Schmittian Moment 12: John Keane On Schmitt

Speaking some years ago in Beijing but with an eye on what he calls our “Shakespearean moment”, times out of joint, thick with surprises, saturated by populisms and anti-political moods, political theorist John Keane frames Schmitt not as a curio of Weimar but as a live wire running through contemporary politics. The result is a lucid tour of Schmitt’s core claims and a warning about their seductions.

Keane begins with the scandal of Schmitt: a brilliant jurist and political philosopher whose most famous work, The Concept of the Political, was incubated in the turbulence of the 1920s and republished on the eve of his joining the Nazi Party. Keane neither sanitises that fact nor treats it as incidental. He wants us to see how Schmitt’s concepts - friend/enemy, sovereignty as decision, the total state, dictatorship - were forged as interventions in a perceived crisis and then put to work to justify a catastrophic regime. That genealogy matters.

From there Keane maps seven interlocking themes. First, Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Schmitt depicts nineteenth-century liberalism as the doctrine of the weak state: jealous of public power, devoted to protecting the property-owning individual through law, Parliament and talk. Its institutional soul is deliberation; its social spirit is money. Liberal parliaments are engines of negotiation where truth supposedly emerges from open discussion; liberal societies lean on markets to pacify conflicts. Schmitt thinks this self-portrait is naïve and, in any case, crumbling.

That sets up the second theme: a “spiritual crisis” of liberal parliamentarism. Mass parties, class conflict, revolutionary movements and the shock of the Great War expose the impotence of proceduralism. Words and prices cannot arbitrate existential conflicts. The parliamentary promise, the force of the better argument, dissolves into trench warfare of parties and interests. Keane stresses that for Schmitt the crisis is not a bug but the revelation of politics’ essence.

Third comes Schmitt’s heterodox account of democracy. Against the easy pairing of “liberal democracy”, he insists the two pull in different directions. Liberalism exalts the individual and limits power; democracy invokes the people, equality and homogeneity, and so tends to empower the state. Schmitt’s democratic imaginary is Rousseauian and majoritarian: equality for insiders, exclusion of outsiders. Hence his provocation that the British Empire could be “democratic” at home while ruling others, an argument that exposes the moral abyss opened by defining “the people” in homogeneous, boundary-policing terms.

Fourth, the “total state”. Not “totalitarian” in the sense later popularised, but a comprehensive state swollen by democratic pressures for welfare and protection, organising society’s conflicts rather than abstaining from them. For Schmitt this is the horizon of modern politics: a state that legislates, administers, polices and fights, able to act decisively amid antagonisms. Keane underscores that this is the conceptual bridge by which Schmitt walks from critique of liberalism to admiration for strong state capacity.

Fifth, the concept of the political itself. Here Schmitt’s anthropological pessimism bites. Humans are not naturally harmonious; conflict is irreducible; politics is defined by the friend/enemy distinction. “Enemy” is not a polite “opponent”: it names the possibility of existential negation culminating in war. All high talk of “humanity” or universal morality looks anti-political from this vantage. Words, concepts, images - “democracy”, “civil society”, “sovereignty” - are not neutral but weapons in struggles. Keane shows how this polemical ontology turns politics into a field where ethics follows force rather than constraining it.

Sixth, sovereignty. Schmitt’s famous decisionism defines the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception, who, in crisis, cuts through indeterminacy and declares what must be done. The echo of theological “miracle” is deliberate: normal law cannot ground itself; at the limit, an authority must decide. Keane notes the Hobbesian bargain lurking here: protection in exchange for obedience, with civil war as the nightmare that justifies concentration of power.Finally, dictatorship. Schmitt distinguishes sovereign dictatorship (transformative, remaking the constitution - think Bolshevism) from commissarial dictatorship (temporary emergency rule to “save” the existing order). Keane highlights how attractive Schmitt found the commissarial form; it is the legal casing of emergency, the pathway by which exceptional measures are normalised in the name of order. It is also the road by which Schmitt became “crown jurist” for the Third Reich.

As a reconstruction, Keane’s lecture is exemplary: precise, historically situated, philosophically alert. Its deeper value lies in the discussion it provokes. There is genuine diagnostic power in Schmitt’s insistence on conflict. He saw with unnerving clarity that parliaments can decay into cartelised bargaining, that political language is never fully innocent, that emergencies tempt executives to step beyond law, that appeals to “humanity” are easily weaponised by empires. The friend/enemy lens, however stark, does illuminate populist styles of rule today, where leaders elevate a purified “people”, brand opponents as enemies, and promise to sweep aside the fetters of legality and debate. Keane’s opening portrait of a world “out of joint” gives Schmitt immediate resonance.

Yet the costs of Schmitt’s vision are not incidental; they are built into its foundations. His caricature of liberalism as money-and-talk misses its adaptive capacities. Historically, liberal constitutionalism has absorbed democratic demands through rights, welfare legislation and institutional redesign without annihilating pluralism. Deliberation, properly conceived, does not presume harmony; it institutionalises contestation under conditions of publicity, reciprocity and revisability. Habermas is not Mill with a microphone; he reconstructs norms that make disagreement productive rather than fatal. Schmitt reduces this to prettified impotence because he begins by denying that language can ever discipline power.

Similarly, the claim that democracy requires homogeneity blocks a more demanding understanding of democratic equality as the fair management of deep difference. It opens the door to ethnonational projects that exact “unity” by expelling or subjugating others. Schmitt’s British Empire example is meant as realist diagnosis, but it morphs easily into apology for domination. Keane’s emphasis on this edge is apt: the path from homogeneity to exclusion is short, and Schmitt walks it.

The “total state” also looks less neutral than Schmitt pretends. A capacious administrative state can indeed deliver social protection, but the same capacities, when concentrically aligned with decisionist sovereignty, enable the construction of permanent emergencies. Commissarial dictatorship rarely remains “temporary” unless tightly chained by sunset clauses, judicial review, legislative oversight and a culture of restraint. Schmitt distrusts precisely these chains; his theory celebrates the hand that cuts them. Once the exception is normalised, the threshold for naming enemies falls, and the friend/enemy machine devours constitutional life from within.

Schmitt’s anthropology deserves pushback as well. Conflict is ineradicable; violence is not. Humans are neither lambs nor wolves by essence; institutions and norms shape behaviour over time. The point of constitutional democracy is not to abolish antagonism but to transmute it, away from existential enmity and towards regulated rivalry. That is why agonistic thinkers recast enemies as adversaries, and why the distinction between opponent and enemy is politically precious. Schmitt collapses it; Keane’s account quietly urges us to rebuild it.Sovereignty as decision has its own romance, the strong hand in the storm, but the image is misleading in modern polities whose power is dispersed across courts, councils, agencies, central banks, independent media, international regimes and sub-national governments. Emergencies still come; decisions still matter; but the real question is how to distribute and bound decisive capacities so that no one hand can turn crisis into alibi. Here Schmitt is a brilliant negative teacher. He shows where the rails give way; constitutionalists must lay better track.

Keane’s “Shakespearean” framing is finally the right one. Our moment does feel out of joint. That very mood fertilises Schmittian temptations: disdain for procedure, lust for unity, impatience with doubt, the glamour of decisive leaders. The lesson of the lecture is not that Schmitt should be cancelled; it is that he should be read against himself. Take seriously his x-ray of conflict and crisis; refuse his cure. Invest instead in practices that tame the political without denying it: robust rights, independent courts, honest parties, open media, public spheres plural enough to keep words sharp but not mortal, emergency powers that expire by design, and a democratic ethic that names opponents as opponents, not enemies. If Keane’s patient exposition makes that harder to forget the next time the drumbeat for “order” begins, it will have done more than summarise a dangerous book; it will have armed us against it.