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Host
This is a bonus episode of History as it happens. It's Wednesday, October 29th. Who was Carl Schmitt? Well, to start, he was a legal theorist in Germany who joined the Nazi party after Hitler achieved power. His political writings have influenced anti liberal movements on the right and left today in the United States in the Age of Trump, Carl Schmitt, who died in 1985, is popular on the New Right among people who may call themselves conservative but may be more reactionary. As Jack Nicastro and Phil Magnus write in Reason, a libertarian publication, when conservatives reject constitutional limits on executive power and foment civil conflict, what exactly are they conserving? They say one of the more vocal Neo schmidtians is Orrin McIntyre, a podcaster and writer for the Blaze and Internet popularizer of post liberalism. McIntyre, they say, has a long running affinity for Schmidt, describing the friend enemy distinction as the true essence of the political. Now, I'd never even heard of Orrin McIntyre until reading this article@reason.com I don't pay a lot of attention to the far right or left podcasting space, so I checked out McIntyre's show on YouTube. Here he is talking about the friend enemy distinction.
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Orrin McIntyre
For Schmidt, the friend enemy distinction is the fundamental distinction of the political, and any other distinctions that might exist when forming groups is subordinate to the friend enemy distinction.
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Host
In a 1997 essay for the New York Review, Mark Lillo the ultimate problem with liberalism, according to Schmidt, is that it fears decisions more than it fears enemies. But sovereign decisions are unavoidable in politics, even those founded on democratic principles, having started from an assumption about belligerent human nature. And Schmidt then tries to find historical evidence for the permanent political necessity of controlling it arbitrarily. And I'll thank Damon Linker for telling me about that article written in 1997. So the more I learned about Carl Schmitt, the more dangerous his ideas appear, and not only because he was a Nazi. But Schmidt did enjoy a respectful following despite his position in the Third Reich as a legal theorist, and he is considered one of the most important political thinkers of the past century. The concept of the political may be his most famous work. Historian Philip Magness is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and the David J. Thoreau Chair in Political Economy. He co authored the aforementioned piece in Reason under the headline the American New Right Looks like the European Old Right. Phil Magness, welcome back.
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Philip Magness
Happy to be here.
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Co-host
On one of my recent episodes, I discussed Hannah Arendt. Now I'm on to Carl Schmitt, another major thinker of The Twentiet century. Although unlike Arendt, Carl Schmidt was a Nazi. Hannah Arendt was fleeing the Nazis. So yeah. Schmidt is considered one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. And we can get into when his influence was its strongest or when it had a resurgence. His work has influenced right wing and left wing anti liberal political movements, such as the 1960s German student movement and the Italian New Left.
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Host
You wrote this piece in Reason.
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Co-host
It deals with his more recent pop popularity on the New Right. Who are these people and why do they find Carl Schmitt appealing?
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Philip Magness
Right, so this is a branch of. Well, they call themselves conservatives, although I don't think they're really conserving much of anything. But they view American conservatism, which was always rooted in kind of an alliance between social moral conservatism and free markets and opposition to communism. It's the old William F. Buckley right. They consider that an impediment to success in the political arena, to winning. And they view Trump as a breakaway from that. And in many cases he is. He's not nearly as committed to the free market tenet of historical American conservatism, but also not a big respecter of constitutional norms either. And this branch of the New Right kind of sees that as a pathway forward to beat the left, to really own the left in the political arena. And they see it as correcting from what they claim are mistakes of the Reagan era style of conservatism. And Schmidt is an interesting figure to them because he doesn't come out of this American lineage. He's not following the Madisonian tradition of constitutional liberalism and constraint and norms, and viewing the purpose of the Constitution as this mechanism to control government power. He's a direct repudiation of that. And you can see how that's very convenient to people that want to throw off those same norms in the present day to own the libs.
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Co-host
Anybody in the administration itself subscribe to Carl Schmitt?
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Philip Magness
There are people that are in the orbit around, in particular vice president J.D. vance. So Vance has described himself as a proponent and adherent to a political philosophy known as post liberalism. And this is like the academic articulation of the New Right, a rejection of the Buckleyite tripod of conservatism that has free markets, limited government, constitutionalism, morality tied in there, and that they pursue more of an old, almost reactionary European style of the Right, not conservative, but just hard right celebration of feudalism and monarchical societies that preceded the French Revolution. And seeing that as like a lost way from the past that's been corrupted by the Enlightenment. Obscure throwback reactionary figures that the post liberals all adore. Joseph de Maistre, who's 19th century theorist of reaction to the French Revolution and other events at this time. Thomas Carlyle is the Scottish historian, a public intellectual in the mid 19th century and he's a theorist of power and a repudiator of basically all things liberal. He's pro slavery, for example, well past the point that most in the British public have abandoned slavery. Their 20th century person that they rally around is Carl Schmitt. They view him as a continuation of this tradition and as a major insightful legal theorist that lays the groundwork for post liberalism. So in terms of people that are in the administration. So J.D. vance subscribes to political philosophy that's heavily influenced by a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermeule who sees he presents himself as like the leader of the post liberal faction in academia. And Vermeule is one of the major right wing articulators of Carl Schmidt.
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Co-host
I've tried to read Vermeule because I discussed this general subject with Damon Linker a few months ago. The ideas behind Trump 2.0, Strauss, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmidt. I found Vermeule's prose in. That's more of a reflection on me than him, I guess. But I do get the gist. It's anti democratic, anti liberal.
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Host
A belief in the power of the sovereign, the executive.
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Co-host
I mean that was what Schmidt was about. I did mention at the top here that he appealed to people both on the far left and the far right. Well, I mentioned the Italian New left German student movement who said liberal democratic institutions don't actually represent the people. They are an impediment to liberation. They're an impediment to liberation. So therefore they found Schmidt appealing.
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Philip Magness
It's like a Marxian throwback to false consciousness. You can see kind of the parallels in there. They view liberal institutions as distracting the public away from being able to have clear and decisive evaluations of the conditions before them. And now if you're on the Marxian left, that means that you're an exploited worker and you've been distracted by liberal institutions. So you can see how that maps over. But it was really in the 1980s and 1990s, there were figures on kind of this critical theory left that started to really discover rediscover Carl Schmitt. And they said, wait a minute, even though he's a right wing Nazi affiliated theorist, he had concepts that apply to us. And there are really two major developments in the late 1990s. So Jacques Derrida, a famous postmodern literary thinker, writes several works where he draws on Carl Schmitt. And then the other one is Antonio Negri and Michael Hart write this book that comes out in 2000 called Empire. And this is dense, impenetrable, jargon filled Marxist screed that became an academic bestseller because all the academic left loved it. And it supposedly explained how liberal internationalism created this de facto empire state for the market economy across the world. And even though it wasn't flexing in the same way that an old colonial system would have, it was using institutions to do the same way. And they too appealed to Carl Schmitten, a key chapter. And they say Schmidt was writing as a nationalist. But if we take some of these concepts and we apply them in an international framework, we can also see how liberalism has distracted the masses away from the truth. The real distinction of who their enemies.
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Host
Are basically on the way to true liberation.
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Co-host
And on the far right too, the true voice of the people is the sovereign who can rule what's called decisionism. We'll return to this in a second. They would say it's with the best of intentions, but we all can understand why this would lead to some really pernicious. I mean, after all, Schmidt was a legal theorist in the Third Reich, for goodness sake. I'll just mention one other thing. Mark Lillo wrote a really good essay about Schmidt in 1997 that I located at the New York Review of Books, where he says, Raymond Aaron, whose liberal convictions were unshakeable, met with Schmidt and carried on an intermittent correspondence with him, and in his memoirs called him a great social philosopher in the tradition of Max Weber. Alexandra Kohaev, Russian philosopher who gave lectures on Hegel, attended by leading French intellectuals in Paris during the 30s, visited Plettenberg, that's where Schmidt lived in Germany in the 60s, explaining to an acquaintance that Schmidt is the only man in Germany worth talking to. And last one here, Jacob Taubes, an influential and somewhat mysterious professor of Jewish theology in New York, Jerusalem, Paris, in Berlin, argued that the anti Semitic Schmidt, along with Heidegger, another Nazi, was among the most important thinkers of our time. Wow.
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Philip Magness
Interesting assessments there. One of the common themes that you see. So Schmidt is an academic for most of the prime of his life, and this is really the 1920s and 1930s. He's a prominent figure on the academic scene. Now. That doesn't necessarily mean he spills over into international renown, certainly in the German academic scene. He's running in the same circles of some very major figures, and they're reading his work and citing his work and responding to him. You mentioned Leo Strauss is another one that, like, writes reviews of Schmidt's books. But this would be akin to, you know, myself today, I'm an economic historian who works on income inequality. Yes, I read Thomas Piketty on the other side, and I engage with his work. It certainly doesn't mean that I would consider Piketty the greatest economist of the.
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Host
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Co-host
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Host
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