Week 6 Carl Schmitt On the Contradiction Between Parliamentariam and Democcracy

hello and welcome to our week six supplemental lecture on Carl Schmitt on the contradiction between parliamentarism and democracy Schmitt is a strange and controversial figure we will run into a number of authors later in the term who use his political theory and think that it helps them cast light on contemporary governments who use it often critically and often understand it as something that is a good complement to a left-wing critique of existing social institutions the reason that this is odd is that Schmitt is a Nazi and an active and enthusiastic one his political theory is attempting to provide a rationale a basis for the actions taken by the Nazi Party and after World War two he refuses to participate in denazification programs loses the ability to teach as a result and keeps writing things that are consistent with the views that he wrote during the period that the Reich was still in power so he is a controversial figure there are people who think that his work is valuable for understanding aspects of contemporary political institutions and there are other people as you would imagine from some of the things we've read the last couple of weeks who are highly dubious what value it offers to use someone who is expressly a fascist philosopher a fascist political theorist when we're trying to do particularly left-wing critiques today because his take-up has been by a lot of figures who understand themselves as being on the left and being critical so let's take a look at this and it will come up again later in the term so she was talking about attention that he thinks lies within what we think of now is liberal democracy he says that we sort of staple these terms together parliamentary democracy or liberal democracy as though they naturally go together we take for granted they have something in common but he thinks actually they have an uneasy relationship with each other they sit in some tension democracy is quite historically old liberalism is quite a bit newer and the combination of the two is ngerous still and Schmidt believes that what look a viable alliance because both liberalism and Democratic impulses were fighting against minar kacal Authority now that liberal democracy or parliamentary democracy has become more dominant as a political institution he thinks it's going to start unraveling he thinks the basic philosophical differences between liberalism on the one hand and democracy on the other are so conflicting that he doesn't think that this is a viable form and he's going to try to unpack wolly he goes back to classical text than the first few pages of the piece that we've assigned here is him arguing with someone that's critical of him for going back the classical texts asking him why he's not engaging with more contemporary liberal theory and Schmidt is arguing now the contemporary stuff Miller's this stuff together it doesn't make clear distinctions it doesn't fully understand the differences between democratic theory on the one hand and liberal theory on the other liberal theory itself is still most clearly articulated in the classical sources it hasn't really developed as a theory he says since 1848 so since the working-class revolutions of that period he also notes that when he tries to talk about the theoretical the idea dimensions of liberalism and democracy people immediately sort of change the register of the discussion and they don't want to argue about tensions within the ideas what they instead say is liberal democracy is a good practical solution or it's better than the alternatives it's better than Bolshevism or fascism or direct democracy or dictatorship and he says look you can have that discussion you can talk about whether it is the least worst institution available to us but it doesn't change the basic question of whether there's a real tension within this forum and he thinks the tension comes from certain key principles that he thinks are institutionally embedded in what he calls parliamentarism in parliamentary democracy that have to do with principles of discussion and the idea of a competitive discussion aimed at coming up with the truest or the best policy a particular kind of orientation to publicity and openness and principles alike that representatives chosen are meant to actually be independent from their constituents and their party he talks about the fact that most constitutions don't even discuss in the existence of parties they pretend like they're not there so representatives are presumed to be chosen and then to enter this public sphere of competitive discussion and it is out of that competitive discursive process that you're going to get your best policy and he thinks that this is a very liberal view that sits in tension with more democratic principles that boat would be less comfortable with the representative dimension but that also would have notions that people beyond Representatives would be able to establish their their views their contributions their ideas what is legitimate government he tries to unpack this idea of discussion and what discussion means in a specifically liberal political theory context he says it's not a broad term it's a specific term of art it has a determinate meaning it doesn't refer to just any sort of negotiation he says it is specifically an exchange of opinion that is governed by the purpose of persuading one's opponent through argument of the truth or justice of something or allowing oneself to be persuaded and again if you think about popper or Palani talking about science in previous weeks they have a sort of liberal conception of how science operates that you're going to argue and through that sort of crucible of argument come up with what the best position is Schmidt is pointing out the similarity between that and liberal conceptions of how you're going to come up with the best laws he says the characteristic of all representative constitutions is that laws arise out of a conflict of opinions not out of a struggle of interests to discussion belong shared convictions as premises the willingness to be persuaded independence of party ties freedom from self interests oh he thinks that this is all baked into the concept of why you would want specifically liberal parliamentary representative institutions this is what it's trying to achieve is this particular kind of space of public discussion that people enter and them and through leave behind their private interests they're not fighting it out to see which interest is going to end up being dominant they're meant to be in principle persuadable participants in an equal exchange of rational discussion and he notes that there's currently a great deal of skepticism about the possibility of achieving the kind of disinterested miss this model seems to imply and that the skepticism he says is related to the crisis of parliamentarism he says the concept nevertheless is embedded in institutions in existing parliamentary structures you have provisions for freedom of speech for public sittings of parliament for independence of Representatives and all of this he says is geared toward one goal which is the idea that you've got a particular discursive space where people will in their discussion work out what is rationally correct ok so there's some in point that we can locate that is rationally correct if we have the right institutions to make the right kind of discussion possible now we will still see this view when we return to works by Juergen hover months for example later in the term who someone who is trying to work out how you get institutions that can do this better than some of our inherited institutions but he's oriented toward the idea that you have discussion oriented to rational consensus Schmitt says there's all kinds of conversations you can have that don't count as discussion in this sense so if you were having some sort of speech interaction but you're pursuing your own interest that doesn't count as a discussion in this specifically liberal conception he says there's been deliberation and compromise everywhere in world history people know that it's better most of the time to tolerate one another than to quarrel and that a thin settlement is better than a thick lawsuit that's without a doubt true but it is not the principle of a specific kind of state or form of government so general negotiation swapping compromise this is existed in all sorts of governmental forms it doesn't define something specifically there's something more precise going on in this specifically liberal notion of discussion that parliamentary institutions are set up to promote and it is this idea that you're going to zero in on the rationally correct policy solution if you have discussion operating within specific parameters he says the problem with this is that this liberal conception has been stapled together with modern mass and democratic states and he says this has made the notion that you can have a meaningful argumentative public discussion an empty formality it's not going to be able to take place he says the parties which according to the text of the written constitution officially do not exist do not face each other today discussing opinions but as social or economic power groups calculating their mutual interests and opportunities for power and they actually agree compromises and coalition's on this basis okay so we have party structures we don't have individual representatives who go into a cauldron of public discussion and make decisions aimed at the rational solution we've got people who represent their constituents and who represent them via party structures but this is doesn't make it into the formal liberal constitutions it's something that's emerged outside that framework but within this party framework people are naked Lee competing based on their own interests and again he's thinking about working-class parties and parties that explicitly represent particular segments of the population he says the masses are won over through a propaganda apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions okay so the party is in power it is doing its political deals it has a propaganda arm whose job is to sell the masses to support that particular party and it doesn't based on they can appeal to their personal interests and their personal passions and again this is quite different from the notion that you will leave behind all interests or personal gain all desire for personal enrichment when you enter the public sphere of politics argument in the real sense that is characteristic for genuine discussion ceases okay so you just have this competition of interests people are not entering this leaving their interest behind trying to enter into rational discussion in its place there appears a conscious reckoning of interests and chances for power in the parties negotiations okay and he just takes this for a given he doesn't think there's any way you can institutionally innovate around it it's something that has grown up organically in spite of institutional structures and constitutional provisions that are meant actually to secure something very different he notes the fact that there are people who think that in this cauldron of discussion once your representative step into it and start reasoning it out with each other this is understood to form an indicative process that will generate a very skilled political elite and he says look at what actually happens there's nothing like that process going on it is idealistic to assume that what is actually going on in the parliamentary spaces is going to generate any kind of useful political elite educated by their exposure to other people's arguments that have persuaded them to change their views and come around to other points of view he says again people give practical or technical justifications for why we need the institution's we've got but this is an intrinsically vulnerable argument he thinks because all that's then required is for some other institutional proposal to come up that may be quite anti liberal or anti-democratic even that achieves the same thing on a practical basis so saying you know do you really want your defence of liberal democracy or parliamentary democracy to be that it's it works more because other things might well work and then he has this long discussion of equality and a very peculiar of a typical of Schmidt linking of equality and the exclusion of particular populations okay so he says parliamentarism is government by discussion and this is a liberal ideal but it is not a democratic one the idea of government by discussion is that the representatives enter the discursive space and in that space they will collectively work out what is they collect and what is the correct rational decision this is quite different from a democratic idea that the the people will drive by their will what's going to go on governmentally and he says every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally okay that sounds like he's just playing with words there but the idea for him is that if you've got an ideal of equality that needs to be a bounded ideal he doesn't think equality makes any sense except in contrast with inequality so there are people who will be equal who participate in the democracy and then those people will exclude other people who will not be regarded as equal and do not get to participate in the democracy democracy is an exclusionary thing he doesn't actually think liberalism is and he thinks that's at the heart of the tension between them he says democracy requires therefore first homogeneity and second if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity and here to the glory of our country he talks quite positively of the White Australia Policy as one of the good examples of how a democracy functions it secures the homogeneity of its population by excluding people who are two different who are too heterogeneous to participate and that exclusion for him is the hallmark of a good functioning democracy okay elimination or eradication of heterogeneity if necessary so he is one board with fascist goals of eradicating heterogeneity and he links this and this is the peculiar move to democracy itself okay a democracy he says demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep it bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity the question of equality is precisely not one of abstract logical arithmetic Alain's it is about the substance of equality okay so he's got a critique here and this kind of critique is made by a lot of people from a lot of different political perspectives the idea that there's something wrong with liberal notions of formal equality under all the formal equality under law that could extract Li apply to just anyone and you will have people from all different political directions saying we need a concept of substantive equality people can have formal legal rights and still not really be able to do anything with us right because they're very poor they're disadvantaged by some form of discrimination or something like that Schmidt is also saying you need a substitute equality but you think you're only were going to get substantive equality if you secure an extremely congenial population okay so you need to eradicate or exclude difference rather than a critique of formal notions equality that said that you need some way of having substantive equality in diversity and difference MIT doesn't think that's a realistic proposition he says a risk of inequality is always present he thinks it is bound together with meaning equality self that term equality wouldn't have it wouldn't many sense and you had a mission of inequality it has a democracy because inequality always belongs to equality can exclude one part of those governed without ceasing to be a mock receipt until now people who in some way were completely partially without rights and who were restricted from the exercise of political power let me call barbarians a civilized atheists aristocrats counter revolutionaries or even slaves have belonged to a democracy we can again democracy is quite an old form and historic descriptive level you've had a number of government systems that have functioned as democracies of the citizens democracies of a particular elite population but within the geographic territories of these democracies have been all sorts of populations that were unfree in various ways or at least didn't have full political rights and he's suggesting that mrs. simms and acid dental fear of democracy it is a defining characteristic of it that it has these excluded populations and then he draws an example from the British Empire and the fact that the Empire rules over a large number of colony but doesn't thought a citizenship to the people in those colonies he says does the British Empire rest on Universal and equal voting rights for all its inhabitants it cannot serve a free link on this foundation with their terrible majority the coloreds would dominate the whites in spite of that the British Empire is a democracy okay this is a fear that is very common at this time we've gone through several waves of it across the 19th century every time the franchise is expended there's always this terror that the majority will take it out on the elite minority and so there's a fight against extending the franchise smithers takes for granted that it would be insane to try to include people you hang on to your small narrow set of population that is included in your dock recei and it's fine or that Shawne Merriman or to rule over everybody else that falls with your territory he is fully comfortable with this is it not yeah and he talks about the issue of storage and equal rights and what is can and can't mean he said again subject if equality is based in homogeneity so where you've got a fairly homogeneous population universal suffrage is reasonable a course that all be similar they're all alike of course all of them should participate in vote if you have a vote and we'll see in a bit but he doesn't think the Morrissey's require a vote he says the current discourse of universal suffrage and plus something very different from this and he thinks it's therefore problematic least is that even buys that every adult person simply as a person should be oh if so politically equal to every other person this is a liberal not a democratic idea it replaces formerly existing democracy based on substantial equality and homogeneity with a democracy of mankind and he thinks this is on its face absurd that you would have everybody all through humanity all over the world be regarded as equal in some ways he thinks that it's sort of on its face an absurdity he says this doesn't exist anywhere in the world the world is divided up into States and those states have their own internal divisions he also says that if you tried to extend equality to everyone as a consequence of nothing more than the fact that they were born and they were of the right age and he thinks this is on its face absurd that you would have everybody all through humanity all over the world be regarded as equal in some ways he thinks that it's sort of on its face an absurdity he says this doesn't exist anywhere in the world the world's divided up into States and those states have their own internal divisions he also says that if you tried to extend equality to everyone as a consequence of nothing more than the fact that they were born and they were of the right age it would rob equality of what he calls its value and substance okay so equality for him is is a prize it is achieved by people who possess certain characteristics and there is a sort of a competitive vision of equality in contrast with inequality he thinks people are going to seek this out and if you make the political sphere a sphere in which everyone is equal by definition what this does is it debases the political sphere and that people will then start to valorize other spheres where they can have meaningful kinds of competition and meaningful kinds of inequalities expressed so that they can ruthlessly compete with each other and he says that this is part of the reason the rise of these notions of universal suffrage that mean that the political sphere and the right to participate in the political sphere no longer gives you a kind of a dominance over unequal people that is driving people's interest in the economy which is a place where you can be ruthlessly competitive and where there can be real inequalities and he's presenting an image here as though a society means this this is going to happen this kind of struggle and fight that people want to have over those who are a subordinate and then he goes to Russo and Russo is a figure that does have a lot of deep tensions around these issues so it's not an accident that he pick on him rather than on some of the other figures that feed into modern political theory he says the Equality of all persons as persons is not democracy but a certain kind of liberalism not a state form but an individualistic humanitarian ethic and Belsen Shan worldview modern mass democracy rests on the confused combination of both okay so mass democracy has gotten kind of infected with a particular liberal conception that he thinks is not going to be tenable and he takes resource social contract as an exemplar of these tensions and he says it sets out liberal and democratic conceptions side by side without trying to reconcile them so they see it in a more obvious visible tension with one another he says the facade is liberal the state's legitimacy is justified by a free contract but the subsequent depiction and development of the central concept with general will demonstrates that a true state according to Rousseau only exists where the people are so homogeneous that there is essentially unanimity okay and this is a tension that other people have noted within Russo's works or so has a concept all over the general will which is opposed to notions like majority rule or like the idea that you might sort of compromise on your interests in some way the general will is something that is generally applicable to the people whose symbol in a particular society we may enter into this sort of role he says that Rousseau envisages no differences in parties or religions or interests he says according to Rousseau this unanimity must go so far that the laws come into existence songs the gushin without discussion homogeneity elevated into an identity understands itself completely from itself okay so there's no division in the body politic in the concept of the general will so there's not the sort of liberal space for even rational competition that results in something general this is something that expresses the general will of a Schmidt is saying homogeneous people and he says this conflicts with the social contract conception that enters into the discourse from liberalism he says if unanimity and agreement of all wills with one another is really so great why then must another contract be concluded or even construct construed a contract assumes differences and opposition's where unanimity exists a contract is meaningless where it does not exist a contract does not help the idea of a free contract of all with all comes from a completely different theoretical world where opposing interests differences and egoism are assumed this idea comes from liberalism the general will as Rousseau constructs it is in truth homogeneity that is a really consequential democracy okay so again liberalism this idea of how you balance opposing interests how you bring things together given the assumption of individual diversity and possible conflict versus a notion of direct mass democracy that is not mediated through various institutions that are trying to deal with possible conflicts and Schmidt is saying that requires an extremely high level of homogeneity among the population so he says you have a crisis and you have a crisis because of the conflict between these different ideals that are stapled on to one another in parliamentary democracy but that don't really sit well with each other when this becomes a dominant institution it worked fine when people were trying to fight against monarchic Authority because the common enemy could stave off the discussion of internal tensions but now things are going to come to the fore he says in a democracy where those who command and those who obey are identical the sovereign that is an assembly composed of all citizens can change laws and change constitutions at will in a monarchy or aristocracy where there are some who command and some who are commanded a mutual contract is possible and thus also a limitation of state power okay so there's no limitation of the state when the state is understood to be democratic in form and democracy here means that those who command and those who must obey are identical there's no internal social differential differentiation between the two categories so there's also no idea of a constitution or law that can restrict the power of the sovereign and this is something actually that will be important for Schmitt when he tries to defend the right the idea that you don't need a state to be bound by some law or contract that sits outside and above it and liberalism is as a philosophy a way of constraining the state a way of constraining the sovereign he says a popular presentation sees parliamentarism in the middle today threatened from both sides by Bolshevism and fascism that's a simple but superficial constellation the crisis of the parliamentary system of parliamentary institutions in fact Springs from the circumstances of modern mass democracy these lead first of all to a crisis of democracy itself because the problem of substantial equality and homogeneity which is necessary to democracy cannot be resolved by the general equality of mankind it leads to a further crisis of parliamentarism okay sir the tension he thinks we have parliamentary democracy is not that it's threatened by competing political forms the tension is the fact that modern mass democracy is butting up against a liberal impulse to create formal equality between quiet and diverse peoples modern democracy Schmitt things requires people's to be substantially alike and people who are not alike to be fundamentally excluded and thrown out of the sovereign okay so this tension between a form of political theory that for Schmitt is oriented to exclusion so that the people who remain behind who have not been excluded can then function as people who are both commanded and who obey who will be the sovereign and can enact their own will through their own political activity that small homogeneous group is being threatened its possibility is being threatened by liberalism which is trying to construct these sorts of formal legal equality's that still allow people to remain extremely different from one another but drawn together into the same body politic and treated as equal ones in some level in that body politic Schmitt says both crises of democracy and of parliamentarism have appeared at the same time and each one aggravates the other but they are conceptually an in reality different as a democracy modern mass democracy attempts to realize an identity of governed and governing and thus it confronts Parliament as an inconceivable and outmoded institution so there are tensions here you want an immediate ability to exercise the democratic Authority but you're constrained by these representative institutions that say no no you can't directly decide what's going to happen to you pick a representative and that representative will decide along with other representatives what that's going to be okay so it feels like Parliament is a constraint of the holding back on the people's ability to exercise its own will he says if Democratic identity is taken seriously then in an emergency and this notion of emergency is very pivotal to Schmitt the idea that in the emergency of a sort of body politic the sovereign can assemble itself and can Institute itself and ordinary laws need not be followed no other constitutional institution can withstand the sole criterion of the people's will however it is expressed against the will of the people especially an institution based on discussion by independent representatives has no autonomous justification for its existence even less so because the belief in discussion is not democratic but originally in the book okay so democracy doesn't require a discussion that builds consensus amongst people with diverse interests because it's predicated on the idea for Schmidt that people in fact don't have diverse interests so they can come together and by acclamation in a sense and decide what they're going to do and he thinks it's increasingly difficult for liberal institutions to find legitimacy because they're holding back on that Democratic impulse and so he says you get three crises you get a crisis of democracy a crisis of the modern state and a crisis of parliamentarism and these are internal they're not related to external challenges from Bolshevism and the fascism he says democracy liberalism could be aligned to each other for a time just as socialism and democracy have been allied but as soon as it achieves power liberal democracy must decide between its elements just as social democracy which is finally in fact as social liberal democracy must also decide so it's not really willing to let people blend these sorts of things pragmatically he wants a kind of a an ideological purity and he thinks you're going to have political tension until you achieve that in democracy there is only the Equality of equals and the will of those who belong to the equals okay so there's a lot of a hierarchy in Schmidt's equal while other institutions transform themselves into in substantial social technical experience which are not in a position to oppose the will of the people however expressed with their own values and their own principles the crisis of the modern state arises from the fact that no state can realize a mass democracy a democracy of mankind not even a democratic state so you get states in the States and compass of diverse populations and if you want to treat every member of that population as equal Schmidt thinks you're going to get a crisis democratic principles require a real equality which is going to mean you've got a small clump of people who end up on top who's gets the count and they get to impose it on everyone else so this position sort of fascism as an ideal democracy and then he goes they're explicitly Bolshevism and fascism by contrasts are like all dictatorships certainly anti liberal but not necessarily anti-democratic in the history of democracy there have been numerous dictatorships Caeser isms and other more striking forms that have tried to create homogeneity and to shape the will of the people with methods uncommon in the liberal tradition of the past century so you have things that are treated as dictatorships that are generally viewed quite negatively from a liberal perspective but he says that these are things that to the degree that they can successfully shape the will of the people where the people is defined by the small group of people who get to count these people can approve in a way that for Schmidt falls within the category of democracy what the dictatorships do he says these strange liberal principles where you have isolated and secret voting and you get majority rule and you can't jump what position is going to win out by seeing what the majority of the people wanted that these are new and strange conceptions of the will of the people this is not historically how you've established what the will of the people is the will of his people is established in public and voting is not a necessary part of that process you can have other things like acclamation the direct you know immediate declaration of what the people want but the people is a small and and uniform subset of the population the people exist only in the sphere of publicity okay so no secret of OU ting no tallying up of individual positions expressed in private the unanimous opinion of one hundred million private persons is neither the will of the people nor public opinion the will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation through something taken for granted and obvious and unchallenged presence then through the statistical apparatus that has been constructed with such meticulousness in the last 50 years okay so it's a critique of voting and voting as a check on the state and voting as a way of expressing Democratic opinion he thinks it's fundamentally anti-democratic compared to a democracy that is direct okay so direct democracy you have no representatives not only in the technical sense but also in a vital sense Parliament appears an artificial machinery produced by liberal reasoning while dictatorial and Ceaser istic methods not only can produce the acclamation of the people but can also be a direct expression of a democratic substance and power okay so dictatorships really are your better option for Schmitt if you want democracy there they're more loyal to the spirit of democracy because what they do is they pick their subset of people whose views get to count and those people are similar enough that they can just come together in a room and a claim that can directly support what's going on and he says the tension between democracy as he's defined it and liberalism as he's defined it is an intrinsic crisis Bolshevism and fascism could both be defeated and go away we're still gonna have this problem you're gonna get a drive to the development of a proper democratic movement which in this account sounds really rather like a proper fascist movement he says rather the crisis springs from the consequences of modern mass democracy and in the final analysis from the contradiction of a liberal individualism burdened by moral papers and a democratic sentiment governed essentially by political ideals a century of historical alliance and common struggle against royal absolutism has obscured the awareness of this contradiction with the crisis unfolds today evermore strikingly and no cosmopolitan rhetoric can pretend to eliminate it it is in its depths the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and Democratic homogeneity okay so he's aiming himself straight at the Cosmopolitan's here in a couple of weeks we will hit cosmopolitan theory will read some people talking about it explicitly it's something that in some ways can traces and they bring in some of the text where he does that in lecture in a couple of weeks but this is a common fault line between the Cosmopolitan's who do want to aim for something like an equality of humankind that transcends national boundaries a global human equality and a global set of human rights and this sort of conception okay so we'll come back to all of this

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Length: 37min 49sec (2269 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 05 2014