Carl Schorske's Theory and Practice

Book reviewed in this article:
Thinking with History. Explorations in the Passage to Modernism , by Carl E. Schorske     

The Theology of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology

The theological turn in studies of Carl Schmitt is pronounced. This paper does not challenge this turn, but questions what theology means for Schmitt. Specifically, it challenges the assumption that Schmitt's political theology is grounded in divine revelation. By distinguishing between “theology in the sense of divine revelation” and “theology in the sense of epistemic faith,” it argues that Schmitt's political theology is epistemic in origin. Schmitt's political theology is not rooted in faith in divine revelation, but in the narrower notion that human cognition is, ultimately, rooted in faith not reason, revelation, or common sense.     

Carl Schmitt on land and sea

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support.     

Contextualising the AIDS epidemic in the South Pacific: orthodoxies,estimates and evidence

There is a growing consensus that HIV/AIDS is a ‘time bomb’ ticking in the South Pacific. This may, in fact, be the case. However, there are at least two major problems with this approach. First, analysis of the implications of the epidemic is based on supposedly concrete links between the epidemic and social, economic and political outcomes. Many of these apparent links have not been established (because the data is not available for the South Pacific). As such, much of the method for analysing the ramifications of the epidemic is borrowed from elsewhere, notably Africa, and the strength of these links is beginning to unravel. Second, research on the vectors of the epidemic that informs this consensus is only as good as the data that it relies on. There are major testing and surveillance gaps in the South Pacific that mean projections are often based on patchy and incomplete data. This can dramatically skew priorities. Reflecting on these problems is important because of the clear ramifications they pose for the development of good public policy in, and toward, the South Pacific.     

Variety and Adventure in the Life of Carl Linden

Abstract

In his long life Carl Linden lived variously and wonderfully. For more than half a century he was a teacher and promoter of Great Books in the classroom and in the neighborhood. Great Books in his hands and mind transformed him into a kind of latter-day Socrates, always questioning, always smiling, sometimes teasingly. As a naturalist he was a hiker/biker on the C&O Canal towpath and promoter of it, as well. His scholarly pursuits took him to Eastern Europe, especially to Russia and Ukraine, about which he wrote and taught for four decades. Finally, he was a bon vivant whose Socratic ways won him laurels in the classroom and friends in the places where good fellows meet.     

Marching to the Beat of an Imperial Drum: Contextualising Australia's Military Effort During the First World War

When war erupted in 1914, Britain embarked on its prewar plans of mobilising resources from its vast Empire, and created an imperial coalition which fought within a wider coalition with France, Russia and, later, the United States of America. This article examines the limited role performed by Australian naval and military forces within this wider imperial effort and assesses the extent to which Australian forces relied on British command, technology, and logistic support. It challenges common assumptions about Australia’s wartime performance, including the degree to which Australian forces and commanders contributed to tactical innovation and wider planning and operational thought.     

Contextualising the papal censure of the Disputationes de Indiarum Iure (1642). The consultores of the Congregation of the Index

This study discusses hitherto unknown aspects concerning the papal censure of the work by the Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira, author of the two-volume treatise on Derecho indiano, known as the Disputationes de Indiarum Iure. Immediately after the publication of its second part in 1639, the Curia (under the government of Pope Urban VIII Barberini) prompted the Congregation of the Index in Rome to examine Solórzano's seminal treatise and, eventually, condemn its section about Spain's royal patronage of the Church. By looking at the circumstances of the censure (e.g. the early ‘leak’ orchestrated by the Congregation, the other reports about the censure), the present work aims at bringing to the attention of scholars the Solórzano file conserved in the Vatican archives. Considering both the reasons of the censure and the circumstances under which it developed, the present study sheds new light on the complex relationship between Spain and the Papacy in the first half of the seventeenth century and beyond.     

The Paradox of the Political: Carl Schmitt's Autonomous Account of Politics

Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political advances an understanding of the political in which the political is assessed in terms of the autonomy of the friend-and-enemy distinction. This article questions the autonomous foundations of Schmitt's concept of the political. Ultimately, Schmitt's desire to establish the autonomous nature of the political, allowing the specifically political antithesis to achieve mastery over all other forms of discourse, is replete with paradox. Whilst Schmitt endeavours to establish the autonomy of the political—where the political is free from interference from other domains—it is argued that his account of the political is highly dependent on the state. More critically, Schmitt's depiction of the political as autonomous is a strategic manoeuvre to establish the autonomy of the domain of the political vis-à-vis other conceptual domains.     

Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and the foundations of history and politics

This article explores the intellectual relations between Carl Schmitt and the German historian Reinhart Koselleck with a focus on the inspiration that Koselleck found in Schmitt's work in the early 1950s. The article goes beyond earlier contributions in the field by illuminating how the most important discursive features that Koselleck drew from Schmitt were utilized toward a very independent intellectual project. This project concerned an attempt to revise modern political thought by means of outlining a new concept of history. Koselleck's concept of history was to depart from all utopian notions of history as a singular, unified and goal-directed process. Instead, it aimed to outline certain fundamental existential structures of the human condition and to take account of the social relations existing among human beings in order to understand (historically) and contain (politically) the potential conflict in human societies. Hence Koselleck believed that his new concept of history would lead to a more responsible foundation of political order and decision making. Following an analysis of how Koselleck developed his project in a dialogue with the work of Schmitt and a number of other scholars, first of all Friedrich Meinecke and Martin Heidegger, the article presents a brief perspective on how his new concept of history was received in the 1950s and on how it came to provide his work with a certain analytical, thematic and argumentative unity.