Summary of my clever objections to Carl Schmitt


Author: Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Draft version: 3 (6th June 2026 objections added around "Immortal longings" - my favourite; 7th October 2025, plan to recheck English later)


Evil poem: Dream of feeding on the brain of Carl Schmitt
And anyone attracted to it!


Schmitt’s philosophy in brief. According to Carl Schmitt, politics is about friends versus enemies. A nation has a way of life (or a dominant way) and the enemy is he who is a threat to the continued existence of this way of life. Members of a nation must be willing to die to protect this way of life - without this willingness, life is meaningless. The history of a nation is divided into ordinary and exceptional periods, exceptional periods being distinguished by the suspension or absence of a legal system. The sovereign is defined by Schmitt as he who decides on the exception: the person or institution with the power to suspend the law. Schmitt recommends suspending the law when a nation is faced with an enemy. (Clarificatory question: suspend the whole law or some of it?) If the enemy invades, the aim of war is to drive the enemy back to his own territory. Schmitt is opposed to going to war against an enemy on the grounds that the enemy is immoral, rather than a threat to one’s way of life. Moral justification inevitably leads to intense warfare: anyone with those qualities all over the world is now the enemy and one must seek them out to destroy those qualities.


Note on wording. I have cut and paste from numerous previous contributions of mine to produce this summary document. There is consequently quite a bit of repetition of relevant bits of Schmitt’s philosophy. Some complicated objections I devised are on an old computer and not yet online. 


Objection (not clever): climate change. In war, Schmitt recommends the aim of driving the enemy back to their territory, rather than destroying them completely, because that is enough to protect the way of life in your nation. But pollution from within another territory can threaten your way of life, affecting your country: acid rain, climate change, etc. In this case, the enemy is within their territory. (This was the first objection I devised to Schmitt and told to Qi Zheng in 2010 or 11. First online appearance here.)


Objection (obvious not clever): no return. Schmitt divides the life of a nation into normal periods and extraordinary periods. In normal periods, there is rule of law. In extraordinary periods, there is not. Schmitt is especially interested in extraordinary periods in which the law is (partly or wholly?) suspended to better combat an enemy to the nation, to the shared way of life in that nation. Schmitt recommends such suspensions but the aim should be to return to a new normal period. The objection is from political science. There are just lots of cases where rule of law is suspended and the nation does not get back to a normal period (assuming Schmitt's distinction), so by inductive reasoning this political and legal philosophy is a bad idea to implement. A group of politicians decides to suspend the law and what you get is an evil dictatorship rather than a return to a normal period. "Can you give examples?" I am not a political scientist, but I suppose there are lots of national histories which suggest this objection. Maybe Chile! (This objection is surely well-known, but where is it in the literature?)


Objection (not so clever): against the divide. As I understand Schmitt, he divides periods in the life of a nation into ordinary and extraordinary periods. In normal/ordinary periods, the law functions. In extraordinary periods, the law does not function. (Partly or wholly?) Schmitt is especially interested in those extraordinary periods in which the law is suspended in order to better combat an enemy to the nation, to the way of life in that nation. Schmitt recommends that the law be suspended for this purpose but the overall aim is to return to a normal period, in which the law functions. What I anticipate is that, if you make this political philosophy your official philosophy, there will be lots of minor "suspensions of the law" for the sake of protecting the nation. For example, a German mathematics teacher in Germany regards a certain student as a French-style mathematician and marks them down, even though there is nothing wrong with their work from the point of view of mathematics. He engages in a little violation of the law, for the sake of protecting the nation against "other ways." I anticipate that there will not be the normal period that Schmitt promises, where the law simply functions and citizens (or the vast majority) follow the law. There will be lots of these little suspensions, and it would be misleading to describe some people as enjoying a functioning legal system in the so-called normal/ordinary period. (Note: I called this my main objection on academia.edu, but maybe that was a mistake! It was devised/realized during the corona virus pandemic lockdown.)
 
Objection: brain-drain worry. Schmitt believes that legal systems are unsuited to dealing with some political problems. Notably, one should suspend the law (partly or wholly?) to better combat an enemy: a threat to the shared way of life in a nation. But some legal specialists, I presume, are experts in patching up a legal system. It did not look as if it could cope with a certain problem, but once patched up it can keep going. (They are like the trainers in the Balinese cockfight?) These people will not feel valued if you implement Schmitt's legal and political philosophy. There is not enough value on rule of law. And they will leave the nation for one which values rule of law to a greater extent. Then, in their former nation, these suspensions of the law Schmitt recommends will happen too frequently. They are meant to be infrequent, I suppose. But the intelligence is now just lacking to deal with various problems within a legal system. "Once again, we have to suspend the law to deal with this problem we are facing." (All the other nations laugh at it for that even. This objection was devised/realized during the coronavirus lockdown, but recently I proposed that Argentina is what a country implementing Schmitt could end up like. In 1913 Argentina was richer than France, but it has suffered from lack of stable government: between 1930 and 1970 there was 6 military coups. (This is an obvious solution to the Argentina paradox of why it fell behind.)


Objection: cake-eat-it problem. English society seems to be rich in what various people think of as “Have-your-cake-and-eat-it” practices, after the English saying. Such a practice combines things which intuitively seem uncombinable. For example, one does not beat one’s children yet avoids brats, avoids spoilt children: children so poorly behaved they cannot function or integrate socially. (Given another saying, “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” how is this achieved? Not sure. Clever techniques such as a culture within which other children refuse to play with a child becoming spoilt and then the child changes to gain acceptance.) Another example is that in some institutions one does not fire people from the organization but amazingly still avoids problems; colleagues behave so that a problematic worker leaves. What then if a nation has a shared way of life which is about such practices and it faces an enemy? They cannot follow Schmitt’s advice of having a sovereign who suspends the legal system to confront the enemy, because this is too stupidly direct for such a society.


Objection: disease survival. Schmitt thinks that the people within a state must prioritize political values (protecting the way of life of a nation, if threatened) over other values, such as moral values (“I won’t protect it, because the people trying to change it are morally better”) and aesthetic values (“Acts of protection are so ugly”) and the value of comfort. But think about how Europeans discovered the new world and brought diseases which wiped out so many native tribes. Which tribes survived? Plausibly tribes which prioritized the medical over the political. “We care more about good medicine than protecting our way of life.” Where does implementing Schmitt lead to for them? Yet another vanished tribe? Note that there is some evidence of situations in which the medical is prioritized. Concerning another continent, in 1937, anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote, "A political boundary now intervenes between the Azande of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the forests of the Belgian Congo wherein grows the poison creeper. However, it is rather for medical than for political reasons that the British authorities frown upon those who cross the border… " (1937: 278)


Objection: ordinary and extraordinary versus artefacts. Schmitt divides periods in the history of a nation into ordinary and extraordinary periods. In ordinary periods, a legal system is imposed on citizens. In extraordinary periods, the legal system does not function.. I am not convinced by this neat division into ordinary and extraordinary periods. Probably if the law is suspended to better deal with an enemy, as Schmitt recommends, people use certain artefacts to deal with the so-called enemy and these artefacts are not acceptable when the legal system is restored (poisons, etc.). But how to dispose of them? You are probably going to have to not impose the law on the possessors of this stuff in the subsequent ordinary period, or you would create a disincentive against using them in the extraordinary period. But then, is it even an ordinary period at all, given the conception above: imposition of the legal system. Has this ordinary-extraordinary distinction been thought through properly? I am not sure. By the way, these admirers of Schmitt don't want to get involved in the subtle analyses of analytic philosophy, but how else to defend him against this objection.


Objection: no sensible immigration policy. Carl Schmitt is associated with racist and xenophobic policies. But a country does not want to become totally closed to immigration, like North Korea or worse even. Societies benefit from immigration. However, what would be a sensible immigration policy for an apish Schmittian state? Take in less talented migrants for menial work, freeing up natives to do something else: but then there will be complaints from less prestigious workers that “our jobs are being taken” and it makes sense to take in lots; take in more talented migrants but then there will be complaints that “our local talent is eclipsed and we are now being ruled by immigrants.” Whatever you do with immigration, the people of a Schmittian state will not be happy. (Note: this was initially a comedy sketch idea.)


Objection: psychiatric treatment. Schmitt says that humans are evil but liberalism wrongly assumes that humans are good. Qi Zheng defines evil as what causes enmity between cultural groups, where enmity is denial of another group’s way of life (2016: 69). But what plays this causal role exactly? There are various candidates, such as stupidity, corruption, etc. This is what I guess is the response of some British psychiatrists: for every plausible specification of what this human evil consists in, we have medication to stop that.


Objection: allows for paranoia.  Schmitt’s philosophy allows for a kind of paranoid individual to not be treated, given a Nozickian definition of paranoia, illegitimate paranoia to be precise. Psychiatrists today distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate paranoia, illegitimate paranoia being unjustified, e.g. an unjustified belief that you are following me.  Robert Nozick’s definition of knowledge allows us to introduce a replacement for making use of the more vague concept of justification in the definition. Instead use Nozick's tracking conditions. When there is illegitimate paranoia a person believes P (e.g. you are following me) and even if P is true, they would still believe P if it were false. This replacement will allow you to "catch" a kind of European intellectual. Call them EI. EI sees a person on the street and takes one look at their face and forms the belief "This is the enemy to our society." They then begin to gather evidence in favour of this belief and they are successful in doing so. The belief is now justified. BUT if they found no evidence they would still hold the belief. Furthermore, in a possible world where the belief is false, they would still hold the belief. That face "rigidly" causes that belief in them, whether the belief be true or not. This person is paranoid by the Nozickian redefinition. My redefinition brings Nozick into further collision with Carl Schmitt than he obviously is by demanding exceptionless protection of rights, Schmitt who said that politics is about the friend-enemy distinction. I wonder if psychiatrists are not allowed to catch this kind of paranoid subject, and even if they are, they are probably not allowed to inject him, and even if they are, the medicines will probably fast improve.


Objection: use children instead. Schmitt believes that the law should sometimes be suspended to better combat an enemy. In some contexts at least, perhaps many, an alternative approach is available, which I was stimulated to conceive from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and perhaps life experience too: set children on the enemy. Tamina is the enemy, let us say, and she is pressured until she ends up the only adult amongst children. The law is not suspended but it is difficult to punish awful children. Instead they drive you away or to death.


Objection: use a dangerous migrant instead. To repeat: Schmitt recommends that a government sometimes suspend the law to better protect a nation from an enemy, an enemy to its shared way of life. I have conceived a disturbing alternative, which may be  workable in some small societies. You have an intuition that a certain person is dangerous. But you let them into your society anyway. If you catch them breaking the law, you will punish them. The law is never suspended. Why let them in though? You think of someone else as the enemy. There is some chance that the dangerous migrant will kill the enemy and you even hope for this.


Objection: multiculturalism as economic problem. There is an old objection to liberal multicultural projects, which Schmittians seem to agree with. This is that people's group identities are so strong that these projects of different ethnic groups living together cannot work: there will be significant violence. Recent terrorist incidents (usually associated with radical Islam), and perhaps earlier terrorism, probably convinced quite a few people of this argument in the UK (though Muslims are a religious not an ethnic group). But there is a variation on the objection, which does not anticipate violence. What it anticipates is a kind of economic problem. There is a skilled worker in a field - a doctor, a lawyer, a nurse, a builder, etc. - but the level at which he (or she) works at varies considerably depending on whether "these are my people or not," even within the same society. "I am a civilized person, I don't become violent, but I do the minimum for these folk and work lovingly well for these other folk."


Half-objection: alternative explanation. It is tempting to use Schmitt not just to make recommendations but also to explain what is going on in actual situations and I think many political scientists are interested in Schmitt for this purpose. The state reacts violently to an individual who seems harmless. Schmitt provides an explanation: the individual is an enemy to the way of life in the state. There is an alternative explanation, but it is going to sound mad and I will have to later defuse that impression. What seems like violence is actually an erotic reaction: the government is engaging in erotic relations with the individual by means of the police. Yes, this sounds mad at present. But consider this realistic possibility, before you jump to conclusion. A politician would like erotic relations with a certain individual but fears to pursue this desire. They daydream about getting the police to do so on their behalf. Is this so strange? No! But you cannot become a politician and be so risk averse and life is short. So they actually instruct the police to act.


An inductive reasoning objection. Let's suppose that a nation begins at time T, and at time T + 1 rule of law is established. At time T+7 a state of exception is called, but it doesn't go very well and all the other nations of the earth regard your nation as making a mistake in dealing with a problem: one should have maintained rule of law. At time T+8, rule of law resumes, but at time T+14, another state of exception is called and an enemy is again combatted, or supposed enemy, but the result is the same. The nation is regarded by other nations as having made a mistake. (1 could be more than 1 year, it could be for example 1 decade. "Must we count in 1s or 10s or 100s using the decimal system?" It's up to you.) This happens again and again, until people within the nation come to a conclusion: we are not good with doing anything but following rule of law. Can't an argument against Schmitt's recommendations - suspect the law to deal with the enemy -emerge through this kind of repeated experience?


*The immortal longings objection. Imagine a society with immortal longings, as the Ancient Greeks seem to us to be: they want their art and philosophy and science to survive forever. The encounter a society which they are capable of defeating in war, but if they lose, the society will become stronger than theirs, which is in decline, and also better preserve their works. It is rational for the society to lose, but this mentality is completely alien to Schmittian thinking.


The Roman empire: Mary Beard's objection? In an online video discussing her book Emperor of Rome, Mary Beard tells us that all ancient cultures were militaristic and nasty (7 min 11 seconds - dresses similar to how I often do). But she also tells us that the expansion of the Roman empire caused the implosion of its old political system. This does not sound like something a Schmittian people would tolerate. One does not change one's political system as part of empire building (or even empire-build?). The details of the change are not spelt out sufficiently clearly for me.


Objections from Schmitt-Wyndham Lewis comparisons. Britain has had its own fascism sympathizers, one of them being the artist, novelist, and social commentator Wyndham Lewis. (i) Whereas Schmitt thinks of liberals as naively optimistic about human nature and so thinking that there should be a war to end all wars, Lewis thinks of the call for this as wicked, pursued by an evil gentleman. (ii) Whereas Schmitt seems to favour an openly authoritarian system to deal with the enemy, Lewis is alive to the possibility of running a dictatorship while maintaining a democratic surface. Various British politicians of that time thought Britain is unsuited to fascism. (iii) Lewis suggests the way of life within a culture is partly protected by God rather than people, writing that if a golden generation of painters were gathered in a hall in which a fire occurred, killing them all, "I should be horrified, but I should see that God did not mean England to have painters, and I would accept this, perhaps, as another example of those actions of the divinity which we find it impossible to understand." (iv) Lewis's conservatism seems to accept the natural "mortality" of one's culture, its way of life, whereas Schmitt makes a categorical demand to aim at survival: "He regards the society to which he belongs as something alive, and subject to laws of growth, like a tree – not an inorganic matter to be made up into any shape that the intellect may decide. He sees it evolving, more or less slowly, until, in the fullness of time it shall have to die, as have other human societies, nations, or empires, before it." 


References
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. A "well-known" objection to Carl Schmitt. Available at PhilPapers. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWAQO-2
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Carl Schmitt's legal philosophy: a brain drain worry. Available at PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWCSL-3
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Comparison of two ridiculous fascists: Carl Schmitt and Wyndham Lewis. Available at PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWCOT-13.pdf
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. When political values lose: E.E. Evans-Pritchard on African boundaries. Available at PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWWPV
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Carl Schmitt and Rawls's the political versus the medical: a massive loss for Schmitt & co. Available at PhilPapers at:
 https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWCSA-4
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. To have your cake and eat it, versus Carl Schmitt, holocaust advocates, and a working-people's comedian. Available at PhilPapers at:
https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWTHY-2
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. An economic problem for multiculturalism instead. Available at PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWAEP-3
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Why can’t television comedy sketch shows flourish because of convenience? No scouring the Internet required. Available at PhilPapers at:
https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWWCT-3.pdf
(Suggests no sensible immigration policy objection.)
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. My main objection to the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt. Available on academia.edu at:
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. An alternative to Carl Schmitt. Available at academia.edu
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Children versus Carl Schmitt. Available at academia.edu
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Carl Schmitt, suspension of the law, and artefacts. Available at academia.edu.
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. On my Nozickian redefinition of illegitimate paranoia and Carl Schmitt. Available at academia.edu
(See also Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Defining legitimate and illegitimate paranoia. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWDLA-2)
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. The state against a law-abiding individual: an alternative to Carl Schmitt. Available at academia.edu
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Peace offering: why psychiatrists don't accept Carl Schmitt. Available at academia.edu
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2026. The Argentina paradox and what a Carl Schmitt country would be like. Available at academia.edu at:
https://www.academia.edu/165173356/The_Argentina_paradox_and_what_a_Carl_Schmitt_country_would_be_like
And also at: https://website2.net/schmitt_argentina.txt
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2026. Carl Schmitt and immortal longings. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/164498887/Carl_Schmitt_and_immortal_longings
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2026. A German objection to Carl Schmitt? Available at:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DXHfCfzkbTN/
[The entire European Union law is built on objections to Schmitt, I believe, which is one reason for being pro-EU at least.)
Imbruglia, Natalie. 2009. Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (Official Video). Available at YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV1XWJN3nJo&list=RDVV1XWJN3nJo&start_radio=1
(YouTube suddenly started playing this. It is not on my playlist. No artificial intelligence was intentionally used in producing this summary, apart from Google docs grammar checker, if you wish to count that. “The Internet depends on lots of AI”?)
Kundera, Milan. (translated by Aaron Asher). 1996. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. London: Faber and Faber.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1936. Left Wings over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing. London: Jonathan Cape. Available at:
https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/LeftWingsOverEuropeOrHowToMakeAWarAboutNothing/LeftWingsOverEuropeOrHowToMakeAWarAboutNothing.pdf
Lewis, Wyndham. 1938. The Mysterious Mr Bull. London: Robert Hale.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1954. The Demon of Progress in the Arts. London: Methuen. Available at:
https://ia601503.us.archive.org/29/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.86653/2015.86653.The-Demon-Of-Progress-In-The-Arts.pdf
Zheng, Qi. 2016. Carl Schmitt, Mao Zedong, and the Politics of Transition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. (My source for Schmitt’s philosophy. I must thank my friend Qi Zheng.)
Note: the academia.edu contributions are mostly on my webpage in the Dreams of Preview, Not Preview of Dreams section.
https://independent.academia.edu/TerenceRajivanEdward/Dreams%20of%20Preview%20(Not%20Preview%20of%20Dreams)


Some further reading:
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Prisoner’s dilemma and outline of an alternative to Carl Schmitt? Available on Researchgate.net at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393448581_Prisoner's_dilemma_and_outline_of_an_alternative_to
Nugee, Richard. 2025. Why Britain's climate and defence strategies need to be better integrated. Letter to The Guardian October 13th 2025:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/13/why-britains-climate-and-defence-strategies-need-to-be-better-integrated