Why are the concepts of Carl Schmitt and Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin chosen here for comparison on such an important subject? Carl Schmitt is a well recognized authority in modern political philosophy. In fact, it was he who developed the concept of “the political,” which today is one of the main foundations of political-philosophical understanding of the world of politics. At the same time, his concept of the political expresses in the most distinct form the ideas already outlined by many representatives of Western political-philosophical thought. It should be added that in Russia in recent years, various branches of conservatism are becoming increasingly popular, and Carl Schmitt’s ideas belong, no doubt, to this part of the political-ideological spectrum. Ivan Ilyin’s ideas, on the other hand, are often discussed in Russia today. In our opinion, Ilyin’s political-philosophical works express in a very concentrated and perfectly articulated form many fundamental ideas about power, state and politics, characteristic of Russian thought in general. Moreover, the political-philosophical thought of Ivan Ilyin, after a short youthful infatuation of the author with liberal ideas, developed in a definitely conservative direction, although, in accordance with the spirit of the time, this conservatism can be called to some extent liberal. Thus, we are talking here not only about individual thinkers, but also about the concentrated expression of certain matrices of political-philosophical thinking, which are very characteristic, in particular, of national thinking traditions. The purpose of this article is to try to identify similarities and differences in the views of the two thinkers on the foundations and basic meaning of politics as an undertaking.
But what makes such a comparison possible? In a direct justoposition of the texts, the possibility of a meaningful comparison is questionable. Schmitt and Ivan Ilyin wrote their works with completely different goals; most of Schmitt’s works are decidedly academic, while Ilyin, for whom, in the spirit of Russian thought tradition, the main question is, “What is to be done?” Schmitt writes large political-philosophical and philosophical-legal treatises, while Ilyin’s political writings tend to be short articles or bulletins; the authors belong to very different thought traditions; but it is also impossible to “unify” the terminology they use. In fact, the terminology peculiar to political theory is quite alien to Ivan Ilyin in general. Because the Russian philosophy of law and politics began with the philosophy of law, he is much closer to philosophical-legal language, and even one of the central categories of his political philosophy, filled with deep political meaning, he designates by the quite “legal” term “legal consciousness.”
Meanwhile, for all its obvious and expected difficulties, such a comparison is still possible and meaningful. Despite all the difference of approaches, both authors know European, especially German, philosophical and socio-political thought very well, and have in many respects a similar philosophical schooling; in particular, Hegel’s philosophy of law is a recognized authority for each of them. The ideas of both thinkers, by and large, belong, albeit with a number of reservations, to the conservative part of the political-ideological spectrum. Both thinkers are not alien to the idea of “revitalizing” dictatorship designed to preserve or strengthen the foundations of statehood. As for the terminology, the difference seems to be surmountable. After all, Schmitt comes to the concept of “the political” trying to deepen the analysis of the foundations of statehood, which is not alien to the course of Ilyin’s thought. The general meaning of the category “the political” in Schmitt, as it seems, is connected with the search for the deep foundations and meaning of politics, in particular, through an attempt to identify the distinctive characteristics of this sphere, to distinguish it with the help of these characteristics from other spheres of social life and human activity. “Demarcation” subjects are not all that close to the thought of Ilyin, but the questions about the general meaning and purpose of politics as an activity undoubtedly occupy him. Thus, a comparison of the ideas of the two thinkers in this area seems possible; at the same time, such a direct comparison, to the author’s knowledge, has not yet been carried out in the scientific literature.
Schmitt camw to the concept of “the political,” as noted above, by analyzing the foundations of statehood. “The concept of the state,” he writes in his famous work on this concept, “requires the concept of the political.” The state is, in his opinion, a certain special state of the people. However, it is necessary to make one important clarification here. Schmitt writes that traditionally in political thought it was customary to equate “state” and “the political,” and this identification, in general, worked. But it ceases to work effectively just in the conditions of the formation of a special kind of statehood, which Schmitt describes as follows: “The equation ‘state=political’ becomes wrong and misleading to the extent that state and society begin to permeate each other.” This idea of his could be understood in different ways, but the further course of reasoning gives it unambiguous certainty. Schmitt describes “a total state of the identity of state and society, not indifferent to any subject area, potentially capturing any subject area,” and adds Hildegard Trescher’s characterization of such a state as one in which there is “a living penetration of all social spheres by the state for a universal purpose: to extract all the vital forces of the people’s body for the state whole.”
Thus, the ideas expressed acquire geater clarity. Schmitt requires the concept of “the political” first of all in order to distinguish between the “state” and “the political” in the activity of the state, which is not only concerned with political issues, but tries to take control of the life of society as a whole, penetrating into all pores of its daily life. For such a state, this distinction does indeed have a concrete meaning. We can say that Schmitt in the 1920s is trying to renew and actualize the theory of the state, and in this respect he sees as relevant just the state that seeks comprehensive control over the public and private life of citizens; that is, in essence, the totalitarian state, which at that time already existed in Italy and in Germany, was becoming an increasingly popular and attractive idea.
Obviously, the prospect of the establishment of such a state does not intimidate Schmitt, at least in these years. Moreover, he is particularly interested in such a state. Thus, for example, already in 1921 the first edition of his book Dictatorship was published (the book went through many editions), where, with a generally neutral-academic tone, not only political, but even philosophical and legal grounds were given for the idea of an essentially unrestricted dictatorship. In this book, Schmitt distinguishes, in particular, between the concepts of “commissar” and “sovereign” dictatorship. And if the “commissar” dictatorship is interpreted by him as a necessary restriction of freedom in conditions of very great threats to the existing constitution, that is, in essence, is a dictatorial protection of the existing constitution, then the sovereign dictatorship is understood as fundamentally unbound by constitutional norms. Schmitt gives such dictatorship a peculiar legal basis. “The sovereign… dictatorship,” he writes, ”regards the whole existing order as a condition to be eliminated by its action. It does not suspend the existing constitution by virtue of a constitutional right founded on it and, therefore, of a constitutional right, but seeks to reach a state which would permit the introduction of such a constitution as it considers to be the true constitution. Thus, it does not refer to the existing constitution but to the one to be introduced.” It is clear that we are talking about a situation, to put it in modern terms, beyond the legal field. However, Schmitt assesses it as follows: “It might seem that such an enterprise escapes all legal consideration. For a state can only be legally understood in its constitution, and a total negation of the existing constitution would, in fact, have to claim no legal justification, since the constitution being introduced, according to its own premise, does not yet exist. It would therefore only be a question of power. But this is not the case if we allow for the existence of an authority which, while not itself constitutionally established, is nevertheless in such connection with any existing constitution that it acts as a founding power, even if it is never itself covered by it, so that as a consequence it is not negated even when it is seemingly negated by an existing constitution. This is the meaning of the “constituent power.”
Thus, Schmitt here not only recognizes unlimited dictatorship as an incidental political fact, but also constructs a certain philosophical and legal justification for it. In his work Political Theology, published in 1922, Schmitt formulates a peculiar concept of state sovereignty, according to which the sovereignty in the state is possessed by the one who can declare a state of emergency. At the same time, the state of emergency is conceived here as not limited by rigid legal frameworks (as it is done in modern constitutions). Thus, here we are talking about the actions of the authorities outside the framework of the “legal field,” and it is such actions of authorities which are considered as directly political. In fact, this is where the Schmittian philosophical-legal concept of “decisionism,” gradually grows out of, which considers the decision of power as the main source of the law. It is against this intellectual background that Schmitt’s concept of “the political” is formed.
According to Schmitt, it is possible to define the concept of “the political” only by discovering and establishing specifically political categories. As such, he defines the correlative categories of friend and enemy. “The meaning of the distinction between friend and enemy,” the thinker notes, “is to designate the highest degree of intensity of connection or separation, association or dissociation.” Thus the political, according to Schmitt, does not represent any subject matter of its own, but only expresses the degree of intensity of association or dissociation. Therefore, any conflict can become political by reaching a certain degree of acuteness. We can say that Schmitt does not see politics as an activity with any positive or creative content; politics for him is just a designation for a conflict that has reached a high degree of acuteness.
It is interesting that Schmitt writes about the categories of friend and enemy, but he does not explore the category of friend in his main work on the concept of the political; he is much more interested in the category of enemy. And he treats this category in a very peculiar way. He notes that the political must have its own criteria, and therefore “the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically harmful is not yet an enemy in itself.” In essence, Schmitt denies the possibility of enmity between political subjects also because of a difference of interests (say, economic or geopolitical). For him, the question of the enemy is elevated to an existential level. The enemy, the thinker notes, “is precisely the other, the alien… he is in a particularly intense sense something different and alien”; “the enemy is only… a struggling totality of people, opposing exactly the same totality.” Thus, in essence, at the level of political communities, the image of the enemy for Schmitt is simply the image of the Other, brought to a special acuteness of rejection: a different mode of existence that somehow negates the mode of existence of your community. It is clear that, oriented on such a view, it is possible to bring to the state of enmity relations that may not turn into enmity in themselves.
Having defined the Other as an enemy in the political sense, Schmitt does not stop at the practical conclusions that follow from this. “The notions of friend, enemy, and struggle,” he writes, ”are given real meaning by the fact that they are especially conjugated and constantly retain a connection with the real possibility of physical killing.” War follows from enmity, for the latter is the negation of the being of another’s being. War is only the extreme realization of enmity. Indeed, having defined another political community as an enemy whose very mode of existence negates one’s own, one cannot but strive for its destruction (if the enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed, otherwise he will destroy you and your entire community; this seems quite logical if we understand another community as an enemy in the Schmittian sense). With this level and existential character of enmity between communities, war between them looks like something absolutely natural. In fact, according to Schmitt, it does not even require a clash of interests—this constantly existing existential enmity is quite enough.
The following thesis of Schmitt seems to be very important. “War,” he writes, “is not at all the goal or even the content of politics, but. rather, as a real possibility, it is always the present prerequisite, which uniquely determines human thinking and acting and thus causes specifically political behavior.” Thus, according to Schmitt, war is not always present in relations between communities as a physical given, but always exists as a possibility’ and such a possibility that determines the nature of the thoughts of the members of these communities and, moreover, it determines their political behavior. That is, their political existence is determined first of all by enmity, and war is the most adequate expression of this enmity, which is always present, if not as an actual existence, then as a very real possibility and, moreover, a possibility that corresponds to the nature of their mutual relations to the greatest extent.
Possible objections to such an interpretation of Schmitt’s doctrine of the political are mainly reduced to the fact that enmity concerns the subjects of big politics, but not individuals, and that enmity refers to the external, international, but not the internal being of the state.
Indeed, Schmitt emphasizes that “the individual man as such has no enemy with whom he must fight not for life but for death.” The collective enemy must be defined by a collective subject. In his early works, the thinker presents the Catholic Church as such a collective subject, and in later works—the state. “The state as an essentially political unity,” Schmitt writes in The Concept of the Political, “has… the real possibility in some given case, by virtue of its own decision, to define the enemy and to fight the enemy.”
What is left in such a case to the individual? He himself has no irreconcilable enemies, but as a member of the political community he is drawn into this enmity, which, under certain circumstances, may determine his entire existence and his destiny, since it may require him to be ready to give his life, or to being killed. That is, the citizen as a person has no enemies in the existential sense, but he must be prepared to experience the full, sometimes extreme, intensity of confrontation with the enemies that others may choose to define for him. And this applies not only to his belonging to a certain state, but also to his belonging to a certain people. It seems that Schmitt in this matter not only “states” the existence of enmity as an actually inevitable character of relations between political communities, but also advocates a kind of apologia of this enmity. “As long as a people,” he writes, ”exist in the realm of the political, it must… define the distinction of friend and enemy. This is the essence of its political existentiality. If it no longer has the capacity or will for this distinction, it ceases to exist politically.” “If this distinction disappears, then political life in general disappears… If a part of the people declares that it no longer has enemies, then by doing so, by virtue of the state of affairs, it puts itself on the side of the enemies and helps them, but the distinction of friend and enemy is not thereby eliminated… From the fact that the people no longer have the strength or will to hold on to the sphere of the political, the political does not disappear from the world. Only a weak people disappears.” Thus, according to Schmitt’s teaching, a nation that stops feuding with someone will essentially disappear as a nation, and a citizen belonging to any nation is thereby condemned to feuding. Enmity, on the other hand, is most naturally expressed in a war of annihilation. Obviously, Schmitt places “real enmity” very high. “The highest points of great politics,” he writes, ”are precisely those moments when the enemy is concretely and clearly seen as an enemy. What leads to war is thus conceptualized here as the highest manifestation of politics.
The citizen who is drawn into the vortex of existential enmity, however, in the context of Schmitt’s conception, does not seem to be pitied, since he is, according to Schmitt, “an evil being.” Moreover, Schmitt is convinced that such a person appears in any of the political teachings, and this malignity is most closely connected with the best manifestations of human nature. Thus, Schmitt characterizes the doctrine of Thomas Hobbes as “the correct understanding that it is the conviction on both sides of the true, good and just that entails the worst enmity.” It should be noted that in relation to political doctrines in general Schmitt is certainly wrong in this respect. Not to mention the teachings of the ancient world, for example, the disciple of Confucian Mencius, who certainly believed in the good nature of man, it must be said that such a belief is certainly inspired, for example, by Thomas Jefferson’s doctrine of the “virtuous republic” and, more broadly, by most of the teachings of the Enlightenment, since one can sincerely advocate the expansion and deepening of freedom and democracy only if one trusts people in their majority and believes in both their mental and moral abilities. Certainly, the majority of Russian thinkers do not proceed from the idea of the “evil nature of man” either—otherwise there is no other way to explain, for example, the ideal of “God-manhood” so characteristic of Russian thought.
Another objection to the understanding of the Schmittian doctrine of the political as a doctrine of enmity consists in limiting the “sphere” of this enmity to relations between states and foreign policy. Thus, for example, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde in his article, “The Notion of the Political as a Key to K. Schmitt’s Works on State Law,” argues that, according to Schmitt, in the internal politics of the state “people make it so that the intensity of grouping according to the principle of friend-enemy is not achieved.” However, this appears to be a simplification. Thus, Schmitt himself in The Concept of the Political writes, for example, the following: “The equation ‘political = party-political’ is possible if the idea of an encompassing, relativizing all internal political parties and their opposites political unity (“state”) loses its force and, as a consequence, internal opposites acquire greater intensity than the general external political opposition to another state. If the party-political opposites within a state exhaust the political opposites without remainder, the highest limit of the “intra-political” series is thereby reached, i.e., the intra-state rather than the extra-state division into friend/enemy groups is decisive for armed confrontation. The real possibility of struggle, which must always be present in order to be able to speak of politics, with this kind of ‘primacy of domestic politics’ refers, therefore, no longer to war between organized unities of peoples (states or empires), but to civil war.” Thus, according to Schmitt, there may be situations in which the entire acuteness of existential confrontation with enemies will be carried out precisely within the state.
Attempts to present Schmitt’s doctrine of acute enmity as a political entity and only as a certain stage in the development of the thinker’s views also seem to lack sufficient grounds. The essence of Schmitt’s views seems to have changed relatively little throughout his life. And just as the basic ideas of his articles from the Nazi period about how “the Führer defends the right” can also be found in his writings from other periods; ideas about genuine politics as an intense expression of enmity are found in every period of his work. Thus, for example, even in his 1954 work “The New Nomos of the Earth,” he essentially treats the entire history of mankind as a history of violent conquest;” and in his 1963 work, “Theory of the Partisan” he praises the phenomenon of guerrilla movement as an expression of “real enmity” and argues that “the consistent realization of absolute enmity gives war its meaning and justice.” Moreover, in this later work, Schmitt develops the basic ideas of The Concept of the Political, arguing that it is only in the encounter with the enemy that we can “find our own measure, our own limits, our own gestalt.”
As for Ivan Ilyin, there is no doubt that he has a significantly different view of politics, even a different angle of view on it. However, let us first try to understand whether there is something in common in the views of the two thinkers. Like Carl Schmitt, Ivan Ilyin approaches the analysis of politics as a philosopher, seeking to uncover its deepest foundations. Therefore, he considers it necessary to free its understanding from false layers. “Whoever wants to correctly understand the essence of the state, politics and democracy,” writes Ilyin in one of the articles of his mature period of creativity, “must from the very beginning abandon artificial fictions and false doctrines.” To fight against hypocrisy in the interpretation of politics—this pathos undoubtedly unites the intellectual search of the two thinkers. Both of them also note the important role in politics of spiritual and psychological factors, in particular, human feelings. We have already talked about the interpretation of their role in Schmitt’s concept. Ivan Ilyin, believing that politics has a soul-spiritual nature, writes, for example, the following: “A nation whose political life is emotionless, will-less, meaningless, is state-dead and barren.”
However, Schmitt and Ilyin understand the very feelings that create political life differently. While Schmitt, as already noted, emphasizes “real enmity,” Ivan Ilyin emphasizes quite different feelings. Thus, according to Ilyin, the key aspect of the category of legal consciousness, so important for him, is a lively sense of responsibility. It should also be noted that Ilyin, unlike Schmitt, does not draw a demarcation line between the “political” and the “state,” so what he writes about statehood also applies to political life. Thus, for example, his words that “spiritual solidarity is the true and real basis of the state are directly relevant to his understanding of the meaning of politics. It is on this basis that the state must be understood and realized as a living system of brotherhood, not only not contradicting Christianity, but also corresponding to the spirit of the Gospel.” Thus, the feelings that constitute the political community, according to Ilyin, are not feelings of enmity at all, but feelings of responsibility, solidarity, empathy, forming a system of brotherhood. The essence of politics, Ilyin emphasizes again and again, is that people cooperate.
As we have already said, Ilyin believes that politics has a soul-spiritual nature, and therefore the central category of analyzing its foundations for Ilyin is the category of legal consciousness, the most concentrated expression of which is a living sense of responsibility for what happens to your country. According to Ilyin’s thought, “law and state form are either carried by legal consciousness or they are degenerate.” Ilyin introduces the concept of axioms of legal consciousness. and one of such axioms is mutual trust and respect of citizen to citizen, citizen to authority and authority to citizen. It is clear that such trust and respect would be impossible in conditions of enmity.
In fact, in one of the bulletins of the mature period, included by the publisher in the collection Our Tasks, Ilyin speaks directly about enmity. His point here is that to believe that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend is to fall into a delusion. The enemy of your enemy may well be your enemy’s worst enemy as well.
According to Ilyin, politics is not the main thing in the life of most people (the main thing is to “create culture”). Therefore, the task of politics is to provide favorable conditions for people’s lives: order, freedom, legality, justice, “technical and economic conveniences of life,” to conserve the strength of the people, not to spend them in a continuous struggle.
Ilyin thinks of the state, politics not as a separation and irreconcilable struggle, but primarily as a connection of people in a common creative work. This work of the state, according to Ilyin, is not at all a struggle of private interests. On the contrary, this work of the state, in his words, “begins where there is a common, i.e., something that is important to all and unites all, something that either all will have at once, or that all will not have at once; and if it does not, then everything will collapse and be abolished, and everything will crumble like sand.”
It is very important that Ilyin, unlike Schmitt, does not think of this concentration of citizens’ efforts on the common cause as a totalitarian state; on the contrary, he believes that the state must know its limits. The state, according to Ilyin, only creates conditions for the creative activity of people, while “all creative states of mind and spirit, involving love, freedom and good will, are not subject to the dictates of state power and cannot be prescribed by it. The state cannot demand faith, prayer, love, kindness and conviction from its citizens. It may not regulate scientific, religious and artistic creativity. It may not prescribe the expression of feelings or opinions. It shall not intrude into moral, family and daily life. It must not unnecessarily restrict people’s economic initiative and economic creativity. He characterizes the totalitarian state as a “socially hypnotic machine” and “a slave dictatorship of unprecedented size and all-pervasive grasp.”
Reflecting on the foundations of a policy that brings real success in his later works, Ilyin introduces the normative notion of “true politics” that corresponds to its purpose. He understands such a policy as the service of power to the interests of the people, and as a criterion of true success in politics he calls “public success and the flourishing of people’s life”. It is important that, according to Ilyin, true politics works to unite people. “Politics in its essence,” notes the Russian thinker, “does not divide people and does not inflame their passions that they hurl themselves at each other; on the contrary, it unites people on what is common to them all… True politics asserts the organic solidarity of all with all’… Politics is the art of uniting people,” concludes the thinker, and this unification should be loyal, legal, free in form, nationwide, just and creative in content, and it should begin with the unification of the worthiest. According to Ilyin, such unification can only be realized by taking up political work with responsibility and love.
Summarizing, we can say that our comparison of the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Ivan Ilyin on the problem of the foundations of politics and the meaning of political activity revealed, with minor similarities, profound differences in the positions of the two thinkers. These differences concern their basic conclusions about the meaning and purpose of politics as an activity. Since the Schmittian approach is now much better known to those who are professionally engaged in political science and political philosophy, it is important to note that, in addition to understanding politics as a concentrated expression of enmity, there are and, at least in the field of domestic political thought, look no less convincing fundamentally different approaches to this problem.
Please see the original for full citations:
