Against Illusion: Carl Schmitt and the Reality of Power

Carl Schmitt stands as one of the few jurists of the last century who dared to speak the most elemental of truths: law and politics are inseparable, for every constitution rests not upon principle but upon power, and power in the end is force, the capacity to command and, if need be, to wield violence. No legal order is upheld by parchment and procedure alone; it endures only so long as an authority remains that is willing to defend it. We do not read Schmitt out of antiquarian curiosity but because the falsehoods he unmasked still govern our world. Liberal regimes preach neutrality, balance, and debate, yet they recoil from the fact that politics is never neutral, that every people has enemies as well as friends, and that to deny this truth is to prepare the way for violence in its most barbarous form. Schmitt gave this its sharpest expression in what he named the state of exception, the moment when sovereignty steps forth from behind procedure and discloses the foundations upon which every political order rests.

This recognition pierces the vainglory of modern democracies, which promise security while yielding paralysis. We behold it whenever crises erupt and institutions devised for procedure prove incapable of decision. The courts multiply injunctions, legislatures dissolve in quarrel, executives defer responsibility, and the state itself falters while rivals, parties, lobbies, bureaucracies, even foreign powers, seize the initiative. Schmitt saw that a regime which refuses to confront the hard truth of sovereignty creates a void that others will hasten to fill. To begin with him, therefore, is not to indulge in theory but to recover a severe clarity: that politics, stripped of illusion, is a contest over who commands, who obeys, and who possesses the will to decide when law no longer suffices.

To read Schmitt today is to feel the sting of recognition, for the maladies he diagnosed in his own age abide still in ours. His words were shaped by the tempests of his time, yet the dilemmas he described extend far beyond them. We live beneath systems that mistake procedure for substance and weakness for virtue, that extend rights in proclamation while dissolving the power that alone can secure them. Governments invoke democracy without defining the people in whose name they claim to rule, proclaim peace while entangling themselves in wars abroad, and exalt equality while yielding authority to oligarchies veiled as neutral institutions. Schmitt’s lesson is that such contradictions cannot endure. They culminate, as they ever have, in moments when the elemental ground of power reasserts itself and sovereignty passes to him who has the will to seize it.

For Schmitt, the fever dream of liberalism, of a politics reduced to administration, of order without force and unity without decision, was not a mark of progress but of decay, and a denial of reality. Parliamentary chambers spoke endlessly of rights, freedoms, and humanity, yet in practice they neutralized the state’s capacity to defend its people. By mistaking weakness for virtue and compromise for wisdom, they displaced real decisions into hollow procedure. His diagnosis, read today, explains the paralysis of our own putative democracies in the face of an ever-mounting succession of crises. Institutions that profess to embody principles which exist only as abstractions reveal themselves incapable of decisive action, while parasitic parties and moneyed interests surrender ground to ethnic forces that hasten to occupy the space abandoned by sovereignty in retreat. What he offered was neither a summons to restore the past nor a demand to overthrow the present, but the sober recognition that politics, in its essence, is conflict, and that no people can withstand the test of time if it refuses to know its enemies, within or without, and to affirm its unity by acting against them.

From this recognition there issues Schmitt’s first lesson: conflict is no accident of history but the abiding horizon of collective life.

“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

The Concept of the Political

By this he signified the friend–enemy distinction, so oft cited, so seldom understood, and more often still caricatured: the line a people draws in order to know those who imperil its existence and to affirm its own being against them. This was no celebration of violence for its own sake, nor an exaltation of war as an ideal. It was the recognition that enmity is ever possible, that it inheres in the structure of human life, for life among men is ever conflict and struggle. Treaties may be concluded, institutions refined, yet peoples will ever discover differences they deem essential, and they will defend them, if need be, with blood. Order itself depends upon this recognition. To deny it is to prepare the ground for ruin. Our age, however, is defined precisely by such denial. Rulers proclaim that borders are obsolete, that nations may be dissolved into a formless humanity without limit, that inclusion has extinguished the very memory of antagonism. The consequence is ever the same: the divisions they repress return with greater ferocity, for the attempt to erase conflict only sharpens its reappearance.

Schmitt’s second lesson concerns the meaning of sovereignty. In Political Theology he delivered the definition that has become his most renowned:

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

This definition was no rhetorical flourish but a distillation of political reality: law depends upon authority, and no rule sustains itself. Every order rests upon the readiness to wield force, for without the possibility of violence authority dissolves into illusion. Schmitt pressed the point further with a deeper observation:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”

Here he laid bare the hidden structure of modern politics: sovereignty draws its weight from theological origins transposed into secular form. What once belonged to God and divine revelation now belongs to the state and to decision. At first it may seem an abstraction, yet its force lies in stripping politics to its core. Sovereignty is disclosed not in the daily application of rules, nor in the quiet routines of administration, but in the moment when order falters, when law no longer suffices, and when survival demands decision. The sovereign is not a mere functionary bound by regulation but the figure who proclaims that an exception has come and who acts to preserve the political community in the face of it.

This insight was born of experience. Schmitt lived in an age when constitutions were revered as sacred texts, invoked as though their authority were self-sustaining and severed from the contingencies of history. Yet every genuine crisis revealed the contrary. Paper cannot defend itself, tribunals cannot hold ground, legal formulas avail nothing when the very existence of the state is imperiled. In such moments sovereignty appears in its starkest form, not in procedure but in decision, not in rules but in the act that restores order. To decide upon the exception is to lay bare the foundation of political life, to show that law presupposes authority, and that without a will to enforce and defend it no order can stand.

Liberalism recoiled from this truth because it contradicted its central illusion: that legality is autonomous, that norms sustain themselves, that peace has been made permanent. For Schmitt this was the most perilous of delusions, for it encouraged states to deny the very power upon which their laws depended. Every statute requires an enforcer, every constitution presupposes a defender. Neutrality and delay do not avert conflict; they sharpen it. A state that refuses to decide, that abdicates its sovereign capacity, invites others to seize it, whether partisans within its borders or enemies beyond them.

Sovereignty, then, was for Schmitt not a matter of arbitrary will but of political strength, of the ability to recognize when norms have failed and to act beyond them in defense of the community. Far from a license for tyranny, it was the sober recognition that survival itself depends upon authority willing to suspend rules when necessity demands it. To conceal this fact beneath the veneer of legality is to wager the life of a people on the fiction that law sustains itself. To confront it is to accept that every order rests upon the will to defend it, and that the fate of a nation may turn upon the courage of a sovereign act. This, for Schmitt, was the scandal that liberal theory could not endure but that political reality will never cease to prove.

His third lesson concerned parliamentarism. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy he contended that representative institutions had once possessed real strength, but only because they rested upon a deeper social unity. Where a people shared race, tongue, faith, and custom, debate could be conducted openly without imperiling cohesion. The chamber could serve as a forum in which common convictions were refined, and argument could sharpen rather than dissolve loyalty. Once that homogeneity waned, parliament became hollow, no longer grounded in the realities of existence but sustained instead by abstractions spun from utopian fancy. Debate no longer sought truth or the common good but declined into bargaining among rival and contradictory interests, rhetoric concealing the fact that decisions were already determined elsewhere. What had once been an organ of deliberation was reduced to theater, its rituals masking the disappearance of real authority.

“Democracy requires, first, homogeneity and, second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”

The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

Schmitt exposed the contradiction at the heart of liberal impartiality. Parliaments boasted of openness, of their capacity to give every voice a hearing, yet this multiplication of perspectives destroyed the very possibility of persuasion. Where no common ground remained, compromise became the sole path to agreement, and compromise meant that principle yielded to expedience. As factions multiplied, so too did the weight of money and influence, for in an endless contest of voices only wealth and power could secure an outcome. The claim of parliament to embody the people was inverted: it no longer articulated unity but dissolved it, no longer refined decisions but concealed the fact that decisions had already been seized by powers outside its walls—bureaucracies, lobbies, courts, and oligarchs wielding influence without accountability.

This decline was no accident of circumstance but the inmost truth of liberalism itself. By mistaking procedural openness for strength, liberal theory celebrated precisely what eroded the state’s capacity to inspire loyalty and command sacrifice. As the authority of parliament waned, cynicism spread among the people, who saw that their professed representatives were neither sovereign nor decisive but actors upon a hollow stage. Schmitt warned that such a state, incapable of affirming unity, invites the rise of forces that will define enemies and friends in its place. Politics does not vanish in the neutral chamber; it reappears outside it, often in sharper and more destructive forms. The refusal of the state to affirm substance leaves a void that will inevitably be filled, not by reasoned persuasion but by naked power.

From this point Schmitt advanced to a broader principle: the state does not exist to arbitrate consumer preference or to maximize comfort, but to embody the unity of a people. It is the vessel of their history, the guardian of their continuity, and the form in which their willingness to sacrifice for one another is made visible. That unity rests upon ancestral bonds, upon the blood that is received from forebears, upon the tongue that carries memory, and upon the faith that binds the living to the dead, without which no lasting solidarity can arise. A regime that abdicates this role does not abolish politics; it merely allows politics to seep into other domains, where it is seized by factions and by private powers eager to define enemies and friends in the state’s absence. This is why Schmitt judged liberal neutrality a fraud. A state that refuses to name its enemies is not more humane or enlightened; it merely cedes the ground to others who will do so with less restraint. The void created by refusal is never empty for long, for power cannot abide a vacuum. It presses in to occupy the breach, and those who claim to stand above conflict discover that they have merely surrendered their authority to rivals who recognize no such illusions.

Schmitt understood that no community can be sustained by rational calculation alone. Rules and procedures may order daily life, but they cannot forge the deeper loyalty without which no society endures. Beyond law and administration there must remain an ethnocultural inheritance, a vision of destiny, and a living myth that transcends mere interest. Liberal societies, given over to skepticism and consumed by relativism, proved incapable of supplying this. Their appeals to “humanity” and “universal peace” masked economic imperialism abroad and exhaustion at home, an exhaustion that was demographic in character, that was material in substance, and that was spiritual in depth. Their utterances unraveled loyalties rather than giving them form, and in place of a living myth they offered abstractions that stirred no devotion.

By contrast, even an imperfect national myth bears a power that liberal universalism cannot rival. It binds a people to their land, to their dead, to their inheritance, and to their posterity. It reminds them that they are not an assemblage of solitary individuals but a people bound across the generations. It stirs men to risk their lives not for abstractions but for that which unites them with their ancestors and obliges them to their descendants. Schmitt discerned that such myths were no idle ornaments but the very foundation of political survival. Without them the state becomes little more than an administrative machine, presiding over a population of atomized souls who no longer behold themselves as a people. And such a state, stripped of its unifying principle, dissolves into the formless mass of global commerce and pacifist illusion.

Societies that refuse to cultivate these sources of unity sink into weakness: their populations fragment, their rulers lose the capacity to decide, and their fate is delivered to powers that do not hesitate to name friend and enemy in their stead. Schmitt’s relevance abides in compelling us to see that without a unifying principle of loyalty and sacrifice no state can withstand the forces of dissolution that encompass it.

This was the deeper meaning of Schmitt’s warning concerning Europe’s decline. In The Nomos of the Earth he described the jus publicum Europaeum, the European law of nations, which for centuries restrained war among sovereign states and confined violence within limits. It was not peace in the liberal sense, but a disciplined order that recognized the legitimacy of states as actors and prevented conflict from collapsing into total destruction. That structure began to unravel in the twentieth century with the rise of the post-1945 order, which recast the world in moral rather than political terms. Liberal humanitarianism promised to transcend sovereignty and abolish conflict in the language of universal rights; yet in practice it dissolved the very restraints that had sustained Europe’s geopolitical balance. Wars were no longer waged between recognized powers within a fixed set of civilized rules, but redefined as crusades against inhumanity, conflicts in which the enemy was no longer a legitimate adversary but a criminal to be punished or a blasphemy to be purged.

“To confiscate the word ‘humanity’ is to attempt to deny the enemy the quality of being human. This dehumanization turns war into an absolute war of annihilation.”

The Nomos of the Earth

Here Schmitt discerned the rise of a new and more perilous barbarism. When war is waged in the name of humanity, it ceases to know restraint. To cast the enemy not as a rival but as an embodiment of evil is to strip him of legal status and place him beyond every boundary of order. The humanitarian tongue professed to abolish conflict, yet in truth it rendered war more frequent, more moralized, and more destructive. It did not abolish enmity; it consecrated it. War ceased to be a contest among powers and became a prosecution in the name of morality, conducted in the language of good and evil, boundless in scope and unrestrained in means. The displacement of political order by moral abstraction was not a path to peace but a descent into total war, the very opposite of the concord it claimed to bestow.

Europe, in Schmitt’s eyes, had abandoned the hard-won wisdom of its political tradition. It had cast aside the disciplined equilibrium of sovereignty and statecraft for the childish delusions of limitless progress and conflictless peace. It exchanged a system that acknowledged limits for vain utterance that denied them, and in so doing it unleashed unbridled violence, corrupted yet further by the fervor of a new secular faith. The lesson he pressed is immediate: to replace politics with morality is not to transcend conflict but to unchain it in its most absolute form. When order is grounded upon universal claims, every war becomes a holy war, every use of force a crusade, every adversary a heretic to be destroyed.

The gravity of Schmitt’s insight is this: politics cannot be abolished, for conflict endures inseparably in the life of man. To deny this truth is the utopian conceit born of the revolutionary doctrines first unleashed in the French Revolution and renewed in every upheaval thereafter, each presuming to refashion man without strife, without enemies, without history. This dream, ever reappearing in new guises throughout the modern age, has been the seed of the paralysis and decay that now encompass us. Conflict may be veiled or suppressed, yet it ever returns, and after denial it reemerges with greater ferocity. Liberalism strove to dissolve the political into commerce and law, into the phantoms of abstraction of a formless humanity; and in this unreality it fashioned an order enfeebled and brought low by its own instability. States lost the will to defend themselves, parliaments degenerated into theater, and peoples ceased to believe in their right to unity and with it to generational continuity, those twin requisites without which no nation survives. Schmitt compels us to behold that conflict never vanishes, that sovereignty cannot be interred beneath procedure, and that a nation which forsakes the principle that sustains it heaps the kindling upon its own funeral pyre. To read him now is to strip away illusion and to confront the question from which no order escapes: who decides, and who has the will to preserve the life of a people.