Page 52 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Arts&Letters
The Concept of Carl Schmitt
by PAUL GOTTFRIED
Carl Schmitt: A Biography, Reinhard RMehring, Polity, 700 pages
einhard Mehring’s study of the long-lived German po- litical and legal theorist Carl
Schmitt (1888-1985) is the most exhaustive biography known to me of a deeply fascinating subject. Given his opportunistic embrace of the Nazis in 1933, Schmitt does not fit the image that postwar Germans have worked to create for themselves. Yet Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Legal- ity and Legitimacy, Dictatorship, Law of the Earth, and Political Theology con- tinue to be read because of their con-
ceptual depth and stylistic brilliance. These elegantly phrased works can- not be reduced to the circumstances that inspired them—Weimar Germany, the Nazi regime, and the postwar American order—any more than Hobbes’s master- piece Leviathan can be seen purely as an artifact of the English Civil War. Indeed, aphorisms can be found in Schmitt’s works that are so pregnant with mean- ing that they invariably fail in transla- tion: “Sovereign is the one who deter- mines the challenge of the exception,” “All modern political teachings are secularized theological concepts,” and
“Historical truths are true only once.” Schmitt has always appealed to the political outliers, from the revolutionary right to the anti-capitalist, anti-liberal left. Geoffrey Barraclough’s observation that the Hegelian right and the Hegelian left clashed at Stalingrad in 1943 might beappliedevenmoreappropriatelyto Schmitt, if we allow for a certain hy- perbole. The Frankfurt School Marx- ist Walter Benjamin devoted one of his most famous essays to an elaboration of Schmitt’s observations about Re- naissance politics. Otto Kirchheimer— who was Schmitt’s graduate student at
Bonn—and the young Jürgen Haber- mas were only two of the numerous German socialists who tried to adapt Schmitt’s critical studies of Weimar German politics for leftist agendas. It was hardly accidental that Leo Strauss’s first published work was a commentary on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, which Schmitt graciously appended to the second edition of his work.
In interwar Germany, Schmitt en- joyed indisputable renown. Leading jurists of the time like Hans Kelsen and Rudolf Smend, who had sharp disagree- ments with him, readily conceded his mental acuity and gift for language. It may have been almost incidental that Schmitt held a professorship in Bonn and eventually one in Berlin, or that he became the major legal advisor to the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag during the Weimar era. As a literary and scholarly star he operated on a different level from the professional posts he held.
The details of his life of more than 96 years are truly staggering. Although the author of an intellectual biogra- phy of Schmitt, I learnt from Mehring things about Schmitt’s life I encoun- tered nowhere else. Even longtime Schmitt-researchers may be surprised, or shocked, by some of these revela- tions. Schmitt’s first wife, for example, whom he divorced in 1922, was not, as is often believed, a Serb or Croatian from a prominent family but a thief and embezzler from Vienna who may have been involved in a prostitution ring.
The womanizing Schmitt became involved in an affair with an Austra- lian teaching English, Kathleen Mur- ray, while his divorce was still pend- ing. At one point he promised to marry her, but she returned to Austra- lia, having used Schmitt to complete her German-language dissertation. Later Schmitt plunged into other liai- sons, perhaps most passionately with a certain “Magda” while he was still a professor in Bonn.
Teaching in Berlin while his second wife was in a sanitarium, he became so sexually promiscuous that Mehring
refers to this period in his life as an “erot- ic state of the exception.” Just as Schmitt argued that constitutional government required an awareness of “exceptional circumstances” in order to function even in normal times, so too did the survival of Schmitt’s conjugal life depend on his liberty to plunge into serial affairs.
Perhaps curiously, given his sexual passion, Schmitt had chosen for his sec- ond wife a gravely ill, tubercular wom- an. The union brought Schmitt high medical expenses but minimal sexual satisfaction. This remarriage after a di- vorce also led to his excommunication. Mehring suggests that Schmitt’s straying from his strict Catholic upbringing, a development hastened by his unsatisfied sexual desires, intensified his amoral ca- reerism, culminating in his kowtowing to the Nazis. Although this causal con- nection is not provable, Schmitt’s Cath- olic students and colleagues brought it up after 1933 when they attempted to explain their teacher’s unexpected ac- commodation of the Third Reich.
Mehring confirms that Schmitt’s devotion to the Catholic Church was mostly political. A Rhineland Catholic who grew up under Prussian Protes- tant rule, Schmitt resented the German imperial government as a foreign pres- ence. He noticeably gravitated toward Latin cultures and seemed pleased with his mother’s French ancestry, particularly since as a young man he managed to borrow money from his uncle in Lorraine. In his publications Schmitt defended the hierarchical structure and Roman law of the Catho- lic Church and became identified with Germany’s (Catholic) Center Party. But theologically Schmitt was heavily influenced by the Danish existentialist Protestant Kierkegaard, and even when hedefendedthe19th-centuryCatho- lic counterrevolutionaries Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortes, he habitually quoted his Protestant men- tors Kierkegaard and Hobbes.
Mehring understandably questions whether Schmitt really believed in Catholic Christian doctrines. Here one
52 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015