About Schmitt: Partisans and Theory

Carl Schmitt's intervention on the partisan came late in a career whose high public profile had made him illustrious, then notorious. In the wake of the Nazi cataclysm he was a historically disappointed man, and through the partisan he visited a pox on both houses of the polarized Cold War world. The origin of his essay in a Spanish academic commission of the Franco period confirms his historical isolation. Yet his disillusion with the choices Europeans were faced with was widespread. "We must endure, and stand between two fools," William Empson complained of this historical double-bind¹ (2001, 102). That Schmitt's essay should be revived in post-Cold War rethinking of political modernity is indicative of disillusion with the troubles of the New World Order proclaimed on behalf of the victors. His partisans have been taken up by a distinguished readership that includes leading political theorists and postmodernists. This translation, the first of Schmitt's partisan theory into English, provides domestic readers a view through his wide-angle lens, which captures the romantic origins of the partisan as well as the "cosmo-pirates and cosmo-partisans" (Schmitt 1963, 83) he sees in our future. These stick figures came uncannily alive on 11 September 2001, making a prophet of their author and recalling his essay from its Cold War limbo.

Politische Theologie (Political Theology) was the title of Schmitt's influential broadside of 1922 on the cultural condition of modernity. He was Catholic by birth (1888 in the Prussian Rhineland), a subject of the Holy Roman Empire by elective affinity. His enthusiasm for the monument to Otto the Great (912-973), expressed in a letter of 1934 to Ernst Jünger (Jünger and Schmitt 1999, 24) speaks volumes about his responsiveness to a theocratic political past. Celebration of this past was standard fare in the imperial dreaming of the period.² Schmitt's titular role as Staatsrat (state counsel) to the Third Reich confirmed his sense of mission in reviving a truly ancien régime. It also meant that he was held after the war for possible prosecution at the Nürnberg Tribunal on war crimes. He was released after extensive questioning—by a German-Jewish interrogator whose vindictive attitude he bitterly resented—showed him to be free of direct responsibility for the Holocaust. His own political theology is evident in his forthright identification of the enemy in a categorical binary of friend and foe that underwrites his mythification of the partisan.

Writing in 1946, in the rearview mirror of his collusion with Goering and his Führer, Schmitt reverted to his identity as a professional jurist: "I am at home as a teacher and researcher in two juridical fields, international law and constitutional law. Both disciplines are branches of public jurisprudence. Work in these areas is publicity [publizistisch] in the strongest sense of the word. It deals with questions of broad import in domestic as well as international politics. It is immediately exposed to the dangers of the political, in consequence. The jurist in such fields cannot evade such danger even by disappearing into the Nirvana of a pure positivism" (1950, 55, my translation). The defensive tone is unmistakable, and so is the defiance. The partisan essay reflects the point of view of a legalistic mind under historical pressure. Visceral dislike of parliamentary democracy and its principal international sponsor is reinforced by doubts about the legality of the Nürnberg trials. Fear of the Soviet colossus lurking menacingly across the Elbe in German territory inspires rumination on the key role played by Russian partisans in defeating the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. His instinctive sympathy with the partisan's defense of home and hearth runs head-on here into his own national pride. Beneath the veneer of the professional jurist lurks a political player manqué. Schmitt's escape from legal positivism amounts to a plea for an international law of war that contains conflict within effectively defined limits without criminalizing it, as the Nürnberg Tribunal had done.

Nothing is more characteristic of the role of jurist as publicist than his...