The Historicity of Schmitt's Political Ontology

Few definitions in twentieth-century political thought have been repeated as often as Carl Schmitt’s dictum: “the specific political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy.” It is usually treated as the foundation of Schmitt’s accounts of sovereignty, war, and the state, and as the core principle underlying his anti-liberal political philosophy. Yet read closely, the friend-enemy distinction is not the deepest level of Schmitt’s thought. Schmitt built his political ontology on top of a deeper ontology, one that is often overlooked. From The Concept of the Political—first published as an essay in 1927 and expanded into a book in 1932—to the end of his life, Schmitt retained this formal definition. But the definition itself points beyond the political to something the political neither creates nor exhausts: a logic of association and dissociation that precedes every public order and survives each one. The political, in Schmitt’s sense, is simultaneously a foundation and a containment strategy—a way of organizing and restraining underlying natural structures—and for that reason it is historical through and through. The historicity of friends and enemies alike stems from the fact that neither exists in the abstract, but arises only in the concrete realm of historical socio-political existence, which is dynamic and ever-changing.

It is worth taking a detour to define Schmitt’s formulation. Schmitt maintains that human relations acquire a political character wherever association and dissociation reach an intensity at which the other is apprehended as existentially different—as something alien. This existential other is neither merely a competitor nor something morally bad or evil, nor is it simply economically disadvantageous or unprofitable. The existential other is “other” precisely insofar as its existence makes the possibility of physical violence and death real and conceivable. The friend-enemy distinction is therefore neither substantive nor necessarily institutional. It tells us nothing about who the parties are, how many parties there are, or what constitutive form they take. In this sense, it is purely a formal structure. As Schmitt puts it:

The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations.

But the very notion of a threshold of intensity presupposes something whose intensity can increase. It presupposes an underlying relation of association and dissociation that exists prior to the point at which a particular antithesis becomes political. If the political had no structure beneath it, it would be unclear what precisely was being intensified—or, indeed, what the religious, moral, or national antithesis was an antithesis of. These domains are not neutral materials that are politicized from the outside, as is made clear by Schmitt’s own statement above. They already contain relations of association and dissociation prior to, and independently of, their incorporation into the political.

The same point follows from Schmitt’s conception of the state’s monopoly over the political decision. This monopoly does not mean that the state has a monopoly over the existence of enmity; rather, it concerns the public recognition and organization of enmity. When the sovereign state wages war against another state, it does not thereby establish that friend-enemy distinctions cannot arise elsewhere. Such distinctions can and do emerge within and between families, corporations, churches, and other associations. What distinguishes these relations from the political, in Schmitt’s sense, is not the absence of enmity but the public character that makes a relation of enmity politically constitutive.

Schmitt’s use of the Christian distinction between hostis and inimicus makes the same point from the opposite direction. The personal, private enemy (inimicus) is excluded from the concept of the political not because the individual does not experience or participate in enmity, but because Schmitt reserves the term “political” for those forms of enmity that have acquired a public character (hostis), or, in other words, pose a collective existential threat. The distinction therefore makes sense only if the underlying realm of association and dissociation is broader than its politically recognized manifestations. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the state to exclude and nothing for political recognition to recognize.

To use a Heideggerian term, this realm of enmity can be called the Abgrund, the unfathomable abyss from which all friend-enemy distinctions emerge. Indeed, it is this “pre-political” Abgrund of enmity that, in Schmitt’s view, first produces the pre-political unity necessary for a group to decide upon the particular constitution it will adopt. Political unity thus has a historical origin, but that which precedes history is nature. The political, in other words, cannot be understood apart from some conception of the human beings who constitute it. Thus, Schmitt placed great emphasis on the anthropological foundations of the political. He maintained that political doctrines and philosophies could be judged according to the anthropological assumptions they presuppose. Pessimistic views associated with the Christian doctrine of original sin and with Thomas Hobbes, which regard man as naturally wicked and dangerous, tend to produce doctrines that emphasize hierarchy, order, and authority. Optimistic views, associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, by contrast, regard man as fundamentally good but corrupted by socio-historical conditions, and consequently tend toward doctrines that conceive peaceful coexistence as the truly human form of existence, but this is only achieved if men manage to abolish socio-economic inequality and oppression.

Such anthropological positions can be debated, discussed, and justified in the abstract, but, for Schmitt, they can ultimately be confirmed or dismissed through history. Anthropology cannot, therefore, be separated from the historical world in which human beings act. Man is, after all, the constant actor across historical epochs and social formations. Men create culture, and through historical change they transform it; as human beings change, so too does the culture they produce. Every age possesses a particular conception of itself and, consequently, of man, but each age both anticipates a coming one and succeeds a previous one. Each age also has a particular pole around which the political tends to coalesce: theology in the Middle Ages; “metaphysics” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; economics from the nineteenth up until our own day; and so on. From the perspective of the friend-enemy distinction, however, this succession does not imply progress or regression. Rather, one culture or social formation replaces another, and with it comes corresponding transformations of political order.

If human beings are the constant actors through these transformations, however, culture cannot be treated as something independent of human nature. Culture is cultivated from something, and that something is man, for human nature produces culture. Yet culture is always shaped by the existence of others, of friends and enemies, and the relations between them, because there is no such thing as “man” in the abstract; there are only men, each with his peculiar combination of character and intellect. Human beings differ from each other in sex, class, social status, age, religion, conviction, and many other things. These differences generate forms of enmity which are regulated within the state. Yet the state itself exists within a world of other states, each regulating forms of enmity of its own. The interaction of these distinct political communities produces further culture and political differences between states, and thus the possibility of enmity between them.

For Schmitt, then, difference—and by extension, strife—is an ontological fact. It cannot simply be abolished through political or social transformation. This is precisely what makes a thinker like Karl Marx dangerous from Schmitt’s perspective. Marx conceives of the possibility of overcoming the fundamental antagonisms of human existence and thereby reaching an end to the struggle that characterizes political life. Yet the attempt to abolish antagonism would therefore itself take on a political form, and in doing so would confront precisely the problems of power, authority, and enmity it sought to overcome. But it does so with absolute moral conviction because it believes it is on the side of “man” and “humanity,” which necessarily means that those who oppose this self-proclaimed progressive force are on the side of the “unhuman.” The fusion of morality and politics produces the most dehumanizing forms of strife and warfare in Schmitt’s eyes. Communism, liberal humanitarianism, and all forms of secular-political messianism totalize the limited distinction between friend and enemy, by transforming a relation between existentially opposed but politically equal opponents into a moral opposition between humanity and that which it needs to negate. The totalization of the political creates an asymmetry so great that the so-called friends come to regard the complete destruction of the enemy as a moral-historical necessity.

One of Schmitt’s students, Reinhart Koselleck, continued this theme. In his essay “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” published in Futures Past, he discusses the totalizing aspect in depth. Each group naturally lays claim to an identity of its own, and, by extension, concepts of its own. Despite their differences, friends and enemies have recognized each other as human beings throughout history. As Koselleck maintains, the binaries of Greek-Barbarian and Christian-Heathen never excluded the enemy from humanity. It was only with the Enlightenment that the concept of “human” took on a polemical, negating function. The philosophes had their enemies in the church, the nobility, and the prince. The particular distinctions of the ancien régime were thus to be negated by the One, the true Human Being. Thus, with the Revolution, Man was fighting against his enemy, the Unhuman. The historical development of the friend-enemy distinction thus took on a new turn, a potentially more destructive one than ever, and the twentieth century is witness to that. Schmitt feared precisely this outcome.

Thus the optimistic view of man, which sees the New Eden on the horizon, brings with it the prospect of a new Flood. It sows not flowers, but death. This was a secular form of messianism: a new eschatology unleashed by the philosophy of history which emerged during the Enlightenment. Earlier eras of European history had been marked by forms of restraint. Wars were considered legitimate and were therefore, in principle, limited. The Westphalian system affirmed the formal equality of states, and general rules and principles regulated human affairs while allowing states and peoples to retain their distinct identities. The dissolution of this plural political order weakened these restraints by introducing universal claims that no longer recognized the legitimacy of political difference. The promise of Salvation in this world took root, and the question of what that Salvation would look like—and how the globe and all of humanity were ultimately to partake in Progress—took center stage. Yet the universal claims of the new doctrines—Jacobinism, liberalism, communism, and human rights—did not eliminate the friend-enemy distinction. Instead, they transformed its scale and intensified its stakes. Each doctrine confronted the others as competing visions of the universal, and its opponents could therefore appear not merely as political adversaries but as obstacles to the realization of Humanity or History itself.

Schmitt’s existential dread stems precisely from the recognition of this paradox: constraint is perpetually necessary because it can never be finally secured, either within or beyond the political order. Every political order is an attempt to contain forces that precede and exceed it and is therefore experienced by its rulers and their friends as good and necessary, even as it remains provisional. The katechon must continually be renewed because the possibility of its failure is constitutive of the very order it sustains.

History is thus, for Schmitt, neither a linear progression beyond enmity nor merely a succession of stable political forms. Rather, it consists of recurring attempts to contain an ontology whose destructive possibilities—whether as total anarchy or the promise of secular salvation—can never be permanently abolished. The political remains historical because every political order is finite, whereas the structure of association and dissociation that it seeks to organize is not.

There is, for this reason, a parallel with Hegel. Hegel’s Spirit does not overcome contradiction by dissolving it, but by recognizing contradiction as a necessary moment of its own constitution. In this sense, the political remains historical in a manner analogous to the way Hegel’s Spirit remains historical even after the “end of history.” It remains so because conflict is not merely a contingent event to be overcome; it is the constitutive element of both Hegel’s Spirit and Schmitt’s state. Every political order, in the Schmittian sense, is finite because the friend-enemy grouping it organizes has no final endpoint. The structure of association and dissociation is not itself a historical stage to be overcome; only the forms through which that structure is contained are historical. In this sense, we can see the shadow of Schmitt’s state in the way the Harvard idealist Josiah Royce once described Hegel’s Absolute in The Atlantic in 1891:

Hegel, as we see, makes his Absolute, the Lord, most decidedly a man of war. Consciousness is paradoxical, restless, struggling. Weak souls get weary of the fight, and give up trying to get wisdom, skill, virtue, because all these are won only in presence of the enemy. But the Absolute Self is simply the absolutely strong spirit who bears the contradictions of life, and wins the eternal victory.