Telos 208 (Fall 2024): Carl Schmitt and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

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It hardly needs mentioning that liberal democracy is facing a number of threats today, both internal and external. Even if the political parties in the United States cannot agree on the main source of the threats, they both believe that democracy is in danger. Democrats point to the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in it as examples of the way in which liberal democratic procedures are being directly attacked. Republicans point to the Democratic-backed court cases against Trump as well as the FBI’s favoritism toward Democrats in their public announcements before elections as evidence that the legal system and the administrative state are being used to shut out political opponents. Both parties point to violations of free speech rights at college campuses, yet they also both seek to establish limits to those rights in defense of liberal democratic values.

Meanwhile, authoritarian governments in places such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have becoming increasingly aggressive in opposing liberal democracies as threats to their own legitimacy. In doing so, they have attempted to provide theoretical justifications for their authoritarian rule that are based in anti-Western and anti-colonial discourses that align with critiques of the West advanced by left-leaning academics in liberal democracies.

Because they are based on freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, liberal democracies must allow open public spheres whose dynamics could take unforeseen directions that end up undermining the cultural and procedural foundations of liberal democratic governance. While the American Revolution provides the best example of the success of liberal democracy, the French Revolution and the Weimar Republic demonstrate spectacular failures. Outside of the West, the contrast between Taiwan and China and between Indonesian democracy and the Iranian Revolution indicate that we can find the same contrasts between failure and success in East Asia and in the Islamic world.

Are liberal democracies inherently unstable? Do they depend on cultural preconditions out of their control for their stability? How can they maintain themselves in spite of the challenges? Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy remains one of the key meditations on these questions, and this issue of Telos focuses on this book to explore the foundations of liberal democracies and the major challenges to their stability.

Liberal democracies depend on a set of common values, and Joseph Bendersky argues that a key aspect of Schmitt’s thought was the moral aspect of the political, in which the decision on the enemy is a moral decision about values. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy this concern shows up in an underlying moral argument about the importance of open debate as a means of arriving at decisions. At the same time, Schmitt argues against the moralizing stance of Marxists and Nazis, whose turn to myth-making allows them to abandon all moral constraints on their own actions and demonize their enemies.

Jakob Norberg, by contrast, sees Schmitt’s decisionism not as an appeal to values but as a dangerous threat to liberal democratic processes. Norberg shows how, in Schmitt’s account, Marxism, fascism, parliamentarism, and Romanticism can be contrasted with each other through their degree of rationalism as well as their absolute vs. mediating character. The underlying goal of parliamentarism for Schmitt is not rational truth but the mediation of opposing positions so that there will not be a descent into violent conflict. Norberg argues that the key opposition in the text is not rationalism vs. myth but the contrast between parliamentarism, in which discussion is meant to harmonize opposing positions, and decisionism, in which decision replaces discussion and thus prevents mediation.

The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy focuses much attention on the question of popular sovereignty in the French Revolution, suggesting that the rise of this idea, in particular in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the general will, led to a tendency of democracy to become dictatorship. William Patch argues that Schmitt is unjustified in suggesting that Rousseau’s theory of the general will was the reason for the Reign of Terror and the shift from democracy to dictatorship. Instead, Patch argues that the Reign of Terror was the result of a subversion of democracy by Robespierre in the coup of June 2, 1793. Nevertheless, Patch affirms Schmitt’s stance that Rousseau’s idea of the general will contributed to the administrative centralization that undermined the power of the provinces and local decision-making.

Jeffrey Seitzer argues that Schmitt’s account of democracy focuses too much on the unitary model of the French Revolution and consequently does not take into account the federalist model of the United States, which disperses power and prevents moves toward dictatorship. On the one hand, U.S. politics demonstrates how Schmitt correctly diagnosed the ways in which representational methods of politics can forge group allegiances that override rational economic self-interest in voting. On the other hand, Seitzer shows how the dispersal of power across different institutions at the state and federal level in the United States serves to prevent a single group from gaining unified power and shutting out opponents.

My own essay argues that The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy not only criticizes theories of myth but also, through its focus on political theology, adumbrates a theory of the mythic basis for all political forms, including parliamentarism. Schmitt begins with an argument about the need for a homogeneity of the popular will, forged through a common myth, in order for democracy to function. Since democracy has no inherent content, being only the rule of the majority, the real content of liberal democracy is the idea of parliamentarism, in which public discussion is the basis for decision-making. Parliamentarism can only endure for Schmitt as long as it can maintain its own mythic form of legitimacy.

The two subsequent essays in the issue turn to historical accounts of the significance of Schmitt’s work, both for other theorists and for his own decision-making. Todd Maslyk describes the reception of Schmitt’s work by the Japanese scholar Ōgushi Toyoo in 1930 as indicative of both Japanese familiarity with the context of German legal and political theory and an interest by Japanese conservative thinkers in developing critiques of liberal democracy. Ōgushi’s essay provides a relatively straightforward summary of Schmitt’s arguments on sovereignty but then argues for the inapplicability of these ideas for the Japanese context and thus for the specificity of Japanese historical development.

Hubert Treiber describes the relationships between Schmitt, Max Weber, and Joseph Redlich in an attempt to determine the intellectual basis for Schmitt’s decision to work with the Nazis. In contrast to the view that Schmitt was pursuing a form of legal positivism in which jurists should simply follow the laws that are established by politicians, Treiber argues that Schmitt’s personal views reveal an alternative rationale for his decision to support the Nazis. In both his statements made to Redlich and his arguments in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt indicates that the main reason for his fateful decision was the shift in the intellectual-historical situation that he thought made parliamentarism obsolete.

In an essay about a theorist whose anarchism contrasts sharply with Schmitt’s focus on sovereignty, Jorn Janssen presents Max Stirner’s idea of an egoism that rejects all political representations of individual identity. Rather than subordinating the individual to a collective ideal, Stirner seeks to prioritize the right of the individual to be free to exist as an ineffable and dynamic particularity, free of all external representations of its essence. Whereas Schmitt begins with the necessity of representation to move toward the ubiquity of myth in politics, Stirner, in rejecting all mythic representations, also rejects all political identities and collectivities. The point of the rejection of all representation is to avoid any sacrifice of the self to an external ideal. The difficulty here, not mentioned by Janssen, is that the avoidance of all sacrifice leaves the self with an incapacity to make any value distinctions at all.

In a final note, Antonio Lecuna describes the split in Chile’s strong entrepreneurial culture between formal and informal entrepreneurs. While the former are able to increase their incomes and wealth, the latter are hampered by their informal status. Over 50 percent of workers are in the informal economy, and this high percentage is a main aspect of high income inequality in Chile. Lecuna suggests that policies such as providing financing opportunities and simplifying and reducing the tax burden on informal entrepreneurs would encourage more of them to enter the formal economy.

David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.