History and Theory 56, no.

3 (September 2017), 370-378 © Wesleyan University 2017 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.12025
Forum: Carl Schmitt in History and Theory

2.

CONFRONTING DEFEAT:
CARL SCHMITT BETWEEN THE VICTORS AND THE VANQUISHED

ENZO TRAVERSO

ABSTRACT

Quoting a text on Tocqueville written by Carl Schmitt in 1946, Reinhart Koselleck hypoth-
esized about the epistemological advantage of being vanquished in writing history. This
essay analyzes Schmitt’s intellectual and political positions in reaction to three successive
defeats: the collapse of the German Empire in 1918; the end of the Weimar Republic in
1933; and the overthrow of the Third Reich in 1945. Schmitt was a German nationalist
and, at least until Hitler’s rise to power, an anti-Nazi conservative, but he easily adapted to
both the Weimar Republic in 1919 and National Socialism in 1933, two political turns that
coincided with significant improvements in his academic career. He felt vanquished only
in 1945, after his double imprisonment, the Nuremberg trial, and finally his retirement to
Plettenberg. 1945 was a watershed that he symbolized through two metaphorical figures:
the reactionary thinker of Spanish Absolutism Juan Donoso Cortés and Melville’s literary
character Benito Cereno. Thus, the case of Carl Schmitt does not confirm Koselleck’s
hypothesis, insofar as the most productive and creative part of his intellectual life does not
fit into an awareness of being vanquished. Koselleck’s statement deals with the gaze of the
ruled, whereas Schmitt belonged to a different tradition of political thinkers interested in
building domination and smashing revolution (Hobbes, Maistre, Donoso Cortés). He was a
thinker of action, not of mourning. Defeat did not inspire, but rather paralyzed his thought.

Keywords: Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, Juan Donoso Cortés, historiography, episte-
mology, defeat, National Socialism

Interviewed by an Italian journal of jurisprudence in 1982, three years before his

death, Carl Schmitt depicted himself as a victim who had survived two world
wars and imprisonment.1 His words, nevertheless, did not address any political
or intellectual failure; they rather suggested an indulgent self-portrait of spiritual
greatness. They echoed an appraisal of Tocqueville that he wrote in 1946 from an
American jail in Berlin, in which he interpreted the work of “the greatest historian
of the nineteenth century” through his status as vanquished. Tocqueville was van-
quished from many points of view: as an aristocrat, the representative of a class
that had been overthrown in 1789; as a Frenchman who grew up in a country
defeated by a European coalition of monarchies; as a reluctant defender of clas-
sical liberalism that was threatened by revolution in 1848 and by Bonapartism
in the following years; and as a Christian, whose world and values were being

1. Carl Schmitt, “Un giurista davanti a se stesso,” in Un giurista davanti a se stesso: Saggi e
interviste, ed. Giorgio Agamben (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), 182.
 CONFRONTING DEFEAT 371
destroyed by the process of secularization.2 Many years later, Reinhart Koselleck,
one of Schmitt’s last disciples, drew from this article on Tocqueville a more
general assessment on history-writing, in which he opposed the clairvoyance of
Marx to the complacent narratives of Guizot and Droysen, the historians from the
July Monarchy and the Prussian Kingdom: “The experience of being vanquished
contains an epistemological potential that transcends its cause, especially when
the vanquished are required to rewrite general history in conjunction with their
own.”3 Unlike the victors, whose interpretation of the past is always apologetic,
the gaze of the vanquished is much sharper and more critical. It is interesting to
observe that Koselleck quotes Schmitt but does not apply this historiographical
assessment to him. In fact, as I will argue, it is not as vanquished that Schmitt
elaborated his political theory and wrote his major works. On the contrary: the
awareness of being vanquished exhausted his genius and significantly diminished
his intellectual creativity.
In a life lasting for a good part of the twentieth century, Schmitt experienced
three German historical defeats: the fall of the Kaiserreich at the end of the First
World War; the failure of the Weimar Republic between 1930 and 1933; and the
apocalyptic collapse of the Third Reich in 1945. All of these historical events
deeply affected his existential and intellectual life, but only the last one gave him
the awareness of being vanquished. The two previous events had certainly shaped
his political thought, but he did not react to them as one who was defeated. At
those moments, this feeling was unknown to him.
Schmitt did not experience the trenches during the Great War, but 1918 was a
significant turning point in his life. With the French annexation of Alsace, he lost
his academic position at the University of Strasbourg and, for a short moment,
remained outside of the German universities. An admirer of French literature and
fond of the tradition of Catholic conservatism, he never identified with the “ideas
of 1914” nor with the radicalism of völkisch nationalists, but he doubtless felt the
end of the German Empire as a terrible loss. In 1919, as a young professor of the
Handelshochschule of Munich, he experienced both revolution and the bloody
repression enforced by the Freikorps in Bavaria. Unlike other conservative schol-
ars like Ernst Kantorowicz, he did not take up arms against the Red Republic of
Ernst Toller and Gustav Landauer, but did strongly support the reestablishment
of order by the counterrevolution. It is during the turbulent years of the begin-
ning of the Weimar Republic, shaped by political chaos, economic disorder, left
uprisings, military repression, putsch attempts, and foreign military occupation,
that Schmitt conceived his major theoretical works. This is the highly explosive
historical context in which he systematized his critique of liberalism, his vision
of “the political” as an agonistic relationship between friend and enemy, his
theory of dictatorship and the “state of exception,” his vision of sovereignty as
political decision, his theological-political conception of secularized politics, his

2. Carl Schmitt, “Historiographie in nuce: Alexis de Tocqueville” (1946), in Ex Captivitate Salus:

Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), 25-33.
3. Reinhart Koselleck, “Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change: A Historical-
Anthropological Essay,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, ed. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 76.
372 ENZO TRAVERSO

critique of juridical normativism, and his distinction between legality and legiti-
macy. He did not elaborate these concepts as one who was defeated, but rather
as a thinker involved in a political struggle. He was neither the victor nor the
vanquished; mobilizing an allegorical figure coined by Machiavelli and used by
Isaac Deutscher for depicting the young Trotsky, one could sketch a portrait of
Schmitt during the Weimar years as a kind of “armed prophet.”4
In 1933, he probably perceived the rise to power of National Socialism as a
personal defeat. Between 1930 and 1933, he restlessly pursued a political turn
that, applying article 48 of the Constitution, would have established a “state of
exception,” a dictatorship based on the legitimacy of the President and opposed
to the Parliament, the symbol of an impotent legal power. This authoritarian turn
had two distinct but parallel purposes: on the one hand, to replace an exhausted
parliamentary democracy; on the other hand, to avoid the threat represented by
the growing forces of both the communists and the Nazis. Schmitt passionately
defended this option in many articles as well as in his numerous interventions as
an adviser to the chancellors of the Weimar Republic toward its end: Heinrich
Brüning, Fritz von Papen, and, to a lesser degree, Kurt von Schleicher. The com-
plete failure of this strategy, however, did not discourage Schmitt. He did not
approve Hitler’s nomination as chancellor at the end of January 1933 and did not
vote in the March elections, but a few weeks later he endorsed the Gleichhaltung
in an article for the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, in which he stressed that Germany
had entered “the sphere of supra-legality” (Überlegalität).5 The legal rise of Hitler
to power in January 1933 opened a new era to which our constitutional thinker
suddenly adapted himself, both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, he
reformulated his concepts, making them closer to Nazi ideology, until he pre-
sented Hitler as the embodiment of the German Nomos—the hidden, primordial
source of any legal order—and of the “people’s right to live” (Lebensrecht des
Volkes).6 He supported Nazi politics and presented the Third Reich as the expres-
sion of a modern Leviathan protecting the national body against the disruptive
effects of Weimar democracy. Practically, he broke any relation with his Jewish
friends, colleagues, and disciples, including his Berlin publisher, Duncker
& Humblot. Of course, the main ground of this political turn was Schmitt’s
opportunism (speaking with Karl Löwith, we could say his personal “occasional
decisionism”7). Behind this convenient choice, which resulted in getting a chair
at the University of Berlin and the prestigious position of “crown jurist of the

4. Isaac Deutscher, The Armed Prophet: Trotsky 1879–1921 (London: Oxford University Press,
1954).
5. Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 277-278;
Joseph J. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983), 188; Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), 17; Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt
(London: Verso, 2000), 175; Carlo Galli, Genealogia della politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pen-
siero politico moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), 840-863.
6. Carl Schmitt, “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (1934), in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf
mit Weimar, Genf, Versailles 1923–1939 [1939] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 200. See also
Mehring, Carl Schmitt, 322.
7. Karl Löwith, “The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt,” in Martin Heidegger and
European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 137-158.
 CONFRONTING DEFEAT 373
Reich,” there was also a worldview coupled with an illusion: the conviction that
in times of European civil war and the collapse of classical liberalism, Hitler
could play the role of a modern katechon, the force that “withholds,” the last
defense against the threat of Bolshevism, the secular form of the Antichrist. This
was not the choice of someone who was vanquished; it was the preference of a
fighter who, cynically and skillfully, acted with a mixture of intellectual audacity,
political calculation, and fearful surrender to the new ruler.
The defeat of 1945 was a whole different story. Whereas the Weimar Republic
and the Third Reich had been significant steps of Schmitt’s ascension in intel-
lectual and public life, the fall of National Socialism destroyed his ambitions and
put an end to his academic career. Arrested twice, first by the Soviet and then by
the American occupiers, which put him in jail for more than a year and seized
his library, he definitively lost his chair and was forbidden to publish until 1950.
Thus, he retired in Plettenberg, his native town on the Moselle, where he played
the role of passive observer. The former celebrated scholar who had stigmatized
exiled intellectuals and Jewish thinkers, had become a kind of German pariah.8
Socially and politically marginalized, excluded from the university and living
in a defeated country that the Cold War had divided into two separate entities
deprived of any real sovereignty, he truly felt, for the first time, the experience of
being vanquished. He lived in “exile.” In his eyes, politics without sovereignty
did not deserve any consideration, and he renounced his involvement in public
affairs. Of course, he was a German citizen, but in his own way he was a pariah,
in the sense given by Hannah Arendt: a person living in a condition of “world-
lessness” (Weltlosigkeit).9 In these circumstances, he lost much of his intellectual
imagination and theoretical creativity; his thought seemed to dry out.
The most fruitful period of Schmitt’s intellectual life was the Weimar
Republic, in which he published an impressive succession of outstanding books:
Political Romanticism (1919), Dictatorship (1921), Political Theology (1922),
Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1922), The Concept of the Political
(1927), Constitutional Theory (1928), and Legality and Legitimacy (1932). Under
the Nazi regime he wrote a multitude of propaganda articles and essays, including
a significant number of anti-Semitic pieces like The Leviathan in the State Theory
of Thomas Hobbes (1938), but also remarkable essays like Land and Sea (1942),
and one of his most important books, which was finally released in 1950: The
Nomos of the Earth. Compared with the brilliance of these works, his writings
of the postwar years are simple recollections of old pieces, like A Pan-European
Interpretation of Donoso Cortés (1950), or appear as shameful apologetic pleas
charged with resentment, like Ex Captivitate Salus (1950) and Glossarium
(1951). Schmitt’s only original contributions written after the Second World
War are probably two short essays: Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) and Theory of the

8. I borrow this definition from Anson Rabinbach, who used it in a different context; see Anson
Rabinbach, “The German as Pariah: Karl Jaspers’s The Question of German Guilt,” in In the Shadow
of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), 129-165.
9. Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1968), 16-17.
374 ENZO TRAVERSO

Partisan (1963). It would be difficult to say he drew inspiration from defeat.

After 1945, he not only felt vanquished; he had lost a distinguishable enemy,
which always was the necessary, irreplaceable, inspiring source of his thought.
The passage from the “armed prophet” (Weimar and the Third Reich) to the
vanquished (the postwar years) can be synthesized by two allegorical figures who
played an important role in Schmitt’s intellectual trajectory, and with whom he
liked to identify himself: Juan Donoso Cortés and Benito Cereno. Donoso Cortés
was a model of a reactionary thinker who inspired his philosophy of history and
his political theory; Benito Cereno was a literary character, forged by Herman
Melville in his eponymous novel as an epitome of ambiguity, who furnished him
an allegorical mirror and an elegant justification. Of course, for Schmitt they
were not opposed to each other, but they belong to two clearly distinct periods
of his intellectual and political life, in which they fulfill two different purposes.
Schmitt devoted to Donoso Cortés four essays, written between 1922 and
1944, later collected in a booklet in 1950.10 He considered this Spanish philoso-
pher, essayist, and statesman as “one of the greatest political thinkers of the nine-
teenth century,”11 in whom he found a peculiar fusion between an “eschatological
prophet” and an “ambitious professional diplomat.”12 In the age of classical lib-
eralism, Donoso Cortés had perfectly understood the dilemma of 1848 as a his-
torical confrontation between Catholic absolutism and atheistic socialism, which
prefigured the crucial alternative of the twentieth century: revolution or counter-
revolution, Bolshevism or fascism, anarchism or authoritarianism. In the wake
of his apocalyptic forerunner, the French legitimist Joseph de Maistre, Donoso
Cortés was “the most radical of the counterrevolutionaries, an extreme reac-
tionary and a conservative of almost medieval fanaticism,”13 but these are pre-
cisely the features that so irresistibly attracted Schmitt. His writings, notably his
Discourse on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1851), helped his German
admirer to build some of his own key concepts—decision, sovereignty, and dicta-
torship—as the secularized forms of a Christian political theology rather than the
codified categories of an abstract system of juridical norms. It is Donoso Cortés
who, one century earlier, stigmatized liberalism as the mirror of an impotent clase
discutidora and claimed the legitimacy of a dictator against the impersonal rule
of law. Like Hobbes, Donoso Cortés knew that law did not establish any political
order, but could become effective only if it was based upon a concrete authority.
Embodied by worshipping soldiers, Catholic absolutism was a spiritual power
incomparably superior to liberalism, a legal and mechanical order based upon
the market and rational law (what Hans Kelsen called Gesetzmässigkeit). Schmitt

10. Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation (Cologne: Grieven, 1950);
the first of the four essays composing this book was included in Carl Schmitt, Political Theology:
Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, ed. Georg Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006) as chapter 4: “On the Counterrevolutionary Theory of the State (de Maistre, Bonald,
Donoso Cortés),” 53-65; the other three essays are translated in Telos, no. 125 (2002) (“Donoso
Cortés in Berlin (1849),” “The Unknown Donoso Cortés,” and “A Pan-European Interpretation of
Donoso Cortés”).
11. Schmitt, “The Unknown Donoso Cortés,” 85.
12. Ibid., 83.
13. Schmitt, “A Pan-European Interpretation of Donoso Cortés,” 101.
 CONFRONTING DEFEAT 375
was fascinated by Donoso Cortés’s powerful allegorical style through which he
described history as a gigantic labyrinth or like a boat piloted by a crew of drunk
sailors in the middle of a tempest. Schmitt also liked Donoso Cortés’s aristocratic
contempt for human beings, depicted as a gathering of corrupted sinners who
only deserved to be crushed to death (Donoso Cortés’s “contempt for man knew
no limits”).14 He appreciated this forceful imagination and certainly agreed with
Donoso Cortés’s plea for authoritarian leadership: human beings needed to be
ruled. This was their destiny as well as the true meaning of political theory.
Schmitt transformed Donoso Cortés into a kind of “autobiographical mask,”
according to the felicitous definition suggested by Reinhard Mehring.15 This
relationship reveals an intellectual background that was very unusual in the
Weimar years, where the harbingers of the Conservative Revolution came either
from völkisch nationalism or from a cultural pessimism completely alien to the
Catholic tradition. The names of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur
Moeller van der Bruck are neglected in his writings, whereas he was an ardent
admirer of Joseph de Maistre, Charles Maurras, and Léon Bloy, the representa-
tives of French legitimism and Catholic nationalism. And his radicalism (though
reactionary) exposed him to the influence of the aesthetic transgressions of
Dadaist writers like Theodor Däubler and Hugo Ball, thinkers far beyond the
Zentrum’s political conformism. Like Donoso Cortés, a diplomat appointed to
the Spanish embassy in Prussia in 1849, Schmitt always felt himself a Catholic
outsider, both in Plettenberg, a Catholic island in a Protestant region, and of
course in Berlin.
According to Schmitt, Donoso Cortés’s apocalyptic political theology showed
a fatal limit: he did not know the katechon.16 This concept, which he discovered
in 1932 in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, became a pillar of his own
political theology insofar as it offered a spiritual foundation to his political
choices. The idea of a restraining force (Aufhalter) that delays the advent of
the Antichrist and prevents the world from falling into complete impiety was
embodied in the Middle Ages by the Christian emperors. Schmitt theorized this
category for the first time in The Nomos of the Earth, but had used it in many
letters and occasional texts since the beginning of the 1930s.17 Fundamentally,
he thought the katechon could also find a secularized form, and the search for
its modern equivalent became the secret tropism of his political commitment.
One can suppose that for Schmitt this religious overpowering force inspired
the Bavarian Freikorps in 1919; after 1930, Schmitt claimed this role for the
President, to whom he suggested applying article 48 of the Constitution; and
after 1933 he attributed the same role to Hitler, whom he saw as a national

14. Schmitt, Political Theology, 58.

15. Mehring, Carl Schmitt, 198.
16. Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951, ed. Eberhard von Medem
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1951), 63.
17. Carl Schmitt, “The Christian Empire as a Restrainer of the Antichrist (Katechon),” in The
Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeum, ed. G. L. Ulmen (New
York: Telos Press, 2003), 59-61. See Felix Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996). On the concept of katechon, see, in particular, Massimo
Cacciari, Il potere che frena: Saggio di teologia politica (Milan: Adelphi, 2013).
376 ENZO TRAVERSO

redeemer. In 1944, in a lecture on Donoso Cortés he delivered at Madrid’s uni-

versity, Schmitt implicitly compared the katechontic role of the German armies
that defended the Third Reich against the advance of the Red Army with the
struggle the European counterrevolution fought in 1848 against atheistic social-
ism. In his eyes, the entire European civil war opened by the Great War became
understandable through this “great world-historical parallel.”18 Any historical
time, Schmitt argued in Glossarium (1951), had its own katechon. Once the era
of Christian emperors was exhausted, new “temporary, transient, splinter-like
and fragmentary holders” appeared to fulfill its historical task. Sometimes, the
secular aspect of this spiritual force was not very beautiful. From 1789 until
the battle of Stalingrad, nevertheless, the katechon had recognizable enemies:
atheism, socialism, and Bolshevism. After 1945, it had become a mysterious,
hidden entity: “It is, after all, hardly possible to think it is Churchill or John
Foster Dulles. . . .”19 (Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer could easily be
added to this list of failed applicants.) The katechon had become an analytical
category of his political theology, but it no longer was a myth—in the sense of
Sorel or Mussolini—useful for mobilizing the masses in actual struggles. The
time of the European civil war was over. Schmitt never explained who really
embodied the katechon after 1945. This meant that his thought was unable to
inspire a political commitment, and this was the most evident expression of his
status as vanquished.
Whatever form it takes, the katechon shows a heroic dimension and displays
Promethean strength. After the fall of National Socialism and his own defeat,
Schmitt began to compare himself to a “Christian Epimetheus.”20 Thus, he
implicitly recognized his wrong choices and admitted to having contributed, by
opportunism or irresponsibility, to opening an awful Pandora’s box. His preferred
apologetic allegory, nevertheless, was Benito Cereno, the character of Melville’s
novel, whose misadventure took on in his eyes, as he wrote to Ernst Jünger in
1941, an overwhelming “hidden symbolism.”21
By his own admission, Schmitt always obeyed authority with a mixture of sub-
mission, zeal, calculation, and cynicism. His ardent empathy with Benito Cereno
eloquently reveals both his culture and his mental world. Published in 1855, in
the age of abolitionism, Melville’s novel tells the story of Don Benito Cereno,
the captain of a Spanish ship, San Dominick, that, in 1799, transports a cargo of
African slaves to the Americas. In fact, the slaves had mutinied, killed the white
sailors, and decided to come back to Senegal, but kept the captain alive in order
to hide the rebellion. Benito Cereno still appeared to be the captain, whereas the
true chief was Babo, a slave who pretended to be his black servant but who in fact

18. Schmitt, “A Pan-European Interpretation of Donoso Cortés,” 105.

19. Schmitt, Glossarium, 63.
20. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, 12. See Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish
Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2007), 210-214.
21. Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel 1930–1983, ed. Helmut Kiesel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1999), 115. See Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008), and Thomas
O. Beebee, “Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 42),
no. 2 (2006), 114-134.
 CONFRONTING DEFEAT 377
held him captive. On the Chilean shores, San Dominick encounters an American
ship whose commander, Amasa Delano, wishes to meet captain Benito Cereno.
He does not like the strange atmosphere of the Spanish ship, but at the moment
of their separation, Benito Cereno suddenly jumps into his boat and the mystery
is unveiled: he was a prisoner of the rebels. He was menaced and compelled to
act against his will; his behavior was a pure appearance and his words were not
true. Delano had taken him for an unreliable, weak, and ambiguous captain, but
this was a wrong perception, because in fact Cereno was a “victim.”
The allegorical interpretation of this tale is quite clear: Schmitt was a hostage
of National Socialism. He seemed a faithful supporter of Hitler’s regime, but in
reality, he was a victim. His acts and writings, as well as his prestigious institu-
tional positions under the Nazi dictatorship, were a fallacious appearance. This
apologetic allegory deserves careful scrutiny. Schmitt not only liked to identify
with a Spanish aristocrat, but even the inscription on San Dominick’s prow—seg-
ued vuestro jefe, “follow your leader”—reflected well his attitude toward author-
ity. The self-justificatory aim of this convenient symbolism does not need to be
emphasized. Joseph J. Bendersky is right to observe that, unlike Benito Cereno,
who had been captured, Schmitt had not been compelled to support Hitler; he
made this choice without any external constraint; and whereas Captain Cereno
escaped from his jail, Schmitt always accepted Nazi rule.22 But this is not the
crucial point. His identification with Benito Cereno implies a second, much more
audacious—and thoroughly indecent—comparison between the Nazis and Babo,
the leader of the slaves’ rebellion. Schmitt transformed the tale of the slaves’
self-emancipation into the parable of his own captivity. It is true that the author
of The Concept of the Political never expressed any empathy with class struggle
and the liberation movements of the oppressed. Regarding his time’s revolutions,
he was as horrified as Joseph de Maistre had been in 1789 observing the insurgent
sans-culottes, and Donoso Cortés in 1848 fighting atheistic socialism. Schmitt
liked to quote a passage of Donoso Cortés’s Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism
and Socialism (1851) in which history is depicted as a river whose “muddy and
filthy waters” are navigated by “multitudes of peoples without God or law, blas-
phemers, fornicators and adulterers.” He compared them with “a mutinous crew”
made of human beings who “know not whither they go, or whence they came, or
the name of the ship which bears, nor the wind which impels, them.”23 Humanity
deserved only disdain and contempt. This anthropological pessimism, so typical
of reactionary thought, should induce us to treat with nuance Koselleck’s episte-
mological assessment quoted above. In 1945, Schmitt was incontestably among
the defeated, but his Weltanschauung did not allow him to think of history from
the viewpoint of the vanquished. He had lost the katechon, but never found—nor
sought—a redemptive hope of human self-emancipation.

22. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 262-63.

23. Juan Donoso Cortés, Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo (Madrid:
Imprenta de la Publicidad, 1851), 127; Translated as Juan Donoso Cortés, Essay on Catholicism,
Liberalism, and Socialism Considered in their Fundamental Principles, transl. Madeleine Winton
Goddard (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1862).
378 ENZO TRAVERSO

Thus, the case of Carl Schmitt does not confirm Koselleck’s hypothesis, inso-
far as the most productive and creative part of his intellectual life does not fit into
the awareness of being vanquished. Koselleck’s statement deals with the gaze of
the ruled, whereas Schmitt belonged to a different tradition of political thinkers
interested in building domination and smashing revolution (Hobbes, Maistre,
Donoso Cortés). He was a thinker (rather than a man) of action, not of mourning.
Defeat did not inspire, but rather paralyzed his thought.

Cornell University