Carl Schmitt

Schmitt

Am in a hotel room in Cambridge reading a copy of Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium which I have just borrowed from the university library. Schmitt was a lawyer dealing with the law of the State who spent the period of the Third Reich saying that Might was Right, and that since Power was the source of law then anyone who had power could not act illegally. This coincided with the policy of the government at that time. After May 1945, he spent two years in detention, as a potential criminal. Since he had been a vocal supporter of a previous chancellor, and an earlier ‘state of emergency’, he was marked as an enemy of Hitler– although obviously a Fascist. This meant that he was never employed by the Reich. He was an unemployed whore. He made the offer but the expensive cars didn’t stop to pick him up. So, on examination, he had not taken part in any war crimes, and was released. But he lost his job as professor of law – having failed the practical. You can’t teach students that everything the State does is lawful. So in the period 1947-58 (when this book was composed) he had a lot of time on his hands.
‘Glosse’ means an explanation of part of a law but also a satirical and witty interpretation of something a politician has said, or some event in the news. It is, then, an act of resistance. So a glossarium is a collection of glosses. It has elements of a diary but is mainly bilious grumbles about items in the news. He disapproves of Europe without Hitler and Pétain. It all seems wrong to him. He quotes early-modern Spanish jurists in Latin, but is also scurrilous and paranoid.
The new Right in Germany is furious about the need to feel guilty about the national past. They want to reach a state in which Nazism was a perfectly normal part of history, just another set of neutral facts and of glorious victories. It is attractive for them to go to Schmitt, who never went through the stage of feeling guilty about any of that.
He grumbles on about his loss of power every few days. He never mentions the fact that the Reich had taken away the liberty and lives of so many people. He is indifferent to that. He is a lawyer who has chosen a client, and nothing the client does can be bad in his eyes. He does chide the Reich for exaggerated racial policies– but only while making anti-Semitic remarks.

The Allies won the war. If might is right, then what they did to ex-Nazis (not so ex in some cases) was just by definition. Schmitt never even mentions this. He only believes in power – and his side lost. Establishing a moral basis for criticising Allied occupation policies is a task he never even starts on. He lacks self-awareness. In this condition, a diary cannot shed very much light on anything.

This is not a work of literature. It does describe personal feelings throughout, it is emotional, but it has a minimum of psychological content. He just wants to argue all the time. And it all feeds back into the central complex, whereby the wrong side won the war and he deserves to be a professor of law again. So democracy in America must be wrong, because it led to America winning the war, and so the wrong side being defeated.

People who respect pretention, as a symbol of social power and links to the powerful, look up to Schmitt. For me, his erudition is misplaced. For example, when he refers to himself as peripsema. I had to look this up, it means “offscouring, anything wiped away”. Like the French word décapage. So perhaps something dirty that is excreted through the skin. He had been purged by the university, scoured off. But he adds nothing by using a Greek word, in Greek characters, when several German words would have done just as well. He is signalling that his thoughts are significant. It is not a work of learning, but that does not make it literature. Schmitt is super erudite, but if you are wrong about everything then it doesn’t make any difference that you can quote some opinion in Latin.

Schmitt was almost a Literat, at one point in his life (around 1912-20?). He was at least on the periphery of the Stefan George world. When he talks about his house (modest as befits someone fired from his job), the paintings he mentions as decorating it are by Ernst-Wilhelm Nay and Werner Gilles. This is embarrassing. I wouldn’t mind some Nays on my wall. Of the George followers, he mentions Norbert von Hellingrath as being more important than Rilke or George. Hellingrath wrote the essay on parataxis which Adorno made so much of. I suppose Schmitt and Adorno were reading the same books, at a certain point. Hellingrath was killed in the First World War and is less significant, if only for that reason, than Schmitt suggests. Perhaps it was only part of a house. It was in a small town about halfway between the Rhine and the Dutch border. It was his home town, in fact.

He writes several times about a work by Otto Brunner on dominion and aristocracy in the Middle Ages, a work which came out in 1949. I have no use for this book, it is legal history with no interest in sociology. The land-owners may have been 3% of the population (already a sociological fact) and Brunner has no interest in the other 97%. He never mentions the ones who actually cultivated the soil. For him, the ownership of estates and attached rights is something abstract and purely conceptual, noble like gold. The soil and its bacteria have vanished from his view along with the peasants. No wonder Schmitt likes this, it reflects his view of history. Marc Bloch was a century ahead of Brunner even though his book came out a decade before.

At that time, 1949, the land-owners were being ‘collectivised’ in a whole strip of Europe, from the Baltic to Greece. I think that excludes the south Slavs, the big land-owners there were part of the Ottoman regime and had lost their estates generations before. I think the land was owned by the peasants in pre-communist Serbia or Bulgaria, although I might be wrong. Croatia was probably more thick with lords and estates. This was a moment of great estates being broken up, the end of the Middle Ages for somewhere like Pomerania. And that process created a group of dispossessed and resentful ex-landowners.
Generally, serfdom was destabilsied by the Black Death of the 14th century, which created a labour shortage, and this led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe. However, the same processes led to the continuation of serfdom in eastern Europe, where also landowners throve by exporting grain to western Europe. This parting of the ways led to the differentiation between Western and Eastern Europe, a difference which we still find as basic and formative. The strip, from the Baltic to the Balkans, which saw the end of serfdom only in the 19th century, was also the strip where the break-up of great estates, and the redistribution of land, was taking place in the later years of the 1940s. The landowning pattern had reproduced the later stages of serfdom, because the serfs received freedom but not any right to the land which they worked. So years like 1947 and 1948 were seeing one of the largest changes ever in European society. Schmitt pays no attention to this.
In 1950, there was a stratum of off-scoured and worthless Europeans, the survivors of the Fascist world and also of a feudal-monarchist world. They were like a nation, one without a territory. It is helpful to recognise the sounds they made, the self-justifying ideas which they exchanged. Reading a book from that zone is like visiting a foreign country. Like disaster tourism, I suppose.

Why am I reading Schmitt? It goes back to an atlas, which I believe my mother owned, which dated from the 1960s (I think) and marked East Germany as “Soviet occupied zone” (SBZ) and most of Poland as “Eastern Germany”. So this was a map of resentment and projective fantasy – of lost territory. I had the idea of a map of Far Right ideas which would link isolated acts of irrationality into a larger pattern. Schmitt owned that pattern, he was trapped inside it.
I have been pursuing that for forty years, probably a bit more. My worry is that I can read this book and not locate any new ideas, to round out my collection. Suppose we ask, what is the difference between Schmitt and Steve Bannon. It is not simple. But if you collect the ideas you get closer to an answer. Bannon was recently trying to organise the Right anti-democrats of Europe into an alliance. Presumably Schmitt would be a text-book for that movement of thought. The database of academic papers which I occasionally use shows publications on the use of Schmitt by Putin. Presumably, once Putin had suppressed democracy, his lawyers went on a shopping trip to collect anti-democratic thinkers.

There is another reason – in the glossarium, there are quite a few characters, and it is helpful to recognise them. Reading Schmitt is part of the equipment for recognising characters in some other text, not yet identified, where it would be important to know what is being said. So this is part of my work as a philologer.
For example, he reads poems by Max Kommerell. Now that I have looked up Kommerell, I at least know who he was. Conversely, when S attacks Bernanos this gives me reason to respect Bernanos, although he was politically far to the Right (Action française style) and in his lifetime was only read by people from that section of opinion. Schmitt spends time reading poetry by Kommerell and Däubler.
One of the papers I looked up, and glanced at, records a meeting between Schmitt and Mircea Eliade. In summer 1942. They discussed René Guénon. This was a moment of the occultist Right. Schmitt is also, fractionally, a writer of myth. He refers more often to Jünger than anyone else. Yes, those four are part of the syllabus of 20th C culture which we have to know about.
15/1/49. “I am reading an author, who develops an allegedly purely scientific theory, for example the descent of Man from the apes or the psychoanalytical explanation of dreams and neuroses. I however see only the author. The material is multiple, ambiguous, unpredictable in its consequences, never completed, therefore at base completely uncontrollable and open to every mythical interpretation. The more clear and irrefutable becomes the shape of the author and his historical position. From Darwin’s Origin of Species results nothing but a portrait of Darwin, his psychological make-up and his sociological situation. From all books and writings of Sigmund Freud, the same. In both cases scientific conviction is only the reflection of the certainty of victory of an upwardly mobile layer striving against a dying-out class. The animal developing from ape to human, that is the plebeian on his way in the 19th C; this was allowed by the European situation in the first generation after 1848, from that the huge success of “Origin of Species” in 1856. And now afresh the Viennese psychoanalysis since about 1912!” So, workers becoming enfranchised is like monkeys becoming humans. Except that both processes are wrong. And the scientific accuracy of Darwin is irrelevant because his idea must have been a justification of democracy, the barbaric and criminal theory of godless liberals. I don’t see any process of seeking the truth in Schmitt. He doesn’t even ask if evolution might be a true theory. He doesn’t care. For him, science and democracy are part of the same disaster, an error of History. There is a system here. The violence of the Third Reich is justified because it was the adequate instrument for fighting off Bolshevism. But the working-class movement in Germany was part of Bolshevism, not a separate thing. And democracy brought it about. So, Hitler abolishing democracy is not really a loss to feel bad about. You give them the vote and they use it to vote for a Marxist party. So it’s for the best that you take it away again.
The problem with reducing scientific knowledge to a reflection of sociology is that Schmitt doesn’t believe in sociology. It is one of the plebeian sciences which he rejects. It conflicts with law, as a knowledge of society.

17/5/49. “Grade 1: there are people, who are not ashamed to have accepted the Nobel Prize. Yet lower grade, 2:there are people who are not ashamed to have accepted the National prize founded by Hitler in opposition to the Nobel; all-lowest grade 3: there are people, who let themselves be compensated, because they received a prize from Stalin and not from Hitler, and for that reason announce and recommend themselves as candidates for the Atlantic-Nobel-Prize. Miracle of the D-Mark: Thomas Mann re-appears in Germany!”
The “Atlantic” qualification is meant to suggest that the prize bestowed by the Swedish Academy is now aligned with NATO, the Atlantic treaty organisation. Sweden was not a member of NATO. S is denouncing Mann, and other Nobel Prize Winners, and moves on to equate them with Stalin Prize winners. The point is to revalue winners of the Hitler Prize and to relativise the criticism which removes from such winners their rightful praise and admiration. The interest in prizes is significant because it connects to a scale, or scales, of worth and value. Something which preoccupies Schmitt is denying worth to people, and to the cultural objects they produce. He wants tight control over that, before anything else. He has to be the examiner; other people should not think of awarding prizes. The authority which ascribes value to achievements. So he starts with denying any value to science and democracy. Mocking Mauriac and Bernanos is just a moment in a long process of freezing disapproval. Mann was anti-Hitler so he couldn't be a good writer.
So, you have scholars who have never read a book by a working-class writer. Ones who have never read a book by a Jewish writer. Who have never read a book by a Protestant. And there are bookshops which guarantee this, because they don’t stock any books which would cross those lines. That was the everyday of European conservatism. Had Schmitt ever read a book by a Jewish writer?

Disdain is a central activity for Right-wing thinkers of this era. At maximum, they just spend all day expressing, and experiencing, disdain. It is like a job. This is partly a way of erasing independent knowledge - the validity of knowledge is constrained by the status of the people uttering it. Everyone who is not of the Far Right has to be discredited, before they can utter. Disdain carries that function.

November 1947. Discussion of the space left for resistance. And of the ocean. Possibly the idea that continental powers have continuous authority and naturally expand to the physical borders of the space; whereas oceanic powers are surrounded by the free ocean (and allow the activity of different parties?). The ocean is like a space open for resistance. The idea isn’t clearly made out – because of the diary style. But this is interesting. He thinks the ocean gave rise to Utopias, thought of as colonies with arbitrary and “philosophical” laws. So that the Ocean gives birth to the world of “total planning” of the 1950s. Interesting, although it was the navally weak Third Reich which was into “total planning”. He almost emerges into the idea that resistance is necessary to a state, and that is so because totalitarianism is wrong. But he never actually says that. His small house as hermit is, within the land of west Germany (which he never recognised as an independent state) a “space of resistance”, that is the basic position of the whole Glossarium.
He elsewhere quotes Heracleitus as saying that “nomos is space”. I don’t understand this. Perhaps simply that a law attaches to the territory of the state which makes the law. But does ”nomos” actually mean “law” in the 6th century BC?

He refers (November 1947) to the katekhon, identified in Second Thessalonians, 2,6-7 as the restrainer, which restrains Antichrist so that he cannot break loose and bring about the End of Days (and the Millennium). “only he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way”. Let is like let or hindrance, a restraint. He mentions an essay of 1932 on the subject. The Third Reich was the katekhon which held back Bolshevism. But he says that there was a katekhon in every century. It was the Jesuits, in their day. So the Jesuits hold back the Enlightenment, they are abolished and the Enlightenment breaks loose. It roams the land and brings about the plagues of democracy and the end of serfdom. The sequel is Bolshevism. And the katekhon which can deal with that is the Nazi Party and its instruments.
“One must be able to name a katekhon for every one of the last 1948 years. The post was never unoccupied, or we would not be in existence. Every great emperor of the Christian Middle Ages took himself with all faith and consciousness for the katekhon, and he was it, too.”
I find that this is an anomaly in the New Testament, a fragment of myth which has drifted in through the window and lacks connection to the main doctrines. It is ambiguous because it is isolated. It is not even certain that the thing which Paul refers to is the same as the Antichrist. He calls it “the mystery of iniquity”, the secret of evil. This mythic strand is like pieces of naive art in a museum full of learned paintings, which correspond to the work of Greek theologians. I am not sure why it is a mystery, surely it's visible and audible and you can even smell it.

What is the status of the rule of the Occupying Powers in Germany from 1945 to 1949? evidently it was only legal as an Emergency Situation, Notzustand, and so extralegal and comparable to the rule in Germany from 1932 to 1945. We have to concede this to Schmitt. He had theorised this situation. It was the suspension of democracy – an American conducted an opinion poll in 1946 and discovered that 80% of Germans would have voted for the Nazi Party. So they had the vote taken away from them. Might is right, the government was legitimised by the armies which had won the war and not by the consent of the people. One can only judge this situation by noticing that the Allies pulled out and handed power over to democratic government in 1949. That changes everything. (Of course the Soviet Zone did not turn into a democracy and did not really regain sovereignty until 1990.)

I find that Utopia was composed in 1516, and that England had no colonies at that date. It was very slightly engaged in Atlantic trade at the time, and had few ships capable of sailing the Atlantic. Moreover, Brave New World is an anti-Utopia. So Schmitt’s idea is wrong. An interesting idea, though. And could work for Bacon’s New Atlantis.