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Nazi Philosophy’s Revenge on Liberal Societies?
Assessing Carl Schmitt’s Romantic case for authoritarianism
In the Trumpian era in which we may be living, liberals had better reckon with Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt (1888–1985) was a Nazi political theorist who critiqued the Weimar Republic’s liberalism to provide a rationale for Adolf Hitler’s suspension of German democracy.
Unlike the average American rural populists and Republican grifters who support Trump’s authoritarian performances, though, Schmitt was no fool. So, if liberalism is to make a comeback and forestall a descent into a late-modern dark age, there had better be a decisive liberal rejoinder to Schmitt’s main argument.
Schmitt’s critique of liberalism
What Schmitt argued is that liberals rely on the mere conceit of a society in which everyone is treated “equally before the law.” In Latin, that slogan is “par in parem non habet imperium,” which means that equals have no authority over one another.
The reason this is supposed to be a mere conceit is that there are exceptions to this rule, namely cases of emergency in which the law is suspended, or a new, martial law is declared. In these exceptional circumstances, the hidden essence of politics is revealed. Politics…
