Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy

1. Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 (paperback)) at lxi.

2. I would have thought that everybody was able to understand that it was possible to use, so to speak, Schmitt against Schmitt, i.e, to use the insights of his critique of liberalism in order to consolidate liberalism—while recognizing that this was, of course, not his aim. However, it does not seem to be the case since Scheuerman, Bill in his book Between the Norm and the Exception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) at 8 criticizes me for presenting Schmitt as a theorist of radical pluralist democracy!

3. Held, David, Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995).

4. Falk, Richard, On Human Governance (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995) ch. 7.

5. Schmitt, Carl, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) at 9.

6. Ibid. at 9.

7. Supra note 5 at 13.

8. Ibid. at 9.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid. at 11.

11. Ibid. at 12.

12. I have made a similar argument concerning the tension that exists between the articulation of the liberal logic of difference and the democratic logic on equivalence in my discussion of Schmitt in The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993) chs. 7 and 8.

13. Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976) at 70.

14. For a critique of the Rawlsian model and its incapacity to acknowledge the political nature of the discrimination that it establishes between ‘simple’ and ‘reasonable pluralism’, see my article “Democracy and Pluralism: A Critique of the Rationalist Approach” (1995) 16:5 Cardozo, L. Rev. 1533.

15. Benhabib, Seyla, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy” (1994) 1 Constellations 30.

16. Ibid, at 31.

17. This, of course, takes place in a different way in both authors. Rawls relegates pluralism to the private sphere while Habermas screens it out, so to speak, from the public sphere through the procedures of argumentation. However, in both cases the result is the elimination of pluralism from the public sphere.

18. Schmitt, Carl, supra note 13 at 35.

19. Ibid. at 53.

20. Supra note 18 at 45

21. Schmitt, Carl, “Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat” (1930) 35 Kantstudien 1 at 31.

22. Ibid. at 34.

23. Ibid. at 41.

24. Jean-François, Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt: Le Politique entre Spéculation et Positivité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992) at 259.