"This is why we read Schmitt. Far from being poisonous or dangerous he has good ideas and insights about political life. "

So why did he support the Nazis? Were some of his ideas good and others poisonous and dangerous? Or was he acting in contradiction of his own thought? Or, did the Nazis have good ideas and insights about political life?

"is not this moment of totality what we are currently living through with the national security state in a situation of a war on terrorism?"

Given this analogy, I can see why Bush, Ashcroft and Gonzales migh like Schmitt. But why should opponents of these developments regard him as anything other than poisonous and dangerous?

John,
For the Nazi question the answer would be that we read Schmitt's texts and winnow and sift his ideas re good and bad in the light of our concrete situation.

Is that not what intellectual autonomy is about?

Schmitt was a Nazi, sure. But I do not judge your texts in terms of whether you are a social democrat. I read your texts for the usefulness of your insights and ideas into making sense and explaining the changes in our social democratic mode of life. Similarly with Schmitt.

Unless you are saying that we should not read his texts because he was a Nazi. You are not saying that, are you? You are not saying that we should be publicly chastised for trying to take seriously, study and critically understand the New Right as a relevant political entity, are you?

For the second question---'why should opponents of these developments regard him as anything other than poisonous and dangerous'?-- the answer is simple.

Schmitt's way of doing philosophy and law was through an analysis of concrete situations he lived through. His analyses of political life (Weimer liberalism) are often quite illuminating of that historical situation, bring a sophisticated grasp of political, legal and philosophical concepts to bear on that situation, and throw light on emerging trends in and between nation states.

Those philosophical concepts may be of use to us today to help us understand the political conservatism of the New Right.

On a more personal note Schmitt takes us outside the horizons of current public policy/political debates structured around free traders and libertarians who are in favour of freedoms on the one hand; and people who believe in the centralisation of power and the general restriction of freedoms on the other hand.

May I suggest that you read Schmitt's text before you pass judgement. What would be the argument that we should dismiss Schmitt's texts without reading hum. It sould like dumping the academic tradition of basing one's judgements on sustained arguments to me.

Well, it seems pretty clear to me that the ideas for which he is most commonly cited today (with respect to the state of exception) are bad now and were worse, in terms of their consequences, when he put them forward. What are the good ideas?

The fact that Schmitt, like other Nazis, was outside the horizons of current public debate does not strike me as a recommendation for extending those horizons.

John,
Your prejudices are showing. Am I seeing the Australian Left-liberal establishment's concern about the threat of a "new fascism," become a call for the exclusion from public discussion of ideas considered particularly repulsive, before they could be critically evaluated.

If so, then I consider that process as dangerous.

As I said above my touchstone is the concepts/categories that enable us to make sense of the concrete situations that I am living through. An example.

You say all of Schmitt's concepts are of no use. Really? That is closure.

What about the other good ideas, such as the critique of the assumptions of legal formalism and constitutional liberalism that the rule of law and legal procedures can adequately secure a political system's legitimacy.

We do go about reading Schmitt differently apart from me reading his texts and you reading the secondary literature. You are hostile to, or critical of, the category of 'the state of exception', in which extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. You think of Hitler and reject Schmitt, as the Nazi. I also think classical republican Rome, Republican Washington and Australia in wartime.

For us today the category, 'state of exception' means emergency measures are required to preserve a liberal constitutional order in times of crisis. What is required is an all-powerful sovereign who must rescue our constitutional order from its constitutional mechanisms.

What is bad about that idea? We have had states of exception in Australia. Do you not agree?

I think Bush and the way he has defined the emergency facing America, and the need to safeguard America in terms of the war of terror, is a good example of what Schmitt means by the state of exception.

In this case the state of exception means granting the president all necessary measures to restore public security and order with the aid of armed forces, as well as by provisionally suspending the citizen?s constitutional rights: government by executive decree in times of political crisis trump parliamentary statutes and procedures.

So I use the category of the state exception (with its roots in Roman jurisprudence and political theory) to try and make sense of the way Bush is hollowing out the republic through the national security state fighting the war on terror.

The state of exception, with its long political lineage, is outside the horizons of Australian liberalism. But it makes sense of what Bush is up to, what the Australian Govt has signed up to, and is working within. You can hear it's resonances in Ruddock's language yesterday, when he justified the imprisonment and treatment of Mamdouh Habib with his legal formalism. Surely you heard the resonances of the state of exception there?

So I ask: does your absolute rejection of Schmitt imply a left vigilante practice that indulges in the well-tested McCarthyite practices of conducting inquisitions aimed at no one in particular and, therefore, potentially everyone, to create a climate of ideological intimidation?

Surely not?

"Is not this moment of totality what we are currently living through with the national security state in a situation of a war on terrorism?"

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I believe that some of the Bush people do think like Schmitt, but to me that's evidence against them. However, one peculiarity of the Bush GWOT is the refusal to ask much sacrifice from anyone except members of the military, while talking a lot of menaingless trash about terror.

I personally think that the threat of Islamic terror is being vastly exaggerated for nefarious political purposes, but again, when I start talking that way I put myself outside the American mainstream.

So anyway, to me Schmitt IS relevant to the present situation, but only in a bad way (i.e., as a disgraceful antecedent.)

John,
I concur with what you say.

As for Schmitt, he is more than a bad antecedent. He understood the dynamic of war, statism and political conflict and he devised categories to deal with these situations.

We do have the option to winnow, sift and use those categories to understand the interplay of war and the growth of State power for different political purposes.

There is a shift in the nature of the state taking place under the conservatives in Canberra and Washington. It is one captured by the phrase re the US---from republic to empire. The rise of America as an expansive global hegemon means that the classical liberal idea of limited government goes right out the window. You cannot think of the American or Australian state in those terms any more.

We need new categories.

Carl Schmitt is certainly relevant to understanding what is happening here in the states today, but not in the way most people present it. Unlike liberals, Schmitt was aware that there is a danger of tyranny from civil society, from a takeover of the state by elements within civil society, who would then use the power of the state to oppress everybody else, both within and without.

The Bush regime is a group of well-connected insiders who are working together to advance the narrow, particularistic interests of those who elected them, primarily the oil industry, Wall Street and so-called "evangelical" whites in the rural south, midwest and west. Bush swings wildly from apocalyptic biblical language to that of liberalism in seeking to justify the actions of his administration, but the real causes can be determined by examining the interests of the coalition that elected him.

As far as the administration using Schmitt as some sort of guide to establish dominion, that is nonsense. They are not that smart. Yes, they understand cracker psychology quite well, but it must be remembered that they thought that the Iraqi people would tolerate a long occupation. Again, they thought that an Arab nation would long tolerate the american troops on Iraqi soil. These are not politically or philosophically sophisticated people. Sie verstehen den entscheidenden Unterschied zwischen Freund und Feind gar nicht.

As far as the hegemony of the US goes, you need have no fear of it, for it will be an ephemeral thing, as neither democrats nor republicans have any conception of the true interests of the state. We are busy shipping our national wealth--our industrial facilities, jobs and know-how--off to Asia as quickly as possible. The future belongs to the Communist Party of China, who have consistently demonstrated a true understanding of their own national interest.

Scott,
Yes I agree. The old Hegelian civil society/state divide, as an interaction of opposites with the parliament (Congress) as a 'bridge' over the divide, no longer holds up like it used to.

Are we walking down the pathway to what Schmitt called a total state? One that eliminates the distinction between executive and legislature in favour of the former; utilizes all resources in the one direction of a war on teror; restricts individual rights, procedures and institutions;

As for your remarks on the US as a hegemon I reckon that what is tipping the balance is the in favour of expansionism is the messianic strand of American's uniqueness and mission to the world. It is a heady brew when mixed with nationalism and patriotism.

Does it not mean that interstate conflict becomes replaced by police work to keep order and ensure security?

As I see it with regard to state/civil society dichotomy (and the revision of Hegel that led to the omission of the family from the triad is part of the problem for Schmitt).

We see here an example of Schmitt's two-facedness: while Schmitt did think it was in the process of being superseded by history, he did not like the modern alternative, and so sought, as much as possible, to preserve the traditional relationship between the state and civil society in German political theory. In fact, I see this as the central idea of all of Schmitt's work, from the teens until his death. Though it may be an oversimplification to say he is simply an etatist, he is for the state, and against the encroachment of civil society into its domain.

On the subject of the movement toward the total state, would that be the qualitative, or the quantitative total state? Though Schmitt expresses himself in such absolutes, I think of the total state as a sort of theoretical endpoint that he believes we are headed toward, rather than an actual possibility. In some measure, the idea of the quantitative total state is a blunt instrument he uses to attack liberalism. As a criticism of "the economic state," there's some truth in the idea that the US is a quantitative total state;insofar as it exists as a means to further the interests of property owners, though this is not primarily what Schmitt would have understood as being wrong with the quantitative total state.

As for the qualitative total state, we have seen, in fact, the breakdown of the liberal "checks and balances" Schmitt so often criticized. This does not mean, however, that we have made the turn toward the qualitative total state. The erosion of the power of Congress has happened because it is in line with their electoral goals. The minute the normal pattern of divided partisan control resumes, Congress will reassert itself. Congress is more Mayhewian than Schmittian.

I fail to see this total mobilization of all resources in the war on terror that you reference and Bush claims. Bush would like folks to believe that such a mobilization exists, because it disguises how weak his hand is. In point of fact, he does not even have the political capital necessary to pass a tax increase to pay for his war on terror. Have we headed a little toward the quantitative total state? It is arguable, but I don’t think so. There are many, many reasons why this is so: Bush cannot undo our long tradition of political freedom in the short time he has left to him, we lack the ethno-national homogeneity needed for this type of political unity, but mainly because Bush's own form of legitimacy is based on a pluralistic coalition of big business, blue-collar males belabored by false consciousness and insecurity about their own status in an economy that increasingly has no place for them, and religious true believers who care more about the death of a brain-dead woman in Florida than hundreds of non brain-dead children in Iraq. Though Bush uses language that is evocative of the quantitative total state, the actual policies of his administration are better understood by the model of the qualitative total state.

Finally, it may well be that "interstate conflict becomes replaced by police work to keep order and ensure security," but it would be more accurate to say that "interstate conflict will be disguised by the language of police work", of "keeping order and ensuring security." The conflict is there, primordially, and cannot be done away with. One part of Schmitt's understanding of the development of international politics was revealed to be valuable to us today when even Bush, who inveighed against humanitarian intervention and nation-building in the 2000 campaign, was ultimately forced to resort to the language of international humanitarianism in Iraq when all his other lies failed him. Defining the enemy as a "Verbrecher" does lead to an especially brutal and dehumanizing form of conflict, as may be seen every time our troops kill civilians at a checkpoint, or vice versa.

Scott,
good points.
You write:

" Though it may be an oversimplification to say he [Schmitt] is simply an etatist, he is for the state, and against the encroachment of civil society into its domain."

Maybe. Probably. But he did argue that the classic 19th century liberal distinction between state and civil society was undermined by developments in the 20th century. That is where we start from--the emergence of the total state.

You also write:

"The minute the normal pattern of divided partisan control resumes, Congress will reassert itself."

I'm not so sure. We do have the historical trajectory of executive dominance over Parliament /Congress that has meant the declining power of Parliament vis-a-vis the executive.

On the difference between qualitative and quantitative total state you make I will do more reading of Schmitt's Four Articles 1931-1938. I'm not sure about this category, or how it differs from Hobbes' Leviathan.

Re your point that it is more likely that:

"interstate conflict will be disguised by the language of police work", of "keeping order and ensuring security."