CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL
Gene Wolfe wrote The Book of the New Sun against the conjoined intellectual and political upheaval in Catholicism and liberalism in America during the 1970s. Carl Schmitt wrote the two political treatises with which we are illuminating Wolfe’s text during the teetering liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s. Wolfe and Schmitt both belonged to a Catholic intellectual tradition that stood in direct opposition to Protestant ideologies and liberal democracy, and both authors looked back to similar pre-modern ideals to inform their writing. Gene Wolfe is a Science Fiction writer of great stature, and Carl Schmitt is regarded as the greatest opponent of liberal democratic thought writing in twentieth century. Both Wolfe and Schmitt have created texts controversial in their transmission of political theory.
Carl Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, Westphalia on July 11, 1888, into a staunchly Roman Catholic family and society. Schmitt spent his early years in the predominately Catholic regions of the Rhineland and Bavaria in the aftermath of Kulturkampf, the ‘culture wars’, during which Protestant Prussia tried to break Catholicism as an oppositional force.(76) Catholic to the core, his schooling was at a Catholic gymnasium. His undergraduate years at the Bismarckian University of Berlin were marked by intense discomfort and later he lectured at the preponderantly Catholic University of Bonn.(77) The Catholic press published almost half of Schmitt’s articles, the Catholic intelligentsia made up his social circle, and until the rise of Nazism, he consulted for the Catholic Centre Party in German national politics.(78)
There was a marked alienation of young Catholic intellectuals from the Protestant Prussian German ruling class after the Kulturkampf. Catholic Germans remained socially and culturally apart from other Germans well into the twentieth century,(79) which produced political conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. One of Schmitt’s commentators, G. L. Ulman, suggests that Schmitt was writing his first two political treatise, Roman Catholicism and Political Form and Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, in response to Max Weber's argument that 'Calvinism established the psychological and moral preconditions for prosperity … Schmitt tried to show that, while Protestants did encourage material acquisition, only the Catholic world still concerned itself with politics, properly defined. The Catholic belief system led to the acceptance of political authority vested in a sovereign.'(80)
Scholars studying Schmitt are convinced of the strong influence of Catholicism and the intellectual impact of the Kulturkampf on his political theory,(81) creating for Schmitt an atmosphere in which the German Catholic experience shaped his desire to create a deeply Catholic political theory.(82) Indeed, historians propose that ‘the overriding purpose of Catholic political action in inter-war Europe was to rally the faithful in as large numbers as possible in the public sphere ... to create an enclosed world of distinctly and homogenously Catholic spiritual, economic, social and ultimately political organizations.’(83) Wolfe too creates an identifiably Catholic text concerned with political intervention, his critic John Clute emphasizing The Book of the New Sun as a ‘religious book … [presenting] history as a theophany.’(84)
Schmitt’s second political treatise was Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concepts of Sovereignty, written in 1922, and his third the more famous The Concept of the Political, written in 1926. Political Theology is particularly noted as a counter-revolutionary theory designed to bring hierarchy back into a political system that seemed to be heading towards anarchy.(85) Balakrishnan reminds us that 'clearly, Schmitt's ideas took shape at a time when liberal democracy was more fragile and menaced than it is today, but I believe that as a theory … his writing can help us frame more sharply the outlines of these problems in our own time.'(86) Schmitt and Wolfe were both writing in a time of political change and were intellectually preoccupied with order in a time of crisis.
Political Theology is interpreted by commentators as a ‘theologically conceived, counter-revolutionary philosophy of history'(87) concerned with the significance of the 'state of emergency' as a constitutional problem from which Schmitt believed ‘it was not longer possible to insulate the legal system.’(88) Political Theology was written in 1922 out of a profound feeling that the legal system was stagnating,(89) that it could not move as swiftly as was needed to follow the 'conflict over substantive political questions'(90) and that legal rationality was incompatible with the political reality of the current European state.(91) The Concept of the Political went on to rehabilitate the ‘classic’ ideas of the state, the current European State misunderstanding the meaning of classical politics.(92) It is Schmitt’s concept of the ‘friend-enemy’ relationship however that made The Concept of the Political and Carl Schmitt both famous and infamous,(93) and it is of interest to this thesis for the central thesis that the ‘friend-enemy’ relationship is not private enmity but the core of the political state and political interactions within the state.(94)
Gene Wolfe and Carl Schmitt wrote their critiques of liberal democracy sixty years apart, but at similar moments of crisis the history of liberal democratic theory. Schmitt wrote during the fragile Weimar Republic of the 1920s beset by internal political problems that shaped Schmitt’s theory and Wolfe wrote during the formerly ascendant American Republic of the early 1980s, during which the interaction between the Catholic Church and American society was creating an ideological crisis for Wolfe. Schmitt was a jurist in Germany when 'theoretical interest in the state moved away from the law toward economics and sociology, literature and history. The question of what authorises the state's power and what legitimates the positive law was left to intellectuals outside the mainstream of German jursiprudence, or outside the law altogether.'(95) Wolfe was a Catholic in the Thomist tradition whose influence was declining in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.(96) Wolfe and Schmitt wrote their texts as marginalised ultra-conservatives in liberal democracies that seemed to be failing, although they presented similar political arguments in slightly different circumstances. Schmitt sought political unity, authority, and power for the governing institutions to combat the hostile political forces within the Republic,(97) while The Book of the New Sun undermines the contemporary, conventional moral and social attitudes of liberal democracy,(98) reacting more to the crisis of liberalism resting for Wolfe at the meeting of Church and liberal society.
Schmitt outlined his political theory in the medium of a political treatise that sought to prompt the philosophers of the day to conceive a different political reality to the liberal democratic tradition that seemed to be heading for political turmoil. Wolfe presents a similar line of argument in a genre text that explicitly explores the theoretical and practical reality of one alternative to the liberal democratic ideology of the twentieth century by integrating practical political philosophy into the internal history of a speculative text. Both texts are arguments for absolute sovereignty in opposition to liberal democracy, and as such they are direct challenges to the ‘modern’ historical and cultural political system, although uncertain threats at first. The Book of the New Sun is genre text, not obviously a political treatise, but Carl Schmitt’s work has had an even harder fight for relevance, given Schmitt’s association with Nazism.
Schmitt collaborated with the Nazis from 1933 to 1936,(99) joining the party and writing in support of Hitler, along with another great thinker, Martin Heidegger, who wrote to Schmitt in 1933 ‘acknowledging their mutual intellectual and political affinities … to make common cause on behalf of the German ‘Awakening’.’(100) In 1936 he came under investigation from the SS, convinced his conversion to Nazism was not genuine and although during that year he produced writing compromising all previous convictions he had held to assure the investigators of his loyalty, he retired from public life at the end of that year.(101) He paid for his unwise collaboration with the National Socialists for the rest of his career, his political thinking disregarded in the West due to his association with the Third Reich.(102) The stain of Schmitt’s collusion with the Nazis is beginning to fade as his work is translated into English and the force of his critique of liberal democracy begins to transcend the history of his time and circumstances.(103)
The Catholic nature of Schmitt’s political philosophy is well established, as is Wolfe’s, but there is another similarity between the influence of history on the texts produced by both writers. Both show unmistakable signs of being influenced by Roman law. Indeed Schmitt had a ‘lifelong identification with the Latin world, summed up by his oft-quoted remark to the German nationalist Ernst Niekisch, “I am Roman by origin, tradition and right.” ’(104) Schmitt joined a German jurist tradition ‘habituated to Roman law and Latin syntax'(105) and went on to write his political theory during a weakening of this same Roman juristic tradition in Germany.(106) Wolfe’s own extensive use of ancient language includes Roman judicial terms and concepts within a textual vocabulary borrowed from the entire spread of the historical record,(107) and critics agree the social and cultural aspects of The Book of the New Sun are recognizably similar to those of the Roman and Byzantine Empire.(108)
Carl Schmitt and Gene Wolfe composed their texts within an ultra-Conservative Catholic tradition of anti-liberalism intending to intervene explicitly in a collapsing liberal democratic present. While Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political and Political Theology critique the liberal democratic ideals within a political treatise, Wolfe conveys his political ideology in a genre text, and creates a political anti-liberalism through characterization and narrative arc. The Book of the New Sun concerns itself with the justification of absolute sovereignty above the rule of law in a political system in a permanent state of exception. The absolute sovereign rules by the Schmittian concept of the exception defined against the norm in law, and this sovereignty is exercised in a society that conforms to Schmitt’s ‘friend-enemy’ relationship.
Before outlining the specificity of Schmittian presence in The Book of the New Sun, a further explanation of the concepts used as the framework of analysis is needed. Schmitt’s argument for absolute sovereignty considered the difference between legal sovereignty and political sovereignty and argued for political sovereignty when legal sovereignty fails. Władysław Józef Stankiewicz in Aspects of Political Theory: Classical Concepts in an Age of Relativism defines legal sovereignty as follows,
Stankiewicz observes that legal sovereignty has become closely associated with ‘democracy’(110) , and defines political sovereignty as follows,
CHAPTER ONE: GENE WOLFE AND THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
CHAPTER THREE: THE ‘FRIEND-ENEMY’ RELATIONSHIP AND THE DEFINITION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
NOTES
(75) G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London, Verso, 2000, p. 1.
(76) P. Gottfried, Thinkers of Our Time: Carl Schmitt, London, The Claridge Press, 1990, pp. 7-8.
(77) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 9; Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 13.
(78) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 9; Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 12.
(79) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, pp. 8-9.
(80) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 21.
(81) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, pp. 11-12.
(82) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, pp. 41-42.
(83) W. Kaiser, H. Wohnout, Political Catholicism in Europe: 1918-1945, New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 236.
(84) J. Clute, ‘On the Cusp of Fear’, D. Broderick, (ed), Earth is but a star, Perth, UWA Press, 2001, p. 163.
(85) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 43.
(86) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 2.
(87) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 44.
(88) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 45.
(89) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 4.
(90) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 45.
(91) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 51.
(92) M. Forsyth, ‘Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political’ in M. Forsyth, M. Keens-Soper, (eds) The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 83.
(93) H. Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, J. H. Lomax (trans), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 3.
(94) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 106.
(95) E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimer, London, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 64.
(96) D. Miller, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, London, Blackwell Publishing, 1987.
(97) Forsyth, ‘Carl Schmitt’, The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin, p.80
(98) P. Malekin, 'Remembering the Future: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun’ in D. E. Morse (ed.), The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts. London, Greenwood Press, 1987, p. 55.
(99) P. Hirst, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism’ in C. Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, London, Verso, 1999, p. 8.
(100) R. Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 89.
(101) Forsyth, ‘Carl Schmitt’, The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin, pp. 81-82.
(102) Hirst, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism’, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, p. 8.
(103) J. P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 1-3.
(104) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 7.
(105) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 7.
(106) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 3.
(107) See M. Andre-Druissi, Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, Albany, Sirius Fiction, 1994; Wolfe, ‘Words Weird and Wonderful’, The Castle of the Otter, pp. 25-42.
Swanson, 'Gene Wolfe', p. 39.
(109) W. J. Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory: Classical Concepts in an Age of Relativism, London, Collier Macmillan, Transaction Publishers, 1976, p. 69.
(110) Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory, p. 69.
(111) Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory, p. 70.
(112) Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory, p. 70.
The writings of Carl Schmitt form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought. In the English-speaking world he is terra incognita, a name redolent of Nazism, the author of a largely untranslated oeuvre of short texts forming no system, coming to us from a disturbing place and time in the form of scrambled fragments.(75)
THE ENEMY: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT OF CARL SCHMITT
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN
Gene Wolfe wrote The Book of the New Sun against the conjoined intellectual and political upheaval in Catholicism and liberalism in America during the 1970s. Carl Schmitt wrote the two political treatises with which we are illuminating Wolfe’s text during the teetering liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s. Wolfe and Schmitt both belonged to a Catholic intellectual tradition that stood in direct opposition to Protestant ideologies and liberal democracy, and both authors looked back to similar pre-modern ideals to inform their writing. Gene Wolfe is a Science Fiction writer of great stature, and Carl Schmitt is regarded as the greatest opponent of liberal democratic thought writing in twentieth century. Both Wolfe and Schmitt have created texts controversial in their transmission of political theory.
Carl Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, Westphalia on July 11, 1888, into a staunchly Roman Catholic family and society. Schmitt spent his early years in the predominately Catholic regions of the Rhineland and Bavaria in the aftermath of Kulturkampf, the ‘culture wars’, during which Protestant Prussia tried to break Catholicism as an oppositional force.(76) Catholic to the core, his schooling was at a Catholic gymnasium. His undergraduate years at the Bismarckian University of Berlin were marked by intense discomfort and later he lectured at the preponderantly Catholic University of Bonn.(77) The Catholic press published almost half of Schmitt’s articles, the Catholic intelligentsia made up his social circle, and until the rise of Nazism, he consulted for the Catholic Centre Party in German national politics.(78)
There was a marked alienation of young Catholic intellectuals from the Protestant Prussian German ruling class after the Kulturkampf. Catholic Germans remained socially and culturally apart from other Germans well into the twentieth century,(79) which produced political conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. One of Schmitt’s commentators, G. L. Ulman, suggests that Schmitt was writing his first two political treatise, Roman Catholicism and Political Form and Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, in response to Max Weber's argument that 'Calvinism established the psychological and moral preconditions for prosperity … Schmitt tried to show that, while Protestants did encourage material acquisition, only the Catholic world still concerned itself with politics, properly defined. The Catholic belief system led to the acceptance of political authority vested in a sovereign.'(80)
Scholars studying Schmitt are convinced of the strong influence of Catholicism and the intellectual impact of the Kulturkampf on his political theory,(81) creating for Schmitt an atmosphere in which the German Catholic experience shaped his desire to create a deeply Catholic political theory.(82) Indeed, historians propose that ‘the overriding purpose of Catholic political action in inter-war Europe was to rally the faithful in as large numbers as possible in the public sphere ... to create an enclosed world of distinctly and homogenously Catholic spiritual, economic, social and ultimately political organizations.’(83) Wolfe too creates an identifiably Catholic text concerned with political intervention, his critic John Clute emphasizing The Book of the New Sun as a ‘religious book … [presenting] history as a theophany.’(84)
Schmitt’s second political treatise was Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concepts of Sovereignty, written in 1922, and his third the more famous The Concept of the Political, written in 1926. Political Theology is particularly noted as a counter-revolutionary theory designed to bring hierarchy back into a political system that seemed to be heading towards anarchy.(85) Balakrishnan reminds us that 'clearly, Schmitt's ideas took shape at a time when liberal democracy was more fragile and menaced than it is today, but I believe that as a theory … his writing can help us frame more sharply the outlines of these problems in our own time.'(86) Schmitt and Wolfe were both writing in a time of political change and were intellectually preoccupied with order in a time of crisis.
Political Theology is interpreted by commentators as a ‘theologically conceived, counter-revolutionary philosophy of history'(87) concerned with the significance of the 'state of emergency' as a constitutional problem from which Schmitt believed ‘it was not longer possible to insulate the legal system.’(88) Political Theology was written in 1922 out of a profound feeling that the legal system was stagnating,(89) that it could not move as swiftly as was needed to follow the 'conflict over substantive political questions'(90) and that legal rationality was incompatible with the political reality of the current European state.(91) The Concept of the Political went on to rehabilitate the ‘classic’ ideas of the state, the current European State misunderstanding the meaning of classical politics.(92) It is Schmitt’s concept of the ‘friend-enemy’ relationship however that made The Concept of the Political and Carl Schmitt both famous and infamous,(93) and it is of interest to this thesis for the central thesis that the ‘friend-enemy’ relationship is not private enmity but the core of the political state and political interactions within the state.(94)
Gene Wolfe and Carl Schmitt wrote their critiques of liberal democracy sixty years apart, but at similar moments of crisis the history of liberal democratic theory. Schmitt wrote during the fragile Weimar Republic of the 1920s beset by internal political problems that shaped Schmitt’s theory and Wolfe wrote during the formerly ascendant American Republic of the early 1980s, during which the interaction between the Catholic Church and American society was creating an ideological crisis for Wolfe. Schmitt was a jurist in Germany when 'theoretical interest in the state moved away from the law toward economics and sociology, literature and history. The question of what authorises the state's power and what legitimates the positive law was left to intellectuals outside the mainstream of German jursiprudence, or outside the law altogether.'(95) Wolfe was a Catholic in the Thomist tradition whose influence was declining in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.(96) Wolfe and Schmitt wrote their texts as marginalised ultra-conservatives in liberal democracies that seemed to be failing, although they presented similar political arguments in slightly different circumstances. Schmitt sought political unity, authority, and power for the governing institutions to combat the hostile political forces within the Republic,(97) while The Book of the New Sun undermines the contemporary, conventional moral and social attitudes of liberal democracy,(98) reacting more to the crisis of liberalism resting for Wolfe at the meeting of Church and liberal society.
Schmitt outlined his political theory in the medium of a political treatise that sought to prompt the philosophers of the day to conceive a different political reality to the liberal democratic tradition that seemed to be heading for political turmoil. Wolfe presents a similar line of argument in a genre text that explicitly explores the theoretical and practical reality of one alternative to the liberal democratic ideology of the twentieth century by integrating practical political philosophy into the internal history of a speculative text. Both texts are arguments for absolute sovereignty in opposition to liberal democracy, and as such they are direct challenges to the ‘modern’ historical and cultural political system, although uncertain threats at first. The Book of the New Sun is genre text, not obviously a political treatise, but Carl Schmitt’s work has had an even harder fight for relevance, given Schmitt’s association with Nazism.
Schmitt collaborated with the Nazis from 1933 to 1936,(99) joining the party and writing in support of Hitler, along with another great thinker, Martin Heidegger, who wrote to Schmitt in 1933 ‘acknowledging their mutual intellectual and political affinities … to make common cause on behalf of the German ‘Awakening’.’(100) In 1936 he came under investigation from the SS, convinced his conversion to Nazism was not genuine and although during that year he produced writing compromising all previous convictions he had held to assure the investigators of his loyalty, he retired from public life at the end of that year.(101) He paid for his unwise collaboration with the National Socialists for the rest of his career, his political thinking disregarded in the West due to his association with the Third Reich.(102) The stain of Schmitt’s collusion with the Nazis is beginning to fade as his work is translated into English and the force of his critique of liberal democracy begins to transcend the history of his time and circumstances.(103)
The Catholic nature of Schmitt’s political philosophy is well established, as is Wolfe’s, but there is another similarity between the influence of history on the texts produced by both writers. Both show unmistakable signs of being influenced by Roman law. Indeed Schmitt had a ‘lifelong identification with the Latin world, summed up by his oft-quoted remark to the German nationalist Ernst Niekisch, “I am Roman by origin, tradition and right.” ’(104) Schmitt joined a German jurist tradition ‘habituated to Roman law and Latin syntax'(105) and went on to write his political theory during a weakening of this same Roman juristic tradition in Germany.(106) Wolfe’s own extensive use of ancient language includes Roman judicial terms and concepts within a textual vocabulary borrowed from the entire spread of the historical record,(107) and critics agree the social and cultural aspects of The Book of the New Sun are recognizably similar to those of the Roman and Byzantine Empire.(108)
Carl Schmitt and Gene Wolfe composed their texts within an ultra-Conservative Catholic tradition of anti-liberalism intending to intervene explicitly in a collapsing liberal democratic present. While Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political and Political Theology critique the liberal democratic ideals within a political treatise, Wolfe conveys his political ideology in a genre text, and creates a political anti-liberalism through characterization and narrative arc. The Book of the New Sun concerns itself with the justification of absolute sovereignty above the rule of law in a political system in a permanent state of exception. The absolute sovereign rules by the Schmittian concept of the exception defined against the norm in law, and this sovereignty is exercised in a society that conforms to Schmitt’s ‘friend-enemy’ relationship.
Before outlining the specificity of Schmittian presence in The Book of the New Sun, a further explanation of the concepts used as the framework of analysis is needed. Schmitt’s argument for absolute sovereignty considered the difference between legal sovereignty and political sovereignty and argued for political sovereignty when legal sovereignty fails. Władysław Józef Stankiewicz in Aspects of Political Theory: Classical Concepts in an Age of Relativism defines legal sovereignty as follows,
The main characteristic of legal sovereignty is that it takes law – which is in fact a part of the concept of sovereignty and a consequence of a system of sovereignty - and attempts to make it the system itself … the concept of legal sovereignty suffers the defect of presupposing a basic stability in social relations – a stability that would make the very concept of sovereignty unnecessary.(109)The basic stability in social relations is the concept of ‘the norm’ against which Schmitt defines ‘the exception’. Within Stankiewicz’s definition ‘the exception’ is the instability in social relations that requires the rule of law to exist, and Schmitt defined the exception as inevitable and thus legal sovereignty to be unstable. Wolfe and Schmitt write as authors aware of the immanent instability of the exception, the ideological and political crisis present in their times so central to their arguments for sovereignty. In The Book of the New Sun Wolfe takes the exception from inevitable to permanent, and creates in his political system the need for an absolute sovereign to wield political sovereignty.
Stankiewicz observes that legal sovereignty has become closely associated with ‘democracy’(110) , and defines political sovereignty as follows,
Political sovereignty fulfils the requirements of democratic theory, but it differs from the latter [legal sovereignty] in an important way: it recognises that life in society requires a set of norms that cannot be assumed to be a part of man’s nature – the laws of society can never simply reflect the will of the people, no matter what may be the form of government.(111)Stankiewicz then explains that Hobbesian political sovereignty is based on the individual norms being private, not public, and that,
Democratic theory, attempting to assign ultimate authority to the ‘people’, has not been able to overcome the problem of public and private norms. In order to mediate between the two sets of norms, it is inclined to adopt legal sovereignty which means abandoning the norms of individuality for the norms of the ‘constitution’ and insisting that everyone adapt his behaviour to a static conception of society while living in one that is unmistakably changing.(112)Schmitt and Wolfe both conceive of an absolute sovereign ruling when legal sovereignty encounters the exception in a changing society. The anti-liberal democratic ideology of both authors stem from the problematic nature of constitutional norms given the faltering constitutional states in which they were writing. Wolfe actually creates a changing society in terms of Schmitt’s ‘friend-enemy’ relationship, and in extrapolating such a society in a permanent state of the exception, Wolfe creates the need for an absolute sovereign. Schmitt believed democratic theory fails to reconcile the private and public norms of the ‘people’, and the solution offered by both Schmitt and Wolfe is to give political sovereignty to an absolute sovereign so he may rule when legal sovereignty encounters the exception and fails.
CHAPTER ONE: GENE WOLFE AND THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
CHAPTER THREE: THE ‘FRIEND-ENEMY’ RELATIONSHIP AND THE DEFINITION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
NOTES
(75) G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London, Verso, 2000, p. 1.
(76) P. Gottfried, Thinkers of Our Time: Carl Schmitt, London, The Claridge Press, 1990, pp. 7-8.
(77) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 9; Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 13.
(78) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 9; Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 12.
(79) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, pp. 8-9.
(80) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 21.
(81) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, pp. 11-12.
(82) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, pp. 41-42.
(83) W. Kaiser, H. Wohnout, Political Catholicism in Europe: 1918-1945, New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 236.
(84) J. Clute, ‘On the Cusp of Fear’, D. Broderick, (ed), Earth is but a star, Perth, UWA Press, 2001, p. 163.
(85) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 43.
(86) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 2.
(87) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 44.
(88) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 45.
(89) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 4.
(90) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 45.
(91) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 51.
(92) M. Forsyth, ‘Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political’ in M. Forsyth, M. Keens-Soper, (eds) The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 83.
(93) H. Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, J. H. Lomax (trans), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 3.
(94) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 106.
(95) E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimer, London, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 64.
(96) D. Miller, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, London, Blackwell Publishing, 1987.
(97) Forsyth, ‘Carl Schmitt’, The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin, p.80
(98) P. Malekin, 'Remembering the Future: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun’ in D. E. Morse (ed.), The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts. London, Greenwood Press, 1987, p. 55.
(99) P. Hirst, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism’ in C. Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, London, Verso, 1999, p. 8.
(100) R. Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 89.
(101) Forsyth, ‘Carl Schmitt’, The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin, pp. 81-82.
(102) Hirst, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism’, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, p. 8.
(103) J. P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 1-3.
(104) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 7.
(105) Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, p. 7.
(106) Balakrishnan, An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, p. 3.
(107) See M. Andre-Druissi, Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, Albany, Sirius Fiction, 1994; Wolfe, ‘Words Weird and Wonderful’, The Castle of the Otter, pp. 25-42.
Swanson, 'Gene Wolfe', p. 39.
(109) W. J. Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory: Classical Concepts in an Age of Relativism, London, Collier Macmillan, Transaction Publishers, 1976, p. 69.
(110) Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory, p. 69.
(111) Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory, p. 70.
(112) Stankiewicz, Aspects of Political Theory, p. 70.
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