The Concept of Modern Democracy in Relation to the Concept of the State - Carl Schmitt
This is a review of Richard Thoma’s Der Begriff der modernen Demokratie in seinem Verhältnis zum Staatsbegriff. First published in 1924.
Thoma defines the concept of modern democracy according to the “prevailing linguistic usage”. In his view, any state based on “the foundation of universal and equal suffrage” is democratic. The democratic ideal of freedom and equality certainly allows us to distinguish between radical (egalitarian) and liberal (anti-egalitarian) democracy; egalitarian democracy systematically leads to referendums on all important issues, economically to communism, whereas liberal democracy regards legal equality alone as the basis of social life, freely developing the natural inequality of men; constitutionally the tension between the two ideals of freedom and equality is reflected in two types of modern democracy, representative and mixed (the latter is a radical democracy, with elements of referendum, popular initiative, recall, etc., as pure direct democracy is virtually impossible). But for this concept universal and equal suffrage for all adult citizens (not necessarily including women) is always essential. Once this “basis” is constitutionally established, the legal and scientific considerations must take on democratic form, without raising further questions about the real sovereign. For democracy is a legal concept. But modern democracy means more than a mere form of state (such as parliamentary monarchy or the various republican forms of state) it can take various forms, since even in a monarchy universal and equal suffrage can be the “foundation of the whole.” The only exclusive opposition to democracy is any form of privileged state. The old Aristotelian tripartite division - monarchy, aristocracy and democracy - can no longer be used to understand modern democracy.
So much for the partly terminological, partly methodological explanations of the first chapter.
The second chapter similarly defines the modern state and recognises the dual concept of the state. The old, original conception of the state is the real and concrete “status” of the means of power in the hands of individual rulers and their organisations, i.e. the “power-presiding ruling group” of the people. The more modern view, on the other hand, sees the state as “the totality of the relationship between the ruling organisation, the people, and the country”, turning the state into a collective. Both conceptions of the state are correct, there is “no right” between them, one can only distinguish correctly between them. Thoma recommends a more correct use of language, namely “to call the State only that entity which the common language and most jurists so designate, that is the union of the people in a territory under an associative organisation which cannot be perceived by the senses, which can never be realised in all its nominal content.” The state is an entity which has to observe legal and ethical norms, but there is another “complication”: the validity of these norms can only be confirmed if they are a real motive of behaviour for enough people, so that only “the interaction between the ideal normative essence and the reality of a certain effective recognition” gives the state. It is only within this general concept of value that the concepts of interpretation differ according to their epistemological goals: political history (the state as historical-political authority), political economy (the state as a regulator and factor in economic life) and ethics (the state as an ideal entity to which people owe and which has obligations). For sociology as understood by Max Weber, the state is a totality of actions, omissions, and individual willingness to act, with various motives that result in the domination of a multitude of orders (in varying degrees) over a much larger number of obedient ones; here, therefore, individual behaviour is the only real thing in social events, and the legal concept of the state, creating unity over diversity, is synthetic. The state therefore has neither a legal ‘side’ nor a sociological ‘side’, nor a ‘dual nature’; it is not social at all, but a ‘construction of reason’. The legal conception of the state (state = collective) is the extreme of the synthetic approach, the sociological conception of the state (state = complex producing the dominance of several social forms of behaviour) is the extreme of the analytical approach. The question of what the state itself is remains unanswered, since it is a metaphysical question.