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What Is Politics About? AUREL KOLNAI 1933 (Translated from the German by Francis Dunlop)1 I 1. There was a time when “politics” simply meant the way a country is governed , or, as an object of study, the theory of the state. Today the discriminating usage of the intelligentsia receives full confirmation from the systematic disciplines, and there is a general concern for a sociology of politics. This is definitely not supposed to be about constitutional law, the art of government or reasons of state, but about the mysteries of politics in the most confined sense. Carl Schmitt, whose work2 has become a model for the most recent studies of this kind, has even tried to interpret the state as “the purest example of political existence” .3 However, “political existence” is still given a very specific, and questionable, meaning here. In view of the enormous influence that this unusually profound and spirited work of Schmitt’s has had, and of its obvious connection with a very definite and tendentious interpretation of both state and politics, the champion of a different view must work out especially carefully where he stands in relation to it. Speaking very generally, one may place Schmitt among those thinkers very widely represented among German-speaking intellectuals today, who can be briefly described as “irrationalists of life and power” . The members of this group appeal to thinkers like Nietzsche, Klages, Scheler (?),4 Bergson (?),5 Sorel, Pareto, Spengler, Heidegger and so on, in this or that respect and with more or less justice from case to case. In terms of the history of ideas one might link them inter alia with Vitalism, theYouth Movement, Bolshevism and Fascism. Naturally this is not the place to produce a philosophical critique of this complex movement of thought. We can only indicate in the barest outline and with special reference to political theory the fundamental ideas of this way of thinking: “life” and “existence” do not serve any rational purpose, or any values, ethical or logical, which could be understood as normative; they exist simply for their own sake. It is in principle impossible to rationalise life completely, that is, to give it a pervasive structure of rational considerations and normative responsibilities ; the attempt to do so falsifies and weakens life, leads to hypocrisy, half-measures and atrophy. Rational justifications of this “life-centred attitude ” are mere pretences, ideological will o’ the wisps. Nothing that takes EXPLORING THE WORLD OF HUMAN PRACTICE place in the human world, or even the spiritual world, is really the attainment of purposes, but the unfolding of the life-drive. In the social sphere life takes the form of power. Moral legitimations of power are futile and superfluous. Since power justifies itself, conflicts between powers whose spheres of action intersect are natural and unavoidable—indeed the true test and highest intensification of vigorous life. Power can be concealed by means of laws and humanitarian ideologies—perhaps cleverly disguised or made really impotent—but there is no substitute for it as a fundamental category of social existence. Liberalism and democracy, public discussion and a plurality of parties are, on the one hand, the cover for capitalist power seizures, on the other, passing phases of weakness in the lives of states. It would be a mistake to think that all attention to irrational motives, all criticism of customary rationalistic constructions, all sociological interpretation and relativisation of points of view and systems of ideas, must be irrational in this sense. Indeed, as we shall see, this cannot be said of all Schmitt’s points. His distinction between that aspect of the life of states which can be given the quite general name of “administration” , and that consisting of “politics” in the narrower sense6 , is of inestimable benefit to political science (as an example of the narrowly political we may take the basic political orientation of the regime, on the basis of which the rules of administration are worked out; this is in a certain sense irrational, since it cannot be unequivocally derived from normative considerations). So is his demonstration that the contemporary rationalisation of life is a historical process of a specific kind, which gives rise to distinct kinds of claim and provokes irrationalist reactions. We should also add his critique of all “rational” social theories, with their naïve pseudo objectivity and their uncouth pretensions to truth.7 But this is quite different from putting the main emphasis on what is purely vital, irrational, and “a-spiritual” , or—let...

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