A recent article about the resurgence of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt in Chinese legal circles has set off something of an internet firestorm. Schmitt, for those unaware, is the architect of the Nazi party’s legal strategy and quite possibly the single most dangerous intellectual of the 20th century. His work is heavily influential to a number of leftist scholars of fascism and the state like Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, who have drawn on his work broadly in order to demonstrate how fascism forms and continues in the modern capitalist state. Other aspects of his work are drawn on by liberal theorists like Claude Lefort as part of what I consider to be a broad counter-revolutionary intellectual project designed to stabilize the modern capitalist democratic state. It was this tradition that caused a number of leftist to simply blow off the article altogether as another piece of pure cold war hack shit, designed to smear the CCP for simply daring to open the work of an intellectual widely engaged with in the West. And to some extent they’re right to do so.
Carl Schmitt Goes to China
Carl Schmitt Goes to China
Carl Schmitt Goes to China
A recent article about the resurgence of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt in Chinese legal circles has set off something of an internet firestorm. Schmitt, for those unaware, is the architect of the Nazi party’s legal strategy and quite possibly the single most dangerous intellectual of the 20th century. His work is heavily influential to a number of leftist scholars of fascism and the state like Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, who have drawn on his work broadly in order to demonstrate how fascism forms and continues in the modern capitalist state. Other aspects of his work are drawn on by liberal theorists like Claude Lefort as part of what I consider to be a broad counter-revolutionary intellectual project designed to stabilize the modern capitalist democratic state. It was this tradition that caused a number of leftist to simply blow off the article altogether as another piece of pure cold war hack shit, designed to smear the CCP for simply daring to open the work of an intellectual widely engaged with in the West. And to some extent they’re right to do so.