used elsewhere in the Holy Scriptures. Mary proclaims the power of Christ who promises to give Israel “salvation from our enemies [ἐχθρῶν], and from the hands of those who hate us” (Luke 1:71), which could hardly have been limited to a private enemy. Jesus quotes the divine promise to make King David’s enemies [ἐχθρῶν] his footstool (Luke 20:43); in parables, the word is used to denote an explicitly political enemy, as when the enemies of a king refuse his rule: “But bring here those enemies [ἐχθρῶν] of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, and slay them before me” (Luke 19:27). In the Vulgate, things are even worse for Schmitt. From the first appearance of inimicos (“And you shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword”: Lev. 26:7) throughout the entirety of the Old Testament and into the New, inimicos are the “political” enemy more clearly than the “personal”; it is the enemy against whom Israel wars, the enemy about whom the Lord says to David, “Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool” (Ps 110:1). Schmitt makes a distinction that the Scripture simply does not sustain. Scripture knows that the enemy of the nation and the enemy of the man cannot but be, at the point of battle, the same:
When you go forth to war against your enemies [hostes], and see horses and chariots and an army larger than your own, you shall not be afraid of them; for the LORD your God is with you, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And when you draw near to the battle, the priest shall come forward and speak to the people, and shall say to them, “Hear, O Israel, you draw near this day to battle against your enemies [inimicos]: let not your heart faint; do not fear, or tremble, or be in dread of them; for the LORD your God is he that goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies [adversarios], to give you the victory.” (Deut. 10:1-4)
Obviously, echthrous and inimicos are quite capable of designating the political enemy, and in no way does Christ’s command to “love your enemies” exclude love of the political enemy. The only way Schmitt makes this reading appear plausible is by separating “love” from the use of force, as if one could not possibly love someone with whom one was at war. He says: “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. [The verse] certainly does not mean one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.” [10] But, as any good parent knows, love does not necessitate support. In fact, love often demands punishment and coercion, either for the good of the wrongdoer or for the good of the community that he is threatening. For the sake of the salvation of both the heretics and the society they threatened, King Louis IX confiscated their property upon their excommunication—an act of ecclesiastical and political love for which the Apostle Paul supplies an archetypal example: “deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 5:5).
The Catholic tradition has been unequivocal in this regard. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, glosses Matthew’s text:
It should be said, according to Augustine, that we should [love our enemies], as to nature but not as to fault. Hence your adversary is to be loved in what he shares with you, as also appears among natural things; for white is opposed to black as it is unlike: as black, not as a color. Hence we should destroy hatred, i.e., the fact that he is an enemy should displease us, and we should destroy this in him. [11]
Aquinas does not define the enemy negatively, but positively, as one who always has some degree of likeness, however small, by which he is “by nature” a friend, and through which he may become “in act” a friend once more. At the same time we are given the commandment to “love our enemies” we are given the wisdom necessary to do so, namely, the recognition that everyone is a “very good” creation of God, beloved by God destined for unity with Him, and prayed for by the Church unto salvation. This is true of the man haloed in the sniper’s scope, as it was true of the Muslim whom the crusader travelled to fight. Christ’s command to love one’s enemies, far from leaving the “political enemy” untouched by grace, positively includes him as the object of love, and creates a new ethic for warfare, one exemplified by the reforming knights of the high Middle Ages, who were to fight with love in their hearts: orienting their hatred, not toward the person, but toward that sin whereby the person is an enemy of the Church. As St. Bernard wrote of such warriors: “Surely, if he kills an evil doer, he is not a man-killer, but, if I may so put it, an evil-killer.” The great saint could assert with confidence, “Let both swords of the faithful fall upon the necks of their enemies (inimicorum) to the destruction of every lofty thing lifting itself up against the knowledge of God.” [12] And yet, “the true Israelites march into battle as men of peace.” [13] “Indeed, danger or victory for the Christian are weighed by the focus of the heart, not the fortunes of war.… [I]f anger or arrogance have got the best of you, in vain do you boast over the fallen enemy.” [14] Only within this radical assumption of peace and friendship as real and already-partially-fulfilled possibilities, only within the new order of love, does the charitable coercion and killing practiced within Christendom make sense, as St. Thomas makes abundantly clear:
Hence while preserving charity I can wish some temporal evil on my neighbor to the extent that it would give him the occasion of doing good and attaining eternal life. Hence Gregory says in his Morals that the sign that you do not love your neighbor is when you rejoice in his ruin; but I can rejoice in his temporal ruin to the extent that it is ordered to his good or that of others or of the multitude. [15]
Schmitt reduces the divine command to a fictitious “private sphere” and leaves the “political enemy” (and thus politics as a whole) to a pagan, graceless world. As a result, war, coercion, and fighting become realms in which love is excluded a priori. This is a cooperation with liberalism, a more-than-usually visible instance of liberalism’s general project: to render the Church politically irrelevant by positing a realm free from its influence, and so free from the influence of God, and then, historically, building and maintaining this realm as the sovereign state.
So it is no surprise to see Schmitt bolstering Max Weber’s description of “states” as monopolies on legitimate violence. As Schmitt says “the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political,” [16] and the “political” is the capacity to declare the friend-enemy distinction, where the enemy is public, rather than private, and where one’s decision as to the public enemy is actually effective, i.e., when the entity in question really can lead a people into or away from war with the declared enemy. Thus, the only thing that can properly be political is the modern state, which is defined in advance as the entity capable of doing politics in the above, reduced manner—that of successfully declaring war, of making the decision of who is an enemy: “In its literal sense and in its historical appearance the state is a specific entity of a people ... it is in the decisive case the ultimate authority.” [17]
Schmitt defines entities that can make war (including civil war) as states, and argues that if any organization—no matter if it is religious, economic, or cultural—is able to make war, it simply is a state: “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” [18] Schmitt appears to grant political power to the Church, but only insofar as the Church is a state: “A religious community which wages wars … is already more than a religious community; it is a political entity.” [19] Catholicism can be a political Catholicism, but it does not actually transform politics, or give a particular object to man’s political nature, it simply becomes the means to political ends, which are always only enmity:
[T]he real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria and motives to the conditions and conclusions of the political at hand. [19]
A political Catholicism, in this description, is a Catholicism that performs the task of motivating common hatred around a common enemy in and through subordinating its “religious criteria and motives” to the self-contained “conclusions of the political,” that is, to the necessities of war. Crucially, it does this in precisely the same form as any other association of human beings which does the same thing. The political is an ideal form of enmity-production which transforms the Church into itself; the Church can never work the other way round and take politics up into her logic. Again, this is to collude with liberalism in the subordination of the spiritual power of the Church to the raw power of the sovereign state.
Schmitt’s admiration for the Catholic Church, then, is a back-handed sort of admiration. He respects the Church as a perfection of “political” form. For Schmitt, the form of politics is always the form of the decision on war, on the friend-enemy distinction. Friends are inside the law and enemies are outside the law, so the decision by which one determines who is friend and who is enemy is always made, ultimately, from beyond the law. Any such decision suspends the normal political order for reasons that do not emerge from within the order and through a power that is not derived from the order. (The ability to efficaciously make this decision is sovereignty.) Schmitt sees this supra-legal decision at the very heart of the Church’s authority. The Church knows itself to have a “decisionist” form that terminates ultimately in the perfect sovereignty that is papal infallibility, justified through the assertion that the pope represents the Incarnate God Himself—which is to say that it is justified entirely from without and so cannot be judged. [20] The Church is ordered by a legal system that is always and everywhere structurally vulnerable to an external decision on the exception, a decision that by definition cannot emerge from within the competence of the norm. The authority of the norm of the law, in each instance of its application, is grounded exactly on the ever-present possibility of an un-appealable decision on its suspension. The law is supremely powerful only because it is held in being from without, only because it does not claim self-referential and so seamless authority. Such a form is, for Schmitt, the form of politics itself. [21] As Schmitt famously stated: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” [22]
Schmitt claims to see modern politics as the “secularization” of this, the Church’s order, but he is playing with words. [23] In fact, in Schmitt’s telling, nothing essential has been lost in the translation of “political theology” from the Church to the state. The Church perfected politics, as Schmitt defines it, and the states just adopted it and carried it forward into modernity—this is all his “secularization” amounts to. Indeed, the Church itself had merely carried forward the Roman form and so the movement back to the state is a movement that occurs within a politics that is, fundamentally, “secular”—it is a return home. The “true” religion is necessarily political for the exact same reason that sovereign states are necessarily “religious,” because they always operate through an external, “transcendent” idea, which is nothing other than the justification of the sovereign’s de facto ability to suspend the normal order from without, which is to say to declare war, civil or otherwise, which is to declare new enemies. [24] The “church” can only be political as a de facto department of the state. [25] It cannot be universal because the political is always particular: “A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.” [26] Real churches and real states are, for Schmitt, the same thing—because there must be one decisive grouping and this grouping is always oriented to war. As Schmitt explains:
In any event, that grouping is always political which orients itself toward this most extreme possibility [i.e., conflict]. This grouping is therefore always the decisive human grouping, the political entity. If such an entity exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always necessarily reside there. [27]
This is, of course, Hobbes. It is also the complete subordination of the spiritual to the temporal, a subordination far more complete than liberalism’s embarrassingly naive public/private binary. Within this Hobbesian state-theory, “which,” as Schmitt observed with admiration, “destroyed the murky distinctions of indirect powers,” [28] the spiritual has always been, in truth, just more war, just more power. In Schmitt, grace working on nature is nowhere to be found—only law, only “decisions,” only the “miraculous” power of the “gods” (or of “God” as the case may, incidentally, be). [29]
Political power is always “divine” power of the nominalist type: arbitrarily holding the political order in being through a voluntarist decision no more grounded than the decision to suspend that order. When the potentia absoluta of sovereignty becomes visible to those beneath it, it does so as a miracle of the Spinozian variety, as an inexplicable suspension of an equally inexplicable norm; the miracle is noteworthy only from below, only because the subjects hold always imperfect knowledge of their god and of his decrees. Because it is the perfection of this political form, the Church is always integrated into the decisive political order; and the decisive political order always takes this form, even the de facto political order that must openly emerge from beneath the liberal “procedural” delusions where it hides:
The new order [liberal-capitalist] cannot confine itself to management of the process of production and consumption, because it must be constituted formally: every order is a legal order; every state, a constitutional state. Once this step is taken, [once, that is, the managers become rulers] the Church can align itself with this new order, as it has with every order. [30]
Schmitt praises the Church, but his praise is ultimately for sovereign power. The Church is only praised incidentally, for being an order where a constituting, sovereign power is obvious and on display. That the Church follows the teachings of Christ rather than, say, Muhammad, is irrelevant: it is the Church’s revelation of the nature of the political—that is, of the truth of Schmitt’s thesis—that makes it so wonderful.
Understanding this about Schmitt allows us to return to his treatment of “love your enemies,” perceiving a deeper coherence than at first pass—though a profoundly cynical coherence. A subject must love his “private” enemies because the sovereign (in the complex sense of whatever configuration of forces is politically decisive) has decided that they are his “friends.” He must hate his “political” enemies because this sovereign has decided that they are his “enemies.” For him to do otherwise, for him to hate his private enemies or love his public enemies, would be nothing short of an attempt to establish a new sovereignty, a new locus of “the decision.” [31] It would be an act of rebellion, which is at the same time always an act of impiety—unless and until, of course, the new alignment becomes “decisive,” at which moment the “private” enemy becomes the “public” enemy. [32] Christ’s command to love one’s enemies, the very heart of Christianity, becomes nothing more than the assertion of the practical “divinity” of some men over others. Through his positing of reading the truth of Christianity as functioning only within the sovereign majesty of men, Schmitt reduces the Church to the perfect form of the merely political: Christianity is true and truth is ultimately whatever the sovereign says it is. In Schmitt’s “political theology” all the emphasis is on “political.” Schmitt loves the Church, this comes through in his writing, but it is a Church that is really an Empire. [33]
Within his line of thought, the historical churches that operate in any given society are no different from any other sub-grouping that operates within decisive, political groupings. To demand that people die or kill for any of these subordinate groupings is, for Schmitt, “sinister and crazy” because it is tautologically impossible. Schmitt repeatedly quotes Hobbes: “autoritas non veritas facit legem”—“authority, not truth, makes law.” [34] What Hobbes means, of course, is that raw power masks itself as legitimate authority by producing “truth” through making law. Which is simply a way of collapsing power, authority, law, and truth into each other. For Hobbes, and Schmitt, history is ultimately the conflict between such raw powers, rendered into “authorities,” and cannot be anything else.
Alternatives
Schmitt’s work envisions man as, by virtue of creation, engaged in a war of all against all: evil in nature and already in hell. It is, as we have already seen, a gloss on the thought of Hobbes, with his presumption of primordial violence. Indeed, for all his effort to delineate the essence of the political as the capacity to make the friend-enemy distinction, Schmitt never defines friendship—only enmity. Political groupings of “friends” are (by implication) defined as groupings oriented against enemies. The friend is never anything more than the one with whom you are not currently at war. One’s friend could, however, gain enough power to declare the friend-enemy grouping against the fighting collectivity to which you belong, in which case he would become your enemy. [35] So, the friend is a threat and must be prevented from gaining power: the friend is nothing other than a potential enemy. Therefore, everyone is an enemy and there is no friend/enemy grouping—the distinction collapses into a fluid contest for mastery and there is no meaningful content to “friend” other than simply the one you are not currently fighting, the one who happens to be aligned with you against a mutual enemy. Which is another way of saying that the friend is merely one who has submitted to the same sovereign, handing over his power.
This, quite simply, does not match life as we know it. There may be times, here and there, when we feel like all of life is enmity and potential enmity, but normally life involves friends. This, then, is the alternative assertion: friendship is the fundamental political reality. Man’s political nature has, as its end, the act of making friends. A friend is the one for whom you desire good—and to whatever extent you do desire good for another, there is friendship. If Jesus could say “love your enemies,” it is not because “the enemy” has some ideal, ontological status as an Evil Thing that we are nevertheless required to grit our teeth and love (which seems to be the only way Schmitt can imagine love for the political enemy). Rather, an enemy, like evil, has no real existence; enmity is the privation of friendship as evil is the privation of good. To love your enemy is to be a friend to your enemy; it is to destabilize the very concept of “enemy,” reconceiving it as a relative lack within a really existing friendship.
This assertion avoids the heresy of dualism (where “evil” is necessary to the definition of “good,” and “enemy” to “friend”), and avoids also the pessimism that characterizes much of Protestant thought: where politics is considered an effect of sin rather than a characteristic of our “very good” nature. If friendship is the end of politics, then Adam would have fulfilled his political nature in extending his friendship with God to his friendship with his wife to his friendship with his children, and so on, extending a kingdom of love from the paradisal garden out into and across the world. This primordial politics would have been dynamic, full of planning, deciding, building, and teaching—for it is not the case that friendship needs enmity, any more than virtue needs vice to flourish.
One sees this in parenthood: a father’s relationship with his son is one in which a dumb, wailing human, incapable of friendship, is moved—over many years—into friendship, precisely by the father preemptively willing the good of his child and working to effect that end: identifying the good habits of his child and orienting them toward higher goods, ultimately toward friendship with God. Adam and Eve in the garden were political creatures, precisely because they had power over each other and a will to orient that power toward the building-up of each other in virtue. The kingdom of Christ is no more devoid of politics than a good marriage is devoid of politics: within this kingdom, we surprise each other as we find new ways to grow in friendship, mutually willing the good of all in imitation of Christ, the mighty friend and lord of mankind.
But Schmitt is not merely wrong about Eden and the eschaton, but also about the everyday, which contains glimpses, memories, anticipations, and real achievements of the political peace exemplified by the beginning and promised at the end. Even modern politics, with all its obvious assumptions of violence, is not really a reading of the real possibility of physical killing into every human relationship. It is not war, but the pursuit of friendship, that makes sense out of this world's politics.
In Book 1 of his Politics, Aristotle wrote:
And human beings are clearly political animals more than bees and other animals living in groups are. For nature does nothing in vain, as people say, and only human beings, in contrast with other animals, use speech. Therefore, expressions of sadness and pleasure are signs and so also belong to other animals. For the nature of other animals is such as to have sense experiences of sadness and pleasure and to signify these experiences to one another. But speech indicates what is useful or harmful, and so also what is just and unjust. For, strictly speaking, it belongs to human beings alone, in contrast with other animals, to perceive good and evil, just and unjust, and the like. And communicating these perceptions produces households and political communities. [36]
Man, a political animal, is necessarily a speaking animal. He is not necessarily a warring animal. In fact, were he a necessarily warring animal, he could not be a speaking animal. Without trust, language doesn’t work. Even lying, propaganda, and manipulation assume trust as their foundation: only through trust in a shared world, in the shared meanings of words, in the basic truth-telling end of language, and in the communal exchange of authority and obedience between speaker and listener do sounds (or marks on a page) convey meaning at all, and thus serve as units for more superficial acts of lying and distrust. Politics is a linguistic reality, and it is the ever-present possibility of speech, not of war, that makes acts properly political.
This is to argue that politics is about friendship, because, as long as speech is possible, friendship is to some extent realized. As Aquinas says, the “adversary is to be loved in what he shares with you”—that is, insofar as he is still a friend. The gift of communication, even adversarial communication, is both what is shared and the very capacity for sharing itself.
War, as an instance of collective enmity, is fundamentally characterized by speech, but speech is not fundamentally characterized by war. In his widely celebrated phrase, Carl von Clausewitz asserted, “war is the continuation of politics with other means.” War is integrated into a politics that is more fundamentally diplomacy: talking. When war finally breaks out, it does so within the context of a discourse, and those at war continue to talk as they fight. They continue to attempt friendship and to, in some degree, trust each other. When it comes time for one side to surrender, it is possible.
Schmitt describes this oddity of war, but does not address it. He says that in war “the adversaries most often confront each other openly; normally they are identifiable by a uniform, and the distinction of the enemy is therefore no longer a political problem which the fighting soldier has to solve.” Why should war have rules? Why does it normally tend toward donning uniforms? Surely, if it is oriented toward physical killing, the destruction of the enemy, then the most effective way of going about it is not to identify oneself as the killable enemy, not to create and obey rules which limit how, when, and why one may kill the enemy, but to suspend all “rules” and to kill in whatever manner appears most convenient. If the real possibility of killing is what makes an act political, why is the form that war takes so at odds with effective killing? Why do we bother making a distinction between a ravenous, infant-murdering, raping, pillaging horde bent on genocide, and an army?
But the fact that the active effort to kill the enemy is normally performed by men wearing uniforms, which signify one’s enemy-status to the other side, while it cannot be understood within Schmitt’s thought, can be understood within a politics of peace. Here, war is a communication made on the presumption of a remnant of still-remaining shared ground, a still-remaining friendship. War, as a specific form that emerges from within peace, is fundamentally an openness to the surrender of the enemy, and so to reconciliation and to an eventually-restored or -established friendship. Fighting is experienced as “war,” that is, as a political reality—as distinguished from the violent lust of a drunken mob, precisely insofar as it is fighting between collectivities that retain some degree of friendship, retain something shared, and that may thereby, because they are not pure enemies, continue to speak.
The production of a pure enemy is, of course, forbidden to a Christian conception of conflict: “The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.” [37] War, within the politics of peace, can only be a gift of peace, or else it is sin, as Augustine admonishes: “We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.” [38] Here, deploying the friend-enemy distinction is a tactic of a higher friendship—a bid for peace. (This is a major theme in Book 19 of The City of God.)
This “friendship” is weakened as one gets closer to the actual battlefield, as one approaches the personal, hand-to-hand combat within which language turns into a scream of pain in defeat or of pleasure in triumph. At this vanishing point of actual killing, the “enemy” would seem to finally drive out the “friend.” [39] This exceptional event of actual physical killing, however, is not “politics” in its pure form. It is the one place in human experience where politics has been finally eclipsed, where politics ends. This is true even in a Schmittian understanding, though he doesn’t see it. For all his talk of sovereign decisions, he cannot escape the fact that, at the moment of actual killing, it is the soldier who decides whether or not to pull the trigger. It is the soldier who decides whether or not to suspend the order of communication and to make the decisive friend-enemy distinction. This is true, likewise, in every instance of policing, which is, of course, a small instance of civil warfare. The decision to shoot or to talk simply is the decision on whether to continue or suspend the legal order. This decision, the “sovereign decision,” is made just as decisively whichever way the soldier decides. The decision to talk is no less real, no less “sovereign,” than the decision to shoot. He holds the whole order in his hands at that moment—the moment of possible enmity that is, for Schmitt, the political. The individual soldier or policeman is, therefore, sovereign either way he chooses; and Schmitt’s politics of sovereignty dissolves precisely in actual combat, its supposed ground.
Above the level of the soldier, a “sovereign” decision can only be made through the “speaking” of that decision to the soldiers, who, through their own “sovereign” decisions, decide which way to go. A de facto political sovereign of the Schmittian variety is always, therefore, no sovereign at all because unless his decision is spoken into an order of friendship that looks to him for leadership it has no efficacy—it is just the pitiful ravings of an eccentric individual, vainly declaring friends to be enemies and enemies to be friends to a bemused group of armed men who see things otherwise. He must speak within the order (in Schmittian language, the deep “norm”) that has gathered these men together and has led them to decide to dress in uniform—to be friends. Against Schmitt, then, we must see that de facto political power can never be a “monopoly to decide.” [40] The decision can never be truly “new and alien”; it never “emanates from nothingness.” [41] If things were so, the decision simply would not work. The efficacious leader is not a god. He is a man, working in an order that he does not create and so cannot suspend.
We can return here to the Hobbesian assertion that authority and not truth makes law. This statement is literal nonsense. Truth is primarily in the intellect, which means it is necessarily communicable. That is what makes it truth. And all communication functions within a frame of authority and obedience, of assertion and trust, and there is no authority that is not an operation within a matrix of truth (even if a disordered matrix of truth). “Autoritas non veritas facit legem” is tough-sounding babble, a phrase that renders all its terms meaningless in its utterance. Why not reduce the phrase to a single word—Power—and stop with all the talk?
Nevertheless, if the point is merely to show that the liberal fantasy of a closed, disinterested, positive law that operates akin to the Enlightenment “laws of nature” is ridiculous, then “Hear! Hear!” Of course we are ruled by men, not laws. Of course law is real only through men. Law is a dictate, a saying of reason, after all. This insight has value. But it is not enough. If one stops here, one is opposing liberalism through an assertion of absolutism, and this is to stay decidedly within the anti-Christian, and indeed “positive,” current of modern politics.
If the whole take-away of “decisionist” politics is that liberal, positive legal regimes actually have a hidden absolute sovereign that lies outside them—and that at the same time absolutist, sovereign regimes make the appearance of a closed, positive legal code possible precisely because they have a ground outside that code (and so can suspend it)—it is hard to understand what the point is. [42] This would seem not to be a denial of the functioning of “constitutions” at all, but merely an explanation of how they actually work. This would be a version of the meta-liberalism that hides discreetly in the work of liberals such as F. A. Hayek. Hayek knew full well that liberal “rule of law” did not ground itself, that it was a contingent product of artifice, rooted in power: something made and implemented by an elite who could and did change it and who necessarily stood outside its logic. He merely thought it was an extremely productive machine, the best policy the sovereign could pursue. The most sophisticated liberals were, propaganda aside, as Hobbesian as Schmitt.
Or is the point merely to assert emphatically that power is real? This assertion is not a waste of time and is, no doubt, a shock to naïve liberals; but for Christians it must be merely the starting place and not any sort of conclusion. Of course power is real. Of course all order comes through human beings acting through their de facto power over other human beings. Of course “the rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything.” [43] This is where we begin discussing justice, authority, obedience, punishment, statute, prudence, and so on. It would be hard to agree more with Schmitt when he states: “What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides,” [44] though we would add, of course, “and what they decide.” Politics is a department of morals. [45]
The problem with Schmitt, then, is that he isn’t “decisionist” enough: that he still wants to corral the decision, locate it, limit it, and label it—and wants to preserve thereby the norm as an abstract “code,” as an order experienced by those ruled as a closed and self-referential system, as if they were “laws of nature” under an inscrutable divine will. [46] A politics of friendship moves past this half-way measure. It shifts the decision from being an isolated event at the top to being of the very nature of the order itself, all the way down and through it. “Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm.” [47] Indeed! This makes both peace and war intelligible.
When we survey the reality of warfare, it is not man’s willingness to kill that should draw our attention. Such willingness is sad, but not difficult to understand within a simple utility-maximization action theory; it is not hard to see how the desire to kill can flow from either fear of punishment or desire for reward. What should draw our attention about warfare is man’s willingness to die. This is much harder to understand. It points to the deep reality of man’s social nature. Warfare is possible precisely because the ground of society—the order of friendship—cannot, finally, be “suspended.” Men fight for their friends. Their enemy is incidental, and so, to a certain extent, is their commander. And so “sovereignty” is never sovereign. The sovereign is always actually the leader of men who decide to follow him into a war against an enemy precisely because that enemy threatens their friends, among whom the leader himself is numbered. Schmitt is not wrong when he asserts that order is grounded on the decision. He is wrong because he does not see that the decision goes all the way down: that as a friend, every man, and not only the sovereign, “although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it.” [48] Even the power of the most tyrannical, propagandizing, narcissistic, megalomaniac dictator—even the power of Hitler—reveals the deeper politics of friendship.
Schmitt asserts that what “characterizes [a sovereign] exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order.” [49] However, such a final, total suspension actually occurs not when one fighting collective lines up against another, but only at the moment of killing and so only when one man confronts another man in the most primordial, Hobbesian “state of nature.”
And, on second thought, it doesn’t really happen even there. Even at the point of decisive combat, the possibility of communication remains; the possibility of talking, of coming to share an ordered human world, of friendship, remains. This has become a trope of war movies, a standard scene in which two soldiers who stumble upon each other across the hell of no-man’s land recognize their shared humanity. The friendship that underwrites this cliché is the reason why surrender is always possible. The soldier makes the decision to pull the trigger only within the norm of communication. The deliberative resources that he brings to bear on the problem are the linguistic, moral, normative content of the political order of friendship. He decides on the enemy within the matrix of a more profound friendship. The decision on the exception is, then, not a suspension of “the entire existing order” at all; it is not the case that “the norm is destroyed in the exception.” [50] Rather, the exception can only be made within the greater norm. War, then, is possible only because the politics of peace is unavoidable.
It is, therefore, only when one party is finally dead that the political, as friendship, completely vanishes. It is only with a corpse that one can have, final, total enmity. But, of course, the moment of death is the moment that one no longer views the other as a man at all. Pure enmity vanishes; it has no real existence. The enemy is only ever the estranged friend. Or to say it another way, the enemy is always a partial friend. If for Schmitt enemies and potential enemies are all that really exist, we must assert against him the very opposite, that, in fact, friends and partial friends are all that exist.
Thus turning Schmitt on his head, we can assert definitively that the enemy is not the foundation of politics; the enemy is not, finally, possible. The enemy is not the content of politics, but the vanishing point of politics. [51]
In opposition to such a cloudy and abstract enmity, friendship is what is clear. Friendship is what has form. Friendship is everywhere we look—not killing. Men are intellectual and volitional. And it is through friendship—the union of intellects and wills within power differentials—and not through one body running up against another body that the socialness of human nature subsists. And so, “love your enemies” is not a private, moral injunction devoid of political content; it is a comprehensive definition of politics, an assertion that the “friend” half of the friend-enemy distinction is what is decisive; “friend” is the measure of “enemy,” not the other way around. We can agree with Schmitt that “the political is the total,” “that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision,” even while coming to almost opposite final conclusions. [52]
What this means is that the political is not grounded in the “safety” of collective violence, but in the exposure, the risk, of collective friendship. In friendship there is no ever-present possibility of physical killing that produces anxiety and so Schmittian politics. A turn toward killing is always a surprise, always a betrayal, always unanticipated—because friends are real. Friendship is grounded not in fear but in hope. Schmitt is unjustified in his supposition that because man is “a dangerous being” the logic of enmity must dominate. [53] He is wrong because love is essentially dangerous (as faith is foolish and hope is naïve), and therefore always involves having the hope and courage to face this danger. In contrast, fear seeks to control; a cowardly person seeks to reduce the object of his fear to something smaller than himself, something he can understand and control, something devoid of mystery, devoid of power. A fearful person looks up with trembling and down with contempt and so he attempts to build ever more particular, simple worlds of little things. He seeks to close himself to the universal because the universal is always beyond his understanding, beyond his control, and thus frightening. But man’s fear is never total. It is always parasitic on his loves, his beliefs, and his hopes: movements which boldly reach beyond his control. What is fundamental in man as a spiritual being is his participation in that which is higher than he; and valor, not fear, is characteristic of this participation. The boldness of this valor is our un-grounded and profoundly humble elevation beyond the particular and into the universal: our love carries us beyond ourselves. Such courageous reaching-beyond in faith, hope, and charity (or at least their anticipations) is what it means to be a spiritual being.
Against Schmitt, then, we assert that men are dangerous to each other only because we first, actually, mysteriously, love each other; we risk friendship. And “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (Jn 15:13).” The cross reveals who we truly are, and the willingness to take up our crosses for our friends, even at the hands of our friends, is the foundation of social order. Because of the truth of friendship, sin is a betrayal. Such betrayals will come, “but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.” War must be waged exactly because war does not fit in our world, exactly because it does not belong, exactly because friendship is always vulnerable. And because war drags man out of the political, war must be brought to a close. Because of its ground in friendship, the political is always open to the universal; it can never finally be closed and particular. The political is open through the vulnerability of friendship to the universal, to the truth that always transcends its articulation. The political is grounded in an openness that permeates it from top to bottom; it is open to all humanity, and beyond humanity to the divine, in its very structural form. It is not open only at the top. It is open throughout. Animals in their natures group together for defense and rocks in their natures smash into each other, but only man, as a spiritual being, is political. Man is political because he is spiritual. Here the Church emerges as man’s only hope at becoming truly political: grace is not the perfect form of law; it is, rather, the fulfillment of law beyond itself in perfect, supernatural virtue, in peace with self, peace with neighbor, and peace with God. In this light, Schmitt isn’t merely mistaken. He couldn’t be more wrong. He is wrong about everything that matters.
Footnotes
[1] Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3-14.
[2] One could argue that even in Eden the potential enemy is always there: that man is potentially political by nature, even if he, by virtue of living in accord with the will of God in perfect peace, never actualizes his political powers. But this leads to a metaphysically untenable idea that man is created with a power that cannot be perfected except insofar as he sins—akin to arguing that Adam had an adulterous nature which could only be actualized insofar as he sinned, but which remained in potentia insofar as he remained chaste. Fornication, however, is not a power waiting to be perfected; it is a dis-orienting of the good, life-giving desire for marital unity toward mere pleasure. Similarly, Edenic politics could not be enmity in potentia—a power waiting to be actualized by sin. Edenic politics was something real: a potency of the person that could be lived out in Paradise.
[3] The Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007) 35.
[4] The Concept of the Political, 34. This axiom is derived, as best as we can tell, from a twofold source. First, from a (supposed) positive observation that those things we call “political” all have to do with the justified use of coercive force, the ultimate expression of which is physical killing. The second is an assumption articulated by Hobbes and implied in Schmitt, that the drive, desire or will for self-preservation is the most important motivation within human existence, making the one who can threaten physical killing the ultimate motivator of human action. Insofar as the political can be broadly demarcated as the field in which the actions of some are motivated by others, physical killing appears as a kind of exemplary form of the political. It is the burden of this essay to show that this axiom is not fundamental to politics, but, at best, describes a limited sphere of politics, one revealed in its limitation by martyrdom and the willingness to die for others, political acts which take love and the common good as primary motivations, over and above the possibility of physical killing.
[5] The Concept of the Political, 30-31.
[6] Part I, Chap. V.
[7] The Concept of the Political, 33-34.
[8] A gentler reading of Schmitt might argue that, by reducing the enemy to the public enemy, he is arguing that only those enemies that seem to pose a threat to the whole society become the object of politics, motivating the coercive action of those who have as their primary charge care for the whole society. On this reading, Schmitt is not articulating the essence of the political, he is merely describing what pragmatically works within political systems: enemies must be described as “public enemies” in order to justify police or military action. But if this is what Schmitt is arguing, it contradicts his claim that enmity gives action its specifically political character. Rather, the relation of activities (including enemies) to the whole society (what the Aristotelian tradition would call the common good) gives them their political character, and this is both prior and incidental to the possibility that these activities might be related to enmity and the possibility of physical killing. This description of the political would have the effect of collapsing the distinction between private and public enemies, insofar as every enemy (indeed, every thing) is related to the common good, meaning there could be no private enmity that was not, in some sense, political. Likewise, insofar as the “common good” can only be attacked in and through an attack on some particular, private good, we would also have to say that there is no public enemy who is not a private enemy: a point obviously admitted by the victims “personally affected” by an enemy deemed “public.” In all likelihood, Schmitt simply does not care about this ontological question, and his attempt at delineating the “essence” of the political is just a pose aimed at justifying violent control.
[9] The Concept of the Political, 29.
[10] The Concept of the Political, 29.
[11] Super Matthaeum, ad 5:43-8.
[12] In Praise of the New Knighthood (Cistercian Publications: Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), 3.4-5.
[13] In Praise of the New Knighthood, 4.8
[14] In Praise of the New Knighthood, 1.2
[15] Super Matthaeum, ad 5:43-8.
[16] The Concept of the Political, 1.
[17] The Concept of the Political, 20.
[18] The Concept of the Political, 37.
[19] The Concept of the Political, 38.
[20] Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 18-19, 30-31.
[21] It is often hard to disentangle Schmitt’s opinions concerning infallibility and sovereignty from those of the thinkers he is discussing. Nevertheless, he is discussing the ideas of these thinkers in this context for a reason. See, for example, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005), 55. Furthermore, in his treatment he provides no alternatives between the maximal “decision” of anarchic anti-decisionism and the maximal decision of dictatorship: see Political Theology, 66.
[22] Political Theology, 5.
[23] Political Theology, 36.
[24] The Concept of the Political, 54, 67; Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 26-29.
[25] The Concept of the Political, 45-9.
[26] The Concept of the Political, 53.
[27] The Concept of the Political, 38.
[28] Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 86.
[29] “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (Political Theology, 36).
[30] Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 25.
[31] The Concept of the Political, 39.
[32] “A religious community, a church, can exhort a member to die for his belief and become a martyr, but only for the salvation of his own soul, not for the religious community in its quality as an earthly power; otherwise it assumes a political dimension (The Concept of the Political, 48).
[33] See the odd, but sometimes moving, essay, “The Visibility of the Church: A Scholastic Consideration” in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 47-59.
[34] Schmitt, Political Theology, 33, 52; Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 1, Chapter 26.
[35] The Concept of the Political, 32-33, 38-39.
[36] Quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Richard J. Regan (Hackett: Indianapolis, 2007), 6.
[37] ST II-II, Q. 40, A. 1.
[38] Quoted in ibid.
[39] See The Concept of the Political, 35.
[40] Political Theology, 13.
[41] Political Theology, 31-32.
[42] The Concept of the Political, 76-79.
[43] Political Theology, 15.
[44] Political Theology, 34.
[45] As Schmitt writes, “The core of the political idea, the exacting moral decision, is evaded in both [economism and endless discussion]” (Political Theology, 65, emphasis added).
[46] He often hints in a direction that shows he knows this is a problem. For example, Political Theology, 30-1; The Concept of the Political, 27.
[47] Political Theology, 10.
[48] Political Theology, 7.
[49] Political Theology, 12.
[50] Political Theology, 12.
[51] This is the very opposite of Schmitt’s “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (The Concept of the Political, 29).
[52] Political Theology, 2.
[53] The Concept of the Political, 58.