As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Michael Millerman looks at Carl Schmitt’s “Appropriation/Distribution/Production: Toward a Proper Formulation of Basic Questions of any Social and Economic Order” from Telos 95 (Spring 1993). Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum is available for purchase in our store.
As indicated by its title, Carl Schmitt’s essay addresses to two problems: (1) what are the basic questions that we must raise about the social and the economic order? (2) how are those questions properly formulated? A moment’s reflection should reveal to us the great generality of these problems, which are designed—so Schmitt says—to answer a need for “comprehensive consideration” of social life in its unity (52). Whether we are asking about orders democratic, non-democratic, capitalist, or socialist; whether we inquire into totalitarianisms, fascisms, traditionalisms, ethno-nationalisms; whether we put the question to republics or princedoms, Schmitt is indicating that there are basic questions to ask, and he is suggesting that he has the key to their proper formulation.
