Capra Contra Schmitt: Two Traditions of Political Romanticism

Introduction

This paper explores two different traditions of political romanticism and their differing critical and artistic receptions in the twentieth century. The first tradition emerged in Europe largely in response to the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, European romanticis m found its most prominent critic in Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). In his Political Romanticism, Schmitt argued that romanticism represents a flight from concrete, political reality into the inconsequential realm of fantasy. Above all else, the romantic subject avoids decision. Intimately connected with Schmitt’s rejection of European political romanticism is his embrace of fascism. I will argue that fascism for Schmitt is the precise inversion of politically indecisive romanticism. Fascism concretizes decision in the sovereign will of the dictator and in the popular act of acclamation that, in Schmitt’s theory of fascist democracy, legitimizes sovereign dictatorship.

The second tradition of political romanticism has its roots in the American Revolution and finds one of its most most prominent artistic exponents in Frank Capra (1897–1991).¹ Intimately connected with Capra’s embrace of the American romantic tradition is his rejection of fascism, especially apparent in his movie Meet John Doe (1941).² My aim in this paper is to lay bare the contrast between the two traditions of political romanticism, one given its theoretical explication and critique in Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, the other its artistic expression in the movies of Frank Capra. To understand the theoretical grounding of the American tradition of political romanticism, and to explain Capra’s artistic achievement, I turn for guidance to the work of Stanley Cavell, especially his Pursuits of Happiness in which he offers a philosophical explication of the genre of film he dubs “comedies of remarriage.” Although Cavell is the most important contemporary exponent of the American tradition of romanticism, he does not deal directly with the theme that is central for Schmitt, namely, the identification of the political with sovereign decision. The thinker who offers the clearest and most direct response to Schmitt’s central theme is Hannah Arendt. I will argue that she and Cavell together offer a theoretical elaboration of what I identify as the American tradition of political romanticism.

I have titled my paper “Capra Contra Schmitt” because I believe that each man, one in his art and the other in his theoretical writing, represents two different traditions of political romanticism at a decisive moment in their histories. This moment brings to the fore the critical relationship between aesthetics and politics in the modern democratic state. Capra’s faith is that romantic art in the mass medium of film can sustain and nurture American democracy in its battle against fascism. Schmitt believes that romanticism is the “religion” of the bourgeois state and must be overcome in order to achieve the authentic democracy of the fascist state.

The overcoming of the indecisiveness of political romanticism would take place, if we follow Schmitt to the logical conclusion of his critique, when a dictator brings into concrete actuality political romanticism’s “core” idea, namely, that “the state is a work of art” (1986: 125). Richard Wolin correctly diagnosed Schmitt’s theory of fascism as the fusion of the political and the aesthetic when he speaks of Schmitt’s embrace of a fascist “aesthetics of horror” (1992: 443). Wolin points out that Benjamin’s critique of fascism as the aestheticization of the political grows out of his reading of Schmitt. Benjamin understood from Schmitt that fascism inverts the bourgeois de-politicization of art, transforming the political into the realm where free-floating imagination is given license to test its fantasies in the living flesh of the state’s subjects. Benjamin also saw film as a medium ideally suited to represent and sustain the illusions of fascism. I will argue that Capra’s film work attempts to contest this appropriation of film for fascism. I will also argue that Capra’s own aesthetic draws deeply from romanticism, but in its American incarnation.

In the next section of the paper I will discuss Schmitt’s analysis of political romanticism and relate it to his embrace of fascism as the only hope...