Sovereign is he who decides the exception
What was this?
Did liberal democracy fail in 2020?
Or have radical dissidents been right all along?
For example, Alain Soral wrote in 2011 that the West is moving toward “global governance in the name of public health under the diktat of the World Health Organization,” using pandemics as “another phony construct that will allow the global oligarchy to terrorize entire populations and subjugate them to authoritarian policies: mandatory vaccination under the supervision of armed forces, assembly bans, and so on.”
I was invited to discuss this with members of Panda this past week, where I interpreted the Covid Event in the light of Carl Schmitt’s famous dictum concerning liberal democracy: ‘Sovereign is he who decides the exception.’
You can watch here on YouTube or here on Rumble.
Chris, thanks a lot for this very interesting lecture. I would just have a few questions which you can maybe clarify.
What is, for Schmidt, the nature of this extranormative sovereign? For a Hobbesian the sovereign is concrete, even if also Hobbes seems to oversimplify - the Magna Carta did limit the powers of the king, after all. But what you describe seems to be a mystification, just as all post-Hobbesian theories mystify the sovereign. Theology is as political as politics is theological, and there are still vying parties trying to shape events whether they do so within or outside of the system of legal norms. So I do not think any unitary sovereign will or can emerge. However much this notion has been sanctioned and sanctified in political theory, I think it is perfectly unhelpful. Yes, the State has a form of sovereignty but the State does not act by itself. So who (or what) wields power really? If this is theology it seems more akin to the competing fratricidal egos of Mount Olympus than any serene first mover.
What do you think is the positive value of the institutions of liberal democracy? We are clearly better off under them than in a system of completely arbitrary power. For example, the Peace of Westphalia, though doubtless overestimated, did improve on some fundamental weaknesses in the governance of the Holy Roman Empire and ultimately established a model for resolving some existential challenges on the path of moving into modernity.
It is fairly obvious I would say that the strategy of working within the system has chances of success only when allied with biopower, and that civil disobedience is necessary in all other cases.
In what way are friends constituted for Schmidt? Is this not again a mystification? Is it pre-political necessarily? Is it something other than just shifting coalitions? And what do you think about Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism?
Waiting for God could be waiting for Godot. I think we need a social theory of power in order to illuminate what levers we have to change the established order. Nevertheless, I must say that I do ultimately believe that we can only evolve politically if we can evolve spiritually. I think this is not a question of surrendering to an omnipotent but capricious sovereign but it is more about our relationship to the world and to the cosmos. A collective worldview which commands a large degree of assent. The chaos and nihilism which currently reigns in this regard is the principal reason we find ourselves in the bind we do and unable to find our way out of it. Obviously, for example, the Covid event could not have taken the form it did if people had a more healthy relationship to their own mortality.
I agree with you that we need to have a more realistic view of liberal democracy and to deconstruct the myths which underlie it and particularly those myths which reinforce biopower. I would, however, be concerned not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. What has been revealed by the Covid event is certainly important to those who formerly subscribed to naive models of liberal democracy, but the takeaway should not be that it is nothing more than a cloak for the exercise of naked power, simply that it is, and always will be, imperfect, and that we can sometimes improve it by working within its strictures, but in other cases we need to embrace more radical strategies, and often, no doubt, one is just (as Clausewitz said) a continuation of the other.