Carl Schmitt and the dictatorship

Dictators and dictatorships have disrupted the course of history from time to time, leaving a blood trail behind them. They are a disturbing presence in historical records. However, that made them an appealing topic for scholars in law, political science, and so on. Carl Schmitt, who was involved in Germany’s political turmoil in the 1930s, wrote about dictatorial regimes, and that’s what we’re going to discuss here.

Introduction

Today, I want to speak to you about the famous essay by Carl Schmitt titled On Dictatorship. Probably, it isn’t as much renowned as his work The concept of the political. Despite that, it turned out to be a yardstick for anyone interested in the study of this topic.

The importance of his work about dictatorship rests on the relationship between this political regime and Schmitt’s way of understanding sovereignty and the role of exceptional political scenarios to ensure the existence of the political community. Although I spoke about these issues in another episode, I want to go over it with more detail.

I already know that it’s impossible to summarize this book in a few words or discuss it in-depth, either. However, I’m going to explain the most relevant aspects of it.

Definition of dictatorship

First of all, I want to stress that the dictator figure comes from the Roman Republic. Schmitt links his theorization with this fact and makes the difference between different kinds of dictatorships. In this regard, the dictator’s main characteristic was that the Senate elected him in an extraordinary situation that posed a severe danger for the political community. So, this figure received special powers by surrendering constitutional constraints to save the polity. When the threat that justified his appointment vanished, the legal order was restored. So, the dictatorship was temporary, and the law contemplated this possibility.

The Schmitt approach was the result of the new political regime in the Weimar Republic, and the provisions of the German constitution. That led him to analyze the dictatorship in history, and especially the new political order set by this constitution. In this regard, he focused the attention on the role of the office of the Reichpräsident. Schmitt compared and contrasted what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of his country’s new constitution. In his view, the considered the office of the president as a comparatively effective element, due to the power granted to the president to declare a state of exception. Schmitt discussed this power, and implicitly praised it as dictatorial. He was right on this if we take into account the consequences of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. I discussed it recently in another episode.

Besides this, Schmitt didn’t hesitate to claim that this constitutional provision was in line with the underlying mindset inherent to the executive power. At least if we compare it with the slower and ineffective processes of the legislative power in which parliamentary discussion and compromise are a must to reach any agreement.

The novelty in Schmitt’s thought was the removal of the taboo that surrounded the concept of dictatorship. He showed it as something implicit when someone wields power by means other than the slow processes of parliamentary politics and the bureaucracy. In this respect, he argued that “If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.”

Any sovereignty political community has the capacity to take decisive action, and that involves the inclusion of a dictatorial element within its constitution. Schmitt resorted to the concept of the state of exception and described it as that extraordinary situation in which the executive doesn’t have any legal restraints to its power that would usually apply. This exceptionality defines sovereignty in Schmitt’s view. It is the power to decide to initiate a state of exception in which the sovereign body or individual exercises open violence under right.

Dictatorial powers are necessary for exceptional circumstances because they ensure the survival of the polity. That led Schmitt to differentiate two sorts of dictatorship. On the one hand, the commissarial dictatorship in which the declaration of a state of exception intends to save the legal order. That means a temporary suspension of law that it’s regulated by legal right. In this situation, the state of exception is limited by law. That’s the extraordinary situation in which the constitution itself establishes a stronger and expanded power to deal with whatever is threatening the polity.

On the other hand, Schmitt identified the sovereign dictatorship. It is different than the commissarial dictatorship because, in this case, it involves the suspension of law. If the classical state of exception aims to save the constitution, the sovereign dictatorship, on the contrary, seeks to create another constitution. That means the creation of a new political community by resorting to extraordinary powers and breaking legality. It recalls the usurpation of sovereignty that tyrants carry out to seize full power in the country.

All of this explains why Schmitt became an ideologist of the permanent state of exception in Germany from 1933 on. In this way, Nazis never needed to abolish the Weimar Constitution. Rather than that, they only suspended it by proclaiming the state of exception. That allowed them to get rid of any legal constraints and to impose extraordinary measures that led to the formation of a totalitarian regime. Indeed, the entire Third Reich was a permanent state of exception by concentrating power in the executive branch. Article 48 of the constitution made it possible and provided a stamp of legality to the new regime. What was devised for temporary situations to preserve the polity from an existential threat became a new normal.

The common usage of the concept of dictatorship

The common usage of the concept of dictatorship has altered its original meaning. Nowadays, most people understand by dictatorship any political regime in which one individual, or a government body, concentrates power and wields absolute authority in any sphere. That’s why many people call dictators to those individuals who developed a leading role in those regimes that stripped people of their rights and liberties. That’s the case of figures such as Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franco, Stalin, Castro and so on. However, they never had any intention of exercising a temporary rule. So, dictatorships have become political systems in which the executive branch controls almost everything and the individual lacks any autonomy and any right.

Due to extraordinary events, we’re witnessing how many countries adopt constitutional dictatorships to preserve the political community, as we’ve seen in the last world pandemic. However, they haven’t stripped people of their rights, but their liberties have been shacked due to security reasons. That may lead to permanent dictatorships in the long run because authorities vested with extraordinary powers are reluctant to surrender them after the peril is over.

Question of the day

Question of the day! What is a dictatorship for you? Post your opinion in the comments section below, and I’ll check it out.

Bibliography used:

Schmitt, Carl, On Dictatorship

Vagts, Detlev, “Carl Schmitt’s Ultimate Emergency: The Night of the Long Knives” in The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 87(2), 2012, pp. 203-209

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception

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