This article on Carl Schmitt, the German legal jurist and philosopher, by Paul Gottfried the American paleo conservative, is a good piece of work.
I read Schmitt a couple of years ago and found his criticisms of liberalism (the parliamentary version) in modernity to be on the mark. The public forum and public debate are undermined by the workings of closed committees and mass party politics; liberals trade principles for compromise and have a preference for legal form (legality) and offer no fundamental opposition to technological civilization.
Paul Gottfried takes Schmitt seriously: he forgets the smears and apologetics and engages with the ideas. He is right to do so. Schmitt is a tough nut. I read him as a critic of modernity. I interpreted his texts from the perspective of the Frankfurt School concern's with technology and instrumental reason and viewed Schmitt as putting his finger on the aporias of modernity and loosely working within a Hegelian dialectical tradition.
He nailed the deep opposition between positivism (the analytic formal elements of science and technology) and the romantic (concrete, content orientated, particularity).These dichotomies (dialectical oppositions for Hegelians) within modernity are with us today and they find a clear expression in the current conflict between a free market economics infused with techology and environmentalism.
So I basically read Schmitt as being concerned about the implications of economic-technical thought that manipulates matter, empties the human world of meaning and produces a technologically disenchanted world that establishes the possibilities for harsh modes of domination. Schmitt was able to see that an Enlightenment rationality had become technological and that it produced its own form of the concrete, subjective and qualitative----romanticism, which he characterized as subjective expression that aestheticizes everything.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 9, 2003 11:28 PM | TrackBack