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March 13, 2004
In making the return to Carl Schmitt we are really returning to the territory mapped out by Max Weber, with his idea of modern rationalization, formal rationality and irrationality. Weber--like many neo-liberal economists today--- saw irrationality as confronting the system (and language) of rationalty of modernity.
Weber saw irrationality as something external or prior to a formal Enlightenment rationality--the "warring gods"; as a reaction to the ongoing process of rationalization or as a deviaton from rationality. In other words irirationality is either a modern remnant of an irrational past or a contemporary flight from an overly rationalised present--the iron cage of modernity.
The flight account is what many contemporary liberal economists hold when they give an account of the negative reaction within nation states to the process of globalization. What is taken for granted here is instrumental rationality and so the the blind domination of nature is not questioned; nor the functional means towards senseless purpose.
But why cannot a formal instrumental rationality foster irrationality? Why not think in terms of there being an intrinsic link between an abstract Enlightenment rationality and irrationality?
That is what Schmitt proposes along with the Frankfurt School. It is a more dialectical account, which mediates between the oppositions of instrumental rationality and irrationality.
Here is one account. The economic stance noted above is Weberian, in that it values a model of scientific reason that is itself value neutral. The problem is that this model of instrumental reason as a means without a given end requires the supplement of the very values it denies. But since these values by definition elude rational evaluation, this requirement inevitably places reason in the service of the irrational.
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