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Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

Chantal Mouffe
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Extract

In his introduction to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism, John Rawls, referring to Carl Schmitt's critique of parliamentary democracy, suggests that the fall of Weimar's constitutional regime was in part due to the fact that German elites no longer believed in the possibility of a decent liberal parliamentary regime. This should, in his view, make us realize the importance of providing convincing arguments in favor of a just and well-ordered constitutional democracy. “Debates about general philosophical questions”, he says, “cannot be the daily stuff of politics, but that does not make these questions without significance, since what we think their answers are will shape the underlying attitudes of the public culture and the conduct of politics.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 10 , Issue 1: CARL SCHMITT , January 1997 , pp. 21 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 1997

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References

1. Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 (paperback)) at lxi.Google Scholar

2. I would have thought that everybody was able to understand that it was possible to use, so to speak, Schmitt against Schmitt, i.e, to use the insights of his critique of liberalism in order to consolidate liberalism—while recognizing that this was, of course, not his aim. However, it does not seem to be the case since Scheuerman, Bill in his book Between the Norm and the Exception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar at 8 criticizes me for presenting Schmitt as a theorist of radical pluralist democracy!

3. Held, David, Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995).Google Scholar

4. Falk, Richard, On Human Governance (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995) ch. 7.Google Scholar

5. Schmitt, Carl, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) at 9.Google Scholar

6. Ibid. at 9.

7. Supra note 5 at 13.

8. Ibid. at 9.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid. at 11.

11. Ibid. at 12.

12. I have made a similar argument concerning the tension that exists between the articulation of the liberal logic of difference and the democratic logic on equivalence in my discussion of Schmitt in The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993) chs. 7 and 8.Google ScholarPubMed

13. Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976) at 70.Google Scholar

14. For a critique of the Rawlsian model and its incapacity to acknowledge the political nature of the discrimination that it establishes between ‘simple’ and ‘reasonable pluralism’, see my article “Democracy and Pluralism: A Critique of the Rationalist Approach” (1995) 16:5 Cardozo, L. Rev. 1533.Google Scholar

15. Benhabib, Seyla, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy” (1994) 1 Constellations 30.Google Scholar

16. Ibid, at 31.

17. This, of course, takes place in a different way in both authors. Rawls relegates pluralism to the private sphere while Habermas screens it out, so to speak, from the public sphere through the procedures of argumentation. However, in both cases the result is the elimination of pluralism from the public sphere.

18. Schmitt, Carl, supra note 13 at 35.Google Scholar

19. Ibid. at 53.

20. Supra note 18 at 45

21. Schmitt, Carl, “Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat” (1930) 35 Kantstudien 1 at 31.Google Scholar

22. Ibid. at 34.

23. Ibid. at 41.

24. Jean-François, Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt: Le Politique entre Spéculation et Positivité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992) at 259.Google Scholar