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Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
Political Theology Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
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1 Reddit comment about Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty:

u/YoungModern ยท 3 pointsr/DebateAnarchism

Read Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism Political Theology. The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that political struggle against actors which seek to overthrow the state/prevailing order not only does not follow the ordinary rules of ethics but that it is an empirical reality that it cannot follow the ordinary rules of ethics because the stability of the state/prevailing order is an essential predicate for determining ordinary ethical behaviour. Political actors which seek to undermine that stability are necessarily beyond the scope of the ordinary and therefore fall in the scope of the exception.

As far as it being equally fine for police to attack revolutionary leftists: yes, it is must necessarily be "fine" from the point of view of the state. The most important thing that you have to understand about Schmitt's theory of the state is that it he is being descriptive, not prescriptive. This means he is merely describing how things actual play out in material reality, and not suggesting how they ought to be.

This is why committed revolutionaries who are not liberals LARPing as anarchists understand that when they attack the state they can expect no mercy or justice from it, and so they'd better be serious as death about the consequences of their actions and be prepared deal with the fallout when it doesn't go their way.

This is because power in the state doesn't come from mythical abstractions like "divine right" or "the constitution", but from living people who make decisions about how to wield their power to direct the claim of monopoly of violence that a state has. If the state ever fails to fully excercise its monopoly of violence to whatever extent is necessary in order to ensure its own existence, then the state will collapse. This is a neutral empirical fact, not a theoretical moral claim -it is a simple description of the nature of what is state actually is.

What Schmitt does here is to utterly destroy the bourgeois myth that the chattering-classes can settle all political issues by yakking it out, because the very existence of political actors who reject that premise refutes that possibility. The fact is that we have real political enemies, not just "strangers whose stories we heard yet", and that states always, without exception, violate their own moral and legal principles in order to ensure their continued existence or collapse and give way to chaos and then a new order.

So if you're going to attack the state of your political adversaries then you'd better have a serious plan for how to escape retribution or how implement a new order in its place, and be prepared to face consequences of your actions because by its very nature the closed-system of the state is justified in going beyond the law in order to squelch threats to its sovereignty. Likewise, the revolutionary socialist and anarchist is justified by the historical nature of class struggle to go beyond the law in order to overcome class oppression. It's a contradiction which can only be resolved by strength of will and demonstration of force, and no resort to fanciful abstract ideals can alter that fundamental material reality.