Carl Schmitt's Theory of Democratic Judgment

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy II

Abstract

In this paper I turn to Schmitt’s under-studied 1931 radio broadcast, ‘Hegel and Marx,’ to apply a Hegelian corrective to the usual understanding of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. First translated in 2014 by James Furner and Max Henninger, it has since received little attention. Taking up Robyn Marasco’s (2023) provocative emphasis on Schmitt’s existentialism, and Jason Frank’s (2016, 2021) turn to enactment, I reread the friend-enemy distinction through Schmitt’s existentialist commitment. I find an emphasis on judgement, specifically a Zerillian-Arendtian democratic judgement, rather than decision. I also find a concern with constituting world-historical actors that clarifies Schmitt’s infrequent citations of left-revolutionary thinkers like Marx, citations previously examined by, for example, Ellen Kennedy (1987). This re-reading is friendly to Mariano Croce and Andrea Salvatore’s (2023) move away from reading Schmitt only through the lens of the state of exception and reinforces the urgency of the turn to enactment in moving past democratic theory’s Schmittian obsession with identification. However, this paper also finds that Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction is a resilient challenge for the political Left. That friend and enemy are not transcendental categories but tied to the constitution of world-historical actors means the friend-enemy distinction will haunt the left for as long as it is primarily concerned with that project of constitution. Further, this paper suggests that democratic judgement alone may be unreliable as a measure to safeguard against populism’s big lies (see Lars Rensmann 2023): we need a theory of democracy qua action.

Author

• Noah Blakemore Briggs, University of Illinois at Chicago