The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political was written by Carl Schmitt in 1932. It defines the political as situations where there are clear friend-enemy distinctions. The schism in opinions is usually in the central domain of the time. The central domain is defined as the domain which captures the attention of the best minds. From the 16th to 20th centuries, the central domains shifted from religion to metaphysics to economics and finally to technology. Each central domain during its prominence was seen as the most neutral, the next being more neutral than the previous. However, wars still happened due to every central domain. When a war happens, the political becomes central, and the previous central domain becomes secondary. All previous central domains continue to inspire meaning in people’s lives, meaning domains are pluralistic. The secondary domains, instead of being instruments of the state, retreat into the private sphere. The central domain of technology during 1932 is quasi-neutral, and because it serves all of humanity, it is used as a tool to sharpen conflicts in secondary domains. Because of technology’s non-direct relations to the political, its status as the dominant domain leads to meaninglessness. Critiquing technism critiques liberalism. It follows then that rising liberal attitudes correlate with widespread depression.

The political exists because of man’s dangerous nature, a view held by Hobbes. Though the nature of singular man is relevant here, at scale, this view becomes the basis of the political, the view that man is dangerous in groups. Hobbes sought to conquer this nature of man by advocating for absolute sovereignty, the view that only a strong leader could keep in check the brutishness of man. The re-education of man to not be so naturally dangerous has its roots in liberalism, whose eventual goal is to erase the existence of the political and for there to be global peace. As a result, liberals are typically apolitical. Schmitt, in a thought experiment, thinks the long term goal of liberalism will lead to the worst and final war of all, a war between pacifists and non-pacifists, especially if liberals are serious about maintaining peace. He also thinks that liberals are silly to believe that man’s nature is good but corrupted by society, a view held by Rousseau. Liberal societies who inhabited this mindset were decayed and violently usurped, such as the French bourgeoisie before the French revolution. Because liberals oppose war, the only way to resolve conflicts is through endless discussions, also known as occasionalist ironism. For this specific issue, absolutism offers an advantage.

The state is usually defined as a sovereign, independent group of people living inside territorial boundaries. The state has become synonymous with the political, for the head of state is the power that decides the hostis or enemy. Until the distinction is made clear, the political doesn’t exist. Because the state protects its citizens and grants them rights, it demands obedience in return. Protego ergo obligo. The obedience in terms of the political indicates an individual obligation to fight for the survival of the way of living inside the state. Of course, the individual surviving is the most important for the survival of the state, but fighting the enemy is of next importance. The friend-enemy distinction is created when the way of living is threatened existentially as the central domain between two states. The enemy may be respected morally, aesthetically, and technologically, but if the central domain were economics, the friend-enemy distinction would still result in war among capitalist-communist divides despite the respect in all other domains. The state’s right to declare war is jus ad bellum and is decoupled from its conduct within war, or jus in bello. In jus in bello, a state determines the life and death of an enemy, or jus vitae ac necis. An enemy invoking a humanitarian reason when using jus ad bellum is cheating as it’s universal. Similarly, from Grotius, a war cannot be waged on the basis of justice.

The idea of the central domains was inspired by Eduard Spranger’s characterization of personalities in 1920, which groups types of men into those whose interests are theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. When I discovered that its origins were psychological, I felt consternation. But it made sense that psychological ideas are memorable because repression, the loss of memories to the unconscious, is what psychoanalysts fight against. Central domains extend the incompleteness of Herbert Spencer’s idea of societal development. Spencer divided societies into two categories, military vis-a-vis industrial. Societies who ruled militarily compel citizens to collective action with force. Industrial societies rule with reason and use justified claims instead, or claims that are universally justified among rational humans. Comte’s law of three stages was also similar, the idea that society develops from a theological to a metaphysical to a positive stage, the final positive stage being a scientific society which strives to logically prove all non-axiomatic ideas. However, Spencer’s societal development and Comte’s law of three stages miss the economic central domain.

History was used to justify the roles central domains had in conflicts. It is difficult for myself, a non-historian, to verify whether of all possible events that happened in the 16th century, the religious was central, and so on so forth for the rest of the central domains. But I could see that the English Reformation began in 1517 after Martin Luther posted the 95 theses, which excommunicated him from the Catholic Church and created the Protestants who followed him. He lived in the German part of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by Charles V at the time, and peasant uprisings siding with the Protestants soon followed. The Peace of Augsburg was signed in 1555 to end the Protestant-Catholic wars in the Holy Roman Empire. The agreement allowed rulers of each association to designate it as Protestant or Catholic and for those in the wrong association to move. France was then mired in Wars of Religion starting 1562 between the Catholics and the Huguenots, a group of French Calvinist Protestants. By 1598, the Edict of Nantes was signed, ending the Wars of Religion, which allowed the Catholics and Huguenots to coexist peacefully in France. England gradually turned Protestant after the Reformation and defeated the Spanish Armada, a Catholic superpower, in 1588. It resolved its Protestant-Catholic divide with the formation of the Anglican church and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement during Elizabeth I’s reign from 1558 to 1603. England’s Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland from 1649 to 1653 and defeated the largely Roman Catholic Ireland. In the Holy Roman Empire again, the Peace of Augsburg was not enough to stop the Thirty Years’ War, which stirred religious tensions after Emperor Ferdinand II forced associations to adhere to Catholicism. It concluded with 8 million casualties and the relinquishment of Catholic power in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which also allowed rights for Calvinism for the first time. The Protestant-Catholic divide certainly captured the attention of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Religious conflict still happens today even if it’s not the central domain, especially between Sunni and Shia Muslims. In 632 AD, after the Prophet Muhammad died, Muslims divided in two predominant groups characterized by who they thought should rule the Islamic community. The Sunni elected Abu Bakr who was the first caliph of Islam. They, who still are in the majority today, believed the caliph should be democratically elected. The Shia, in the minority, believed the caliph should have the same blood as Prophet Muhammad. It wasn’t until the fourth caliph that they got Ali ibn Abi Talib, Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, to rule from 656 to 661. He, however, was assassinated shortly after. The second caliphate, the Sunni Umayyad Empire, ruled from 661 to 750, until they were toppled by the Abbasids. The Shia Abbasids ruled from 750 to 1258 until they were toppled by the Sunni Ottoman Empire, nowadays Turkey, who ruled the Islamic kingdom from 1299 to 1922. Today, in the Middle East, Iran, majority Shia, and Saudi Arabia, majority Sunni, wage proxy wars against each other. For example, the Syrian civil war, which started from March 2011 and is still ongoing, is one of them. There are also many Islamic extremist groups: Hamas, ISIS/ISIL, and al-Qaeda are Sunni, and Hezbollah is Shia. They fight amongst each other but also against Western countries and Israel, making the Middle East situation complicated.

The central domain became metaphysical during the Enlightenment, which happened in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Enlightenment started when Rene Descartes coined, “I think, therefore I am” in 1637 and accelerated philosophical and scientific growth. John Locke invented the idea of the social contract, which allowed citizens to overthrow their government if their natural rights of life, liberty, and property were violated. Suffering from the effects of absolutism which they saw as infringements on their natural rights and being taxed excessively by Britain, America fought the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783. They also used “separation of church and state” thought by Locke to incorporate in their constitution, being wary of the religious wars of Europe in the prior century. They used “separation of powers” thought by Montesquieu to form the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. In addition, the French Revolution, which happened between 1789 and 1799, saw the French overthrow their monarchy and execute King Louis XVI. Both America and France became representative democracies, a less radical form of the direct democracy thought of by Rousseau. The Enlightenment ended with the end of the French Revolution when a new movement, Romanticism, took its place.

Romanticism was a polemical movement against the Enlightenment that inserted aestheticism as the central domain in the beginning of the 19th century, which favored the arts and individual expression over the sciences and philosophy of the Enlightenment. I think aestheticism is an exception to the central domains theory, as I’m not aware of wars that were or could’ve been waged due to differences of opinions in it. The central domain became economic with Karl Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto. The economic domain was used by Vladimir Lenin in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to overthrow Czar Nicholas II. This happened amidst Russia’s participation in World War I from 1914 to 1918 as Russia sustained casualties and food shortages. To change their lives, Russian peasants embraced Lenin-Marxist socialist ideals. The Third International, or the Comintern, was formed in 1919 by the Soviet Union to expand communism to the rest of the world. The capitalist-communist divide caused many wars after The Concept of the Political was published, like the Cold War which started in 1947 between America and the Soviet Union. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1990, which divided Germany into East and West, precipitated the end of Cold War. By 1991, Gorbachev had already started most of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He lost the presidential election to Yeltsin because Gorbachev wanted a more gradual dissolution and Yeltsin wanted it immediately. The Cold War ended when Yeltsin was elected. The Korean War, which started in 1950 and ended in 1953, was another example of the capitalist-communist divide, as well as the Vietnam War, which started in 1955 and ended in 1975.

During 1932, the time when The Concept of the Political was written, World War I had just ended. Germany was forced to sign the Versailles Treaty in 1919, which made them concede territory, accept responsibility for World War I, and pay reparations. Also, in 1919, Otto von Gierke undergirded the Weimar Constitution, which crafted Germany into a parliamentary republic, a democracy where people elect legislative officials. Schmitt had lived through recent memory of the Kulturkampf, a political conflict during 1872-1878 between Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, and the Catholic Church, a reminder of the intense religious wars of the 16th century. Despite that, peace was gaining momentum with the formation of the League of Nations in 1920, which would sanction offenders of world peace. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was created in 1928, where those who signed it, including France, Germany, and America, promised not to use national policy to start wars. Ultimately, the pacts and sanctions were impossible to enforce. The Weimar Constitution through Article 48 allowed commissarial dictatorship, where the President could override the parliament in times of emergency. Hitler legally came to power using Article 48, an unfortunate consequence of Schmitt’s endorsement of Hobbesian absolutism, and fomented World War II.

Today, liberalism is widespread and Schmitt’s critiques still apply. What should succeed it?

Resources

[1] The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt

[2] https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/thirty-years-war

Thirty Years’ War

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xaF5p86Y84

The Shia-Sunni divide

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDqvzFY72mg

The fall of the Soviet Union

[5] Wikipedia

[6] Encyclopedia Britannica