Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:18:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Handelman <mhandelman1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Negri/Hardt and Carl Schmitt


Isn't the author of this (Alan Wolfe) piece someone
who has veered to the Right since the 70s (I think it
was Paul Buhle who referred to him as ex-New Leftist
moving towards the "neo-liberal centre" or something
like that)?

In n fact in this article he says specifically that he
is a liberal: 

"Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for
why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly
fight for their ideas with much more aggressive
self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan
Wolfe."

Which would probably have surprise the Alan Wolfe who
wrote the fascinating article on the Trilateral
Commission in that book edited by Holly Sklair....


--- Michael Pugliese <michael098762001-AT-earthlink.net>
wrote:
> <URL: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i30/30b01601.htm
> >
> > ...Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and
> unambiguous Nazi 
> > commitments, the left's continuing fascination
> with him is difficult to 
> > comprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at
> All Soul's College, 
> > Oxford, points out in his recently published A
> Dangerous Mind, that 
> > attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that
> Schmitt's spirit pervades 
> > Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the
> antiglobalization 
> > movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio
> Negri, as well as the 
> > writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio
> Agamben, recently much in the 
> > news because of his decision to turn down a
> position at New York 
> > University as a protest against America's decision
> to fingerprint 
> > overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).
> 
> When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of
> political and social 
> science at the New School for Social Research in the
> 1990s, the efforts of 
> the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a
> conference on Schmitt's 
> thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish
> donor who informed me that 
> he was not going to give any more of his money to an
> institution 
> sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to "that
> fascist." I was tempted to tell 
> him, not that it would have helped, that Schmitt had
> become the rage in 
> leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968
> dedicated to bringing 
> European critical theory to American audiences, had
> started a campaign in 
> the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed
> by his no-nonsense 
> attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian
> idealism. A 
> comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings,
> Gopal Balakrishnan's The 
> Enemy, published by the New Leftist firm of Verso in
> 2000, finds Schmitt's 
> conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a
> crisis oddly reassuring, 
> for it gives the left hope that its present
> stalemate will not last 
> indefinitely. Such prominent European thinkers as
> Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal 
> Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been
> preoccupied with Schmitt's 
> ideas. It is not that they admire Schmitt's
> political views. But they 
> recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like
> themselves, opposed 
> humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of
> power in modern society, a 
> perspective that has more in common with a
> poststructuralist like Michel 
> Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John
> Rawls.
> 
> Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to
> realize that after the 
> collapse of communism, Marxism needed considerable
> rethinking. Yet in 
> turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they
> have clung fast to an 
> authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by such
> 20th-century thinkers 
> as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn't
> just been Schmitt. Telos, 
> in particular, developed a fascination with
> neofascist thinkers and 
> movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that anything
> would be better than 
> Marx's contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his
> legacy.
> 
> Schmitt's influence on the contemporary right has
> taken a different course. 
> In Europe, new-right thinkers such as Gianfranco
> Miglio in Italy, Alain de 
> Benoist in France, and the German writers
> contributing to the magazine 
> Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built on
> Schmitt's ideas. Right-wing 
> Schmittians in the United States are not as
> numerous, but they include 
> intellectuals -- often described as
> paleoconservative -- who expend 
> considerable energy attacking neoconservatism from
> the right. One of them, 
> Paul Edward Gottfried, a humanities professor at
> Elizabethtown College, in 
> Pennsylvania, is especially prolific. Himself an
> occasional contributor to 
> Junge Freiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine for
> rejecting "the view that 
> every German patriot should be evermore browbeaten
> by self-appointed 
> victims of the Holocaust." No wonder he has a soft
> spot for Carl Schmitt. 
> Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term
> "fascism" in quotation 
> marks, as if its existence in the European past is
> somehow open to 
> question.
> 
> But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on
> Schmitt taking place 
> anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any
> important conservative 
> political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is
> unlikely, they would 
> surely distance themselves from his totalitarian
> sympathies. Still, 
> Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades
> the contemporary 
> zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has
> flourished, often in ways so 
> prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his
> analysis helps explain the 
> ways in which conservatives attack liberals and
> liberals, often 
> reluctantly, defend themselves.
> <SNIP>
> -- 
> Michael Pugliese
> 
> 
> -- 
> Michael Pugliese
> 
> 
>      --- from list
> aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


===="Economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy - from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, abolition of "public opinion" together with its makers." Herbert Marcuse


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---