Every expansion of power, economic or any other, must find a justification, a principle of legitimacy. All concepts and formulas, expressions and slogans that serve this purpose evidence that all human activity, including politics and imperialism, is by its very nature intellectual and cultural. Carl Schmitt clearly demonstrates that American imperialism corresponds to the legitimating principles and justifying forms of “modern” imperialism. It is in this sense that we must understand his statement: “American imperialism is certainly an economic imperialism; but, (...) as such, it is no less intensively imperialistic.”. (shrink)

Because of the growing debate concerning the nature of Soviet-type societies, a symposium-review was organized around two important recent books on the subject. The following are discussions of either one or both of the following volumes: Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over Needs, St. Martin's Press (New York, 1983). Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society, M.E. Sharpe, Inc. (New York, 1982). In social analysis, effective explanations alternate “thick description” with “thin description” Zaslavsky's (...) The Neo-Stalinist State and Feher's, Heller's and Markus’ Dictatorship over Needs, can be seen to track “actually existine socialism” down the respective paths of “thick” and “think” analysis. (shrink)

The thesis concerning the totalitarian character of the Enlightenment was originally articulated, if only briefly, during the heyday of the California exile of the Institute for Social Research, then suddenly dropped. Dialectic of Enlightenment was never completed and it was around that time, the mid-1940s, that Critical Theory went into its notorious theoretical hibernation. As Nancy Jachec shows in “Adorno, Greenberg and Modernist Politics,” the next two decades were wasted on forays into aesthetics, psychoanalysis and opportunistic liberal apologetics such as (...) The Authoritarian Personality — nothing radically different from what run-of-the-mill liberal ideologues such as Clement Greenberg were also doing. (shrink)

“Who are you? Tu quis es?” The interrogator was the German philosopher and pedagogue Eduard Spranger. The subject was Carl Schmitt. The place: Berlin. The time: summer of 1945. The question was “precipitous,” as Schmitt acknowledged in Ex Captivitate Salus, the book he completed following his release from Nuremberg in 1947. “Who are you?” Who, but one of the most highly acclaimed and esteemed jurists and political thinkers of the Weimar Republic, whose writings captured the attention of Georg Lukács, Karl (...) Korsch, Felix Gilbert, Leo Strauss, Ferdinand Toennies, and whose concepts significantly influenced Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, Karl Mannheim and many other intellectuals and writers on the Left and the Right? (shrink)

“Spy and Scholar.” “Party Functionary and Social Scientist.” The association of the professions or callings is surely intriguing because seemingly incongruous. In an age in which the two primary meanings of intelligence have been blurred in the persons and activities of certain individuals, however, the incongruity has been submerged in intrigue. But whereas the persons and activities of scholars and social scientists are not the stuff of myth, those of spies and party functionaries have attained mythic proportions. Richard Sorge was (...) not posthumously made a “Hero of the Soviet Union” by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on November 5,1964 because he was a “scholar” and “social scientist”. (shrink)

Title: Föderalismus und Europäische Gemeinschaften Unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung von Umwelt und Gesundheit, Kultur und BildungPublisher: Duncker & HumblotISBN: 3428078934Author: Detlef Merton Title: Die Deutschen Länder im Prozess der Europäischen Einigung: Eine Analyse der Europapolitik Unter Intergrationspolitischen GesichtpunktenPublisher: Duncker & HumblotISBN: 3428072790Author: Doris Fuhrmann-MittlmeierTitle: Föderalismus und Integrationsgewalt: Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Spanien, Italien, und Belgien als Dezentralisierte Saaten in der EG, Schriften zun Europäischen Recht, vol. 7Publisher: Duncker & HumblotISBN: 3428071131Author: Hermann-Josef BlankeTitle: Europa der Regionen: Aktuelle Dokumente zur Rolle und Zukunft der (...) Deutschen Länder im Europäischen IntegrationsprozessPublisher: Duncker & HumblotISBN: 3428074777Author: Joachim Bauer. (shrink)

The need to anticipate these questions already betrays an abnormal state of affairs. Carl Schmitt is an extremely controversial figure, compromised by his collusion with Nazism at the peak of his career and throughout his life a European conservative whose authoritarian political objectives have never been in doubt. So what is a nice leftist journal like Telos doing in a dieoretical dive like this? Having successfully protected our political virtues from corruption by the totalitarian undercurrents of the various Marxisms and (...) Marxism-Leninisms, have we now succumbed to one of the few alternatives that made the worst Stalinism palatable to a whole generation of odierwise highly sophisticated intellectuals like Bloch and Lukács? (shrink)

Silete theologi in munere alieno! As Schmitt observes in Der Nomos der Erde, this was Alberico Gentili's battle cry to remove theologians from discussion of politics and to rescue a non-discriminatory concept of war. According to Schmitt, it became the slogan of an epoch — the epoch of the ius publicum Europaeum. The turn to the modern age in the history of international law was accomplished by a dual division of two lines of thought inseparable in the Middle Ages — (...) moral-theological from juridical-political arguments and the question of iusta causa, grounded in moral arguments and natural law, from the typically juridical-formal question of iustus hostis. (shrink)

Celebrated and castigated as the “Hobbes of the twentieth century” and even a modern Machiavelli. Carl Schmitt (1888–1984) is undoubtedly the most controversial legal and political theorist of the twentieth century. He greatly influenced the thinking of such political scientists and political philosophers as Hans J. Morgenthau, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Strauss, and Julien Freund. But Schmitt always spoke and wrote as a jurist. He grounded his thinking in jurisprudence and was the teacher in the wider sense of such (...) jurists as Ernst‐Wolfgang Böckenförde and Ernst‐Rudolf Huber. (shrink)