Schmitt and Sorel: Parliamentarism, Liberalism, and Myth

Abstract: I provide a brief reading of Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary politics, as well as Schmitt and Sorel’s treatment of political myth. I argue against Schmitt and for a version of liberalism that is primarily myth-oriented.

For Schmitt, the principle political crime was the veiling of depoliticalizations; in a fully mythologized world, it is only the myth of the non-myth that is a sin.[1] Schmitt’s own aesthetic tapering of Catholic religiosity with the politics of the civitas humana, beautifully analyzed by Victoria Kahn,[2] is thus no stranger to the “realism” the myth entails, and it is in fact against this backcloth that Schmitt’s assaults on the liberal parliamentary system gain their true credibility.

Schmitt, an ardent supporter of the “executive discretionary powers” clause in Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, saw in liberalism a fundamental eschewal of the political. Rather than a proper political doctrine, liberalism was a moral-cosmopolitan philosophy without resources of its own capable of defining or participating in the political, so defined later in Schmitt’s work as the “distinction between friend and enemy,” with the potential staking of real human lives.[3] Schmitt launches a two-pronged knife into democratic liberalism, developing, on the one hand, a historical argument that suggests changing social conditions have made parliamentarism politically unviable, and a more theoretical account that locates the deficiencies of parliamentarism less as a result of the historical context and more in terms of parliamentarism’s own conceptual dead-ends. As Schmitt notes, “Against the will of the people especially an institution based on discussion by independent representatives has no autonomous justification for its existence, even less so because the belief in discussion is not democratic but originally liberal.”[4]

Schmitt here connects the historical deficiency—that nobody anymore believes parliament was achieving what it was designed to originally achieve—with an objectified political analysis, as it is in this “nobody believing” that parliamentarism failed to adequately produce the terms of a political will. Fundamentally, the endless deliberation at the heart of parliamentarism—which for Schmitt is derived from the assumption of autonomy harbored by liberalism—fails to account for the operative moment of decision. Rather, political conversation debated the elusiveness of the “norm” prior to the decision, circling around a desired—but impossible—access to a perfect standard by which to measure competing criteria. This stagnant cyclicality of “mere” discourse lies in direct contradistinction to Schmitt’s celebration of the political will, and his associated declaration that “The legitimacy of a constitution does not mean that a constitution originated according to previously valid constitutional laws….A constitution does not generally come into being according to rules that stand above it.”[5] This, of course, is the principle basis for Schmitt’s further reflections in Political Theology concerning sovereignty, namely his insistence that “Sovereignty is he who decides on the exception.”[6] If the role of the “exception” is really what determines the contours of sovereignty; if “everything depends on how the will of the people is formed”[7]; and if the endless deliberations of the parliamentary system end not in the active identification of a particular will, but the bloated entitlements of a naïve and depleted diplomacy, then “Democracy seems fated to destroy itself in the problem of the formation of a will.”[8]

At the heart of parliamentarism’s failure of will is its conjoinment of opposites. Democracy, for Schmitt, is reducible to the will of the people, and it is on this basis that Schmitt is able to permit a host of Hobbesian forms of sovereign authoritarianism as compatible with democratic precepts. Liberalism, on the other hand, with its insistence on autonomy and equality, evades the true political arena—which is fundamentally the arena of competing myths—and transforms existential political conflicts into economic measurements of competition.[9] Schmitt responds as Nietzsche to the ascetic priest: in liberalism there is all that enervates, pervades, veils and confuses—fundamentally, liberalism is a rejection on the existential level of life itself.[10] “The crisis of parliamentarism presented here,” Schmitt writes, “rests on the fact that democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other or a time, just as socialism and democracy have been allied; but as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements…”[11]

The time had come, according to Schmitt, for democracy—the will of the people—to decouple itself from liberalism. But how to achieve this end? No mere argument, subsumed under the decayed image of parliamentary deliberation, would suffice. It is on this point that Schmitt turns to Marx and Sorel, and finds in the latter the mythical resources that could re-dramatize the antagonisms of the political. Schmitt reads Sorel as developing a quintessentially “political” theory in the grandest sense: “Its [Sorel’s theory’s] center,” says Schmitt, “is a theory of myth that poses the starkest contradiction of absolute rationalism and its dictatorship, but at the same time because it is a theory of direct, active decision, it is an even more powerful contradiction to the relative rationalism of the whole complex that is ground around conceptions such as ‘balancing,’ ‘public discussion,’ and ‘parliamentarism.’”[12]

To this end, “Discussing, bargaining, parliamentary proceedings, appear a betrayal of myth and the enormous enthusiasm on which everything depends.”[13] Like Cassirer’s reading of Machiavelli, Schmitt’s reading of Sorel highlights the nature of myth in contradistinction to a given condition of normalcy—for Cassirer, this was the use of reason itself, while Schmitt linked the “decision” and the “exception” to the will-forming capacity of the myth as a substitute for a desiccated parliamentarism. Schmitt’s reading of Sorel pushes still further, unpacking Sorel’s notion into a full-fledged existentialism, replete with an associated form of political judgment:

Out of the depths of our genuine life instinct, not out of reason or pragmatism, springs the great enthusiasm, the great moral decision and the great myth. In direct intuition the enthusiastic mass creates a mythical image that pushes its energy forward….Only in this way can a people or a class become the engine of world history. Wherever this is lacking, no social and political power can remain standing, and no mechanical apparatus can build a dam if a new storm of historical life has broken loose. Accordingly, it is all a matter of seeing correctly where this capacity for myth and this vital strength are really alive today.[14]

Here taken, the myth is both fuel and fire for revolutionary syndicalism. Note Schmitt’s emphasis on what happens when the myth is lacking: with a Machiavellian nod to “embankments and dykes,” Schmitt identifies the myth as that which barricades the “dam” of “social and political power” such that no “new storm of historical life” will disrupt the true historical march. The myth, drawing from “the depths of our genuine life instinct,” establishes the preconditions for genuine historical change by first shoring the politics it circumscribes from the tides of contingency.

For Sorel, the ability for myth to achieve this end was defined in relation to the insufficiency of elite-driven rhetoric, particularly molded and delivered by “parliamentary socialists.” To this end Sorel speaks of the “confused language,” “high sounding phrases” and “gibberish” of those parliamentary socialists who endlessly squabbled and who had grown incapable of actually acting.[15] It is “Against the noisy, garrulous and lying socialism,”[16] unable to reach the latent hearts of the masses, that Sorel constructs his politicalization of the myth, worth quoting in full:

Syndacalisms strives to employ methods of expression which throw a full light on things, which put them exactly in the place assigned to them by their nature, and which bring out the whole value of the forces in play. Opposition, instead of being glossed over, must be thrown into sharp relief if we are to follow syndicalist thinking; the groups that are struggling against each other must be shown to be as separate as possible; finally, the movements of the revolting masses are presented so as to make a deep and lasting impression on the souls of the rebels.

Ordinary language could not produce these results in any very certain manner, appeal must be made to collections of images which, taken together and through intuition alone, before any consider analyses are made, are capable of evoking the mass of sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society. The syndicalists solve this problem perfectly by concentrating the whole of socialism in the drama of the general strike; there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of opposites through the nonsense of official thinkers everything is clearly mapped out, so that only one interpretation of socialism is possible.[17]

Marx’s notion of the epoch of “simplifications” that capitalism had brought about,[18] whereby the end result is disenchantment of the proletariat and the emergence of class-consciousness, is here tweaked in an important manner. Sorel seems to suggest that it is the very enchantment of the myth which promotes the Marxist process of disenchantment: the myth “throws things in full light” by emphasizing the “opposition” between groups, leading, it would appear, to a kind of determinism. That “only one interpretation of socialism is possible” is linked specifically with the image, rather than the word. The insufficiency of “ordinary language” is seen as merely a reproduction of terms of domination; the myth tinkers below all this, collapsing the entirety of the socialist project and general program (“collections of images” “taken together”) into an immediate and overwhelming engagement with the staged political “drama.”

Sorel concludes his reflections of the myth with a similar proposition: “the general strike,” he begins, “is indeed what I have said: the myth in which socialism is wholly comprised, i.e. A body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society….We thus obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness—and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously.”[19] There is no socialism without the “body of images” that preempt any of the imperfections and ambiguities of language. Sorel continues, linking the defective status of language as a political vehicle for revolution to the realism of experience, reminiscent of Koselleck:

Experience shows that the framing of the future in some indeterminate time may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective and have few inconveniences; this happens when it is a question of myths, in which are found all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life, and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action upon which the reform of the will is founded.[20]

The myth is not only a source of “dams” and “embankments,” but the basis of predictive and future-oriented planning. With the myth, and the stability it offers its created people, “framing” the future transforms from a mockery of contingency to a feasible political reality. Myth, to a great extent, dictates the fate of a group in relation to contingency: with it, there is a ship and mast, an image, in the form of a memory and a promise, awaiting fulfillment; without it, there are so many drifting souls on an angry and infinite ocean. It is perhaps with this somber importance of myth in mind that Schmitt concludes: “Art is more important for the life of mankind than science.”[21]

For both Schmitt and Sorel, the myth is not some dangling supplement to more intrinsic political virtues, but constitutes the core limits of the political itself. Both thinkers emphasize the role of myth as an aesthetic phenomenon, capable—at least for Sorel—of giving voice to an association and simultaneously working below the level of voice in the production of identification. Unlike Cassirer, Schmitt and Sorel find in myth positive regimes and political promise, engendering actual group solidarity at the level of an existential affirmation of life’s most basic forces. The shift between Cassirer, Schmitt and Sorel is thus in their normative treatment of the myth, taken as a political strategy: what is at stake is how to use the myth well.

It is Sorel’s notion of myth, however, that seems helplessly vague in its insistence on the myth’s self-made and self-replicating status among devotees; building an alternative apparatus means altering some of the basic objectives of the syndicalist program. To this tension, Sorel has no answer, and instead develops what I would call the myth of the syndicalist myth as a reaction. But what this myth misses, as does Schmitt’s treatment of Sorel and myth-making writ large, is the constitutive status between liberalism and democracy. There is here first and foremost the assumption, the lie, the illusion, etc.—there is here the myth that an adequate myth can be developed and deployed—the myth of mythology meeting one “half way,” so to speak. That is—and this is especially a critique of Schmitt—the stagnations and confusions that arise from parliamentarism have less to do with the contradiction between the self-rule of the people’s will and the tenets of liberalism so much as they have to do with the philosophical question at the heart of democracy to which liberalism is the most intuitive and logical response. It would seem that it is less a matter of the “myth of democracy” versus the “myth of liberalism,” and more that it is democracy itself which stands as the myth in the ultimate compatibility between individual autonomy and the general will. This democratic myth privileges the process of myth-making as an organic human need: the myth cannot be reduced to a single form, and in fact to impose such a form would be the simultaneous closure of human knowledge. Democracy upholds the unforeseen emergence and explosion of the meta-myth (Wolin), e.g. myth-making forever open to its own redefinition and self-transcendence. But, as to the nature of myths themselves, all myths are simultaneously myths of closure: that is, that the world will one day conform to its narrative of truth. Though utopia remains our most perennial myth, there remains no myth in utopia; this is far different than rehearsing the formula “utopia = disenchantment” (which is itself the process of one myth competing among others), for a world without myth is radically distinct from a disenchanted world. While the latter arrives with the decline of the “sacred,” we might say that the former would involve the ultimate death of the “secular.”[22]

[1] Interestingly enough, I think one could link this Schmittian assumption to the problem of political hypocrisy as told by David Runciman today. For Runciman, the only political hypocrisy is the suggestion that there is no hypocrisy; of course, Runciman lacks all the other “realist” elements Schmitt’s deep agonistic politics entails.

[2]  Victoria Kahn, The Future of the Illusion, p. 61

[3] Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 26

[4] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 15

[5] Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, p. 136

[6] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 5

[7] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 27

[8] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 28

[9] See Carl Schmitt, Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticalizations, p. 89—note the “impulse” for the :neutral domain” of which liberalism is the apotheosis.

[10] See Carl Schmitt, Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticalizations, pp. 95-96

[11] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 15

[12] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 68

[13] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 69

[14] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 68

[15] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 110

[16] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 112

[17] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 112-113

[18] See Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, p. 3: “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisies and Proletariat.”

[19] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 118

[20] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 115

[21] Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 67. It is here of historical irony that, according to Eric Hobsbawm, “what power destroyed or stifled in the era of the dictators is more evident than what it achieved. These regimes were better at stopping undesirable artists creating undesirable works than at finding good art to express their aspirations. They were not the first to want buildings and monuments to celebrate their power and glory, nor did they add much to the traditional ways of achieving these objects.” Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times, p. 238

[22] This is, in some sense, to tie back into the existential condition of the politkon zoon.