Schmitt: The Concept of the Political

Schmitt, Carl, & Schmitt, Carl. (2007). The concept of the political (Expanded ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For Schmitt, the political is threatened by plurality and liberalism, and threatens to undermine the state and create a world whereby “humanitarian” can be used to justify the heinous. The political is necessary for us to understand where divisions are drawn; it is a necessary classification to clear the air of any foggy relativism brought about by the “perhaps” of liberalism.

Schmitt begins by looking at a number of different concepts that have clear, binary categories into which they can be divided. Economic can be divided into profit/loss. Ascetics can be divided into beautiful/ugly. Religious can be divided into good/bad. For Schmitt, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (26).

Going on,

“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible” (27)

Schmitt has a problem with liberalism:

“Liberalism is one of its typical dilemmas…of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary… The concern here is neither with abstractions nor with normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of such a (friend/enemy) distinction” (28).

Liberals do not understand or embrace the friend/enemy distinction, and this is problematic. Liberals would rather engage in economic competition with what should be their enemies. However, when it comes down to the task of making war, a real possibility in the affairs of states, the liberal will be baffled because they do not know who their enemies are. For the liberal, they have only amenable competitors. “War is the external negation of an enemy” (33).

The political friend/enemy distinction makes it clear where one’s loyalties lie:

“Their pluralism consists in denying the sovereignty of the political entity by stressing time and again that the individual lives in numerous different social entities and associations. He is a member of a religious institution, nation, labor union, family, sports club, and many other associations. These control him in differing degrees from case to case, and impose on him a cluster of obligations in such a way that no one of these associations can be said to be decisive and sovereign” (40-1).

The concept of Humanity is problematic for Schmitt. Firstly, “Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet” (54): it is problematic because it does not allow for the friend/enemy distinction. Schmitt goes on:

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in the ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat” (54).

Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. (1956). The birth of tragedy and The genealogy of morals ([1st ed.). Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday.


The Genealogy of Morals is broken down into four sections: 1.) Preface; 2.) “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”; 3.) “Guilt,” “Bad Consciousness,” and Related Matters; and 4.) What do Ascetic Ideals Mean?

He begins the preface by deriding those who continuously are looking for more and more knowledge to solve their problems because they do not spend time to examine themselves. “Our treasure lies in the beehives of our knowledge” (149). He then goes on to snidely make the claim, “As for the rest of life—so=-called “experience—who among us is serious enough for that? Or has time enough?” (149).

This book is a snide, rude and polemical attack (both polemic and attack are different translations for its subtitle) that attempts to use a distinct methodology to write history. As opposed to other authors who focus on the fact of history, be it material or ideational, this account focuses on cultural symbols as the starting ground for building and telling a historical story. Etymology plays an important role in explaining concepts. Symbols, mostly religious in nature, help Nietzsche tell his story about the trajectory that morality has taken throughout history.

In the first essay, Nietzsche examines the roots of good/bad and good/evil. He uses etymology to derive the base of good as being noble and the base of bad as being common, plebian. Good is synonymous with activity, health, strength, etc. Bad is a synonymous with the antonyms of the terms in the previous sentence.

Nietzsche also uses the priestly class as a tool for the development of his history. The priestly class derived from the noble class and stood above the slave class. However, because of their natural constraints, they were never able to engage in the “good” that the noble class so enjoyed. They were impotent in battle, constrained by moral law, and thus lashed out against the nobility.

He writes that the Jews created the slave revolt in morality, which is a revolt that begins by saying, “no” to the other, the one who stands in opposition. All of the action on the part of the slave is reactionary; they require an object to stand against themselves (171).

The weak are weak, but they claim superiority because they do not act as vengefully as the strong. However, the strong act as they do because they must, just like the bird of prey attacks, kills and eats the lamb. The bird of prey is not castigated because it is naturally inclined to eat lamb, no, it is understood that this is a natural expression of the circle of life.

In the second essay, Nietzsche addresses guilt and bad consciousness. He claims that humans are distinct from other animals in that they are able to make promises to one another. This is the beginnings of a system of credit and debt. Those who owe others and who can not pay are punished.

Additionally, because we have an understanding of those who came before us, our ancestors, we feel like we owe them for our existence, though it is impossible to pay them for this. This is one reason that we construct a god that we can worship and to whom we can offer gifts. Gods were also invented so that the spectacle of punishment did not go unobserved. It’s all much more complicated than that, but that’s all I’ll say for now.

In the third essay, Nietzsche explains that it is human nature to avoid a void and to search move towards a goal. Will eventually becomes to be represented by the ascetic ideal, which is represented by poverty, humility and chastity. The Ascetic ideal is the way forward, the remaining essence left over from the classical period for the philosopher.

The book, as stated earlier, is written as a polemic, or an attack and does provoke the reader in many places. Nietzsche looks as if he embraces cruelty, misogyny, anti-Semitic thought, war, etc. However, it may be more helpful to read him as providing a descriptive reading of history using a genealogical methodology, with hyperbole thrown in for show. If he is read from this perspective, he provides an account of history that is critical of modernity and liberalism in the sense that they attempt to obscure realities of the interaction of beings operating within nature. They search for knowledge and have forgotten about experience.

Polanyi: The Great Transformation

Polanyi, Karl. (2001). The great transformation : the political and economic origins of our time (2nd Beacon Paperback ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

“Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way” (3-4).

Polanyi begins by examining the 100 years peace in Western Europe from 1815-1914. He makes a clear point that this peace is largely based on economic organization, and that the transformation and commodification of land, labor and money/capital created a situation where society had to negatively respond to market forces. This societal response against the market, referred to as the double-movement by Polanyi (defined on 79, 136), caused for or allowed the rise of fascism in Europe and the horrors of WWII (Polanyi was writing just after WWII).

The cause of the double movement can be traced to the “Satanic mills” which ground men into masses (35). These mills, or industrialization and the commodification of land, labor and money, i.e., the self-regulating market, were created as a project to improve the aggregate material welfare of Britain, though Polanyi makes the clear case that this was not improvement for all (42).

He traces the origins of markets (and here we must make clear that he is talking about self-regulating markets working under the conditions of the commodification of land, labor and capital), and does not agree with Smith that they were organically created by the self-interest of members of a community, but by long-distance trade (61) and then further facilitated by the intervention of the state (66). This involved an explicit effort to embed society into the logic of the market, as opposed to the market being embedded in society.

This was initially attempted without the creation of a large labor class, and the Poor-laws and Speenhamland laws were enacted to protect those who had no land after the commons were enclosed. “In 1834 industrial capitalism was ready to be started, and Poor Law Reform was ushered in. The Speenhamland Law which had protected rural England, and thereby the laboring population in general, against the full force of the market mechanism was eating into the marrow of society” (106).

This was the creation of a labor class, and the first official commodification of labor in Britain. Polanyi goes on to describe the commodification of land and capital, and subsequent double-movements created by the self-regulating market interacting with society.

Polanyi concludes with a chapter entitles “Freedom in a Complex Society”. Here, he argues that a system of economics should not be based on self-interest (257). Also, that market systems should no longer be self-regulating, and that land, labor and capital should not be commodities but should be regulated (he talks about regulation earlier in the book and how markets and regulation were created in tandem). He wonders why markets do not seem to promote freedom, as they claim. He separates institutional freedom from moral/religious freedom.

Institutions must regulate the market; there must be bureaucracy. “No mere declaration of rights can suffice: institutions are required to make the rights effective” (264). Additionally, Polanyi acknowledges that this will lead to greater inefficiencies, but, in one of his more striking lines, claims that, “An industrial society can afford to be free” (264).

He concludes his final chapter by examining his other form of freedom: religious/moral. He claims that there are three truths about Western man: knowledge of death, knowledge of freedom and knowledge of society. First, man knew death and resigned himself to this. Then, man knew freedom through Christ and resigned himself to this. Now, man must know freedom through society and resign himself to this.

Great lines from the book include:

“No less a thinker than Adam Smith suggested that the division of labor in a society was dependent upon the existence of markets, or, as he put it, upon man’s ‘propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another.’ This phrase was later to yield the concept of the Economic Man. In retrospect, it can be said that no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future” (45).

and

“While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not” (147).

Hegel: Reason in History

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1953). Reason in history, a general introduction to the philosophy of history. New York,: Liberal Arts Press.

Reason in History is a compilation of notes taken by some of Hegels students. It is an attempt to understand Hegel’s approach and method through his teaching, filtered by students, as opposed to through his other works, like Phenomenology of Spirit. That being said, it is occasionally a difficult read, as the notes from different students are roughly spliced together.

Firstly, the Robert Hartman introduction is very thorough, dense and may want to be approached after you read Hegel’s text. Hartman explains the dialectic process of Hegel, how the thesis leads to the antithesis, how that then leads to a synthesis, or something new, and then how that synthesis negates something in itself and thus becomes the new thesis.

The key for Hegel’s thought is that sense certainly leads to consciousness, and then that this consciousness leads to an acknowledgement of the other, and thus a negation of the self. This then leads to the interpretation and acknowledgement of the is and the ought, which causes the tension which eventually leads to a synthesis. This is all much more thoroughly fleshed out in Phenomenology of Spirit.

Hegel begins by identifying three types of writing history, and eventually makes a case for him using the Philosophical History as the method for his writings. The first two types of writing history are the Original History and the Reflective History.

Original History was practiced by historians who, “transferred what was externally present into the realm of mental representation and thus translated the external appearances into inner conception—much as does the poet, who transforms perceptual material into mental images” (3). These historians, “transform the events, actions and situations present to them into a work of representative thought” (4).

Reflective History is broken down into four parts: 1.) Universal History: present the totality of a country’s history; 2.) Pragmatic History: make this historic narrative practically important; 3.) Critical History: evaluation of historic narratives and examination of their trustworthiness; and 4.) Fragmentary History: refer to the whole of a people’s history.

This brings us to the Philosophical History method: the thoughtful contemplation of history (10).

He then moves on to describe the structure of the dialectical process of history and he sets history in motion. Firstly, the thesis is the Idea, the a priori estimations that are made sans empirical evidence. This is the thesis, the ought, the noumenal. The Idea, operating through Thought, produces Reason, or, in Hegel’s words, “Reason is Thought determining itself in absolute freedom” (15). Then there is the State, or Nature, resting squarely on an empirical foundation, on a posteriori adjudications. These two stand in contrast to one another, and they bring about the synthesis of Spirit, which is the, “substance of history” (20).

“World history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, just as nature is the development of the Idea in Space” (87). Understanding this is vital to understanding Hegel more generally. The Idea develops in Space, which is actually what we would think about as space/time. It is a specific development at a specific time and space. However, this gets translated and begins to move through history when the Spirit develops in Time. However, according to Hartman (xxii), this Time is Time of Consciousness, or a universal Time that operates above and beyond our specific Space/Time.

Thus the Spirit emerges from the synthesis of Idea interacting with Nature, what is interacting with what ought. Then Spirit, like the Phoenix, arises from its own ashes refreshed and renewed and becomes the Thesis. Spirit also contains within it all of its previous iterations, and thus learns from the past and progresses into the future towards greater absolute freedom.

Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund, & Strachey, James. (2005). Civilization and its discontents. New York: Norton.

As Louis Menand points out in the introduction to this well known work, Freud did not believe in the perfectibility of man (14). Freud takes a step slightly outside of his realm of psychology and attempts to explain how civilization must always be a mitigating factor on human instincts generally, and human aggression more specifically. This conclusion about human nature in relation to society allows Freud to speak very negatively about communism.

Freud begins his exploration by talking about an “oceanic” feeling that is common to all people, and that many tend to relate to a belief in God. This feeling is related to the feeling of being in love, a point where the boundary between the ego and the object seems to fade away. He then moves on to discuss the separation of the ego and the object, or the outside, which happens in infancy. “In this way [the separation of ego and object] one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development” (10).

Freud then goes on to discuss the pleasure principle. “The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other” (63). He also explains how religion acts as a constraint on human instinct and aggression, a helpful transition for explaining how the state does the same.

Civilization is then defined by Freud: “…describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (73). Humans became civilized through processes that embraced order, cleanliness and beauty. The individual must become subsumed to society, the individual is condemned as “brute force” and the community is exalted as “right” (81).

Freud also picks apart the Biblical claim that one should “love your neighbor as yourself” by positing that, “…the element of truth behind all this…is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (103-4).

Communism is critiqued because it attempts to destroy the regime of private property, and thus bring about a society where humans can interact free from avarice. However, Freud claims that, “…I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion” (106). And that, “Aggressiveness was not created by property” (106). There is still the tension that arises from sex, as well as other psychological tensions that do not arise from relations based on private property. Freud quips that, “One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois” (108).

The meaning of the evolution of civilization is thus: “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species” (119). Civilization exists to curtail the instincts of man, and it does this, “by weakening and disarming [him] and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (121).

Freud ends by positing this question: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (154).

The text is generally sexist, and grand statements are consistently proponed. Additionally, the critique of Communism looks like a straw-man argument and doesn’t deal with any of the substantive critiques of industrial society presented by Marx (among others).

Baudrillard: The Spirit of Terrorism

Baudrillard, Jean, & Baudrillard, Jean. (2003). The spirit of terrorism ; and, Other essays (New ed.). London ; New York: Verso.

This is a short book, a glorified pamphlet, if you will, of four essays: The Spirit of Terrorism, Requiem for the Twin Towers, Hypotheses on Terrorism and The Violence of the Global. I will look briefly at what he says, will take part of my analysis from a professor of mine (who probably wouldn’t want to be named) and then make a brief conclusion.

Baudrillard looks at 9/11 as an event; as something that is meaningless and shatters the globalizing, totalizing violence of our current international system. 9/11 partially becomes an event because it does rupture the homogenizing violence of globalization.

“We may dismiss from the outset the hypothesis that September 11 constituted merely an accident or incident on the path to irreversible globalization. An ultimately despairing hypothesis, since something very extraordinary occurred there, and to deny it is to admit that henceforth nothing can even constitute an event, that we are doomed to play out the flawless logic of global power capable of absorbing any resistance, any antagonism, and even strengthening itself by so doing—the terrorist act merely hastening the planetary ascendancy of a single power and a single way of thinking” (51).

It is also an event because it invokes the spirit of terrorism. The “Spirit of Terrorism” is “a death which is symbolic and sacrificial—that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event” (17). The terrorist, “have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. They have even—and this is the height of cunning—used the banality of American every day life as cover and camouflage” (19).

He then looks at how this event ruptured our construction of images. “The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage” (27). The image was ruptured, partially because the material was brought back to the image. The video of people jumping from buildings, the smoke billowing down the streets channeled by buildings, these made a Manhattan Horror Film real.

Since the modern image was ruptured and brought to face reality, the question of how to respond to such an event becomes problematic. How can you have a meaningful response when the very idea of meaning is problematized? For Baudrillard, it seems as if 9/11 brought about a sense of relief that the singular event could still rupture the ever-growing influence of hegemonic cultural ideals.

Another interesting note is a quote that allows Baudrillard to be snarlingly reviewed by the NY Times. The review says this (on the back of the book):

“First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard… It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture.”

The quote that they are referring to is this:

“The violence of globalization also involves architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel” (41)

No one would discount the coldbloodedness of this statement, though the NY Times may have taken it out of context. Baudrillard is pointing to the violence of the global, specifically through looking at how that violence can be portrayed in architecture. He certainly does not feel like the WTC was destroyed, in fact, he believes that, since it has moved from material space to the ideation space, it has transformed. “By the grace of terrorism, the World Trace Center has become the world’s most beautiful building—the eighth wonder of the world!” (48).