Evaluating European intellectuals who aligned with or sympathized toward fascism presents unavoidable challenges. Figures such as Heidegger, De Man, Céline, Jünger, Gentile, Croce, Della Volpe, and Pound each represent complex cases that resist straightforward judgment. Yet, none pose a more intricate dilemma than Carl Schmitt. His shifting political stances and his unusual relationship to conservative intellectual traditions make him particularly difficult to assess. Schmitt’s works, emerging from a turbulent historical setting and reaching English readers through fragmented and inconsistent translations, resist placement within the boundaries of modern academic disciplines. To evaluate him responsibly, one must situate his ideas within their historical context and examine them with critical depth.
Benno Teschke’s essay “Decisions and Indecisions,” published in New Left Review 67, attempts to navigate these complexities. A historical sociologist known for his study of early modern European state formation and the emergence of capitalism, Teschke gained prominence through The Myth of 1648. His recent engagement with Schmitt offers both critique and interpretation, focusing on Schmitt’s major work, The Nomos of the Earth. In it, Teschke develops a rigorous reading framed by a broader reflection on how Schmitt’s writings have been received and sustained over time.
Teschke’s Interpretation of Schmitt and His Legacy
Teschke’s portrayal is that of a committed fascist theorist whose intellectual legacy continues to influence contemporary political thought. He argues that Schmitt’s ideas now underpin strands of United States neoconservatism, extending their reach into the logic of international relations and the broader realm of ideas. According to Teschke, Schmitt casts a lingering and troubling influence over American foreign policy, but his writings ultimately fail to provide meaningful insight into either the present or the past. This argument unfolds through Teschke’s review of Reinhard Mehring’s detailed biography, Carl Schmitt, Aufstieg und Fall.
Mehring’s biography, meticulously researched and grounded in a strong historical framework, enhances our understanding of Schmitt’s complex life. His study adds new archival material and interprets Schmitt’s evolution within the context of twentieth-century German intellectual life. A careful evaluation of this biography might have emphasized its historical contributions and examined how its findings reshape our perception of Schmitt. However, Teschke largely dismisses this potential. Instead of engaging deeply with Mehring’s narrative, he criticizes the biographer for not issuing a sufficiently severe moral condemnation of Schmitt.
The Question of Moral Judgment and Historical Context
Teschke’s critique centers on the argument that Mehring fails to deliver a clear moral verdict against Schmitt’s actions, particularly his decision to join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in May 1933. Mehring’s detailed investigation of Schmitt’s motives at age forty-four is quickly rejected by Teschke, who instead constructs a psychological and political framework suggesting that Schmitt was “predestined” to align with Hitler. Yet historical evidence indicates that many contemporaries were stunned and disillusioned by Schmitt’s decision, suggesting it was far from inevitable.
To explain such a choice, one must take into account both intellectual and political factors that shaped Schmitt’s earlier development. Mehring’s careful exploration of these motivations, although imperfect, contributes to an understanding of the conditions that made Schmitt’s turn possible. Any analysis that claims to explain his alignment with fascism must consider his broader intellectual affiliations on the political right before and after 1933. Ignoring these relationships risks oversimplifying his ideological path and undermining the complexity of his evolution.
The Critique of Schmitt’s International Thought
Teschke maintains that Schmitt’s international political theory is both empirically unsupported and conceptually unsound. He characterizes it as riddled with contradictions, reversals, omissions, mythologizing tendencies, and speculative etymological exercises. To examine whether this description is fair, one must first understand the general contours of Schmitt’s thinking about Germany’s place in the global order following the First World War.
In Schmitt’s interpretation, the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations sought to maintain the postwar status quo through legal constraints. Effectively placing Germany under a regime of international economic and military supervision. The victorious powers retained their sovereignty and privileges, while defeated states, such as Germany. Were subjected to invasive conditions that compromised their independence. Sanctions, embargoes, and external control over debt repayments reflected a form of governance that blurred the distinction between law and domination.
The Crisis of Legal Order and the Dissolution of Boundaries
For Schmitt, this new arrangement revealed a profound crisis in the modern conception of law. The postwar settlement, he argued, no longer represented a universal legal order but a fragmented system in which states experienced vastly different levels of subjugation. This erosion of legal uniformity marked the collapse of the bourgeois separation between politics and economics and the weakening of the state’s monopoly on legitimate authority. Europe found itself trapped between remnants of the old order and the emerging social structures of welfare capitalism.
In this shifting landscape, distinctions that had previously structured international relations began to disintegrate. The opposition between war and peace, belligerent and neutral, or soldier and civilian, lost clarity. The terms that had once defined the political world no longer corresponded to stable realities. The mechanisms designed to preserve peace increasingly resembled extensions of warfare itself, creating a condition of ongoing low-intensity conflict. This in-between state of affairs, marked by civil unrest and economic instability.Reflected a breakdown in the old legal and political order of Europe.
The Role of the United States and the Fragility of Sovereignty
Amid this disordered environment, the United States emerged as a dominant financial power. Acting primarily through international institutions such as the League of Nations—bodies that it influenced but did not subject itself to. It became a central force in shaping the global economy during the interwar period. Germany and other European nations remained trapped in cycles of debt repayment and borrowing. Sustaining an unstable balance that depended heavily on American credit.
Schmitt interpreted this situation as evidence that Europe’s sovereignty was being quietly undermined by economic dependency. The idea that national independence could be exchanged for participation in a global legal order of prosperity appeared to him dangerously naïve. In his view, the resulting structure represented not progress but a fragile system of interdependence without political safeguards. Through his Weimar-era writings on constitutional and international conflicts, Schmitt attempted to address these challenges. Warning of the vulnerabilities created by Europe’s drift into an American-centered world economy.
Relevance and Limitations of Schmitt’s Perspective
The insights Schmitt offered into the instability of postwar Europe continue to bear historical significance. While his interpretations may not account for every dimension of international politics. They captured key tensions in the transition from traditional state sovereignty to global interdependence. His observations about the erosion of legal and political boundaries reflected genuine crises that defined his era.
Still, Schmitt’s analysis was far from complete. One may justifiably critique its partiality or question its pessimism. Contemporary readers might regard the transformations he described as necessary adaptations rather than symptoms of decay. Yet, to dismiss his work entirely would be to overlook its attempt to grapple with one of the central problems of modernity. The relationship between law, power, and international order.
Teschke’s Limited Engagement and the Broader Implications
Despite these complexities, Teschke views Schmitt’s writings primarily through the lens of moral condemnation. He interprets Schmitt’s emphasis on sovereign decision-making as an authoritarian obsession with defining friends and enemies. While this interpretation is not without justification, it reduces Schmitt’s thought to a single moral dimension, neglecting its broader historical and theoretical implications. In doing so, Teschke risks obscuring how Schmitt’s ideas reflect real dilemmas within liberal and imperial systems, both in the early twentieth century and today.
Ultimately, Teschke’s analysis provides limited insight into understanding how Schmitt’s legacy relates to the evolution of liberal imperialism. Schmitt’s reflections on sovereignty, legality, and power remain challenging, troubling, and at times deeply flawed. Yet, they also provide a mirror through which to examine the contradictions of the modern global order. An honest assessment of Schmitt demands not only moral clarity but also intellectual precision. Qualities that must coexist if his enduring influence is to be understood.