Carl Schmitt/Bill Barr

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Right, Carl Schmitt, whose importance for the Third Reich usually gets exaggerated like it is the case in this article (we can, of course, discuss the issue, but only if you know Schmitt's biography & work in detail, otherwise I'm not interested), was an asshole & an antisemite. Doubtlessly an unsympathetic human being. That said, he was also an important legal & political theorist of the 20th century. Schmitt rarely gives good answers, but he always asks the right questions. Furthermore, his books are, as Heiner Müller once put it in an interview, "stage productions": Thoroughly composed & concisely unfolded. Actually there are a lot of authors in the wide field of social theory I "spen(t) altogether too much time" with, but Schmitt is definitely not among them ...

+ ... Just as Carl Schmitt’s identification of parliamentary democracy’s weaknesses in the 1920s (...) had a basis that was quite independent of the cult of Hitler ... +

THIS is correct. Have a look! Or don't ...

The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (orig. 1923):

"Great political and economic decisions on which the fate of mankind rests no longer result today (if they ever did) from balancing opinions in public debate and counterdebate. Such decisions are no longer the outcome of parliamentary debate. The participation of popular representatives in the government - parliamentary government - has proven the most effective means of abolishing the division of powers, and with it the old concept of parliamentarism. As things stand today, it is of course practically impossible not to work with committees, and increasingly smaller committees; in this way the parliamentary plenum gradually drifts away from its purpose (that is, from its public), and as a result it necessarily becomes a mere facade. It may be that there is no other practical alternative. But one must then have at least enough awareness of the historical situation to see that parliamentarism thus abandons its intellectual foundation and that the whole system of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, of public meetings, parliamentary immunities and privileges, is losing its rationale. Small and exclusive committees of parties or of party coalitions make their decisions behind closed doors, and what representatives of the big capitalist interest groups agree to in the smallest committees is more important for the fate of millions of people, perhaps, than any political decision. The idea of modern parliamentarism, the demand for checks, and the believe in openness and publicity were born in the struggle against the secret politics of absolute princes. The popular sense of freedom and justice was outraged by arcane practices that decided the fate of nations in secret resolutions. But how harmless and idyllic are the objects of cabinet politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries compared with the fate that is at stake today and which is the subject of all manner of secrets. In the face of this reality, the belief in a discussing public must suffer a terrible disillusionment. There are certainly not many people today who want to renounce the old liberal freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and the press. But on the European continent there are not many more who believe that these freedoms still exist where they could actually endanger the real holders of power. And the smallest number still believe that just laws and the right politics can be achieved through newspaper articles, speeches at demonstrations, and parliamentary debates. But that is the very belief in parliament. If in the actual circumstances of parliamentary business, openness and discussion have become an empty and trivial formality, then parliament, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has also lost its previous foundation and its meaning." (pp. 49-50)

http://www.untag-smd.ac.id/files/Perpustakaan_Digital_1/DEMOCRACY%20The%20Crisis%20of%20Paliamentary%20Democracy.pdf


Am 19.01.20 um 02:28 schrieb rich:

makes for rather depressing reading

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/15/william-barr-the-carl-schmitt-of-our-time/

US Attorney General William Barr’s defense of unchecked executive authority
in his recent speech to the Federalist Society had an unpleasant
familiarity for me. It took me back to a time in my life—during the late
1990s, as a graduate student in England, and the early 2000s, teaching
political theory in the politics department at Princeton University—when I
seemed to spend altogether too much time arguing over the ideas of a Nazi
legal theorist notorious as the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.
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