Carl Schmitt - The Political and Spiritual Central Domain

Already in the nineteenth century technical progress proceeded at such an astonishing rate, even as did social and economic situations as a consequence, that all moral, political, social and economic situations were affected.  Given the overpowering suggestion of ever new and surprising inventions and achievements, there arose a religion of technical progress which promised all other problems would be solved by technological progress.  This belief was self-evident to the great masses of the industrialized countries.  They skipped all intermediary stages typical of the thinking of intellectual vanguards and turned the belief in miracles and an afterlife - into a religion of technical miracles, human achievements and the domination of nature.  A magical religiosity became an equally magical technicity.  The twentieth century began as the age not only of technology but of a religious belief in technology.  It is often called the age of technology.  But this is only a tentative characterization of the whole situation.  The question of the significance of overwhelming technicity should for now be left open, because the belief in technology is in fact only the result of a certain tendency in the shifting of the central domain - as a belief, it is only the result of this shifting.

 All concepts of the spiritual sphere, including the concept of the spirit, are pluralistic in themselves and can only be understood in terms of concrete political existence...All essential concepts are not normative but existential.  If the center of intellectual life has shifted in the last four centuries, so have all concepts and words.  It is thus necessary to bear in mind the ambiguity of every concept and word.  The greatest and most egregious misunderstandings (from which, of course, many impostors make their living) can be explained by the erroneous transfer of a concept at home in one domain (e.g., only in the metaphysical, the moral or the economic) to other domains of intellectual life.  It is not only true that incidents and events which make their mark on people and become the object of their personal reflections and discussions have reference to the central domain (e.g., Lisbon's earthquake could occasion a whole flood of moralizing literature, whereas today a similar event would pass almost unnoticed); it is also true that an economic catastrophe, such as a sharp monetary devaluation or a crash, occasions widespread and acute interest both practical and theoretical.

The specific concepts of individual centuries also derive their meaning from the respective central domains.  One example will suffice.  The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief.  Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self determination, and education: moral perfection.  In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress.  To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress.  If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain - they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved...




Schmitt, C.  Der Begriff des politshen.  Duncker & Humblot, Munich 1932.  G. Schwab (trans.) Univ. Chicago, 1996.


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