Abstract
In his Foreword to the 1963 edition of Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt admits that the text of 1932 contained a major lacuna — a lacuna, he adds, that was pointed out to him by ‘a Frenchman, Julien Freund’ and ‘an American, George Schwab’. He explains: ‘the main deficiency [of Concept of the Political] lies in the fact that the different types of enemy — conventional, real or absolute — are not separated and distinguished with sufficient clarity and precision’.1 The clearest understanding of the differences between conventional, real and absolute hostility can be gained from the Theory of the Partisan which was published by Schmitt at about the same time as the Foreword to Concept of the Political.
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Notes
‘Der Hauptmangel in der Sache liegt darin, daβ die vershiedenen Arten des Feindes — konventioneller, wirklicher oder absoluter Feind — nicht deultich und präzise genug getrennt und unterschieden werden.’ C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 5th edn (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), p. 17.
See for example C. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, [1950] 2002), p. 69.
C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [1932] 1996), p. 34.
C. Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, [1963] 1975), p. 39.
‘Auch der Feind hat einen Status; er ist kein Verbrecher’, C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 5th edn (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), p. 11.
C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, p. 11. A similar idea was put across in A. Brenet, La France et l’Allemagne devant le droit international, pendant les operations militaries de la guerre 1870–71 (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1902).
K. Nabulsi, Traditions of War: Occupation, Resistance, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5.
D. Graber, The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation 1863–1914: A Historical Survey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).
R. Guelff and A. Roberts, Documents on the Laws of War, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 54–5.
M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd edn (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
The following quotation from a veteran of Vietnam seems to support Schmitt’s insight: ‘It was no orderly campaign [...] but a war for survival waged in a wilderness without rules or laws; a war in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring who he killed in that personal cause or how many or in what manners and feeling only contempt for those who sought to impose on his savage struggle the mincing distinctions of civilized warfare — that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war’, Caputo quoted in A.J. Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 27.
E. Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political (London: Westport, 2001), p. 156.
C. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, [1950] 1997), p. 299.
V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 11.
A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 60.
Important contributions to this debate can be found in J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997)
G. Marramao, ‘The Exile of the Nomos: for a critical profile of Carl Schmitt’ in Cardozo Law Review, 21 (2000) 1577–87.
B. Arditi, ‘On the Political: Schmitt contra Schmitt’, Telos, 142 (Spring 2008) 7–28
P. Stirk, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordung’, History of Political Thought, 20:2 (1999) 357–74.
See C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), pp. 140–1.
R. Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (London: Routledge, 1983).
I discuss this G. Slomp, ‘Kant Against Hobbes: Reasoning and Rhetoric’, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 4:2 (2007) 208–23.
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© 2009 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2009). Hostility: Historical and Conceptual Forms. In: Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234673_5
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