Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman: Hannah Arendt and Politics

Hannah Arendt and Politics Book Cover Hannah Arendt and Politics
Thinking Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman
Edinburgh University Press
2024
Hardback
232

Reviewed by: Samantha Fazekas (Trinity College Dublin)

In their book, Hannah Arendt and Politics, Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman not only develop a comprehensive and rich account of Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking and judging. But their analysis also constitutes an act of thinking and judging itself, as they employ Arendt’s “exercises in political thinking” (2023: 3) to understand the political crises of Arendt’s time as well as our own. Following the “Introduction,” which sketches Arendt’s elusive notion of “exercises in political thinking,” comes Part I, “Arendt and Politics: Thinking about the World as a Public Space,” which consists of three chapters: Chapter 1: “Action,” Chapter 2: “Between Human Action and the Life of the Mind,” and Chapter 3: “Exercises in Political Thinking.” Part I provides an excellent account of Arendt’s conception of politics, the human condition, as well as thinking and judging.

In Part II, “Arendt and Political Thinking: Judging the World(s) We Share,” Robaszkiewicz and Weinman offer up a wide variety of political (and social) topics for debate. In Arendtian fashion, they think about the crises that Arendt was confronted with herself, namely, the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (reflected in the Heidegger controversy) and the Eichmann trial, explored in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman do not limit their analysis to the political concerns that Arendt sought to understand. Instead, they apply her exercises in political thinking to the crises and political concerns of our time. In Chapter 6, “The Earth, Education, and Human Action,” the authors tackle one of our most pressing political concerns: the climate crisis. By taking the Fridays for Future protest as a “case study” (2023: 199), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman emphasize the vital role that children play in shaping and changing the world.

Chapter 7, “Social Justice and Feminist Agency,” explores an appropriate way to politicize social concerns, thereby making feminist action possible within an Arendtian framework. Chapter 8, “Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty,” sets “political personhood,” not nationality, as the criterion for membership in a political community (2023: 157). Lastly, Chapter 9, “Thinking With and Against Arendt about Race, Racism, and Anti-racism,” exposes the blind spots in Arendt’s thinking about race, her Eurocentrism, and subsequently employs Arendt’s conception of enlarged mentality as a means for incorporating diverse perspectives into our own.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman navigate between thoroughly sketching the secondary literature on each proposed topic, advancing their own original opinions, and maintaining the freedom of their readers to think and judge for themselves. The authors thus tease out and exemplify what it means to engage in exercises in political thinking. To this end, the “Introduction” sheds light on Arendt’s elusive and ambiguous notion of exercises in political thinking. As the authors point out, this notion appears as an “inconspicuous remark” because Arendt only mentions it in the title and “Introduction” of Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2023: 1). It is therefore no wonder that this notion has not been picked up in the secondary literature.[1]

However, Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s novel contribution to the secondary literature is their contention that Arendt’s exercises in political thinking lie at the very core of her work. As they claim, “Arendt’s writings, regardless of their scope, specific subject matter, or the time they were written, can function as examples of such exercises” (2023: 1). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus establish a new and powerful approach to considering Arendt’s work. “Throughout her body of work,” the authors maintain, Arendt “never loses sight of her primary goal: to understand and judge the phenomena of political life” (2023: 1). It is generally acknowledged that understanding political events is Arendt’s main objective. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman shine new light on Arendt’s oeuvre by viewing it as an instantiation of exercises in political thinking, which is a means for gaining an understanding of the world.

The wide array of topics covered in Hannah Arendt and Politics thus serve as examples for how to think and judge about the world. By applying Arendt’s exercises in political thinking to the political crises and issues of our own time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman illuminate the continued relevance of Arendt’s thought. “By examining more closely Arendt’s concept of exercises in political thinking,” the authors claim, “our work understands itself as an opening for further research into the practical applicability of her political thinking” (2023: 201). In this way, each chapter offers an example of a possible judgment on a given topic, from Arendt’s misjudgment of Heidegger to framing the Friday for Future protests as an example of the political capability of children to change the world. By exemplifying what it means to think and judge, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus equip their readers with a framework through which to think about the concerns and crises of our time.

At the same time, the authors remain true to Arendt’s thought, insofar as they do not prescribe how their readers ought to think about and judge political events. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, “we also express our judgments and we do so in an explicitly Arendtian sense: not trying to tell our readers what they should think, but inviting them as dialogue partners to think and judge together about the world that we share” (2023: 71). Thus, the accuracy of their approach is that they remain true to the freedom involved in thinking and judging. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman could describe themselves in the way they describe Arendt: “perhaps like Socrates: a gadfly irritating the people of Athens to motivate them to thinking and better understanding of the world and themselves” (2023: 153). Like Arendt, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman inspire their readers to think and judge critically and freely, so that they reach their own judgments and conclusions. Hannah Arendt and Politics therefore truly embodies what the authors claim lies at the core of Arendt’s own work: exercises in political thinking.

In Chapter 1, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman proceed by accurately and succinctly sketching the core tenets of Arendt’s thought by following Arendt’s own unsystematic method, which is “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (Arendt 1958: 5). Since Arendt defines the activity of thinking as inconclusive or “resultless” (Arendt 2003a: 167), the authors thus paint the broad strokes of Arendt’s political thought. Not in “building block format,” but rather, they “pave Arendt’s conceptual paths in small steps, from one notion to the next, illuminating the fragile framing of her theory” (2023: 11). Accordingly, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman employ the concepts of “natality, plurality, action, power, freedom, the private and the public, and the social” as “guideposts” (2023: 12) to understand Arendt’s political thought.

Their method thus does not over-systematize Arendt’s thought, but rather establishes a red thread that twists and turns through paradoxes, weaving key concepts into a rich and colorful fabric that allows us to see Arendt’s thought as a whole. For example, the authors establish a link between the activity of labor and the realization of the political phenomena that Arendt cherishes, e.g., speech and action, plurality, and political freedom. In what is meant to be a summary of Arendt’s political thought, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus already make a novel contribution to the secondary literature. While they provide a standard definition of labor as responsible for maintaining the natural life cycle, they tease out the political implication of labor that Arendt seems to overlook herself.

Generally, labor is regarded as pre-political in the sense that it tends to necessity (Arendt 1958: 31), thereby setting persons up for political participation. What Robaszkiewicz and Weinman add however is that the body is the medium through which citizens speak and interact with each other. As they contend:

This description of labor might seem deflated but we must not forget that human embodiment is one of the central conditions for all activities we ever undertake. Without a body that we take time to nourish, care for, and cultivate, as subjects we would have no worldly reality (2023: 16).

In this way, embodiment can be regarded as the physical condition for the possibility of political action and the realization of all public-political phenomena. Without engaging in labor, neither political participation, natality, plurality, nor political freedom could unfold in the world.

In Chapter 2, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly parse out three versions of thinking, which are often overlooked and conflated in the secondary literature. Namely, metaphysical or philosophical thinking; dialectical thinking (the Socratic two-in-one); and political thinking (enlarged mentality). I will focus on the first two versions and will return to the third later. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman rightly note that metaphysical thinking undergirds the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (city). This follows because the philosopher must withdraw from the world to pursue eternal and universal truths through contemplation. As such, the philosopher is fundamentally at odds with the polis and political involvement. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus convey the tension between the contemplative and active life as Arendt sees it: “thinking as such has little use for society” (Arendt 2006h: 190)” (2023: 39).

In contrast, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman frame the second type of thinking, namely, dialectical thinking, as relevant to the political community. They elucidate what Arendt means with dialectical thinking by turning to Socrates. While Socrates too withdraws from the world, “in his thinking he is alone, but not lonely” (2023: 40). Even though Socrates must retreat from the world in order to think, his internal conversation partner keeps him company. As such, dialectical thinking contains an inner form of plurality and intersubjectivity, insofar as it represents a dialogue between two people (Arendt 2003b: 90). This leads Robaszkiewicz and Weinman to the conclusion that dialectical thinking “turns out to be a thoroughly practical activity, even if of a very particular kind” (2023: 40). Similarly to other scholars, such as Berkowitz (2010), Fazekas (2024), and Topolski (2015), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman present dialectical thinking as world-oriented. Precisely because the internal dialogue between Socrates and himself mirrors public debate (Arendt 2017: 625-626).

Specifically, the authors argue that the political relevance of dialectical thinking is that it fosters moral character development, underlining political speech and action with moral responsibility (2023: 45-46). On the one hand, their claim squares with Arendt’s link between dialectical thinking and morality. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly observe, morality is “a by-product of the activity of thinking itself (SQMP 106)” (2023: 46), insofar as it is achieved by conversing with oneself openly and harmoniously. The authors explain that an honest internal dialogue therefore prevents self-deception and self-contradiction (2023: 45).

On the other hand, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman concede that their proposition appears to contradict Arendt’s stringent demarcation between morality and politics (2023: 46). Arendt upholds this division because morality is fundamentally subjective (Arendt 2003b: 97), which opposes the intersubjectivity and plurality that marks political debate. This follows because the golden standard that guides dialectical thinking, for Arendt as for Socrates, is being able to ‘live with oneself’ (Arendt 2003b: 78). Basing morality on internal harmony makes it subjective, seeing as what persons can live with is highly changeable. As Arendt admits herself, moral judgments “can change considerably and uncomfortably from person to person, from country to country, from century to century” (Arendt 2003b: 101).

Yet Robaszkiewicz and Weinman claim that dialectical thinking underscores political participation with moral responsibility. Thus, they suggest a link between morality and politics:

We may see the relation between them as an instance of the butterfly effect: as a by-product of thinking, the constitution of the person influences all her actions. Since action takes place between people, it always has a moral dimension (2023: 46).

While they point out that there is no guarantee that citizens will ignite and maintain an internal dialogue with themselves (2023: 47), the moral imperative is clear.[2] If citizens do not converse with themselves, they run the risk of contradicting themselves, and hence not being able to live with themselves.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman unfortunately leave the precise connection between moral responsibility and political action implicit. There are three reasons that make it difficult to connect the dots. First, Arendt does not make it easy to link morality to politics, owing to her commitment to keep morality and politics entirely separate. Second, and as the authors acknowledge, “Arendt herself sees this connection as somewhat ephemeral” (2023: 46). Third, Arendt’s understanding of morality is self-referential and highly subjective, which presents difficulties when squaring it with the world-interest, plurality, and the intersubjectivity of the political world. However, the following questions remain: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? If political action is world-oriented, then it follows that moral responsibility (in a way) should be as well. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to favor this interpretation when they hold that dialectical thinking “improve[s] both the moral and political competence of democratic citizens” (2023: 47).

Although this answer remains implicit in Chapter 2, it can be teased out in Chapter 5 by turning to Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s analysis of Arendt’s “ironic tone” (2023: 96) in her judgment of Adolf Eichmann. In this chapter, the authors interpret Arendt’s irony in her assessment of Eichmann as a means for the public appearance of her personality (2023: 101). In this way, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman capture the importance of the delivery of judgments, as opposed to their “particular content” (2023: 101). As the authors rightly note, Arendt’s irony in delivering her judgment of Eichmann reveals who she is and how she sees the world in her own unique way.

Their interpretation squares nicely with Arendt’s insistence that the appearance of our personalities is a fundamentally public-political phenomenon over which individuals have no control (Arendt 1958: 179). It is against this claim that Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s portrayal of Arendt should be read. For the authors argue that the tonality of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann has been questioned and misunderstood (2023: 101). From Arendt’s perspective, perhaps it is the lack of control that persons have over their appearance that has caused a discrepancy in the way Arendt judged Eichmann and the way her verdict has been received. To substantiate their claim, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman focus on “how she wrote (and spoke) even more than what she did in judging Eichmann;” and how her “‘wildly ironic’” (2023: 101) tone has been misunderstood.

Accordingly, the authors take Gershom Scholem’s criticism of Arendt as an example of misinterpreting Arendt’s irony in response to Eichmann (2023: 98). As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, Scholem found Arendt’s irony not only misplaced, but also indicative of her lack of love for her own people (Knott 2017: 203-204; 2023: 102). In response, Arendt contends that Scholem misunderstood her irony. She did not absolve Eichmann of culpability for committing crimes against humanity. Instead, Arendt believed she was simply recounting Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone (2023: 102). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus clarify that Arendt’s irony was her unique mode of judging Eichmann.

The objection to Eichmann [the book], Arendt is saying, is actually an objection to her subjectivity: not really the particular content of her judgments, but the personality that comes across in her manner of expressing that content (2023: 101).

This leads the authors to claim that irony is not only a means for the public appearance of the who. But it is also a means for sustaining public debate when confronted with unprecedented political events (2023: 102). Irony is thus portrayed as a mode of judging that reinvigorates public debate, and hence preserves the political world.

Furthermore, uncovering Arendt’s irony as the only viable response to unprecedented political events could have provided Robaszkiewicz and Weinman with a more precise connection between morality and politics. Arendt’s ironic response to Eichmann thus clarifies the questions raised above: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? A potential answer could be that the moral imperative to externalize one’s internal dialogue sustains and preserves public debate, and by extension the political world. Arendt’s particular way of acting on this moral imperative was to frame Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone.

Accordingly, what makes moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented is perhaps the realization that expressing one’s inner dialogue has the potential to promote the continuity and integrity of the political world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to imply this when they claim, albeit in reference to political thinking, “the public performance of irony as the manner of passing reflective judgment is integral to enacting one’s sense of personal responsibility as a democratic citizen” (2023: 107).[3] This statement demonstrates why the connection between moral responsibility and political action remains somewhat unclear. While Robaszkiewicz and Weinman distinguish between dialectical and political thinking, this distinction becomes muddled in their analysis of Arendt’s response to Eichmann.

However, there is a way to account for a possible connection between moral responsibility and political action while maintaining a distinction between dialectical and political thinking. Realizing that expressing one’s internal dialogue has the potential to spark public debate is the moment when dialectical thinking turns into political thinking, thereby making moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented. This squares with Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s claim that reflective judgment ties moral responsibility to political action (2023: 107). This realization thus constitutes a bridge between dialectical thinking and political action, mediated by political thinking.

Moreover, the third form of thinking, namely, political thinking, is presented in Chapter 3. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman sketch political thinking conceived of as enlarged mentality, which Arendt plucks from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. The most salient aspect of their account is that Arendt follows Kant by conceiving of enlarged mentality as a reflective ability. In contrast, many scholars, such as Disch (1993), Flynn (1988), Passerin d’Entrèves (1994), Pitkin (1981), and Young (2001), have misread Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality as a public ability. However, as Robaszkiewicz and Weinman make clear, enlarged mentality sparks a “speculative” plurality and “speculative community” (2023: 54), which occurs when persons think in the place of someone else. The authors thus proceed by teasing out the elements of reflective judgment that appeal to Arendt: the plurality incited by enlarged mentality (2023: 54); the intersubjective validity, impartiality, and communicability of aesthetic judgments (2023: 54-59).

Subsequently, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman introduce a valid point that problematizes the veracity of Arendt’s notion of enlarged mentality. They wonder, “[c]an we really think in place of someone else, let alone everyone else?” (2023: 55). This follows because we cannot truly know what it is like to judge from someone else’s perspective. The authors thus criticize Arendt’s choice of example when elucidating political thinking. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, “she suggests a thought experiment, in which she imagines how she would feel living in a slum from the perspective of a slum dweller (SQMP 140), and she frames this example as if it was not a problem whatsoever to do so” (2023: 55). The issue is twofold. First, if one has not experienced what it is like to live in such a situation, then one cannot fully inhabit the perspective of someone who has. Arendt seems to suggest as much when she holds that “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt 1992: 43; 2023: 55).

While Arendt’s example fails, reading her reflections on enlarged mentality as a whole allows us to arrive at the type of exercise the authors believe is more accurate. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman have it,

one can attempt to find a third perspective, in which the judging subject simultaneously remains herself and brackets her own position: the one in which she still judges as herself but, in doing so, she imagines multiple other perspectives, which are not her own, and thinks them through in a critical way (2023: 56).

Engaging in critical introspection, while not knowing exactly what it is like to think in someone else’s shows, is precisely the hallmark of Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality. While we can neither extricate ourselves from our own perspective fully, nor inhabit someone else’s perspective perfectly, what matters is that we ‘enlarge’ our mentality and aim for our judgments to be “more representative” (Arendt 2003b, 141; 2023: 55) of the political world.

This leads into the second point. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, our ability to invoke possible perspectives, and hence our very ability to judge politically, is flawed. As the authors point out, we might not envision someone else’s perspective accurately, let alone know what it is truly like for them to see the world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus hold, “[i]t is clear that in this process we might simply be wrong in our representation of other persons’ perspectives” (2023: 56). The authors link the failure of judgment up nicely with Arendt’s conception of opinion as partial, fleeing, and vulnerable. Arendt conceives of opinion, as the authors rightly note, in line with Socrates, namely, as “‘what appears to me’ (dokei moi)” (2023: 56). While opinions should always incorporate other possible perspectives, what Robaszkiewicz and Weinman home in on, is that opinions are nevertheless grounded in subjectivity.[4] That is, one can only ever engage in enlarged mentality from one’s own viewpoint. As such, political thinking and judging will always be limited, flawed, and sometimes completely mistaken. The novelty of their reading is that they present political thinking as “a very fragile practice, in which neither the journey nor the destination is certain” (2023: 56).

At the same time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain that political thinking is not an altogether futile undertaking. While we might fail in our thinking and judging, what motivates us to try again is to keep the political world alive. As the authors hold, “Arendt’s keenest and most lasting observation: the political, which is what makes us human at all, entails an ongoing practice of exercises in political thinking” (2023: 192). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus correctly observe that political thinking is a never-ending process of improving and correcting our judgments. On the one hand, this can be achieved by taking new perspectives into account when enlarging our mentality (2023: 200).

On the other hand, conceiving of political thinking as a “practice” means that “the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized” (2023: 200). The open-endedness of political thinking thus ensures that persons continue to improve and correct their judgments – with the hope that they will learn to judge well and more accurately each time. We can therefore view Hannah Arendt and Politics as an open-ended, non-prescriptive yet loosely instructive, performative guide for thinking and judging through the political events that marked Arendt’s time, as well as the current and future political events of our time. As such, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman fulfill their aim of unearthing “the hidden treasure of [Arendt’s] political philosophy” (2023: 198).

Bibliography

  1. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  2. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  3. Arendt, 2003a. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 159-192. New York: Schocken Books.
  4. Arendt, 2003b. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 49-146. New York: Schocken Books.
  5. Arendt, Hannah. 2006h. Vom Leben des Geistes. Munich and Zurich: Piper.
  6. Arendt, Hannah. 2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York and London: Penguin Classics.
  7. Bar On, Bat-Ami. 2002. The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
  8. Berkowitz, Roger. 2010. “Solitude and the Activity of Thinking.” In Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan, 237-246. New York: Fordham University Press.
  9. Bot, Michael. 2013. “Irony as an Antidote to Thoughtlessness.” Amor Mundi, July 10. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/irony-as-an-antidote-to-thoughtlessness-2013-10-07
  10. Disch 1993. “More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory Vol. 21, No. 4 (November): 665-694.
  11. Fazekas, Samantha. 2024. “Leaving PhronesisBehind: Arendt’s Turn to Kant,” in Works of Philosophy and Their Reception (WPR). Edited by Nicholas Dunn. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://www.degruyter.com/database/WPR/entry/wpr.28861265/html
  12. Flynn 1988. “Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theory of Judgment.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Vol, 19, no. 2: 128-140.
  13. Gines, Kathryn T. 2014. Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  14. Knott, Marie Luise, ed. 2017. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  15. Koivusalo, Markku. 2010. “Hannah Arendt’s Angels and Demons: Ten Spiritual Exercises.” In Hannah Arendt: Practice, Thought and Judgment, edited by Mika Ojakangas, 105-150. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
  16. Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio. 1994. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London & New York: Routledge.
  17. Pitkin, 1981. “Justice: On Relating Private and Public.” Political Theory Vol. 9, No. 3 (Aug.): 327-352.
  18. Robaszkiewicz, Maria. 2017. Übungen im politischen Denken: Hannah Arendts Schriften als Einleitung der politischen Praxis. Wiesbaden: Springer.
  19. Robaszkiewicz, Maria, and Michael Weinman. 2023. Hannah Arendt and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  20. Topolski, Anya. 2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
  21. Young, Iris Marion. 2001. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, edited by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 205-228. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

[1] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman list the following accounts that deal with Arendt’s exercises in political thinking: Bar On (2002); Koivusalo (2010); and Robaszkiewicz (2017); (2023: 1).

[2] The term, “moral imperative,” is used here in the loosest sense possible, seeing as moral decision-making, for Arendt, does not establish any rules for moral actions (Arendt 2003a: 78).

[3] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Michael Bot (2013) as making a similar point (2023: 105).

[4] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Gines (2014) as developing a similar point (2023: 192-193).

Lorenzo Girardi: Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023






Lorenzo Girardi: Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka Book Cover




Lorenzo Girardi: Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka




Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political




Rowman & Littlefield Publishers




2023




Paperback




226

André Duarte: Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy, Routledge, 2023






Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy Book Cover




Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy





Andrè Duarte





Routledge




2023




Paperback




169

Reviewed by: Garrett Pierman (Florida International University)

The 21st century seems filled to the brim with crises that political theorists have a duty to make sense of.  Three years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that has rendered most of our lives irreparably changed in some way, critical theorists are beginning to develop mature, articulate responses to local, national, and international political responses to, and effects of, the pandemic. Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy is one such book and represents an exercise in sense-making of recent politics that will likely be a boon to many of those who get the opportunity to read it.

This review begins with a summary of the book as a whole. From there,  I turn to three specific lines of thinking that are present throughout the book, all of which are highlights in terms of the overall contribution of the book to contemporary political theory. Having completed that summary and one brief critique, I offer a contextualization of this exceptionally timely work in terms of identifying prospective audiences and placing it as a work of new critical theory that can begin to address a new idea of “The Americas” in a 21st-century context.

As a whole, the book seeks to situate the presidential politics of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro as not only a horrible mismanagement of a public health crisis by an authoritarian who seeks to erode democratic institutions but, alongside that mismanagement, a creation of a new kind of necropolitics that amplifies existing trends within Neoliberalism to even more catastrophic ends. To these ends, Duarte masterfully begins a book with an essay, sometimes in first-person perspective, about the pandemic as he experienced it in Brazil. These sorts of narratives, I hope, will prove useful to those who come after us and who might not have firsthand experience of the anxiety, death, mourning, and authoritarian encroachment of this period in our history. Chapter two, then, develops ideas of power in the context of biopolitics, which turns into necropolitics under neoliberalism. The analytical framework set out in chapter two is applied in chapters three and four, which demonstrates that the Necropolitics of covid was not a breach of politics as normal, but, rather, a continuance and intensification of already-existing neoliberal political processes that cast many persons and groups outside of the consideration of worthiness for life. The conclusion is a clear one: such necropolitics are a clear and present threat to democracy, and we can no longer pretend that mere constitutional rights and Enlightenment hopes for democracy are enough to stop authoritarianism. Instead, Duarte concludes, we need a more performative theory and praxis of democracy that has a chance at developing meaningful counters to the bio- and necropolitical praxes offered by the right.

To make this nuanced and necessary political argument, Duarte takes the time, especially in the second chapter, to outline the important contributions to contemporary understandings of Foucault, Arendt, Mbembe, and several others in the areas surrounding the politics of bodies in the contemporary world, such as Judith Butler. These explanations are one of the highlights of the book, as they summarize and situate many years’ worth of reading and analysis into a few dozen pages, rendering some of the more complicated ideas of recent decades of political thought into simple and easily accessible concepts that are then deftly deployed in the rest of the book. At times, the reader might mistake the book for a transcript of lectures given by an experienced professor for the sake of clarifying the aforementioned giants in contemporary political thought: the clarifying role of these sections of the book make what could otherwise have been a hard argument to follow much more compelling.

Making good use of those clear explanations, the book’s second major contribution is in its recording and situating of Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic within the context of existing political practices. As the book outlines in chapter three, Brazilian politics already exhibited an increasingly authoritarian politics before COVID that sought to other the LGBTQ community, communists, those on the left, darker-skinned folks, and so on, COVID provided an opportunity to not only expand those same biopolitical narratives but declare whole swaths of the population who did not belong to those already marginalized groups as subject to death for the sake of the preservation of the image of Brazilian strength personified by Bolsonaro himself. This politics, which Duarte labels as Bolsonarism, makes use of COVID to intensify dedication to those in political power by disregarding any form of knowledge that would seek to question the official line of the moment: the resultant deaths from this foreclosure of critique and discussion towards good public health ends directly turns the biopolitics of neoliberalism into the necropolitics of authoritarianism. As the author describes it, “ If biopolitical mechanisms for the governing of the lives of the population bring together dangerous side-effects derived from the distinction between worthy and unworthy lives, these consequences tend to become even more intensified and aggravated when authoritarian regimes or illiberal, immunitarian, populist or façade democracies recur to them”(Pg. 44). Documenting that shift from biopolitics to necropolitics is of vital political importance to any reader of this work.

The book also situates itself vitally as a work of political theory aimed at recording and making sense of the lived present of the author in the hopes of explaining the trends that he sees to those of us who would read the work. Intellectually, the foundations for this are best laid in the second chapter’s deployment of Arendt, who spent much of her academic career carefully documenting the major events of the Second World War as well as the formation of the state of Isreal in theoretical terms. This sense of political theorist as historian of the present carries throughout the book, however. For instance, Duarte makes the case that writing books such as this one is the “duty” of academics in times like these (Pg. 22) in the introduction of the book, and he spends much of the final few pages turning towards a call for praxis that might slow down or alter the catastrophically destructive and anti-democratic course upon which many nation states have set themselves.  With these three highlights in mind, I would highly recommend this work to anyone interested in gaining a more critical understanding of COVID politics and how those political trends may well set the stage for upcoming anti-democratic political movements and struggles in the coming years and decades.

Pandemic and the Crisis of Democracy is, as a whole, well-written and timely, situating contemporary political thought within ongoing political practices. No work is without flaws, however. In the case of this work, the conclusion, though it is itself well-done, connects less to the overall theme of Brazillian COVID politics than the rest of the work does. A future edition, perhaps with several more years to observe political outcomes and make reflections that can move beyond calls for praxis, would address the political fate of Bolsonaro thanks to the demos’ perception of and action against his COVID politics as neoliberal necropolitics.

In terms of audience, this book would be of great benefit to undergraduate students in two contexts. The most obvious of these would be in an international relations class that focused on Latin America as a whole, or Brazil in particular. In such a context, this book serves as a timely and critical intervention in some more recent events that highlight power dynamics and authoritarian political shifts. Perhaps less obviously, this would make an excellent part of a contemporary political theory course: the first and second chapters that lay the intellectual framework for the arguments of chapters three and four would make excellent companions to assigned readings from Foucault and Arendt. As I said above, Duarte’s explanations of earlier thinkers are masterful in their clarity without doing much, if any, conceptual violence to the original works.  Graduate students focused on Latin American politics, or who are looking to begin research agendas in the contemporary application of critical theory to COVID and the world thereafter should consider this book to be essential reading.  Finally, the book is written clearly enough that those politically concerned with, but perhaps unable to articulate praxis about, the erosion of democracy should also consider this to be an important book to better understand the political processes through which we are living.

Beyond the text of the book, this work is also an important intervention in a contemporary political understanding of The Americas. In reading this work, especially the sections in which Duarte documents Boslonaro’s refusal to take medical advice, insistence on always having been “right” despite having contradicted himself, and utter willingness to sacrifice his countrymen for the preservation of his own power and ego, I was brought back to my own experiences as a citizen of the United States (and moreover of Florida). Both (former, twice impeached) President Trump and Governor DeSantis not only promoted the same ineffective drugs as Bolsonaro, but the Floridian counterparts also saw fit to happily merge their anti-LGBTQ agendas was red-scare tactics and a biopolitics of the “Good Citizen” that was more than willing to throw away the lives of the working class. Beyond the fact that Bolsonaro now lives in a gated community in Florida, apparently a favorite post-career trend of would-be authoritarians, the similarities of the political responses to COVID have, in my view, brought into sharper focus a concept of “The Americas.”

For recent decades, many activists and scholars have been reluctant to consider this hemisphere as any one political unit, and rightly so: the colonial overtones to the concept are clear, as are the neocolonial ones in the economic dependencies built into NAFTA and its military precursors, the Monroe Doctrine and American anticommunist efforts in Latin America. With that said, there may be a case from within critical theory to take a closer look at the similarities we see in Latin America, the United States, and Canada in terms of the concerning development of necropolitics. This goes beyond what Duarte correctly identifies in the relationships between, for example, the United States in Chile, the former being more than happy to cooperate with a dictatorship in the latter to try out neoliberal principles. Instead, I suggest that this Bolsonarist politics, with its quick move to necropolitics for the sake of hastening neoliberal-style corporate hegemony and authoritarian power are a style of politics beginning to affect the Americas more broadly. And, unlike the temporal cycles of colonialism, this style of necropolitics developed simultaneously. The political sickness that COVID-19 brought to the Americas, then, might be a bolstering of a new, authoritarian necropolitics that travels well across borders. In combatting this new strain of neoliberal horror, books like Pandemic and the Crisis of Democracy are essential inoculations against misinformation and authoritarian rewritings of history, which are already well underway. Despite, or perhaps because, of the Bolsonarist politics unfolding in some of the communities most affected by COVID in the United States, this work should be considered required reading for those critical of the new political normal after the pandemic.

André Duarte: Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy, Routledge, 2022






Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and Necropolitics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil Book Cover




Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and Necropolitics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil





André Duarte





Routledge




2022




Paperback GBP £34.99




182

Jens Bonnemann, Paul Helfritzsch, Thomas Zingelmann (Hg.): 1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen






1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen Book Cover




1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen





Jens Bonnemann, Paul Helfritzsch, Thomas Zingelmann (Hg.)





zu Klampen Verlag




2019




Paperback 28,00 €




268

Reviewed by: Matthias Warkus

»1968«, die Studentenbewegung, die Jugendrevolte, wie auch immer man das Phänomen genau nennen mag, ist etwas, wozu es insbesondere aus der Außensicht des politisch interessierten Laien, wie der Verfasser dieser Rezension einer ist, zwei konfligierende Leiterzählungen gibt. Die eine könnte man die orthodoxe oder revolutionäre nennen. Ihr zufolge war »1968« tatsächlich ein Epochenbruch, ein – im Guten oder im Schlechten – grundstürzendes Ereignis, der Beginn unzähliger Kausalketten, die erheblichen Anteil an der Hervorbringung der Welt, in der wir heute leben, hatten. Die andere Erzählung könnte man, um einen Ausdruck von Jacques Rancière auszuborgen, die »furetistische« nennen.[1] Hält man sich an sie, dann war 1968 weniger ein Anfang als ein Ende: der Kulminationspunkt und die Sichtbarwerdung einer bereits seit Jahren im Schwange befindlichen Transformation der westlichen Industriegesellschaften.

Im Zuge der Rechtsbewegung zahlreicher westlicher Demokratien in den letzten Jahren (oder doch zumindest der Aktivierung und Sichtbarwerdung ihrer latenten rechten Kräfte) liegt auch die Frage erneut auf dem Tisch, inwieweit die heutigen Verhältnisse ein Produkt von »1968« sind, was auch gleichzeitig die Frage bedeutet, was anders sein könnte, hätte »1968« größere oder geringere Auswirkungen gehabt. Nicht die schlechteste Lektüre dazu ist der Sammelband 1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen, herausgegeben von Jens Bonnemann, Paul Helfritzsch und Thomas Zingelmann (Springe: zu Klampen! 2019, 270 S.).

Schon die Einleitung der Herausgeber führt auf hervorragende und kompakt Weise zu dem Problem der Einordnung des Phänomens »1968« heran (und diskutiert dabei mit hoher Aktualität die Bezüge zum »Rechtsruck« der letzten Jahre, 7–10). Die folgenden Beiträge gehen dieses Phänomen in schlaglichtartigen Einzelbetrachtungen multidimensional und ohne Anspruch auf eine »Entschlüsselung« oder klare Beantwortung der eingangs benannten Fragen an, wobei die Herausgeber (völlig zu Recht) eingangs betonen, dass »1968« Wurzeln hatte, die bis weit in die 50er zurückgehen (16).

Das theoretische Atomgewicht der Beiträge nimmt von vorne nach hinten weitgehend stetig zu. Den Auftakt machen Zeitdarstellungen: Sabine Pamperrien gibt in ihrem Beitrag »Szenen des Jahres 1967«, der laut Anmerkung auf einer Lesung aus ihrem Buch 1967. Das Jahr der zwei Sommer basiert, einen guten Überblick über die Ausgangslage in der Bundesrepublik und international. Sie arbeitet dabei überraschende Parallelen zur Gegenwart heraus. Wolfgang Kraushaar zeichnet anschließend die nach seiner These maßgeblich durch die Situationisten geprägte Entwicklung der in Deutschland führenden Akteure um Rudi Dutschke nach.

Der Beitrag von Hannah Chodura und Paul Helfritzsch nimmt sich für seine Kürze etwas viel vor, indem er anhand von Guy Debords Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels und Goyas berühmtem Alptraum-Capricho eine Neuausdeutung des Traums als Metapher für die kapitalistische Gesellschaft versucht. Deutlich »süffiger« liest sich der Aufsatz von Christian Dries, der in seinem Aufsatz einen hilfreichen Überblick über verschiedene Parameter des politischen Engagements von Günther Anders vor und um 1968 gibt.

Michael Jenewein und Jörg Müller Hipper beschäftigen sich in ihrem Beitrag am Beispiel der Rede Michael Köhlmeiers am 5.5.2018 mit den sartreschen Begriffen von engagierter Literatur und von Literatur überhaupt. Werner Jung diskutiert knapp, aber informativ die Lukács-Rezeption in der Studentenbewegung vor und um 1968, wozu Lukács’ Positionen zum Realsozialismus, aber auch seine Wirkung in die Inhalte von Lehre und Forschung (insbesondere in der Germanistik) gehören. Sein melancholisches Fazit ist allerdings, dass eine tatsächliche produktive und das Gesamtwerk nicht verzerrende Rezeption nie stattgefunden habe.

Gerhard Schweppenhäusers Beitrag über »Marcuse und die Metaphysik« liefert über die Erwartung des Titels hinaus eine kompakt und kurzweilig geschriebene Zusammenschau der frühen kritischen Theorie insgesamt und ihres Verhältnisses zur Metaphysik im Speziellen, die gegen Ende in eine Parallelsetzung von Marcuses und der heutigen Zeit einmündet. Diese geht mit einer in der kurzen Form arg thetisch und formelhaft wirkenden Programmatik für eine Erneuerung der kritischen Theorie einher, wie man sie schon öfters gesehen hat. Der Verfasser dieser Rezension ist in der »Szene« der gegenwärtigen kritischen Theorie ein informierter Außenseiter und weiß nicht so recht, was er von den immer neuen Aktualisierungsforderungen zu halten hat. Manche Punkte Schweppenhäusers erscheinen empirisch fragwürdig, dort, wo zum Beispiel die Rede davon ist, Phantasie konzentriere sich heute »auf das Ausmalen ›technischer Utopien‹«; während zu Marcuses Zeit und noch bis weit in die 1970er, wenn nicht 80er technische Utopien mit fliegenden Autos, Kuppelstädten, Raumkolonien, Abschaffung von Krankheit und Leid seriös präsentiert wurden,[2] hat dies heute eigentlich aufgehört. Die technischen Utopien unserer Zeit, soweit man sich überhaupt noch traut, welche zu äußern, sind sozialtechnische Utopien von »Connectivity« und »Digitalisierung«. Diese kritisiert Schweppenhäuser am Ende seines Beitrages eher schematisch und wenig überzeugend.

Ebenfalls Einführungscharakter hat Alfred Betscharts Beitrag über »Die Vordenker der sexuellen Revolution«, der in großem Bogen von Freud über Reich, Marcuse, Margaret Mead und Kinsey, Gide und Genet, Kerouac und Ginsberg die Wurzeln der sexuellen Befreiung der 60er skizziert, vor allem aber dichte Belege dafür liefert, dass der Einfluss von Sartre und Beauvoir auf diese kulturelle Bewegung nicht zu unterschätzen war. Der auch sprachlich gelungene Aufsatz schreckt vor zielsicheren Spitzen nicht zurück (wenn etwa mokant und eher nebenbei die »in der Frankfurter Schule nicht unübliche[] Umwandlung bildungsbürgerlicher Ideale in vermeintliche linke Postulate« aufgespießt wird, 154f.), lehnt sich aber hier und da etwas aus dem Fenster (es wird etwa angedeutet, Literatur habe nur noch bis in die 1970er eine »außerordentliche Reichweite in der Gesellschaft gehabt, 157, oder »die Ephebophilie« sei »bis in die 1980er Jahre die dominante Form von Homosexualität« gewesen (158), ohne dass dies belegt wird).

Eine pièce de résistance des Bandes, nicht nur aufgrund des gerade erschienen »neuen Houellebecq« Anéantir, stellt für mich der Aufsatz des Herausgebers Jens Bonnemann dar, der sich mit eben jenem französischen Bestsellerautor und seinem Verhältnis zum Erbe der sexuellen Befreiung beschäftigt. Er zeigt, deutlich detaillierter als Betschart zuvor, die Bedeutung von Wilhelm Reich für »die 68er« auf und arbeitet vor allem genau heraus, dass das der freudomarxistischen Kulturtheorie Marcuses immanente Konzept einer Befreiung des Eros nichts mit der zur wirtschaftlichen Deregulierung homologen Befreiung des Sexus bzw. des »Sexual Marketplace«[3] bei Houellebecq zu tun hat.

Jörg Müller Hipper führt in seinem Beitrag mit und gegen Helmuth Plessner den Nachweis, »dass soziale Konzepte der maximalen Nähe und Offenheit«, sprich der Gemeinschaftlichkeit im Gegensatz zur Gesellschaftlichkeit, entgegen der Intuition zahlreicher »68er« keine gangbare Grundlage für neue, bessere Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens darstellen. Im Gegenteil müssten solche Formen schon aus rein anthropologischen Gründen auf einer Gesellschaftlichkeit von Distanz und Takt, »die Möglichkeit, unbehelligt zu bleiben, nicht mitmachen zu müssen« (205) aufbauen.

Herausgeber Thomas Zingelmann nimmt im Anschluss die beliebte Vorstellung auseinander, die verschiedenen Gegenkulturen, die heute mit der Zeit von »1968« assoziiert werden, seien miteinander verflochten und irgendwie eine Einheit gewesen. Er unterscheidet die verschiedenen Unterströme in kollektivistische Protestbewegungen und individualistische Gegenkulturen (und bleibt damit im Groben in der Spur von Müller Hipper zuvor). So liefert er eine knappe, aber informative historische Beschreibung und Einordnung von Beat Generation und Hippies als Vertreter des unpolitischen Gegenkulturaspekts.

Der dritte Herausgeber, Paul Helfritzsch, konzipiert in seinem Beitrag, der nicht mehr unmittelbar kulturhistorisch ist, im Ausgang von Jean-Paul Sartre und Frantz Fanon die Rolle des Intellektuellen als Instanz der performativen Benennung von Unterdrückungsverhältnissen auf Grundlage von Theoriewissen. Auf dem Intellektuellen liegt nach Helfritzsch eine »ontologische Verantwortung«, also eine Verantwortung für das Verfasstsein der Welt in durch diese performativen Benennungen erst etablierten Strukturen von praktischen Begriffen.

Der Band schließt mit einer geschichtsphilosophischen Betrachtung von Peggy Breitenstein, die sich implizit auch gegen eine Reihe der versammelten anderen Beiträge stellt, indem sie mit einem benjaminschen Geschichtsverständnis den Wert von Versuchen der Geschichtsschreibung, die Fragen wie »Was war…?« und »Was bleibt von…?« stellen und sie von berufenen Zeitzeugen (»Siegern«) deuten lassen (245), allgemein in Frage stellt. An verschiedenen Belegen (Erinnerungen der Malerin Sarah Haffner, die Thesen des Westberliner Aktionsrats zur Befreiung der Frauen sowie Kommentare und Reaktionen darauf wie das berühmte »Penisflugblatt«) entlang zeigt sie die der Studentenbewegung als Lebensstil und als politische Bewegung entgegen ihrem revolutionären Anspruch innewohnenden patriarchalischen Strukturen und Selbstwidersprüche auf. Ihre Bilanz bleibt eine melancholische: dass die »selbstreflexive und selbstkritische Praxis« (259), die jede Emanzipation mit Marx sein müsse und die in den weniger theoriegesättigten feministischen Seitenbewegungen von »1968« noch eher zu finden gewesen sei, bis auf Weiteres höchstens Dialogräume und solidarischen Rückzug bedeuten kann, da das Erbe der emanzipatorischen Diskurse bis heute zumindest im akademischen Raum vor allem in Form von »Debattenwettstreit und Konkurrenz«[4] (262) stattfinde. Breitensteins Aufsatz hat aufgrund seiner inhaltlichen Spannweite und stilistischen Brillanz die prominente Position am Schluss, sozusagen als »inoffizielles Fazit«, des Bandes mehr als verdient.

Insgesamt kann der Band, auch wenn nicht alle Beiträge gleich interessant sind und man sich mancherorts einige Belege mehr gewünscht hätte, trotz (oder gerade wegen) seiner Entstehung als Tagungsband für nicht ins Thema Eingelesene als gute Heranführung an das Phänomen 1968 dienen und auch Kundigeren die eine oder andere neue Perspektive vermitteln. Ein Wermutstropfen bleibt die leider nicht geringe Zahl von nicht nur Tipp-, sondern auch Grammatik- und Trennfehlern, über die man in der Lektüre immer wieder stolpert. Die Frage, ob »1968« nun eher Ursache oder eher Wirkung war, löst sich beim Studium des Bandes jedenfalls nach und nach zusammen mit jeder scheinbar kompakten Substanz des Phänomens auf. »1968« erweist sich als Sammelbegriff für eine heterogene, allenfalls familienähnliche Vielfalt von zeitlich grob koinzidierenden Entwicklungen, deren Zusammenordnung unter einer leitenden Erzählung selbst vielleicht am ehesten so etwas ist wie eine popkulturelle Retrofiktion.


[1] Vgl. Jacques Rancière, interviewt von Julia Christ und Bertrand Ogilvie: »Republikanismus ist heute ein Rassismus für Intellektuelle«, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 65.4 (2017), 727–761, hier 731.

[2] Drastisch vor Augen führt dies ein Blick z.B. in Ulrich Schippke, Die 7 Weltwunder von morgen, Gütersloh 1972, oder ders., Zukunft, Gütersloh 1974.

[3] Dieser Ausdruck ist in der Szene der militanten modernen Frauenfeinde (»MRAs«, »Incels«) in den sozialen Medien, die u.a. für ihre Unterstützung von Donald Trump und die Anstiftung mehrerer Massenmorde berüchtigt sind, der geläufige. Houellebecq kann, wenn nicht als Stifter, so doch mindestens als geistiger Vorläufer dieses Denkens gesehen werden.

[4] Der Verf. dankt Katharina Herrmann, München, dafür, durch sie schon vor längerer Zeit auf Karl Helds berühmte Sentenz »Ihr wollt ja lieber dichten« beim konkret-Kongress 1993 hingewiesen worden zu sein.

Roberta de Monticelli: Towards a Phenomenological Axiology, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021






Towards a Phenomenological Axiology: Discovering What Matters Book Cover




Towards a Phenomenological Axiology: Discovering What Matters





Roberta de Monticelli





Palgrave Macmillan




2021




Hardback 106,99 €




XI, 310

William E. Scheuerman: The End of Law






The End of Law: Carl Schmitt in the Twenty-First Century Book Cover




The End of Law: Carl Schmitt in the Twenty-First Century





William E. Scheuerman





Rowman & Littlefield International




2019




Paperback £35.00




358

Reviewed by: Samuel Lee (The New School for Social Research)

In the past few decades, we witness a renaissance of Schmitt studies in the English-speaking world. The field of legal philosophy in the US shares a similar trend. A vast amount of manuscripts, journals or PhD dissertations published every year and engage Carl Schmitt’s thought in different ways. As a disputed figure like Schmitt, the reception of his doctrine widely varies in the spectrum between far left and far right. Among many controversies, one of them is about him joining the Nazi party in 1933 and the immanent relationship between his political decision and his legal thought. Through the careful examination and critical engagement with Schmitt’s works in different periods, William Scheuerman argues that the life-long belief of legal indeterminacy led Schmitt to join the Nazi party eventually (8).

This book is divided into three parts. In the first part, Scheuerman shows that Schmitt’s early writings on judicial issues, the decisionist approach of sovereignty, the critique of liberal parliamentarianism, as well as the concrete order doctrine of international law, these stages consistently shed light on the lack of legal determinacy. To re-establish the ground of determinacy, Schmitt demands homogeneity of ethnic community (21), with which, for Scheuerman, Nazi offers a plausible solution for the Weimar Republic. Hence, Schmitt’s legal philosophy inevitably drives him to the Nazi. The next part compares Schmitt with two contemporaries, namely Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek. Following Between the Norm and the Exception, Scheuerman continues to shed light on the impact of Schmitt’s thought in the transatlantic world. In this book, he rather focuses on the influence of Schmitt’s legal theory in the post-war America. Comparatively, there are very few studies examine this period of intellectual history.  Scheuerman substantially contributes to the intellectual history by revealing the theoretical relationship between these pivotal post-war scholars. In the last part, Scheuerman borrows Schmitt’s idea of political emergency and engages with the contemporary political and legal issue concerning global emergency in the era of terrorism. In this way, Scheuerman offers a timely reading of Schmitt and reveals the fundamental weakness and insights inherent in his legal political view.

As a work that is largely devoted to legal philosophy, not a political debate of sovereignty, Scheuerman comprehends Schmitt’s thoughts in the context of contemporary critique of liberal rule of law.  In the American context, there are two inter-related statements that generalize the challenges of the rule of law. First, the expansion of state interventions to different fields of capitalist economy and social welfare brings the judges and administrators with a vast amount of power.  Second, the proliferation of powerful constitutional courts, endowed with generous powers of judicial review over legislation, has arguably accelerated trends toward discretionary government. To put it in a nutshell, the overwhelmingly centralized power of executive and judicial power that accumulated over the past century culminated in the asymmetrical relationship between the branch of legislative and judicial. The latter could now outweigh the power of the former by means of large numbers of judicial reviews and the obscurity of legal interpretations. The democracy and the rule of law are under severe threat from within. This current crisis of the rule of law is, for Scheuerman, best depicted by Schmitt’s legal diagnosis. Despite the flawed political solution Schmitt offered, the accurate analysis against liberal parliamentarianism is worthy of scrutiny.

In the first part, Scheuerman studies carefully the works of Schmitt over his long academic lifespan. He realizes that the legal philosophy of Carl Schmitt was devoted largely to the critique of legal indeterminacy that happened in the liberal Weimar constitutional order. Eventually, this judgment results in consenting the Nazi’s reign and even the idea of Großraum in the realm of international law. Hence in Scheuerman’s claim, joining the Nazi is to a large extent consistent with Schmitt’s early legal and political thoughts. In the 1920s, for instance, Schmitt argued for the centrality of the ‘exception’ of law in the Political Theology. “In its very essence, all legal experience is permeated by indeterminacy, by the ever-changing dictates of the concrete exception.” (35) The sovereign that is endowed with ultimate power to decide the exception represents the ambiguity of the law. All laws are then normatively justified not by the abstract moral reasons, but the absolute decision of the sovereign in concrete circumstances.

This issue of legal indeterminacy that largely embodied in the liberal political and legal order is caused by the crisis of parliamentary democracy. The basic incompatibility between liberalism and democracy that posited by Schmitt seems to show the doomed failure of liberal parliamentarism in the age of mass democracy, given that only democracy could provide a substantial homogeneity between the rulers and the ruled. This homogeneity determines the legal meaning of all laws (50). Nevertheless, Scheuerman is aware that liberal parliamentarism does not necessarily lead to legal indeterminacy in Schmitt’s account. At least in the 19th century, the homogeneity was to a certain degree maintained by means of Besitz und Bildung (property and education) (47). In other words, before the age of mass democracy, the minority of the aristocrats who were qualified to engage deliberation and debate in the parliament would somehow realize the ideal of free discussion and promote social interest for all.  Yet, mass democracy fundamentally changed the game that the parliament deteriorated to vales of endless interest-based claims that lead to nowhere. “The people itself cannot discuss…and it can only engage in acts of acclamation, voting, and saying yes or no to questions posed to it”, as Schmitt famously put in the Constitutional Theory. As a result, the discursive characteristic of the parliament in the age of mass democracy turns anti-political in terms of paralyzing the political order and provoking legal indeterminacy.

In Scheuerman’s original interpretation, this argument “depicts twentieth-century mass-based authoritarianism as a fulfillment of the democratic project.” (49) Thus, Nazi would be a plausible solution of legal indeterminacy for Schmitt. Hence, since 1933, Schmitt wrote a vale of article to affirm the Nazi quest of ethnic and racial homogeneity. Unlike many scholars who conceive 1933 as the watershed of Schmitt’s academic life that shifts from the stage of decisionism to the stage of concrete-order approach, Scheuerman rather sheds light on the theoretical consistencies of Schmitt’s legal thought before and after 1933. “Essential to Schmitt’s idiosyncratic quest to reconceive the possibility of legal determinacy is an open endorsement of dystopian National Socialist visions of a racially and ethnically homogeneous ‘folk community’.” (135) Hence, to a certain extend, the Nazi realized the idea of sovereign dictatorship that Schmitt suggested in the early 1920s. The quest of homogeneous racial community and the emphasis of executive power of the party “re-politicize” Weimar’s state government through the friend-enemy distinction and dissolve the problem of legal indeterminacy. Scheuerman critically comments Schmitt over-emphasize the importance of the political, which would romanticize the use of violence. Also, the legal predictability and regularity are almost impossible to attain by the branch of legislative in mass democracy. Consequently, dictatorship seems to be the natural result.

Furthermore, Scheuerman believes the framework of the legal indeterminacy is embodied in Schmitt’s discussion of international law as well. Similar to the critique of liberal parliamentarism, liberal international law fails to represent a uniform will of a homogeneous group of people. Hence, the boundless extension of the liberal international law deprives the legality of it, insomuch as the legality should be grounded on the identity between the ruled and the ruler.  Scheuerman argues that, in order to criticize the liberal international law, Schmitt endorsed the experience of American imperialism to support the National Socialist imperialism in the 30s and 40s before the war (165). Schwab first proposed the similarity between Schmitt’s concept of Großraum and Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum[1]. Unlike the original international law that posits a groundless, anti-political notion of universality, imperial rule constitutes Großraum that is a grand political entity encountering others. In contrast to the globality of liberal international law, Großraum, illustrated by the US imperialism, has a hegemonic power to form the relations of domination. In the case of US, for instance, the nonintervention treaty between the US and the Latin American is made for the sake of protecting American property, though the US constantly used the exceptional clauses for various political purposes.

Scheuerman doubts if Schmitt could justify the German’s imperial expansion on the basis of the US imperialism. “In Schmitt’s legal theory, international law is systematically reduced to a direct and unmediated plaything of Nazi Realpolitik.” (190) Regardless of any traditional virtue of international law, Schmitt’s idea of Großraum is merely a veil for racial imperialism, as Scheuerman condemns. Accordingly, Schmitt fails to provide any alternative concept of international law to replace the liberal one.

The next part is to establish to linkage between the thought of Schmitt and two renowned American thinkers that are also Schmitt’s contemporaries, Schumpeter and Hayek. This contextual reading is inspiring and original, given that the majority of scholars shed light only on the Continental impact of Schmitt’s thought, such as the critical reception of Schmitt in the Frankfurt School or the Post-structuralism. On the other side of the transatlantic world, the influence of Carl Schmitt is largely ignored until the translation projects of George Schwab. By engaging with these thinkers, Scheuerman believes his studies could fill in this blank of intellectual history about the reception of Schmitt in the post-war American academia.

Concerning Schumpeter, his classic work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is for Scheuerman a response to Schmitt’s diagnosis of the crisis of liberal parliamentarism (217). Alike Schmitt, Schumpeter acknowledged Max Weber’s argument that modernization is the process of rationalism in which instrumental rationality, mechanization and bureaucratization dominate the modern logic of the world. The source of legitimacy, thus, is changed from charismatic leaders to rational legal authorities. What he disagreed with Weber is the annihilation of the heroic element in the discourse of iron cage. Schumpeter sheds light on the conception of the capitalist entrepreneur. Regarding the entrepreneurship, it allows the capitalist to be a heroic figure that pursue economic innovations and introduce new forms of economic activity to reform the current commercial routines. As a will to conquer, it appeals to the consumers. The boost of consumerism is a positive reinforcement from the market that manifests its support. His emphasis of will and heroic figure is akin to Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty.

More importantly, for Schumpeter, the rise of mass democracy, in the 20th century undermined the parliamentary democracy. In an essay, “Socialist Possibilities for Today” (1920), Schumpeter argued that liberal parliamentarism was genuinely functioned in the past due to the limit participation of the poor and working classes. The elites or the representatives that worked in the parliament – either from the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the state bureaucracy- they shared a similar view of social interests. This is the only way that “government by discussion” could work (227). This analysis clearly echoed with Schmitt’s diagnosis of the crisis of parliamentarism in the early 1920s. Through the archival study, Scheuerman finds out that in this period, Schumpeter did exchange his view with Schmitt on this topic. He even encouraged Schmitt to work on his famous writing, Concept of the Political, and had a high opinion of it. In the meantime, Schmitt quoted occasionally Schumpeter’s claims about imperialism in his works. For Scheuerman, their disagreement on the solution of the crisis of parliamentarism is clear but not too far. While Schumpeter endorsed liberal elitism; Schmitt rather opt for a mass-based authoritarian plebiscitarianism. To put it in a nutshell, for both of them, homogeneity that dissolved the problem of legal indeterminacy is the prerequisite of a functional parliamentary democracy. Mass democracy leads only to a dead end.

Apart from Schumpeter, Scheuerman also examine the intellectual inheritance between Schmitt and Hayek. The critique of the modern interventionist state by Schmitt in the 1920s and 30s had a great impact on Hayek, which resulted in his magnum opus, The Road to Serfdom (1944). Hayek posited a dichotomy between general law and individual commands that the former should not refer to “the wants and needs of particular people”. It determines his understanding of the rule of law. To put it in another way, the society and the state should be clearly separated. The former is diversified and heterogeneous while the latter is not. The interventionist state they witnessed in the first half of the 20th century was, as Hayek adopted Schmitt’s thought, the phenomenon of the total state. It is different from the neutral state that liberal thinkers endorsed in the 19th century, insomuch as the state and society were now fused with each other in the age of mass democracy (254). It resulted in the establishment of welfare state and lawmaking for the sake of a particular group of people. It is not hard to find the affinity between Hayek and Schmitt’s critique of interventionist development that contributes to the decay of liberal parliamentarism. In fact, as late as 1976, when Hayek wrote a new Preface to The Road to Serfdom, he still admitted he was not free from the “interventionist superstition” and this tone of anti-welfare state polemics was indebted to Schmitt’s decisionist approach (256). Despite several differences between Schmitt and Hayek in terms of the endorsement of the pluralist party state as well as the epistemological skepticism that the rule of law is grounded on, Scheuerman reveals the uncanny intimacy between their thought. For him, it could somehow explain the marriage between authoritarian plebiscitary and neoliberal capitalism in the 20th century, particularly the myth of Chinese capitalism.

In the last part, Schmitt’s legal and political thoughts are engaged with the contemporary political issues. In particular, the renaissance of the Schmitt studies in America is caused by the warfare in the name of anti-terrorism. When we take the global scale of the state of emergency into account, the explanatory power of Schmitt’s theory seems to outweigh the mainstream liberal political thought or legal thought. Scheuerman endeavors to scrutinize the relevance of Schmitt’s view and see if his understanding and ideas could shed some new lights to our current plights. The white house gradually centralized its power in the past century. After the cold war, the US government has a new way to strengthen its power-counter-terrorism. The terrorist attack in 2001 marked a watershed of US history in the sense that the USA Patriot Act was passed spontaneously. The bill endowed the executive government with unprecedented great power to fight the enemies by all costs, including regularization of emergency authority, such as a suspension of human rights of suspects during anti-terrorist interrogation.

Apparently, in Schmitt’s doctrine of sovereignty, the emergency power fundamentally constitutes the idea of sovereignty. “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception”[2], he eloquently wrote at the beginning of Political Theology. Provided that the emergency power is triggered in face of crisis, Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty argued for the “unavoidability and ubiquity of dire crisis” and it leads to his fundamental belief of legal skepticism (269). The latter is comparatively far-reaching in the field of legal theory. Scheuerman is not going to challenge these conventional views of Schmitt. Rather, his writing shows that Schmitt’s views about emergency power originated in his early academic writings and he maintained these thoughts for several decades. In this case, Schmitt’s intimacy with National Socialism before and during the WWII is closely related to his own intellectual reflection of sovereignty.

More importantly, many accept Schmitt’s idea that authoritarian rule and even inhumane measures maybe necessary for some exceptional circumstance lest the state would collapse in the crisis, even though the debate concerning counter-terrorism seldom embraces Schmitt’s theory (292). Hence, Scheuerman finds it essential to revisit Schmitt’s idea of international politics critically and presents different ways to engage with it. Schmitt’s emphasis of crisis in the notion of sovereignty denotes that “crisis management would constitute a paramount activity for contemporary government.” (289) To encounter the unpredictable crisis ahead, Schmitt inevitably favors the centralized power of the unified executive government, which would at least potentially undermine the rule of law. Moreover, in the light that the law fails to anticipate all sorts of emergent circumstances, the sovereign power of the executive branch of government should have the absolute power and limit not by the ‘situational laws’. In other words, the sovereign power must be lawless, for the sake of dealing with unprecedented crisis and saving the normalcy of legal order. For

Scheuerman, the extremely skeptical view of norms of Schmitt, which demands the laws to be able to predict all sorts of circumstance, is problematic. More precisely speaking, it is assaulting a straw man. To endorse Andrew Arato’s claim, there is a spectrum between a purely formalistic legal order and the lawless, absolute sovereign power. A reasonable degree of legal constraint by means of a set of constitutional procedure should be plausible to contain the emergency power of the government (291) and make it consistent with the rule of law.

Scheuerman’s interpretation of Schmitt is well grounded, systemic and timely. His historical configuration contributes both to the Schmitt studies as well as the studies on intellectual history in America.  Unlike a mere historical inquiry, Scheuerman endeavors to engage Schmitt with the contemporary debate in the field of legal theory, in order to find out how Schmitt’s legal thought would help articulate the legal problems we have, aka legal indeterminacy in the age of mass democracy. Yet, there are a few questions that this brilliant work should have addressed.

To begin with, Scheuerman strongly believes that there is a strong affinity between Schmitt’s theoretical reflection and his political decision of joining the Nazi party in 1933. Hence, he reconstructs a coherent theoretical view of Schmitt on legal indeterminacy by widely examining his works from the 1910s to the post-war period. It is, however, a bit surprise to find that in this book, Scheuerman seldom pays attention to the counter-side of the debate. Since George Schwab introduced Schmitt to the American intellectual circle by a series of English translation in the 1980s, a decade long debate emerged concerning whether Schmitt’s alliance with Nazi is motivated by his legal and political thought or not. American scholars like George Schwab[3] and Joseph Bendersky[4] strongly defended the ‘early Schmitt’ that Schmitt showed no sign of anti-Semitism or the empathy of National Socialism before 1933. On the contrary, Carl Schmitt was once a Kantian and then a conservative Catholic who devoted to be the guardian of the republican constitution. For the leftist side of interpretation, Schmitt’s legal and political thought before 1933 is far from legal Fascism. In contrast, he defended the newly born republican state of Weimar against the threat of populist movements and the formalistic positivism by developing a cutting edge doctrine of popular sovereignty. Scheuerman was apparently aware of their arguments and his article written in 1993 was an attempt to respond to these critiques[5]. However, his response is far from satisfactory. He does not consider elaborating his counterarguments in his latest work, which, to a certain degree, undermines the validity of his approach.

The defense against the Fascist reading of Schmitt before 1933 is mainly twofold: historical and theoretical. Historically speaking, the anti-Semitic charge of Schmitt is questionable in a few ways. Many of Schmitt’s friends were Jews, like Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Waldemar Gurian. When he moved to Berlin to teach in 1927, the school he chose was Handelshochschulen, a new established school that had a reputation of being an institution with many Jews. He published nothing openly against the Jews before 1933. Most importantly, according to Gopal Balakrishnan, the honeymoon between Schmitt and the Nazi party is much shorter than he anticipated. Schutzstaffel commenced to investigate Schmitt’s opportunistic tendency towards anti-Semitism. It didn’t result in a catastrophic retribution by SS is thanks to the protection from Goering. In a letter to the editorial board of the SS paper, Goering urged the SS to stop further attacks on Schmitt[6].

With regard to the theoretically concern, Schmitt’s concept of the political and the emphasis of the social homogeneity aim not at promoting the purity of nation, don’t mentions the exclusion of the Jews. In the Concept of the Political, for instance, he clearly stated that the friend/enemy distinction is dispensable from the personal hostility or profitability. In contrast, it is about an existential relationship between political entities. He specifically traced the idea of public enemy back to Plato’s The Republic in order to distant from the idea of private enemy. The eternal existence of the enemy also constitutes to Schmitt’s political metaphysics of pluriverse. In short, identity coexists as diversity. It could also echo Schmitt’s early Catholic view that the Catholic Church is a complexio oppositorum that contains a wide spectrum of contradictory schools and thoughts without dismantling the papacy. Unless the Jewish group is existentially threatened the unity and order of the absolute constitution, it is hard to find a legitimate reason to annihilate the Jews in early Schmitt’s doctrine of popular sovereignty.

Another question is posed with respect to Schmitt’s preference of authoritarian plebiscite. Scheuerman repeatedly argues that Schmitt’s critique of normativism and formalistic liberalism is to justify his preference on sovereign dictatorship or authoritarian plebiscite, which paves his way to the Nazi party (109; 165; 218). He, however, does not respond to the republican interpretation of Schmitt. For the counter-argument, some argue that Schmitt had no intention to reject liberal parliamentarism entirely. Nevertheless, encountering the vulnerable political order of Weimar republic, Schmitt was rather devoted to save democracy by separating it from liberalism. Liberalism that appeals to universalism and deliberation fails to embody the social homogeneity that democracy presumes at the first place. In light of solving the problem of legal indeterminacy, Schmitt revisited the tradition of pouvoir constituant and developed his own approach of popular sovereignty, aka decisionism. Andreas Kalyvas used three moments of democracy to conceive Schmitt’s democratic doctrine[7]. Hence, the emphasis of level of dictatorship is to manifest the political will that forms the order of the political community, instead of replacing exception with normalcy. At the end, the exceptional measures of sovereign are employed to restore the order for the sake of returning the power back to the normal political and legal order. In the Constitutional Theory, Schmitt sheds much light on the two pillars of the constitution, identity and representation. After the constitutional order is formed, the representation of the public will then will be endowed with the political power to execute the will of the people. It defines the second level of constitution, the positive constitution. The appearance of the people in the public sphere is to assure the representational organ of the state will stay as close as the people’s will. If so, it is unclear how Schmitt would prefer authoritarianism or even totalitarianism before 1933 at the expense of the normal representational apparatus of parliament.

In short, Scheuerman delivers a fruitful, well-grounded study on Schmitt’s account of legal indeterminacy and its legal and political consequences. Also, his brilliant critique of the decay of liberal parliamentarism is influential among the American thinkers in the early 20th century. To a certain extend, Schmitt’s thought shaped the landscape of the post-war American academia, as well as the contemporary reaction of the controversial political issues, such as counter-terrorism and the global status of emergency. His political decision of joining the Nazi is undoubtedly unwise, but his diagnosis of the immanent problems of liberal parliamentarism is still full of insights. This remarkable work would surely contribute much to the Schmitt studies as much as the debate of legal theory.

References:

Balakrishnan, Gopal. 2002. The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso.

Bendersky, Joseph. 2016. Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kalyvas, Andreas. 1999-2000. “Carl Schmitt and the Three Moments of Democracy.” 21 Cardozo L. Rev. 1525.

Scheuerman, Bill. 1993. “The Fascism of Carl Schmitt: A Reply to George Schwab.” German Politics and Society 29: 104. ProQuest.

Schmitt, Carl. 2011. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schwab, George. 1994. “Contextualising Carl Schmitts concept of Grossraum.” History of European Ideas, 19: 1-3, 185-190. http://doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(94)90213-5.

Schwab, George. 1989. The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936. Westport: Greenwood Press.


[1] George Schwab, “Contextualising Carl Schmitts concept of Grossraum,” History of European Ideas, 19  (1994):1-3, 185-190, DOI: 10.1016/0191-6599(94)90213-5.

[2] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5.

[3] George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989).

[4] Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016).

[5] Bill Scheuerman, “The Fascism of Carl Schmitt: A Reply to George Schwab,” German Politics and Society 29 (1993): 104, ProQuest.

[6] Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, (London: Verso, 2002), 207.

[7] Andreas Kalyvas, “Carl Schmitt and the Three Moments of Democracy,” 21 Cardozo L. Rev. 1525 (1999-2000).

Orietta Ombrosi, Raphael Zagury-Orly: Derrida-Levinas: An Alliance Awaiting the Political, Mimesis, 2019






Derrida-Levinas: An Alliance Awaiting the Political Book Cover




Derrida-Levinas: An Alliance Awaiting the Political





Orietta Ombrosi, Raphael Zagury-Orly





Mimesis




2019




Paperback $ 27.00 / £ 22.00 / € 25,00




330