Dangerous Thinkers

20th-century philosophers' love affair with totalitarianism

Mark Goldblatt from the October 2002 issue

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Slippery comfort to the victims of Hitler's holocaust.

Heidegger's Nazism, however repulsive, seems a mere flirtation compared to the deep embrace of Hitler by his German contemporary Carl Schmitt. Already a prominent university professor and political and legal theorist when he joined the Nazi Party in 1933, Schmitt was personally mentored by Hermann Goring and eventually became, in Lilla's words, "a committed, official advocate of the Nazi regime." He spoke at a 1936 conference titled "German Jurisprudence in the Struggle Against the Jewish Spirit," calling for a purge of Jewish texts from libraries and encouraging his colleagues not to cite Jewish authors in their own writings. He closed his speech by quoting Hitler himself: "By warding off the Jews, I struggle for the work of the Lord."

After the war, when Schmitt was interrogated by both the Americans and the Russians, he defended himself with characteristic academic smugness: "I drank the Nazi bacillus but was not infected." He was in the end released, but he was never allowed to teach again.

Still, his political theorizing exercised a considerable influence on later European thinkers -- especially those contemptuous of modern liberalism. Enmity was Schmitt's key concept. By enmity, he means a relation in which certain persons or groups are recognized as "existentially something different and alien."

"Tell me who your enemy is," Schmitt writes, "and I'll tell you who you are." This is true, according to Schmitt, in every field of engagement; in morals, religion, economics, and art, you eventually encounter an enemy and, through the encounter, find your own true nature. The principal duty of the sovereign is not to keep the peace but to identify the state's enemies and to make war against them, thus solidifying the collective character of the people.

This is the very antithesis of modern liberalism, in which the state functions as a neutral institution whose role is to uphold the rule of law, promote compromise, and resolve differences peacefully. Of course, the fact that Schmitt's conclusions are at odds with liberalism is not necessarily a strike against him. If he's right, he's right.

But as Lilla points out, "Schmitt does not arrive at this view inductively after surveying the bloody record of political history." He is, rather, "making an anthropological assumption about human nature that is meant to reveal the true lessons of history." And he is framing his case in fervent, teleological, even apocalyptic terms: For Schmitt, recovery of the true German character is not only desirable, it is inevitable. It is the national destiny.

It's not difficult to understand why the Nazis would pick up on Schmitt's theories. Hitler's targeting of Jews as the German enemy, and of Jewish Marxists as the enemy par excellence, becomes a necessary step in recovering and then tapping into the inner resources of the national identity. What's harder to understand is the lure of Schmitt for more recent thinkers on the political left.

According to Lilla, it seems a case of my enemy's enemy must be my friend. Schmitt regarded liberalism as deformed because it attempted to reconcile differences rather than cultivate natural enmities. Michel Foucault picked up bits and pieces of this -- the notion that liberalism thwarts natural desires, the institutionalized necessity of defining yourself against your enemies -- and formulated his own critique of liberalism. Much of the academic left followed.

Liberalism is now viewed, from the Foucauldian perspective, as a mere shell game, a nothing-up-my-sleeves performance in which the pretense of neutrality functions as a necessary distraction while the privileged few ruthlessly consolidate their oppressive power over the masses. This is a bastardization of Schmitt; he wouldn't have taken oppressive tendencies of any sort as an indictment. But Schmitt himself, according to Lilla, is "virtually unknown in America." So who cares -- at least on this side of the Atlantic -- if Foucault got him wrong?

This is not the case in Europe, where, Lilla writes, even today Schmitt remains "one of the most significant political theorists of the twentieth century." That Schmitt influenced Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish literary critic and crypto-mystic, would be downright farcical if not for the fact that Benjamin wound up committing suicide in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis.

It is likely that he was initially drawn to Schmitt's style as much as to his substance, to the messianic urgency of his tone as much as to the dubious logic of his arguments. The hyperrational modern world, according to Benjamin, had lost touch with its underlying spiritual nature, which could only be glimpsed through spontaneous outbursts of art and language. The natural world will eventually pass away; bringing about that apocalyptic event is "the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism."

Benjamin's apocalyptic obsession soon evolved from theological speculation to Marxist politics -- a shift from spiritualism to materialism inexplicable except in light of his love affair with a woman named Asja Lacis, a radical communist associated with Bertolt Brecht's political theater. Benjamin wrote, poignantly, that he felt himself torn between "cultic and Communist activity." As he struggled to embrace both, the man who once dedicated a book to Carl Schmitt now epitomized Schmitt's notion of the necessary enemy of Germany: a Jewish Marxist. That Benjamin lived long enough to witness the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 only compounds tragedy with irony. Few suicides have been as logically defensible as Benjamin's.

Michel Foucault's debt to Schmitt, unlike Benjamin's, is evident at first glance. Schmitt had argued that a society must define itself against its enemies to prosper. Foucault concerns himself, according to Lilla's neat summary, with the question of "how the distinctions that exist in modern society -- between law and crime, sanity and insanity, order and disorder, natural and perverse -- came to develop." Inherent in Foucault's project is the belief that such distinctions are made to consolidate power, to define the dominant group in a hierarchical relation with the marginalized group.

Also inherent is the belief that such distinctions are ultimately arbitrary. All prisoners, if you follow Foucault's reasoning, are political prisoners; indeed, they are even heroes for their transgressions. Though Foucault was homosexual, and certainly tormented by that fact in his early life, Lilla is right to point out that "it was the idea of social boundaries and their transgression, not homoeroticism as such, that dominated his mature outlook." He pursued "limit-experiences" in drug use, communal living, and sexual experimentation, and he was drawn, erotically, to extreme violence.