POLITICAL, THE.

The word political derives from a Latin cognate (politicus ) of the original Greek adjective politikos, which is also sometimes employed as a masculine noun to signify a public official or statesman.

Origins

The term thus originates in the ancient world, where it was typically applied to the features and qualities of a life based in the polis, delineating the uniquely civic existence led by its citizens from other modes of life. In Roman antiquity, Greek terminology for the polis disappeared in favor of civitas (which can refer to the city, but also to the condition of being a citizen) and related words derived from the Latin world of the Roman Republic. But under the influence of Aristotle, medieval Europe became reacquainted with the Greek vocabulary, employing it interchangeably with the Latin and, later, incorporating it into vernacular languages. Early modern authors referred repeatedly to "political society" and similar doctrines. Subsequently, social researchers have maintained that politics, like other human endeavors, should be the subject of scientific study, creating the modern discipline of "political science."

Current Usage

Precisely understood, the nominalization of the adjective "political" to construct the political, an abstract noun that demarcates a unique realm of existential experience, reflects an entirely modern development along with the influence of German philosophy on the contemporary lexicon of political theory. While in the early twenty-first century it enjoys broad circulation conveying a range of meanings that traverse the spectrum of contemporary political theory, this usage can be traced to the controversial German legal scholar, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), whose treatise on The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen) appeared in 1932.

Schmitt contends that the concept of the political is integral to the idea—and therefore to the intelligibility as well as ultimately the viability—of the state. As he explains at the beginning of The Concept of the Political, "[t]he concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political" (p. 19), for the latter expresses the defining antithesis around which every genuine political order arises. To be precise, the political denotes a fundamental, existential category to which belongs the distinction between friend and enemy. It hence encompasses powers, actions, and institutions tied to the necessity of such a determination, distinguishing them from those that pertain to other elemental categories, such as the moral, the aesthetic, or the economic. Moreover, it necessarily exercises a certain priority over all other categories since it entails, as Schmitt puts it, "the right to demand from [members of the polity] the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies" (p. 46). And by the same token, it conveys the essence of the idea of sovereignty, that is, the authority to make such demands from those claiming membership in the sovereign entity.

An enemy, for Schmitt, is one who threatens the way of life of another. Schmitt therefore represents the state as a collective body whose political character resides most definitively in its ability to identify those who threaten its way of life—its enemies. In Schmitt's words, "the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction" (p. 29). Schmitt does not, however, mean to imply that every state is perpetually faced with war and conflict or that political life consists only of military action. He argued, in fact, that war is neither the aim nor the substance of politics but simply "the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking, and thereby creates a specifically political behavior" (p. 34). That behavior, accordingly, always has the preservation and perpetuation of a certain existence or mode of life as its ultimate impetus and justification. Thus the practice of politics is always tethered to a situation in which war, acknowledged by Schmitt to be the "most extreme" possibility (p. 35), remains nevertheless wholly conceivable.

If the possibility of war should be finally eliminated and the distinction between friend and enemy rendered obsolete, politics too would disappear. A world in which no social entity any longer finds reason to employ the distinction between friend and enemy would, according to Schmitt, include "neither politics nor state," even if "culture, civilization, economics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc." persist (p. 53). Moreover, because politics can never be cordoned off from the possibility of conflict and violence, the attempt to liberate politics from the friend-enemy distinction, an endeavor that Schmitt identified with modern liberalism, leads to an illusionary politics that eventually abandons the state to the play of private interests. Schmitt believed this condition to be in fact the state of affairs that characterized Germany during the Weimar Republic.

Recent Impact

Schmitt had a pronounced if sometimes unacknowledged impact on a number of important German social and political thinkers coming of age in the Weimar period, in particular on leading members of the Frankfurt School such as Walter Benjamin and Otto Kirchheimer. The often uneasy interest of radical left-wing thinkers is largely what enabled Schmitt to exercise a lasting influence on the contours and vocabulary of modern political thought. It is certainly not the case, however, that Schmitt's influence has been limited to thinkers on the left. Among the last century's most important thinkers for conservatives was Leo Strauss, another young student of political philosophy who came to maturity in the Weimar Republic. Strauss's critique of modern liberalism might be said to take its cue from an acknowledgment of Schmitt's achievement in reviving the political.

In more recent decades, both contemporary feminist political theory and select currents of democratic theory have been invigorated by a confrontation with the thought of Schmitt. Feminist champions of an "agonistic politics" have drawn inspiration from Schmitt's treatment of the state, which arises in the first instance as a bulwark against enemies. Schmitt's formulation of the political, moreover, implicitly rejects the liberal subordination of politics to material and economic relations, lending support to feminist assertions of the primacy of politics. Other theorists of contemporary democracy have found in Schmitt's work a powerful critique of liberal democracy that can, however, usefully orient its defenders to the limitations and vulnerabilities of liberal-democratic theory and practice.

See also Liberalism ; Political Science ; Public Sphere ; Sovereignty ; State, The .

bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political (with Leo Strauss's Notes on Schmitt's Essay). Translation, introduction, and notes by George Schwab; with Leo Strauss's notes on Schmitt's essay; translated by J. Harvey Lomax; forward by Tracy B. Strong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

——. Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Translated by Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

——. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Kelly, Duncan. The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. Oxford and New York: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2003.

McCormick, John P. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Mouffe, Chantal, ed. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso Books, 1999.

——. The Return of the Political. London and New York: Verso Books, 1993.

Dwight D. Allman