The Misapplication of Carl Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy Distinction
The meme version of Schmitt's argument tends to obscure Schmitt's intentions. A corrective exploration of the concept follows with a concluding application to contemporary circumstances.
Carl Schmitt is one of the most studied political theorists of the 20th century. In recent years, there’s been a revival in popular references to his Concept of the Political, which articulates famous dictum that the core of any understanding of the political is the ‘friend-enemy distinction.’ In the essay itself, his meaning is clarified and painstakingly placed into the context of Plato’s thinking on the subject as described in Book V of the Republic, although there are some important distinctions in which he departs from Plato’s conception. Schmitt writes:
The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies.[1]
Schmitt further describes this type of political distinction from mere rivals in terms of party politics, economics, or any other type of distinction that does not involve the clash of arms on the battlefield.[2] He is specific on this point: enemies are distinct from mere party politics rivals or economic competitors: they are the opposing side in a war, whether it be “armed combat between organized political entities; [or] civil war [which] is armed combat within an organized unit.”[3]
Schmitt was looking to clarify the meaning of a political community in the context of the deliberate confusion created by the ‘penetration’ and conflation of the state with society created by liberalism.[4] At the end of this essay, I hope that you will walk away with a greater appreciation of Schmitt’s meaning, and if you haven’t read the essays discussed, that you will go ahead and read the primary material yourself instead of relying on others for interpretation.
Examples of the Mistaken Application
I’m going to use two examples of popular but erroneous applications of the friend-enemy distinction as representatives of a class of such mistaken interpretations. I don’t choose these out of any personal animus to the authors. Mostly, I want to see the bad interpretation corrected and to encourage people to read the original source. There are too many incidental examples of interpretive errors on social media to bother with. This is more about correcting a type of mistake than it is about criticizing individuals.
The first example of this misapplication comes from the writer Pedro Gonzales, writing for American Greatness in January 2021.[5] He also recorded a podcast episode with Jose Niño around the same time about the article on the same topic.[6] The second example is a video from the pseudonymous Auron Macintyre, a popular social media user who also frequently references Schmitt’s distinction online to a right-wing audience.[7]
In the American Greatness article, Gonzales opens with a direct quote from Schmitt’s essay combined with a lament that the dictum is ‘relevant’ because it is ‘so often ignored.’ He then infers that “it seems self-evident enough that one ought to reward friends and punish enemies.” This is true enough, but he progresses to a series of invalid inferences of Schmitt’s principle as it relates to his definitions of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy.’ The trouble here is not that his reasoning is badly constructed when considered within its own structure, but that it is erroneous in its connection to Schmitt’s essay and terminology.
Enemies Are Not Rivals
As described earlier in this essay, Schmitt states that enemies are not metaphorical. Enemies are individuals and collectives arrayed in arms against you and yours. Friends, in the context of the distinction, are allies in real combat, not to be mistaken for non-political allies engaged in metaphorical combat which is more correctly described as competition. Schmitt derives this and redefines it in Plato’s Greek terminology translated to the Latin of hostis contrasted with inimicus, meaning a public and external enemy in war, rather than a mere private rival.[8] When faced with a hostis, it is your duty to kill them. When faced with an inimicus, you address them by the process of law.
In this context, your friend is the hoplite next to you, and an enemy is the Persian opposite you during the Greco-Persian war. It is not the politician you dislike or your economic competitor in the olive press business. Your friend is not a guy you follow on Instagram because he posts funny memes, but the man assigned to the foxhole with you. In this context, it doesn’t really have that much to do with love or hate: if you love your brother, but he is a Union man and you are a Confederate, he is your enemy when you arrive on the battlefield no matter how sincere your affection for him happens to be. While the fighting relationship is famously conducive to amiability to allies and hostility to enemies, it’s not necessarily related to Schmitt’s distinction. The distinction is not about individuals, but about the dynamic of “one fighting collectivity of people [confronting] a similar collectivity.”[9]
Gonzales describes Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Michael Anton as friends that former president Donald Trump spurned while simultaneously rewarding individuals that operated at cross-purposes with the ostensible Trump agenda like John Bolton, Eliot Abrams, Jay Clayton and Gary Cohn. In journalistic terms, this is a reasonable opinion backed by an array of facts. The main issue is the framing device of Schmitt’s terms, which are already muddled in the original by virtue of having been translated from Greek to Latin to German and then from Greek to Latin to English and then from German to English. My edition also has publisher notes concerning the specific German to English translation decisions regarding the crucial terms. This type of conflation within a modern society of political matters with the non-political is the critical analytical thread within Schmitt’s essay.
“Rip Their Flesh / Burn Their Hearts / Stab Them In The Eyes…”
This mistake is compounded in the podcast discussion between Gonzales and Niño. The first three minutes of the recording restates the thesis of the American Greatness article, which is that Trump consistently punished his allies while rewarding his enemies. At roughly 21 minutes into the discussion, John Bolton is identified as an ‘enemy’ in the context of Schmitt’s essay.[10] To reiterate, this in invalid application of the concept. Unless John Bolton is a public enemy akin to someone like Osama bin Laden, slated to be killed in the due course of battle in a legitimate war, then it is an invalid application of the principle. In the podcast, it’s clear that this is not the intended meaning: Bolton and others like Abrams and the former acting director of Homeland Security Chad Wolf are all contextualized as domestic rivals to an ostensible policy agenda who were appointed officials within the executive branch. Bolton and Wolfe are not enemies in this context: they are mere rivals, and they do not even represent potential enemies in Schmitt’s articulation.
This type of conflation is hard for English speakers to avoid. We use ‘politics’ and other political terms interchangeably between domestic procedural concerns and matters of war. We routinely conflate policy with politics, rhetoric with politics, popular sentiment with politics, and many other things besides. In Schmitt’s essay, the focus is in making that distinction and identifying the enemy (as in who is the enemy that must be killed) as the core political question. At roughly 43 minutes into the recording, Gonzales raises the friend-enemy distinction again, but as a question of identity: who are we, who are we opposed to, and what do we support? This is a legitimate set of questions to ask, but again, those questions are ancillary to what Schmitt articulated in his essay.
Few Will Kill and Die for Economics
The short Macintyre video makes a similar set of mistakes, although the video opens with a mostly accurate interpretation of Schmitt’s description of the attempt by liberals to end war and blend the definitions of friend and enemy.[11] At just after the three minute mark, he makes an off-hand comment that ‘a religion or economic system’ that makes a friend-enemy distinction stops being ‘about economics’ or ‘about theology’ and starts being political. This is half of an accurate reading and half inaccurate.
I’ll be charitable because I know how difficult public speaking is and will assume that he misspoke. One of the more important arguments that Schmitt makes in the essay is that only religious communities and the state can credibly and consistently muster fighting collectivities. Schmitt writes:
Under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society, whose order in the economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations. To justify such a demand on the basis of economic expediency would contradict the individualistic principles of a liberal economic order and could never be justified by the norms or ideals of an economy autonomously conceived. The individual may voluntarily die for whatever reason he may wish. That is, like everything in an essentially individualist liberal society, a thoroughly private matter – decided upon freely.[12]
On the same page, Schmitt goes on to describe how economically ordered societies do purge people: through what is today trendy to refer to as ‘cancel culture,’ in which the person is economically “neutralized nonviolently,” whether via marginalization through competition or through a more defined embargo.
Although both the representative pieces discussed in this essay made similar interpretive errors, they made exactly opposite arguments to one another concerning president Trump. At roughly the 7 minute 30 second mark, Macintyre argues that former president understands the friend-enemy distinction at a fundamental and instinctive level. Gonzales made the opposite argument: that Trump was undone by his inexplicable incomprehension of the distinction between friends and enemies as it related to his staffing decisions.
On examination, neither of the arguments presented here had much to do with Schmitt, although both did properly interpret some elements of Concept of the Political while using the central framing device of the essay incorrectly. There’s room for a proper application of the principle to current circumstances.
Schmitt May Have Translated the Concept Imperfectly
I don’t speak Latin or Greek, so I am out of my depth in terms of personally evaluating whether Schmitt’s translation of Plato, Cicero, and others was accurate or not. However, there is debate about whether Schmitt correctly emphasized the stark separation between hostis and inimicus.[13] David Lloyd Dusenbury traces Schmitt’s conception to Cicero’s Eleventh Phillipic among other sources.[14] Dusenbury then went to Justinian’s Code to parse out the meaning of hostis, finely splicing the hairs, finding that Roman law had many distinct gradations between public and private enemies.[15]
In this context, however, Schmitt’s generalization and simplification shines a bit brighter after the polishing: included in hostes are private enemies whom it is justified to kill: latrones (brigands) and praedones (pirates). Simplifying further, it encompasses a category of people for whom it is legally justified to kill without due process. They may or may not have rights according to the nature of the conflict – Dusenbury quotes Cicero on proper treatment of enemies under the laws of a duly declared war – but Schmitt’s simplification still holds broadly.[16] This linguistic-legal controversy shows how complex some of these questions are. If Schmitt himself smudged the definitions a bit in service of advancing a strong argument, it makes it funnier that Schmitt’s definitions have themselves become smudged in the service of the pro-and-anti-Trump-take industry.
Trump, whether he embodied Schmitt’s philosophy or not, is himself like Schmitt in that observers tend to project diametrically opposing ideas onto him, and then vigorously debate if this was a valid projection. Schmitt has been variously described as a Nazi, an anti-Nazi, Hitler’s jurist, a republican, an anti-republican, a war crimes tribunal supporter, an anti-Semite, a nationalist, an anti-nationalist, a defender of Jews, an ogre, a saint, and everything in between.[17]
The reason why there seems to be so much ambiguity concerning his inner beliefs is simply because Schmitt was a jurist. He had to be able to make a good argument for whatever circumstance the sovereign finds itself or himself in. In his works, he’s aiming to educate and advise leaders. Advisors are not supposed to stay fixed to some unshakeable and unchanging ideology, because that would make them useless. Schmitt’s language is also often deliberately enigmatic and ambiguous. His tends to open his major essays with Sphinx-like utterances that are then supported, clarified, and qualified in the following text. This sort of issue around ambiguity within famous political treatises is not uncommon: think of all the debates around Thomas Jefferson’s statement that “all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence.
A Darker Application of the Distinction
When it comes to whether Trump understood Schmitt deep inside his bones if not within his heart, stomach, or head, I have no meaningful opinion. He was certainly advised by many people who are scholars and experts in Schmitt’s thinking – no doubt he had a surplus of Straussians, Schmittians, and gaggles of other associated *ans, all blended into a contentious fluid not unlike some strange insoluble mixture of paint, oil, glue, water, blood, turpentine, and piss. John Bolton, ironically in the context of the discussion here, has probably been one of the most prominent advocates of a Schmitt-tinged view on global multilateral institutions, owing to his well-known views on the United Nations among other topics.
Returning to the Concept, there is a darker point that has been missed due to all the misunderstandings: namely that for a group of people to have political validity, its borders must be demarcated by war. A group has no political potentiality without the capacity to make war. The state is defined by war, and if any faction is strong enough to determine the course of a war or to block a war, it has subsumed the core function of the state.[18] In a footnote, Schmitt cites Gladstone’s dismissal of English Catholics limiting their opposition to British intervention in the wars wracking Italy in 1874 as an example of a group within a state that has neutralized itself. If the group only has the capacity to issue thoughts, prayers, and sporadic terrorist attacks, then it has been effectively neutralized and cannot constitute a political entity.[19] Any entity with political potentiality must be able to exercise a “right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies.”[20] For it to be meaningful, this concept must mean that the group has to be ready, as in ready today to fight, rather than theoretically capable of fighting after a process of cohering, mustering, recruiting, and developing a comprehensive ethos that prepares it to make war on external enemies while maintaining ‘tranquility, security, and order’ within its own territory.[21] The potentiality means that it’s ready to mobilize to invade France or to bomb Pearl Harbor tomorrow at zero hour, not whenever it gets around to it. For a group to become political, it must be like the bodybuilder the night before the competition and not the skinny person dreaming about growing big muscles.
States Devolve To Ex-States
The unsettling part of Schmitt’s analysis in the contemporary context is that it means that many formally recognized states no longer meet this test. Indeed, many of the world’s most important states match Schmitt’s description of those that disarm and declare themselves the friends of humanity.[22] Many states, at best, have the capacity to provide auxiliary forces to support a protagonist-state in whatever that leading state decides to do. Schmitt’s prediction, which has been informally borne out over the course of postwar history, is that such states will be effectively displaced as sovereigns by more ‘politically normal’ protectors. We see this dynamic operating within NATO and in Pacific Asia.
Have we started to see this breakdown progress further within the constituent components of federations like the United States and quasi-federations like the European Union, in which increasing numbers of civil leaders forsake the use of arms, denounce the concept of internal order, disband or otherwise restrain their ‘fighting collectivities,’ and proclaim a suspension of ordinary legal procedure?
Are we not seeing many of these atrophied ex-states attempt to redevelop their political potentiality by creating arbitrary domestic distinctions, writing up fictional internal enemies that it moves to attack through some combination of informal economic sanction and legal procedure? Such an attempted transformation might be akin to a crippled old man doing physical therapy exercises to display the capacity to get in and out of his own wheelchair without aid from a nurse. This is not without its dangers: namely, that the old man flops out of his wheelchair and dies, bequeathing the rest of us the peril of an empty throne.
[1] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27-28.
[2] Schmitt, 28.
[3] Schmitt, 32.
[4] Schmitt, 22.
[5] Pedro Gonzalez, “Rewarding Enemies, Punishing Friends,” Amgreatness.com, January 18, 2021, https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/17/rewarding-enemies-punishing-friends/.
[6] Pedro Gonzales and Jose Niño, “CaudilloCast: Ep. 6: What Is the Friend/Enemy Distinction?,” Libsyn.com, February 18, 2021, https://caudillocast.libsyn.com/ep-6-american-greatness.
[7] Auron Macintyre, The Friend-Enemy Distinction, 2020, https://odysee.com/@AuronMacIntyre:f/the-friend-enemy-distinction:0.
[8] Schmitt, 28-29.
[9] Schmitt, 28.
[10] Gonzales and Niño.
[11] Auron Macintyre, The Friend-Enemy Distinction, 2020, https://odysee.com/@AuronMacIntyre:f/the-friend-enemy-distinction.
[12] Schmitt, 48.
[13] David Lloyd Dusenbury, “Carl Schmitt on Hostis and Inimicus (Ratio Juris 2015),” Ratio Juris 28, No. 3 (Sept. 2015), 431-433., 2013, https://www.academia.edu/5169815/Carl_Schmitt_on_Hostis_and_Inimicus_Ratio_Juris_2015_.
[14] Dusenbury, 436.
[15] Dusenbury, 438.
[16] Dusenbury, 436-437.
[17] Peter C. Caldwell, “Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent Literature,” The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (2005): 357–87, https://doi.org/10.1086/431819.
[18] Schmitt, 38-39.
[19] Schmitt, 43.
[20] Schmitt, 46.
[21] Schmitt, 46.
[22] Schmitt, 51-52.
Bibliography
Benhabib, Seyla. “Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Kant: Sovereignty and International Law.” Political Theory 40, no. 6 (2012): 688–713. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591712460651
Caldwell, Peter C. “Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent Literature.” The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (2005): 357–87. https://doi.org/10.1086/431819.
Dusenbury, David Lloyd. “Carl Schmitt on Hostis and Inimicus (Ratio Juris 2015).” Ratio Juris 28, No. 3 (Sept. 2015), 431-439., 2013. https://www.academia.edu/5169815/Carl_Schmitt_on_Hostis_and_Inimicus_Ratio_Juris_2015_.
Gonzalez, Pedro. “Rewarding Enemies, Punishing Friends.” Amgreatness.com, January 18, 2021. https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/17/rewarding-enemies-punishing-friends/.
Gonzales, Pedro & Niño, Jose. “CaudilloCast: Ep. 6: What Is the Friend/Enemy Distinction?” Libsyn.com, February 18, 2021. https://caudillocast.libsyn.com/ep-6-american-greatness.
Lind, Michael. “Carl Schmitt’s War on Liberalism.” Nationalinterest.org, April 23, 2015. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/carl-schmitt%E2%80%99s-war-liberalism-12704.
Macintyre, Auron. The Friend-Enemy Distinction, 2020. https://odysee.com/@AuronMacIntyre:f/the-friend-enemy-distinction:0.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
———. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.