The Temptations of Carl Schmitt – by N.S. Lyons
To many people this will probably sound incredibly arcane, like pure academic pedantry. I assure you it is not. As I soon discovered, the evolution of Schmitt s ideas and the course of his life seems to speak directly to the forces at work beneath our present political, cultural, and spiritual upheavals, almost a century after his own time. From the liberal state s flailing degradation of its popular legitimacy, to the emergence of governance by permanent emergency, to the radical polarization of politics, to the birth of post-modernism and the dominance of identity: Schmitt foreshadowed all of these things. Indeed, to read Schmitt in 2023 can easily present the alluring feeling of having opened a hidden dialogue willing to honestly diagnosis the undercurrents so obviously raging beneath the chaos, absurdity, and official obfuscations of a Weimar America.
Even more significantly but far less well known or understood Schmitt was among the first to truly wrestle with how we should collectively respond to the arrival of what he labeled the Age of Technicity, in which, in a disenchanted world, technology now threatened to dominate Man. But his proposed solution would in the end only help birth the modern techno-nihilist total state and provoke a cataclysm of violence.
To read Schmitt seriously is to flirt with the abyss. It is both to see hard truths revealed and to listen to the false whispers of a snake. Nonetheless, or therefore, I believe Schmitt is truly a symbolic man of our moment just perhaps not in the way either his newfound admirers or long-time detractors, right and left alike, have necessarily thought through.
So, one way or another, I think you should probably know more about Carl Schmitt than you likely do. If you re willing to listen to what I at least believe I ve learned, then pour yourself a long, stiff drink and strap in.
Carl Schmitt has been on our radar for a decade at least. He’s the anti-liberal’s anti-liberal. He writes pretty well too (at least in translation) for a German. More like Schopenhauer than Hegel.