Postei uma notícia bibliográfica sobre o livro de Müller, um excelente texto que analisa sine ira et studio os trabalhos de Carl Schmitt. Encontro, agora, na livraria Questia, uma resenha do escrito.Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Postwar European Thought.by Peter C. Caldwell in German Politics and Society, Vol. 22, 2004. Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Postwar European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) Carl Schmitt played a shadowy and yet ubiquitous role in postwar European thought. His pupils and interlocutors, friends and enemies, evoked the aging Nazi and constitutional lawyer on a broad range of matters, including the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials and the entry of morality into politics, the rise of constitutional courts, emergency laws and terrorism, and the Cold War. Dirk van Laak has invoked the network that developed around Schmitt , especially in Germany, and its attempt to create an alternative public to the mass democracy of the Federal Republic. (1) While van Laak remained at the level of description, Jan-Werner Muller evaluates the ideas that appeared among Schmitt´s followers and readers. The result is a clearly written and well-argued book that illuminates far more than Schmitt himself: it is a description of the struggle over finding a place for older traditions of European political thought in a Western Europe now marginalized by the politics of the Cold War. Muller's book consists of three parts: a brief intellectual biography of Schmitt before 1945; a long section on Schmitt´s "afterlife" in post-1945 Europe; and a final, short discussion of Schmitt presence in the work of critics of globalization. The first part, "A German Public Lawyer in the Twentieth Century," describes Schmitt´s work before 1945 without apologetics. Muller has no time for readingSchmitt as a defender of Weimar; Schmitt 's work sought to take apart the ideals of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law on which the republic was founded, and his Constitutional Theory, often held up as a respectable interpretation of the new democracy, was in fact "a brilliant conservative effort in deconstructing and containing mass democracy" (31). Yet Schmitt´s claim that liberalism could not deal with politics, with the need for decision, struck a chord on both left and right. After 1929, Schmitt became more directly involved in the struggle over the republic, penning arguments for presidential power and against the role of courts in politics, and then, in 1933, jumping on the Nazi bandwagon. Schmitt´s endorsement of the Fuhrer, anti-Semitism, and racial homogeneity did not save him from attacks by younger Nazis who sought to dismantle law in general. Nonetheless, Schmitt remained an apologist for the Nazis until near the end, when he shifted his emphasis to the formation of post-state imperial entities and a new kind of international law. Language that served to "legitimize Hitler's policies of conquest" (43) in its attack on the abstract, formal rule of "dollar diplomacy" and "humanitarianism" would take on new meaning in the post-1945 world--as a tool for criticizing American hegemony over Western Europe. The most important material of the book is in part two. Muller divides his description of Schmitt ´s post-1945 impact into thirteen short chapters, each exploring a different arena where thought entered discussion. Muller notes a problem from the start:Schmitt is able to "shock with his apodictic pronouncements in political realism," but at the same time his writing remains "curiously elusive" (4). Nonetheless, the claim to political realism and the open-ended nature of his thoughts appealed to those considering the questions of political stability and social cohesion that the Pax Americana had declared solved but recent European history suggested remained open. Muller also highlights Schmitt´s "strong tendency towards constructing myths around his own politics and philosophy" (7). "The self-mythologization (Schmitt] had put so much effort into paid off after his death" (203); even those who criticize Schmitt contribute to the hermeneutic circle that lends an aura to his work.Schmitt saw himself after the war as a diagnostician of modernity who had been blamed for what he sought merely to describe (57). As Muller notes, "he never made a single statement admitting his complicity with the crimes of the Third Reich, nor did he ever express any empathy with its victims"--indeed, the assimilated Jew appears in his work as a key representation of deception in the modern world (58). The person Schmitt , rather than Schmittian ideas abstracted from their context, is the focus: a man who managed to transform himself from opportunist Nazi to a skeptical "old European," who questioned whether politics could really be tamed and whether the era of European civil war had really come to an end. Muller examines the challenge posed by Carl Schmitt to the Pax Americana, in particular his critical approach to constitutional democracy; gestures toward a new theory of international relations; and pessimistic assessments of secularization and the challenge of modernization. Schmitt´s work on constitutional law was marked by the unstable context of Weimar democracy. As such, it resonated with intellectuals across the political spectrum who were concerned about the stability of postwar democracies, in particular that of the Federal Republic of Germany.Schmitt´s preoccupation with political parties reappeared in work of his close students on the far right, Werner Weber and Ernst Forsthoff, who, like Schmitt , feared that social groups would gobble up the substance of the state, especially as the state took over ever more responsibility for the basic requirements of existence (76f.). On the left, Jurgen Habermas and others who feared a neutralization of democratic energies by established groups in a "refeudalized" society of privileges also read and commented on Schmitt (78f.). Schmitt´s influence was felt as well in arguments that the Federal Republic's Basic Law lacked the clear, sovereign decision that characterized a "real constitution." While some of the techniques for protecting the new democracy in the constitution, such as the protection of fundamental principles against constitutional amendment, seemed to reflect Schmitt´s ideas, Muller notes thatSchmitt in fact considered the new state worse than Weimar: it lacked a strong executive leader capable of standing above mere laws in emergencies, and the Constitutional Court "juridified" and emasculated politics (64ff.). It is interesting to note that, with the return of constitutional democracy, Schmitt abandoned his Nazi-era advocacy of a "concrete order" of values and social norms as basis of the law and now condemned the role of values in West German constitutional jurisprudence. Judges, he argued, could exercise a "tyranny of values" over the state (71f.). Schmitt's complaint about the "political premium" of parties in power to exclude those out of power, used in 1932 to attack the republican caretaker government in Prussia, now supported, in an odd twist, arguments from both left and right questioning the right of a "militant democracy" to ban antidemocratic parties (67). Schmitt´s ideas challenged the basic order of the Federal Republic. On the right, Forsthoff and others initially called for a strong, presidential state to respond to these challenges; by the late 1960s, he, Rudiger Altmann, and the right-leaning Social Democrat Hermann Lubbe had settled on a pessimistic appraisal of present-day industrial society. They argued that it followed its own internal imperatives without the need for external regulation, and as such was immune to politics. On the left, Ingeborg Maus read Schmitt as the authoritarian defender of extraordinary law that would preserve monopoly capitalism, while Ulrich Preuss took on the democracy deficit of the Constitutional Court. But Schmitt´s interpreters in law were not entirely critical. Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde, who eventually rose to the position of judge on the Constitutional Court, was able to use Schmitt´s challenges to develop compelling and constructive understandings of West Germany's constitutional law and politics (118f., 167, 186f.). But Bockenforde arrived at his positions by reexamining the entire German legal and historical tradition, as well as through direct, practical knowledge of the constitutional law of the Federal Republic. The example of Bockenforde reveals both the importance of Schmitt´s thought to the new political and constitutional culture of the Federal Republic and the limits to Muller's methodology, which cannot do justice to Bockenforde's contributions. For the followers of Schmitt, Europe had been dethroned in 1945 and an entire tradition of historical thinking about the state had ended. As Muller notes, this grand and mythic history "served Schmitt´s purpose of dissolving the Nazi era in world-historical reflections" (88). With Alexandre Kojeve, Schmitt pondered the rise of a new world order based on values claimed to be universal (98).Schmitt´s students Hanno Kesting and Reinhart Koselleck connected the universalism of the Enlightenment with the Terror, the latter in his important Critique and Crisis; that work's account of Freemasonry, secrecy, and totalitarianism was quickly translated into Spanish and published in Franco's Madrid under the auspices of the Catholic organization Opus Dei (266, n. 16). For this group of Schmitt´s followers, the entrance of universal morals into politics was itself the threat that would lead to a worldwide civil war (Ernst Nolte). The anti-Bolshevik and anti-American aspects of Schmitt´s work made an impression in Franco's Spain, where the regime intellectuals justified dictatorship as a defense of western values (134ff.). Schmitt hoped that a politicized "Iberian Catholicism" might overcome the crisis of secularization of the modern constitutional state (138). Modern constitutionalism cemented in place the secular state and freedom of individual conscience, which Schmitt had identified during the Nazi years as the germ of liberalism borne by the assimilated Jew Spinoza (41). Like Karl Lowith,Schmitt thought modernity affirmed the "Promethean self-empowerment of a deluded humanity" (109), which bore bloody consequences. Secularization demolished legitimacy instead of strengthening order. By implication, a secular modernity necessarily suffered from illegitimacy (157). And the inevitable problem of legitimacy involved, as Schmitt argued in his earlier writings, some kind of theological residue. Politics and theology were inseparable. Muller discusses two main challengers to Schmitt's "political theology." The first, Erik Peterson, had criticized Schmitt's doctrine of the Trinity already in 1935, and argued for the inevitable separation of politics and theology after Augustine. Muller shows well what was at stake in this debate forSchmitt--namely, his unity of Christianity and politics. He is less convincing in explaining Schmitt´s Gnostic response to Peterson--which, I suspect, was in fact of limited theological validity.Schmitt 's response to Hans Blumenberg's attempt to ground modernity as the qualitatively new "reoccupation" of old theological questions is also hard to follow. But the main point is clear: at issue in Schmitt 's "political theology" is a discrediting of the modern world--and an affirmation of "unquestioning political obedience to powers transcending worldly politics" (168). Part three of Muller's book turns to the post-1990 world, where the United States has repeatedly used military force to reach goals it claims are humanitarian and democratizing. Over the 1970s and 1980s, radicals on both left and right developed "Schmittian" criticisms of the United States that merged with a new rhetoric of antiglobalization. In Germany and Italy, left radicals used Schmitt to focus on the state of emergency: what they viewed as the normal repression of bourgeois society by means of parliamentarism was complemented by the state's direct suppression of the people in times of emergency (173). Political revolution gradually took on the form of a "miracle," and "political economy was replaced by a leftwing political theology" (179). The right, and in particular the newspaper Junge Freiheit, began citing Schmitt as well-although, Muller argues, the importance of Schmitt´s actual thought, as opposed to Schmittas symbol, for the new fight was unclear (212). But certainly both left and fight used the symbol of "old Europe" to resist the New World Order. Muller argues, and I think that he is correct, that the left's use of Schmitt to imply that liberal ethics and economics produced the violence of the 1990s reflects more than anything else a "theoretical paucity" after the collapse of Marxism (223). Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben, in different ways, launched attacks on the new American "empire," referring to the "permanent state of exception" and the new world of camps it entailed (229ff.). They attack liberalism for allegedly wanting to create a "people fully identical with itself"--itself a dubious argument. Muller notes that despite the criticism, an alternative politics is not clear. Of the many books on Carl Schmitt in English currently on the market, Muller's is the most important. For Schmitt´s significance does not lie in some abstract body of work--he will never achieve the status of careful scholars of modern law and politics like Marx, Weber, or Kelsen. His importance lies in his practical impact, in his ideas' contribution to the ongoing discussion of the end of "old European" thought. It is Muller's achievement to write a readable book describing this discussion, without falling victim to the myth of the man. Notes (1.) Dirk van Laak, Gesprache in der Sicherheit des Schweigens. Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der fruhen Bundesrepublik, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie, 2002). Peter C. Caldwell, History, Rice University |