Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism

In Part One, I established more firmly Schmitt's notion of technology, its relationship to “economic-technical thought,” and the broader significance it has within his work as a whole and even within twentieth-century German intellectual history in general. In this chapter, I concentrate on the way Schmitt understands technology functioning within and through the liberal political institution of the Western European parliament.

We know from Part One how an often-neglected work of 1923, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, serves as the center of Schmitt's early theory of technology, as well as the soil from which his more famous “concept of the political” would later develop. In the present chapter, I show how, in Political Form, Schmitt lays out his theory of representation, a theory that he would bring to bear on his critique of the liberal theory and practice of representation in his more widely influential book The Intellectual and Historical Plight of Contemporary Parliamentarism, published later that same year. The “personalist” ideal of representation set forth against “technological” and “economic thought” in the first work is the tacit criterion employed to criticize the modern institution of representation, parliament, in the second work. According to Schmitt, the representation entailed by the presently dominant process of technological reproducibility – the mass replication of material objects – has infiltrated political representation, which originally meant literally the re-presentation of substantive ideals. By comparing the two modes of representation, Schmitt reveals the modern parliamentary scheme to be a degeneration into positivist functionality.