Schmitt, Renan, Muller: Defining the "Political"
Abstract: I address some lingering questions I’ve had viz. reading Schmitt, Renan, and Muller: under what conditions can political identifications transcend local contexts? What resources does the political possess in creating and motivating civic solidarity/stability?
Schmitt and the Political
Schmitt’s definition of the political is deceptively simple. He begins his argument by situating the extant fact of the “state” alongside an implied assumption of the “political”: to the extent that the state exists, so too does the political, and vice-versa. This is, of course, the paradox Schmitt finds unacceptable, and he identifies the lack of a stable definition of the “political” as constitutive of misunderstandings regarding the “people” and “entity” of the state as a whole.[1] Historical developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily the interpenetration of state and society, meant an erasure of the traditional “state = politics” formula and a reanalysis of the “political” in light of its potential seizure of the separate domains of civic life.
To this end, Schmitt seeks to disentangle the “criteria” of the political from the conceptual polarities that circumscribe other fields of action. It is not so much that the political thus possesses its own “distinct new domain,”[2] but that it differs from the domains of aesthetics (beautiful/ugly binary) and ethics (good/evil binary) to the extent that it cannot be reduced to, nor explained by, any combination of these principle categories. Schmitt thus seems to develop the terms of the “political” as a metacategory, that which, in a nearly Lefort-like manner, is without essence of its own, but
can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious economic, moral and other antithesis. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations.[3]
As a measure of the intensity of the relation, rather than the relation itself, the political operates along the axes of friend-enemy.[4] For Schmitt, this polarity is thus latent in every other sphere, and may even draw from the criteria of distinct spheres to mobilize its energies: though “the political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly,” etc., “he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger” who discloses the possibility of “extreme case conflicts.”[5]
Two points are here important: first, Schmitt’s insistence on how the political may “draw upon other distinctions for support,” and second, Schmitt’s private-language definition of the political distinction as strictly a collective phenomenon. As to the first, it seems to me that this leads to Schmitt’s political realism, e.g. his insistence that “political concepts, images and terms” are “bound to a concrete situation.”[6] To the extent that the political grouping is made actual, Schmitt identifies the necessary role of “supplemental” discourses in identifying the political enemy and granting the political entity the ability to “wage war and publically dispose the lives of men.”[7] Conflict is always “real” conflict for Schmitt, and, though politics is not reducible to war, it nevertheless assumes its dormant potentiality. The endemic concept that links one to the other is the manifest possibility to identify the enemy in a “concrete situation,”[8] and the ability of the political entity to stake real human lives against an identified enemy.
Though different political entities possess different mechanisms of identification,[9] the production of the political enemy must reside within the political sphere of a people; without this ability to distinguish, the people “ceases to exist politically.”[10] Schmitt rejects the possibility of a full cosmopolitanism outright—this discourse, in turn, merely engenders new potential identities to emerge and contest with one another. “War cannot altogether be outlawed”[11] might be Schmitt’s summational point against these utopian plans. Recent developments in Crimea—what John Kerry and a recent Time article described as nineteenth-century land-grabs in the age of 21st century diplomacy—is a good example of this, and perhaps exemplifies Schmitt’s critique of liberalism: if we take seriously Schmitt’s claim that “the weight of the political is determined by the intensity of alignments according to which the decisive associations and dissociations adjust themselves,”[12] then we might better understand his argument against the structural deficits of liberalism—namely, that it has no political theory of its own.[13]
Liberalism, in its distrust of the political, attempts to depoliticize and reduce the friend-enemy binary down to a problematic of “ethics and economics.” The ultimate paradox for liberalism thus is its inability to theoretically address real conflict: to the extent that the liberal state asks the individual to sacrifice his life, it has already depleted its own legitimate claim to a truly liberal standard. By reducing actual conflict to endless discussion and perpetual competition,[14] liberalism’s attempt to neutralize the political—which, for Schmitt, is one more iteration of a general will-to-neutralize,[15] the economic “phase” part of a process of disenchantment that reaches four centuries back[16]—falsifies the reality of politics and ignores the decisive truth, stretching between Hobbes, Hegel and Nietzsche, that “life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things.”[17] The ultimate implication here is that stability is secured only/ever through some form of real exclusion.
Renan and the Nation
Renan achieves less a definition of a theoretical metacategory (a la Schmitt’s “political”) and more a historical genealogy of the modern nation. Renan explores the question “what is a nation?” first in a fairly negative light: he decouples it from a series of reducible categories, including cleavages along race, language, religion, and material/geographic measures. I think one can see a lot of Rousseau in Renan, as Renan’s focus on the “fusion of component populations”[18] is theoretically analogous to the movement from an aggregate to an association catalyzed by the law-giver qua the general will.
For Renan, “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”[19] Renan points to the role of religion in solidifying civic solidarity as a supplement to this necessity to forget, which is less a critique of myths of foundation (which every people possess, invented or otherwise) and more an erasure of “authentic,” often violent, origins. There has been no single cause to unity, and dynasty is just one of several routes to this interlinking of individual wills. With race being a marker “which is made and unmade,” and differences in language as permitting a host of empirical exceptions, Renan concentrates on the “will”[20] as the decisive political category in relation to the construction of nationhood. Like Rousseau, Renan is careful to demonstrate how this association is greater than an aggregate of interests,[21] and argues powerfully that “Man is everything in the formation of this sacred thing, which is called a people. Nothing [purely] material suffices for it. A nation is a spiritual principle, the outcome of the profound complications of history; it is a spiritual family…”[22]
The nation is thus that “soul” which links the traditions of the past to a felt horizon of futurity. Renan here converges with Benedict Anderson’s definition of an “imagined community” as a “deep, horizontal comradeship”[23] that draws its energies from cultural/historical developments and, in a Schmittian mode, provides the basis by which members of the political entity are willing to sacrifice their lives. While both Renan and Anderson focus on the centrality of cultural memory and forgetting, Anderson seems to see both as potential sources of solidarity—as long as whatever history is being remembered is remembered as “one’s own.”[24] For Anderson, resources such as the newspaper—and its associated temporal imagining of the “meanwhile”—provide tangible means by which the terms of membership are defined and repeated; in a Machiavellian sense, Renan points to “glory” as the “capital” of nationalism, and defines a nation as a
large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite…
The role of “sacrifice” sounds a great deal like Schmitt, and it is important to note a final point—namely, Renan’s insistence that even—and especially—suffering may act as a focal point for this kind-of spiritual solidarity.
Muller and Markell: Constitutional Patriotism
I’ve grouped Muller and Markell together given their status as commentators on a more general argument: namely, identification with constitutional essentials as the primary basis of civic solidarity for contemporary “cosmopolitan” populations. Termed “constitutional patriotism,” this argument, embodied most recently by Habermas, differentiates itself from liberal nationalism (and its focus on a common political culture) in its development of a “de-centered,” self-reflexive civic identification with constitutional essentials that mediates between the particular commitments individuals face in concrete, particular circumstances and claims to universal standards of legitimacy that take seriously the assumption of reasonable pluralism.
While Muller concentrates on Habermas’ more general story of disenchantment, where modern popular sovereignty eclipsed the “quasi-sacred” resources of the pre-modern period,[25] Markell criticizes Habermas’ theory of law and morality as a “strategy of redirection” that ultimately draws from the very historical/particular conditions it so radically wants to disengage in its claim to universal validity.[26] What both authors identify might be termed the “motivational deficit” of Rawls and Habermas’ specific kinds-of universalisms: the argument, in short, is that any claim to universalism ultimately lands in the messy business of working itself out through concrete supplements of affective identification, thus supplanting its ascent to a trans-historical and trans-local theoretical cohesion. The “cold rationality” of reasons, reason-giving and the rule of law only manifests in active identifications if it is grounded in more immediate, affectionate/passionate commitments to localized institutions, rituals, symbols, etc.
While Markell ultimately rejects the full claims of constitutional patriotism, both he and Muller—and more so Muller—identify certain aspects of constitutional patriotism worth preserving. Markell points to the “failure of equivalence” between the practices and standards of constitutional patriotism as indicative of the ongoing “project of universalization”[27], and Muller, in tracing the historical development of the concept from Jaspers and Sternberger’s “militant democracy” to Loewenstein and Habermas, links this historicization to a reflection on how Germany’s unique history of suffering (in the mode of Renan) can contribute to a robust culture of solidarity and reflexivity. To this end, Muller less counteracts Markell’s point of redirection so much as he redirects it once more, transforming the historical basis as itself a contributing factor to the health and robustness of this ongoing civic conversation.
Critique of Schmitt
I want to argue something between Schmitt and Markell/Muller qua Habermas, and say: to the extent that we authorize the state to preserve our citizenship/subjectivity, we authorize those decisions as legitimate that manufacture and preserve the terms of that citizenship/subjectivity. To this end, the state must retain a monopoly on the means of identification, and I mean here far more than the identification of the Schmittian “enemy,” but the identification of the criteria that will determine the “normal” functioning of that form of life. What I mean by “identification” thus points to 1. the criteria that will determine when/how the “normal” legitimately becomes the “exceptional” (e.g. the terms by which one can determine when the “decisive moment” has actually arrived), and 2. more importantly, the resources of affective identification with symbols/institutions/practices, what we might generally term resources of passionate commitment, or, even more generally, resources of glory. To the extent that the state retains this monopoly, it is coherent, and there is a clear “center” of civic focus.
This, I think, begs a second question, which is: to what extent is the self-preservation of the state distinct from the preservation of those within it? Telling here are the terms labeled on monuments: “so rest those brave souls that died in her service…” reads the WWII Atlantic Coast monument in Battery Park. The nation is something different than a “soul” or imagined community: it becomes embodied, radically externalized as the manifest consequence of so-much history. As Schmitt would have it, it is this embodiment that authorizes the identification of the enemy as a collective enemy: the people identifies its enemies in concrete situations. But is this true? It seems what the exception enables is the complete opposite, e.g. when the people not so much authorize as abdicate a certain power. One question lingers: how does one identify the enemy? In the decisive moment of the exception, isn’t this precisely when the people converts the power of identification to a single man? In other words, the normal practicing of liberalism is predicated on the potential for a decidedly illiberal practice—namely, the self-abdication of the people’s identification and its transfer to the whims of a single individual. To the extent that this moment of illiberalism at the heart of liberalism is abused, what resources do a people turn to? As Locke says—this is when you begin to pray. And, of course, this is all part-and-parcel of Schmitt’s general critique of liberalism, even if he misses the individual quality of identification.
But what if the terms of the political itself where extended, less as a friend/enemy binary and more on the effectual scale of use/usefulness. This is of course not to claim that anytime one makes a pragmatic decision one is participating in politics, but rather that the “political,” taken liberally, is a mode of thinking rather than an intensity of relation. To this extent, the ordinary language conditions of politics—the modern trend to designate everything as the “politics of _____”—discloses the true conditions of the “political entity,” namely, the realm of strategic rationality predicated on pragmatic calculations. Liberalism’s political theory might then be this version of the pragmatic: that I participate in a kind-of “political judgment” is itself indicative of the political. This is not to say: political judgment is the political, and vice-versa (as this is just to rehearse Schmitt’s paradox). Rather, this is to designate the political as counter to the purely cooperative. To the extent that people cooperate in the effort of some instrumental end, and not for the terms of cooperation themselves, that people is participating in a political modality. To this end, Schmitt’s definition of the political is itself political less because people will risk their lives in concrete situations on its behalf, and more because it participates in an economy of instrumental rationality that in itself becomes useful for this or that power to legitimate its practices. This 1. individualizes the political, and 2. opens up the theoretical space to legitimize various forms of affective identification.
The real liberal question is less, then, “how do we make affect safe for democracy?” and more “to what extent is affect useful for democracy?” To the extent that the answer is “a great deal,” then the question of legitimation becomes mute at the exact moment the political entity is forged. To the extent that one’s compass is “effectual truth,” one is political. Liberalism retains certain limits as to the ends of effectual truth; if we take liberalism to be a certain manner of dealing with contingency, e.g. that, no matter what, the actions of the individual and the political entity will not trespass against certain rights, then the mode of instrumentalizing this relation is legitimate to the extent that it is liberally effectual. It would be absurd to claim that liberalism cannot and does not deal with “real enemies,” or that it does not theoretically permit such a grouping to come into existence—what liberalism does, and what it does effectively, is to mobilize civic energies against a given enemy only when it has become useful to do so. Thus the decisive political decision is what is useful (to the liberal end) and what is not (note the “best practices” discourse in neo-liberalism, or that of the “agenda”); the threshold that separates the domain of diplomacy from the domain of war/conflict/the staking of real lives is precisely where popular sovereignty rests, and not merely in the identification of the enemy (which is a structural tactic within the latter domain only).
The whole enterprise of constitutional patriotism seems to collapse on this front—namely, its rejection of political realism. If I authorize the state to monopolize the means of glory on the basis of its political saliency (that is, its usefulness to the liberal end), then certainly I may authorize the state to regulate the ends of this glory. There is nothing in the liberal model that suggests one state ought to cooperate with another—but neither does the liberal model forbid such cooperation. And this seems to be the decisive point: I pledge allegiance to the EU to the extent that it has become politically useful for my own state to do so. The world becomes a cosmopolitan order to the extent that it is politically useful in terms of my own liberalism. We may historicize and contextualize, all the while assuming less a universal model and more a universal mode of thinking. To appeal to this mode of thinking is the real object of liberalism’s diplomacy, whereby its theoretical core—what Schmitt misidentifies as its lack of a political theory—is really the potentialized place of its political judgment, unhinged from any sustained commitment but capable of pragmatic survival. I am liberal to the extent that it is useful for me to be so; at the moment I begin to question this liberal identity/commitment in the name of a separate strategic end, I have entered the business of politics. Whether I stake my life is inconsequential; this question, like war, is subsumed as one more iteration of “is it useful?” Liberalism’s failure is less Schmitt’s critique and more its inability to mine its own endemic theoretical resources, e.g. the legitimate mobilization of “affect” in the name of the true political end: the perpetual resilience of the liberal state. Here, we accept the universal argument as universal not because it actually is universal, but because it is politically salient. Universalism is thus a type-of liberal performance, staged not as truth, but as effectiveness; we here consecrate a necessary turn to a pragmatic liberalism in order to best defend against Schmitt’s critique.
[1] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 20
[2] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 26
[3] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 38
[4] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 26: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
[5] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 27
[6] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 30
[7] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 46
[8] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 37
[9] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, pp. 46-47
[10] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 49
[11] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 51
[12] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 59
[13] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p.70
[14] Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 71
[15] Schmitt, Age of Neautrlizations, p. 89
[16] Schmitt, Age of Neautrlizations, p. 82
[17] Schmitt, Age of Neautrlizations, p. 96
[18] Renan, What is a Nation?, p. 10
[19] Renan, What is a Nation?, p. 11
[20] Renan, What is a Nation?, p. 16
[21] Renan, What is a Nation?, p. 18
[22] Renan, What is a Nation?, pp. 18-19
[23] Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7
[24] Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 206
[25] Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, p. 27
[26] Markell, Making Affect Safe, p. 39
[27] Markell, Making Affect Safe, p. 58