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SOME YEARS AGO I TAUGHT A GRADUATE SEMINAR ON CARL SCHMITT, THE perceived relevance of his ideas to the contemporary global situation, and the anxious reaction to the revival of interest in his work. Schmitt's justly famous analysis of the political uses of the term "humanity" were among the themes discussed, and within this context I pointed to a footnote in The Concept of the Political containing a caustic aside that I assumed would be puzzling to some of the students. As readers of Concept will recall, Schmitt maintains that the term "humanity" lays claim to universal validity and thus is, as he writes, "an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion," because:
When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military enemy. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one's own and to deny the same to the enemy. (1976, 54)
Schmitt then utters his often cited "modified" paraphrase of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat," and concludes with the following: "To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity: and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity." It is to this sentence that the footnote is appended. Here Schmitt refers to Baron Samuel von Pufendorf 's endorsement of "Bacon's comment that specific peoples are 'proscribed by nature itself,' e.g., the Indians, because they eat human flesh. And in fact the Indians of North America were then exterminated" (1976, 54).
Now comes the distinctly sardonic continuation that I thought might give some students pause. "As civilization progresses and morality rises, even less harmful things than devouring human flesh could perhaps qualify as deserving to be outlawed in such a manner. Maybe one day it will be enough if a people were unable to pay its debts" (Schmitt...