Carl Schmitt/Bill Barr

[rich]

Howdy

I wasnt so much concerned about the Schmitt angle but the danger Barr
currently represents, this shining corrupt irrationality. That is what I
find depressing

rich



On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 6:47 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> 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.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>