Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Who is the Enemy? More on Carl Schmitt

Commenter Ben wrote:

Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a "citizen of the world" and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen . . .

That's right. I'll add that while we are enjoined to love our neighbors, we are also commanded to love our enemies (MT 5:44 and Luke 6:27). Are these enemies familiar and local too and not, say, Iranian Islamists? Do the verses mentioned rule out hating foreigners who pose an existential threat to us? Or do they permit it?

Carl Schmitt has something to say on the question in The Concept of the Political (expanded ed., tr. G. Schwab, U. of Chicago Press, 2007, 28-29):

The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense; polemios, not ecthros. As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” agapate tous ecthrous, and not diligite hostes vestros.

No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.

What is Schmitt telling us?  The criterion of the political sphere is the Freund-Feind, friend-enemy distinction. (26) But who is the enemy? The main point made above, as I understand it, is that the political enemy is a public enemy who may or may not be in addition a private adversary whom one hates.  Suppose you are I are Trump supporters who hate each other.  That would be a case of political friendship but personal enmity.  Or it may be that you and I are on the same side politically and love each other. That would be a case of both political and personal friendship. (I assume that love includes friendship but not conversely.) A third possibility is realized in many marriages: the partners love each other on the personal plane but are on opposite sides of a political divide. (James Carville and Mary Matalin?)

Now consider Luke 6:27: "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you (KJV)."  Who are the enemies referred to in this verse? Not political/public enemies, but private enemies, according to Schmitt.  The verse therefore allows the hating, and presumably also the killing, of foreign and domestic enemies who pose an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is one not merely to our biological life, but to our way of life.

Is that right?

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13 responses to “Who is the Enemy? More on Carl Schmitt”

  1. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,
    Where things get hot is when the State chooses sides amongst its own people to declare an internal political party hostis, as Joe Biden did to “MAGA extremists” in his infamous “Red” speech. In a post about this back in January 2024, I quoted another passage from The Concept of the Political:

    “As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy. The declaration in the public law of the Greek republics and the hostis declaration in Roman public law are but two examples. Whether the form is sharper or milder, explicit or implicit, whether ostracism, expulsion, proscription, or outlawry are provided for in special laws or in explicit or general descriptions, the aim is always the same, namely to declare an enemy. That, depending on the attitude of those who had been declared enemies of state, is possibly the sign of civil war, i.e., the dissolution of the state as an organized political entity, internally peaceful, territorially enclosed, and impenetrable to aliens. The civil war then decides the further fate of this entity.” [p. 46]

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    Your Jan 2024 post is very good. I have been thinking about this quotation that you cite:
    >>[D]esignating the adversary as political and oneself as nonpolitical (i.e., scientific, just, objective, neutral, etc.) is in actuality a typical and unusually intensive way of pursuing politics. [p. 80]<< Along the same lines, in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, p. 2. Schmitt tells us that “the political is the total” and that therefore “any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision . . . this also holds for whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.” That too is a political decision.
    He seems to be maintaining that the political is an all-inclusive sphere that subsumes such other spheres as the aesthetic (beautiful-ugly), the moral (good-evil) the economic, and the theological (divine-secular). Should we conclude that political theology is primarily political and only secondarily theological?. I think so. As I read him he subordinates the theological to the political.
    Our man is a totalitarian for whom Der Staat ist ueber alles!
    And so, Malcolm, we should not get too enthusiastic about this old Nazi until we understand what he is really up to.
    You understand that I am not using ‘Nazi’ as a term of abuse.

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  3. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Bill,

    “As I read him he subordinates the theological to the political.”

    I think this is perhaps too narrow a reading of what Schmitt is saying in general about the relation of politics and theology; I understand the thrust of this book to be that politics is always conditioned and shaped in it deepest premises by the prevailing religious metaphysics of every era. (For example, the age of absolute monarchy coincided with a prevailing view of God as absolute personal sovereign, as we see in seventeenth-century defenses of absolutism such as Filmer’s Patriarcha, while the primacy of arbitrary, sovereign Will evolved toward a more rationalistic and legalistic formalism under Enlightenment deism.)
    From page 45 of Political Theology:

    The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. The determination of such an identity is the sociology of the concept of sovereignty.

    From this perspective, then, I see Schmitt as saying that the form and axioms of the political are always subordinate to the theology of the age, not the other way round.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    I don’t find that quotation on p. 45 of my copy of POL THEOL.
    >>I understand the thrust of this book to be that politics [or rather the political] is always conditioned and shaped in it deepest premises by the prevailing religious metaphysics of every era.<< I agree. We should note, however, that if X and Y have the same structure, that fact by itself does not justify subordinating X to Y, or Y to X. It seems clear that Schmitt sees structural isomorphisms between theological concepts and axioms and political concepts and axioms. Political theology (Theistic politology?) explores these isomorphisms. But who rules in the end, God or the State? For Schmitt, the State. Does he in any of his works affirm the existence of God? Not that I know of.

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  5. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,
    Well, I have the Kindle version of this one (actually just ordered a hard copy today, after failing to find one on my bookshelf), so maybe my page-numbers are off.
    I don’t know what Schmitt’s personal religious views were. I know he was raised in a devoutly Catholic family, but who did he really think was sovereign – God or Man?
    Well, this is Schmitt, so I suppose it would be he (He?) who, in times of crisis, “decides the exception”. (Schmitt says elsewhere in PT that the place of “the exception” in the political is homologous to the miraculous in theology.)

    “We should note, however, that if X and Y have the same structure, that fact by itself does not justify subordinating X to Y, or Y to X. It seems clear that Schmitt sees structural isomorphisms between theological concepts and axioms and political concepts and axioms.

    Agreed, and so perhaps I was wrong to say that for Schmitt the political was subordinate to the theology of the era. But maybe not: doesn’t our overarching metaphysics usually shape and condition how we think about everything else? Wouldn’t our political philosophy almost inevitably be downstream from our theology, if we take that theology seriously?

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  6. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Bill:
    >>Is that right?<< It would seem to follow from a Schmittian analysis, but of course such does not square with the Gospel accounts of the love commandment. And if Schmitt is positing an isomorphism (whether hierarchical or coequal structures) of religious metaphysics with the political order, I think the love commandment alone indicates there is no such mapping possible with a specifically Christian metaphysics. For instance, in the context of the parable of The Good Samaritan, a Samaritan was not a member of the Jewish community - and yet the clear import is that the Samaritan was operating as a neighbor and helping an injured man who was more than likely a Jew (or at least, not a Samaritan). And in so doing, was acting on the love commandment to love a neighbor, even if he might be an enemy. The love commandment to me obviates human political distinctions between different communities, which ultimately is grounded in Genesis's revelation that all human races and communities are derived from a single source - Adam and Eve. On a fundamental level, we are all of the same family - the family of God - despite our different political allegiances. Paul reiterates this in Acts 17:26-27 when he states "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined … that they should seek God … " Not only are we of the same family, but we all have the same purpose, to seek the one true living God. In all of this, the friend/enemy distinction is dissolved within a higher spiritual truth than is contained in Schmitt's speculations. But like all such spiritual truths, it is paradoxical when applied in the world, and becomes difficult, and in some cases impossible, to follow in our fallen state of affairs. Thus, the numerous efforts, like a Schmittian analysis, to reinterpret things so as to conform to our needs and desires rather than to the New Testament demands. The fundamental problem for Schmitt is that a Christian metaphysics is grounded in the transcendence of God. The Cross itself establishes an inherent opposition to the "principalities and powers" of the political ways of doing things in favor of a Christian ideal that can only be lived in a constant recurrence to the forgiveness of God as our laws, institutions, international relations, and other political structures fall short of God's purposes.

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  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    Good comment, Tom. When I asked, “Is that right?” I was asking whether Schmitt’s reading of the cited NT verses is plausible. You’ve reinforced my view that it is not.
    Schmitt is coming across to me as a totalitarian of the Right as opposed to a totalitarian of the Left. My tendency is to reject both, but in an intellectually responsible, as opposed to a reflexive (knee-jerk) way. That requires on my part a deep dive into political aporetics by one who is not well-versed in political theory (whether pol. phi, or pol. sci.) So I am trying to get as clear as possible about the fundamental problems that honest and penetrating totalitarian thinkers are trying to solve.
    I think we can say that on both sides of the divide, the personal is subordinated to the political and the political is characterized by struggle, Kampf, total war unto the annihilation of the adversary/enemy. But the enemy is different. For Marx and subsequent commies, the enemy is a class-enemy, the bourgeoisie; for Nazis like Schmitt — who joined the NSDAP in May of ’33, the same month as Heidegger joined — the enemy is a particular racial/ethnic/religious group, the Jews.
    As I suggested to Malcolm, For Schmitt “the political is an all-inclusive sphere that subsumes such other spheres as the aesthetic (beautiful-ugly), the moral (good-evil) the economic, and the theological (divine-secular). Should we conclude that political theology is primarily political and only secondarily theological?. I think so. As I read him he subordinates the theological to the political.”
    Perhaps I should have said that Schmitt eliminates the theological as a real sphere in favor of the all-inclusive reality of the political, whose criterion is the Freund-Feind opposition. The totalitarians of the Left, on the other side, eliminate God and the reality of the theological sphere in favor of the hegemony of the economic sphere (at least in ‘classical’ Marxism.) In ‘cultural’ Marxism, sex-conflict is added to the mix.
    This may help explain why the some of the boys in the ‘manosphere’ gravitate toward Schmitt. Is commenter Ben one of them? I don’t know. I suspect our friend Malcolm likes Schmitt for similar reasons. I wonder what Schmitt thought of Hannah Arendt?
    Finally, note that if the classical God is real, then he threatens to swallow up everything similarly as the totalitarian state threatens to swallow up everything.

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  8. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    I think you are both reading Schmitt far too unsympathetically here, and elevating the State to something more than Schmitt’s nuanced concept of it.
    But before I reply in any more detail I would like to give Political Theology a careful re-reading. (I now have a hard copy of it, which will help with page references.)

    Reply
  9. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    Bill,
    I think your interpretation of Schmitt here is correct. While he doesn’t explicitly encourage hatred of the public political enemy because the friend-enemy distinction is agnostic to questions of morality, truth, beauty, economics, it does permit the moral hazard of it, though. It is for that reason, the totalitarianism statism latent in Schmitt’s thought, why I consider him merely a good diagnostician of liberal modernity, not a remediator of it. Ultimately, our enemies have to be our enemies because they’re enemies of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and our friends are our friends because they’re friends of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. What is it to gain unlimited state power but forfeit your soul? The point is well-taken, Bill. Thanks for this and slew of Carl Schmitt posts you’ve been doing.
    In addition to being clear, direct, and easy to understand, Carl Schmitt is catnip to youngish men online like myself (I’m 35) precisely because he is forbidden in our smothering, politically correct, effeminate socio-political order. Now that they’ve discovered their first swear word, so to speak, they revel in taking every opportunity to be profane and sacrilegious to spite the cathedral of the establishment left, with its elites in law, academia, media, government bureaucracy, and the like. As a consequence, there is definitely a noticeable presence of those who unwisely fraternize with perennial temptations, specifically 20th-century ghouls that are now summoned in digital seances of 21st-century irony and idiom that should be left undisturbed among the dead.
    With all that admitted, I will gently push back against Tom T. and his invocation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Sure, Christianity implies a Kingdom of God-standard that’s transcendent and greater to the fallen and corrupted world. But until we reach our eternal destination in communion with God and all our other brethren in Christ, we are still in this imperfect world, this veil of tears, though not belonging to it. The Son of Man himself, after all, acknowledges a distinction between what is owed to civil authority and what is owed to God in Mark 12:17 and Matthew 22:21. I think it’s obvious that the Parable of the Good Samaritan is not to be mistaken for a model of wise statecraft. It presupposes that its audiences has the means to care for the downtrodden. Can a country 37 trillion in debt and counting afford to just be a haven for and accommodate the world’s poor and preyed-upon? Bill, I’m reminded of a piece you wrote years ago criticizing the Catholic bishops for failing to recognize the distinction — putting aside public and private enmity — between public and private morality: https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2008/12/morality-private-and-public-on-not-confusing-them.html.

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  10. BV Avatar
    BV

    Ben,
    The link doesn’t work. I am wondering which post of mine you are referring to.
    In any case, good comments by you. Schmitt is not an easy nut to crack. His position is slightly different in the three editions of Concept of the Political. If you want to go deep into this, I recommend Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, expanded ed., U of Chicago Press, 2011.

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  11. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Ben & Bill
    This link worked for me:
    https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2008/12/morality-private-and-public-on-not-confusing-them.html
    I think the problem is with the period at the end of the Ben’s link; Typepad interprets that as part of the link.

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  12. BV Avatar
    BV

    Thanks, Tom. I uploaded a cleaned-up version to Substack.

    Reply
  13. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Ben:
    >>With all that admitted, I will gently push back against Tom T. and his invocation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan … I think it’s obvious that the Parable of the Good Samaritan is not to be mistaken for a model of wise statecraft.<< I agree completely with your courteous comment, Ben, which for me is somewhere in the neighborhood of the Two Cities distinction going back to Augustine. However, I presented the Parable as only one example that pointed to the radical transcendence aspect of Christianity which was not assimilable to a Schmittian analysis. Throughout the Scriptures, God is presented as both a mystery - unnamable, unknowable, absolutely Other than His creation - and as imminent and knowable in his commandments, manifestations, and affects in the world. His Justice, for instance, is a standard of behavior by which we can be judged guilty or innocent for our actions, which implies we can know the standard . Some general religious metaphysical version of these latter imminent conceptions of God and His work in the world, are probably what Schmitt had in mind. But my point was that the transcendent God is the ultimate ground of all His imminent manifestations, which introduces a radical interpretive break in any political theory. And more to the issue I was addressing, it certainly prevents an isomorphic relation between a Christian metaphysics and the Schmittian political order. Which is not to say that a Schmittian approach may not have some value, which I take Bill to be investigating. The friend/enemy distinction might very well be a helpful way to analyze our situation in this fallen world, as well Bill's public/private morality distinction. In any case, as you remark, despite the Love Commandment, it is doubtful that God really intends thereby for us to commit national suicide in favor of third world invaders. But if the transcendence of God is neglected, any political theory risks falling into the abyss of Utopianism - or as you put it, "the totalitarianism statism latent in Schmitt's thought." Eric Voegelin cautioned in The New Science of Politics (1952), "The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy." Or, as William F. Buckley popularized Voegelin's point, "Do not immanentize the eschaton."

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