This article discusses two conceptions of sovereignty, the decisionistic model of Carl Schmitt and the deliberative paradigm of Jurgen Habermas. The comparison is informed by an attempt to prove the centrality of the notion of sovereignty, as it is so seriously contested today in political theory. As a dynamic principle of the mutual constitution of legal and political order, sovereignty represents a fundamental characteristic of constitutional regimes and in the form of popular sovereignty is a key normative principle of democracy. Schmitt presents a substantive model of sovereignty, derived from radical revolutionary practice and based on a substantive notion of the people as an entity endowed with a will that finds a unique expression in the original act of decision, made outside all forms of preexisting authority. Habermas's deliberative paradigm of politics proves exceptionally convincing in articulating the critique of the substantive model of sovereignty from the vantage point of his discursive, proceduralized paradigm of law and democracy. Schmitt and Habermas thus represent a paradigmatic dispute between substance and procedure as two bases of democratic legitimacy. It is however a controversy between political substantivism and legal proceduralism that makes this juxtaposition relevant to contemporary discourses on sovereignty. Neither Schmitt, nor Habermas find an appropriate model of sovereignty based on a balanced relationship between the legal and the political.
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This article reconstructs the hidden dialogue between Johan Huizinga and Carl Schmitt that emerged throughout the 1930s. Huizinga phrased an early critique on Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. It appears that throughout the 1930s the Dutch historian had a thorough Auseinandersetzung with Schmitt, running from his In the shadow of tomorrow up to his Homo Ludens. Schmitt, in his turn, responded to Huizinga’s criticism, albeit somewhat implicitly, first, in a small text from 1938 and later in his book on Hamlet. In mapping the emergence of this “dialogue” it appears that their disagreement concerns the relationship between play and war. In particular, they have conflicting ideas on the state of exception, or, to use the German word on which the entire dialogue hinges: Ernstfall. To properly assess the possible relationship between play and war it is first necessary to reconstruct this dialogue and to consider the role of the state of exception within it.
This article aims to introduce the mutual links between the key political points (political-philosophical and political-theological) of Carl Schmitt’s writings, set against the background of his own specific anthropology, which could be seen as inspired by Christianity, though certainly not traditional. The text shows the links between the “theory of the politics”, based on the categories of friend and enemy, and political theology, which can be understood as a process and even an (anthropological) project. This basis, formulated primarily in his key text The Concept of the Politics in its first and later editions is then compared, seen in anthropological perspective, with the central problems of earlier texts (The Value of the State and the Meaning of the Individual and Dictatorship) with the aim to indicate the development and continuity of C. Schmitt’s work. The paper shows that the theory of the politics is not reducible to the so-called “theory of friend / enemy”; its full understanding rather requires taking into consideration Schmitt’s anthropological stand, which in the twentieth century represents a specific and peculiar critique of modern thought and “modern man”. Despite the fact that Schmitt is a very problematic figure, it cannot be denied that his analyses, especially those from the 1920s, have their considerable worth even today.
The aim of the article is to show what place the fight (polemos) occupies in a broader context marked out by the theory of the political, political theology, and the criticism of modernity or modern human. On this basis the key role the fight plays in Schmitt’s political philosophy can be demonstrated. This role of the fight is then recognizable first of all in the correspondence between his critical cultural and juridical philosophical writings as well as on the background of Schmitt’s evaluation of his own spiritual condition as presented in particular in his diaries.
Nowadays, the work of Carl Schmitt attracts the special attention of current political theoreticians and historians. However, this work is understood in opposite ways, as is demonstrated by the controversy over Schmitt’s position in the conservative revolutionary movement. From this controversy Schmitt comes up as a radical and subversive thinker or, by contrast, as a theoretician of stability and order. These contrary views are founded on Schmitt’s ambivalent attitude to political conflict. The conflict is both negated and affirmed, that is to say, it is something desirable as well as undesirable. This ambivalent attitude marks out two directions in which we can set off in order to draw upon Schmitt’s conflictual theory of politics. Whereas the first one is used by authors employing Schmitt’s affirmation of political conflict in favour of the idea of emancipation, the second one leads to the emphasis on the state and stability, which is incompatible with such affirmation. Nonetheless, the article defends the thesis that also in the latter case it is possible to benefit from Schmitt’s partial affirmation of conflict, that is, to transform it in a fruitful way. This can be done by articulating the unpolitical conception of the agon, which enables us to replace the affirmation of conflict by the affirmation of a specific, unpolitical kind of competition. This conception is directed against Chantal Mouffe’s political agonism, which represents the emancipatory exploitation of Schmitt’s concepts. Unlike Mouffe’s political agon, its unpolitical version does not endanger a political unit and moreover deepens the non-utilitarian dimension of culture.
The paper focuses on the fact that, in recent political philosophy, we have witnessed a critical overturning of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political and, in its place, of what the author will call a non-philosophical understanding that has determined a certain war (pólemos), and the “friend-enemy” relation, as the permanent ground from which any critical or strategic understanding of the political must now depart. This tendency can most clearly be illustrated by Jacques Derrida’s commentaries on the German jurist Karl Schmitt and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In this article, the author will address Derrida’s overt polemic and/or Auseinandersetzung with these two thinkers in his later writings. First, she will discuss his polemic with Schmitt from The Politics of Friendship (1990), and will conclude with some preliminary remarks on the culmination of this polemic in his reflections on Heidegger from the same period.
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