In the 1920s Carl Schmitt provided a clear account of “political theology,” an approach to politics that very few modernists understood and systematically confused with theology as such. Schmitt's theory of political theology simply claimed that all political concepts are secularized versions of theological concepts, and, consequently, to attempt to vindicate their universality and uniqueness would have been an unwarranted recycling of theology.
This is why Schmitt always emphasized the Eurocentric character of Western political theory, and claimed that liberals, mired in a universalism that regarded any particularity as variations on the same theme, could not really deal with politics.The liberals’ commitment to a fictitious universalism and to the neutrality of their political model, continues today, by adhering to a political theory that refuses to acknowledge its historical obsolescence — to deny its particularistic traditional foundations and therefore to avoid anything connected with desecularization.
It is now clear that the foundations of Western political institutions are not neutral, and that the modernist celebration of the break with traditions (seen as conformist residues projecting false ideals and possible reconciliations) presuppsoed a unilinear theory of progress dismissive of all traditions and customs. This modernist narrative is now give way to the refunctioning of traditions in that popular sovereignty is now seen to be deeply embedded in the country's very social fiber.
Charles Taylor has argued that an explanatory key to contemporary life is expresssivism: “Expressive individuation,” he writes in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, “has become one of the cornerstones of modern culture. So much that we barely notice it.” As Victoria Fareld observes in Charles Taylor’s Identity Holism: Romantic Expressivism as Epigenetic Self-Realization in Telos (Winter 2007) 'expressivism for Taylor refers to
the most crucial interpretative tool in Taylor’s understanding of German Idealism, notably Herder’s, Humboldt’s, and Hegel’s philosophies. But it is also used diagnostically to capture and evaluate trends in contemporary life, indeed tied to Taylor’s effort to normatively use the insights of the German philosophers to articulate “a contemporary expressivism which tries to go beyond subjectivism in discovering and articulating what is expressed. Expressivism is thus both a hermeneutical, historico-analytical concept aimed at orienting us in the terrain of history of philosophy, and a highly normative concept directed against what Taylor perceives as the dominant trends in contemporary thinking on personal identity, that is, against the Anglo-American liberal notion of identity, as well as against its poststructruralist and conservative critiques
Taylor’s expressivism embraces the twofold lexical meaning of expression as a medium or an outward form conveying or reflecting an inner content, something that precedes and exists independently of the expression itself, as well as something that is brought into being in and by the expression itself.
Bildung is both individual development and at the same time a process where the individual makes herself part of a larger social whole and makes it into a part of her own individuality.This, in pointing toward the
nonsubjective sources constitutive of who we are as subject, so avoids subjectivism, since a 'self' is to be realized through a 'we.'
Schmitt’s political and legal thought has returned to the forefront of current debates within political theory. The interest in Schmitt's understanding of the political has been triggered by a growing skepticism with regard to liberal political thought, such as John Rawls’s theory of justice and Kantian models of communicative action and discourse ethics, which both Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck have sought to establish as models for a deliberative democracy with cosmopolitan reach.
This interest remains despite Schmitt’s vehement criticism of Weimar constitutionalism, which together with his attack on the legislative state, promotes concepts of sovereignty and political decision that have clear tendencies toward totalitarianism.
What is of interest is Schmitt's pointing to the imminent “collapse of the parliamentary legislative state” and the increasing transition of a highly complex administrative democracy to a total state. In Legality and Legitimacy he says:
[G]iven the absence of another authority, the individual parts of the German civil service could become a focal point of the strong need for a tendency toward an authoritarian state, and the civil service on its own could attempt to “produce order” in an administrative state. . . . In the peculiar, though practical, alliance of legality and technical functionalism, the bureaucracy in the long run . . . transforms the law of the parliamentary legislative state into the measures of the administrative state.(pp. 13–14.)
A fundamental defect of liberalism is that it is founded on a contradiction. Liberalism purports to be a rationally transparent, culturally and religiously neutral account of objective reality, accessible to all human beings in terms of their shared universal reason. However, in truth, liberalism is merely one particular, debatable account among others, stemming from a particular debatable tradition of rationality. Highlighting liberalism as a tradition diffuses its primary rhetorical strategy of preempting any debate as to the debatable character of its own premises.
So the basic incoherence of standard liberalism is that it is a particular political/economic tradition that pretends it is not a tradition. Enlightenment “reason” now seemed to be only empty rhetoric, being just one narrative of one particular culture’s self-understanding among many, and a deeply problematic narrative at that. If liberalism is to survive the collapse of Enlightenment culture, liberals must now attempt to de-universalize or contextualize their political language, to learn to explain and advocate liberal democratic moral ideals in a vocabulary that can express the particularism of liberal political norms without thereby invalidating them.
In order to defend itself in the present intellectual climate, liberalism must adopt a postmodernist, narrative approach to its own origins and history, accepting the a priori characterization of all philosophical systems as culturally and historically particularistic. If it does not reconfigure itself in this way, it remains vulnerable to the critiques of both the anti-modern traditionalist and the postmodern genealogist.
Is there such a liberalism?
In theory, the liberal democratic state operated under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions.
It is It has been obvious for some time that these principles are in jeopardy. The suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 have become part of what is normal. Our world of liberal democracy is becoming a world constituted by the new anti-terrorism laws in the United States, Great Britain, and the European Union; the placing of certain groups of individuals outside the law (terrorists, enemy combatants, suspect airline passengers); the creation of exceptional procedures of containment, detention, and interrogation by government agencies; an ongoing and intensified regime of police surveillance inside Western societies, and ongoing American state of a global war against terror.
Hence the critique (based on the work of Schmitt, Agamben, and Hardt and Negri) of the so-called democratic state—from the United States to Europe to Australia —and of the transformation of liberal systems of constitutional governance into police, military, and security orders. The various lines of critique inform us that the state of exception in the making is in fact a new norm, a state of permanence.The state of exception created by emergency laws and other extra-constitutional decisions and actions in Western societies is indeed a permanent condition.
Jean-Claude Paye, in his Global War on Liberty, argues that:
the rule of law becomes increasingly formal, not only because its content, the protection of private life and the defense of individual and publicliberties, turns out to be very limited, but also by the practical possibility offered to the executive power to free itself completely from the last safeguards of legal order.... The strengthening of the executive relative to the other powers makes possible the general and permanent suspension of the law. It is the instrument for setting up a state of exception.
It is interesting to look back on the writings about the significance of 9/11 written in 2001 about the significance of those events. Thus Paul Piccone in So, This is the Brave New World in Telos says that since the US sees itself engaged in a war, it has:
a right and a duty to mobilize; but since the enemy is only a criminal enterprise rooted nowhere in particular, but operating anywhere, the US need not bother, at least in the short run, with whatever happens to pass as international law concerning normal wars. President Bush has said as much in his various statements prefiguring intervention anywhere with whatever means necessary. What this means is: a) internationally, greater US world hegemony; b) domestically, a massive centralization of power; and c) operationally, considerably more space within which to pursue whatever course of action the US eventually chooses.
By reserving for itself the right of intervention into any country without having to respect national sovereignty, while at the same time remaining unaccountable to anyone but its own well-mediatized domestic constituency. This rejection of the terrorists’ definition of the new enmity lines in sharp civilizational
terms checkmates the American conservatives’ rush to condemn all Muslims — thus indirectly accepting the terrorists’ definition of the conflict. In isolating the perpetrators as pathological expressions of an anti-modern fundamentalism preventing the kind of economic rationalization (globalization) essential
for the development of the Third World (but also conducive to an ever greater US economic hegemony), it also isolates domestic isolationists calling for a US international disengagement, or at least for a substantially diminished presence abroad — the kind of presence necessary to pursue essential economic interestssuch as unhindered access to foreign energy sources.
Russell Berman in the Introduction" to Telos Winter 2006 says:
The promises of modernity have always been problematic. The aspiration to draw a neat line between a rosy present and a benighted past, the paradigmatic modern historiography, never adequately gauged the force of tradition. The cultural legacy of the past can be heavy with inertia, but it can also draw on an organic vibrancy that can intrude abruptly into the up-to-date illusions of reason. What modern thought derides as old-fashioned just refuses to disappear—not because modernity has been too weak to expunge it (for it has surely tried hard to do so), but because modernity elicits its opposite, calls it forth, creates its own monsters,and then wonders why they won’t go away.
The creatures at the limits of modernity are multifold: the gripping power of religion that, as if to shame the arrogance of secularism, has returned with a vengeance to the world-political center-stage of the twenty-first century; the material life of the body, which resists the late-enlightenment project to repress
subjective desire by repackaging it as performativity; and the various dreams of the past, nature, and community, which refuse to succumb to the managerial utopias of the new class of social engineers. When the project of modernity declines into bureaucracy—the last ditch effort to manage a world that will not be managed— its opponents appear, sometimes plausible, sometimes grotesque, an array of desires and fantasies that frustrate the well-laid plans of the good people in power.
Paul Gottfield describes the managerial liberal state of today thus:
What seems most significant about the alliance of mass democracy and the managerial state is that it leads to a radical and irreversible break from bourgeois society and its conservative liberal ideas. The new order’s appeal to democracy is an attempt to justify a managerial revolution in which popular rule is reduced to plebiscitary procedures and “democratic” socialization by the state. The older constitutional liberalism is kept as window-dressing, but is progressively hollowed out, supposedly to remove its “elitist,” “racist,” and “sexist” character. At the end of this process, only judges, administrators, and the media exercise effective power, though politicians and parties play a functional role by organizing elections and funneling patronage. The last, like welfare and entitlements, assure supporters for the system.
Pierre Bourdieu in his Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1989), describes neo-liberalism thus:
A new kind of conservative revolution [which] appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case) to justify the restoration and so tries to write off progressive thought and action as archaic. It sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called laws of the market. It reifies and glorifies the reign of what are called the financial markets, in other words the return to a kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than that of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination, such as ‘business administration’, and techniques of manipulation, such as market research and advertising. (p. 35 )
A democratic resistance to neo-liberalism holds that democracy in this view is not limited to the struggle over economic resources and power; since it also includes the creation of public spheres where individuals can be educated as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need to perform as autonomous political agents.
One institution that provides such a space is the university, a site that, incompletely and imperfectly, sought to educate individuals to be self-critical and independent thinkers as well as participants in a just and democratic society. However, things have changed.
As Henry A. Giroux observes in his Higher Education under Siege:Implications for Public Intellectuals theory is now treated
less as a resource to inform public debate,address the demands of civic engagement, and expand the critical capacities of students to become social agents, theory degenerates into a performance for a small coterie of academics happily ensconced in a professionalized, gated community marked by linguistic privatization, indifference to translating private issues into public concerns, and a refusal to connect the acquisition of theoretical skills to the exercise of social power....This retreat from public engagement on the part of many academics is increasingly lamentable as the space of official politics seems to grow more and more corrupt, inhabited by ideologues and a deep disdain for debate, dialogue, and democracy itself.