ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (2001 [1942]) (Land and Sea: A Consideration on World History) has not received the attention that it merits. Written in 1942, during a period in which Germany was at war on several fronts, and Schmitt himself having withdrawn from the public limelight due to the attacks by the SS that threatened his life,1 the book could be read as an act of resistance, even as a veiled critique of the Nazi regime.2 It can also be read as the register of a major paradigm change in Schmitt’s own thinking, and as the testament to what Nicolaus Sombart called a ‘intellectual and moral midlife-crisis’ (Sombart, 1984, 251, original emphasis). Land and Sea, at the very least, has to be read as a conceptual bridge between his The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (2008 [1938]) and his The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (2003 [1950]). While the central ideas of the Nomos book are all anticipated, although not fully developed, in Land and Sea, this book takes up where the Hobbes book leaves off, namely on the ‘meaning and failure of a political symbol’. It can be said that Land and Sea is Schmitt’s answer to his own assessment of Hobbes’ failure to see through and beyond his own evocative political symbol of the leviathan (Nowak, 2008). In contrast to these two other books, which are circumscribed and specialized, Land and Sea is wide-ranging, encyclopaedic, poetic and philosophically provocative. If there is a book that contains Schmitt’s philosophy, it is this. Additionally, thoughtful consideration of this book will also reveal that Schmitt’s thought had undergone a major theoretical shift between 1938 and 1942. In a very general sense it can be said that from the 1920s through to the late 1930s Schmitt’s theoretical position had to do with ‘the political’ and the relationship between the sovereign, the state and the law. This general period can be labelled the ‘decisionist’ phase of his thinking, which is captured in the phrase: ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy’ (Schmitt, 2007 [1927], 26). This formulation could be rephrased in the following way, paraphrasing Schmitt himself (2007 [1927], 52): The decision as to who is a friend and who is an enemy is the ground of the sovereignty of the state. Thus, ‘protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of
ground of all law [Raumordnung].3 The central pivot of Schmitt’s new thinking is expressed in the formulation ‘Jede Grundordnung is eine Raumordnung’ [Every fundamental order is a spatial order] (2001 [1942], 71). Nomos, law, to use its most approximate translation, is no longer conceived as emanating from the decision of a sovereign, but from an original ‘appropriation, distribution, production’ that establishes a new spatial order (2003 [1950], 324). Law is now conceived spatially (Palaver, 1996). It could be said, then, that the new cogito ergo sum of the state, as a spatial ordering that grounds the law, would be ego conquiro ergo obligo (Dussel, 1985, 3). For this reason, the exclusive focus on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political that has marked the reception and rediscovery of Schmitt in contemporary political theory is a distortion of Schmitt’s own intellectual itinerary and what he in fact contributed to the understanding of law, politics and the history of political philosophy. At the same time, we must be critical of the uses that can be made of Schmitt in international law and contemporary geopolitics (see Elden in this volume).
