When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of political and social science at the New School for Social Research in the 1990s, the efforts of the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a conference on Schmitt's thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish donor who informed me that he was not going to give any more of his money to an institution sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to "that fascist." I was tempted to tell him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had become the rage in leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968 dedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences, had started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian idealism. A comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings, Gopal Balakrishnan's The Enemy, published by the New Leftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt's conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left hope that its present stalemate will not last indefinitely. Such prominent European thinkers as Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt's ideas. It is not that they admire Schmitt's political views. But they recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.
Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to realize that after the collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable rethinking. Yet in turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they have clung fast to an authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such 20th-century thinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn't just been Schmitt. Telos, in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist thinkers and movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything would be better than Marx's contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his legacy.
Schmitt's influence on the contemporary right has taken a different course. In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco Miglio in Italy, Alain de Benoist in France, and the German writers contributing to the magazine Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built on Schmitt's ideas. Right-wing Schmittians in the United States are not as numerous, but they include intellectuals -- often described as paleoconservative -- who expend considerable energy attacking neoconservatism from the right. One of them, Paul Edward Gottfried, a humanities professor at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, is especially prolific. Himself an occasional contributor to Junge Freiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine for rejecting "the view that every German patriot should be evermore browbeaten by self-appointed victims of the Holocaust." No wonder he has a soft spot for Carl Schmitt. Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term "fascism" in quotation marks, as if its existence in the European past is somehow open to question.
But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies. Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves. <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese
-- Michael Pugliese