In defense of the state: Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism as the ideology of civil society (Germany)

Carl Schmitt's Weimar era critique of liberalism and democracy has been hailed as original and significant for contemporary political theory, yet Schmitt operated within a historical, political and cultural context very different from our own. I argue that Schmitt is best understood within the context of German historicism, and that his political philosophy is motivated by concerns he shares in common with the nineteenth century German conservative historicism of the sort best represented by the political works of Heinrich von Treitschke. Though reacting to different events, both seek to preserve the status of the state as a force standing over civil society. Both react to the advance of what might be regarded as the ideology of modern civil society, i.e., liberalism, economics, and the politics of the rational, self-interested individual. I will attempt to show that the themes of war, duty and power are central to Schmitt's political philosophy, and that these are borrowings from the German tradition of conservatism typified by the work of Treitschke. In an effort to preserve what he saw as valuable in the German tradition of the state against the encroachment of civil society, Schmitt placed a strong emphasis on war as a firm basis for the state's right to demand obedience from its subjects, and strove to increase the power of the state to overcome what he saw as the centrifugal forces of civil society. Schmitt specifically denies that liberalism is a political doctrine: although Schmitt does not call liberalism the ideology of civil society, he presents it as such, and offers his own, unambiguously "political" theory as an alternative.{09}In seeking to reinforce the power of the state while diminishing the role of civil society in politics, Schmitt relies greatly on the application of an older critique of bourgeois civil society to the political theory of liberalism.