Gulsen Seven and Aylin Özman
Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) is one of the major political theorists of the twentieth century. For him, 'rationalism' was not a keyword. But he was certainly critical of the enlightenment tradition of political reflection, and found much in what we now consider reactionary thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortes. Schmitt's political theory—though elaborated in many different directions—is fundamentally about the importance of recognising that politics and law cannot be understood in terms of norms. Not only does politics require an awareness of what Schmitt abstracted and called 'the exception': it is, in his Concept of the Political, constituted by it. The binary of norm and exception is fundamental to Schmitt. It was the basis of his relentless critique of Hans Kelsen's theory of law. He argued that it was 'rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme'. As such, his own theory was a critique of rationalism.
In this chapter we shall characterise the exact nature of this critique of rationalism. It bears no resemblance to Oakeshott's critique of rationalism, for instance. Oakeshott took rationalism to be one style of politics—planning in terms of ideologies abstracted from a tradition—as opposed to another style—enjoying, exploring and defending one's tradition. But the style of politics Oakeshott wanted to defend against what he called 'rationalism'—politics as conversation—was in effect condemned by Schmitt as just another form of 'rationalism'. Against an immanentist political style of peaceful conversation, Schmitt counterposed what he thought was more fundamental: a transcendental vision of a politics based on the perpetual possibility of fundamental conflict—which meant not mere political struggle in an everyday sense but the Hobbesian possibility of the entire system being dissolved, and which required in turn that the system itself be grounded not on what is normal, immanent to that system, but exceptional, transcendental to that system. In one aspect, this gave Schmitt his theory of the sovereign, as developed most clearly in Political Theology; but it also gave him a very deep and marked hostility to modern thought in its preference for the normal over the exceptional and the immanent over the transcendent.