Tuesday, 24 July 2012

Freedom and Necessity - Carl Schmitt and the Exception

A theory is an explanation of life and the world that attempts to encompass them in their totality by con-necting their parts in a systematic manner that is internally consistent and that, through this consistent nexus rerum, achieves the adaequatio rei et intellectus of Scholastic fame. It follows that a theory must connect the relationship of the parts to one another in a manner consistent with the systematicity of the whole. Consequently, regardless of the content of the theory, the con-nections between parts and of the parts in their totality must be necessary. This necessity removes any freedom that the parts may have had in relation to the totality in such a manner that the theory admits of no exception that is not re-conducible to or con-sistent with the totality and its systematicity.

This logical notion of freedom as the opposite of logical necessity has nothing to do with the political notion of freedom. It is instead the opposite of contingency, and in fact ought not to be called freedom at all! Freedom is a political notion the opposite of coercion (Arendt in LotM). Once the notion of freedom is reduced to the opposite of logical necessity, then it becomes mere contingency and is reduced to an onto-logical problem. The fact is that, as we are demonstrating here, there is no such thing as logical necessity so that all truths are contingent. But the fact that truth can be understood as logical necessity- that the necessity of logic is what makes it true - and that freedom can be mistaken for contingency means that truth or logical necessity can be abused or be used instrumentally for the purpose of political coercion! By this process, freedom of the will can be mistaken for a telos that, by positing the systematicity of life and the world as a totality becomes a quest for freedom from the will which is what the negatives Denken claims whilst at the same time, by denying the existence of freedom in a political sense (because it understands freedom only ontologically), denies the possibility of political freedom or else reduces it to contingency, to superfluity (Sartres de trop, Heideggers de-jection and Dasein as pro-ject). Freedom is understood then as universal Eris, as total conflict so that freedom is no longer a function of the will but the will becomes a function of freedom understood as cosmic contingency (Schelling).

Arendt correctly distinguishes between freedom (political) and contingency (ontological), pointing to their discrete opposites coercion or necessity, and logical necessity or irresistibility. But she fails to see that there is nothing irresistible or true about logicomathematics and science, that these are contingent, and that therefore these (contingent, arbitrary) conventions can be utilized for the purposes of coercion by erecting measurable frameworks of conduct (institutions) that force human conduct and choices into measurable channels or behavioral straitjackets. The irresistibility of mathesis can ec-sist only as a value, as truth, and therefore as a will to truth that is internalized to coerce human behaviour. This is the necessity of mathesis precisely, a restriction or channeling of human freedom understood not ontologically (as contingency, which is categorically not, and can-not be affected by mathesis) but rather politically.

The negatives Denken understands free-dom as the battleground of conflict between wills. For Weber, for instance, the individual will acts freely if it acts rationally; and rationality is defined as the wills choice of adequate means in pursuit of its own ends. This choice the will makes is therefore con-ditioned by the choices of other wills in conflict with it. In essence, for Weber, rationality is the game-theoretic strategy that is chosen by independent and conflicting wills freely pursuing their irreconcilable ends or wants whose provision is scarce. The freedom of the will is de-fined not intrinsically as in the Freiheit of German Idealism but rather instrumentally in terms of the relationship of given means to projected ends. It is free-dom in the sense of room to manoeuvre (Ellenbongsraum) - to maneuvre against other wills, that is. Thus, there can be no freedom of the will in the objective genitive. It is the will that is a function of free-dom, not the other way around which means that the freedom of the will has no positive universalistic telos or inter esse, but is rather the op-posite, the contrary of this inter esse. For the negatives Denken there is no freedom in an ab-solute, idealistic sense: freedom exists only as contingency, as the opposite of necessity, not of co-ercion - onto-logically, not politically! And insofar as there is freedom, as in Schopenhauer or Heidegger, this ec-sists only as transcendence, as a leap of faith, as intelligible freedom (even in Kant), as astute theology (note the etymological link between theory and theo-logy).

The negatives Denken replaces the Idealist Freiheit which, as we have seen, turns by reason of its systematicity into a quest for freedom from the will, from its arbitrariness, with the conversion of this teleological freedom into an instrumental free-dom, one that is intended not as a telos, as an aspiration, but rather as its opposite, as contingence, a mere lack of conceptual or material necessity; and thus it conceives of the Will as an antagonistic universal condition, as the obverse of Kants Dinge an sich. The de-struction of the telos of freedom invites and elicits the destruction of any system, of any teleological rule by means of the exception. For the negatives Denken the exception is not what con-firms the rule, not Hegels negation that is meaningfully re-absorbed by the negation of the negation. No such repechage is possible. Instead, it is the exception that determines the very essence of the rule, the truth of the system, by de-fining its limits. Schmitt quotes from Kierkegaard (in PT, p15): The exception explains the general *the rule, the system+ and itself. Yet if the exception explains the general, it can do so only if it de-structs the general or rule or system if it negates the system as a totality, as truth. Any attempt to erect the system to a universal application as the Sozialismus seeks to do in politics will result only in the suppression of any free-dom that remains beyond the grasp of the system and within the purview of the exception. Schmitt writes (p15):

It would be consequent rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme.

Here the negatives Denken can conceive of the will only as a destructive force that works or uses the world only in the sense of consuming it because the opposite, the will and its Arbeit as the creation of wealth, would entail the possibility of a common-wealth, of an inter esse common to all wills, and not merely a subjective greed-dom or appetitus. This destruction of truth, of the telos of freedom, entails also the de-struction of Reason and the Ratio as the summum bonum of humanity, as the Platonic Good. In this perspective, not only can the Logic not be a science as in Hegel and even in Kant where synthetic a priori judgements are made possible by Reason, but it becomes a mere instrument of the intellect this last understood as mere perceptions or sensations (Empfindungen) in accordance with causality and the principle of sufficient reason. Yet in much of the negatives Denken, from Schopenhauer to Weber for instance, the attachment to science and rationality (even when conceived as instrumental) remains steadfast. We have seen that Nietzsche ridicules this Schopenhauerian atavistic attachment to scientific and logical rationality, although it was his Educator who first insisted on the purely instrumental, non-theological, ontological status of logic (see G. Piana, Commenti su Schopenhauer., 2). Schmitt remains attached to this juridical notion of the exception:

That a neo-Kantian like Kelsen does not know what to do with the exception is obvious. But it should be of interest to the rationalist that the legal system itself can anticipate the exception and can suspend itself.But how the systematic unity and order can suspend itself in a concrete case is difficult to construe, and yet it remains a juristic problem as long as the exception is distinguishable from a juristic chaos, from any kind of anarchyFrom where does the law obtain this force, and how is it logically possible [m.e.] that a norm is valid except for one concrete case that it cannot factually determine? (p15)

We saw earlier in our Weberbuch that Bobbio moves the same objection to Weber and Kelsen against the neo-Kantian determination of the Norm and its sociological implications the fact that Norm must include also the notion of apparatus or coaction wherewith it can be enforced. This calls into question the notion of the State, which Schmitt so far does not explain. For the state of exception is one that, like the Hobbesian and Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean, calls into question the entire socio-ontological foundation of the state and society, and not merely the concept of a juridical legal order. Schmitt correctly identifies the two moments of the legal order the norm, what gives legitimacy to the legal order, and the decision, which gives effect to the legal order when it has legality. But the two moments legitimacy and norm on one side and legality and decision on the other remain distinct and separate to the point that they are aporetic and irreconcilable: this is the reality that the exception and the state of exception expose, regardless of whether the state of exception is an organized state or a state of anarchy! By pre-serving the conceptual legitimacy of the state as an entity Schmitt has a-voided the question that he had posed himself originally: - that is, how can a state exist as the foundation of a legal order founded on a norm when in fact the exception shows that it has no socioontological foundation?

A jurisprudence concerned with ordinary day-today questions has practically no interest in the concept of sovereignty. Only the recognizable is its normal concern; everything else is a "disturbance." Such a jurisprudence confronts the extreme case disconcertedly, for not every extraordinary measure, not every police emergency measure or emergency decree, is necessarily an exception. What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind. (PT, p13)

Let us recall that even for general equilibrium theory in economics it is those disturbances or noise that challenge the validity of the theory. Schmitt does well to challenge normal jurisprudence (legal positivism in large part). But he is wrong to insist on the legality of the state of exception and of its political State because the exception challenges both normality as well as its enforcer, the State, whose entire legitimacy and legality is destroyed by the exception!

The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute [a legibus soluta! Freed from laws]. The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say. The two elements of the concept legal order are then dissolved into independent notions and thereby testify to their conceptual independence. Unlike the normal situation, when the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to a minimum, the norm is destroyed in the exception. (p13)

In fact, more than just the norm is destroyed by the exception: the legitimacy and legality of the legal order and of its State is destroyed as well and our task is to find out how this can be so and why.

The exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence [14] because both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the juristic. It would be a distortion of the schematic disjunction between sociology and jurisprudence if one were to say that the exception has no juristic significance and is therefore "sociology." The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element - the decision in absolute purity. The exception appears

in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogeneous medium. This effective normal situation is not a mere "superficial presupposition" that a jurist can ignore; that situation belongs precisely to its immanent validity. There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists. All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision. Therein resides the essence of the state's sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide. The exception reveals most clearly the essence of the state's authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law. (pp13-4)

The fact that a legal order requires the legitimacy of the norm and the legality of the decision does not mean that, once the exception obtains, this exceptional decision remains within the framework of the juristic, because that begs the question of why the juristic brought about a situation in which the existing legal order could be suspended to allow the decision on the exception on which, Schmitt tells us, sovereignty is founded. Sovereignty, but not necessarily authority! This is why Schmitt is wrong to affirm as he does above that

[t]he exception reveals most clearly the essence of the state's authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law.

On the contrary, we say, the decision on the exception actually puts in question (!) the Statesauthority because the State could not have come to be a State of exception had its authority not been seriously undermined in the society governed by its legal order! The fact that Schmitt feels impelled to introduce without further explanation the novel notion of authority to prove that to produce law *the State+ need not be based on law is further evidence of his confusion on this point.

Schmitts analysis of the legal order as characterized by norm and decision - which in turn gives rise to the division of jurisprudential doctrines into normativist and decisionist is analogous to our earlier discussion of the notion of arbitrium which, in its moment as arbitration, involves an element of judgement founded on rational principles, but then in its arbitrary moment is characterized by the actual decision which is no longer based on rational principles but rather resides with the actual person (or will) responsible for making that decision. Irrespective of how this responsible person is appointed or charged with making a decision, the ultimate arbitrariness of the process cannot be gainsaid. This is the limit of Weberian rationality (discussed by Schmitt on p27), one whose formal properties, in the absence of any substantive element of humaninter esse, must ultimately be founded on irrational principles. This salient point is made quite validly by Lowith in his review of Schmitts jurisprudence because Schmitt, unlike Nietzsche, never moves beyond the challenge of the rule (the rationalist order or system) and insists instead on the juristic nature of the decision on the exception. In other words, Schmitt himself, though challenging normativism and positivism from the wholly other of the exception or disturbance, simply fails to tackle critically the entire notion of law and of the legal order. Schmitt understands the political in a Hobbesian sense the state of nature as a status belli in which the State does not play a neutral role but an interested one that includes its self-preservation. But the elision of the complex transition from individuals to association to State orres publica or common-wealth is never outlined or even tackled by Schmitt who simply hypostatizes the State uncritically as an Idol. This is the basis of Lowiths critique, although he focuses on the role of the individual in any association that becomes a legal order with a State.

El puro decisionismo, tal como fue defendido de manera clsica por Hobbes, presupone un "desorden" que slo puede convertirse en un orden por medio de la decisin; esta decisin aparece, pero ahora tambin ella misma, como una decisin para una "vida comunitaria" ordenada, cuya expresin jurdica es el pensamiento del orden y ya no el pensamiento en el sentido de mera decisin.83 (p77 in Heidegger)

In what Schmitt calls the age of neutralization, the terminus ad quem of romanticism is to attain the realization of the system so as to eliminate conflict from social life and with it to neutralizethe political. This is the aim of all scientism and rationalism. But by the political, Schmitt means conflict, its ineluctability even and especially in the state of nature. Hobbes saw the political as the way out of the state of nature, which he conceived of as pre-political. His starting point was the in-dividuum, just like the point in Euclid, and its self-interest, which consisted principally of the a-voidance of death and the pre-servation of life. This is the foundation of the common weal and therefrom, mechanically or more geometrico, of the common-wealth, of the State. Schmitt instead starts with the State as an interested party in what is the political state of nature, which, contrary to Hobbes, does not begin with individual selfinterest but rather with the division of humanity into friends and foes. For Schmitt therefore the state of nature is not pre-political, but rather the very essence of the political. (Cf. the famous review of Schmitt by Leo-Strauss.)

This is why the State is not and cannot be wholly other or neutral, like the Protestant God or the State of Law of Political Economy. The State does not stand, as in Hobbes and the liberal tradition, au dessus de la melee: it is an interest in society; its interest is the preservation of itself as state, as the legal order. And this preservation depends on a political decision, on sovereignty that is not assigned by law but that is rather the very content of law.

To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology. (p2)

As the defensor pacis (Marsilius), the State is not the pro-duct of the con-vergence or con-vention of individual self-interests as found in the state of nature (the degree zero of politics). Rather, the State is a direct product of the conflict, of the di-vergence of these self-interests so that the State remains conceptually tied to the state of nature it does not transcend it. There is no meeting of the minds or wills upon which the State can be founded; rather, the State is the sovereign that can preserve social peace not by mediating or reconciling the conflicting interests of the state of nature, but rather by ensuring that friends keep the foes in check. The State is not a product of law, and thence sub-ordinate to law. Instead, the State as sovereign determines the content of the law, it does not ascertain it; it does not find it; it creates it. This is contrary to the legal positivism of Kelsen and Krabbe that Schmitt sternly eschews:

[For Krabbe, t]he state is confined exclusively to producing law. But this does not mean that it produces the content of law. It does nothing but ascertain the legal value of interests as it springs from the people's feeling or sense of right. Therein resides a double limitation: first, a limitation on law, in contrast with interest or welfare, in short, with what is known in Kantian jurisprudence as "matter"; second, a limitation on the declaratory but by no means constitutive act of ascertaining. I will show that the problem of law as a substantial form lies precisely in this act of ascertaining. (PT, p23)

The genius of Hobbes was to posit the alienation of personal freedom (the freedom of the will) for the sake of the preservation of life: this last is what supplies the con-ventum, the agreement on

which the State as common wealth can be erected consistently the system or order or freedom from the will. This is the truth, the rationalist inter esse of Hobbess political theory that is exalted in all the liberalist interpretations of his theory (starting with Leo Strauss). But for Schmitt, no such inter esse exists or can exist because the State is not super partes; it is a partisan that de-fines the political boundary between friend and foe, a boundary that is absolutely inescapable not merely in foro externo, with regard to other, foreign States, but also and above all with regard to the conflicts internal to the state, in foro interno. And herein lies the paramount importance of the exception. The State, or the sovereign, is he who decides on the exception. This de-cision is as I now style it an incision in time: it is a pivotal point that arbitrarily, not rationally or systematically or formally, founds the battleground of politics and thusprotects and preserves the social peace. Protection that must be traded for obedience: not (!) in a con-sensual manner; only in an authoritarian fashion.

Among the newer representatives of association theory is Kurt Wolzendorff, who has tried to use the theory to solve "the problem of a new epoch of state. Among his numerous works,'^ his last is of the greatest interest here. Its starting point is that the state needs law and law needs the state; but "law, as the deeper principle, holds the state in check in the final analysis." The state is the original power of rule, but it is so as the power of order, as the "form" of national life and not an arbitrary force applied by just any authority. What is demanded of this power is that it intervene only when the free individual or associational act proves to be insufficient; it should remain in the background as the ultima ratio. What is subject to order must not be coupled with economic, social, or cultural interests; these must be left to self-government. That a certain "maturity" belongs to self-government could, incidentally, make Wolzendorffs postulates dangerous, because in historical reality such historical-pedagogic problems often take an unexpected turn from discussion to dictatorship. WolzendorfF's pure state confines itself to maintaining order. To this state also belongs the formation of law, because all law is simultaneously a problem of the existence of the state order. The state should preserve law; it is "guardian, not master," guardian, not a mere "blind servant," and "responsible and ultimate guarantor." Wolzendorff sees in the idea of soviets an expression of this tendency to associational self-government, to confining the state to the "pure" function that belongs to it. I don't believe that Wolzendorff was aware of how close he came with his "ultimate guarantor" to the authoritarian theory of the state, which is so completely antithetical to the associational and democratic conception of the state. This is why his last work, compared with those of Krabbe and other representatives of the association theory mentioned, is particularly important. It focuses the discussion on the decisive concept, namely, that of the form in its substantive sense. The authority of the order is valued so highly, and the function of guarantor is of such independence,

that the state is no longer only the ascertainer or the "externally formal" transformer of the idea of law. The problem that arises is to what extent, with legal-logical necessity, every ascertainment and decision contains a constitutive element, an intrinsic value of form. (PT, pp25-6)

It is the maturity of the association (the Gemeinschaft of Tonnies, Gierke) that Schmitt disputes. Only the State, by protecting its friends, can ensure that its foes do not subvert the legal order. The formal or normative (neo-Kantian) approach to the legal order can be counterproductive or even self-destructive when its formal guarantees (Constant) are exploited by the foes of the State so as to undermine the authority of the ultimate guarantor, the State. It is at that precise stage that the State must declare a state of exception, suspend the existing legal order, and take all necessary actions to protect its friends and re-establish a fresh legal order or restore the old one. There is no neutrality in the State: the State must decide when a state of exception exists. This exception and the decision that enacts it challenge the normative approach to law and the legal order by ex-posing the political or substantive rather than jurisprudential or formal foundations of all legal orders.

The objections that those most erudite liberal critics of Schmitt, from Leo Strauss to Lowith, move to his theory of politics all presume the existence of a Ratio-Ordo that legally-logically necessarily requires the State to be subordinate to the law, whose content is then supposed to emerge or spring from the community. Yet, if this comunitas actually existed, if its truth were real, then there would be no need of a State in the first place! Contra Schmitt, however, it can be said that he fails to explain how a State can come into being at all! Yes, indeed: a decision may be auf Nichts gestellt be taken out of nothing, that is, be the product of pure arbitrium -, but not a State, because a State is composed of in-dividuals whose selfinterests must somehow converge so as to form a friend-ship, a group of friends opposed to their foes: and this con-vergence or conventum, must have a con-ventional basis that as such can be recognized by all parties to it. Schmitt makes the fundamental error of thinking that there can be an intrinsic value of form (see above), that form and substance can meet in the decision because the decision is exceptional with respect to what is the normal legal order, and seeks to preserve it. But if this were correct, then it would be the normal that explains the exception, and not the other way around as Schmitt had argued earlier! His notion of decision is simply too formal, it lacks sub-stance, and therefore cannot provide a proper account of the State even one that challenges the ratio or telos of its classical theories.

Friday, 17 August 2012

Freedom and Necessity in the Negatives Denken

Freedom and Necessity - Schmitt and the Exception
A. The Exception and the Rule

A theory is an explanation of life and the world that attempts to encompass them in their totality by con-necting their parts in a systematic manner that is internally consistent and that, through this consistent nexus rerum, achieves the adaequatio rei et intellectus of Scholastic fame. It follows that a theory must connect the relationship of the parts to one another in a manner consistent with the systematicity of the whole. Consequently, regardless of the content of the theory, the con-nections between parts and of the parts in their totality must be necessary. This necessity removes any freedom that the parts may have had in relation to the totality in such a manner that the theory admits of no exception that is not re-conducible to or con-sistent with the totality and its systematicity. This logical notion of freedom as the opposite of logical necessity has nothing to do with thepolitical notion of freedom. Indeed, political freedom is not analogous to contingency or chance, it is instead their opposite and in fact ought not to be called freedom at all! Freedom is a political notion the opposite of coercion (Arendt in LotM). Once the notion of freedom is reduced to the opposite of logical necessity, then it becomes mere contingency and is reduced to an onto-logical problem. The fact is that, as we are demonstrating here, there is no such thing as logical necessity so that all truths are contingent. But the fact that truth can be understood as logical or scientific necessity- that the necessity of logic or science is what makes it true - and that freedom can be mistaken for contingency or chance means that truth or logico-mathematical necessity can be abused or be used instrumentally for the purpose of political coercion! By this process, freedom of the will can be mistaken for a telos that, by positing the systematicity of life and the world as a totality becomes a quest for freedom from the will which is what the negatives Denken claims whilst at the same time, by denying the existence of freedom in a political sense (because it understands freedom only ontologically), it denies the possibility of political freedom or else reduces it to contingency, to superfluity (Sartres de trop, Heideggers de-jection and Dasein as pro-ject). Freedom is understood then as universal Eris, as total conflict so that freedom is no longer a function of the will but the will becomes a function of freedom understood as cosmic contingency (Schelling). It is this reduction of political freedom to contingency or chance to free-dom - that is clearly unacceptable in the negatives Denken. Yet the valuable and valid aspect of the remarkably novel and revealing approach to freedom taken by the negatives Denken is that it re-introduces the notion of decision (in Schmitt, resolve *Gewiss+ in Nietzsche, and resoluteness or disclosure *Entschlossenheit+ in Heidegger), and therefore of the effect of one will coming into conflict with another, which is the essence of the Political. Arendt correctly distinguishes between freedom (political) and contingency (ontological), pointing to their discrete opposites coercion or necessity, and logical necessity or irresistibility. But she fails to see that there is nothing irresistible or true about logicomathematics and science, that these also are contingent and conventional, and that therefore these (contingent, arbitrary) conventions can be utilized for the purposes of coercion by erecting measurable frameworks of conduct (institutions) that force human conduct and choices into measurable channels or behavioral straitjackets. The irresistibility of mathesis can ec-sist only as a value, as truth, and therefore as a will to truth that is internalized to coerce human behaviour. This is the necessity of mathesis precisely, a restriction or channeling of human

freedom understood not ontologically (as contingency, which is categorically not, and can-not be affected by mathesis) but rather politically. The negatives Denken understands free-dom as the battleground of conflict between wills. For Weber, for instance, the individual will acts freely if it acts rationally; and rationality is defined as the wills choice of adequate means in pursuit of its own ends. This choice the will makes is therefore con-ditioned by the choices of other wills in conflict with it. In essence, for Weber, rationality is the game-theoretic strategy that is chosen by independent and conflicting wills freelypursuing their irreconcilable ends or wants whose provision is scarce. The freedom of the will is de-fined not intrinsically as in the Freiheit of German Idealism but rather instrumentally in terms of the relationship of given means to projected ends. It is freedom in the sense of room to manoeuvre (Ellenbongsraum) to manoeuvre against other wills, that is. Thus, there can be no freedom of the will in the objective genitive. It is the will that is a function of free-dom, not the other way around which means that the freedom of the will has no positive universalistic telos or inter esse, but is rather the op-posite, the contrary of this inter esse. This crucial kernel of Webers Wissenschaftslehre is clearly perceived by the great jusnaturalist philosopher Leo Strauss in a passage that is worth quoting for its impressive perspicacity:

Let us assume that we had genuine knowledge of right and wrong, or of the Ought, or of the true value system. That knowledge, while not derived from empirical science, would legitimately direct all empirical social science; it would be the foundation of a l l empirical social science. For social science is meant to be of practical value. It tries to find means for given ends. For this purpose it has to understand the ends. Regardless of whether the ends are " g i v e n " in a different manner from the means, the end and the means belong together; therefore, "the end belongs to the same science as the means."9 If there were genuine knowledge of the ends, that knowledge would naturally guide all search for means. There would be no reason to delegate knowledge of the ends to social philosophy and the search for the means to an independent social science. Based on genuine knowledge of the true ends, social science would search for the proper means to those ends; it would lead up to objective and specific value judgments regarding policies. Social science would be a truly policy-making, not to say architectonic, science rather than a mere supplier of data for the teal policymakers. The true reason why Weber insisted on the ethically neutral character of social science as well as of social philosophy was, then, not his belief in the fundamental opposition of the Is and the Ought but his belief that there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought. He denied to man any science, empirical or rational, any knowledge, scientific or philosophic, of the true value system: the true value system does not exist; there is a variety of values which are of the same 42 NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY rank, whose demands conflict with one another, and whose

conflict cannot be solved by human reason. Social science or social philosophy can do no more than clarify that conflict and all i t s implications; the solution has to be left to the free, nonrational decision of each individual. I contend that Weber's thesis necessarily leads to nihilism or to the view that every preference, however evil, base, or insane, has to be judged before the tribunal of reason to be as legitimate as any other preference. (L. Strauss in Natural Right and History)
For the negatives Denken there is no freedom in an ab-solute, idealistic sense: freedom exists only as contingency, as the opposite of necessity, not of co-ercion - onto-logically, not politically! And insofar as there is freedom, as in Schopenhauer or Heidegger, this ec-sists only as transcendence, as a leap of faith, as intelligible freedom, as the ab-strusion of the Will from the world either as self-awareness (even in Kants astute theology *note the etymological link between theory and theo-logy+) or as the possibility of nothing-ness, as pro-ject (as in Heideggers Da-sein). The negatives Denken replaces the Idealist Freiheit which, as we have seen, turns by reason of its systematicity into a quest for freedom from the will, from its arbitrariness, with the conversion of this teleological freedom into an instrumental free-dom, one that is intended not as a telos, as an aspiration, but rather as its opposite, as decision, and therefore as contingence, a mere lack of conceptual or material necessity; and thus it conceives of the Will as an antagonistic universal condition, as the obverse of Kants Dinge an sich. The de-struction of the telos of freedom and its reduction to conflictual and contingent free-dom invites and elicits the destruction of any system, of any teleological rule by means of the exception. The only real decision possible is ultimately a decision on the exception. For the negatives Denken the exception and the decision it entails necessarily is not what con-firms the rule, not Hegels negation that is meaningfully and dialectically re-absorbed within the rational System or Science of Logic by the negation of the negation. No such repechage is possible for the negatives Denken. Instead, it is the exception that determines the very essence of the rule, the truth of the system, by de-fining its limits. Schmitt quotes from Kierkegaard (in PT, p15): The exception explains the general *the rule, the system+ and itself. Yet if the exception explains the general, it can do so only if it de-structs the general or rule or system if it negates the system as a totality, as truth. Any attempt to erect the system to a universal application as the Sozialismus seeks to do in politics with the harmonious State-less society and in politics with the just remuneration of labour value will result only in the suppression of any freedom that remains beyond the grasp of the system and within the purview of the exception. Schmitt writes (p15):

It would be consequent rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme.
Here the negatives Denken can conceive of the will only negatively as a destructive force that works or uses the world only in the sense of consuming it because the opposite, the will and itsArbeit as the creation of wealth, would entail the possibility of a common-wealth, of an inter esse common to all wills, and not merely a subjective greed-dom or appetitus. This destruction of truth, of the telos of freedom, entails also the de-struction of Reason and the Ratio

as the summum bonum of humanity, as the Platonic Good. (Lukacss indictment of this tragic denouement into what he calls nihilism in Der Zerstorung der Vernunft and his late-Romantic championing of Reason is pathetic in the extreme and serves only to highlight the Wille zur Ohnmacht of theLinkskommunismus at the time of the Weimar Republic.) In this perspective, not only can the Logic not be a science as in Hegel and even in Kant where synthetic a priori judgements are made possible by Reason, but it becomes a mere instrument of the intellect this last understood as mere perceptions or sensations (Empfindungen) in accordance with causality and the principle of sufficient reason. Yet in much of the negatives Denken, from Schopenhauer to Weber for instance, the attachment to science and rationality (even when conceived as instrumental) remains steadfast. We have seen that Nietzsche ridicules this Schopenhauerian atavistic attachment to scientific and logical rationality, although it was his Educator who first insisted on the purely instrumental, non-theological, ontological status of logic (see G. Piana, Commenti su Schopenhauer., 2). Schmitt remains attached to this juridical notion of the exception:

That a neo-Kantian like Kelsen does not know what to do with the exception is obvious. But it should be of interest to the rationalist that the legal system itself can anticipate the exception and can suspend itself.But how the systematic unity and order can suspend itself in a concrete case is difficult to construe, and yet it remains a juristic problem as long as the exception is distinguishable from a juristic chaos, from any kind of anarchyFrom where does the law obtain this force, and how is itlogically possible [m.e.] that a norm is valid except for one concrete case that it cannot factually determine? (p15)
We saw earlier in our Weberbuch that Bobbio moves the same objection to Weber and Kelsen against the neo-Kantian determination of the Norm and its sociological implications the fact that Norm must include also the notion of apparatus or coaction wherewith it can be enforced. This calls into question the notion of the State, which Schmitt so far does not explain. For the state of exception is one that, like the Hobbesian and Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean, calls into question the entire socio-ontological foundation of the state and society, and not merely the concept of a juridical legal order. Schmitt correctly identifies the two moments of the legal order the norm, what gives legitimacy to the legal order, and the decision, which gives effect to the legal order when it has legality. But the two moments legitimacy and norm on one side and legality and decision on the other remain distinct and separate to the point that they are aporetic and irreconcilable: this is the reality that the exception and the state of exception expose, regardless of whether the state of exception is an organized state or a state of anarchy! By pre-serving the conceptual legitimacy of the state as an entity Schmitt has a-voided the question that he had posed himself originally: - that is, how can a state exist as the foundation of a legal order founded on a norm when in fact the exception shows that it has no socioontological foundation?

If measures undertaken in an exception could be circumscribed by mutual control, by imposing a time limit, or finally, as in the liberal constitutional procedure governing a state of siege, by enumerating extraordinary powers, the question of sovereignty would then be considered less significant but would certainly not be eliminated. A jurisprudence concerned with ordinary day-to-day questions has practically no interest in the concept of sovereignty.

Only the recognizable is its normal concern; everything else is a "disturbance." Such a jurisprudence confronts the extreme case disconcertedly, for not every extraordinary measure, not every police emergency measure or emergency decree, is necessarily an exception. What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind. (PT, pp13-13)
Let us recall that even for general equilibrium theory in economics it is those disturbances or noise that challenge the validity of the theory. Schmitt does well to challenge normal jurisprudence (legal positivism in large part). But he is wrong to insist on the legality of the state of exception and of its political State because the exception challenges both normality as well as its enforcer, the State, whose entire legitimacy and legality is destroyed by the exception!

The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say. The two elements of the concept legal order are then dissolved into independent notions and thereby testify to their conceptual independence. Unlike the normal situation, when the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to a minimum, the norm is destroyed in the exception. (p13)
In fact, more than just the norm is destroyed by the exception: the legitimacy and legality of the legal order and of its State is destroyed as well and our task is to find out how this can be so and why. It is therefore incongruous and inconsistent with his realist-decisionist approach to political theory for Schmitt to insist that *in+ the normal situation, <.the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to a minimum, because this minimum is the spoonful of tar that spoils the barrel of honey!

We cannot therefore agree with what Schmitt contends below:

The exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence [14] because both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the juristic. It would be a distortion of the schematic disjunction between sociology and jurisprudence if one were to say that the exception has no juristic significance and is therefore "sociology." The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element - the decision in absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be

factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogeneous medium. This effective normal situation is not a mere "superficial presupposition" that a jurist can ignore; that situation belongs precisely to its immanent validity. There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists. (p13)
But the exception assumes paramount importance in Schmitts unquestionably provocative reformulation of the theory of the state and of legal order not for the occurrence of the sovereign deciding that a normal situation actually exists, but rather for deciding the opposite that a normal situation does not exist and that a state of exception is declared! The extent of Schmitts confusion is amply demonstrated by the suite to this paragraph:

All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision. Therein resides the essence of the state's sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide. The exception reveals most clearly the essence of the state's authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law. (pp13-4)
The fact that a legal order requires the legitimacy of the norm and the legality of the decision does not mean that, once the exception obtains, this exceptional decision remains within the framework of the juristic, because that begs the question of why the juristic brought about a situation in which the existing legal order could be suspended to allow the decision on the exception on which, Schmitt tells us, sovereignty is founded. Sovereignty, but not necessarily authority! Yes, indeed, *t+he decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law. But in parting from the legal norm the decision actually radically questions, challenges and finallynegates the legal-logical foundations of both the legal norm and of the States authority as well! The decision on the exception actually negates (!) the States authority except in its meaning as coercion and coaction because the State could not have come to be a State of exception had its authority not been seriously undermined in the society governed by its legal order! The fact that Schmitt feels impelled to introduce without further explanation the novel notion of authorityto prove that to produce law *the State+ need not be based on law is further evidence of his confusion on this point.

B. The Decision and the Will

Schmitt perceives the difficulty, which explains why he seeks to compromise his formulation of the pivotal relation of exception and decision:

The assertion that the exception is truly appropriate for the juristic definition of sovereignty has a systematic, legal-logical foundation. The decision on the exception is a decision in the true sense of the word. Because a general norm, as represented by an ordinary legal prescription, can never encompass a total exception, the decision that a real exception exists cannot therefore be entirely derived from this norm. (PT, pp5-6)
Yet, if the decision that a real exception exists cannot therefore be entirely derived from this *general+ norm, then no decision on the exception can ever be a decision in the true sense of the word because its decisiveness, its quiddity or facticity is then violated or vitiated by the fact that it is partially derived from the general norm that re-conduces it to the sphere of the juristic. Schmitt has here resurrected the neo-Kantian conception of law and the State. That explains why he is then impelled to resort to the notion of sovereignty as a systematic, legallogical foundation quite an exceptional (!) claim for the theoretician of the exception as the subversion of rational systems! Again, in the attempt to recuperate this systematic-rational concept of sovereignty which must be juristically defined correctly! - for the State within the homology of the neo-Kantian legal form, Schmitt is even prepared to call into play (in the tradition of Jaspers and Lukacs) the notion of totality. - All of which is antinomic to the notion of exception that Schmitt champions in this work! Schmitts analysis of the legal order as characterized by norm and decision - which in turn gives rise to the division of jurisprudential doctrines into normativist and decisionist is analogous to our earlier discussion of the notion (in The Philosophy of the Flesh) of arbitrium which, in its moment as arbitration, involves an element of judgement founded on rational principles (understood even in a Weberian fashion), but then in its arbitrary moment is characterized by the actual decision which is no longer based on rational legal-logical or formal principles but rather resides with the actual person (or will) responsible for making that decision. Irrespective of how this responsible person is appointed or charged with making a decision, the ultimate arbitrariness of the process as well as of the content of the decision cannot be gainsaid. Schmitt incisively proves this argument by pointing out that even a wrong or false decision remains a valid decision from this perspective!

That the legal idea cannot translate itself independently can be is evident from the fact that it says nothing about who should apply it.That it is the instance of competence that renders a decision, makes the decision relative, and in certain circumstances absolute and independent of the correctness of its content.A legal validity is attributed to a wrong and faulty decision. The wrong decision assumes a constitutive element precisely because of its falseness. (PT, p31)
It is the fact the substantive content of a decision, its effectuality that even a false or wrong decision is still a valid decision that shows conclusively how dependent the legal idea or norm is on the authority of the person who decides which the legal idea as such cannotindicate. Schmitts devastatingly blunt argument here is entirely identical with Nietzsches apocalyptic remark in Wille zur Macht that seen from the moral viewpoint, the world is false!What is false, of course, is the moral viewpoint and not the world, because it is the world thatenables and constitutes the moral viewpoint. Similarly with the legal norm, it is the norm and

not the decision, not the personality of the decision, the Sovereign, that can be false not the other way around!

Kelsen solved the problem of the concept of sovereignty by negating it. The result of his deduction is that "the concept of sovereignty must be radically repressed." This is in fact the old liberal negation of the state vis-i-vis law and the disregard of the independent problem of the realization of law. This conception has received a significant exposition by Hugo Krabbe. His theory of the sovereignty of laws rests on the thesis that it is not the state but law that is sovereign. (PT, p21)
This is the limit of Weberian rationality (discussed by Schmitt on p27), one whose formal properties, in the absence of any substantive element of human inter esse, must ultimately be founded on what are in its own terms irrational principles. This salient point is made quite validly by Lowith in his review of Schmitts jurisprudence because Schmitt, unlike Nietzsche, never moves beyond the challenge of the rule (the rationalist order or system) and insists instead on the juristic nature of the decision on the exception. In other words, Schmitt himself, though challenging normativism and positivism from the wholly other of the exception or disturbance, simply fails to tackle critically the entire notion of law and of the legal order. Schmitt understands the political in a Hobbesian sense the state of nature as a status belli in which the State does not play a neutral role but an interested one that includes its selfpreservation. But the elision of the complex transition from individuals to association to State orres publica or common-wealth is never outlined or even tackled by Schmitt who simply hypostatizes the State uncritically as an Idol.

This is the basis of Lowiths critique, although he focuses on the role of the individual in any association that becomes a legal order with a State.

El puro decisionismo, tal como fue defendido de manera clsica por Hobbes, presupone un "desorden" que slo puede convertirse en un orden por medio de la decisin; esta decisin aparece, pero ahora tambin ella misma, como una decisin para una "vida comunitaria" ordenada, cuya expresin jurdica es el pensamiento del orden y ya no el pensamiento en el sentido de mera decisin.83 (p77 in Heidegger)
This is the ambivalence in Schmitt: on one hand, the decision is a qualified decision, that is, a judgement that presupposes a criterion of whether or not an order or normality exists. On the other hand, the decision, in its arbitrariness, is not subject to any pre-existing criteria whatsoever it is sheer naked violence. That is why Lowith is both right to criticize Schmitts decision for being auf Nichts gestellt but at the same time he is wrong because it is this nothing that founds the violence of the mere decision, its facticity life as exploitation (Nietzsche). The objections that those most erudite liberal critics of Schmitt, from Leo Strauss to Lowith, move to his theory of politics all presume the existence of a Ratio-Ordo that legallylogically necessarily requires the State to be subordinate to the law, whose content is then supposed to emerge or spring from the community. Yet, if this comunitas actually existed, if its truth were real, then there would be no need of a State in the first

place! Contra Schmitt, however, it can be said that he fails to explain how a State can come into being at all! Yes, indeed: a decision may be auf Nichts gestellt be taken out of nothing, that is, be the product of purearbitrium -, but not a State, because a State is composed of individuals whose self-interests must somehow converge so as to form a friend-ship, a group of friends opposed to their foes: and this con-vergence or conventum, must have a conventional basis that as such can be recognized by all parties to it. Schmitt makes the fundamental error of thinking that there can be an intrinsic value of form (see above), that form and substance can meet in the decision because the decision is exceptional with respect to what is the normal legal order, and seeks to preserve it. But if this were correct, then once again it would be the normal that explains the exception, and not the other way around as Schmitt had argued earlier! His notion of decision is simply too formal, it lacks sub-stance, and therefore cannot provide a proper account of the State even one that challenges the ratio or telos of its classical theories.

And therein lies the paramount importance of the exception. The State, or the sovereign, is he who decides on the exception. This de-cision is as I now style it an incision in time: it is a pivotal point that arbitrarily, not rationally or systematically or formally, founds thebattleground of politics and thus protects and preserves the social peace. Protection that must be traded for obedience: not (!) in a con-sensual manner, but only in an authoritarian fashion.

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' Only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept. Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature, a borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine. It will soon become clear that the exception is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege.
There are two sides to the decision, then two sides of the border-line. One side belongs to the establishment of the legal norm so that normal decisions can be made as routine. The other side of the decision, however, is its real foundation, its facticity that simply cannot be comprehended as part of the norm, of a rule or order or system or unity or totality, or indeed of truth. It is this materiality or substantiality of the decision that makes Schmitt invoke Hobbes approvingly: Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem. The exception, therefore, is the truth of normality, as Schmitt claims. But as this obverse, as this wholly other of the legal norm, the decision itself as e-voked by the exception is not and cannot be com-prehended by the norm, because it lies wholly outside the norm! (Recall our discussion of Arendts constituent power and constituted power in Part Four of the Weberbuch.) The decision on the exception, which is the mark and seal of sovereignty, is an either-or, an aut-aut that founds the legal norm. This legal norm, in turn, grants legality to the sovereign but it does not itself have legitimacy. The legitimacy of the legal norm is its legality but legality cannot legitimate the legal norm. Only if the law possessed an implicit truth could it found itself, legitimate itself. But it does not: the

truth of the law is authority, the fact of the decision, its power to coerce, its command, which cannot be founded on legality but on legitimacy or competence.

The legal prescription, as the norm of decision, only designates how decisions should be made, not who should decide. In the absence of a pivotal authority, anybody can refer to the correctness of the content. But the pivotal authority is not derived from the norm of decision. Accordingly, the question is that of competence, a question that cannot be raised by and much less answered from the content of the legal quality of a maxim. (PT, pp32-3)
*A similar argument, though from rationalist positions, is made by Rafael Agapito in his lengthy and appreciable introduction to the Spanish translation of El Concepto de la Politica. With unusual perspicacity, Agapito explains how Schmitt so keen to supplant the juridic form with the political substance of the decision succumbs to his own brand of formalism, in that the decision, as an ultimate instance or ultima ratio, becomes simply an onto-logical category, that of facticity or quidditas (Dass-Sein), and not what Schmitt intended it to be originally, a historical-substantive and political, as well as part-juridical one. The merit of Agapitos review and critique of Schmitt is to have seen that the political is not and cannot be irreconcilable or eristic, as Schmitt and the entire negatives Denken (its negativity consists largely in this) presume because at the very least, as in Hobbess version of it as the fear of death (not its inevitability, as in Heidegger, but its fear), the Political must involve an element of inter-subjectivity, the foundation, the co-hesion of the polity and the disputandum that it occasions. Yet the vice of his critique is to posit the requisite inter-subjectivity still in terms of what liesbetween subjects that remain irreducibly in-dividual, a-tomic and atomized. Consequently, Agapito elevates and even glorifies the liberal-bourgeois Constitution without looking closely at the effective correspondence of this Constitution to the will of the people: he approaches the liberal legal order in terms of its own selfunderstanding and not in terms of material Constitution which is essentially the critique that Marx moved against Hegels theory of the State. Agapito pretends to substitute idealistically if not ideologically the arbitrary, conjunctural will of the negatives Denken with the social unity, as against mere homogeneity of the people that Schmitt refutes, supposedly supplied by a mythical intersubjective criterion that Agapito recklessly attributes to liberal bourgeois constitutions!

La razn ltima de este dilema ha de buscarse menos en el concepto mismo de soberana que en cmo se concibe el sujeto de sta: ste se entiende comnmente como pura voluntad en abstracto, como voluntad subjetiva_y emprica de los individuos a los que concierne ese principio democrtico. Se trata en consecuencia de una voluntad de carcter arbitrario, coyuntural, que no puede fundar ninguna unidad social. De ah derivan las aporas a que conduce este dilema. La voluntad poltica (ya sea constituyente o ya sea ordinaria) se define como poder, porque esa realidad meramente emprica de voluntades subjetivas y discretas no incluye ningn criterio intersubjetivo, y en consecuencia no puede dar lugar ms que a la lucha y a la imposicin de posiciones unilateralmente definidas. (Agapito, Intro to El COncepto, p31.)]
For Schmitt, politics means conflict, even to the extent that the sovereignty or authority of the State is disputed. For Hobbes, political theory entails the end of politics. Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem: Hobbes admits that his subjects cannot engage in a contractum unionis unless this becomes im-mediately a contractum subjectionis. But how can this be? What value does life or the fear of death have in Hobbess theory that can lead out of the bellum civium? There is a glaring

contradiction here between the truth or Ratio of the preservation of life this inter esse and the authority that is needed to found the Law of the social contract, and the State with it. This is quite apart from the inability of Hobbesian theory to explain the distribution of power in a society, except in a mechanical manner which cannot account for historical transformations. If a historical state of nature exists, in which life is nasty brutish and short how can the selfsame individuals who populate the state of nature, mere a-toms who do not share anything except their con-flicting free-doms, agree to exit it?

Hobbes says that power as a Euclidean (geometric) and Galileian-Newtonian (mechanical) hypothesis can be hypostatized in the State, by rational convention: thus scientific rationality is comforted by rational free choice: freedom and necessity are reconciled. In Schmitts words, for Hobbes the machine runs itself! Schmitt and Heidegger reject this possibility as the idealistic mirage of the era of bourgeois Enlightenment. For Hobbes, infinitely small points can form a line; for Schmitt instead, more consistently, the line remains a point. For Hobbes, the facticity of authority does turn into the truth of law and the State through the rational free choice of selfinterested individuals in the state of nature. In Schmitt, instead, the facticity of authority rules over the law and the State which is why the authority of law and the State (the force of law) must return to the subject of the decision, the command and the in-divisible will of the sovereign in-dividual.

Words such as order, system, and unity are only circumscriptions of the same postulate, which must demonstrate how it can be fulfilled in its purity. It has to be shown how a system can arise on the foundation of a "constitution" (which is either a further tautological circumscription of the "unity" or a brutal sociopolitical reality). The systematic unity is, according to Kelsen, an "independent act of juristic perception. " Let us for now disregard the interesting mathematical assumption that a point must be an order as well as a system and must also be identical with a norm; let us ask another question: On what does the intellectual necessity and objectivity of the various ascriptions with the various points of ascription rest if it does not rest on a positive determination, on a command? (p20)
For Schmitt the Euclidean line retains the essential properties of the point, the point cannot merge into a line except through a meta-physical projectio per hiatus irrationalem. The Sovereign or the State remains an individual, an indivisible will. The Sover-reign may reign but not rule only in situations or legal orders, from constitutional monarchies to liberal parliamentary democracies, in which the ultima ratio, the ultimate foundation of authority or competence is carefully hidden from view. But in the naked brutal reality of the Political the indivisibility of decision and sovereignty cannot be avoided.

The decisive point about Bodin's concept is that by referring to the emergency, he reduced his analysis of the relationships between prince and estates to a simple either/or. This is what is truly impressive in his definition of sovereignty; by considering sovereignty to be indivisible, he finally settled the

question of power in the state. His scholarly accomplishment and the basis for his success thus reside in his having incorporated the decision into the concept of sovereignty.(p8)
This is why the State is not and cannot be wholly other or neutral, like the Protestant God or the State of Law of Political Economy. The State does not stand, as in Hobbes and the liberal tradition, au dessus de la melee: it is an interest in society; its interest is the preservation of itself as state, as the legal order. And this preservation depends on a political decision, on sovereignty that is not assigned by law but that is rather the very content of law. As the defensor pacis(Marsilius), the State is for Schmitt not the pro-duct of the con-vergence or con-vention of individual self-interests as found in the state of nature (the degree zero of politics), even as the Hobbesian ultima ratio of avoiding death. Rather, the State is a direct product of the conflict, of the di-vergence of these self-interests so that the State remains conceptually tied to the state of nature it does not transcend it. There is no meeting of the minds or wills upon which the State can be founded; rather, the State is the sovereign that can preserve social peace not by mediating or reconciling the conflicting interests of the state of nature, but rather by ensuring that friends keep the foes in check. The State is not a pro-duct of law, and thence subordinate to law. Instead, the State as sovereign determines the content of the law, it does not ascertain the law; it does not find it; it creates it. In what Schmitt calls the age of neutralization, the terminus ad quem of romanticism is to attain the realization of the system so as to eliminate conflict from social life and with it to neutralizethe political. This is the aim of all scientism and rationalism. But by the political, Schmitt means conflict, its ineluctability even and especially in the state of nature. Hobbes saw the political as the way out of the state of nature, which he conceived of as pre-political. His starting point was the in-dividuum, just like the point in Euclid, and its self-interest, which consisted principally of the a-voidance of death and the pre-servation of life. This is the foundation of the common weal and therefrom, mechanically or more geometrico, of the common-wealth, of the State. As in Euclid, Hobbess point or individuum merges miraculously into the line of the common weal, of the social contract. Schmitt instead starts with the State as an interested party in what is the political state of nature, which, contrary to Hobbes, does not begin with individual self-interest but rather with the division of humanity into friends and foes. For Schmitt therefore the state of nature is not pre-political, as it is in Hobbes, but rather the very essence of the political because its bellum civium its conflict between friend and foe, rather than between atomized self-interested in-dividuals is one in which even the Sovereign takes part. The Sovereign rules at all times he never simply reigns. (Cf. the famous review of Schmitt by Leo-Strauss.)

To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology. (p2)

Hobbess Leviathan is a deus mortalis because, like a god, it is the incarnation of the Ratio of the will and therefore it cannot be merely mortal, like any individual, because its mechanistic scientifichypothesis is sustained by the immortal or divine Ratio of the free will that allows the reaching of a social contract, of the con-vention. On the other hand, however, Hobbess Sovereign is a deus mortalis because, like that of all sovereigns, its decision is mortal, it is based not on truth but on authority, that is, on the power possessed by a particular authority or will and is objectified in a concrete decision or command. Hence, the machinery of the State stands with the scientific hypothesis and the authority of the will of the Sovereign, whereas the ratio of the convention of free wills stands with the truth (veritas) of the State as the emanation of the legal order, of the Norm. Here is the fatidic dualism of Soul and Form, Spirit and Machine, Freedom (contingency) and Necessity (logico-scientific). Schmitt intuits this antinomic dualism implicit in Hobbesian political and legal theory and genially makes it explicit, as the following extract reveals:

It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of this abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century [Hobbes] became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature. He did not discover that there is a juristic reality and life that need not be reality in the sense of the natural sciences. Mathematical relativism and nominalism also operate concurrently. Often he seemed to be able to construct the unity of the state from any arbitrary given point. But juristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life inherent in the legal form. The form that he sought lies in the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority. In the independent meaning of the decision, the subject of the decision has an independent meaning, apart from the question of content. What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides. (PT, p34)
Hobbes never completely resiles from the scientific truth of his axioms, because he identifies truth with the very facticity of authority, so that for him there is no antinomy or apory between the two. For Hobbes, the truth is not to be found in the theo-logical emanation of laws but rather in their mechanistic facticity. As Schmitt puts it, the machinery of State the mortality of the deus mortalis is not determined by the divine, and yet Hobbes knew that the divinity of the deus mortalis, the underlying scientific Ratio of the machine, had to be founded ultimately on the mortal decision! An entirely mechanical State would relegate the mechanical laws under which it operates from the realm of logico-scientific necessity to that of complete contingency. The Ratio of the State had therefore to be located not in its mechanical make-up but rather in a free decision whose rationality, however, ends up being no less contingent than the mechanical laws and rationality of the State! By contrast, and much more consistently, Schmitt ascribes to the auctoritas of the State a real substantive ascendancy over the veritas not only of the legal form and norm but of any scientific reality whatsoever. The Schmittian sovereign remains an in-dividuum, because the

decision is in-divisible and must rest ultimately on one will: it is this Individualitat of the decision on the exception what Schmitt calls the personality of the Sovereign - that precludes it from being absorbed into any logico-scientific schema. As we have learned from Nietzsche, this applies both to the legal-moral order and to the logico-mathematical and scientific one!

That constitutive, specific element of a decision is, from the perspective of the content of the underlying norm, new and alien. Looked at normatively, the [32] decision emanates from nothingness. The legal force of a decision is different from the result of substantiation. Ascription is not achieved with the aid of a norm; it happens the other way around. A point of ascription first determines what a norm is and what normative rightness is. (PT, pp31-2)
Recall once more Nietzsche: Looked at from a moral point of view, the world is false! But because the world is ausser-moralisch, it is morality that is false, that contains no truth, but can contain only authority. It is not morality (the Hobbesian lex qua veritas) that a-scribes the world (lex qua auctoritas), but rather the world that ascribes morality (auctoritas qua lex). And just as the world is contingent emanating from nothingness so is also the decision (which, as we styled it earlier, is an in-cision in time, an act that is substantive and a-scriptive by its very nature an act of will is a pleonasm!).

The law gives authority, said Locke, and he consciously used the word law antithetically to commissio which means the personal command of the monarch. But he did not recognize that the law does not designate to whom it gives authority. It cannot be just anybody who can execute and realize every desired legal prescription. The legal prescription, as the norm of decision, only designates how decisions should [33] be made, not who should decide. In the absence of a pivotal authority, anybody can refer to the correctness of the content. But the pivotal authority is not derived from the norm of decision. Accordingly, the question is that of competence, a question that cannot be raised by and much less answered from the content of the legal quality of a maxim. (PT, pp32-3)
C. The Decision and the Political The point of the facticity of the conception of the Political in the negatives Denken is illustrated most tellingly by Lowith in a fascinating homologation of the political philosophy of Schmitt with the existential (though not necessarily existentialist!) onto-theo-logy of Heidegger.

El pathos de la decisin en favor de la pura decisividad supo encontrar una aprobacin generalizada en la poca de entreguerras. Prepar el camino para la decisin en favor de la decisividad de Hitler e hizo posible el viraje poltico como"revolucin del nihilismo". Pero este pathos no estaba de ningn modo confinado al decisionismo poltico, sino que caracterizaba no menos la teologa dialctica y la filosofa de la existencia decidida. Esta conexin interna entre el decisionismo poltico, filosfico y teolgico85 ser desarrollada en el siguiente

complemento al anterior tratado de 1935 sobre Carl Schmitt, en relacin con Martin Heidegger86 y Friedrich Gogarten. El ser y el 78 HEIDEGGER, PENSADOR DE UN TIEMPO INDIGENTE tiempo -un libro en apariencia completamente apoltico, que no hace ms que plantear la pregunta por el ser, aunque en el horizonte del tiempo- apareci en el mismo ao que El concepto de lo poltico de Schmitt, y la teologa dialctica alcanzaba su mayor poder de seduccin en ese mismo momento. Para comprender el trasfondo contemporneo de los impulsos radicales de Heidegger resulta til ponerlos en relacin con una expresin de Rilke. El mundo burgus, escribe Rilke en una carta del 8 de noviembre de 1915, ha olvidado por medio de su fe en el progreso y en la humanidad las "ltimas instancias" de la vida humana; ha olvidado que este mundo burgus "estaba superado de antemano por Dios y la muerte". El mismo significado tambin tiene la muerte en El ser y el tiempo ( 63): como la insuperable "instancia superior de apelacin" de nuestro ser y poder. En El ser y el tiempo, por supuesto, de Dios no se habla; Heidegger haba sido por mucho tiempo telogo cristiano, como para poder contar, como Rilke, las "historias del buen Dios". Lo nico que es necesario para l es la pregunta por el ser en cuanto tal y en su totalidad; una pregunta para la cual la nada y la muerte resultan especialmente reveladoras. La muerte es la nada ante la cual se manifiesta la radical finitud de nuestra existencia temporal o, como se encuentra formulado en las lecciones de Friburgo en torno al ao 1920, la "facticidad histrica" cuyo pathos es la resolucin de asumir el ser-ah [Da-sein] ms propio. La "libertad para la muerte" con subrayado doble en El ser y el tiempo ( 53), por medio de la cual el Dasein en cada caso propio y aislado en s mismo alcanza su "poder-ser-total" [Ganz-sein-konnen], se corresponde en el decisionismo poltico con el sacrificio de la vida por el Estado total en el caso de emergencia de la guerra. El principio es en ambos casos el mismo: el regreso radical a algo ltimo, al nudo que-es [Da-sein] de la facticidad, es decir, a lo que queda de la vida cuando se ha barrido con todos los contenidos vitales tradicionales, con la quididad.
In the quotation above, Lowith homologates the decision in Schmitts political theory with the freedom before death (reminiscent of the sickness unto death of Kierkegaardian memory) that Heidegger underlines doubly in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit. This is what Heidegger achieves for Schmitt: - the de-struction of form, of system, order and unity, of totality as the truth or necessity of all human concepts - which begins with the only freedom possible for Heidegger, that of freedom as contingency, as the possibility of nothingness: and hence of the decision auf Nichts gestellt. It is this pro-jectuality that allows truth to be seen as disclosedness, being as becoming, and therefore freedom as resolve (Ent-schlossenheit), as resoluteness - as Decision.

Interesting is the contrast with Hobbes who sees death in a political dimension, rather than an ontological one (like Nietzsche, not the fact that we die but how we die is important for him)

by selecting the fear of violent death, and the related clinging to life, as the motive for the exit from the state of nature into the political one of the common wealth. In effect, the only free-dom possible for Hobbes is in the state of nature where the human will has free rein. It is the irrationality of this state of nature, its bellum civium, that induces the free will to exercise its rational decision to opt for the status civilis, for the social contract establishing the commonwealth and the State to protect it. Schmitt objects here that Hobbess polity in effect marks the transition or exit from a mythological state of nature that is un-political by definition (the war of all against all, anarchy and chaos) into an equally un-political state in which the adherents to the social pact renounce politics by alienating their free-dom to a wholly mechanical State in exchange for its protection. Politics as conflict now exists in foro externo between States but not within them, in foro interno. If the State is to be truly super partes, then ultimately no politics is possible within its territory. Freedom therefore means for Hobbes the free-dom to decide autonomously over ones conduct in the state of nature and inevitably clashing with the free-dom of others. Unlike Heideggers existential notion of freedom, Hobbess is mechanical at one end and rationalistic at the other. As Lowith correctly notes above, Hobbess freedom contains the Ratio that leads to the inter esse of the common wealth. This is not the freedom that Heidegger intends. For Heidegger freedom means contingency, the possibility of annihilation, the opposite of logical necessity or teleological destiny. For Hobbes freedom is a relation to other individuals so that his state of nature contains a political notion of freedom, but one that annuls itself because this free-dom does not take an institutional form but remains rather one tied to the anarchy and chaos of the bellum civium, the civil war of the state of nature. In Heidegger the will becomes the very foundation of all reality, whereas in Hobbes it is the escape from the will freedom from the will, from the destructiveness of this will that is the aim of political theory for the sake of the rational preservation of life and the avoidance of death: only to see this will clash aporetically with its axiomatic mechanical self-interest. Heideggers will is reconcilable with life and politics because it is essentially ontological; Hobbess is not because it is an acquisitive will that is entirely atomic and a-political. Hobbess will is so unilateral, so one-sided, that it is not free to decide in favour of the preservation of life or of the common weal it can only at best opt for self-preservation, to a-void death. This is the ultimate fallacy of possessive individualism from Hobbes to Smith and neoclassical theory. In both Hobbes and Heidegger the will is an ontological entity, not a political one; but it necessarily becomes political at the point of decision, when it becomes organized conflict, coaction and co-ercion. And this is why Schmitt combines the decision with the pre-existence of friend and foe, the imprescindible moment of the Political that is not acquired historically from the state of nature or instituted contractually, but is rather a given of the universal Eris, a quidditasor qualitas occulta, a world from which even the aporetic Hobbesian Ratio of the decision (however ultimate) to exit the state of nature and to enter the Ordo of the contractum unionis et subjectionis is removed. Heidegger emphasizes resolve (Entschlossenheit) as the moment of decision rather than as the Ratio of politics. But he does not escape the political romanticism decried by Schmitt because his ontology is part of that neutralization of politics that Schmitt combats. In this regard, Lowiths homologation of Schmitt and Heidegger misses the mark. But not entirely; not with regard to the facticity of authority, or power in the Hobbesian sense, or sovereignty in the Schmittian sense. This facticity is the quidditas,

the qualitas occulta that is the exclusive preserve of the Will as understood by the negatives Denken, that is to say, as the obverse of the Kantian Ding an sich.

The Hobbesian ultima ratio is the fear of ones death and the preservation of ones life at the hand of other in-dividuals (cf. Schmitt, Der Leviathan, beginning of ch.3). But that is where politics ends. Schmitt knows that this is far from the reality: not only does politics not begin with the exit from the state of nature, but that state of nature could never have existed because for an exit from it to be at all possible, then that exit must invalidate both the historical existence and the conceptual possibility of the state of nature! In effect, it is impossible to conceive of a state of nature from which there is an escape! Besides, fear is not a positive emotion that can found the Political, let alone a common-wealth! And the State cannot be a God super partes, however mortal Hobbes chooses to label it. Its mortality betrays its partiality: authority would otherwise become a truth, which is what Hobbes denies, instead of retaining its facticity, which is what Schmitt maintains.

The genius of Hobbes was to posit the alienation of personal freedom (the freedom of the will) for the sake of the preservation of life intended in the negative sense of fear of death: this last is what supplies the con-ventum, the agreement on which the State as common wealth can be erected consistently the system or order or freedom from the will. This is the truth, the rationalist inter esse of Hobbess political theory that is exalted in all the liberalist and contractualist interpretations of his theory (starting with Leo Strauss). But for Schmitt, no suchinter esse exists or can exist because the State is not super partes; it is a partisan that defines the political boundary between friend and foe, a boundary that is absolutely inescapable not merelyin foro externo, with regard to other, foreign States, but also and above all with regard to the conflicts internal to the State, in foro interno.

Sunday, 2 September 2012

Politico-Economic Theology: The Exception, the Decision, and the Apories of Bourgeois Economic Science'
All significant concepts of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts.(Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, p36)
Equally, our main contention in this piece is that all significant concepts of modern economic theory and science, too, are secularized theological concepts. A theory is an explanation of life and the world that attempts to encompass them in their totality by con-necting their parts in a systematic manner that is internally consistent and that, through this consistent nexus rerum, achieves the adaequatio rei et intellectus of Scholastic fame. It follows that a theory must connect the relationship of the parts to one another in a manner consistent with the systematicity of the whole. Consequently, regardless of the content of the theory, the connections between parts and of the parts in their totality must be necessary. This necessity removes any freedom that the parts may have had in relation to the totality in such a manner

that the theory admits of no exception that is not re-conducible to or con-sistent with the totality and its systematicity. This logical notion of freedom as the opposite of logical necessity has nothing to do with thepolitical notion of freedom. Indeed, political freedom is not analogous to contingency or chance, it is instead their opposite and in fact ought not to be called freedom at all! Freedom is a political notion the opposite of coercion (Arendt in Life of the Mind). Once the notion of freedom is reduced to the opposite of logical necessity, then it becomes mere contingency and is reduced to an onto-logical problem. The fact is that, as we are demonstrating here, there is no such thing as logical necessity so that all truths are contingent. But the fact that truth can be understood as logical or scientific necessity- that the necessity of logic or science is what makes it true - and that freedom can be mistaken for contingency or chance means that truth or logico-mathematical necessity can be abused or be used instrumentally for the purpose of political coercion! By this process, freedom of the will can be mistaken for a telos that, by positing the systematicity of life and the world as a totality, becomes a quest for freedom from the will which is what the negatives Denken quite correctly declaims in bourgeois theory and science, whilst at the same time, by denying the existence of freedom in a political sense (because it understands freedom only ontologically), it in turn quite incorrectly denies the possibility of political freedom or else reduces it to contingency, to superfluity (Sartres de trop, Heideggers de-jection and Dasein as pro-ject). So whereas bourgeois theory and science either eliminate political freedom with their totality and systematicity, in natural and social science as in logico-mathematics, or else hypostatize it as God or free will, in the negatives Denken freedom is understood as universal Eris, as total conflict: freedom is no longer a function of the will but the will becomes a function of free-dom understood as cosmic contingency (Schelling), as chance or uncertainty (Keynes). It is this reduction of political freedom to contingency or chance to free-dom - that is clearly most objectionable in the negatives Denken. Yet the valuable and valid aspect of the remarkably novel and revealing approach to freedom taken by the negatives Denken is that it re-introduces the notion of decision (in Schmitt, resolve *Gewiss] in Nietzsche, and resoluteness or dis-closure *Entschlossenheit] in Heidegger), and therefore of the effect of individual wills coming into conflict with one another in an institutionally organized manner which is the essence of the Political. It is this Political, this organized conflict of wills, that is totally eschewed by all bourgeoisscience, from economics to jurisprudence and political theory. The supreme aim of bourgeois science is to e-liminate (to place beyond the boundaries) this Political from the subject-matter of its inquiry, to ob-literate the decision on the exception as the conflictual antithesis to the bourgeois homologation of all elements of life in the interests of science.

At the foundation of his [Kelsens] identification of state and legal order rests a metaphysics that identifies the lawfulness of nature and normative lawfulness. This pattern of thinking is characteristic of the natural sciences. It is based on the rejection of all arbitrariness, and attempts to banish from the human mind every exception. (PT, p41)
It is most important to note that whilst bourgeois science seeks to remove all decision on the exception, all arbitrariness, from the object of its inquiry, it is the most distinctive mark of bourgeois political praxis to concentrate decision-making power in fewer hands in effect, to present

society as homogeneous so as to be able to equiparate its scientific method (Popperian falsifiability) which implies the necessity of competing theories with democratic public opinion based on competing opinions, whilst removing all real decision-making power from the demos and entrusting it to sovereign institutions, such as Heads of State and Government or scientific experts who then reduce the Political to Technique. The ideal type of bourgeois science involves the elimination of conflict from theory in such a way that its Science becomes mere Technique (cf. Heideggers Technik) wholly impervious to decision and therefore to critical review. Bourgeois theory and science therefore eschews first and foremost what we may describe as the time of decision, understood in the objective genitive. In other words, bourgeois science and theory always postulates that decisions are made in time, whereas one of the mainstays of the negatives Denken is that our perception of time as an experiential rather than spatial notion requires the assumption of an initium, a creative act, of a de-cision that makes an incision in being a novus actus interveniens that replaces the causal chain of bourgeois science. The aim of bourgeois neoclassical economic theory, for instance, is to reduce economic activity and therefore the subiectum of economics to the mere, pure, formal exchange of endowments between individual economic agents. The very purity and formality of this exchange, the absence of any possible conflict in it even in terms of how individuals came to possess the endowments they exchange with others -, means that an economic equi-librium is possible a priori, deductively, given that any dis-equilibrium can exist only as a distortion or disturbance of the exchange that is axiomatically implicit in the definition of the market as free exchange of endowments that are purely economical in the sense of utilitarian, where the utility schedules of individual market agents exclude again axiomatically anything that may interfere with the free exchange that defines the market. Consequently, individual market participants do not decide the ratios of exchange (what Schumpeter therefore senselessly called coefficients of choice, given that there is no choice involved in this exchange!) because these ratios or prices are pre-determined by the axiomatic definitions of the market and by the utility schedules of economic agents. (This was the gist of Hayeks devastating early [1920s] critique of the concept of economic equilibrium, now in Individualism and Economic Order.) The market assumes thus in neoclassical economic theory the semblance of a Leibnizian preestablished harmony, of a Hidden God (deus absconditus) identical with Adam Smiths Invisible Hand. The market eliminates all conflict, and with it all exceptions to market rules, by defining market equilibrium tautologously. The point of equi-librium or equal weight is that point at which all the exchange ratios between goods in the market can be weighed interchangeably in terms of each good taken as a numeraire. In other words, each good for exchange on the market can be weighed in terms of a homogeneous medium (numeraire) that provides a common measure so that the individual exchange ratios between goods can be expressed as prices. This is another reason why all conflict is eliminated from general equilibrium analysis: once all its component parts are homogeneous because reducible to a homogeneous medium, then it is not possible for these com-ponents to be in-com-patible with one another, which is what the notion of conflictual decision and of the exception make manifest in the negatives Denken. (The analogy between this homogenization of free and fair exchange and the bourgeois theory of democratic or constitutional liberalism in political theory and jurisprudence will be discussed in a later section of this study. Cf. for a preliminary discussion, Part IV of CB Macphersons The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy.)

Once all conflictual decision, all exception is removed from economic science and its market mechanism of free exchange through the homogeneity of all its constituent parts, then the sphere of the Political can be neatly separated from that of the Economic as the sphere of scientific necessity and be homologated as the realm of free-dom, the sphere of public opinion (ethics, morality, religion, taste) that can remain free only on condition (!) that it does not interfere with the scientificnecessity of the Economic sphere and its economic laws. (As we showed in the Weberbuch, the identification of science and economics with the realm of necessity and that of politics and beliefs with that of freedom, is a common erroneous thread running through thinkers as disparate as Marx, Weber and Arendt.) It is this harmonious homologation of the Political and the Economic from which all conflictual decisions are removed (!) to the extent that free political choices and opinions do not interfere with the necessary laws of economic reality that is the supreme achievement of the science of Political Economy both in its Classical and Neo-Classical expressions. (Arrow and Hahn were quite right then [pace Lawson] to insist on naming Adam Smith as the father of neoclassical general equilibrium theory.) In this regard, whilst the theoretical necessity of all science its systematicity becomes immanent to the totality, to its truth, and therefore is deprived of any political freedom, at the same time this immanent identification of the system with a mechanism turns the socalled mechanism into a Supreme Will or Sovereign, into a Hidden God (deus absconditus) as in Leibnizs pre-established harmony and Adam Smiths Invisible Hand or Hobbess Leviathan or State-machine or deus mortalis.

The sovereign who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outsidethe world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself. (PT, p48)
But the machine, the market, cannot run by itself because the Ratio-Ordo behind it, the scientific truth that is its law of nature, cannot be legal if it is not necessary, if it is not an order that is an immanent feature of the world; and this scientific truth cannot be legitimate if it is not free, if it is not spontaneous or "contingent" as a feature of the world that is comprehensible by a transcendental consciousness. (The phrase spontaneous order is used by Hayek inLaw, Legislation and Liberty.) Indeed, starting from its own axiomatic assumption of selfinterested individuals, neoclassical economic theory in particular has developed its theoretical premises of economic liberalism whereby the Political and the Economic are homologated to a point where, once a free market is established in the sense prescribed by the theory, even political interference no longer suffices to condition or disturb or constrain the economic laws of the free market economy or commerce because, as Benjamin Constant argued, it is possible for capitalists to discipline such political interference by means of the simple mobility of capital, that is, by setting up competitive political regimes that reward those States that respect the laws of the market and penalize those that do not, until such time as these anomalous States either perish or return to free market conditions! Constant offers the most pervasive example of how the so-called laws of neoclassical economic science come to be applied to human history and to be hypostatized as the culmination of the interests of individuals and of humanity in its entirety and for eternity! Whence comes Constants famous distinction between ancient freedom, meaning the direct participatory democracy of Antiquity, and modern freedom, which refers to the exchange by individuals in mass societies of their direct participation in politics for the guarantees of their private rights by the all-powerful modern representative

State of liberal constitutional regimes founded on the capitalist market economy. Thus, in Constants thesis, private hedonistic consumption has replaced public political involvement.

Today nothing is more modem than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modem state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant. Political ideas are generally recognized only when groups can be identified that have a plausible economic interest in turning them to their advantage. Whereas, on the one hand, the political vanishes into the economic or technical-organizational, on the other hand the political dissolves into the everlasting discussion of cultural and philosophical-historical commonplaces, which, by aesthetic characterization, identify and accept an epoch as classical, romantic, or baroque. The core of the political idea, the exacting moral decision, is evaded in both. The true significance of those counter-revolutionary philosophers of the state lies precisely in the consistency with which they decide. They heightened the moment of the decision to such an extent that the notion of legitimacy, their starting point, was finally dissolved. As soon as Donoso Cortes realized that the period of monarchy had come to an end because there no longer were kings and no one would have the courage to be king in any way other than by the will of the people, he brought his decisionism to its logical conclusion. He demanded a political dictatorship. In the cited remarks of de Maistre we can also see a reduction of the state to the moment of the decision, to a pure decision not based on reason and discussion and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothingness. But this decisionism is essentially dictatorship, not legitimacy. (PT, pp65-6)
This reduction of the Political to the technical sphere is common to all economic theory, Classical and neoclassical. Let us recall that for general equilibrium theory in economics it is the aforesaidpolitical interference the decision, which it dismisses and eschews as a disturbance or noise - thatconfutes the validity of the theory, that provides its insuperable exception . As Don Patinkin sharply observed, one of the chief objections to equilibrium theory is that if the theory of economic equilibrium were to be accepted as reality or even to be applicable to any reality, then it would be quite impossible for an actual economic system ever to be historically in disequilibrium because equilibrium is a state of simultaneous exchanges incompatible with any notion of time, whether chrono-logical or dia-chronic, that is understood as a time of decision in which an act of will can occur. Equilibrium theory is time-less in the sense that we have described: in the sense that it does not allow of any time of de-cision, of any act of will upon

which the Political may be founded. Equilibrium theory therefore understands time as a mere logico-mathematical sequence, only in its spatial sense, and consequently its description of how equilibrium prices are reached through the mechanism of free market choice is entirely devoid of meaning! Yet this is not to say, as we argue below, that equilibrium theory is thereby devoid of purpose: its purpose is to allow the instrumental mathesis of human action, the measurement of human political activity in accordance with a rule aimed at preserving the existing bourgeois political, social and economic order. A market mechanism that must be in equilibrium is a system or rule from which all notion of decision or choice has been removed and which by that very reason is not and can never be a market! Hayeks early essays in Individualism and Economic Order, and Brian Loasbys Equilibrium and Evolutionwhere he defines the state of equilibrium as a state of total slavery offer insuperable critiques of these antinomies and apories of bourgeois theory and science. Both theoreticians quite validly and definitively confute the reality of Walrasian tatonnement or groping auctioneering whereby the final equilibrium or market-clearing prices are reached through a series of auctions that last until every market participant has maximized his welfare. They do this by noting correctly that this process is illusory because the market participants can grope their way to equilibrium prices only on condition that they are already ab initio (from the beginning of the auction) in possession of all the information that will allow them to reach those final equilibrium prices! In other words, the simultaneity of this tatonnement deprives it of any realitywhatsoever as a historical process. As a result, partial prices before equilibrium is reached, when market participants can still be said to decide freely and independently of one another on these prices, cannot be the final equilibrium market prices. But worse still, once equilibrium is reached and prices can therefore be said to indicate the real market exchange ratios of all endowments between all market participants, at that precise point these exchange ratios or equilibrium prices lose all meaning because it is then impossible to determine what these equilibrium prices actually indicate equilibrium prices are only relative (in terms of a numeraire) and cannot tell us what they are pricing! Once again, market participants cannot be said to be exercising any free choice in the determination of market prices. At that precise point, were it not for its instrumental purpose as a means of measuring human activity, bourgeois economic science is exposed most damningly as sheer and abject metaphysics of the most contemptible kind, that of an astute theology in which the market and its laws serve as a Hidden God, one who in its guise as a pre-established harmony does not decide, and yet, in its guise as legislator does nothing but decide by enforcing the laws of free market competition! What bourgeois economic science removes from economic relations is their political foundation in the decision, which Schmitt above erroneously confines to an exacting moral decision. And it does so above all in the name of a mythical homogeneity of the people and the will of the people homogeneity that is supplied fundamentally by the laws of economic science and the homologation of Politics and Economics that they allow, as we just described above.

Although the liberal bourgeoisie wanted a god, its god could not become active; it wanted a monarch, but he had to be powerless; it demanded freedom and equality but limited voting rights to the propertied classes in order to ensure the influence of education and property on legislation, as if education and property entitled that class to repress the poor [60]

and uneducated; it abolished the aristocracy of blood and family but permitted the impudent rule of the moneyed aristocracy, the most ignorant and the most ordinary form of an aristocracy; it wanted neither the sovereignty of the king nor that of the people. What did it actually want? The curious contradictions of this liberalism struck not only reactionaries such as Donoso Cortes and F. J. Stahl but also revolutionaries such as Marx and Engels.. In his Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich Lorenz von Stein spoke in detail about the liberals: They wanted a monarch, in other words a supreme personal authority, with an independent will and independent action. Yet they made the king a mere executive organ with his every act dependent on the consent of the cabinet, thus removing once again that personal element. They wanted a king who would be above parties, who would thus also have to be above the people's assembly; and simultaneously they insisted that the king could not do anything but execute the will of this people's assembly. They declared the person of the king to be inviolable but had him take an oath on the constitution, so that a violation of the constitution became possible but could not be pursued. "No human ingenuity," said Stein, "is sufficiently sharp to resolve this contradiction conceptually." This must be doubly peculiar to a party such as the liberal, which after all prides itself on its rationalism. (PT, pp59-60)
In other words, the scientific immanentism of bourgeois theory and science its systematic necessity immediately turns into formalistic transcendentalism the very instant that it reaches its apotheosis, its Ver-geist-igung, - when, that is, its claim to scientific truth or necessity collides with the empirical falsifiability or contingency or arbitrariness of that truth which otherwise would lose its scientificity because of its freedom or contingency and its truth-fulness because of its necessity! The concept of truth is im-possible, as we demonstrated in our exegesis of Nietzsches In-variance in the Nietzschebuh, because truth cannot be necessary for the reason that it must be com-prehensible, and it cannot be free because, as truth, it cannot be partial or contingent. Politically, the bourgeoisie desires a world in which the king reigns but does not rule in which, that is, the capitalist system, its market, and its science is spontaneous (free and therefore legitimate) and yet is orderly (necessary, and therefore legal)! In reality, however, what bourgeois theory and science manage to reveal is the impossibility of their truth because bourgeois truth must be at once free (transcendental) and necessary (immanent). It is simply not possible to argue then, as does Weber, that bourgeois science, like general equilibrium in economic theory, is an ideal type that merely approximates reality and thustranscends it ideally - without ever being able to embody it immanently. As we have shown in ourWeberbuch, any ideal type that is antinomic and aporetic exactly at that point where it is fulfilled and com-plete, at the point where it presumably becomes real any such ideal type or theory is entirely devoid of any and all theoretical merit and analytical usefulness however proximate (!) except as a tool of coercion, as an instrument of policy for the simple reason that it ceases to be a

theory or a science and becomes instead an inexorable fate! (This is the great insight of the Italian Marxist theoretician Massimo Cacciari in Krisis, pp65 et ff.) Weber himself often comes very close to this crucial realization in his work. It is myopic in the extreme, however, for Gunnar Myrdal (and the likes of Joan Robinson) to chide equilibrium theory for being meaningless (in The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory) because the whole point of equilibrium theory is not to be true or meaningful but rather to be, as Schumpeter perceived, an instrument we would say, a political instrument, or worse still, a Kafkaesque condemnation as fate. The whole point of bourgeois economic science is not to describe reality as it Is (Sein) or still less as it Ought to be (Sollen): rather, the whole point of bourgeois science is to theorise reality as it Must be (Mussen).

Thursday, 4 October 2012

The Concept of the Political Hobbes, Heidegger, and Schmitt

The starting point of Hobbess construction of the state is fear of the state of nature; the goal and terminus is security of the civil (staatlichen) condition. In the state of nature, everyone can slay everyone else; everyone can do this great feat. In respect to posing and carrying out this threat all are equal. As Hegel characterized it, everyone is weak vis--vis everyone else. To this extent democracy prevails in the state of nature. Everyone knows that everyone can slay everyone else. Everyone is therefore the foe and the competitor of everyone else the well-known bellum omnium contra omnes. In the civil, stately condition all citizens are secure in their physical existence; there reign peace, security and order. This is a familiar definition of police. Modern state and modern police came into being simultaneously and the most vital institution of the security state is the police. It is astonishing that Hobbes appropriated as a characteristic of the condition of peace brought about by the police the formula of Francis Bacon of Verulam by speaking of man becoming god to man, homo homini deus, whereas in the state of nature man was wolf to man, homo homini lupus. The terror of the state of nature drives anguished individuals to come together; their fear rises to an extreme; a spark of reason (ratio) flashes and suddenly there stands in front of them a new god. Who is this god who brings peace and security to people tormented by anguish, who transforms wolves into citizens and [p32] through this miracle proves himself to be a god, obviously a mortal god, a deus mortalis, as Hobbes calls him. (C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, pp31-2)
This all-important transition from in-dividual fear to public safety (salus publica) in the State is Schmitts focus in The Concept of the Political. As we know, Hobbes attributes this transition to the innate reason that humans possess and that indeed governs the entire world the RatioOrdo. Yet Hobbes still remains a decisionist because the supreme aspect of the world remains Power the force that rules the mechanical laws of the physical universe. Later, of course, bourgeois liberalism from Locke to Constant will seek to replace this Hobbesian reason and Power with the equal exchange of individual endowments, with commerce. (See our previous essay on Constant and Weber titled Free-dom and Greed-dom.) The basis of Lowiths and Leo Strausss critique of Schmitts incomprehension of the jusnaturalist Hobbes is precisely

that Schmitt privileges the empty formalism of Hobbess apparent decisionism and wholly neglects the role of reason in dictating the equality of the free exchange and mutual gain that obtain in bourgeois civil society.

El puro decisionismo, tal como fue defendido de manera clsica por Hobbes, presupone un "desorden" que slo puede convertirse en un orden por medio de la decisin; esta decisin aparece, pero ahora tambin ella misma, como una decisin para una "vida comunitaria" ordenada, cuya expresin jurdica es el pensamiento del orden y ya no el pensamiento en el sentido de mera decisin.83 (p77 in Heidegger)
This is the ambivalence in Schmitt: on one hand, the decision is a qualified decision, that is, a judgement that presupposes a criterion of whether or not an order or normality exists. On the other hand, the decision, in its arbitrariness, is not subject to any pre-existing criteria whatsoever it is sheer naked violence. Thus, Schmitts challenge to transcendental formalism cannot succeed because his brand of immanentism fails to identify that substantive element that could give it a proper political foundation. That is why Lowith is both right to criticize the formalism of Schmitts decision for being auf Nichts gestellt, (for being a mere decision); but at the same time he is wrong because it is this nothing that founds the facticity of the mere decision, its substantive content as violence life as exploitation (Nietzsche). The objections that those most erudite liberal critics of Schmitt, from Leo Strauss to Lowith, move to his theory of politics all presume like Hobbess jusnaturalist intent the existence of a Ratio-Ordo that legally-logically necessarily through the fear of ones death and the preservation of ones life leads to the social pact and so requires the State to be subordinate to the law, whose content is then supposed to emerge or spring from the community. Yet, if this comunitas actually existed, if its truth were real, then there would be no need of a State in the first place! The apory in Hobbes, of course, is that it is the very Ratio-Ordo of the Galilean-Newtonian laws of mechanics that leads paradoxically to the dis-order of the state of nature indicated by Lowith above and then in the very next breath is supposedly repaired or remedied by the Ratio-Ordo of the individuals need to a-void his own death and pre-serve his own life. Here Hobbes works with two notions of Ratio-Ordo, one physical-scientific and the other spiritualidealistic, that clearly oppose each other aporetically and are not reconducible to a common rationalistic framework! In any case, the decision to avoid death and preserve life by agreeing to the social pactis an act of will that can never be scientifically necessary because of its very voluntaristicnature! Contra Schmitt, instead, as we shall examine more fully below, it can be said that he fails to explain how a State can come into being at all! Yes, indeed: a decision may be auf Nichts gestellt be taken out of nothing, that is, be the product of pure arbitrium, of pure will -, but not a State, because a State is composed of in-dividuals whose self-interests must somehow converge so as to form a friend-ship, a group of friends opposed to their foes: and this con-vergence orconventum, must have a con-ventional basis that as such can be recognized by all parties to it. Schmitt makes the fundamental error of thinking that there can be an intrinsic value of form (see above), that form and substance can meet in the decision because the decision is exceptional with respect to what is the normal legal order, and seeks to preserve it.

But if this were correct, then once again it would be the normal that explains the exception, and not the other way around as Schmitt had argued earlier! His notion of decision is simply too formal, it lacks sub-stance, and therefore cannot provide a proper account of the State even one that challenges the ratio or telos of its classical theories. For Schmitt, politics means conflict, even to the extent that the sovereignty or authority of the State is disputed. For Hobbes, political theory entails the end of politics. Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem: Hobbes admits that his subjects cannot engage in a contractum unionis unless this becomes im-mediately a contractum subjectionis. But how can this be? What value does life or the fear of death have in Hobbess theory that can lead out of the bellum civium? There is a glaring contradiction here between the truth or Ratio of the preservation of life this inter esse and the authority that is needed to found the Law of the social contract, and the State with it. This is quite apart from the inability of Hobbesian theory to explain the distribution of power in a society, except in a mechanical manner which cannot account for historical transformations. If a historical state of nature exists in which life is nasty brutish and short how can the self-same individuals who populate the state of nature, mere a-toms who do not share anything except their con-flicting free-doms, agree to exit it? The same, as we saw in Part A, can be said of the concepts of equilibrium and market in bourgeois economic theory. *A similar argument to Lowiths and Leo Strausss, though from rationalist positions, is made by Rafael Agapito in his lengthy and appreciable introduction to the Spanish translation of El Concepto de la Politica. With unusual perspicacity, Agapito explains how Schmitt so keen to supplant the juridic form with the political substance of the decision succumbs to his own brand of formalism, in that the decision, as anultimate instance or ultima ratio, becomes simply an onto-logical category, that of facticity or quidditas (Dass-Sein), - almost a neo-Kantian category like those of beautiful and ugly, just and unjust - and not what Schmitt intended it to be originally, a historical-substantive and political, as well as part-juridical one. The merit of Agapitos review and critique of Schmitt is to have seen that the political is not and cannot be irreconcilable or eristic, as Schmitt and the entire negatives Denken (its negativity consists largely in this) presume because at the very least, as in Hobbess version of it as the fear of death (not its inevitability, as in Heidegger, but its fear), the Political must involve an element of inter-subjectivity, the foundation, the co-hesion of the polity and the disputandum that it occasions. Yet the vice of Agapitos critique of Schmitt is that it posits the requisite inter-subjectivity still in terms of what lies between subjects that remain irreducibly in-dividual, a-tomic and atomized. Consequently, Agapito elevates and even glorifies the liberal-bourgeois Constitution without looking closely at the effective correspondence of this Constitution to the will of the people: he approaches the liberal legal order in terms of its own self-understanding and not in terms of material Constitution which is essentially the critique that Marx moved against Hegels theory of the State. Agapito pretends to substituteidealistically if not ideologically the arbitrary, conjunctural will of the negatives Denken with the social unity, as against mere homogeneity of the people that Schmitt refutes, supposedly supplied by a mythical intersubjective criterion that Agapito recklessly attributes to liberal bourgeois constitutions!

La razn ltima de este dilema ha de buscarse menos en el concepto mismo de soberana que en cmo se concibe el sujeto de sta: ste se entiende comnmente como pura voluntad en abstracto, como voluntad subjetiva_y emprica de los individuos a los que concierne ese principio democrtico. Se trata en consecuencia de una voluntad de carcter arbitrario, coyuntural, que no puede fundar ninguna

unidad social. De ah derivan las aporas a que conduce este dilema. La voluntad poltica (ya sea constituyente o ya sea ordinaria) se define como poder, porque esa realidad meramente emprica de voluntades subjetivas y discretas no incluye ningn criterio intersubjetivo, y en consecuencia no puede dar lugar ms que a la lucha y a la imposicin de posiciones unilateralmente definidas. (Agapito, Intro to El COncepto, p31.)]
Yet the paramount importance of the exception in Schmitt is to be found precisely here. The State, or the sovereign, is he who decides on the exception. This de-cision is as I now style it an incision in being, and the foundation of time: - time understood not spatially or chronologically, as a sequence of measurable inter-vals, but rather politically, as the possibility of decision, as the abyss be-tween being and nothingness. The decision is a pivotal point that arbitrarily, not rationally or systematically or formally, founds the battleground of politics and thus protects and preserves the social peace. Protection that must be traded for obedience: not (!) in a con-sensual or contractual manner, still less in a neo-Kantian formal-ethical manner, but only in an authoritarian fashion.

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' Only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept. Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature, a borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine. It will soon become clear that the exception is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege.
There are two sides to the decision, then two sides of the border-line. One side belongs to the establishment of the legal norm so that normal decisions can be made as routine. The other side of the decision, however, is its real foundation, its facticity that simply cannot be comprehended as part of the norm, of a rule or order or system or unity or totality, or indeed of truth. It is this materiality or substantiality of the decision that makes Schmitt invoke Hobbes approvingly: Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem. The exception, therefore, is the truth of normality, as Schmitt claims. But as this obverse, as this wholly other of the legal norm, the decision itself as e-voked by the exception is not and cannot be com-prehended by the norm, because it lies wholly outside the norm! (Recall our discussion of Arendts constituent power and constituted power in Part Four of the Weberbuch.) The decision on the exception, which is the mark and seal of sovereignty, is an either-or, an aut-aut that founds the legal norm. This legal norm, in turn, grants legality to the sovereign but it does not itself have legitimacy. The legitimacy of the legal norm is its legality but legality cannot legitimate the legal norm. Only if the law possessed an implicit truth could it found itself, legitimate itself. But it does not: the truth of the law is authority, the fact of the decision, its power to coerce, its command(commission) which cannot be founded on legality but on legitimacy or competence.

Hobbes says that power as a Euclidean (geometric) and Galileian-Newtonian (mechanical)hypothesis can be hypostatized in the State, by rational convention: thus scientific rationality is comforted by rational free choice: freedom and necessity are reconciled. In Schmitts words, for Hobbes the machine runs itself! Schmitt and Heidegger reject this possibility as the idealistic mirage of the era of bourgeois Enlightenment. It is this specific aspect of Hobbesian jusnaturalist political theory that will form later the core of bourgeois liberalism once the British and American bourgeoisies felt secure enough to proclaim the precedence of their natural rights over the authoritarian decisionism that still pervades Hobbess theory.

The law gives authority, said Locke, and he consciously used the word law antithetically to which means the personal command (commissio) of the monarch. But he did not recognize that the law does not designate to whom it gives authority. It cannot be just anybody who can execute and realize every desired legal prescription. The legal prescription, as the norm of decision, only designates how decisions should [33] be made, not who should decide. In the absence of a pivotal authority, anybody can refer to the correctness of the content. But the pivotal authority is not derived from the norm of decision. Accordingly, the question is that of competence, a question that cannot be raised by and much less answered from the content of the legal quality of a maxim. (PT, pp32-3)
The Lockean jusnaturalist rationalization of bourgeois violence seeks to hide the moment of the decision and highlights instead the legitimacy of the legal order, its intrinsic truth analogous with the legality of the worldview of Galilean-Newtonian mechanics. Even for Hobbes, the infinitely small points (individuals) can still albeit aporetically form a line (the State, or as in Rousseau the general will, or as in Locke public opinion, or in the American Federalists the will of the people). For Schmitt instead, more consistently, the line remains a point: the State remains an individual, a partisan. For Hobbes, the facticity of authority does turn into the truth of law and the State through the rational free choice of self-interested individuals in the state of nature. In Schmitt, instead, the facticity of authority rules over the law and the State which is why the authority of law and the State (the force of law) must return to the subject of the decision, the command and the in-divisible will of the sovereign in-dividual.

Words such as order, system, and unity are only circumscriptions of the same postulate, which must demonstrate how it can be fulfilled in its purity. It has to be shown how a system can arise on the foundation of a "constitution" (which is either a further tautological circumscription of the "unity" or a brutal sociopolitical reality). The systematic unity is, according to Kelsen, an "independent act of juristic perception. " Let us for now disregard the interesting mathematical assumption that a point must be an order as well as a system and must also be identical with a norm; let us ask another question: On what does the intellectual necessity and objectivity of the various ascriptions with the various points of ascription rest if it does not rest on a positive determination, on a command? (p20)

For Schmitt the Euclidean line retains the essential properties of the point, the point cannot merge into a line except through a meta-physical projectio per hiatus irrationalem. The Sovereign or the State remains an individual, an indivisible will. The Sover-reign may reign but not rule only in situations or legal orders, from constitutional monarchies to liberal parliamentary democracies, in which the ultima ratio, the ultimate foundation of authority or competence is carefully hidden from view. But in the naked brutal reality of the Political the indivisibility of decision and sovereignty cannot be avoided. (This point is enucleated further below.) Hobbess Leviathan is a deus mortalis because, like a god, it is the incarnation of the Ratio of the will both in its physical-mechanical aspect as the scientific hypothesis that necessitates the Leviathan-State as well as in its ideal-spiritual aspect leading to the political convention of the social contract that establishes the common-wealth. On the other hand, however, Hobbess Sovereign is a deus mortalis because, like that of all sovereigns, its decision is mortal and therefore arbitrary not necessary like the laws of nature but contingent and voluntary like the act of will! The rule of the Sovereign is based not on truth but on authority, that is, on the power possessed by a particular authority or will and is objectified in a concrete decision or command. Hence, the machinery or rule of the State stands with the scientific hypothesis of the authority, the overwhelming mechanical Power or auctoritas of the Sover-reign, whereas by the same token the authority or reign of the Sovereign understood as legitimacy rests on the ratio of the convention of free wills founded upon the truth and legality (veritas) of the State as the emanation of the legal order, of the Norm, which in turn is founded on the mechanical laws of physics, which is how Hobbes conceived atomistic in-dividuals in the state of nature. The circulus vitiosus of this reasoning is as perspicuous as it is insuperable: the necessity of Hobbesian Galilean-Newtonian mechanics requires the inter-vention of the will, of the decision, to be activated. This applies both to the Political as well as the Scientific whose truth, as we have seen, is also dependent on the result of human action (this is the ultimate truth of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle). And this voluntary act-ivation requires for its implementation the involuntary necessary operation of the laws of mechanics! What Hobbes could not know is that those sacrosanct laws of nature are in fact not laws at all but rather ex post facto arbitrary and conventional descriptions of the world that justify the scientific will to truth as a specific and partial interpretation-and-action upon life and the world. Here is the fatidic dualism of Soul and Form, Spirit and Machine, Freedom (contingency) and Necessity (logico-scientific). Schmitt intuits this antinomic dualism implicit in Hobbesian political and legal theory and genially makes it explicit, as the following extract reveals, without being able, however, to confute as did Nietzsche the legality of the Galilean-Newtonian mechanics adopted by Hobbes:

It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of this abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century [Hobbes] became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature. He did not discover that there is a juristic reality and life that need not be reality in the sense of the natural sciences.

Mathematical relativism and nominalism also operate concurrently. Often he seemed to be able to construct the unity of the state from any arbitrary given point. But juristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life inherent in the legal form. The form that he sought lies in the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority. In the independent meaning of the decision, the subject of the decision has an independent meaning, apart from the question of content. What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides. (PT, p34)
What Schmitt attributes to the overpowering of juristic thought by the natural sciences we should ascribe instead to the emergence of a self-assured and empowered bourgeoisie so confident in the legality and legitimacy of its own form of politico-economic violence as to present itspolitical will to power as a scientific will to truth: - the former in the guise of natural right and the latter in the guise of the laws of nature. Hobbes never completely resiles from the scientific truth of his axioms, because he identifies truth with the very facticity of authority, so that for him there is no antinomy or apory between the two. For Hobbes, the truth is not to be found in the theo-logical emanation of laws but rather in their mechanistic facticity. As Schmitt puts it, the machinery of State the mortal aspect of the deus mortalis is not determined by the divine, and yet Hobbes knew that the divinity of the deus mortalis, the underlying scientific Ratio of the machine, had to be founded ultimately not on the truth of its legal-scienific order but on the authority of its spontaneous, mortal decision! Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem. An entirely mechanical State would relegate the mechanical laws under which it operates from the realm of logico-scientific necessity to that of completely voluntary contingency. The Ratio of the State had therefore to be located not in its mechanical make-up but rather in a free decision whose rationality the ultima ratio of individuals to avoid violent death - ends up being no less contingent and unfounded than the mechanical laws and rationality of the State! In Schmitts correct reading of Hobbes,

[t]he Sovereign is not the Defensor Pacis of [33] a peace traceable to God; he is the creator of none other than an earthly peace. He is a Creator Pacis. The justification provided on the contrary proceeds the other way around than in the processes of divine right. Because state power is supreme, it possesses divine character. But its omnipotence is not at all divinely derived: It is a product of human work and comes about because of a covenant entered into by man. (C. Schmitt, The Leviathan, pp32-3.)
But it is precisely this voluntary-political Hobbesian jusnaturalist covenant that Schmitt rejects and refutes outright! True, the State does not ascertain the law; it does not find it; it creates it terrestrially: - but certainly not as the result of some material scientific Ratio; rather, it does so wholly contingently and ir-rationally: out of nothing.

That constitutive, specific element of a decision is, from the perspective of the content of the underlying norm, new and alien. Looked at normatively, the [32] decision emanates from nothingness. The legal force of a decision is different from the result of substantiation. Ascription is not

achieved with the aid of a norm; it happens the other way around. A point of ascription first determines what a norm is and what normative rightness is. (PT, pp31-2)
Recall once more Nietzsche: Looked at from a moral point of view, the world is false! But because the world is ausser-moralisch (extra-moral), it is morality that is false, that contains no truth, and can contain only authority. It is not morality (the Hobbesian lex qua veritas) that ascribes the world (lex qua auctoritas), but rather the world that ascribes morality (auctoritas qua lex). And just as the world is contingent emanating from nothingness so is also the decision (which, as we styled it earlier, is an in-cision in being, an act that is substantive and ascriptive by its very nature an act of will is a pleonasm!). Seen from the perspective of thenegatives Denken, from Schopenhauer onwards (with Hobbes as its honorary precursor), the State is merely the enforcer of the salus publica; it is not the pro-duct of a comunitas or even of an association, but rather it is the pre-condition for the Political as conflict, not as contract or convention or social pact but as police! That is why for Schmitt, unlike Hobbes, the concept of the State presupposes that of the political (the famous opening sentence of The Concept of the Political) but not vice versa as it did for Hobbes! For Schmitt the Political does not presuppose the State because the latter is an expression of the former and not the other way around. The Political is the fundamental reality and the State merely one of its historical forms. For Schmitt the bellum omnium contra omnes is im-possible or at most an extreme limit case of conflict because it obliterates the Political as a fundamental human reality, because the possibility of this bellum civium universaliumwould entail the impossibility of human society, its annihilation. And yet, as we shall see below, it is precisely the possibility of human society its very facticity that Schmitts Heideggerian onto-logical approach (its transcendental formalism) fails to account for!

Thursday, 25 October 2012

Politico-Economic Theology, Part Two - Overcoming Dezisionismus

To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology. (PT, p2)
In what Schmitt calls the age of neutralization, the terminus ad quem of bourgeois romanticism is to attain the realization of the system so as to eliminate conflict from social life and with it to neutralize the Political. This is the aim of all scientism and rationalism most evident in the bourgeois science of political economy. But by the Political, Schmitt means conflict, its

ineluctability not only in the, for him, mythological Hobbesian state of nature or status naturae, but even and most important in the status civilis, in a society governed by a State. Hobbes saw the Political as the way out of the state of nature, which he conceived of as pre-political. His starting point was the in-dividuum, just like the point in Euclid, and its self-interest, which consisted principally of the a-voidance of its own death and the pre-servation of its own life operating fundamentally in line with the laws of Galilean-Newtonian mechanics. This is the foundation of the social pact, convention or con-ventum - and therefrom, mechanically or more geometrico, of the common-weal, or common-wealth or State. As in Euclid, Hobbess point or individuum mergesmiraculously into the line of the common weal, of the social contract. Schmitt instead abandons such aporetic mystifications and starts with the State as an interested party in what is the political state of nature, which, contrary to Hobbes, does not begin with individual self-interest but rather with the division of humanity into friends and foes. For Schmitt therefore the state of nature is not pre-political, as it is in Hobbes, but rather the very essenceof the political because its bellum civium its conflict between friend and foe, rather than between atomized self-interested in-dividuals is one in which even the Sovereign takes part. The Sovereign rules at all times he never simply reigns. (Cf. the famous review of Schmitt by Leo-Strauss.) Thus, in contrast to Hobbes, Schmitt ascribes to the auctoritas of the State a real substantive ascendancy over the veritas not only of the legal form and norm but of any scientific reality whatsoever. The Schmittian sovereign remains an in-dividuum, because the decision is indivisible and must rest ultimately on one will: it is this Individualitat of the decision on the exception what Schmitt calls the personality of the Sovereign - that precludes it from being absorbed into any logico-scientific schema. As we have learned from Nietzsche, this applies both to the legal-moral order and to the logico-mathematical and scientific one!

The decisive point about Bodin's concept is that by referring to the emergency, he reduced his analysis of the relationships between prince and estates to a simple either/or. This is what is truly impressive in his definition of sovereignty; by considering sovereignty to be indivisible, he finally settled the question of power in the state. His scholarly accomplishment and the basis for his success thus reside in his having incorporated the decision into the concept of sovereignty.(PT, p8)
This is why the State is not and cannot be wholly other or neutral, like the Protestant God or the State of Law of Political Economy. The State does not stand, as in Hobbes and the liberal tradition, au dessus de la melee: it is a partial interest in society; its interest is the preservation of itself as the State, as the legal order. And this preservation depends on a political decision, on sovereignty that is not assigned by law but that is rather the very content of law. As the creator pacis terrestris (the opposite of Marsiliuss defensor pacis divinae), the State is for Schmitt not the pro-duct of the con-vergence or con-vention of individual self-interests, of their mediation, as found in the state of nature (the degree zero of politics, to invoke Barthes), even as the Hobbesian ultima ratio of avoiding (ones own) death. Rather, the State is a direct product of the conflict, of the di-vergence of these selfinterests so that the State remains conceptually tied to the state of nature it does not transcend

it because it is aUnicum, an indivisible Will. There is no meeting of the minds (conventum mentium) or convergence of wills upon which the State can be founded because these wills are uni-vocal, one-sided, and incapable of mediation with one another. The State is the sovereign that can preserve social peace not by mediating or re-conciling the conflicting interests of the state of nature, but by ensuring that friends keep their foes in check. The State is not a pro-duct of law, and thence sub-ordinate to law. Instead, the State as sover-reign, as suzer-rein, is above the law, it is a legibus solutus (ab-solute): therefore, as such, the State determines the content of the law in a conflictual and ineluctably antagonistic sense. And this is precisely what Schmitt disputes. The genius of Hobbes was to posit the alienation of personal freedom (the freedom of the will) for the sake of the preservation of life intended in the negative sense of fear of death: this last is what supplies the con-ventum, the agreement on which the State as common wealth can be erected consistently the system or order or freedom from the will. This is the truth, the rationalist inter esse of Hobbess political theory that is exalted in all the liberalist and contractualist interpretations of his theory (starting with Leo Strauss). But for Schmitt, no such inter esse linking the individuals survival or welfare to the social contract exists or can exist. Therefore, the State is not super partes; it is not a line that magicallyresults from a series of points: the State is a partisan that de-fines the political boundarybetween friend and foe, a boundary that is absolutely inescapable not merely in foro externo, with regard to other, foreign States, but also and above all with regard to the conflicts internal to the State, in foro interno.

El Estado, en su condicin de unidad poltica determinante, concentra en s una competencia aterradora: la posibilidad de declarar la guerra, y en consecuencia de disponer abiertamente de la vida de las personas. Pues el ius belli implica tal capacidad de disposicin: significa la doble posibilidad de requerir por una parte de los miembros del propio pueblo la disponibilidad para matar y ser muertos, y por la otra de matar a las personas que se encuentran del lado del enemigo. Sin embargo la aportacin de un Estado normal consiste sobre todo en producir dentro del Estado y su territorio una pacificacin completa, esto es, en procurar paz, seguridad y orden y crear as la situacin normal que constituye el presupuesto necesario para que las normas jurdicas puedan tener vigencia en general, ya que toda norma presupone una situacin normal y ninguna norma puede tener vigencia en una situacin totalmente anmala por referencia a ella. Esta necesidad de pacificacin dentro del Estado tiene como consecuencia, en caso de situacin crtica, que el Estado como unidad poltica, mientras exista como tal, est capacitado para determinar por s mismo tambin al enemigo interior. Tal es la razn por la que en todo Estado se da una forma u otra lo que en el derecho pblico de las repblicas griegas se conoca como declaracin de isokptLoq, y en el romano como declaracin de hostil: formas de proscripcin, destierro, ostracismo, de poner fuera de la ley, en una palabra, de declarar a alguien enemigo dentro del Estado; formas automticas o de eficacia regulada judicialmente por leyes especiales, formas abiertas u ocultas en circunloquios oficiales. Segn sea el comportamiento del que ha sido declarado enemigo del Estado,

76 Carl Schmitt, El Concepto de lo Politico

tal declaracin ser la seal de la guerra civil, esto es, de la disolucin del Estado como unidad poltica organizada, internamente apaciguada, territorialmente cerrada sobre s e impermeable para extraos. La guerra civil decidir entonces sobre el destino ulterior de esa unidad. Y a despecho de todas las ataduras constitucionales que vinculan al Estado de derecho burgus constitucional, tal cosa vale para l en la misma medida, si no en medida an mayor, que para cualquier otro Estado. Pues, siguiendo una expresin de Lorenz von Stein, en el Estado constitucional la constitucin es la expresin del orden social, la existencia misma de la sociedad ciudadana. En cuanto es atacada, la lucha ha de decidirse fuera de la constitucin y del derecho, en consecuencia por la fuerza de las armas.
The classical idea of the State is that of an entity that successfully resolves or at least reconciles all conflict between its members within its geographical boundaries. The problem is that for the State to have a ratio essendi or raison detre there must still exist conflict within it or else, ultimately, between its members and the members of other States. This is a point that anarchist philosophers have elaborated all too well from the days of Proudhon and Bakunin. Inevitably, the existence of States signals the presence of conflict. And for Schmitt, as for Weber, this conflict cannot be boiled down or reduced to some other specific type of conflict, whether moral, ethical, religious, racial or indeed economic.
4

Todo antagonismo o oposicin religiosa, moral, econmica, tnica o de cualquier clase se transforma en oposicin poltica en cuanto gana la fuerza suficiente como para agrupar de un modo efectivo a los hombres en amigos y enemigos. Lo poltico no estriba en la lucha misma; sta posee a su vez sus propias leyes tcnicas, psicolgicas y militares. Lo poltico est, como decamos, en una conducta determinada por esta posibilidad real, en la clara comprensin de la propia situacin y de su manera de estar determinada por ello, as como en el cometido de distinguir correctamente entre amigos y enemigos. Una comunidad religiosa que haga la guerra como tal, bien contra miembros de otras comunidades religiosas, bien en general, es, ms all de una comunidad religiosa, tambin una unidad poltica. Sera tambin una magnitud poltica con slo que ejerciese de un modo meramente negativo alguna influencia sobre ese proceso decisivo, si estuviese por ejemplo en condiciones de evitar guerras por medio de la correspondiente prohibicin a sus seguidores, esto es, si poseyese la autoridad necesaria para negar efectivamente la condicin de enemigo de un determinado adversario. Lo mismo se aplica para una asociacin de personas basada en un fundamento econmico, por ejemplo un consorcio industrial o un sindicato. Tambin una clase en el sentido marxista del trmi no deja de ser algo puramente econmico y se convierte en una magnitud poltica desde el momento en que alcanza el punto decisivo de tomar en serio la lucha de clases y tratar al adversario de clase como verdadero enemigo y combatirlo, bien de Estado a Estado, bien en una guerra civil dentro de un mismo Estado. La lucha real no podr ya discurrir segn leyes econmicas, sino que, junto a los

mtodos de lucha en el sentido tcnico restrictivo del trmino, poseer sus propias necesidades y orientaciones polticas, y realizar las correspondientes coaliciones, compromisos, etc. Si el proletariado se apodera del poder poltico dentro de un Estado, habr nacido un Estado proletario, que no ser una unidad menos poltica que cualquier Estado nacional, sacerdotal, comercial o militar, que un Estado funcionarial o que cualquier otra categora de unidad poltica. Si se llegara a agrupar de acuerdo con el criterio amigo/ enemigo a la humanidad entera partiendo de la oposicin entre burgueses y proletarios, formando Estados proletarios y estados capitalistas, eliminando con ello todas las dems agrupaciones de
68 Carl Schmitt

amigos y enemigos, el resultado sera que se pondra de manifiesto la plena realidad de lo poltico que contenan estos conceptos en apariencia puramente econmicos. Y si la fuerza poltica de una clase o cualquier otro grupo dentro de un pueblo tiene entidad suficiente como para excluir cualquier guerra exterior, pero ese grupo carece por su parte de la capacidad o de la voluntad necesarias para asumir el poder estatal, para realizar por s mismo la distincin entre amigo y enemigo y, en caso de necesidad, para hacer la guerra, la unidad poltica quedar destruida.
Although it may be possible for a State or different States to resolve and reconcile conflict in a more or less stable manner, there remains nevertheless a real possibility that this conflict and antagonisms, however diverse and insignificant, will reach the decisive point, the limit case, of total conflict, including civil war. It is senseless therefore to try to reduce conflict to its ultimate justification or rationalisation, as if conflict were dependent on any single real cause or root whether moral or religious or economic. All there is to conflict is the blunt fact of its real possibility: that alone is sufficient to allow us to categorise conflict as a separate reality irreducible to any other reality or casus bellithat can only be pretexts for the underlying real possibility of conflict.

Lo poltico puede extraer su fuerza de los mbitos ms diversos de la vida humana, de antagonismos religiosos, econmicos, morales, etc. Por s mismo lo poltico no acota un campo propio de la realidad, sino slo un cierto grada de intensidad de la asociacin o disociacin de hombres. Sus motivos pueden ser de naturaleza religiosa, nacional (en sentido tnico o cultural), econmica, etc., y tener como consecuencia en cada momento y poca uniones y separaciones diferentes. La agrupacin real en amigos y enemigos es en el plano del ser algo tan fuerte y decisivo que, en el momento en que una oposicin no poltica produce una agrupacin de esa ndole, pasan a segundo plano los anteriores criterios puramente religiosos, puramente econmicos o puramente culturales, y dicha agrupacin queda sometida a las condiciones y consecuencias totalmente nuevas y peculiares de una situacin convertida en poltica, con frecuencia harto inconsecuentes e irracionales desde la ptica de aquel punto de partida puramente religioso, puramente econmico o fundado en cualquier otra pureza. En cualquier caso es poltica siempre toda agrupacin que se orienta por referencia al

caso decisivo. Por eso es siempre la agrupacin humana que marca la pauta, y de ah que, siempre que existe una unidad poltica, ella sea la decisiva, y sea soberana en el sentido de que siempre, por necesidad conceptual, posea la competencia para decidir en el caso decisivo, aunque se trate de un caso excepcional. El trmino soberana tiene aqu su sentido correcto, igual que el de unidad. Ninguna de las dos cosas quiere decir que cada detalle de la existencia de toda persona que pertenece a una unidad pol tica tenga que estar determinado por lo poltico o sometido a sus rdenes, ni que un sistema centralista haya de aniquilar cualquier otra organizacin o corporacin. Puede ocurrir que las consideraciones de naturaleza econmica estn por encima de cualquier otra cosa que pueda querer el gobierno de un Estado econmicamente neu
El concepto de lo poltico 69

tral en apariencia; y no es raro que el poder, en un Estado aparentemente neutral en lo confesional, tropiece con su propio lmite en cuanto entran en juego las convicciones religiosas. Lo que decide es siempre y slo el caso de conflicto. Si los antagonismos econmicos, culturales o religiosos llegan a poseer tanta fuerza que determinan por s mismos la decisin en el caso lmite, quiere decir que ellos son la nueva sustancia de la unidad poltica. Y si carecen de la fuerza necesaria para evitar una guerra acordada en contra de sus propios intereses y principios, eso significa que no han alcanzado todava el punto decisivo de lo poltico. Si poseen fuerza suficiente como para evitar una guerra deseada por la direccin poltica pero contraria a sus intereses o principios, pero no tanta como para determinar por s mismos una guerra por propia decisin, es que ya no existe una magnitud poltica unitaria. Sea ello como fuere: como consecuencia de la referencia a la posibilidad lmite de la lucha efectiva contra un enemigo efectivo, una de dos: o la unidad poltica es la que decide la agrupacin de amigos y enemigos, y es soberana en este sentido (no en algn sentido absolutista), o bien es que no existe en absoluto.
All attempts to attribute the source of conflict to analytical or scientific reasons outside of the category of conflict itself, of the category of the Political, end up being therefore for Schmitt indefensible attempts to rationalize conflict and indeed to justify war and political murder and even genocide. Of course, this leaves open the question that Schmitt does not address of how his own theory of the Political differs from all other rationalisations of war and murder. If indeed conflict is a mere real possibility of the very contingency and pro-jectuality of human ecsistence, and indeed of Being itself, then two things follow that surely stand in contradiction with each other: - one is the real possibility of conflict, the mere contingency of agreement; but the other is the equally real possibility of agreement, of peace and co-operation of what Schmitt calls friendship. The incongruity in Schmitt is that enmity assumes clear priority over friendship simply because enmity can result in the final instance, the decisive point, which presumably for Schmitt (as for Heidegger) is war, murder and death.

La oposicin o el antagonismo constituye la ms intensa y extrema de todas las oposiciones, y cualquier antagonismo concreto

se aproximar tanto ms a lo poltico cuanto mayor sea su cercana al punto extremo, esto es, a la distincin entre amigo y enemigo. (p.59) . Los conceptos de amigo, enemigo y lucha adquieren su sentido real por el hecho de que estn y se mantienen en conexin con la posibilidad real de matar fsicamente. La guerra procede de la enemistad, ya que sta es una negacin ntica de un ser distinto. La guerra no es sino la realizacin extrema de la enemistad. (p.63)
What this onto-logical approach to the Political fails to explain is precisely (!) the very real possibility of the Political which, if it were only for the contingency of being-there, of human ecsistence, would have absolutely no reason to be! It may very well be that there is no ultimate reason for friendship but then, neither is there any ultimate reason for enmity; and above all, friendship ec-sists even if we cannot attribute a reason to its ec-sistence. It is to this onto-logical aspect of Schmitts theory of the Political that we now turn.

8888888888 Ontological Aspects of Schmitts Dezisionismus

El concepto de lo poltico 57

Si la distincin entre el bien y el mal no puede ser identificada sin ms con las de belleza y fealdad, o beneficio y perjuicio, ni ser reducida a ellas de una manera directa, mucho menos debe poder confundirse la oposicin amigo-enemigo con aqullas. El sentido de la distincin amigo-enemigo es marcar el grado mximo de intensidad de una unin o separacin, de una asociacin o disociacin. Y este criterio puede sostenerse tanto en la teora como en la prctica sin necesidad de aplicar simultneamente todas aquellas otras distinciones morales, estticas, econmicas y dems. El enemigo poltico no necesita ser moralmente malo, ni estticamente feo; no hace falta que se erija en competidor econmico, e incluso puede tener sus ventajas hacer negocios con l. Simplemente es el otro, el extrao, y para determinar su esencia basta con que sea existencialmente distinto y extrao en un sentido particularmente intensivo. En ltimo extremo pueden producirse conflictos con l que no puedan resolverse ni desde alguna normativa general previa ni en virtud del juicio o sentencia de un tercero no afectado o imparcial. En esto la posibilidad de conocer y comprender adecuadamente, y en consecuencia la competencia para intervenir, estn dadas tan slo en virtud de una cierta participacin, de un tomar parte en sentido existencial. Un conflicto extremo slo puede ser resuelto por los propios implicados; en rigor slo cada uno de ellos puede decidir por s mismo si la alteridad del extrao representa en el conflicto concreto y actual la negacin del propio modo de existencia, y en consecuencia si hay que rechazarlo o combatirlo para preservar la propia forma esencial de vida. En el plano de la realidad psicolgica es fcil que se trate al enemigo como si fuese tambin malo y

feo, ya que toda distincin, y desde luego la de la poltica, que es la ms fuerte e intensa de las distinciones y agrupaciones, echa mano de cualquier otra distincin que encuentre con tal de procurarse apoyo. Pero esto no altera en nada la autonoma de esas oposiciones. Y esto se puede aplicar tambin en sentido inverso: lo que es moralmente malo, estticamente feo o econmicamente perjudicial no tiene por qu ser tambin necesariamente hostil; ni tampoco lo que es moralmente bueno, estticamente hermoso y econmicamente rentable se convierte por s mismo en amistoso en el sentido especfico, esto es, poltico, del trmino. La objetividad y autonoma propias del ser de lo poltico quedan de manifiesto en esta mis
58 Carl Schmitt

ma posibilidad de aislar una distincin especfica como la de amigoenemigo respecto de cualesquiera otras y de concebirla como dotada de consistencia propia.
The point of the facticity of the conception of the Political and its dependence on the notions of contingency (the possibility of nothing-ness) and death in the negatives Denken is illustrated most tellingly by Lowith in a fascinating homologation of the political philosophy of Schmitt with the existential (though not necessarily existentialist!) onto-theo-logy of Heidegger.

El pathos de la decisin en favor de la pura decisividad supo encontrar una aprobacin generalizada en la poca de entreguerras. Prepar el camino para la decisin en favor de la decisividad de Hitler e hizo posible el viraje poltico como"revolucin del nihilismo". Pero este pathos no estaba de ningn modo confinado al decisionismo poltico, sino que caracterizaba no menos la teologa dialctica y la filosofa de la existencia decidida. Esta conexin interna entre el decisionismo poltico, filosfico y teolgico85 ser desarrollada en el siguiente complemento al anterior tratado de 1935 sobre Carl Schmitt, en relacin con Martin Heidegger86 y Friedrich Gogarten. El ser y el 78 HEIDEGGER, PENSADOR DE UN TIEMPO INDIGENTE tiempo - un libro en apariencia completamente apoltico, que no hace ms que plantear la pregunta por el ser, aunque en el horizonte del tiempo- apareci en el mismo ao que El concepto de lo poltico de Schmitt, y la teologa dialctica alcanzaba su mayor poder de seduccin en ese mismo momento. Para comprender el trasfondo contemporneo de los impulsos radicales de Heidegger resulta til ponerlos en relacin con una expresin de Rilke. El mundo burgus, escribe Rilke en una carta del 8 de noviembre de 1915, ha olvidado por medio de su fe en el progreso y en la humanidad las "ltimas instancias" de la vida humana; ha olvidado que este mundo burgus "estaba superado de antemano por Dios y la muerte". El mismo significado tambin tiene la muerte en El ser y el tiempo ( 63): como la insuperable "instancia superior de apelacin" de nuestro ser y poder. En El ser y el tiempo, por supuesto, de Dios no se habla; Heidegger haba sido por mucho tiempo telogo cristiano, como para poder contar, como Rilke, las "historias del buen Dios". Lo nico que es necesario para l es

la pregunta por el ser en cuanto tal y en su totalidad; una pregunta para la cual la nada y la muerte resultan especialmente reveladoras. La muerte es la nada ante la cual se manifiesta la radical finitud de nuestra existencia temporal o, como se encuentra formulado en las lecciones de Friburgo en torno al ao 1920, la "facticidad histrica" cuyo pathos es la resolucin de asumir el ser-ah [Da-sein] ms propio. La "libertad para la muerte" con subrayado doble en El ser y el tiempo ( 53), por medio de la cual el Dasein en cada caso propio y aislado en s mismo alcanza su "poder-ser-total" [Ganz-sein-konnen], se corresponde en el decisionismo poltico con el sacrificio de la vida por el Estado total en el caso de emergencia de la guerra. El principio es en ambos casos el mismo: el regreso radical a algo ltimo, al nudo que-es [Da-sein] de la facticidad, es decir, a lo que queda de la vida cuando se ha barrido con todos los contenidos vitales tradicionales, con la quididad.
In the quotation above, Lowith homologates the decision in Schmitts political theory with the freedom before death (reminiscent of the sickness unto death of Kierkegaardian memory and then of Sartres nausea) that Heidegger underlines doubly in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit. This is what Heidegger achieves for Schmitt: - the de-struction of form, of system, order and unity, of totality as the truth or necessity of all human concepts - which begins with the only freedom possible for Heidegger, that of freedom as contingency, as the possibility of nothingness: and hence of the decision auf Nichts gestellt. It is this pro-jectuality that allows truth to be seen as dis-closedness, being as becoming, and therefore freedom as resolve (Entschlossenheit), as resoluteness - as Decision. Interesting is the contrast with Hobbes who sees death in a political dimension, rather than an ontological one (like Nietzsche, not the fact that we die but how we die is important for him) by selecting the fear of violent death, and the related clinging to life, as the motive for the exit from the state of nature into the political one of the common-wealth. In effect, the only free-dom possible for Hobbes is in the state of nature where the human will has free rein. It is the irrationality of this state of nature, its bellum civium, that induces the free will to exercise its rational decision to opt for the status civilis, for the social contract establishing the commonwealth and obedience to the State in exchange for its protection. Schmitt objects here that Hobbess polity in effect marks the transition or exit from a mythological state of nature that is un-political by definition (the war of all against all, anarchy and chaos) into an equally un-political state in which the adherents to the social pact renounce politics by alienating their free-dom and pledging obedience to a wholly mechanical State in exchange for itsprotection. Politics as conflict now exists in foro externo as Realpolitik or raison dEtat between States but not within them, not in foro interno. If the State is to be truly super partes, then ultimately no politics is possible within its territory. (See our quotation above from Schmitt [CdP, p76].) Freedom therefore means for Hobbes the free-dom to decide autonomously over ones conduct in the state of nature and inevitably clashing with the free-dom of others. Unlike Heideggers existential notion of freedom, Hobbess is mechanical at one end and rationalistic at the other. As Lowith correctly notes above, Hobbess freedom contains the Ratio that leads to the inter esse of

the common wealth. But this is not the freedom that Heidegger and Schmitt intend. For the German philosophers freedom means contingency, the possibility of annihilation, the opposite of logical necessity or teleological destiny. This free-dom cannot lead to any inter esse, to any common weal or wealth that is not a police state. For Hobbes freedom is a relation to other individuals so that his state of nature contains a political notion of freedom, but one that annuls itself because this free-dom does not take an institutional form but remains rather one tied to the anarchy and chaos of the bellum civium, the civil war of the state of nature. In Heidegger the will becomes the very foundation of all reality, whereas in Hobbes it is the escape from the will freedom from the will, from the destructiveness of this will that is the aim of political theory for the sake of the rational preservation of life and the avoidance of death: only to see this will clash aporetically with its axiomatic mechanical self-interest. Heideggers will is reconcilable with life and politics because it is essentially ontological; Hobbess is not because it is an acquisitive will that is entirely atomic and a-political. Hobbess will is so unilateral, so onesided, that it is not free to decide in favour of the preservation of life or, by extension, of the common weal it can only at best opt for self-preservation, for the a-voidance of ones own death. This is the ultimate fallacy of possessive individualism from Hobbes to Smith and neoclassical theory, namely, that they fail to explain and set the limits to possessive-ness that make possession possible! (On this notion see the homonymous work by CB Macpherson.) In both Hobbes and Heidegger, and for Schmitt as well, the will is an ontological entity, not a political one; but it necessarily becomes political at the point where it becomes organized conflict, coaction and co-ercion by human groups. And this is why Schmitt combines the decision with the pre-existence of friend and foe, the imprescindible moment of the Political that is not acquired historically from the state of nature or instituted contractually, but is rather a real possibility (!), a given fact, a datum (cf. the Italian expression dato di fatto or the French donnee) of the universal Eris, a quidditas or qualitas occulta that is an ineluctable aspect of the ontic facticity of being there (Da-sein); a world from which even the aporetic Hobbesian Ratio of the decision (however ultimate) to exit the state of nature and to enter the Ordo of the contractum unionis et subjectionis is removed. This is the Heideggerian freedom before (or toward) death, that debouches in the resolve (Entschlossenheit) as the moment of decision rather than as the Ratio of politics, as a pro-ject, a real possibility founded on nothingness. But Heidegger does not escape the political romanticism decried by Schmitt because his ontology is part of that neutralization of politics that Schmitt combats. In this regard, Lowiths homologation of Schmitt and Heidegger misses the mark. But not entirely; not with regard to the facticity of authority, or power in the Hobbesian sense, or sovereignty in the Schmittian sense. This facticity is the quidditas, thequalitas occulta that is the exclusive preserve of the Will as understood by the negatives Denken, that is to say, as the obverse of the Kantian Ding an sich. Differently put, for the negatives Denken the essence of Being (Sein) is its ec-sistence as being (Seiende) its contingency, its real possibility. But here the facticity that Schmitt highlights as the ontological foundation of the Political assumes a paradoxical duality because, on one hand, it retains a transcendental formalism reminiscent of the Kantian and neo-Kantian categories, whilst on the other hand, when it seeks to found itssubstantive immanence, it ignores one essential aspect of the Political that is obscured by that formalism: - the ec-sistence of friendship.

2 Si se aspira a obtener una determinacin del concepto de lo poltico,

la nica va consiste en proceder a constatar y a poner de manifiesto cules son las categoras especficamente polticas. Pues lo poltico tiene sus propios criterios, y stos operan de una manera muy peculiar en relacin con los diversos dominios ms o menos independientes del pensar y el hacer humanos, en particular por referencia a lo moral, lo esttico y lo econmico. Lo poltico tiene que hallarse en una serie de distinciones propias ltimas a las cuales pueda reconducirse todo cuanto sea accin poltica en un sentido especfico. Supongamos que en el dominio de lo moral la distincin ltima es la del bien y el mal; que en lo esttico lo es la de lo bello y lo feo; en lo econmico la de lo beneficioso o lo perjudicial, o tal vez la de lo rentable y lo no rentable. El problema es si existe alguna distincin especfica, comparable a esas otras aunque, claro est, no de la misma o parecida naturaleza, independiente de ellas, autnoma y que se imponga por s misma como criterio simple de lo poltico; y si existe, cul es? (El Concepto, p56)
That Schmitt should resort ultimately to neo-Kantian specifically political categories to describe the concept of the Political which, by his own contention, was supposed to provide the apex of what is factic, ontic and therefore substantive and immanent in human reality the decision on the exception; that he, like Weber and Heidegger, should then isolate the Political as an autonomous practical and epistemological indeed onto-logical aspect of human reality: all this confirms the abstract, formal and transcendental deviation and degradation of the Schmittian conceptualization of the Political, as the quotation above with its Kantian echoes clearly suggests.

Pues bien, la distincin poltica especfica, aquella a la que pueden reconducirse todas las acciones y motivos polticos, es la distincin de amigo y enemigo. Lo que sta proporciona no es desde luego una definicin exhaustiva de lo poltico, ni una descripcin de su contenido, pero s una determinacin de su concepto en el sentido de un criterio. En la medida en que no deriva de otros criterios, esa distincin se corresponde en el dominio de lo poltico con los criterios relativamente autnomos que proporcionan distinciones como la del bien y el mal en lo moral, la de belleza y fealdad en lo esttico, etc. Es desde luego una distincin autnoma, pero no en el sentido de definir por s misma un nuevo campo de la realidad, sino en el sentido de que ni se funda en una o varias de esas otras distinciones ni se la puede reconducir a ellas. (p56)
Here is an exquisite deviation that Schmitt effects from the Hobbesian analysis. The Hobbesianultima ratio is the fear of ones death and the preservation of ones life at the hand of other in-dividuals (cf. Schmitt, Der Leviathan, beginning of ch.3). That is where politics begins and ends for Hobbes. Schmitt knows that this is far from the reality: not only does politics not begin with the exit from the state of nature, but that state of nature could never have existed because for an exit from it to be at all possible, then that exit must invalidate both the historical existence and even the conceptual possibility of the state of nature! In effect, it is impossible to conceive of a state of nature from which there is an escape! Besides, fear is not a positive emotion that can found the Political, let alone a common-wealth! And the State cannot be a

God super partes, however mortal Hobbes chooses to label it. Its mortality betrays its partiality: authority would otherwise become a truth, which is what Hobbes denies, instead of retaining its facticity, which is what Schmitt maintains. But the exquisite deviation of Schmitts conception of the Political from that of Hobbes consists in the fact that Schmitt no longer envisages the Political as the result, first, of conflict between singleindividuals, and second of a mere e-motion such as fear or of a rationality of selfpreservation that individuals may possess. Instead, Schmitt rightly insists on the necessity of analyzing the Political from the perspective of conflict between groups of individuals, and also, less rightly, on the onto-logical, not e-motional or ontic, root of this conflict, on the real possibility of conflict - although as conflict its mani-festation, its appearance, is necessarily ontic. This last point is illustrated amply in the following Schmittian expressions, sprinkled throughout The Concept:

3 Los conceptos de amigo y enemigo deben tomarse aqu en su sentido concreto y existencial, no como metforas o smbolos; tampoco se los debe confundir o debilitar en nombre de ideas econmicas, morales o de cualquier otro tipo; pero sobre todo no se los debe reducir a una instancia psicolgica privada e individualista, tomndolos como expresin de sentimientos o tendencias privados. No se trata ni de una oposicin normativa ni de una distincin puramente espiritual. En el marco de un dilema especfico entre espritu y economa (y del cual nos ocuparemos en el ap. 8), el liberalismo intenta disolver el concepto de enemigo, por el lado de lo econmico, en el de un competidor, y por el lado del espritu, en el de un oponente en la discusin. Bien es verdad que en el dominio econmico no existen enemigos sino nicamente competidores, y que en un mundo moralizado y reducido por completo a categoras ticas quiz ya no habra tampoco otra cosa que oponentes verbales. En cualquier caso aqu no nos interesa saber si es rechazable o no el que los pueblos sigan agrupndose de hecho segn que se consideren amigos o enemigos, ni si se trata de un resto atvico de pocas de barbarie; tampoco vamos a ocuparnos de las esperanzas de que algn da esa distincin desaparezca de la faz de la tierra, ni de la posible bondad o conveniencia de hacer, con fines educativos, como si ya no hubiese enemigos. No estamos tratando de ficciones ni de normatividades, sino de la realidad ntica y de la posibilidad real de esta distincin. Se podrn compartir o no esas esperanzas y esos objetivos pedaggicos; pero lo que no se puede negar razonablemente es que los pueblos se agrupan como amigos y enemigos, y que esta oposicin sigue estando en vigor, y est dada como posibilidad real, para todo pueblo que exista polticamente.
<. But it is the fundamental categorization that Schmitt undertakes of the Political as encompassing conflict between groups of individuals as an existential aspect of human reality that needs close attention from us here. One of two things: - either all aspects of human behaviour are political and as such can lead to conflict (enmity) or to co-operation (friendship), or else the Political can be logically and categorically be separated or distilled (in a neo-Kantian

fashion) from other aspects of human ec-sistence, as if human being could be treated only ontologically and transcendentally, as Heideggerian Da-sein or being there which encompasses only in-dividuals and not being human, rather than immanently (as we have treated it in our The Philosophy of the Flesh) as being human, that is to say, as a reality that is neither physical-material nor spiritual-idealistic but rather must be seen in a new immanentist dimension (again, we have dealt with these matters in The Philosophy of the Flesh). In the first case, Schmitt has failed to show because he could not! that there is any human reality that is other than political, and in the second case he has failed to show that the Political can indeed be separated and distilled from the economic, religious, artistic or moral-ethical (deontological) aspects of human being!