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Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology. By John P. McCormick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 352p. $39.95.
Andrew Norris, Duquesne University
We have recently witnessed a striking rise of interest in the political and legal philosophy of erstwhile Nazi Carl Schmitt. Much of this has focused on Schmitt's friend/enemy criterion of the political as found in The Concept of the Political. It is both a strength and weakness of McCormick's fine book that it does not follow this familiar path. Its main claim is that Schmitt's resistance to a liberal politics of individual rights and constitutional guarantees of a limited government can be properly understood only in the context of a broader critique of Weberian rationalization. As McCormick demonstrates, for Schmitt, as for Heidegger, bureaucratic liberalism, legal positivism, the political primacy of the economic, and machine technology itself are all epiphenomena of instrumental reason, or modern metaphysical "technicity." Hence, such often discussed works as The Concept of the Political and Political Theology are misunderstood if they are considered in isolation from a careful reading of more obscure works, such as Political Romanticism, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations," and Theodor Daubler's "Northern Lights". It is in these that Schmitt most clearly delineates what technicity entails and what it opposes. And, McCormick argues, both Schmitt's theoretical and political stances are "extensions, even applications" (p. 4) of this analysis. McCormick does not limit himself to an exposition of Schmitt's thought, but neither does he want to criticize it from a perspective alien to Schmitt's own. Accordingly, his argument is not that Schmitt's political theory fails because it does not ground politics on principles of justice or individual autonomy, a la Rawls or Mill. Instead, he seeks, initially at least, to present an immanent critique of Schmitt by "reading him against himself ' (p. 7; but cf. p. 300). This strategy entails demonstrating that Schmitt falls prey to the very sins he denounces in others. McCormick argues quite rightly that only this approach can hope to address adequately the temptations and dangers of totalitarianism.
Schmitt's entanglement with totalitarianism begins with his reaction to Weber. Here we find both poles of the binary which, according to McCormick, structured Weimar even as...