The Lessons of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, Expanded Edition by Heinrich Meier (review)

Reissued with a new conclusion, Heinrich Meier’s book remains highly rewarding for those interested in Carl Schmitt. In the tradition of Leo Strauss, whose dialogue with Schmitt was the theme of one of his earlier books, Meier writes in the company of the authoritative philosophers of the past; he assumes the gravitas of their words without niggling, and addresses their implications in utter confidence of their meaningfulness. Meier’s earnest, not to say hierophantic readings allow him to make sharp distinctions between Schmitt’s thinking and the thinking of others—something that an approach that considered Schmitt only generally as a type of thought would be unable to do. By assuming Schmitt’s genius—which, in Meier’s account, is to have overturned Augustine’s ban on political theology—Meier justifies closely reading Schmitt’s corpus to achieve a definitive interpretation of his central ideas.

If one seeks a sense of what Schmitt represents as Schmitt, then this is an extraordinary place to begin—whatever one’s ultimate verdict on Meier’s assessment. Meier does not mince words, least of all those of Schmitt. That is to say, he does not historicize Schmitt or characterize him by reference to the “Conservative Revolution” or other Weimar-era movements, but instead presents him in terms of what he sees as Schmitt’s internal consistency: he aims at determining the differentia specifica of Schmitt as a thinker whose viewpoint deserves to be brightly highlighted as an epochal statement. One effect of Meier’s approach is to leave it to the reader to decide whether his ultimate goal is to justify Schmitt’s position or reduce it to absurdity.

In Meier’s view, the essence of Schmitt lies in his belief that politics does not involve a prudential calculus, but rather an a priori decision that puts order before anything that threatens it. In broad invocations of Schmitt, this “decision” is tied to the various states of exception in which it is made (“sovereign is he who decides on the exception”). But it misses the mark to see the decision as ad hoc. The decision is rather a constitutive declaration of faith. Wherever anomaly (rebellion) arises in the political order, a Schmittian is imbued with a spirit of retribution—precisely in lieu of the law and by virtue of the decision to have always decided for sovereignty as the precondition of politics. Or, to put it in Hobbesian terms, politics is derived from will, not reason, and its imperative is to stave off the nihilism of self-interest. Politics is energetic artifice in conflict with the natural state, which is the violence of all against all without order. As forceful rule, politics is the recognition and reaffirmation of the decision to resist all invitation to insubordination or civil war.

Hans Kelsen, Schmitt’s antagonist during the Weimar constitutional crises of the early 1930s, held a similar view to the extent that, for him, law rests on a basic norm of obedience to the law. The antagonism between Schmitt and Kelsen did not lie either in the foundational notion of obedience or in the idea that order is given as positive fact. Rather, what distinguished Schmitt from Kelsen was the mindset at stake. For Schmitt, the state of sovereignty must be disclosed in an act of conscious decision whose affective intensity recapitulates the very founding of the state, whereas for Kelsen, as for Schmitt’s liberal antagonists more generally, the order is an impersonal appeal to a given state’s consistency: it lacks the full sense of indignation that comes from a personal intuition of the state’s foundation out of disorder. The personal intensity of this intuition arises from the insight that, as Schmitt says, “the enemy is our own question as a figure” (44). Meier elaborates: “[I]f...