THE PARTISAN AS NEW POPULIST PROTOTYPE

ONE MORE INSIGHT FROM SCHMITT

Just a brief little note, here, that I thought might be worth sharing. I have spent a good bit of time over the last couple months focusing on the relevance of and insights for the new populism of the ideas of Carl Schmitt, while also explaining how the usual efforts to tar populism with a Schmittian association, were misinformed. In the background, though I won’t be discussing it much on the substack, at least for now, I’ve continued to explore Schmitt and related scholars to flesh out further insights. And in that process, though I haven’t had time right now to thoroughly dig into it, I’ve been intrigued by an initial early pass of Schmitt’s 1963 book, The Theory of the Partisan.

This is a source that I haven’t seen much discussed as a Schmittian template for the new populism. But, considering my ideas, developed over several recent posts (for example, see here, here and here), that the new populism, in its existential battle for the rejuvenation of organic community as a bulwark against the social engineering and the culture industry bureaucratic colonization of civil society and the family by managerial liberalism, Schmitt’s idea of the partisan in this book is fascinating.

He sets it up as a historical movement to protect one’s community and patrie against the instrumental, rationalizing colonization of the pro-French Enlightenment forces. If we understand Napoleon and his war effort as a project to impose the values and interests of the French Enlightenment upon the rest of Europe, we can see these partisans as proto-new populists, defending their organic communities and concrete orders from such proto-managerial class invasion. Furthermore, this proto-new populist movement had the additional challenge that their own treacherous ruling class sided with the universalizing, rationalizing invaders, and aspiring globalists — intent on spreading their French Enlightenment project far and wide. (Sound familiar?)

Citing a few passages from the books will give you a sense of his argument.

The starting point for our reflections on the problem of the partisan is the guerrilla war waged by the Spanish people between 1808 and 1813 against the army of a foreign conqueror. In this war, for the first time, the people—pre-bourgeois, pre-industrial, pre-conventional people—faced a modern, well-organized, regular army, born of the experience of the French Revolution. This opened up new spaces of war, developed new concepts of warfare, and gave rise to a new doctrine of war and politics.

It is also pertinent to the Spanish situation that the educated classes of the nobility, high clergy, and bourgeoisie were largely Afrancesados, i.e. sympathetic to the foreign conquerors.

The unique aspect of the situation of the Spanish partisan of 1808 is that he took the risk of fighting on his own home soil, while his own king and his royal family did not yet know exactly who the real enemy was.

the partisan's status under international law, basically agree with this criterion. Its foundation on the tellurian character seems to me necessary in order to make the defensive (i.e. the limitation of enmity) spatially evident, and to protect it from the absolutism of abstract justice.

The Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the Tyrolean uprising of 1809 and the Russian partisan war of 1812 were elemental, autochthonous movements of a pious Catholic or Orthodox people, whose religious tradition was untouched by the philosophical spirit of revolutionary France and which was therefore underdeveloped. Napoleon, in an angry letter to his Hamburg governor-general Davout (dated December 2, 1811), called the Spanish in particular a treacherously murderous, superstitious people, misled by 300,000 monks, who should not be compared with the industrious, hard-working, and sensible Germans. The Berlin of the years 1808-1813, on the other hand, was shaped by a spirit that was quite familiar with the philosophy of the French Enlightenment, so familiar that it could feel equal, if not superior to it.

As I’d mentioned in a recent post, the roots of the modern, managerial class can be traced back to the French Enlightenment. This insight by Schmitt, pointing to a prototype of the new populism, in the early 19th century, opens a fascinating field for further research.

 Additionally, though, with typically Schmittian incisive insight, he observes how during WWII and in its aftermath, the very concept of the partisan was linguistically and conceptually coopted (an example of revolution within the form) by international communism – itself a managerial class expression of the French Enlightenment ethos (an unsurprising claim to those who’ve read my book, The Managerial Class on Trial).

Already in the Second World War there were sabotage troops with partisan training. Such a motorized partisan loses his tellurian character and is only the transportable and interchangeable tool of a powerful, geopolitical headquarters, which uses him in open or invisible warfare and shuts him down again as the situation demands.

So, hopefully readers here will recognize the rich precedent Schmitt is unpacking for us, here. Well, worth looking into for deeper understanding of the precedents and conditions of the new populism. While my research plan going forward (which I’ll discuss in, probably, my next post) soon will be taking me away from a tight focus on the character and immediate political project of the new populism, this angle of Schmitt’s will be one worth returning to some time down the road.