Note
There are two important aspects that emerge from this extract. First the identification of the State with political activity. For this reason, to go beyond the State means to go beyond politics. The second important point is that the criterion that qualifies political activity is the distinction between friends and enemies. To function, politics needs the existence of opposing polarities (in place of accepting autonomous pluralities) and invents them if they do not exist or are not opportunistically characterized.
In the past von Clausewitz wrote that “war is politics by other means” and, in more recent years Charles Tilly has clearly pointed out that “the State makes War and War makes the State”.
Therefore, it follows that the triad State-Politics-War is something indispensable and indivisible, as long as we accept the existence of a territorial invasive power that controls and rules our lives.
Source: Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 1932.
State and political
The concept of the State presupposes the concept of the political. According to current usage, the State is the political status of a people organised in a territorial unity.
This is only an initial description, not a definition of the State. Nor is such a definition necessary here, where we are dealing with the nature of the political. We can leave it open as to what the State is in essence, a machine or an organism, a person or an institution, a society or a community, a company or a beehive, or perhaps even a basic procedural order.
All these definitions and images anticipate too much in terms of interpretation, meaning, illustration and construction and therefore cannot form a suitable starting point for a simple and elementary explanation.
According to its literal sense and its historical appearance, the State is a special kind of condition of a people, the decisive condition in the decisive case and therefore, in contrast to the many conceivable individual and collective statuses, the status par excellence. Nothing more can be said at first. All characteristics of this idea — status and people — receive their meaning through the further characteristic of the political and become incomprehensible if the nature of the political is misunderstood.
You will rarely find a clear definition of the political. In most cases, the word is only used negatively as a contrast to various other terms, in antitheses such as politics and economics, politics and morality, politics and law, and within law, politics and civil law, and so forth. Depending on the context and the specific situation, such negative and usually polemical juxtapositions can be used to describe something sufficiently clear, but this is not yet a specific definition.
In general, ‘political’ is equated in some way with ‘State’ or at least related to the State. The State then appears as something political, the political as something pertaining to the State — obviously an unsatisfactory circle.
There are many such descriptions of the political in juridic literature, but unless they have a polemical-political meaning, they can only be understood from the practical-technical interest of legal or administrative decision-making in individual cases.
They then acquire their significance by the fact that they unproblematically presuppose an existing State within whose framework they operate.
For example, there exists a jurisprudence and literature on the concept of ‘political association’ or ‘political assembly’ in the law of association. Furthermore, the practice of French administrative law has attempted to establish a concept of political motive (mobile politique), with the help of which ‘political’ acts of government (actes de gouvernement) are to be distinguished from ‘non-political’ administrative acts and removed from administrative court control.
Such provisions, which meet the needs of legal practice, basically only seek a practical means of delimiting the various facts that occur within a State in its legal practice. They do not aim to provide a general definition of the political in general. Therefore, they suffice with their reference to the State or to State entities, as long as the State and the State institutions can be taken for granted.
The general definitions of the political, which contain nothing more than a further or backward reference to the ‘State,’ are also understandable and in this respect also scientifically justified to the extent that the State really is a clear, unambiguously defined entity and stands opposite the non-State, and therefore ‘non-political’ groups and matters. In other words, for as long as the State has the monopoly of the political.
This was the case where the State either (as in the 18th century) did not recognise ‘society’ as an opponent or at least (as in Germany during the 19th century and into the 20th century) stood above ‘society’ as a stable and distinguishable power.
In contrast, the equation State = Political becomes incorrect and misleading when State and society interpenetrate each other, when all previously State affairs become social and, conversely, all previously ‘only’ social affairs become State matters, as necessarily occurs in a democratically organised community.
Then the previously ‘neutral’ areas — religion, culture, education, economy — cease to be ‘neutral’ in the sense of non-State and non-political. The total State appears as a polemical counter-concept to such neutralizations and depoliticalizations of important subject areas. A State which potentially embraces every domain.
As a result, everything is political, at least in terms of possibility, and with reference to the State it is no longer possible to establish a specific distinguishing feature of the ‘political.’
The friend-enemy distinction as a criterion of the political
A definition of the political can only be obtained by uncovering and identifying the specifically political categories. The political has its own criteria, which become effective in a peculiar way in relation to the various, relatively independent areas of human thought and action, in particular the moral, aesthetic and economic.
The political must therefore lie in its own ultimate distinctions, to which all political action in the specific sense can be traced back.
Let us suppose that in the moral sphere the ultimate distinctions are good and evil; in the aesthetic, beautiful and ugly; in the economic, useful and harmful, or, for example, profitable and non-profitable, The question then is whether there is also a special distinction, not similar and analogous to those other distinctions, but independent of them and as such readily intelligible, that can be used as a simple criterion of the political, and what it consists in.
The specifically political distinction to which the political actions and motives can be traced back is the distinction between friend and enemy. It provides a definition in the sense of a criterion, and not as an exhaustive definition or as a statement of content. Insofar as it cannot be derived from changing criteria, it corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere; beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on. In any case, it is independent, not in the sense of a new subject area of its own, but in the sense that it can neither be based on one or more of those other opposites, nor can it be traced back to them.
If the opposition of good and evil is not readily and simply identical with that of beautiful and ugly or useful and harmful, and must not be directly reduced to it, still less must the opposition of friend and enemy be confounded or mixed up with any of those other oppositions. The distinction between friend and enemy has the meaning of signifying the extreme degree of intensity of a connection or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically without all those moral, aesthetic, economic or other distinctions having to be applied at the same time.
The political enemy need not be morally evil, or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even seem advantageous to do business with him.
He is simply the other, the stranger, and it is sufficient to his nature that he is existentially something different and strange in a particularly intense sense, so that in extreme cases conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a general standardisation made in advance, nor by the judgement of an ‘uninvolved’ and therefore ‘impartial’ third party.
The possibility of correct cognisance and understanding and thus also the authority to speak and judge is only given here through existential participation and involvement.
The extreme case of conflict can only be decided by the participants themselves; in particular, each of them can only decide for themselves whether the otherness of the stranger in the concrete case of conflict at hand means the negation of their own kind of existence and is therefore fended off or fought against in order to preserve their own way of life.
In psychological reality, the enemy is easily treated as evil and ugly, because each distinction, most obviously the political one as the strongest and most intense distinction and grouping, draws on all other distinctions for support.
This does not change the autonomy of such distinctions. Consequently, the reverse is also true: what is morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not yet be an enemy; what is morally good, aesthetically beautiful and economically useful does not yet become a friend in the specific, i.e. political, sense of the word.
The inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political is therefore evident in this possibility of separating such a specific opposition as friend-enemy from other distinctions and understand it as something independent.