Counter-Currents
This Weekend’s Livestreams
Greg Johnson on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political & Endeavour on The Writers’ Bloc
Greg Johnson
Carl Schmitt, 1888–1985
2,462 words
On Saturday, February 19th, 2022, Greg Johnson will read and discuss his essay “Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.” (The entire essay is reprinted below.) He will also pause to discuss the essay with the audience and, of course, answer YOUR QUESTIONS. Your homework is to read the essay beforehand. If possible, read Schmitt’s essay as well. Counter-Currents Radio starts at noon PST, 3 pm EST, and 9 pm CET on:
- DLive: https://dlive.tv/Counter-Currents
- Odysee: https://odysee.com/@countercurrents/ccradio
- Send questions & donations to Entropy: entropystream.live/countercurrents
Sunday, February 20th, 2022, Nick Jeelvy’s The Writers’ Bloc welcomes Endeavour to talk about Geprge Grant, Canadian nationalism, current events like the Canadian truckers’ protests, and YOUR QUESTIONS. Starting 1 pm PST, 4 pm EST, and 10 pm CET on:
- DLive: https://dlive.tv/Counter-Currents
- Odysee: https://odysee.com/@countercurrents/ccradio
- Send questions & donations to Entropy: entropystream.live/countercurrents
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2,172 words
Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political
“Can we all get along?”—Rodney King
Carl Schmitt’s short book The Concept of the Political (1932) is one of the most important works of 20th-century political philosophy.[1]
The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.
In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world.
Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely.
Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.
Us & Them
What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?
First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective. He is talking about “us vs. them” not “one individual vs. another.”
Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”). The political is founded on the distinction between friend (those on one’s side) and hostis (those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.
Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence. One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.
Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.
Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.” Enmity is relative, but morality—we hope—is not.
Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.
In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.
It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations—the relations between sovereign states and peoples—rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.
Sovereignty
If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.
For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.
If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”
Philosophical Parallels
The root of the political as Schmitt understands it is what Plato and Aristotle call “thumos,” the middle part of the soul that is neither theoretical reason nor physical desire, but is rather the capacity for passionate attachment. Thumos is the root of the political because it is the source of attachments to (1) groups, and politics is collective, and (2) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups.
The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity. He is what Nietzsche called “the Last Man,” the man for whom there is nothing higher than himself, nothing that might require that he risk the continuation of his physical existence. The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped-up, dumbed-down, self-absorbed producer-consumers.
Schmitt’s notion of the political is consistent with Hegel’s notion of history. For Hegel, history is a record of individual and collective struggles to the death over images or interpretations of who we are. These interpretations consist of the whole realm of culture: worldviews and the ways of life that are their concrete manifestations.
There are, of course, many interpretations of who we are. But there is only one truth, and according to Hegel the truth is that man is free. Just as philosophical dialectic works through a plurality of conflicting viewpoints to get to the one truth, so the dialectic of history is a war of conflicting worldviews and ways of life that will come to an end when the correct worldview and way of life are established. The concept of human freedom must become concretely realized in a way of life that recognizes freedom. Then history as Hegel understands it—and politics as Schmitt understands it—will come to an end.
Hegel’s notion of the ideal post-historical state is pretty much everything a 20th- (or 21st-) century fascist could desire. But later interpreters of Hegel like Alexandre Kojève and his follower Francis Fukuyama interpret the end of history as a “universal homogeneous state” that sounds a lot like the globalist utopianism that Schmitt wished to combat.
Why the Political Cannot be Abolished
If the political is rooted in human nature, then it cannot be abolished. Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics—and history—all over again.
But the utopians will never even get that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us.
Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.
Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interest—in which both sides, really, are right—rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities.
But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global Communism or democracy, the end of “terror,” or, more risibly, “evil”—it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.
Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate. The road to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.
Liberalism
Liberalism seeks to reduce the friend/enemy distinction to differences of opinion or economic interests. The liberal utopia is one in which all disputes can be resolved bloodlessly by reasoning or bargaining. But the opposition between liberalism and anti-liberalism cannot be resolved by liberal means. It is perforce political. Liberal anti-politics cannot triumph, therefore, without the political elimination of anti-liberalism.
The abolition of the political requires the abolition of all differences, so there is nothing to fight over, or the abolition of all seriousness, so that differences make no difference. The abolition of difference is accomplished by violence and cultural assimilation. The abolition of seriousness is accomplished by the promotion of spiritual apathy through consumerism and indoctrination in relativism, individualism, tolerance, and diversity worship—the multi-cult.
Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.
Liberalism, however, generally prefers to kill us softly. The old-fashioned version of liberalism prefers the soft dissolution of differences through cultural assimilation, but that preference was reversed when the unassimilable Jewish minority rose to power in the United States, at which time multiculturalism and diversity became the watchwords, and the potential conflicts between different groups were to be managed through spiritual corruption. Today’s liberals make a fetish of the preservation of pluralism and diversity, as long as none of it is taken seriously.
Multicultural utopianism is doomed, because multiculturalism is very successful at increasing diversity, but, in the long run, it cannot manage the conflicts that come with it.
The drug of consumerism cannot be relied upon because economic crises cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, there are absolute ecological limits to the globalization of consumerism.
As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult: only whites are susceptible to their effects, and since these ideas systematically disadvantage whites in ethnic competition, ultimately those whites who accept them will be destroyed (which is the point, really) and those whites who survive will reject them. Then whites will start taking our own side, ethnic competition will get political, and, one way or another, racially and ethnically homogeneous states will emerge.
Lessons for White Nationalists
To become a White Nationalist is to choose one’s friends and one’s enemies for oneself. To choose new friends means to choose a new nation. Our nation is our race. Our enemies are the enemies of our race, of whatever race they may be. By choosing our friends and enemies for ourselves, White Nationalists have constituted ourselves as a sovereign people—a sovereign people that does not have a sovereign homeland, yet—and rejected the sovereignty of those who rule us. This puts us in an implicitly revolutionary position vis-à-vis all existing regimes.
The conservatives among us do not see it yet. They still wish to cling to America’s corpse and suckle from her poisoned teat. But the enemy understands us better than some of us understand ourselves. We may not wish to choose an enemy, but sometimes the enemy chooses us. Thus “mainstreamers” will be denied entry and forced to choose either to abandon White Nationalism or to explicitly embrace its revolutionary destiny.
It may be too late for mainstream politics, but it is still too early for White Nationalist politics. We simply do not have the power to win a political struggle. We lack manpower, money, and leadership. But the present system, like all things old and dissolute, will pass. And our community, like all things young and healthy, will grow in size and strength. Thus today our task is metapolitical: to raise consciousness and cultivate the community from which our kingdom—or republic—will come.
When that day comes, Carl Schmitt will be numbered among our spiritual Founding Fathers.
Counter-Currents, February 24, 2011
Note
[1] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
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14 comments
There were articles on AmRen & Taki’s magazine about the release of a report on Chinese views of our Diversity.
“A formerly secret 2013 Pentagon report, The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States, argues “China is a racist superpower.” It makes for eye-opening reading on how both the Chinese people and the American deep state think.” –Taki
I was hoping that it would be mentioned here as Taki doesn’t permit comments and AmRen is revamping their comments section and is having problems with comments. To wit, all my detailed comments over there are “removed by moderation” or “flagged for Spam”.
I know Schmitt (1888-1985) is an important figure tho but couldn’t think of any place else to post this.
Taki goes on to mention that the report indicates that the Chinese don’t seem to consider Diversity as a Strength but the opposite. The report states that it clearly appears that their unity {non-Diversity} is in fact a strength, but this is, of course, a fallacious idea: as everyone knows.
https://youtu.be/ZUG-0K7iRuc
Watch Canada’s Tiananmen Square moment.
This might seem a stupid, or at least low-tech IQ, question, but will this livestream now be permanently available by clicking on one of the above links? I hope to listen to it after I’ve finished with the Schmitt monograph (which I actually read in the early 90s, but never since – and nothing else by Schmitt).
It will be available on the front page of the site in the coming week.
Bravo again! Yes, mark collet is a serious man, let’s hear from him!
I am intrigued by the concept of the serious versus unserious. Let’s define that more precisely, what does Greg mean by this? Another strategy of opposition groups is to identify and destroy “serious” members of our group, either financially or sometimes physically. That leaves whites docile and placid before stronger, more ethnocentric groups. A recent example might be the law fare against the Charlottesville people. I also think high iq and capable people are either destroyed or assimilated. It’s in keeping with the Bolshevik tactic of decapitation of a subjugated population. It’s not that we don’t have serious people, they are just afraid to step forward.
What are Dr Johnson’s preferred pronouns? I hope I have not been giving offense all this time.
You know, when the bolsheviks would come into Eastern European countries, they would round up and massacre elite people, professionals, leaders, scientists, etc. The Kaityn Massacre in Poland is a well known example. That way the population would be docile and doe like. It takes several generations for genes to congregate in persons and a new smart set to arise, and that will probably never be as good as it was, without a period of evolution under Darwinian conditions. That’s why we haven’t seen any more Siencwitzs out of Eastern Europe recently.
This was all an example of Slav on slab killing, of course.
We have both Russians and Germans to thank for it.
NKVD rounded up officers, enterpreneurs and other social elite members in the eastern part (with eager jewish cooperation). Some were able to evade execution and were instead deported.
Germans were more thorough and effective in raw numbers with AB-Aktion and Intelligenzaktion (among others).
Still, the post-war Poland was able to regenerate its scientific, intelectual and cultural cadres even in such hostile enviroment like socialist realism (which became more nationalistic during the 60s). The biggest danger now is the global westernization and americanization od culture that spreads degenerative idiocy and primitivism contributing to the rise of nihilistic, deracinated youth. Smarthpones, iPads and laptops are more effective than old-fashioned pistols and rifles ever were.
Dark Plato, you should check some of your spellings before posting (Katyn, Sienkiewicz). That helps improve one’s knowledge, and perhaps public esteem, over time. I agree with your observation on communist “aristocracide”, which was indeed genetic as well as classist in target.
My preferred pronoun is Doctor. I’m serious.
I haven’t read the George Grant book but I am struggling to understand the point made about how the Bomarc missile controversy proves that Canada went all-in for Globohomo because the USA bullied them to resist Soviet Bolshevism as a NATO alliance partner during the Cold War in the 1960s.
I think our friends up North went all-in for Globohomo quite a few decades before that, actually. The Canadian Head of State is a HRH Elizabeth II, after all.
And Churchill famously noted already in 1920 that the choice was between Zionism and Bolshevism, and somehow he irredeemably mortgaged his country to both.
Of course, an Austrian artist astutely observed that both sides of the shingle were run by the same (((echoes))). I guess Mr. Churchill must not have gotten that part of the memo.
Anyway, according to Wikipedia:
“The Bomarc Missile Program was highly controversial in Canada.[17] The Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker initially agreed to deploy the missiles, and shortly thereafter controversially scrapped the Avro Arrow, a supersonic manned interceptor aircraft, arguing that the missile program made the Arrow unnecessary.[17]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIM-10_Bomarc
Nationalism is about the big picture, and not about some provincial posturing and penny pinching.
Even the Austrian Corporal of Autarky admitted that “Germany wasn’t against trade ─ “Germany must export or die.”
The Bomarc was a DEFENSIVE surface-to-air missile integrated into the early warning radar network to take out Soviet thermonuclear-armed bombers as they flew over the North Pole to their targets.
Yes, the Bomarc had a nuclear tip in order to stop all of the bombers; that is how it worked.
Once ICBMs were deployed by both sides without proverbial “missile gaps” later in the 1960s, the Bomarc became obsolete. This doesn’t mean that it and its weapon system didn’t do its job in the day, however.
(Note to self: Leftists hate nukes to the point of insanity. Full Stop.)
Think of the brownie points earned by Diefenbaker for pretending to save a few public shekels by cancelling the home-grown Avro Arrow manned interceptor jet ─ and thereby killing about 30 thousand Canadian jobs, woo hoo! ─ according to the Wikipedia article on the Avro Arrow airplane.
That’ll teach those Hosers down South, though, eh?
Yeah, well, you can’t make up this kind of Kabuki theater. I’m about as sad for the optics backfiring on Mr. Diefenbaker as I was when President Jimmy Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980, or when Gulf War I hero George H. W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992.
I doubt the Kennedy Administration cared whether their Canuck friends built the Avro Arrow or just bought American-made manned interceptors like the McDonnel F-101 instead. It is a stretch to say that the Bomarc and Northern radar tracking system scuttled all that was good and proper in Canadian Nationalism.
I does seem that the militaries of both countries liked the early warning system and the Bomarc ─ and if the Left doesn’t like anti-missile missiles, then just wait until 1972 when they do ban them, and we can live under the Maginot Line umbrella of the MAD doctrine or “Mutually Assured Destruction.”
Wars are waged now by woke bean-counters with big corporate analytics apps. Yay!
Pop-historian Stephen Ambrose once sneered, “Hitler loved pourin’ concrete.”
Well, who needs to build fortresses anymore when the enemy is already running riot inside the gates?
🙂
I think I meant HRM Elizabeth II, but you can’t edit comments.
🙂
Like we said towards the end, there’s no substitute for reading the book, but the essence of it is, if Canada isn’t free to determine its own defence policy (when and where it places missiles) and if in response to resistance, the USA stages a colour revolution to depose the Prime Minister of Canada, then Canada has ceased to be a sovereign nation. It has been subsumed into what George Grant calls continentalism, which in our time has become globalism.
I’m not trying to criticize the interview or the fine podcast, but Canada being part of an alliance already links their defense policy largely to the determination of foreign superpowers.
Now, if the claim had been that the Prime Minister was deposed for trying to withdraw from NATO, and then sent to a labor camp somewhere for reeducation, it would be a decent thesis.
France nominally withdrew from NATO under de Gaulle during the 1960s when there were real Soviet threats. Nobody forced them to join or to rejoin NATO later.
Now today, with the removal of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, it may well be argued that NATO is irrelevant and a vehicle for imperial mischief at best, so a good Nationalist case can be made for NATO withdrawal now. In my opinion it has outlived its usefulness.
I find the thesis that ZOG engineered the removal of the Canadian PM, and that Diefenbaker was any kind of serious impediment to American or global imperial interests, absurd.
It may be hard to believe, but I can remember the 1960s, and I don’t think that Canadians were unconcerned about the Soviet thermonuclear threat, particularly since their elites and the bulk of their population clusters near big U.S. cities that were certainly targets, regardless of Leftist anti-nuclear activism.
Back in the 1980s the New Zealanders were not allowing U.S. Naval ships to dock in their ports unless they publicly declared that they had no nuclear weapons on board (not going to happen whether they do have them onboard or not) and this ban also included any ships powered by nuclear energy.
The 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior is attributed to the French foreign intelligence services, and probably had nothing to do with the American Navy. Displaying mild anti-American sentiment, my college roommate from New Zealand at the time quipped, “we don’t want your nukes or your spooks, Scotty.”
Regardless about what we American veterans thought about the New Zealand nuclear ship ban, New Zealand is a major non-NATO U.S. ally, and their provincialism was understandable if somewhat infuriating.
But if Canada is not allowing a robust North American defense, particularly at the hands of anti-nuclear activists, are they holding up their end of the NATO defensive bargain? Nobody is forcing them to remain a signatory to the NATO pledge that “an attack upon one is an attack upon all.”
I think that to say Washington is selecting or deselecting Canada’s Prime Ministers is a bit of a stretch. And, as I already noted, the Canadian Head of State is herself already by definition one of the main founding branches of the global New World Order, or whatever one wants to call it.
🙂
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