LOOKING FORWARD
PART 2: LESSONS OF THE PLURALIST CONSTITUTION
In the last post I reflected upon many of the insights I gained during the last year as I explored the pluralist constitution. As I concluded there, many of those lessons led directly to a recognition of the importance in better understanding the historical context within which they struggled, and often to which they often succumbed. In this second part of my post on the pivot in scholarly direction of this Substack, I’ll tease out some keys ideas I have developed so far about what such a new direction will look like. Before getting to that though, there are some housekeeping matters I’d like to address.
HOUSEKEEPING
It’s now about a year since I released the Kindle version of The Managerial Class on Trial. That was about three years since I’d released it in paperback. As I acknowledged then, that was a bit on the long side. And I promised that the, then, new book would not wait so long for its ebook release. One year seems about right to me, so watch out for the grand release of the Kindle version of A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, hopefully before the end of the year. If not, very soon after. (It might make sense to have it out for Christmas – but do people give ebooks as Christmas presents? I’m guessing not.)
I also decided that I would be releasing member-only audio posts to all members six months (or so) following their original posting. Six months seems like a nice advantage to the paid members. (I’m also considering some other perks for paid members, but details still to be worked out.) Admittedly the more timely aspects of those audio recordings often will be well back in the rear view mirror after six months, but I thought that most of them would still have value in the application of the theory to (not quite any longer) current affairs. And thanks again to the paid subscribers who help keep this Substack in business.
Also, as hinted at in the last post, I will be turning the last year’s material on the pluralist constitution into a new book! I suspect I’ll call it either just The Pluralist Constitution, or maybe inspired by Schmitt, The Pluralist Nomos. This should be less work than was involved in the creation of the last book. It had required a tremendous amount of reorganizing of the material from the Substack posts, so as to create a more cogent theoretical narrative than the haphazard addressing of questions as they had initially appeared to me in the production of the Substack material. The new book will be less theoretical, and the historical material can largely be taken in big chucks from all the series over the last year.
Naturally, there will be a certain amount of work in basic editing and writing of transitional material, plus of course introduction and conclusion type stuff. And the main point of course will be to provide a theoretical overview and synthesis, such as I’ve only scratched the surface of, with the observations of the last post. But I do expect this book creating process to be faster and smoother than last time. So, watch for that down the road. And please excuse any longer than usual absences from posting here in the next several months as I attempt to pull all this together.
FOLLOWUP
Finally, I want to conclude this transitional post with a few words on what I see coming next on the scholarly front: a focus upon the spatial revolution. By that revolution I mean the historical processes and manifestations involved in the shift of what we now call Western society from a more time biased one to being a more space biased one. I may look at such processes in other civilizations/empires cycles/spirals – though not likely Rome, the easiest and therefore most hackneyed – but I may look at some other less attended to civilizations/empires. However, the main focus, at least initially, I expect to be upon the Western world’s own most recent spiral of the phenotype wars: looking at how the European medieval political, economic, social, legal pluralism transformed into today’s Atlanticist monism, modernism, and spatialism.
The originating story, and likely linchpin (maybe regulative lens) through which we’ll get all this started will be Carl Schmitt’s conception of the “spatial revolution.” The main texts in this regard will be Land and Sea and The Nomos of the Earth1, though I think when discussing Schmitt’s concept of space one has to at least reflect upon his notion of the grossraum – though as we’ll see Schmitt seems here to be using rather different ontological notions of space. Additionally, too, I’m increasingly of the opinion that the best understanding of Schmitt’s spatial revolution requires a little deeper excavating of other theoretical ideas of his that may not appear obviously relevant at first blush.
For instance, my own criticism of Schmitt’s critique of pluralism (see here) I now appreciate didn’t sufficiently consider Schmitt’s complicated relation with Hobbes and the Hobbesian contract. Prior to 1933, Schmitt’s Hobbesianism entailed by necessity a rejection of pluralism in so as the latter threatened the Hobbesian state, which in his consideration was our best shield against chaos and violence. As the Hobbesian state provided security and protection we owed it our loyalty and obedience. Under such conditions, he considered pluralism as politically destructive as he considered it theoretically incoherent.
It was such a perspective on Schmitt’s part that informed his self-defined mission of leveraging Weimar constitutionalism, particularly Article 48, as a weapon against the empowerment of the radical political parties.2 It was though only through his experience of existential threat under the National Socialists (see here) that Schmitt became acutely aware that the Hobbesian contract cut both ways. The state which failed to provide security and protection from endogenous chaos and violence had itself broken the contract and no longer had legitimate claim to loyalty and obedience.3
Seen through that lens, the role of pluralism takes on a very different coloration within the logic of the Schmittian model – particularly as the latter increasingly turned to the institutionalism of “concrete order” as the foundation of the political community, rather than sovereign decisionism (see here and here). Once we understand that development in Schmitt’s thought, the valences of the spatial revolution shift from what they might have seemed to be under the influence of a less critical Hobbesianism.
And, interestingly, one way of reading Schmitt’s history of the spatial revolution that remade European jurisprudence was precisely as an ongoing conflict between decisionist and institutionalist juristic legitimacy over land appropriation. Furthermore, Schmitt’s 1938 critique of Hobbes4 can be read as the latter’s failing to retain a sufficiently temporalist dimension in his theory of the state, which brings us back to the complicated place of the state within Schmitt’s attitude to pluralism. So, I anticipate the beginning of the new focus to spend a good deal of attention upon a thorough unpacking of just what precisely we are setting up as an informing framework with Schmitt’s spatial revolution.
And as we’ll see, even with Schmitt the spatial revolution wasn’t only a transportation, economic, legal expansion. Though it certainly was all that. But the spatial expansion turned out to have major impacts on culture, art, and the sciences. Schmitt offers several intriguing observations along these lines. But others have mined these sociological and historical impacts far more deeply. In addition to eventually expanding the more obvious geographical expansions beyond Schmitt’s discussions, these other domains eventually will need to be excavated more thoroughly as well.5 All this will be part of an ambitious examination of the nature and legacy of the spatial revolution. But it will be with Schmitt that we’ll get the ball rolling.
That is how I see things getting started. It may be a little while before the initial posts start to appear, as I both deepen my well of Schmittian arguments and put together the new book. Of course, I may post one-off pieces on specific ideas that pop up along the way. And paid members can depend upon me to continue with the occasional audio posts addressing hot takes on current affairs and the like. Over the long term, I expect the coming year to see me move beyond Schmitt to other scholarly treatments of what he and I would call the spatial revolution of our civilization – shifting though the nomos may be.
And yet, I always reserve the right to change my mind. So, who knows what will really happen! It may be amusing a year from now to look back on this post and ponder what really happened. *insert winking smiley face here* So, if you want to see how it all turns out in the end, and haven’t yet, by all means, please…
And if you know anyone else who might find this new direction of interest, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, ed. Russell A. Berman, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2015); Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006).
Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2016).
This seems to have been Schmitt’s verdict on the National Socialists after the June 1934 Night of the Long Knives, after which Hitler acknowledged violent excesses, targeting conservatives — including friends of Schmitt — but took no action to punish the abusers. Schmitt’s own personal vulnerability, which came to a head with his denunciation by the SS in 1936, only served to reinforce this opinion. In his own words: “if protection ceases, the state too ceases, and every obligation to obey.” Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
In Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt writes, ‘Nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social and religious order determined by this process. Here, measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity.”