What’s Left in Schmitt? Critique of an Academic Fashion
Vložit
- čas přidán 27. 07. 2024
- Matthew Specter is Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.
In the past quarter of a century, the academy has witnessed an explosion of interest in the political theory of Carl Schmitt (1900-1985). For some of the Left, Schmitt offers resources for a critique of U.S. Imperialism, the narrow spectrum of liberal democracies, and the idealism of deliberative democracy. This lecture uses Schmitt’s biography and political theory to highlight and criticize recent Schmitt appropriations on the political Left. It argues that Schmitt, or Schmittianism, as a leftist project is historically incoherent. The theorist of fascism and the ideologist of Nazi Lebensraum is simply not worth the tendentious stretching and pulling necessary to turn him into a progressive and emancipatory egalitarian thinker. Schmitt offers no new vision for the contemporary Left.
Presented by the Council on European Studies.
This dude needs to make a friend/enemy distinction between being close enough to the microphone and being too far away.
So common
Just saying no he was wrong is intellectually lazy. What was right or partially right in Schmitt's writings? All you have done is simply reassert dogmatically that liberalism is everything. That's not engagement.
Germany doesn't have an "unmastered past." What does that even mean?
Mr Specter is absolutely right - the postmodern left-Schmittianism is intellectually underwhelming or just purely naive. Those who seek a fundamental critique of Schmitt should look up the works of Otto Kirchheimer and Franz L. Neumann.
Spector's presentaton on Schmitt is rather a bill of indictment than an academical lecture. Nevertheless, I've listened to this presention because of its involuntary comedy.
This guy is upset that Schmitt's views on politics are correct whether you have left wing goals (and hence the right wing are your enemy) or whether you have right wing goals (and hence the left wing are your enemy)
You can tell he is unsure about his answers when he walks away from the microphone to cut out his speech and bring it back in when he is questioned at the end.
Empowering someone is always humiliating someone else. There is power only through the powerlessness of others!
In Individualistic societies more
@@kevintewey1157
I think no. In communistic kollektiv
societies. The Power of Taxes!
Capitalism is evil communism is great
@@kevintewey1157
Communism is poor!
Speaker should have practiced reading this out loud a lot more. Hard to follow because the delivery is so stilted.
The speaker has a certain smugness... - very uncomfortable.
This was an interesting speech! I guess the key question left out is whether someone can be a disgusting person and still have thought useful thoughts. If you believe this might be the case, his arguments do not hold. Anyhow, a moving lecture!
A Trotskyite?
Yes
As a Marxist-Leninist, I feel the need to take Schmitt seriously /because/ of the explicitly fascist basis of his political thought. Schmitt was an unapologetic defender of the authoritarian state rule of the bourgeois class (though he would argue likely that he is for a ‘unified’ national community). I reference Schmitt because he helps to interpret historical phenomenon like the Third Reich and Italian Fascism, and Spanish Falangism, but also because he treats the issue of sovereignty and state power in a realistic way. In today’s age of “the end of history,” any form of mass based politics dead ends in either left or right libertarianism, arresting any possibility of any real effective change because of the refusal to engage with real political power. It is really the question of sovereignty that I take as most relevant to explaining class struggle and politics, and not his revolutionary-Conservative and national-socialist content.
From another perspective, I see the Marxist-Leninist project as fulfilling Schmitts worst nightmare: the dissolution of political society altogether into a society which simply regulates economic relationships, or “the administration of things” and not people. This is what Schmitt was most afraid of, which is why he sided with Nazism against communism and opposed any sort of class based revolution, or any attempt on the part of state bodies to expropriate and manage the economy. Schmitt warned of the coming of an “economic” age where class hierarchies are abolished and where the state had no role to play, where the “friend-enemy” distinction disappears into the regulation of goods and services in the interests of society as a whole. In that sense, Marxist-Leninists and other leftists should study Schmitt with an eye to fulfilling the future which Schmitt so adamantly wanted to thwart.
Spengler: no
привет
Funnily enough what you describes sounds like a neoglobalist capitalist end state
Gareth Davies well, a socialist state is in a sense the “end state” of capitalism, since it is advanced capitalism that centralizes the means of production in such a way as to make socialism possible.
@@lrgroene socialism is not a desirable end state, it is decay. There is no collectivsm without authoritarian rule. There is nothing liberal about it.
Comical. This guy has never met an "enemy" in his circumcised (1:20) life. Do these people really understand that these books are not meant for them? He was put on earth to place books on shelves, nothing more. He is not to look at the titles and certainly never to crack the spines of books.
Such a poor delivery, and weak argument.
Unbearable.