I first became aware of Carl Schmitt about 30 years ago
while reading Friedrich Hayek’s book, Law, Legislation and Liberty. At
that stage I was left with the impression that while Schmitt still had
influence among German legal philosophers, his views were mainly interest to
people wondering how a respected academic could become a Nazi. Over the last
year or so, however, I seem to be coming across increasing references to the
relevance to contemporary politics of Schmitt’s views about friend-enemy
distinctions and the autonomy of the political.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides the
following biographical information about Schmitt:
“Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a conservative German legal, constitutional, and political theorist. Schmitt is often considered to be one of the most important critics of liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and liberal cosmopolitanism. But the value and significance of Schmitt’s work is subject to controversy, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with National Socialism.”
My reading of the full entry about Schmitt in
the Stanford Encyclopedia (written by Lars Vinx) reinforced the impression I
previously had that Schmitt’s political philosophy is inherently authoritarian.
However, the conclusion that Peter C. Caldwell reached in his literature review
is ambivalent:
“What Schmitt’s real message is remains disputed. Fifty years after the first reflections on his work began to appear, his interpreters still battle over whether he was primarily a brilliant lawyer and theorist of constitutional democracy or a gravedigger of democracy and apologist for authoritarianism; an intellectual adventurer and opportunist or a serious analyst of modernity; a conservative trying to save what could be saved of the European heritage or an antisemite and Nazi.”
(‘Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent
Literature’, The Journal of Modern History 77, June 2025)
The focus of this essay has been determined largely by a
couple of books that I have read recently. I focus on three aspects of Schmitt’s
critique of liberal democracy. First, I consider Adrian Vermeule’s synthesis of
Catholic integralism and Carl Schmitt’s view that politics is war. Second, I
consider the link between entangled political economy and Carl Schmitt’s
concept of the autonomy of the political. Finally, I reconsider Friedrich
Hayek’s view of Carl Schmitt’s legal philosophy.
Vermeule’s synthesis of integralism and Schmittian illiberalism
My initial source for the discussion of integralism was Kevin
Vallier’s book, All the Kingdom’s of the World (2023). I recently
reviewed Vallier's book in an essay entitled, ‘Are
integralists opposed to natural rights?’, but neglected to mention Vermeule’s
affinity with the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt.
Vallier refers to Vermeule’s article, The Ark of
Tradition, which is a review of Schmitt’s book, Roman
Catholicism and Political Form. Vermeule writes:
“My suggestion, which is consistent with Schmitt’s vision, but goes beyond what he articulates, is that the Church serves as a kind of ark, whose vocation is to preserve the living tradition of the Verbum Dei amidst the universal deluge of economic-technical decadence, and the eventual self-undermining of the regime.”
He goes on to quote Schmitt:
“Should economic thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about an absolutely unpolitical condition of human society, the Church would remain the only agency of political thinking and political form. Then the Church would have a stupendous monopoly: its hierarchy would be nearer the political domination of the world than in the Middle Ages.”
My understanding of what Schmitt meant by “an absolutely unpolitical
condition of human society”, is a condition in which people would no longer be interested
in drawing “friend-enemy distinctions”. Schmitt claimed that life in a completely
de-politicized world would be shallow, insignificant, and meaningless.
Such views seem to me to be mistaken and to have potential
to cause a great deal of unnecessary misery. In fields of human endeavour such
as business and sport, friendly rivalry obviously helps to make life meaningful
for many people. However, friendly rivalry does not require friend-enemy
distinctions. Opportunities for human flourishing are enhanced in societies
where individuals tend to seek mutual benefit from voluntary (and friendly) interactions
with other people, rather than seeking to benefit from the friend-enemy
distinctions associated with coercive political processes.
Lars Vinx notes:
“Some interpreters have explained Schmitt’s hostility towards liberal de-politicization as being grounded in the view that a willingness to distinguish between friend and enemy is a theological duty.”
That made me wonder, very briefly, whether a theologian
could argue that it is necessary for Christians to be able to distinguish
between friend and enemy in order to follow Jesus’s exhortation to love one’s
enemies. Before wasting
too much time, however, I reminded myself of Erasmus’s message about refraining
from wars over theology, which seems to me to remain as relevant today as at the
time of the Protestant Reformation. (If further explanation is required, please
read something
I wrote about Erasmus a few years ago.)
Autonomy of the political
In my recent essay entitled “How
does entangled political economy help us to understand political
entrepreneurship?”, I drew heavily on Richard E. Wagner’s book, Politics
as a Peculiar Business,. However, that essay doesn’t discuss the
link that Wagner draws between entangled political economy and Carl Schmitt’s
concept of the autonomy of the political.
The concept of autonomy of the political describes power
relations and the behaviour of those who hold political power in society. The
surface impression is that a small number of rulers dominate larger masses of
citizens, but power is ever present in society and can be manifested in a variety
of different ways. Wagner’s concept of entangled political economy “rests on the
twin autonomies of the political and the economic in society, and the
interaction between those autonomies being a source of turbulence within
society.”
Wagner writes:
“For Schmitt, the autonomy of the political rested on exceptional circumstances and the friend–enemy distinction. Exceptional circumstances mean that a rule of law cannot be articulated that will cover every possible point of decision that might arise. The presence of exceptions is a point where the autonomy of the political enters into society. The friend–enemy distinction is a feature of the crooked timber of humanity that surely intensifies with increases in societal complexity and the hierarchical ordering in terms of status that comes in the wake of growing complexity.”
Schmitt argued that even if constitutional arrangements are
crafted to support private ordering of societal interaction, the autonomy of
the political will assert itself in the guise of exceptional circumstances. As
the scale of the polity expands, consensual action tends to give way to
factional action, wherein some factions gain at the expense of others. For
example, whereas application of general rules and principles might require a
few pages of tax codes, factional action to achieve concessions generates thousands
of pages of tax codes.
To consider Schmitt’s proposed remedies for factional politics,
I have looked beyond the references to Schmitt in Wagner’s book. My main source
is the Stanford Encyclopedia entry written by Lars
Vinx.
Schmitt’s views about the problems of democracy and the need
for strong political leadership are similar to those of Max Weber and Joseph
Schumpeter (discussed in earlier essays, here
and here).
However, while Weber and Schumpeter defend liberty, Schmitt regards constitutionally
guaranteed freedoms as concessions of the state to the individual.
Weber and Schumpeter emphasize the importance of
constitutional procedures, but Schmitt’s view of constitutions seems ambivalent.
Schmitt understands democracy as the self-rule of the people. He argues,
however, that since the will of the people is not necessarily reflected in the
majority view, representative government is not necessarily any more intimately
connected with the principle of democracy than a dictatorship in the name of
the people.
Schmitt denies the possibility of changing the fundamental
nature of an established constitution via use of rules contained within it. Nevertheless,
he acknowledges the possibility of suspending a constitution through a
sovereign decision on the exception. He also acknowledges that a people, in a
renewed exercise of their constituent power, might legitimately choose a
non-liberal and non-parliamentarian form of democracy.
Friedrich Hayek’s view
Hayek held similar views to Schmitt concerning the ability
of the majority in a representative assembly with unlimited powers “to confine
its activities to aims which all members of the majority desire, or even
approve of”. The majority can only be kept together by “paying off each of the
special groups by which it is composed”. (LLL, V3, 138)
In a footnote to that passage, Hayek suggested that in the
1920s “the weakness of the government of an omnipotent democracy was very
clearly seen by the extraordinary German student of politics, Carl Schmitt.” However,
Hayek added that “Schmitt regularly came down on what to me appears both
morally and intellectually the wrong side.” (LLL, V3, 194-5)
The passage quoted in the epigraph at the top of this essay appears
in Volume 1 of Law, Legislation and Liberty (p 71). It is immediately
followed by the assertion that “long before Hitler came to power” Carl Schmitt “devoted
all his formidable intellectual energies to a fight against liberalism in all
its forms”. (Hayek’s perception that Schmitt was so clearly opposed to all
forms of liberalism has been disputed. Some of Schmitt’s writings apparently
give the impression that he was trying to save Europe’s liberal heritage.)
Later in the same paragraph, Hayek explains that Schmitt’s
final formulation of his central belief about the law entailed “concrete order
formation”. Schmitt posits that law is fundamentally a form of political and
social organisation grounded in a community’s values, and that the state is the
embodiment of the community’s legal order. Hayek argues that under that view of
law, individuals are “made to serve concrete purposes”.
Hayek contrasts Schmitt’s view of law with his own view that
law consists of “abstract rules which make possible the formation of a
spontaneous order by the free action of individuals through limiting the range
of their actions.”
While Schmitt saw the state as giving expression to the
values of the dominant community group, Hayek saw law as consisting of rules of
just conduct that have evolved to protect individual liberty.
Conclusions
Carl Schmitt is remembered as a prominent German legal and
political theorist who became a Nazi. However, Schmitt’s political affiliations
have not prevented frequent reference being made to views about friend-enemy
distinctions and the autonomy of the political in contemporary discussions
about political institutions.
This essay has focused on three aspects of Schmitt’s critique
of liberal democracy: Adrian Vermeule’s synthesis of Catholic integralism and Carl
Schmitt’s view that politics is war; the link between Richard Wagner’s concept
of entangled political economy and Carl Schmitt’s concept of the autonomy of
the political; and Friedrich Hayek’s view of Carl Schmitt’s legal philosophy.
Schmitt argued that if economic liberalism succeeded in bringing
about an absolutely unpolitical condition of society – a condition where people
were no longer interested in making friend-enemy distinctions – the Catholic
church would be able to dominate the world. He reasoned that that this
religious organisation would dominate in those circumstances because it would
be the only agency still engaged in political thinking. I am puzzled as to why
he thought a religious organisation would be last to abandon the habit of
making friend-enemy distinctions. It seems to me that criminal organisations would
be likely to pose a greater obstacle to establishing an unpolitical utopia because
friend-enemy distinctions are more intrinsic to their activities.
Schmitt presented a valid argument that constitutional arrangements
crafted to support private ordering are prone to corruption by interest group
politics. The autonomy of the political exerts itself as some groups argue for
exceptions to general rules to obtain benefits at the expense of others.
Other political theorists have proposed stronger executive
government as a remedy for problems that interest groups pose for the
functioning of liberal democracies. However, Schmitt proposed more extreme
remedies. For example, he suggested that under exceptional circumstances a government
could make a “sovereign decision” to suspend a constitution.
Friedrich Hayek acknowledged that Schmitt had clearly seen
the weakness of omnipotent democracy in the 1920s, but suggested that he “regularly
came down on the wrong side” in proposing remedies.
Hayek argued that under Schmitt’s final formulation of his
beliefs about the law, individuals are made to serve concrete purposes determined
by the state. By contrast, Hayek viewed law in terms of abstract rules of just
conduct that have evolved to protect individual liberty.
In my view Schmitt went wrong in his critique of democracy
by seeking authoritarian remedies rather than changes in the rules of the game to address the specific problems
that he identified.
