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NOTES ON CARL SCHMITT AND MARXISM
Benedetto Fontana*
Today we live in the age of liberal triumphalism and capitalist
globalization. The end of history and the end of politics are
everywhere announced and celebrated. Writers from Fukuyama1
to Huntington,2 theorists from Bobbio to Held, have taken up the
theme of structural transformation, democratization, the
increasing importance of international institutions, and the
consequent decline of the state.3 Academics, politicians,4 and
“public intellectuals” are heralding the advent of a novus ordo
seclorum, both national and international, in which traditional
notions of politics, conflict, and citizenship will be redefined, and
in which new behavioral patterns and habits are being formed.
A conference devoted to the thought of Carl Schmitt is
therefore a welcome corrective. It is welcome because the
moralism and the resulting depoliticization of state and society are
not merely instances of infantile vanity and smug selfcongratulation,
but also because they reflect the underlying
tendencies and assumptions of liberal capitalism that Schmitt’s
thought tried to uncover. Of course, Marx and Engels, in their
day, also sought to uncover the material and power structures that
underlay the liberal ideology of natural right, constitutionalism,
and representative government. Thus, the papers presented by
Jorge Dotti5 and Stathis Gourgouris,6 exploring the relation, and
points of contact, between Marxist and Schmittian thought, are not
only interesting and enlightening in their own right, but are also
* Benedetto Fontana teaches Political Philosophy and American Political Thought at
Baruch College, City University of New York. I would like to thank Doris L. Suarez and
Dante Germino for their kind and helpful comments.
1 Francis Fukuyama, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN (1992).
2 Samuel P. Huntington, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF
WORLD ORDER (1996).
3 See COSMOPOLITAN DEMOCRACY: A NEW AGENDA FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER
(Daniele Archibugi & David Held eds., 1995).
4 See, e.g., Slavoj .i.ek, Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism, LONDON REV. OF
BOOKS 3, 5-7 (1999) (reviewing JOHN KEANE, VACLAV HAVEL: A POLITICAL TRAGEDY
IN SIX ACTS (1999)).
5 Jorge Dotti, Schmitt Reads Marx, 21 CARDOZO L. REV. 1473 (2000).
6 Stathis Gourgouris, The Concept of the Mythical (Schmitt and Sorel), 21 CARDOZO
L. REV. 1487 (2000).
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politically and intellectually valuable for engaging and challenging
the contemporary Weltanschauung of liberal and capitalist
thought.
To Schmitt, Marxism adumbrates two related, sometimes
contradictory, tendencies. On one hand, it suggests a theory of
historical development in which the internal contradictions of
capitalism lead to its supersession into a superior socio-political
order. This is its “scientific,” deterministic, and economistic side.
Politically, in the West, this view contributed to the integration of
the working class into the liberal and parliamentary state. Here
Marxism is seen as the mirror image of liberal thought. By its
privileging of the private and the economic, and in its concern with
wages, workplace conditions, and social welfare policies, reformist
socialism is merely the further elaboration of the liberal emphasis
on private life, property rights, and ethical and cultural
considerations (such as individualistic rationality, natural rights,
etc.). As such, rather than challenging the hegemony of the liberal
conception of the world, this type of Marxism may be seen as its
natural and logical result. At the political level, Western socialists
accepted and played the liberal parliamentary game.
Yet Schmitt realized that Marxism contained elements
enabling it to transcend its merely class and economic content—it
contained the germs of what he understood to be a fundamental
and radical critique of liberal thought and liberal society. Both of
these papers show that he found these elements in Sorel and in the
notions of dictatorship elaborated in the East by Lenin and the
Bolsheviks. Sorel, in his emphasis on the myth of the general
strike, and Lenin, in his coup d’état of October 1917, pointed to an
antiliberal understanding of politics. Liberals saw politics in two
contradictory ways: either as the result of rational discussion and
open debate, or as the result of competing private interests
ultimately leading to bargaining, alliance formation, and coalition
building. In either case—whether as a rational and open debate or
as the clash of opposing and interfering interests—political
liberalism leads to the supremacy of parliament and of its political
parties. Here, too, liberalism presents the state and politics as
mere mechanisms, as instruments necessary in maintaining a
“neutral” and objective order. For Schmitt, revolutionary
Marxism and the Sorellian idea of myth recapture a notion that
political liberalism both negates and covers up. In both cases
(Sorel and Lenin), the recovery of the political was made possible
by moving away from the rationalistic and abstract categories
originating in the Enlightenment (humanity, rule of law, rights of
man, the proletariat as the universal class). Both exposed the
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neutral, rational, and universal pretensions not only of liberal
thought, but also of reformist socialist ideology.
In this sense, both liberalism and Western (reformist)
Marxism are the natural descendants of Enlightenment rationalist
thought. Liberalism talks about the “equality of all men” and the
natural rights guaranteed to them by natural law. Although Marx
attacks these notions as mere ideological mystifications that veil
social inequality and economic domination, he nevertheless looks
forward to a future communism that inaugurates a classless society
of universal emancipation. At the same time, both liberalism and
Western Marxism privilege the social over the political, and the
private over the public—indeed, the social is reduced to the
economic. The typical liberal distinction between state and society
is reproduced in Marxian thought, where the former is seen as the
mere outgrowth or epiphenomenon of the latter.
Liberalism, as the ideology of the dominant bourgeois groups
and of the established system of state formations, especially
evinces the overriding tendency to see politics and the state as the
process by which legislation is constitutionally enacted and
subsequently administered through elaborate legal-bureaucratic
mechanisms. The state is the means by which the multiple groups
that together define society—cultural, religious, economic, and
educational—can compete and further their particular private
interests. In other words, the state enables these social groups to
act within the private sphere and, at the same time, to deny the
political character of their activities—thus the obvious and
intimate connection between liberalism and parliamentarism.7
The supremacy of the private sphere leads inevitably to
parliamentary deliberation and discussion. Both the private
sphere and parliament entail the subordination of politics to the
social, economic, and cultural spheres. To the extent that
parliamentary representation mirrors the multiplicity of private
activities that take place within the overall society, parliamentary
government implies the domestication of politics and the state.
Thus, liberalism and Marxism share a concern with the private,
economic aspects of life and culture. They both understand and
analyze politics in terms of society and the economy. Yet, while
liberalism sees such a condition as a natural and normal
conclusion, Marxism sees it simply as a stage of historical
development which must be transcended and overcome.
Schmitt sees the rise of liberalism and parliamentarism as
occurring within the transitional stage between the absolutist state
7 See Paul Hirst, Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism, 72 TELOS 15-16 (1987); Mark Lilla, The
Enemy of Liberalism, N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS, May 15, 1997.
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of the seventeenth century and the mass or total state of the
twentieth century. Such a period is characterized by the
emergence of the people or masses as a political force in history.
In the Anglo-American world, the intervention of the masses into
the political world, became a matter of finding mechanisms by
which to integrate them into an already existing institutional order,
while in Europe such mass intervention challenged the very
foundations of the various anciens régimes. In the latter
circumstances, sovereignty thus becomes problematic. It becomes
complicated, and is rendered unstable and unpredictable, by the
mass mobilization of people and the concomitant transformation
of the power equation and equilibrium in state and society. In
addition, while democratization in the Anglo-American states
meant the channeling and control of the masses through various
institutional devices already established by the prevailing liberal
order, in Europe, democratization meant the interpenetration of
the political and social elements of state and society. In the latter
case, politics was no longer confined and delimited by the
structural boundaries of the state, because “state and society
penetrate[d] each other.”8
It is this very interpenetration of the political and the social
that Schmitt seeks to address. He shares with nineteenth-century
liberals an antipathy toward the people/masses, regarding them as
sources of instability, anarchy, and decline. Technological and
industrial innovations have produced new methods of mass
mobilization and mass propaganda, which, to Schmitt and liberals,
have intensified and accelerated the political and social dangers
threatening the viability and durability of the social order.
Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, and his concomitant analysis of the
Marxist-Leninist notion of dictatorship, issues directly from these
inherently conservative concerns. As he sees it, liberal politics,
since it is based on parliamentary government and interest group
competition or compromise, is not equipped to deal with the
political democratization and the mass politics that emerged in the
first decades of the twentieth century.
Both communism and Sorel’s vision of proletarian mass
action put themselves in stark opposition to what Schmitt called
the “liberal illusion” of the reconcilability of interests,
compromise, and constitutional and parliamentary democracy. In
addition, both see life as an existential struggle with an other. As
such, the function of consciousness or knowledge is not to lead to
discussion or to debate, but rather to action, and to the
8 CARL SCHMITT, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL 22 (George Schwab trans.,
1996).
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overcoming of the class enemy. It is myth or ideology that
galvanizes the consciousness of the masses, organizes their social
reality, and moves them to act.
In Schmitt’s thought, the political is understood in terms of
the distinction between friend and enemy. Such a notion harks
back to the political theory and practice of the ancient world. In
the first book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates is trying to arrive
at a concept of justice, Polemarchus offers a definition in terms of
the friend/enemy dichotomy. Polemarchus says that justice is
“doing good to friends and harm to enemies.”9 Such a notion,
moreover, complements and elaborates Thrasymachus’s definition
of justice as “the interest of the stronger.”10 Both presuppose a
concept of the political defined by opposition and conflict.
Political thought in the ancient world was dominated by the
problem of the struggle between the masses (the demos) and the
rich and powerful (the dynatoi). In Plato’s Republic, for example,
the polis is never seen as a unified totality or unity, but rather is
envisioned as torn asunder by the struggle for power between the
rich and the poor.11 The polis is, in reality, “two cities,” or two
factions: democracy and oligarchy. Moreover, for both Plato and
Aristotle, the struggle between these two cities creates the political
and social prerequisites for the emergence of tyranny. Variants of
such a construction, of course, can be traced from the ancients to
Machiavelli, to Montesquieu, to Madison and Hamilton, and up to
the Marxists and the theorists of elitism (Mosca, Michels, and
Schumpeter).
However, unlike the Marxist and ancient antinomy which
assigns the opposing antagonists a class content, Schmitt’s
distinction between friend and enemy does not define what the
political “is”—for in itself it has no content or substance. What
Schmitt’s dichotomy does is define the “limits” or boundaries of
existence or life.12 As Schmitt notes, “[t]he distinction of friend
and enemy signifies the outer limits of an association or
dissociation.”13
In a stable state the political in this sense is latent, unseen,
mere potential. But if and when the state monopoly over the
means of coercion breaks down, and its authority and legitimacy
begin to unravel, the political is realized as civil strife and civil war.
9 PLATO, REPUBLIC 331 E-336 A (Conford trans., 1948).
10 Id. at 336 B-347 E.
11 Id. at 550 C.
12 See Ellen Kennedy, Hostis Not Inimicus: Toward a Theory of the Public in the Work
of Carl Schmitt, in LAW AS POLITICS 92, 92-108 (David Dyzenhaus ed., 1998).
13 Id. at 100.
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According to Schmitt: “War is just the extreme realization of
enmity. It need not be a common occurrence, nor something
normal, neither must it be an ideal or something to be longed for;
but it must persist as a real possibility, if the concept of an enemy
is to retain meaning.”14 Such a statement is strikingly similar to the
characterization of proletarian revolution described by Karl Marx
in his Eighteenth Brumaire, where he contrasts the development
and direction of the proletarian revolution to those of the
bourgeois revolution. Marx writes:
Proletarian revolutions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt
themselves continually in their own course . . . seem to throw
down their adversary only in order that he may draw new
strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before
them . . . until the situation has been created which makes all
turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!15
The notion that class struggle is not necessarily open war and
violent conflict was stated, of course, in the 1848 Manifesto, where
Marx and Engels proclaimed the enmity of successive historical
classes, which “stood in constant opposition to one another,” and
which “carried on [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight.”16 War, whether international or domestic, must be “a real
possibility”—that is, the distinction between friend and enemy
creates a permanent state of war in the Hobbesian sense.17
It is in this sense that, to Schmitt, the political is always the
exception: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”18
Hence, the sovereign is not to be understood as a legitimating
formula, but rather as a concrete and determinate actor with the
power to make and enforce a political decision. The sovereign is
neither an abstract conception nor a legal/constitutional rule. In
fact, it is contingent, dependent upon the vicissitudes of conflict
and struggle, and thus is always outside the legal/constitutional
order of the state. In effect, the sovereign creates the very
14 Id. at 101.
15 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in THE MARX-ENGELS
READER 594, 597-98 (Robert C. Tucker ed., 1978).
16 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in THE
MARX-ENGELS READER, supra note 15, at 473-74.
17 It is instructive to compare these statements from Schmitt and Marx to those of
Hobbes, in which he identifies the state of nature with the state of war:
For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or in the act of fighting; but in a
tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known . . . .
So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known
disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.
THOMAS HOBBES, LEVIATHAN pt. I, ch. 13 (1996).
18 CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY 5 (1985) (George Schwab trans., 1985).
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possibility for law and order by determining the conditions that
define ordinary and normal politics—that is, he decides what the
exception is. As Schmitt writes: “For a legal order to make sense,
a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely
decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”19 The state,
therefore, whose essence is the political defined by the
friend/enemy antithesis, for both Marx and Schmitt, is
characterized as the product of conflict and struggle. It is reduced
to the executive—that is, to the executive function of organizing
and wielding the coercive power of the community (whether the
community is defined in terms of the people/nation, as in Schmitt,
or in terms of the proletarian class, as in Marx) against the external
enemy.
But if the political is the exception, and if the political also is
discovered in the friend/enemy distinction, Schmitt translates the
notion of class struggle—which in Marx is the ordinary, rather than
the extraordinary, condition of historical and social movement—
into the defining (and universal) characteristic of the political by
stripping it of its class (economic) content. By discarding the class
nature of conflict, Schmitt redirects it toward the international and
national levels, and thus goes back to Hegel and to the nineteenthcentury
theorists of Realpolitik and Machtpolitik. It is now the
nation-state, rather than the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, that is
both protagonist and antagonist of political conflict. In the words
of Benedetto Croce, Hegel and Marx “reasserted the nature of the
State and of politics in terms of authority and of a struggle for
power (the power of nations or the power classes, as the case may
be).”20 Both Schmitt and the Marxists, therefore, seem to have a
mirror image of their respective concepts of war between friends
and enemies. Paradoxically, however, each is attempting to
demystify, and to uncover, what each considers to be ideological
and mythological formulations regarding the nature of the state
and of political conflict.
Yet, Schmitt’s notion of the political as the exception is
precisely the Bolshevik intervention in the historical process.
Unlike the views of Kautsky and Bernstein, the revolution is not
passively waited upon because it is the product of historical
development (either as the result of the Hegelian dialectic, or as
19 Id. at 13.
20 BENEDETTO CROCE, ETICA E POLITICA 181 (1931). Croce, like Schmitt, sees Marx
as the theorist of power and of political realism. He sees Marx as returning to the “best
traditions of Italian political science, thanks to the firm assertion of the principle of force,
of struggle, of power, and of satirical and biting opposition to the anti-historical and
democratic insipidity of natural law doctrine—the so-called ideals of 1789.” BENEDETTO
CROCE, MATERIALISMO STORICO ED ECONOMIA MARXISTICA xii-xiii (1918).
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the result of the objective laws of economic rationality); rather, it
is forced, it is brought into being by will and decision, against the
laws of historical development—Gramsci first greeted the
Bolshevik revolution as the “revolution against Capital.”21 It is in
this sense that Lenin’s dictatorship of the party may be seen as a
sovereign dictatorship that created an entirely new political order.
On the other hand, the very existence of conditions making
possible the coming of dictatorship indicates that the state and
society are riven by factional strife and class conflict, such that
normal politics, conducted within the normal constitutional order,
are breaking down. This, of course, describes the situation
obtained in the late republic of ancient Rome. And this also
describes the political trajectory of the Weimar Republic. In both
cases, the civitas and the state, capable of maintaining and
guaranteeing peace, security, and predictability, ceased to exist,
and the political condition of the anarchic war of all against all that
characterized the external international order was introduced
inside state and society.22 As a solution, therefore, Schmitt
proposed to oppose the red dictatorship of the left with the black
dictatorship of the right.
Schmitt understood, along with the communists, that we are
dealing here with two kinds of “exception:” the commissarial and
the sovereign. The first was used in the first years of the Weimar
Republic against the communists by the Social Democratic Party
leadership to preserve the constitutional order. One is
commissioned to use extralegal and extraconstitutional methods to
restore legality and the constitutional order. The other, on its own
initiative, breaks the legal order in order to create a new one. The
first is grounded in the constitution; the other is groundless and
emerges ex nihilo (legally and morally speaking) because it wills
the new order.23 In Weimar Germany, the commissarial or
constitutional dictatorship exercised by the Reich president was
transformed, in the very attempt to preserve the system, into the
sovereign dictatorship of the Nazis, which ultimately destroyed the
system and established a new order. In Marxism, moreover, the
21 Antonio Gramsci, La Rivoluzione contro il Capitale, in SCRITTI GIOVANILI 1914-
1918, at 149-53 (Giulio Einaudi ed., 1975).
22 For a discussion of the relation between the normal or ordinary politics obtaining
inside or within the political order and that obtaining outside its limits or boundaries, see
Benedetto Fontana, Tacitus on Empire and Republic, in XIV HISTORY OF POLITICAL
THOUGHT 1, 27-40 (1993). See also the analysis in NORBERTO BOBBIO, DEMOCRACY
AND DICTATORSHIP 158-61 (Peter Kennealy trans., 1989).
23 For an incisive analysis, see John P. McCormick, The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl
Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers, 10 CANADIAN J. LAW & JURISPRUDENCE
1, 163-87 (1997).
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original vision of the Marxian dictatorship as a temporary and
transient device subordinated to the will of the proletariat was
transmogrified by Leninism into a permanent dictatorship of the
party.
For Schmitt, the political as the exception, and the political as
adumbrating the friend/enemy dichotomy, are brought together in
the notion of the sovereign dictatorship. While dictatorship relates
to the breakdown of order, or to the lack of order altogether (that
is, the exception), sovereignty for Schmitt is related to democracy
and to the people. Modernity signals not merely the movement of
sovereign power away from the monarch to the people, but also
the constitution of the people as historical agent, as the constituent
power that establishes the social order. The sovereign, Hobbes
says, is the mortal god.24 But since the people constitute
themselves as sovereign in opposition to an other, equally
sovereign people, and notwithstanding the emphasis on unity and
solidarity, Schmitt’s political theology ultimately evinces features
that are fundamentally polytheistic. For the people as a political
unity can only exist in opposition to another political entity:
indeed, the unity of both is established through this very
opposition. In effect, the people as sovereign can only be
maintained as such through the constitution of the people as other,
and thus through the potential or the possibility of war.
24 HOBBES, supra note 17, at pt. II, ch. 17.