Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Biopolitics: Against Political Utopias and Transformation of Human Biology

This paper aims to show that the late work of Carl Schmitt offers an original critique of modern biopolitics that has not been analyzed in previous research about biopolitics. Although many influential contemporary thinkers of biopolitics often utilize Schmitt’s ideas, this is done very selectively, and very few studies exist in which Schmitt’s actual contributions and his own ideas concerning biopolitics would receive a more substantial analysis. In contrast to such studies, this paper argues that Schmitt’s post-war writings, especially his post-war diary, the Glossarium, offer interesting and elaborate criticisms of the way modern politics becomes more and more focused on the question of human life as biology. On the one hand, Schmitt offers an original narrative about the biologization of the political imaginary by exploring how the gradually growing, modern interest in biology is reflected in the development of utopia literature. By focusing on such classics as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and on such modern works as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Georg Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Schmitt offers a depiction of modernity as one that becomes gradually more and more interested in the conscious manipulation of whole populations. On the other hand, Schmitt shows how politics itself becomes utopic. With the development of technology, political technologies now increasingly penetrate the realm of the human body itself. Human beings no longer intervene in nature, but, rather, constantly create nature through their actions and thus manipulate the very basic conditions on which human existence itself is possible. Analyzing the various versions of Enlightenment philosophies of history that believed in the unstoppable progress of humanity, Schmitt argues that modern politics, both in its Liberal-Capitalist and in its Communist versions, has arrived at a situation in which political technologies now necessarily intervene into the realm of the biological. In contrast to those readings, who see in Schmitt’s post-war revival of Catholic arguments nothing more than opportunism and an attempt to blur his true motivations for his earlier Nazi-engagement, we argue that the radical criticisms of modernity that Schmitt offered in his later works were also motivated, at least partially, by his growing concern that human beings were about to lose their humanity. Against the new kind of biopolitics that was about to produce the super-humans Nietzsche had dreamed of, Schmitt defended an anthropocentric and geocentric world-view, fueled by his reinvigorated catholic beliefs. By analyzing Schmitt’s narratives concerning the modern biologization of the political, this paper thus makes two contributions. First, it is argued that Schmitt’s understanding of biopolitical modernity offers an original perspective to debates concerning contemporary biopolitics. Second, by showing that Schmitt’s post-war writings can be fruitfully read in a biopolitical key, the paper also aims to enrich our understanding of the way the themes concerning biopolitics were discussed before Foucault’s specific use of the term biopolitics.