As Carl Schmitt's intellectual reputation continues to rise in scholarly circles, so does the critical heat surrounding his anti-Semitism. The more he is recognized as one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century—he is to political thought what Karl Barth is to theology and Martin Heidegger is to philosophy—the more acrimonious the charges become. With every scholar praising him, another—including Raphael Gross—comes to bury him. The plethora of books written about him in recent years is evidence that the race is on to decide whether the essence of his thought can be salvaged from the wreck of his racial prejudices.

Schmitt (1888-1985) joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the same month as did Heidegger. By 1936, he fell out of favor with the Nazi élite. After the war, the Allies did not permit him to resume teaching, and he spent much of his time shoring up his reputation by obscuring the evidence of his anti-Semitic fulminations.

There are two camps warring over Schmitt's anti-Semitism, one defensive and the other prosecutorial. The defense insists that his involvement with the Nazis was purely opportunistic. He was vain and ambitious, his defenders explain, and seized a chance to make history when he should have stuck to the classroom. Besides, he had a deeply fatalistic worldview that led him to disparage resistance to any reigning regime. The prosecution contends that he actively placed his political theory in the service of the Nazis. Even more disturbing is the argument that his political theory found its logical fulfillment in racist ideology. Raphael Gross enters this debate as judge and jury. He condemns Schmitt outright by arguing that every aspect of Schmitt's thought is shaped (and thus contaminated) by his anti-Semitism.

Drawing largely from recently published diaries, letters, and journals, Gross uncovers derogatory remarks and inexcusable behavior that certainly damage Schmitt's defense. Gross' description of the legal conference Schmitt organized in 1936 called "Judaism in Legal Studies" was enough to convince me that Schmitt's involvement with the Nazis was more than just the accidental by-product of a regrettable character flaw. Not content with a guilty verdict, however, Gross overstates his case by finding prejudice lurking behind every serious concept Schmitt devised. He thus slips into the same kind of paranoia that fueled anti-Semitism in Germany in the first place.

Gross' book caused quite a stir in when it was published several years ago in Germany, where young scholars can still make a career out of settling scores with the moral mendacity of their predecessors. In America, it will be important for another reason. Schmitt is the preeminent critic of political liberalism, which makes him a hero to some and an admonitory instance of the inevitable consequences of conservatism to others.

Schmitt developed some of his best ideas during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), Germany's experiment with liberal democracy that ended in disaster. From its beginning, the republic was assaulted by both left- and right-wing extremists. To this day, scholars debate whether Schmitt was a friendly critic of Weimar or one of its most dangerous enemies. Schmitt was certainly sympathetic to authoritarian rule, and he thought that all liberal democracies were hindered by inherent contradictions, but he always claimed that he was trying to support Weimar by drawing attention to its constitutional weaknesses. Some of Schmitt's contemporaries were prescient enough to worry that any rejection of the principles of the republic ran the risk of opening the door to a dictatorship, but being a critic of Weimar did not, alone, put anyone on the side of Hitler. Nonetheless, one of the staples of liberal apologetics, often relying on Schmitt's case, is the claim that conservatism is merely a more moderate form of fascism.

Schmitt's conservatism was deeply rooted in his Catholic upbringing, which made him an outsider to the German liberal élite. He was heavily influenced by the Catholic counter-revolutionaries who reacted in horror to the way the French Revolution liberated the masses only by overthrowing the authority of the church. Surprisingly, he was also influenced by Protestant theologians who portrayed faith as an act that transcends rational reflection. From this unlikely pair of sources—French Catholic reactionaries and Protestant existential theologians—he revived the concept of sovereignty and developed a political model known as "decisionism." Every political system, he argued, needs a source of authority that lies outside its own rules and regulations. Even the best constitution cannot prepare in advance for every possible challenge. When a constitution is pushed to the limit, someone has to be in the position to suspend it for its own preservation.

In Schmitt's account, liberal democracies, especially of the parliamentarian kind, try to deny the importance of sovereignty by subjecting every decision to discussion and debate. Liberalism pits egalitarianism against sovereignty and rational consensus against finality of political decisions. As Schmitt once scoffed, when confronted with Christ or Barabbas, "the liberal answers with a motion to adjourn the meeting or set up an investigative committee." Nonetheless, even democracies inevitably face states of emergency that require the political equivalent of a leap of faith. (Think, in the American context, of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court decision that resolved the 2000 presidential election.)

The political crises that rocked the Weimar Republic sent many Germans on the hunt for a scapegoat. Jews were targeted in part because they were so closely identified with Weimar, which facilitated their assimilation by abolishing official discrimination. Like many German intellectuals, Schmitt thought Jews would always be shaped by their experience of statelessness, and he supposed that this experience led them to put their hope in the egalitarian quest for rational consensus rather than the need for every nation to define itself through political decisions. He thus attributed Weimar's constitutional weaknesses to the Jews, although it should be emphasized, as Gross repeatedly points out, that Schmitt, for the most part, reserved his anti-Semitic speculations for private diaries and letters and remained friends with many Jewish colleagues, much to the chagrin of the more dedicated Nazis.

Liberal universalism not only obscures the need for sovereignty. It also denies the significance of what Schmitt called the friend-enemy distinction. Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you" (Matt. 26:11), meaning that we will never exhaust the importance of generosity, but for Schmitt, it is enemies that are always pervasive, which is why we can never do without political order. This is the most important and controversial aspect of Schmitt's thought. For Schmitt, all political concepts are essentially theological insofar as they require assumptions about human nature, and no theological belief has more political significance than original sin. The doctrine of original sin, translated into a political idiom, grounds social order in the recognition that people are dangerous. Simply put, we have politics because we have enemies. It follows that there is no worse corruption of politics than applying the injunction "love thy enemies," which Schmitt thought should be limited to the interpersonal realm, to relations between nation-states. The whole point of national sovereignty is to decide when conflict rises to the level of enmity and then to settle that enmity without regard to personal gains and losses.

For Schmitt, political liberalism begins with the denial of the friend-enemy distinction, just as theological liberalism begins with the denial of original sin. Political liberalism is mired in the false promise that universal peace can be obtained without confronting enemies, just as theological liberalism thinks that salvation, not sin, comes from within. Although Schmitt never fully understood American democracy, with its divided powers and strong executive branch, his critique of liberalism is as relevant as ever. Is democracy a fantasy of secular intellectuals who think words without power can translate the will of the people into collective action? Does democracy inevitably erode the sense of authority that is necessary for its own political success? Is liberalism another name for the modern tendency to forget the theological substance of politics?

But how does this critique appear in the light of the Holocaust? Schmitt thought that the Jewish people were bearers of a universal spirit that denied the very possibility of enmity; as such, they were a threat to all politics, but especially the already besieged Weimar Republic. As a political interpretation of Jewish history, this is full of problems, but where Schmitt really goes off the rails, as so many of his contemporaries did also, is in failing to appreciate the theological tradition which recognizes that Jews play a positive role in history as exemplars of God's redeeming plan for all nations.

Schmitt was an exceptional thinker who, for his time, had an unexceptional prejudice. He confessed to being anti-Judaic but always denied being anti-Semitic, yet he contributed to what Hitler called a "rational anti-Semitism," the attempt to turn criticism of Judaism into a racist myth. To smear all of his ideas on the basis of his political activities in the Thirties, however, would be like dismissing a humane diet because Hitler was a vegetarian. That is not to say that there should be no investigation of the links between Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction and anti-Semitism, just as there is much to be said for examining the links between vegetarianism and the liberal dream of a world without enmity.

To be against Schmitt is to be a skeptic of his friend-enemy distinction. The fact that so many scholars line up as either Schmitt's friend or his enemy, however, should suggest just how pervasive that distinction is. Indeed, the further away we get from Carl Schmitt, the longer his shadow becomes. Even his involvement with the Nazis is part of the darkness we cannot escape. We will not silence his theoretical questions just by showing how despicable his practical decisions were during the Nazi era. If anything, those decisions confirm rather than falsify his emphasis on the riskiness of politics—a risk nonetheless made necessary by the even greater danger of human sin.

Stephen H. Webb is professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. He is currently working on a book about creation and evolution, entitled The Dome of Eden.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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