I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
The human imagination is such that there are certainly more than thirteen ways to look at a blackbird—indeed, more than thirteen ways to look at each of the thirteen stanzas in Wallace Stevens’s poem. Yet, the exercise of human imagination is mightily constrained, because of apathy, no doubt, but most likely out of abject fear. What worlds would our fancy unleash were we not able to keep it in check? Is that not why we invented sin? Given the worlds we have unleashed, including the one we currently live in, this fear is not unwarranted. The first half of the twentieth century spawned what we have labeled totalitarian regimes, brutalizing the lives of their own citizens and those of their neighbors, the memories of which still haunt us. The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the sprouting of autocratic leadership, fundamentalist religious regimes and tendencies, and the rise of so-called populist agitation in the likeliest as well as the most surprising of places. In general, the response to this efflorescence of our political imagination has been to say that there really is only one approved way of looking at the blackbird of human cohabitation, and that is the way sanctioned by liberal theory. Pre-political rights of the individual, division of the institutions of political power, the rule of law, and the operations of a so-called free or minimally checked capitalist market are said to be the necessary components of political order. If any one, or each and every one, of these components also displays ambiguity or leads to negative outcomes, then tinkering is called for, but no fundamental questioning. Look what happens, we are told, when you start doubting, when you trust in experiments, when you succumb, for instance, to fist-in-the-air, red-flag romanticism, or dream of the commonality of race or religion as a requirement of community, and community as a requirement of the political.
Truth be told, the economic portion of liberal theory, the free market (with or without safety net), is not in the least bit immune from intense, sometimes frenzied critique. We use a convenient term to excoriate income inequality, the excesses of the profit motive, consumer culture, commodification, global economic imperialism, and so forth—namely, neoliberalism. Whereas liberalism or liberal theory are terms generally used descriptively or positively, neoliberalism is decidedly pejorative. It is almost as if liberal theory would like to amputate the economic limb of its body. Nevertheless, economically speaking, neoliberalism is classical liberalism, a kind of wannabe nineteenth-century, pastoral, laissez-faire liberalism, as if bankers, industrialists, techies all aspire to be Jeffersonian yeoman farmers (sans slaves, to be sure), untouched and untouchable. And if the right to private property is the primary neoliberal right, whereas the rights of freedom of conscience, speech, and assembly may dominate elsewhere, both property and conscience are on every liberal’s menu. It is true that left-liberal theory welcomes some restrictions on the right to private property. Put hyperbolically, “we” (I am assuming a select readership here) would all prefer to live, work, and die in Sweden than, say, in the United States. The social-democratic additive to the liberal brew is so fine and mellow, tastes so right, is so right, that even contemporary Marxism can be amalgamated to liberalism, producing a human-rights Marxism, a rule-of-law Marxism, perhaps even a checks-and-balances Marxism, and also a liberal-cum-social democracy Marxism, one that allows the ownership of the means of production to remain in private hands, but sets limits on what those hands may do. Is, then, liberal theory the only way to look at a blackbird?
Well, we know one thing: Stevens notwithstanding, thirteen is surely too high a number. Ronald Beiner opts for two. “According to one dominant conception,” he writes, naming John Rawls as its exemplar, “we start with an implicit consensus on what we share as members of a liberal political order, and the job of the philosopher is to articulate the basis of this consensus and raise it to theoretical explicitness” (Beiner 1998, vii). Such practices of liberal exegesis, of course, may also be carried out in more than one way: triumphantly, for example, glorying in the demise of various twentieth-century rivals; or critically, pointing to the gap between dogma and practice; and now, also defensively, attempting to ward off with near-magic incantations the rising menace of ironically named “populism”—we love “the people,” but more often than not wish they would leave the thinking to “us.” And so, both triumph and finely measured self-critique is also accompanied by persistent fear of the measureless critics of liberal theory, those adversaries who seem occasionally to disappear, but when they reappear, do so with chips on their shoulders taller than the highest building, wider and deeper than the largest ocean. Nevertheless, despite the “populist” embrace of authoritarian leadership, contemporary political theory remains committed to something generally called liberal democracy, to which the above-mentioned doctrinal attributes (rights, law, etc.) necessarily attach; indeed, these doctrinal shibboleths become forcefully coupled with what was historically considered to be their antithesis—popular sovereignty (a claim we will explore in this volume). To avoid mere advocacy of a status quo (though there is that too), liberal theorists often insist on the gap between the ideal and the real, and that gap is often referred to as a democratic deficit. All progress takes place within the frame of the ideal order, of which actually existing liberal democracy is a mere approximation. When we agitate for reform, therefore, we are asked not to cross boundaries but to expand them.
There is, however, a second, “more radical understanding of political philosophy,” as Beiner puts it, in which the “liberal consensus . . . counts for nothing; rather, the philosopher’s responsibility is to theorize order from the ground up, even if it ends up calling into fundamental question the opinions and beliefs that currently sustain social life within a liberal democratic horizon” (vii). On this view, the task of political theory should not be to affirm existing political order, even if that affirmation is accompanied by internal critique, but to imagine alternatives. Such imagination can take a number of forms, and the purpose of such imagination can also serve multiple ends. One can urge a necessary affiliation with an alternate model as the only way to achieve, as the preamble to the US Constitution has it, “a more perfect union.” One can then surmise that a more perfect union can arise only with the help of presuppositions fundamentally at odds with the foundations of liberal thought. Conversely, one can conjure alternate forms of the political primarily as a warning against deviating too radically from the liberal-democratic norm. One conjures ghosts of the past and fantasies of a dystopic future in a fun house of horrors to warn the innocent away from danger. Theory as Hell House, the avoidance of which leads back to the path of righteousness. In a sense, liberalism as a political philosophy has occupied both of the positions that Beiner articulates. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, in its battles against absolutist monarchy and radical popular democracy, liberalism questioned everything, from state sovereignty to the necessity of war and the very nature of the human being. Once triumphant, however, especially after 1989, it questioned nothing anymore, except of course the propriety of questioning liberalism. Thus the “more radical” form of political philosophy fell out of favor. This disfavor even had a name: the end of history.
If all of this is vaguely accurate (and “vaguely accurate” is the only form of accuracy available in such a hasty overview of such a contested field of thought), if fundamental alternatives to liberal dogma and practice are perceived by liberal theory as either pie-in-the-sky daydreams or regressive, degenerative threats and not curiosity-provoking visions of variable possible futures, then why all the fuss about Carl Schmitt since the flow of English translations began in the 1980s? Beiner answers by identifying Schmitt as one who adheres to the more radical vision of political philosophy in “its most uncompromising version.” He therefore asks whether a “dialogue between Rawls and Schmitt” is possible. “Liberal academics and democratic theorists,” he notes,
certainly aren’t immersing themselves in the study of Schmitt because they welcome the possibility that he will persuade them to jettison their liberal democratic commitments. Rather, they study Schmitt because they know that, philosophically, liberal principles have not (yet) established an unchallengeable claim to normative authority, and because only by engaging in dialogue with a steadfast enemy of liberal dialogue like Schmitt can they vindicate both liberalism and the endless dialogue that is political philosophy. (Beiner 1998, viii–ix)
This sounds bracing, refreshing even, but is what Beiner describes really a dialog between “Rawls” and “Schmitt,” between political philosophy as liberal theory and political philosophy as a more fundamental investigation of the possible types of political order? The parenthetical “yet”—“liberal principles have not (yet) established an unchallengeable claim to normative authority”—is the tell. The duel between “Rawls” and “Schmitt” is rigged. A single outcome is not only preferred, it is assumed—namely, the vindication of liberalism. There is no real dialog, certainly no compromise, no consensus. It is, rather, a staged combat with predetermined outcome to confirm and strengthen what is deemed to be the only political form worthy of existence. Perhaps no real “dialog” between these two forms of political theory is possible. On what ground could it take place that does not tilt toward one or the other position? Either what is is good, and should be made better, or what is is deficient, and should be replaced. Schmitt, Beiner contends, represents the radical wing of political philosophy that questions the status quo, yet, he admits, for liberal theorists there is no legitimate alternative to the status quo, only infinite perfectibility of the same. Schmitt, therefore, is but the whetstone against which the liberal sword is to be sharpened. To engage with Schmitt is not to put one’s own commitments into question, but, in the spirit of “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” to emerge victorious. Having “vindicated” liberalism, the endless dialog that is political philosophy may now continue, for with the sharpened sword in hand, political philosophy once again reduces itself to the thirteen ways of looking at liberal theory.
Is it possible to stand side by side with the dragon against the liberal knight? Maybe, but it is hard. There is the stain of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism and, after the takeover in 1933, his enthusiastic allegiance to National Socialism, which can be bracketed but not ignored or simply washed clean. And there is nearly a century that stands between Schmitt’s major works on political form and our current, much altered situation, a century that would appear to have little for one who is discontented with the liberal hegemony to hang onto. The alternatives seem all to have betrayed us; indeed, some never promised us much to begin with. The anger, agitation, and optimism that accompanied “1968”—a “year” that marked a decade or more of promise that, alas, in many ways is still (or once again) little more than an unfulfilled promissory note—is difficult to recapture. Age—the age and my age—has fine-tuned skepticism. Most telling, however, is our own fearful addiction to liberal individualism itself, and, yes, liberalism is an addiction. At its core is the promise of a protected sanctuary within which each of us may pursue our own interests and private pleasures, released from the burden of public responsibility, and none of us who has ever tasted even some of the fruits of liberalism’s Elysian fields wants to give any of them up. Even Schmitt was chary of doing so. So why not side with Rawls and company? Why not declare the end of history, or if that sounds too dispiriting or at any rate unlikely, then the continuation of history as the endless conversation over the same, unquestioned, fundamentally invariable thing. Are we just killing time, waiting for the final judgment, a judgment that we already know will fall in our favor?
And yet, Schmitt, and others like him, will “not go gentle into that good night,” if I may burden the reader with another canonical, albeit clichéd, example of Western literary modernism.[1] If in the closing decades of the twentieth century Schmitt’s name could still cause apoplexy, in the twenty-first his status has been elevated from irritant to indispensability. In his study of Weber, Schmitt, and Franz Neumann, for instance, Duncan Kelly “seeks to offer a new and more thickly characterized understanding of the conceptions of politics and the state. . . .The current renaissance of interest in the work of Carl Schmitt and his critique of an avowedly ‘neutral’ liberalism, for example, make such an objective, though found in a work of intellectual history, of more than merely antiquarian interest” (Kelly 2003, 1). The premise of this observation must be that the renaissance of Schmitt is not mere fad but felt necessity. Despite the historically distant dialect, he still speaks to us. More forcefully and directly, the editors of a collection of essays titled Law, Liberty and State declare, “This collection examines the response to the problems of law and liberty raised by the modern state of three of the last century’s greatest thinkers: Carl Schmitt . . . Friedrich Hayek . . . and Michael Oakeshott” (Dyzenhaus and Poole 2015, 2). Greatest thinkers? From pariah to canon!
This raises the question: What is the difference between “merely antiquarian interest” and more than merely antiquarian interest? More generally, why do we read the canon of political thinkers from the ancient Greeks down to the present day? Do we resurrect the dead in search of usable models from the past? I doubt it. We have run through and mixed and matched the three main modes of political form—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—that have been bequeathed to us by antiquity, and it seems unlikely that we plan on revisiting the cycle in order to start it all over again. By “we,” of course, I mean we “theorists” or we (academic and public) “intellectuals.” What others may wish to resurrect remains open. For now, at any rate, democracy, whether liberal or illiberal, representative or plebiscitary, oligarchic or direct, is the name of the game, and even Schmitt knew how to play it. If Schmitt is one who attempts to “theorize order from the ground up,” it is not to the structure he assembles that we should pay primary attention (for it is shadowy and quite fragile), but to the foundation he raises it on. The ground, up from which theorists build, is not pristine, it is ploughed, thoroughly worked over. To theorize from the ground up is to plant oneself in ancient furrows that have been crosshatched, tunneled, and dug deeper and wider over the centuries. To work from the ground up, I mean to say, is to locate and re-regard discarded basic presuppositions. Perhaps the occasional genius invents a new one, but most of us either inhabit buildings without inspecting the cellars and foundations or, more adventurously perhaps, become amateur archaeologists, grubbing around abandoned passageways, looking for something that may surprise us, that may be so old that they strike us as something new.
Please pardon the metaphoric miasma. But it is suggestive. What Schmitt unearthed in the early part of the last century is often dismissed as being too dank and musty to be of use, too damp, moldy, and gaseous to be healthy. In this study, however, I investigate a number of Schmitt’s presuppositions that could be seen as direct reversals of liberal—understood broadly—assumptions. I hope to demonstrate general plausibility (not forced, dogmatic certainty) of Schmitt’s argumentative defense of each position. I mention four here.
1. Concrete Reason: Philosophical convention has it that reason is a property of unaided human thought. “Unaided” means reason needs no guide. Reason therefore can dispense with traditional and conventional sources of knowledge and authority. Not all agree with philosophy’s assessment. We humans, even philosophers, use faulty reason all the time. To paraphrase Hobbes, reason is always right, those who reason often err. Although reason is our guide, reason too needs guidance. The Roman Catholic Church finds that guidance in revelation, which in turn is housed in the institution called the magisterium, consisting of the pope and all the bishops. Hobbes too institutionalizes reason in the figure of the sovereign, who serves as the common standard that arbitrates disputes, including disputes about truth. Carl Schmitt distinguishes between “abstract” and “concrete” reason. Just as the church guarantees the truth of reason by housing it in an institution, so Schmitt, following Hobbes, houses concrete reason in the modern European state. That is, part of Schmitt’s political theology consists in asserting that the sixteenth-century, post-Westphalian state becomes the functional equivalent of the medieval church after the Reformation splintered Christianity’s authority. The anarchy of Protestant “Biblicism,” in which each individual has his or her own “reading” of the truth, is no longer countered by Catholicism but by the secular authority of the state. In chapter 1, I attempt a plausible justification of this view. In chapters 2 and 3 I articulate Schmitt’s political-theological description of modernity, a modernity which, he feels, threatens the achievement of the early modern state to thwart anarchy. As with Hobbes, sovereignty remains the linchpin for the political in its secularized form. However, despite Schmitt’s reliance on (an eccentric reading of) Bodin, he has to forge a new definition of sovereignty suitable to the “deism” that characterizes post-Enlightenment Europe. Sovereignty is still needed to ensure a strong state, and a strong state is still needed to protect individuals from the manipulation of their self-interest by the various public and private associations that claim to advocate for them. The definition of sovereignty I offer in chapter 3 relies on a precise reading of the Kantian term Grenzbegriff (boundary concept), a concept that limits the hubristic expansion of social forces, especially law.
2. Is the human being basically good or basically “evil,” problematic, flawed? Liberal theory traditionally affirms the infinite perfectibility of the human individual, or at least of the human species (Kant), the human as Gattungswesen (species being), to use Marx’s term. Schmitt demurs. In Political Romanticism (following Taine) he attributes this belief to the self-consciousness of the rising bourgeoisie and thus labels it a quintessentially liberal concept. To counter it, Schmitt asserts that all genuine political theory must assume the problematic nature of the human being. I read Schmitt’s Political Romanticism within the larger Francophone and Anglophone literary critique of literary and political romanticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially the work of T. E. Hulme, to show the confluence of discontent with liberal-romantic “anthropology.” Reflecting Weber’s conflict of value spheres, Schmitt makes no claim about the human as such, only about how the human must be approached as a political animal.
3. Are rights pre-political? No, says Schmitt. The liberal assault on all things political begins with the fundamental assertion that certain basic rights—freedom of religion and conscience and the right to private property being perhaps the most important—precede the formation of the political association. On this issue, Schmitt was a bull in a china shop with rights the red cape. Rights do not accompany individuals as they enter or become the political collective. This assertion of the primacy of the individual over the community is, according to Schmitt, the wedge that shatters the political and thus is the source of our ills. Schmitt’s primary political parable has the political collective issue rights. In other words, the author of rights is not God, not nature, not the autonomous individual; the author is the state for as long as the state represents the political collectivity. For Schmitt, authorship was more important than the rights themselves.
4. Finally, the institution of the legislative body (parliament). Schmitt authors a withering critique of the ideology and function of parliament. In short, the nineteenth-century belief in discussion as the road to consensus about truth is demonstrated to be illusory. This was not a difficult argument to make, and few attempted to rehabilitate the view. Refutation of Schmitt’s conclusion—his assertion that parliamentary governance is fraudulent because the reality of discussion does not match the ideal—consisted largely in the Weberian argument that parliament was the incubator of political leaders or other assertions that defended the institution on pragmatic grounds. Schmitt rejected those justifications as well. Pragmatism does not suffice because liberal-democratic rule needs the truth of debate as its legitimacy. In reality, therefore, parliament was yet another means to confront the political unity of the people with the disintegrative, self-serving demands of various (primarily economic) interest groups. Put bluntly, parliament is the arena within which social forces undermine political action.
What, then, substitutes for discredited liberal governance? During the decade from about 1923 to 1933, Schmitt advanced what might be called a muscular notion of democracy stripped, as much as possible, of its liberal restraints. While chapter 5 describes Schmitt’s attempted dismantling of liberal ideology and practice, chapter 6 attempts an understanding of what Schmitt meant during this decade by the term “democracy.” Briefly, while the people as the constitution’s constituent power is the true sovereign, the Reichspräsident (in the Weimar Constitution) serves as representative of this power, bringing into presence the non-present. The people, then, either approve or disapprove of the act of representation. In other words, Schmitt articulates an illiberal, plebiscitary democracy. Through historical examples, I will make the case for why plebiscitary leadership might sound appealing, but also why it may lead to the type of disaster that will make all and sundry run screaming back into the shelter of basic, liberal, civil, and human rights. Nevertheless, we ignore the allure of blunt democracy at our own peril. When liberal principles become elitist clichés, the white horse of popular, plebiscitary democracy becomes an attractive alternative.
The political theology of a strong, administrative state, the critique of some essential liberal commonplaces, and the articulation of collectivist, non-liberal democracy all stand under the sign of the subtitle of this book: state and society. Schmitt tried to construct the foundations for a strong state in twentieth-century modernity, a state that can claim to be the suitable heir to the early modern military and bureaucratic state (as he liked to characterize it) that fell victim to nineteenth-century liberalism. The newly configured strong state, then, would be able to stand up to the onslaught of social forces (largely but not exclusively economic) that threaten to overwhelm the autonomy of the political. Behind this way of framing the dichotomy of collective and individual lay Hegel’s distinction between state and society. Chapter 4 lays out Hegel’s design and his conciliatory hope as well as Lorenz von Stein’s more realist assessment. Suffice it to say here that Hegel envisioned an eventual synthesis in which the acquisitive individual would learn to realize that cooperation is to everyone’s benefit so that the modern state, guaranteeing individual freedom and communal cooperation, becomes an ethical state. Stein, on the other hand, sees in the dichotomy a perpetual war among individuals and their assorted groupings and therefore views the state as the chief mediator of conflicts between landowners and capitalists, on the one hand, and agricultural and industrial workers, on the other, but never foresees eventual harmony. Schmitt took Stein to heart and elaborated the basic state/society distinction in a number of correlative ways: collective vs. individual, public vs. private, and, not least, democracy vs. liberalism.
Chapter 7 examines Schmitt’s attempt to delineate a positive notion of the ethical
state to contrast with something he confusingly calls the total state, by which he
means the total self-organization of society—in other words, the “total mobilization”
or occupation of the state by the splintered and splintering forces of political parties
and associations representing the economy and other special interests. Still working
within the tradition of nineteenth-
century German statecraft and the paradigm of the Weimar Constitution, Schmitt increasingly
puts stress on the role of the president as “neutral power” (alluding to both Stein
and Constant) and the bureaucracy as an instrument of executive power. Nevertheless,
the political world around him collapses. After initially opposing a National Socialist
takeover, he embraces the new regime almost from the beginning with a palpable sigh
of relief. In Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, Movement, People) he declares the problem of state and society solved. It is an interesting text,
not least for the passages on Stein and the state/society dualism, but certainly not
a sophisticated one to be emulated. In it he famously declares the Hegelian state,
meaning the Hegelian problematic, including Stein’s explication of that supreme problem,
to be dead. A new era has dawned, he proclaims and tries to explain. In Schmitt’s
writings, this new era lasted no more than three years or so. Banished to the semi-shadows
by the Nazis in 1936, Schmitt returns to his Weimar occupations. In 1940 this includes
an appreciative essay on Stein and many of his nineteenth-century compatriots, which
was used as an introduction to a virtually unknown essay by Stein on the mid-century
Prussian constitution. In this introduction we see Schmitt implicitly acknowledge
the pronouncement of the death of Hegel and Stein to have been premature. The old
problems remain after all, the old liberal dangers are still present, the German fascist
experiment a failure (which did not, however, challenge his loyalty to the regime
during the war).
The grand irony of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism during the 1920s and early 1930s is that it is uttered within a profoundly liberal framework, not only that of the main part of the Weimar Constitution, but also the Hegelian state/society dynamic. What, after all, is society? According to social theory (and I rely on the Weber-Parsons-Luhmann tradition, even if Luhmann rejects Weber as an influence), society is the differentiation of independent and incommensurable value spheres (Weber) or systems (Parsons, Luhmann)—for instance, the economy, law, education, religion, art, and politics (among others). This form of differentiation is functional and non-hierarchical. Each realm affects the others, but because all exist on a horizontal, not vertical, plane, none is in a position to instruct others or dictate specific outcomes. For Luhmann (his name will be cautiously raised from time to time in this study), therefore, what Hegel et al. called the state/society dualism was really the differentiation of social systems within society. The state does not stand over against society; the state—the political—is a function system like all the rest within functionally differentiated modernity. Thus, the state/society distinction is really the political interacting inside society with, say, the economy or law, which are also part of society.
Schmitt knew this already in its most rudimentary form from Weber and took it into account, but he did not accept all of its consequences. He never used the word “system,” occasionally used Weber’s term—“value sphere”—but most often spoke of “associations.” Liberal pluralism and guild socialism theorized society as an assemblage of associations, by which they meant, for example, churches and labor unions, chambers of commerce, and other business interest groups, but also all the components of political governance. To this disarticulation of the state and thus of the political, Schmitt reacted violently. The point he hammers home time and time again is simple: The political is not just another association arrayed horizontally among all the others; the political has primacy among all associations, value spheres, or, if we now prefer, systems. The political stands within society but vertically above all other systems because of its responsibility for the whole. Accordingly, for Schmitt, there may not be a simple Hegelian distinction between state and society, but there is a profound distinction between the political and all the other groupings within society. We will see how he articulates this, for instance, in the way he discusses the necessary presuppositions different value systems assume with regard to the essential nature of the human animal. But he never wavered in his advocacy for the primacy of the political.
Furthermore, even Hegel’s basic distinction is essentially liberal, if for no other reason than that he embraces the entrance of the autonomous, self-asserting individual on the stage of history. Moreover, Lorenz von Stein accepts the institution of a liberal parliament as the means for expressing the political interests of individuals in their various and varied associations. There is no going back from individual liberty (eventually extended, in theory at least, beyond the domain of the white male to the universality of human beings of whatever race, gender, etc.). And again, even Schmitt accepts at least a limited version of this universal humanitarian ethic but is wary of its political consequences. Like Stein, but even more so, he is conscious of the corrosive effects all these “social” attitudes and affairs have on the supremacy of the state as the contemporary carrier of the political. Trapped within a liberal world, Schmitt is no liberal theorist. Still, he cannot escape all liberal principles and presuppositions if he is to be able to have a voice and impact on the society in which he lives. His is an internal critique of liberalism, as it were—not one that aims at perfecting liberal theory and practice, but one that asserts that much, perhaps nearly all, of liberalism’s attributes and assumptions must be jettisoned if one truly wishes to establish that “more perfect union” we all dream of.
And all this reminds me of the opening salvo of Raymond Geuss’s (2001) chapter on liberalism, which I quote appreciatively at length.
For a number of reasons and in a number of ways liberalism is conceptually and theoretically much more elusive than the state. For one thing, a given state, after all, is a set of concrete social institutions, which has an aspect of sheer facticity in the form of customs posts, national assembly buildings, oaths of allegiance, aircraft carriers flying the state’s flag, postage stamps, police stations with stacks of rubber truncheons and cattle prods, printed law books, official seals, and so forth. Liberalism is more like Christianity than like the state, that is, it is a complex of doctrines, ideals, suggestions for implementing those ideals, beliefs, and informal patterns of habitual action and thought. Liberalism, though, is both much more doctrinally amorphous and indeterminate than Christianity was, and has a much more indirect relation to any social reality. Christianity had its church buildings, rituals, symbola, public professions of faith, seminaries, catechisms, and, at least at some points in its history, inquisitorial tribunals, prisons, etc. The prisons of liberalism are prisons of the mind, and they operate by trapping the unwary in a shifting, labyrinthine hall of mirrors rather than by immobilization behind palpable brick and steel. (69)
In the Anglophone world at least, any author presuming to write on political theory, including anyone engaging with the works of Carl Schmitt of necessity, whether wary or unwary, enters this “shifting, labyrinthine hall of mirrors.” I invite you to follow me into the fun house. Watch your step.
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”