ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt is often understood as an intellectual forerunner of the hard-nosed, power politics modeling of inter-state relations developed in the social and behavioral sciences, post-1945. Schmitt’s realist credentials in part reflect his Weimar-era relationship with Hans J. Morgenthau, so-called “founding father” of the discipline of international relations at the University of Chicago. But there is also the fact that Schmitt’s writings on sovereignty, war, and the immutability of conflict, particularly in the guise of his well-cited friendenemy relation, read intuitively as a sort of proto-realism. So, for example, Williams (2005, 93) summarizes Schmitt’s friend-enemy relation and defense of sovereign decisionism as an illiberal realpolitik focused on a “mythologized unity of nation and state within a defining context of enmity.” Chandler (2008, 37), contra various poststructuralist appropriations of Schmitt, likewise describes him as properly “the founding theorist of a geopolitical framework of international relations.” Burchard (2006) too argues that if Schmitt’s rendering of politics as a mass-scale public phenomenon (hostis, not inimicus) is not specific to states, it nonetheless lends itself to a “Westphalian” inter - pretation of the political as a heterogeneous pluriverse of states constituted through strife. Others see Schmitt as an “institutional realist” because of his emphasis on rules that have tempered inter-state politics since 1648 (Zarmanian 2006). Critical international relations scholars too, while warning of the dangers of a “hyper-realist” take on Schmitt (Odysseos and Petito 2008), have traced realism’s “dangerous ontology” of inter-state warfare in part to Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction (Huysmans 1998; Odysseos 2002).
