There are a lot of things that I disagree with about the philosophy of Carl Schmitt, a very in-vogue thinker I read as a tortured Christian who blamed everyone else for his problems, and whose work survives mostly as philosophy for men who seek to control other men and want a philosophical justification.
But one thing in the Schmittian narrative that goes badly undersold: how incompetent he was at his core objective, being a Nazi.
If you have no idea who he is, I’d recommend starting with Hannah Arendt – who Carl Schmitt actually also read obsessively but never mentioned which is its own kind of cowardice. His followers never seem to bring her up either. No National Socialist is perfect.
But if you think he’s brilliant, you are more my target audience.
Let’s look at the facts, drawn from this one article.
- Carl Schmitt initially dismissed Hitler as a “hysteric” and had many Jewish friends, including both his publisher and Leo Strauss
- April 1933: he abandoned his friends and joined the Nazi Party
- May 1933: wrote an article that laid the groundwork for kicking out Albert Einstein and many other brilliant intellectuals.
- June-July 1934: He supplied the legal justification for the Night of Long Knives, a murderous execution of his fellow Nazis in his essay “The Fuhrer Protects the Law”
- December 1936: The SS denounced him as an insincere opportunist, and he was sidelined and discredited by the Nazis for the rest of the war.
- 1945: arrested by American forces and detained for a year
- 1947: arrested again, brought in to Nuremburg, where he insisted he was not an apologist for authoritarianism, and due to being shoved out of power back in 1936 was able to avoid being formally charged
- He returned to his hometown of Plettenberg Germany where he spent his last forty years blaming everyone but himself
Which part is the brilliance? brilliant? Misjudging Hitler, abandoning his friends, sending Einstein to America, sanctioning the murder of Jews and Germans alike, and ultimately failing to hold on to any of the power he betrayed everyone who trusted him to get?
His ideas may or may not have merit. But the next time someone invokes Schmitt as a brilliant realist who understood power better than anyone else, remember that the great theorist of the friend/enemy distinction betrayed his friends and wasn’t even sharp enough to realize that the Nazis were the ones who were his enemy. And he died insisting it was wasn’t his fault.
Draw your own conclusions. I have mine.