The Political Theory of Myth - Carl Schmitt

1923

It may be stated from the beginning that our reflection focuses entirely on the ideological basis of political and state-philosophical tendencies in order to recognise the intellectual-historical situation of present-day parliamentarism and the power of the parliamentary idea. If the possibility of a rationalist dictatorship still lay in the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, the doctrines of direct action are all more or less consciously based on a philosophy of irrationality. The reality as it appeared in Bolshevik rule showed that very different currents and tendencies can operate side by side in political life. Although the Bolshevik government suppressed the anarchists for political reasons, the complex in which Bolshevik reasoning actually moves contains distinctly anarcho-syndicalist lines of thought, and the fact that the Bolsheviks use their political power to eradicate anarchism no more annihilates the intellectual-historical affinity than Cromwell's suppression of the Levellers annuls his connection with them. Perhaps Marxism appeared so unrestrained on Russian soil precisely because here proletarian thought was finally detached from all the ties of Western European tradition and all the moral and educational conceptions in which Marx and Engels quite naturally still lived. The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it is officially known today, would be a fine example of how rationalism, conscious of historical development, steps up to the use of violence; also, the countless parallels to the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793 can be shown in the attitude, in the argumentation, in the organisational and administrative implementation, and the whole teaching and educational organisation created by the Soviet government in the so-called “Proletkult” present a splendid case of a radical educational dictatorship. But this does not explain why it is precisely on Russian soil that the ideas of the industrial proletariat of today's great cities have been able to achieve such domination. The reason lies in the fact that new, irrationalist motives for the use of violence were also effective. It is not rationalism turning from extreme exaggeration into its opposite, fantasising in utopias, but a new evaluation of rational thought in general, a new belief in instinct and intuition, which excludes all faith in discussion and also refuses to make humanity ripe for discussion through an educational dictatorship.

Of the writings of the theory of direct action, only Enrico Ferri's “The Revolutionary Method” has actually become known in Germany, thanks to Robert Michel's translation (in Grünberg's collection Hauptwerke des Sozialismus). The following presentation is based on Georges Sorel's “Réflexions sur la violence”, which shows the intellectual-historical context most clearly. The merit of the book is also that it contains numerous original historical and philosophical aperçus and openly acknowledges its intellectual ancestors: Proudhon, Bakunin, and Bergson. Its influence is significantly greater than one might think at first glance, and has certainly not yet reached its limit. Benedetto Croce said of Sorel that he had given a new form to the Marxist dream, but that democratic thought had finally triumphed among the workers. After the events in Russia and Italy, this can no longer be assumed to be so definitive. At the heart of these reflections on violence is the theory of immediate concrete life, taken from Bergson and applied to problems of social life under the influence of two anarchists, Proudhon and Bakunin.

For Proudhon and for Bakunin, anarchism means a struggle against any kind of systematic unity, against the centralising uniformity of the modern state, against the professional parliamentary politicians, against bureaucracy, military, and police, against the belief in God which is perceived as metaphysical centralism. The analogy of the two conceptions of God and state forced itself on Proudhon under the influence of Restoration philosophy. He gave it a revolutionary, anti-state, and anti-theological twist, which Bakunin took to its ultimate conclusion. Concrete individuality, the social reality of life, is violated in all comprehensive systems. The unity fanaticism of the Enlightenment is no less despotic than the unity and identity of modern democracy. Unity is slavery; it is upon centralism and authority that all tyrannical institutions rest, whether sanctioned by universal suffrage or not, as in modern democracy. Bakunin gives this struggle against God and state the character of a struggle against intellectualism and against the traditional form of education in general. He sees in the appeal to the intellect - with good reason - a claim to be the head, the brain of a movement; that is, again, a new authority. Science also does not have the right to rule. It is not life, it creates nothing, it constructs and sustains, but it understands only the general, the abstract, and sacrifices the individual fullness of life on the altar of its abstraction. Art is more important for the life of humanity than science. Such statements by Bakunin are surprisingly consistent with thoughts by Bergson and have been rightly emphasised. From the immediate, immanent life of labour itself, the importance of trade unions and their specific means of struggle, especially the strike, has been recognised. Thus Proudhon and Bakunin became the fathers of syndicalism. It was from this tradition, supported by arguments taken from Bergson's philosophy, that Sorel's thoughts emerged. At their centre is the theory of the myth. It represents the strongest opposition to absolute rationalism and its dictatorship, but also, because it is a doctrine of immediate active choice, to the relative rationalism of the whole complex, grouped around ideas such as balancing, public discussion, and parliamentarism.

The power of action and great heroism, all great historical activity, lies in the capacity for myth. Examples of such myths for Sorel are: the idea of glory and the great name among the Greeks, the expectation of the Last Judgement in ancient Christianity, the belief in “virtu” and revolutionary freedom during the great French Revolution, the national enthusiasm of the German wars of liberation of 1813. In the power of myth lies the criterion for whether a people or another social group has a historical mission and whether or not its historical moment has come. It is from the depth of genuine life instincts, not from a résonnement or a consideration of expediency, that great enthusiasm, great moral decisiveness, and great myth spring. In immediate intuition, an enthusiastic mass creates the mythical image that drives its energy forward and gives it the strength for martyrdom as well as the courage to use violence. Only in this way can a people or a class become the motor of world history. Where this is lacking, no social and political power can be sustained, and no mechanical apparatus can form a dam when a new current of historical life breaks loose. Accordingly, everything depends on where this capacity for myth and this vital force really lives today. It is certainly not to be found in the modern bourgeoisie, the social class that is rotting in fear for money and property, that has been morally shattered by scepticism, relativism, and parliamentarism. The form of rule of this class, modern democracy, is only a “demagogic plutocracy”. So who is the bearer of the great myth today? Sorel seeks to prove that only the socialist masses of the industrial proletariat still have a myth, and that their belief lives in the general strike. It is much less important what the general strike really means today than what faith the proletariat associates with it, what deeds and sacrifices it inspires them to, and whether it is capable of producing a new morality. The belief in the general strike and in a tremendous catastrophe of the whole social and economic life to be brought about by it is therefore part of the life of socialism. It arose from the masses themselves, from the immediacy of industrial-proletarian life, not as an invention of intellectuals and literati, not as a utopia; for utopia, according to Sorel, is a product of the rationalist mind and seeks to master life from without according to a mechanical scheme.

The bourgeois ideal of peaceful understanding, in which everyone finds their advantage and everyone engages in good business, becomes an outgrowth of cowardly intellectualism under the aspects of this philosophy; the discussing, compromising, negotiating appears as a betrayal of the myth and of the great enthusiasm on which everything depends. The mercantile image of balance is countered by another, the martial idea of a bloody, definitive, annihilating, decisive battle. Against parliamentary constitutionalism, this image appeared in 1848 from both sides: from the side of the traditional order in the conservative sense, represented by a Catholic Spaniard, Donoso Cortes, and in the radical anarcho-syndicalism of Proudhon. Both demand a decision. All the thoughts of the Spaniard move around the great struggle (la gran contienda), around the terrible catastrophe that is imminent and which can only be misjudged by the metaphysical cowardice of a debating liberalism; and Proudhon, for whose thinking the writing “La Guerre et la Paix” is characteristic here, speaks of the Napoleonic battle destroying the opponent, the “Bataille Napoléonienne”. All the violence and violations of rights that belong to the bloody struggle receive, according to Proudhon, their historical sanction. Instead of relative antitheses amenable to parliamentary treatment, absolute antitheses now appear. “The day of radical negations and sovereign affirmations is coming”; no parliamentary discussion can stop it; the people, driven by their instincts, will smash the cathedrals of the sophists – all utterances by Donoso which could literally have come from Sorel, except that the anarchist is on the side of the instincts of the people. For Donoso, radical socialism is something grander than liberal transigency because it goes back to the ultimate problems and gives a decisive answer to radical questions, because it has a theology. Proudhon in particular is the opponent here, not because he was the socialist most mentioned in 1848, against whom Montalembert had made a famous parliamentary speech, but because he radically advocates a radical principle. The great Spaniard despaired in the face of the stupid cluelessness of the legitimists and the cowardly cunning of the bourgeoisie. Only in socialism did he still see what he called instinct (el instinto), from which he concluded that in the long run all parties work for it. In this way, the opposites regain spiritual dimensions and often an almost eschatological tension. Unlike the dialectically constructed tension of Hegelian Marxism, this is immediate, intuitive violence and mythical imagery. Marx, from the height of his Hegelian training, could treat Proudhon as a philosophical dilettante and show him how badly he had misunderstood Hegel. Today, with the help of a now modern philosophy, a radical socialist would be able to show Marx that here he was only a schoolmaster and still completely stuck in the intellectualistic overestimation of Western European bourgeois education, while the poor, cast-off Proudhon at any rate possessed the instinct for the real life of working masses. In the eyes of Donoso, the socialist anarchist was an evil demon, a devil, and for Proudhon, the Catholic is a fanatical Grand Inquisitor whom he tries to laugh at. That these were the two real opponents, and everything else only provisional half-measures, is easy to see today.

All the warlike and heroic ideas associated with battle and combat are taken seriously again by Sorel. They are the great impulses of intense life. The proletariat must take the class struggle seriously, as a real struggle, not as a catchword for parliamentary speeches and democratic electoral agitation. It understands this through an instinct of life, not constructing it scientifically, but creating a great myth which gives it the courage for the decisive battle. There is therefore no greater danger to socialism and its class struggle thought than professional politicians and participation in parliamentary business. It wears down the great enthusiasm into gossip and intrigue and kills all the genuine instincts and intuitions from which moral decisiveness springs. What value human life has does not come from a résonnement; it arises in the state of war among men who, animated by great mythical images, take part in the struggle. It depends '“d'un état de guerre auquel les hommes acceptent de participer et qui se traduit en mythes précis”¹ (Réflexions p. 319). Warlike, revolutionary enthusiasm and the expectation of immense catastrophes are part of the intensity of life and move history. But the momentum must come from the masses themselves; ideologues and intellectuals cannot invent it. This is how the revolutionary wars of 1792 came about; this is how the epoch that Sorel celebrates with Renan as the greatest epopoeia of the 19th century, namely the German wars of liberation of 1813, came about. All heroism springs from the irrational vital energy of an anonymous mass.

Any rationalistic interpretation would falsify the immediacy of life. The myth, as mentioned, is not a utopia; for this, a product of ruminative thought, leads at most to reform; the warlike élan must not be confused with militarism; and above all the use of force of this philosophy of irrationality wants to be something other than dictatorship. Sorel, like Proudhon, hates all intellectualism, all centralisation, uniformity, and yet also, like Proudhon, demands the strictest discipline and morality. The great battle will not be a work of scientific strategy, but an “accumulation d'exploits héroïques” and an unleashing of the “force individualiste dans les masses soulevées”² (Réflexions p. 376). Creative violence, as it breaks out of the spontaneity of enthusiastic masses, is consequently something other than dictatorship. Rationalism and all the monisms that follow it, centralisation and uniformity - furthermore, the bourgeois illusions of the great man - belong, according to Sorel, to dictatorship. Its practical result is systematic subjugation, judicial cruelty and a mechanical apparatus. The dictatorship is nothing but a military-bureaucratic-police machine born of rationalist spirit. The revolutionary use of violence by the masses, on the other hand, springs from immediate life, often savage and barbaric, but never systematically cruel and inhuman.

The dictatorship of the proletariat also means for Sorel, as it does for everyone who sees the intellectual-historical context, a repetition of 1793. When the revisionist Bernstein expressed the opinion that this dictatorship would probably be that of a club of orators and literati, he was thinking of the imitation of 1793, and Sorel replies to him (Réflexions, p. 251) : the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat is an inheritance from the ancien régime. Its consequence is to substitute, as the Jacobins did, a new bureaucratic and military apparatus for the old one. That would be a new rule of intellectuals and ideologists, but not proletarian freedom. Engels, who said that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be like 1793, is also a typical rationalist in Sorel's eyes. But it does not follow from this that the proletarian revolution must be revisionist-peaceful-parliamentary. Rather, the mechanically concentrated power of the bourgeois state is replaced by creative proletarian violence, “force” is replaced by “violence”. This is only an act of war, not a juridically and administratively formed measure. Marx did not yet know the distinction because he was still living in the traditional political conceptions. The proletarian non-political syndicates and the proletarian general strike are specifically new methods of struggle which make a repetition of the old political and military means quite impossible. For the proletariat, therefore, there is only one danger that it will allow its means of struggle to be taken out of its hands and paralysed by parliamentary democracy (Réflexions p. 268).

If one is allowed to counter such a decidedly irrationalist theory with arguments, one will have to point out several inconsistencies, not, therefore, errors in the sense of abstract logic, but inorganic contradictions. First of all, Sorel tries to maintain the purely economic basis of the proletarian point of view and, despite some objections, always proceeds resolutely from Marx. He hopes that the proletariat will create a morality of economic producers. The class struggle is a struggle that takes place on an economic basis by economic means. In the previous chapter it was shown that Marx, out of a systematic and logical necessity, followed his opponent, the bourgeois, into the economic field. Here, therefore, the enemy has determined the terrain on which one fights and also the weapons, i.e. the structure of the argumentation. If one follows the bourgeois into the economic field, one will also have to follow him into democracy and parliamentarism. Moreover, without the economic-technical rationalism of bourgeois economics, one will not be able to move, at least for the time being, in the economic field. The mechanism of production created by the capitalist age has a rationalist regularity in it. From a myth one may well draw the courage to smash it; but if it is to be continued, if production is to increase still further, which is of course what Sorel also wants, the proletariat will have to renounce its myth. Like the bourgeoisie, it will fall into a rationalistic and mechanistic mythlessness through the supremacy of the mechanism of production. Here, Marx was also more consistent in the vital sense, because he was more rationalist. But from the irrational point of view, it was a betrayal to want to be even more economic and even more rationalist than the bourgeoisie. Bakunin was quite right to feel this. Marx's education and way of thinking still remained in the traditional, which at that time meant in the bourgeois conception, so that he fell into an intellectual dependence on his opponent. Nevertheless, it was precisely through his construction of the bourgeois that he did indispensable work for the myth in Sorel's sense.

The great psychological and historical importance of myth-theory cannot be denied. The construction of the bourgeois, undertaken with the means of Hegelian dialectics, has also served to create an image of an adversary on whom all the affects of hatred and contempt could be heaped. I believe that the history of this image of the bourgeois is as important as the history of the bourgeois himself. A figure of ridicule first created by aristocrats is perpetuated in the 19th century by Romantic artists and poets. Ever since the impact of Stendhal spread, all literary figures have despised the bourgeois, even when they make a living from it or when they become the favourite reading of a bourgeois audience, as Murger did with his Bohème. More important than such caricatures is the hatred of socially declassed geniuses, like Baudelaire, which always gives new life to the image. Marx and Engels place this figure, created in France by French authors in the face of the French bourgeois, in the dimensions of a world-historical construction. They give it the meaning of the last representative of a humanity divided into classes, the last enemy of humanity in general, the last odium generis humani. Thus the image was infinitely expanded and carried on to the East with a magnificent background that was not only world-historical but also metaphysical. Here it could give new life to the Russian hatred of the complexity, artificiality, and intellectualism of Western European civilisation and receive, itself, new life from it. On Russian soil, all the energies that had created this image came together. Both the Russian and the proletarian now saw in the bourgeois the incarnation of everything that, like a deadly mechanism, sought to subjugate their kind of life.

The image had migrated from the West to the East. Here, however, a myth took possession of it that no longer grew purely out of class struggle instincts, but contained strong national elements. Sorel, as a kind of testament, added an apology for Lenin to the last edition of his Reflections on Violence in 1919. He calls him the greatest theoretician socialism has had since Marx and compares him as a statesman with Peter the Great, except that today, conversely, it is no longer a West European intellectualism that is assimilating Russia, but rather, conversely, the proletarian use of violence has achieved at least one thing here, namely that Russia has become Russian again, Moscow is once more the capital, and that the Europeanised Russian upper class, which despises its own country, has been destroyed. The proletarian use of force has made Russia Muscovite again. In the mouth of an international Marxist, this is strange praise, for it shows that the energy of the national is greater than that of the myth of class struggle. The other examples of myths which Sorel mentions also prove, so far as they fall into more recent times, the superiority of the national. The revolutionary wars of the French people, the Spanish and German struggles for freedom against Napoleon are symptoms of a national energy. In the national feeling, various elements are at work in very different ways among the various peoples: the more natural ideas of race and descent, a “terrisme” apparently more typical of Celtic-Roman tribes; then language, tradition, consciousness of common culture and education, consciousness of a community of destiny, a sensitivity to difference per se – all this moves today in the direction of national rather than class antagonisms. The two can be combined, as exemplified by the friendship between the martyr of the new Irish national consciousness, Padraic Pearse, and the Irish syndicalist Connolly, both of whom died as victims of the 1916 Dublin uprising. A common ideological enemy can also produce a strange coincidence; thus fascism's rejection of Freemasonry coincides with the Bolsheviks' hatred of this “most perfidious deception of the working class by a radicalising bourgeoisie.” But where there has been an open opposition of the two myths, the national myth has triumphed to this day. Italian fascism has created a gruesome image of its communist enemy: the Mongolian face of Bolshevism; it has proved more effective than the socialist image of the bourgeois. So far there is only one example of democracy and parliamentarism being contemptuously cast aside with deliberate invocation of the myth, and that was an example of the irrational power of the national myth. In his famous speech of October 1922 in Naples, before the march on Rome, Mussolini said: “We have created a myth, this myth is a belief, a noble enthusiasm; it does not need to be reality, it is a striving and a hope, belief and courage. Our myth is the nation, the great nation which we want to make into a concrete reality.” In the same speech he calls socialism an inferior mythology. The intellectual-historical significance of this example is so great because national enthusiasm on Italian soil had a democratic and parliamentary-constitutional tradition, and the national unification of Italy came about under democratic ideas.

The theory of the myth is the strongest expression of how much the relative rationalism of parliamentary thought has lost influence. The fact that anarchist writers, out of hostility to authority and unity, discovered the irrationality of the mythical could not prevent them from working on the basis of a new authority, a new sense of order, discipline and hierarchy. The ideal danger of these irrationalities is great. The last coherences that still exist, at least in some remnants, are annulled in the pluralism of an incalculable number of myths. For political theology, this is polytheism, just as every myth is polytheistic. But as a contemporary ideational tendency, it cannot be ignored. Perhaps parliamentary optimism has the hope of relativising this movement as well and, as in fascist Italy, of letting everything wash over it until it is debated again, perhaps even putting the discussion itself up for discussion, provided only that it is discussed. But it will not be enough if, after such attacks on its foundations, it can only point out that there is still no substitute for it, if it can therefore only counter the anti-parliamentary ideas with its “parliamentarism – what else?”

1. “a state of war in which people agree to participate and which is embodied in accurate myths.”

2. “an individualistic force in the masses has emerged”