Schmitt was one of the twentieth century’s most important yet most controversial political philosophers. His philosophy influenced many thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Norberto Bobbio, Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, and Andreas Kalyvas. This course aims to give an introductory overview of Schmitt’s political philosophy through a reading of two works, The Concept of the Political (1932) and Political Theology (1922). It will initially survey the intellectual context of Schmitt’s philosophy, from the causes of the crisis of liberalism in the 1920s to Schmitt’s problematic adoption of National Socialism. It will then introduce Schmitt’s understanding of the theological background to modern political concepts, his idea of sovereignty as the decision over the state of exception, and the neutralizing/depoliticizing effects of liberal modernity. This course will also present contemporary interpretations of Schmitt, especially those that understand the political as democratic contestation. Although centred around two texts, this course will incorporate other important writings by Schmitt and where relevant introduce the thought of philosophers who were influenced by him.
Lecture One: Methodological Questions and Historical Context
What is it to think the political?; Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’; normative and realist approaches to the political; the intellectual context of modernity, the secularisation thesis and epistemological nihilism; Neo-Kantian legal and social theory in Max Weber and Hans Kelsen; understanding the fact-value distinction; overcoming positive and natural law; legal foundationalism and antifoundationalism; Schmitt’s problematic adoption of fascist ideology; the curious rise of ‘left Schmittianism’.
- Primary reading: Karl Löwith, ‘The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt’, in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism
- Secondary reading: Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; Richard Wolin, ‘Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror’.
Lecture Two: Reading The Concept of the Political (1)
The argument behind the political as the friend-enemy distinction; Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ and political anthropology; the inflated status of natural right in the social contract tradition; risk and sacrifice in politics; nihilism and modernity’s encroaching ‘neutralizations and depoliticizations’; the centrality of decision in law and politics.
- Primary reading: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
- Secondary reading: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘The Concept of the Political’; Carl Schmitt, ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’.
Lecture Three: Reading The Concept of the Political (2)
The political meaning of secularism; surrogates for authority and tradition; the political as a sui generis branch of thinking; the shortcomings of pluralistic and normative approaches to the juridicopolitical; power dynamics and group alignments in state-based and international politics.
- Primary reading: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
- Secondary Reading: William Rasch, Carl Schmitt: State and Society
Lecture Four: Reading Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
What is sovereignty, who is sovereign?; the miracle and political possibility; the extreme case and the exception; decisionism and commissary/plebiscitary dictatorship; popular sovereignty and the idea of constituent power; productive constituent power against state power; the critique of decisionism and the reality of emergency politics.
- Primary reading: Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
- Secondary reading: Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary; Ellen Kennedy, ‘Norm and Exception: Carl Schmitt’s Concept of Sovereignty’ in Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar; Miguel Vatter, ‘The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt’ in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.
Lecture Five: Schmitt’s Influence on the Left
Radical democracy and the political; the state of exception; democratic contestation (agonism) and antagonism; critical theory on constitutionality and the question of recognition and justice; council democracy and the ‘politics of the extraordinary’; summary of the contribution of Schmitt’s philosophy to contemporary political theory.
- Primary reading: Matthew G. Specter, ‘What’s “Left” in Schmitt?” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.
- Secondary reading: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception; Ellen Kennedy, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School’; Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception; William E. Scheuerman, ‘States of Emergency’ in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.