PLURALISM AGAINST NATIONALISM, MOSTLY

AGAINST SCHMITT AGAINST PLURALISM

Long time readers will know that on this substack (here and here) and in the new book I’ve coopted Carl Schmitt for a theoretical defense of populism. And Schmitt was especially interesting and valuable in this regard insofar as his institutionalism was based upon a recognition of the flaw in his prior decisionism, with its apparent legitimizing of the sovereign state.

However, the populism I was defending – as the most reliable means to create a soft landing for the coming arc in the Atlanticist empire’s current spiral of the phenotype wars – was a distinctly pluralist federalism focused one. And indeed, if we understand pluralism in the English and European sense, as a polycentric form of governance, rather than in the American sense as an expression of civic diversity, historically populism’s greatest moments in its North American legacy have been distinctly pluralist. All this is discussed at length in the third part of my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

However, it is true that Schmitt, whose theoretical trajectory I used to ground a defense and explanation of populism was an explicit critic of – pretty thoroughly dismissing – pluralism as a governance option. So, is it a case of an being both with and against Schmitt: appropriating him for a defense of populism, but stuck with his critique of pluralism? And thereby, leaving my own project proposal less than entirely well-moored? Actually, no. In broad strokes I’d have to conclude that Schmitt’s position on pluralism is as incorrect as had been his early decisionism. But, if you dig a little more deeply into his argument, there’s more nuance there than some Schmittianesque critics of pluralism perhaps appreciate. 

Let me also add, quickly, too, though I’m primarily interested in this discussion as a matter of scholarship, it is not exclusively an academic quibble. And that might be worth keeping in mind. Stating the relevance to contemporary politics off the top will entail a bit of foreshadowing for the argument to follow, but its worth getting the cart ahead of the horse, even if only briefly. The preface I want to add here will make more sense once you’ve read the post, so I apologize if it initially seems obscure. But pointing out that context will beneficially remind us of what’s at stake in such an apparently academic dispute.

I’m struck by the fact that going on now a hundred years since Schmitt published the article discussed below, much the same debate that it covers between nationalism and pluralism is as relevant as even. While I understand the nationalism pushed by the likes of Steven Bannon and Yoram Hazony, etc., and the organizations they’ve built — given the threat posed by the globalist agenda of the managerial class — for most nation states in the world, neither nationalism, nor the nation state, is the solution to spatialist hegemony. On the contrary the nation state is a manifestation of spatialism and a stepping stone back to a globalist agenda. It seems to me that “national populism” is making the same mistake as Schmitt is in the argument that I’ll criticize in this post. So, with that bit of context in mind…

These remarks are mostly based on, and quoted from, Schmitt’s 1930 article, “State ethics and the pluralist state.”¹ Though as late as The Nomos of the Earth, published in 1950, he’s still making pretty much the same case against pluralism. Schmitt acknowledges the inexorable fact of social (or values) pluralism. Any complex society is going to have multiple forms of association and diverging interests among them. Leaving such forces to their own devices, though, Schmitt argues will lead to social chaos in the absence of the sovereign state to adjudicate such pluralistic conflict. The influence of Hobbes upon Schmitt is well recognized. (In Leviathan Hobbes famously dismissed pluralist associations as being “as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man.”)

There’s also a couple of other arguments Schmitt makes against pluralism: first, he accuses pluralists (or, at least, certain pluralists) of making inconsistent arguments, attempting to defend pluralism through arguments against the sovereign state which are themselves appeals to a higher universalism. Second, pluralist governance, even if it were workable, would fracture the social cohesion necessary for a people to protect its interests in the friend-enemy context of the political.

So, let’s go through this set of claims more carefully. We’ll begin with Schmitt’s broad brushed characterization of pluralism, as he sees it promoted by G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski, his primary critical focus in this this article. The vision of pluralism they present (and Schmitt depicts accurately), in which the state becomes but one among many forms of association, he argues, creates a sea of disaggregated ethics:

The state becomes a social group or association existing at best side-by-side with, but on no account above, the other associations. The ethical consequence and result of this is that the individual lives in unorganized simultaneity of numerous social duties and loyalties: in a religious community, economic associations such as unions, combines or other organizations, a political party, a club, cultural or social societies, the family and various other social groups. Everywhere he has a duty of loyalty and fidelity; everywhere ethics emerge: church ethics, professional ethics, union ethics, family ethics, association ethics, office and business ethics, etc. For all these complexes of duties—for the “plurality of loyalties”—there is no “hierarchy of duties,” unconditionally decisive principle of superiority and inferiority. Specifically, the ethical attachment to the state, the duty of fidelity and loyalty, appears as merely one among many other ties, besides loyalty to the church, union, or family; loyalty to the state takes no precedence, and state ethics is a special ethics among many other special ethics.

Schmitt provides here what strikes me as a pretty accurate description, not only of Cole’s and Laski’s theoretical position, but also a realistic conception of social powers’ configuration. Though, of course, as we’ll see, in Schmitt’s mind, he’s describing a preposterously flawed vision: 

The state really does appear to be largely dependent on various social groups, sometimes as a victim, sometimes as the outcome of their agreements, an object of compromise between social and economic power groups, a conglomerate of heterogeneous factors, parties, interest groups, combines, unions, churches, etc. reaching understandings with one another. In the compromise of social powers, the state is weakened and relativized, and even becomes problematic, as it is difficult to determine what independent significance it retains. It seems to have become, if not practically the servant or instrument of a ruling class or party, then a mere product of the balance between various fighting groups—at best a pouvoir neutre et intermédiaire, a neutral mediator, a balancer of groups fighting one another, a sort of clearing office.

Sounds right to me. Yet, from Schmitt’s perspective, predictably:

Thus today, in many states, the single individual feels himself to be, in fact, part of a plurality of ethical ties and is bound by religious communities, economic associations, cultural groups, and parties, without a recognized decision on the hierarchy of the many ties in case of conflict.

A key curiosity here is that Schmitt is both describing what he sees as the extant condition of modern society, while disparaging what he considers as an unstable, unsustainable vision of governance based upon the very conditions of modern society which he acknowledges as extant. One of his counter arguments is to insist upon the necessity of grounding political and social life in concrete institutions.

Ethical relationships like fidelity and loyalty are, in the reality of concrete life, possible only in relation to concrete, existing people or structures, not in relation to constructions or fictions.

For an individualist theory of the state as well, the state’s accomplishment lies in the fact that it determines the concrete situation without which moral and legal norms cannot gain validity.

If the state determines the “external conditions of morality,” it means that it determines the normal situation.

If it is no longer the state but one or another social group that in and of itself determines this concrete normality of the individual’s situation—the concrete order in which the individual lives—then the state’s ethical demand for fidelity and loyalty also ceases.

It’s not entirely clear why the state should have any transcendent claim to such grounding of moral or legal norms, or the normal situation. Much of this seems like tautological hand-waving. And there’ll be more tautology to come, but let’s dissect the more articulate arguments. As mentioned, a main criticism from Schmitt is the tendency of these pluralist theorists, Cole and Laski, to root their purported pluralism in universalist critiques of the state. For example, Laski is found to base his arguments in – another pluralist – Figgis’ appeal to the authority of the Catholic Church. He also mentions Cole’s appeal to some universalist notion of “humanity.”

Schmitt argues in contrast that it was, on the contrary, the universalism and monism of Catholic hegemony which was resisted by the pluralism of the emergent states, initially as monarchies, and eventually as nation states. These were the real expression of pluralism in the face of the universalism which those pluralist theorists attempted to smuggle through the back door.

The Roman Catholic Church is not a pluralist structure, and in its battle against the state, pluralism has been on the side of the national state since at least the sixteenth century. A pluralist social theory contradicts itself if it plays off against the state the monism and universalism of the Roman Catholic Church, secularized to the universalism of the Second or Third International, while still trying to remain pluralist.

But, again, even so-called monarchy was always pluralist at its core.

Even the absolutist prince of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was forced to respect divine and natural law and ensure the widest respect for traditional institutions and vested rights. State unity was always a unity from social pluralities. At various times and in various countries it was very different but always complex and, in a certain sense, intrinsically pluralist.

So, by this argument, the emergent state was the vehicle of pluralism, not its contradiction, leaving the pluralists’ appeals to universality at odds with their alleged commitments. Indeed, according to Schmitt, contrary to claims of the state as monist, a major challenge of the emergent state was precisely the pluralist chaos arising from such lack of monism:

When constitutional lawyers speak of the “omnipotence” of the sovereign—the king or the parliament—their baroquely exaggerated formulas should be understood as owing to the fact that in the state of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the issue was overcoming the pluralist chaos of the churches and estates.

Social pluralism, in contrast to state unity, means nothing more than leaving the conflict of social duties to decision by single groups. This thus means sovereignty of the social groups but not freedom and autonomy for the single individual.

While he accepts the inevitability of social pluralism, the political can only be realized through the state:

The political more accurately describes the degree of intensity of a unity. Thus political unity can have and encompass various types of content. But it always describes the most intensive degree of unity, from which, therefore, the most intensive differentiation, grouping into friend and enemy, is determined. Political unity is the supreme unity, not because it all-powerfully dictates or levels all other unities, but because it decides and can, within itself, prevent all other opposing groups from dissociating to the point of extreme hostility (i.e., to the point of civil war). Where it exists, social conflict between individuals and social groups can be decided so that an order, that is, a normal situation, exists.

In this article, as well as in the two decades later The Nomos of the Earth, he invokes the necessity of the state’s supreme unity to prevent some repetition of the religious wars that tore Europe apart during the 16th and 17th centuries. This is a peculiar preposition though to be coming from a German scholar. Despite the widespread truism that the Westphalian Peace gave rise to the modern sovereign state, as we saw in the recent series published here, based on Mack Walker’s history of the German hometowns, by no means did it follow logically or historically to claim that sovereign state unity was the only, or even the best, solution to the strife of the religious wars.

Additionally, it does seem odd for Schmitt to have entirely ignored the prospect that friend-enemy conflict may exist within the state. And remember, for Schmitt, friend-enemy conflict is existential. It cannot be resolved through conflict mediation. If it could, the conflict wouldn’t be existential, and so wouldn’t be an expression of the friend-enemy dyad. He seems to assume state unity as a priori.

Furthermore, while I’d agree with Schmitt’s criticism of trying to ground pluralism in a higher form of universalism, which was frequently observed in early pluralist theory, I’m more dubious about his transition here. Schmitt worries about pluralism’s capacity for conflict resolution to scale down, but the logic of his critique requires conflict resolution to scale up into a single global government, as world-historical Hobbesian conflict referee. That seems as impossible as it seems ill-advised. And of course, today, the grinding conflict between nationalists and globalists may well be the paradigmatic expression of friend-enemy conflict. So, whether such a path was plausible in 1930, which, again, I doubt, it certainly is off the table in 2024, short of a complete capitulation by one side in the current friend-enemy conflict.

Schmitt’s argument seems to me to go off track also in both his tendency to generalize certain forms of the pluralist position (Laski, Cole, Figgis appeals to universalism) with appeals to pluralism in general. Certainly, appeals to pluralist critiques of the sovereign state are not inherently invested in universalist appeals. Even if he’d lacked an example of such, one would have thought Schmitt should have been capable of steel-manning the argument at least that much.

Even less convincing for me though is the smooth transition he seems to assume in the state of the state: since the nascent state emerges as a form of pluralist opposition to the universalism of Catholic hegemony – which I’m willing to provisionally accept² – it hardly follows that the state then somehow becomes the post-historical, transcendent expression of pluralism. Yet, he seems to come close to saying just this.

The uncertainties and inconsistencies that can be demonstrated in the pluralist theory of state have their basis not in pluralism as such, but only in an incorrectly applied pluralism that is intrinsically correct and unavoidable in all problems of objective spirit. For the world of objective spirit is a pluralist world—pluralism of races and peoples, religions and cultures, languages and legal systems. It is not a question of denying this existing pluralism and violating it with universalism and monism, but rather of correctly placing pluralism.

The political world is also essentially pluralist. But the bearers of this pluralism are the political entities as such, that is, the states.

It is an astonishing misunderstanding in intellectual history to wish to dissolve these plural political entities on the basis of a universal and monistic view, and to present this as pluralism…

The plurality of states—that is, the political entities of various peoples— is thus the genuine expression of pluralism, correctly understood.

And responding to that other universalism he sees leveraged by pluralist theory (i.e., Cole), humanity, he says:

There is certainly nothing human, nor any political life, without the idea of humanity. But this idea constitutes nothing—in any event, no distinguishable community. All peoples, all classes, all members of all religions, Christians and Saracens, capitalists and proletarians, the good and the evil, the just and the unjust, delinquents and judges, are human beings, and with the help of such a universal concept, any distinction can be negated and any concrete community ruptured. Such supreme ideas can and should temper and modify. But as soon as certain peoples and social groups, or even single individuals, use them in order to identify with them, the regulative idea is transformed into a terrible instrument of human lust for power. Even in the narrow frame of a state, which fellow citizens can survey, at least for a longer period of time, it is a dangerous deception for individual social groups to pursue their own interests in the name of the whole and to identify without justification with the state.

Here is the further tautology which I anticipated. His defense of the state as some natural expression of pluralism-in-unity is begging the question. First, there's no reason the state must fill this role. Nor, even if he’s correct that at one time it did serve as a vehicle for pluralism, there’s no reason to assume it would continue to do so across changing historical contexts.

Once this tautology is recognized, his argument is seen to be leveraging a straw man in its critique of pluralism. Whatever universalism others may have weaponized against the sovereign state, such appeals are hardly necessary. The power and expanse of the modern state has long been an instrument of national homogenization – beginning with the forging of a French nation out of the French Revolution (as discussed in my new book.) Far from smuggling some universalism in the back door, pluralism as I’ve also elaborated in the new book, is the bulwark of particularity.

I’d certainly be willing to concede that even today it might be possible for small, homogeneous nation states to act as vergemeinschaftung³ vehicles. However, I’m not sure that’s a credible claim even for France, Germany, or Italy, forged through violent conquest, not organic community, and tradition. Among territorially expansive (ostensible) federations like Canada and the US, though, such an idea of the “national” state as defender of particularity seems preposterous. On the contrary, in such polities, the pursuit of pluralism is rooted in a recovery of eroding federalist institutions and norms. Again, this was the core argument for the project of 21st century populism in A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

The last argument from Schmitt with which we’re left, once the universalist straw man case is dismissed, is his claim mentioned above, that the state is required as a referee of conflict resolution to avoid civil war. As he puts it:

…through the pluralist dissolution of the unity of the political whole, a point is reached where unity becomes nothing more than an agglomerate of changing agreements between heterogeneous groups.

…the back-drop to this sort of contract ethics is always an ethics of civil war…

I don't necessarily disagree. In any complex society (i.e., under spatialist regimes) there are by necessity going to be differences of interests and values. Sometimes these are going to spill over into violent conflict. But this brings us back to the scaling issue. Schmitt is concerned to avoid civil war but accepts inter-state war as an inexorable expression of the inevitable friend-enemy conflict. So, why is it preferrable to provide violent conflict avoidance at one scale and not the other?  

The only answer I see is Schmitt’s conviction that because the nascent state once embodied pluralism against universalist claims in one context, it somehow has become a trans-contextual vehicle of a unity captured in each instance of that pluralist particularity. Peoples were being incorrectly homogenized by universalist projects, like the Catholic Church. This pluralist rejection of universalism resulted in the representation of true homogeneity of national peoples. However, as noted above, whatever idealized potential such a notion may contain, the real world, modern state is almost nowhere – certainly in the industrialized world – a manifestation of such homogeneity of interests and values.

Such functional appearance of homogeneity is only maintained through the sovereign state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence. Though, of course, the more aggrieved that suppressed interests and values are, the less legitimate does the sovereign state’s use of violence appear, and become. So, yes, pluralism does always pose the risk of civil war, but no more than that risk is present between states. And a fiction of the state as homogeneous unity only superficially papers over the potential for friend-enemy conflicts to arise within even a genuine nation state. To say nothing of the fictional ones.

Pluralism, as I elaborated in the new book, simultaneously rejects the state’s exclusive claim to sovereignty, while providing institutional form to the inevitable heterogeneous, particularity of modern society. In that it acknowledges the reality of gesellschaft, which seems to me a more dependable perspective for recognizing – and so at least providing a plausible path toward non-violently resolving – its inexorable heterogeneous social conflicts. So, much as Schmitt warned about the ironic inconsistency in some of his contemporary pluralist rivals, he failed to recognize the irony in his own position: misconceiving the society of the state as gemeinschaft, rather than gesellschaft, leaves neither manifestation of the state as sustainable. The friend-enemy distinction was more intractable than even Schmitt apparently was prepared to concede.

Though, of course, in A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, the central purpose for proposing pluralist federalism as the appropriate object of contemporary populism was not to avoid gesellschaft civil war, or even to neutralize any injustice of the sovereign state. Rather, it was to theoretically sculpt out the institutional space within which might yet be nurtured and revived forms of gemeinschaft – organic community and tradition – facilitating a soft landing in the coming arc of the phenotype wars. As valuable as I found Schmitt’s intellectual trajectory in theoretically grounding a contemporary populism, I don’t find his criticism of pluralism as compelling an obstacle to the project of a pluralist federal populism.   

The new series, on the history of legal pluralism, and the “Medieval constitution,” is up next. So, if you’re interested in keeping up on such discussions, and haven’t yet, please…

And, if you know of others who’d be interested in the kind thing we get up to over here, please…

Meanwhile: be seeing you!

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1. Carl Schmitt, “State Ethics and the Pluralist State,” in Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis, ed. Arthur Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink, First Edition (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002). Originally, “Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat,” in Kant-Studien, vol. 35 (Berlin: Pan-Verlag Kurt Metzner, 1930), 28–42.

2. Though it’s worth noting here that a jurist and legal theorist whose eminence is quite the equal of Schmitt, former Italian Constitutional Court Chief Paolo Grossi, in his book on European legal history, has argued that the Roman Churches’ canon law was not nearly as universalist as the former suggests. The practical necessity of responding to the needs of local conditions in the highly decentralized medieval world, he says, required canon law to maintain a flexibility which belies Schmitt’s one-dimensional characterization, here. Paolo Grossi, A History of European Law, trans. Laurence Hooper, 1st edition (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Much more on Grossi to come!

3. For new readers to this substack, this Weberian concept is fleshed out at length in my new (must read!) book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. But, roughly, it means moving in the direction of gemeinschaft.