In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Rise and Fall of Carl Schmitt
  • Ian Cook (bio)
Carl Schmitt: A Biography
Reinhart Mehring
Daniel Steuer, trans
Polity
www.politybooks.com
700 Pages; Print, $45.00

It's hard to account for a biography that, its author acknowledges, is "of such tortuous dimension" and which follows Schmitt's works and their revisions closely, sometimes almost month by month, across much of the 96 years of his life. At over 550 pages of text, the biography "comes close to a chronicle," which "observes and records the sequence of events that made up Schmitt's problematic life, as well as his conscious attempts at finding normative orientation and stability."

Summary is also difficult because the book "tells the scandalous story of a 'life lived in the state of exception,' in which the experience of political and personal crises are inextricably linked with one another." So the book analyses Schmitt's works in terms a "complex historical and theoretical context." Mehring deliberately refuses to identify a pattern in these crises and their effects on Schmitt's works, declaring that "we should not hope for a master key to this complex character." Mehring also "seeks to avoid strong judgments and retrospective projections and, instead, to present the open possibilities and contingencies of a life in, as it were, slow motion."

One of the crucial question for this "contextualization and historicization of Schmitt" concerns the source of his overt anti-Semitism and support for National Socialism. And this brings us back to questions concerning historicist analysis or, more specifically for me, social historicist analysis itself (see my Reading Mill: Studies in Political Theory [1998]). A hallmark of historicist accounts is that its circumstances constitute objective determinants of a political theory. By way of confirming this effect, its translator, Daniel Steuer, describes this biography as "quasi-positivist."

"Schmitt himself looked at his work in its historical context, and he understood it as a response to certain challenges and situations." And historicization tends to validate Schmitt's pointing to external causes for his theoretical positions, as he "would always consider himself to be a collectively—politically or religiously—determined 'participant'" whose "'situation' served as an alibi or excuse." Claiming external determination, as Mehring suggests, allowed Schmitt to create "a strong and beguiling legend of his 'identity with Germany's fate.'" Schmitt wanted to be seen as both "an innocent lamb and a black sheep," indicating a discrepancy between reputation and character, as he did in the case of those authors who served him as intellectual points of reference: Donoso Cortés, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.

Schmitt's self-representation might be more persuasive if he offered a structuralist account of human being, and therefore his being and theories, of which Marxism is an exemplar. But, despite some Marxists taking up his work, Schmitt was no Marxist. For him "Marxism cannot come to terms with the realities" and he celebrated the fact that (circa 1970) the "syndrome of German Hegelianism, English economics and French socialism, which makes up the substance of Marxism, is beginning to unravel."

Nor, despite his increasing commitment to Catholicism, did Schmitt present himself as being directed by God's will. If anything caused him to be who he was and argue what he argued, it was the German state. It was never the party political state, however, and certainly not the pluralist state. And if he sometimes thought of himself as the servant of the German people, Schmitt's was not a biological conception of "the people." Despite Schmitt's support for Nationalism Socialism and his "'scientification' of Anti-semitism," he eschewed crude racialist notions of das Volk and "did not agree with a radically biological racism, which considered [a human being] . . . solely as an animal."

Schmitt's view that individuals were but servants of the state might explain his feeling compelled to support National Socialism. This might have been part of his self-justification and exculpation, however. For, to Mehring, Schmitt was "someone who became implicated in guilt and was later hardly ever able to admit it."

Well before he supported National Socialism and Hitler, though, Schmitt "forcefully suggests that the individual only gains significance as a 'civil servant...

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