Schmitt on Friend vs Enemy
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) has been hugely influential on the left as well as the right of political debate despite the fact that its author joined the Nazi Party shortly after its publication. David explores the origins of Schmitt’s ideas in the debates about the Weimar Republic and examines his critique of liberal democracy. He asks what Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy has to teach us about democratic politics today.
Going Deeper:
- Jan-Werner Mueller, A Dangerous Mind: CarlSchmitt in Post-War European Thought (2003)
- Tamsin Shaw, ‘William Barr: The Carl Schmitt ofOur Time,’ New York Review of Books (2020)
- Chang Che, ‘The Nazi Inspiring China’s Communists,’ The Atlantic (2020)
- (Audio): Carl Schmitt on Liberalism
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week's episode of History of |
| 0:20.7 | Ideas brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books is about a deeply |
| 0:25.0 | controversial writer who's been remarkably influential despite the taint that hangs around his name. |
| 0:31.9 | David explains what Carl Schmidt got right as well as what he got badly wrong and asks why he |
| 0:37.6 | still grabs so much attention today. |
| 0:57.2 | There is a central fact about Carl Schmidt that cannot be evaded, it cannot be avoided, |
| 1:02.4 | it has to be addressed. Up front, Carl Schmidt was a Nazi and he wasn't a Nazi in the sense that |
| 1:10.7 | people might bandy that term around on social media to describe people whose views. They find |
| 1:15.5 | apparent although many people find Carl Schmidt's views. He was an actual literal card carrying |
| 1:22.3 | Nazi. He was a member of the National Socialist Party in Germany between 1933 and 1936. He joined |
| 1:30.1 | in 1933 after Hitler first came to power. He left in 1936 having for three years been a very |
| 1:36.8 | prominent spokesperson for Nazi legal philosophy going out of his way to try and establish a way of |
| 1:44.2 | thinking about the law that he thought was consistent with Nazi ideology including racial ideology |
| 1:49.2 | and yet he didn't go far enough for some. He came under the suspicion of the SS, he was investigated, |
| 1:55.8 | he wasn't purged, he didn't become a pariah but he did become an outsider and for the remainder |
| 2:04.2 | of the thousand year hike which only had nine more years left in it. He remained in the country, |
| 2:10.4 | he remained in his job, he continued to teach and to write, he cooperated more than that, he was |
| 2:17.0 | complicit in the worst of the Nazi regime. He continued to write in support of various |
| 2:24.2 | Hitlerite policies including Laban's round, the doctrine of expansion to the east, he was |
| 2:29.6 | sufficiently complicit in the regime, that when the war was over, he was arrested and he was held |
| 2:36.4 | at Nuremberg and he was investigated and interrogated by the Americans who considered charging him |
| 2:43.2 | with war crimes and in the end they decided against. Schmidt's defence during those interrogations |
... |
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