Fourth Reich Archaeology - #087 - Fourth Reich Political Theology, Part 2, Side B

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

We are back with side B of part two of our ongoing series Fourth Reich Political Theology with Marcus from the Return of the Repressed podcast. Recall that in our opening salvo of this series, we laid the foundation for our excavation by exploring how the superstitious religious worldview of the feudal world order was superimposed onto the capitalist world order with “The Market” playing the role of God. The same way that serfs and peasants lived their lives in awe and default belief of a vengeful deity, we today implicitly believe in the mysterious market forces we are told move the earthly cosmos beyond the will of man.This episode picks up right where we left off, expanding outwards on what we covered in part 1 to reach beyond the “earthly philosophers” of bourgeois political economy (Smith, Bentham, et al.), to the German Idealists from Kant to the so-called neo-Kantains, to the early sociologists, to the man of the hour himself, Carl Schmitt. In our journey, we draw heavily on Georg Lukacs “The Destruction of Reason” to trace the thread of irrationalism through all liberal political philosophizing. Lukacs and Schmitt see eye to eye when it comes to the hypocrisy and incoherence of Western bourgeois liberal democracy. After all, rule of by and for the bourgeoisie–and the exploitation and domination of the proletariat that entails–cannot really pursue the objectives of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. That would destroy the special privileges enjoyed by the ruling class. But from the same observation, Schmitt and Lukacs proceed in polar opposite directions. Schmitt would strip back the pretense of institutional norms in favor of the rule of raw power, which he supported in his advocacy for and membership in the Nazi party. Lukacs, good Marxist that he was, would instead expose the exploitive nature of the state and the society and, developing class consciousness through praxis, expropriate the ruling class in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s another incredible conversation with Marcus, and one that has real practical implications for today when we once again find ourselves in what Schmitt called “the state of exception” where the sovereign alone makes the rules…Return of the Repressed Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheReturnOfTheRepressedFourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. Our people prospered in time. The east and west blocks were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole. But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion, that we had entered, quote, the end of history,

that every nation would now be a liberal democracy. that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood. That the rules-based global order, an overuse term, would now replace the national interests, and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world. This was a foolish idea, and it has cost us dearly.

We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations. The United Nations still has tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world, for good in the world. But we cannot ignore that today on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role. It could not solve the war in Gaza.

Instead it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce. It has not solved the war in Ukraine. It took American leadership in partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still elusive peace. It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran. required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B2 bombers. And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narco-terrorist dictator in Venezuela. Instead, it took American

special forces to bring this fugitive to justice. In a perfect world, all of these problems and more would be solved by diplomats and strongly worded resolutions. But we do not live in a perfect world. And we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate. This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just

find to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The Warren Commission was silent.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the moment. more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA.

Now he has a model. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. A lot of killers. A lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? The CIA. I don't know.

National global. This is for Thrackearchia. I'm Dick and Don has unfortunately been taken captive this week by Sam Altman and he is currently in an AI re-education camp. I'm looking forward to his return and the new efficiencies that he will bring to this project. But let's not dwell on that, folks. We have an episode to get through and so let's get right into it. And you heard it right in that cold open today, folks.

that was Secretary of State Mini Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference just last month. And what did he say in so many words? He said might makes right. And that we have entered in this new frontier, this new paradigm in American national security, in American foreign policy, in American vibes, whatever you want to call it. And really, it's a two-tiered approach. And really, it is a rapist approach. And in these tiers, first, you have might makes right. We are going to go out there and we are going to do what we want to do because we can. And the second tier is that there's going to be no accountability. We're not going to get bogged down by the so-called international laws.

We are just going to go out and do what we need to do to let, quote, freedom ring free out in the world. And that brings us to this discussion today, this return to theory. We are going to be coming at you with the second side, side B, of Fourth Reich Political Theology, Part 2. And that is the discussion between Don and Marcus from the return of the repressed podcast. But before we get into all of that, let's do the usual preliminaries. The first of which is, thank you, thank you, thank you for tuning in. Thank you so much to all of you that keep tuning in week after week. Thank you to all of our Patreon family for supporting us week after week.

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We will write you back. We are at forthrightepod at gmail.com. Thank you so much for tuning in, folks. I'm going to do this thing I've been doing the last couple of weeks and I think it's been pretty successful. Let's take a moment. All together now. breathe. Let's bring our cortisol levels down. Let's do a little breath. And please open up your phones. Go to the Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever app you are listening to this episode on today.

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Now, let's get back into it. Let's get into today's episode. We are back with another installment of our ongoing series, Fourth Reich Political Theology, with Marcus the Goat from the Return of the Repressed podcast. And you'll recall that in the opening episode in the series, we started with this foundation and this exploration into how the world of the superstitious, the world of the religious worldview of the feudal world order of your, how that was superimposed onto the capitalist world order with the all-knowing, all-seeing market playing the role of God. and in the same way that the serfs and peasants live their lives in awe and the default of the belief of avengeful deity, so too do we today implicitly believe in the mysterious market forces we are told to move under. Now, in part two, Don and Marcus start really digging into the people involved in this movement, and namely the man of the hour himself, Carl Schmidt. And in this episode, Side B, Don and Marcus will really get into it and start doing some biographical stuff on Schmidt

and really talking about the journey that he took to bring about this new world order. And without further ado, I'm just going to let the guys take it on from here. So with that, let's get digging. Let's get this boy. Let's get this Catholic boy, this little outsider. The little choir boy with a very strange relationship to his mother. I mean, a guy who honestly really falls outside of the Geminschaft in the way that we were discussing. Definitely because he's born in a majority Protestant state, right, of Germany, I think. Yeah, and he's even born in this area of Germany.

Germany that has kind of been in conflict, like changing hands from Germany to France. And there's a lot of Francophones around him. And he's got, I think, extended family. North Rhine, Westphalia. Yeah. Now you're right. Like the border will move back and forth over the 19th century between France and Germany in a way that the national.

identity is not firmly on one side or the other. Right, right, right. And where the religious affinity is also not on one side or the other. Right. Like the Protestant Catholic divide. Right. Clear cut. I mean, I mean, Schmidt is not, you know, he's not, he's not in quarrel there.

He's a pretty staunch Catholic. But he's in a minority, I think, insofar like, way he described his upbringing, you know, like that it was, yeah, he was surrounded intellectually by Protestant, but he has a more Catholic approach to that. Yeah, and maybe now I think would be a good time for us to talk a little bit about Carl Schmidt's biography. I think so, yeah. Because, you know, while these forces that we've been describing, these ideological forces and movements in the air that have guided the German sociology to this moment in the interwar period where you have liberals essentially putting on a platter these concepts for

fascists to devour. And like you could imagine it like, you know, the game Super Mario when he eats the mushroom and gets bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The black mushroom. Max Weber is like, he's the tube that's shooting out the mushroom. And the Mario of the incipient fascism eats it and just grows like three times as size with armed with these ideological tools. And the mushroom is, Karl Schmidt.

Yeah, good one, good one. I like it. Love it. It makes it very understandable. Yeah. Do you want to do the bio? I think you got a little bit more into his biography. I wrote a few things here, but like, you know, I think it's better if you introduce. Yeah, I'll kick it off and, you know, you can jump in and add anything that you want. I will do.

You know, not to get like too deep in the weeds, but in broadstrokes, right, Carl Schmidt, he's born in 1888. So this is, he's a baby, you know, in the infancy of the German Reich, right? The unification of Germany under Bismarck takes place in 1871 and develops from there into this national project, you know, beyond Prussia, which had been sort of the military force behind German unification. German unification is very much a Prussian project and Schmidt is not Prussian, but is rather from these borderlands where the sense of national identity is not fixed on the German side. And especially like a place where, yeah, you don't have that proisian legacy either of like, yeah, what, you know, the Poissians were on the Protestant side, right, with the Saxony, and the

the Swedish alliance of the Western States, the Western German

States in the 30-year-war. Yes. But now when you say, you know, he's born in 1888, he just struck me

now for the first time. Carl Schmidt is the first teenage generation to be to actually be capable of becoming Nichians, like teenage

nichean nihilists. He would have been 13-year-old, right, when Nietzsche died? Amazing. Dangerous, dangerous group of people. Yeah. Oh, my God. Imagine. Like Gen X, a century before.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah. That's a terrifying thought. Please go on. It really is. Amazing. So in the same respect, too, right? The Prussian identity is very much tied up with this militarism. and the idea of, like you were saying about the mannur-bund, you know, you become a man through military service, through fencing, through all of these traditions that we now associate with Germany,

but they're really Prussian traditions. The moral character building. The Bildungsroman. Yes. Yeah. And Schmidt's viewing all of this from a somewhat outsider position, not being in the center of it. he's obviously a Catholic, as you mentioned. And where that comes to hit the road, right,

the rubber of his Catholicism meets the road of his fascism in the person of his overbearing mother, who really wants young Carl to become a priest. And that's kind of a big defining feature of his formative years to the point where eventually he finds freedom from his mother, who he has a very fraught relationship with in high school, that he goes, unlike most Catholic boys, that go into seminary school through that path of, you know, learning in the Catholic elementary schools and going towards the higher education in the Catholic milieu. he leaves the Catholic milieu as a teenager and goes to a secular high school and there becomes kind of a outcast kid, you know, what you could consider of like an early 19th century punk in some respects. Yeah, Nichon.

Yeah, yeah. Like the, what's the film called when they go on a road trip? there's a teenager it was like one of his early roles he was the priest in the film about oil I'm so sorry that I can't name anything Oh with Paul Danno

Little Miss Sunshine Little Miss Sunshine Yes yes yeah Paul Dano plays like a teenage angst the Nichean right Who's like an outsider who refuses to talk to anybody Yeah yeah yeah Yeah so this is kind of Carl Schmidt

He's an angsty teenager He is getting, you know, himself into trouble, he's reading, like, radical philosophy in his youth and is getting held back for detention after school based on the subversive materials that he's reading in school, like everything from anarchism to other subversive. The Cortez is his big guy, right? Like, he has this strange relationship to a, like, I found this very interesting, like, this Spanish think that I've never heard about. Juan Don Noso Cortez, who lived in 1809, 1853, who is, you know, a descendant of, you know, the Cortes, of course, otherwise it wouldn't work.

who is like you know he's like this traditionalist counter enlightenment ultra monotonist you know the people who believe that the Pope should have like full your additional power to do whatever

yeah we can get back to him later but like it's just interesting like he he's actually like pretty original like in the way that like he picks his ideal like he isn't you know just some you know like he really takes his outsideness to heart

Like he, yeah, he's got a strange idea historical trajectory that he builds upon. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also worth noting, right, he's not coming from the aristocracy in his own right. He's not coming from the upper classes. He is very much like petty bourgeois, I would describe his class position as a child. Right. He's kind of upwardly social mobile aspirational.

His parents are not wealthy at all. He has some rich uncle that gives him money over time in his youth and in his education. And is the person who eventually is like, if I'm going to pay for you to go to college, you got to go to law school and become a lawyer kind of thing, like guides him through the power of the purse in that way. And meanwhile, you know, Schmidt is digesting all of these eclectic philosophical materials in his upbringing and making his way sort of from the provincial atmosphere into the metropole in Berlin, where he goes to study and expands his horizons there. and interestingly, when he does so, who is he making friends with? Who is he socializing with and cozying up to? Jews.

Fucking Jews. Are they Zionist Jews or do we want to go there? Like, what are what kind of Jews we're talking about here? So, you know, that's a really good question. I actually don't know if his Jewish friend was a Zionist. Maybe do you know about that?

No, no, no, I don't. But I just assume that they are not socialist Jews of the not the Bund movement. What's the name of the radical socialist movement among Jews at this time? Not the Jews that make up sort of the crucible

of German communism in the revolution period that will go on to, you know, join up the ranks of the Spartacist League. Yeah, like Luxembourg. Yeah. Uh-huh. No.

Yeah. No, I was thinking about bundism, which is an, it's interesting that they choose the word bundism, right? Because we just talked about, like, how the Bund is also the, the solution concept to the, the Mineshaft and Geselschaft problem, right? Yeah. Like the Yiddish people are fucking, the socialist, the Yiddish people, they are so quick to really and I you know like it's a great effort of them you know you should take the word before

the fascists take the word and they do right uh like I assume at least that bundism is the same the word but it could be that bund I also mean something in Hebrew I don't know but like it's a Yiddish word right yeah I would assume that the meaning comes from the same source as the German word like the Yiddish you know the vocabulary is largely drawn from German some of the grammar and the orthography, obviously, that is often printed in Hebrew script is from Hebrew. But, yeah, I would guess that the Bundism among German Jews is the same type of concept that the Bundists. I mean, that's why they stay. I think why Germany still uses it today because it is a kind of good solution to the Gesterov and Mineshaft problem

if you don't want to go to folk, right? because it's kind of, you know, like it starts, I don't know where it starts, actually, but like you have, like, you know, Polish Jews agreeing with it. You have people in Jewish, Jewish Jews in Sudetenland, you know, the first part of Czech Republic that's going to be incorporated. You know, you see, doesn't Kafka actually start off before he becomes a scientist? He also is interested in this idea and this movement. And, you know, like, it's so interesting that it can combine the internationalism of

socialism and also have the lived experience of being a Jew in Europe, but also being from different nations of Europe. And everything can come together under the word of Bund, but it does, it's not like Jewish exclusivism either. Like, you know,

other socialists are of course allowed to collaborate with this movement. Yeah, it has a lot of things that the Zionist movement lacks. Yeah. I would say. And it is cosmopolitan a way too because the Yiddish speaking community expanded far beyond the borders of what we view as Germany on the map, right?

Like the Russian Jews in the Russian Empire were also speaking Yiddish. Yeah, yeah. But they're not anywhere near the, you know, cosmopolitan core of Germany. No, no, no. Austria, et cetera. Yeah, they are countryside Jews. Yeah, exactly. Ostuden.

Yeah. Yeah. But and that I think that would make sense that his Jewish friend in college is of that orientation because he was also on the wealthier side. Right. So Schmidt is kind of mixing and mingling with the Jewish bourgeoisie, the Jewish oat bourgeoisie in Berlin at this time and is still developing his. thoughts in this eclectic way, certainly, you know, giving some indications of his eventual turn to fascism, but not yet really throwing down in a reactionary way. He still is developing towards it for a while. It's really his life experience, I think, that embitters him to this

cosmopolitan milieu that he enjoys during his sort of the prime of his youth. Because, so first, you know, he gets involved, I think we mentioned in the last episode, he is a real coxman. He is a guy who loves the ladies. And he gets into a romantic love triangle with a pair of Jewish sisters. around this time. Oh, wow. And yeah, one of them he wants to marry,

but he's also kind of seen the sister. What is it with the fucking Nazi brain man? Is it always like this? It's just an ultimate sexual fantasy. Jewish sisters. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, go on. Sorry.

But, you know, know, their father disapproves of him as a suitor because he's not independently wealthy, right? So he's shooting above his economic weight class in terms of his romantic targets at this time, who happened to be Jewish, and who knows whether that influences him to later take the anti-Semitic turn that he of course takes when he joins the Nazi party and becomes its leading theorist. But at the time of his youth in Weimar, Germany, the early days of Weimar Germany, by the way, like when everything is up in the air, right? Like, it cannot be overstated just how uncertain the future is.

Like, the Weberian attempt to bring stability through the Weimarmer. our constitution was never one that carried much water, right? Like in the early 20s, you have all of the, you mentioned already some of these poochers attempts by far right-wing fascists. There's also, of course, the Spartacist uprising and the German... The Spartacist uprising is all over Europe as well, like after 1917. Like the whole of Europe is experiencing, you know, more or less successful communist revolutions, sometimes in cities, sometimes in provinces, sometimes in nations. Yeah, like everything is up for grabs. It seems like in the early 1920s. Like when the communists in Germany, you know, there's, you often hear it,

right? The German communists were far more advanced, actually, than were the Russian communists. And if only, you know, communism would have taken root in. in Germany first, maybe we would all be communist today, is a very common sort of counterfactual hypothetical history that you hear a lot about. You know, I don't really... Kautzke Slavit. Yeah, exactly.

Like, whatever. Because it's a very theory crafted, you know, like, it should be this way, you know. Like, and that's a common German problem, you know. Like, all the theoretical points, you know, shows that this should be the case. But there is something that makes sure that it is actually in the most backward. You know, like the, what Lenin calls, you know,

the weakest link, right? Like in the capitalist system, that's actually where the revolution begins. Yeah. And I love to think about this period. And like why, you know, why didn't it happen? You know, because it's clear that like everybody was trying to make communism happen everywhere.

And, you know, you see. small victories like in Hungary, Vienna, you know, and then like you see the revisionism of Bernstein that we already talked about, how the social democrats kind of like, already with the first World War in a way neutralizes a lot of these things.

You know, it's like, okay, might as well go into this world war so that we don't have to worry about the class war. And, yeah. And Schmidt joins the Bavarian army, right? Like, we're jumping, like, we're already in the 20s, but doesn't he, go and join the Bavarian army for the First World War.

I remember putting this down, having read it somewhere. Yeah. Which is not where he is from, but like it's the Catholic stronghold of Germany, Bavaria, obviously, the South Germany, where Minchin is and so on. Exactly. I don't know if he sees much combat, though. He definitely doesn't come out of it in a similar way to, for example, another guy who's practically his same age

by the name of Adolf Schikelgruba right better known as Hitler who did join the Bavarian army as a volunteer he comes out looking more clean right and he doesn't join the same political movements that Adolf joins

he he enters a university life right and he has a pretty impressive career career. Like he moves from like university to university. I don't know. Like six universities or something that he goes from. And like he keeps being promoted. It seems like people doesn't really want to be

associated with him, but sees the potential in him. And so he's like pushed further along the pipeline of like German conservative revolution within the university structure. That is my feeling. Yeah, he's very talented. That's the thing. It's like, and you see it in his writing. too. He's very perceptive. He is very articulate. He's got a good head on his shoulders. Like,

the guy is not dumb. And he's not, he's not a meathead like writing what he thinks that people want to read or want to hear. He is thinking very originally about the problems of his time in a way that alienates the people around him because, again, he refuses to sort of adopt any of the leading lines of thinking just to go along, right? He kind of in this what we might consider today, you know, to, again, the same that we pop diagnosed Adam Smith with autism, I think. You could also diagnose Carl Schmidt with autism because he's what you call a rigid thinker, right? He does not accept the intellectual authority of people who are positioned above him in the universities. The classic guy that thinks everybody else is a fucking idiot. And in some respects, he's right about that.

And he's right that, you know, he is seeing through some. of the bullshit that the institutions of the universities are very much invested in perpetuating at the time because they too want to avoid another world war, right? Like the goal that Weber was pursuing in Weimar constitutionalism was a very widely shared goal among the liberal institutions of the day. And in order to pursue, you know, that goal, the universities, just like the universities today, were willing to parrot a bunch of bullshit. And when you start with the bullshit, like, then, you know, you're obviously not going to reach

also the, some of the original problems, right? You know, because you start with the solution and then you try to back up why this solution is correct, you know? Like, oh, like, that's a liberal move par excellence. that like yeah we have the best answer now I'm gonna like just make up a problem which this answer you know is an answer too

you know because the answer is so much more interesting than the problem to the liberal you know because of its aesthetics and because of its like just moral normality whereas like yeah like you say like Schmidt is a bit autistic and he's like well actually I think the problem is this

and then like you know I'm going to follow this line of reasoning to its end point and then I'll see what I find over there. And like he starts, you know, like his first really big published book is called The Dictatour, like on dictatorship. It's like in a liberal, you know, milieu of the university,

perhaps not the most palpable title ever. Right. And it's published in 1921, right? and so it's right in the middle of all of these coup attempts all of these incipient moves towards dictatorship but at the time that he's writing he's viewing it sort of with a critical distance he's not viewing it from the partisan lens of oh you know this is what the coup seeks to impose this is what our goal is it's like you You know, if you really wanted to do the coup, maybe you should think about it this way.

Right, right, right. Like, he's not, like actually Max Weber, as we already showed, this may be closer to Ludendorff on a personal level than Schmidt is at this time. You know, it's not like this dictator, the dictator isn't, it's not a pamphlet to sort of like bolster Ludendorff's failed coup or the NSDRPS first before. they become the Anastiapeer, right? Like the beer keller puts. It's from like a third position.

Like he's still like in this, in a much more abstract universe where it's, you know, which is not directly connected to, at least not the populist movement on the ground. I mean, he does have a one foot in the conservative revolution overall, which does agree with, you know, this overall project of like reintroducing a strong leader who's, you know, whose professionalism and, and suitability is defined by his character and his charisma.

Like in this sense, like, yeah, he's with that. He's with the vibe of it in general, but like he's not really like a, you know, boots on the ground kind of guy. Right. And part of that vibe comes from the fact that he was a student under Max Weber. That's an interesting thing, right? He goes to like all of Weber's big seminar. you know like

science as a vocation and politics as a vocation those you know most famous apart from the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capital I'd say those are the yeah most important

Weber projects right and so yeah it's also like that he knows his enemy like he knows what the liberals are about you know like he's not just some poster who's like oh my position is much better No, like, he knows the liberals better than they know themselves, which is why he's also interesting to us, I think.

Because, yeah. He sees through the bullshit. He's like, you think that you're talking science, man, but you're just talking bureaucracy. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right? Because the, like, the liberals are caught in, like,

I think the word that Schmidt likes to use is kind of like, some kind of relativism. Sometimes he uses also the word neocampian. I think to understand this it's like if you imagine Kant like going around in Keningstberg you know in the 1700 thinking you know okay

fuck it like let's deal with this you know like there is no God anymore science is trying to explain everything like how do I know what's right and what's wrong and like many people think that like Kant is kind of like

you know a a speaker for like you know make your own law, you know, like in a kind of, I don't know, like, Crowley sense almost, I think like when the critique of Kant, you know, like, oh, like, what really? Like, you think that the law is up to the individual, like in this sense. But Kant is a little bit more extreme or like a bit more radical, which is why I think one shouldn't think that they can supersede Kant, you know, because it's not only that

you should make your own law. it's also that like you are obliged to then follow that law. Like you will not exist as a subject unless you stick to what it is that, you know, you say, like you don't only have to invent who you are. You also have to be then that which you have invented. Now, of course, in the 1700s, this kind of like moralism, I think, again, like maybe that's possible. like at least on a philosophical level I can bring my mind to think that that's how the world

functions like if I just think that maybe this district of Cunning Sparag is a little bit more greedy and there over there is like you know the district which is a little bit more prone to lovemaking or I don't know then it's like within the universe which we can operate with you know at least we can create an opera out of this with some Mozart music, you know, no problem.

But then the 1800s has happened and economism has happened. And so it's not just this neutral moralism anymore of the French aristocracy thinking, you know, you should be an egoist and then that's going to be the best of all possible worlds, blah, blah, blah. It's clear now that, you know, all these questions of morality

are mainly talking about how to behave on the market. And now you have, you know, the bourgeoisie has already won, you know, like you're not in the underdog position anymore. Now you have to create a, you know, you don't want feudalism, you don't want the king, what is your state going to provide? And so the neocantians are sort of like, they want to have the cake and eat it or maybe like not even recognize that there is a cake to be eaten. So they are like, like, oh yes, everybody's an individual, you know, you're a man of your word. And then the state is a kind of like this abstract entity that just sort of like writes down what is already in everybody's head. You know, and this is like the norm, right? Like law as normality.

And Schmidt is very interested in this. And we will see why he's interested in it. Because he's interested in it for the sake of the Ausnammeshustan, like the state of exception. which is like maybe one of the first concepts we will introduce in a short while, which is like, you know, when the normality disintegrates and when it becomes clear that there is no such thing as norms. And, you know, but he's initially very interested in it for the sake of like, yeah, trying to critique this cloud castle that the neocantians has built, you know,

where they're like, oh, yeah, actually society doesn't function because of our, state which actually holds all the weapons. I mean, don't think that there weren't executions during the Weimar Republic. They cut people's head off with an axe, same as they did during the medieval times. You know, it's just that now we live in an enlightened society, but maybe you are still doing some of the things that they used to do, you know? Like you're, yeah. This was why it was so interesting when I was prepping for the last step,

that we did to learn, which I don't know how I had missed this in having studied Kant, whatever, a decade ago or more, that he was an early acolyte of Adam Smith. And so you can kind of see how his principles are putting into practice the synthesis between those two sides of Smith that we talked about in the recap and that we talked about in the part one episode of the moral sentiments on the one hand and the economic self-interest on the other hand. And Kant's addendum to that is, okay, there's an imperative, right? There's a moral imperative to pursue consistency in your conduct. And only then can this synthesis of the two sides of Adam Smith and the two sides of market capitalism

actually function in a way that's beneficial to humanity, which is ultimately what Kant was trying to theorize, like how to generate rules for behavior that would allow for human thriving in the best reading of him, right? Like if you kind of imbue him with the innocence that modern study of philosophy imbues every fucking asshole from the past. Every dead motherfucker is like an innocent baby with absolutely clean hands. Yeah. Even though we'd know that like Kant spoke about, you know, this moral imperative is, you know, pretty white. Yeah. You know, don't think brown and black people can do this kind of stuff.

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, he didn't have to deal with that in Kunixberg. No, he didn't. He could just assume that that was the case from, you know, what he had read from letters about the new worlds. And I think, but, you know... But to bring it back to Schmidt, he did kind of see that, right? Like, he is coming of age in a time where there are, you know,

members of the gazelshaft that aren't pertinent to the Gemini. shaft and what to do about that, right? So he's got, he's got these Jews around him. He's trying to get as much pussy as he can at the time, too. And, you know, to just kind of round out his psychosexual profile before we get into the substance of his philosophical and theoretical project. Yeah. Eventually, you know, after he's rejected by these Jewish.

sisters for not being sufficiently high class and not yet having the position, right? Like you said, he's going to all these different universities. On the one hand, that's very good for him as a thinker to be forced into a diversity of environments to test his theories and to hone his thought. but economically it signifies that he's not making it, right? Like the really successful academicians of the time would have not bounced around. They would have just found their spot and gotten into like an endowed chair, the equivalent and made their bones, right? Like Max Weber.

He was a successful, an economically successful academician who never wanted for money in, his lifetime. Like he was set. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. He, yeah, there is something interesting about, like, the way that Schmidt is forced to, like, jump around here, but, like, that he still seems to have some velocity. Like, there seems to be, like, he's continually improving his position.

And I guess, even though, like, most of his stuff that I think we will talk about has already been written by the time that the Nazis take power. Of course, we're going to talk about some papers which he writes during the reign of power when he's like an apologetic for them. But, like, so he writes, we already said, yeah, the dictatue, diktu in 21, right? And then 22, maybe his second most famous book, Politician theology, political theology. And then in

the early 1930s, he writes his most famous book, which is, and this is before the Nazis take power, right, the begrif de politician, the concept of the political. But, like, his first sort of like structural or functional mandate, I think appears in 1932 when he became the legal counselor in the Prozian coup d'etat, which plays on the 20th of the 3rd. of July in 1932. And this is when the Reich president, Paul von Hindenburg, Haydenberg, sorry, at the request of, yeah, Franz von Pappen, who was then the Reich Chancellor of Germany,

he like replaced the legal government of the free state of Croatia with this von Pappen as Reich commissioner. And like, you know, Schmidt was allowed to at least somehow theoretically explain why this was, you know, allowed to. to happen. Because this is important, right? Like, this is basically the end of the Weimar Republic. You know, like now they've given back ultimate power to a chancellor of the biggest state that is Proysia. And I mean, there is a lot of interesting notes to be made. Like, why does the conservative revolution and the fascist, you know, reaction? Why does it develop in the

south in Bavaria rather than in Prussia? Like, actually, like here we see that like the conservative revolutionaries are left in Poissia, but they have sort of dismissed and pushed out the populist nature of their movement, which is the NSDAP or the fascists, you know? Like these people like, you know, from

Papen and Hindenburg, I don't think they wouldn't really have like a guy like Hitler, you know, like he's a little bit too much riff, wrath for them. And so this is the last attempt of them to make sure that it is the aristocratic or, you know, the high bourgeois

conservative revolution that truffles or like breaks down the Weimar Republic for their own sake. But what they don't understand is of course that by taking down the Weimar Republic now it's you know the floodgates are open

for the actual movement that is in place which is the populist movement of the fascists which is they pursue the revolution of like yeah the social democrats not being able to rally the people and yeah it's amazing that that happens in July of 1932 because almost to the day two years later is when you have the night of the long

knives. And all of these guys are forced to bow down to Hitler and the extreme state of exception that he ushers in at that time. And by then, Hindenberg is basically like Joe Biden level of dementia, you know, in his estate. And he's just like this old drooling man. And who do you think? And Fomppin. Sorry, go on. I was going to say, you know, it's funny too that Fom Pappen brings Schmidt into the legal apparatus of this maneuver. Maybe I don't know for sure. Like this is an incident in the life of Schmidt that I haven't read that deeply on, but I wonder, you know, Van Pappen was a Catholic as well, right?

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder if it wasn't some affinity that he had based on the shared Catholic ideology that he brings in Schmidt into the fold. And like, you know, remember Schmidt, Schmidt, I don't think I mentioned it in the discussion of his high school and university secularization, but he becomes like a total atheist, right? Like he abandons his religious upbringing with part and parcel of his rejection of his overbearing Catholic mother who wants him to become a priest. Like he is a total atheistic, kind of edge lord in some respects and rejects the... I didn't know that actually, but it makes sense.

Which makes his study of the Spaniard, right? The Spanish monarchist theoretician so interesting that... And you can kind of see why today's fascist freaks, the likes of, you know, J.D. Vance, a Catholic converse. who is obviously like a godless fuck. Like these are such cynical people who only want to appreciate and import Catholicism for its use of the grand sciop, right? To bring the masses into line into these ideological affinities with a power that's so

remote from their everyday life. And Schmidt is doing that work as a lawyer, as a theoretician, and as a political theorist that is like he's bringing it all full circle and using the tools that he's developed as kind of an outsider with this ability to see through the liberal bullshit that was defining and keeping him in his own subjective point of view, keeping him down, right? Like he certainly felt like he deserved more recognition from all of these works that have survived to this day and that have taken on this importance, right? Like these books that we're talking about, like when he's, what, 20, he's 33 years old with the dictator and 30 like one year after the other like pretty young guy publishing these

works that are pretty rupturous with what else is on offer and is not getting what he considers to be his proper so like he's got that chip on his shoulder he's got the chip on his shoulder against the Jews, right? Who were rejecting him sexually, these women. And then, like, his friend that's just like, you know, he, it's, I don't know, that relationship with his Jewish buddy in college, like, they even had a magazine together, like a newspaper. Oh, wow.

It went that deep. Yeah, it was like a satirical thing, too, that they were satirizing Nietzsche. and like the irrationalist philosophers that they were using that as like raw material to satirize in the early part of the 20th century really ahead of his time in many respects. But clearly developing this deeper ethos, the final psychosexual thing I do want to say, I don't exactly know what the significance is, but maybe it'll, occur to me as we get into the substance again. But his next big romance after those Jewish sisters was with this dancer who he called her a Spanish dancer, but she actually was, I think,

Croatian and wasn't Spanish at all. She was kind of a fraudster, actually. Like she invented this whole backstory about coming from nobility. and, you know, having a bunch of money somewhere. And he was, like, pursuing her really relentlessly. But all of the people around him, you know, the same people who he felt were, like, not recognizing his intellectual prowess. They were also not recognizing the sexual conquest that he had in this liaison. on and we're like, dude, this lady is like not, she's not the real deal, you know, keep your distance, bro.

Yeah. And they were all right, of course, but he let his emotions get the better of him and kept on thinking, you know, he was going to have this life with this woman, like all of her backstories were true, et cetera, et cetera. and developed a panic disorder that he, in his diaries, ascribe to a familiar, like a family genetic condition or, you know, some sort of a condition that was common in the family, which also indicates that his parents. It wasn't the fact that he was catfish.

It was, yeah, hereditary. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's like, you know, this incredible mind, that is actually capable of seeing through the superficial tricks that the liberal professors, right? Like the academics, you could think of them as the wokes of their time, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. And he's seen through all their bullshit.

The smug liberal. Yeah. But yet. Before they have even begun, right? Like, I mean, 1921, it's not still not clear. that the like the Weimar Republic is going to be the Weimar Republic right like this is still part of like the German revolution yeah and he's already with the de dicta too he's already predicting how it's going to end before it has begun which is like I mean yeah credit to him I mean

we're only talking about a period of 10 years but I don't want to predict too much what's going to happen in 1936 right now you know like what would the world look like them but he did and he called it pretty nicely in a way. Right. And I only make the point to put out there on the board for those of you keeping score at home, right, that he is also engaging firsthand with what we would call psychosis, right? He's experiencing panic attacks. He's experiencing psychotic breaks. He is having what we might call encounter. with the unspeakable, right, in his subjective existence, that's something that a lot of these people,

and it just keeps happening to Germans, you know, to bring old Nietzsche back into the conversation, right? And moving forward in time to what we were talking about with the psychedelic break into irrationalist, market capitalist extremism of today, right? So Schmidt, too, is not immune. I mean, he's a shaman in that way, like a political, political shaman, like, you know, who's like, I've had this experience. I know how to navigate the unknown. I've been there. Like, and I mean, psychosis is, like, on the deepest psychoanalytic level, a sort of disintegration of the

symbolic order, right? And, like, that's what we've been talking about so far, that, you know, like he is an outsider who does not want to conform to the generic explanations of things. He wants to find his own problems and he wants to develop out of these own problems, his own solutions, which means that like not only are you going to have to be forced to invent neologisms, you know, like political theology, by still, while still being an atheist. You know, like, yeah, of course, you need to go through some kind of like a psychosis to arrive at this novel position of attacking the problems at hand. And then, of course, he wants to guide the others through that existential psychedelic experience.

Proof of concept from the super ego. You intuit the rational system that you are working on in your non-psychotic moment. And then you lapse into the psychosis and you experience at a visceral level the confirmation of all that your thought system has been leading up to. And who knows neurologically or whatever what the mechanism for all of that is? I certainly don't pretend to. But it's something that anybody that's had an experience, whether drug induced or, or non-drug-induced with kind of extra-sensorial perception. You can imagine what that would have been like for somebody so hard-headed,

so self-assured, and so strong-willed as Carl Schmidt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we're going to see also very turn of, well, there is, I think, a problem in psychosis. Like, I mean, I've been in, in, say, in silence from, like, Hong Kong to Sweden for, like, like, psychosis. And I've been, like, strapped down to clinical tables against my will and been injected with substances that I don't know what they are to, like, calm me down and stuff.

I agree when like La Cohn talks about a difference between you know like genuine and generic psychosis like that there is a kind of psychosis that just sort of like takes the already prevalent ideology to a higher level but never

traverses it whereas like genuine psychosis you kind of have to step into like a truly unknown ground or like at least or necessarily maybe embrace the negation of the dominant ideology I think Schmidt did not

embrace the negation of the dominant ideology and that is what we have been talking about right that like if the dominant ideology is liberalism and liberalism paved away for fascism he simply in his critique of liberalism saw where it was lacking and he filled it out so that it could reach its highest potential But of course, you need a generic psychosis to be able to do that because it's still a major break with the liberal order of things.

But it's just taking it to the point that the liberals aren't ready to take it too. But it's not a negation, you know, like as a communist or an anarchist or a radical socialist would have prescribed. Yeah. And we're going to see it when he returns to the kind of core. of all psychosis, which is the trauma and like the terror and the fear and, you know, the Hobbesian Leviathan and like how he makes use of the Leviathan in his political theorizing to actually begin, yeah, like we talked about now many times, to channel the discontent with these antagonisms, which, yeah, liberalism has produced.

And yeah, should we start here to talk about his project? Have you done with this bio, do you think? Yeah, yeah. I think this is good. One final thing, you know, I think hearing you describe it and thank you for sharing, you know, from your personal experience, I know you've talked about it on your podcast as well. But with respect to Schmidt, you know, it doesn't seem like he ever experienced in his psychotic episodes, anything like what we. in modern parlance would refer to as ego death. And I think that that might impact the degree to which he never actually was able to adopt the point of view of the other, right?

And always kept his perspective firmly rooted in the power structure that he always aspired throughout his entire life to be a part of, to strive to join rather than to oppose, right? Like he thought that the people that were in positions of power weren't legitimately there because he was smarter than them and he saw things more clearly and he was willing to not tell the same lies that they were willing to tell to justify the system. But at the same time, he never questioned the legitimacy of that system

because for him, he never got beyond the idea of power predominating. Yeah, if we wanted to be cute, we could say that, like, he is still caught within, you know, like, how can I, as a Vignarian, Siegfried, reach the point of having sex with two Jewish twin? how do I like just alpha the shit out of this you know the ultimate dream I've heard from Jewish friends that there is a there is an inversion of this as well like some of my Jewish friends are very and you see this in Freud as well with some of his patients

and this kind of desire to also have them the shield maiden you know like like to like really like there's like like like an interesting Jewish fetish satization of like yeah the the dendal wearing you know full bosom blonde

German woman as well but you know that is neither here nor there we don't need to get into this too much but I think it should be always there in the background for people like Schmidt you know like it's not inappropriate to suggest that maybe

some of this shit is driving him. Right. Especially a guy with such a clear sort of projection of the edipal desires for his estranged mother. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It began before he went to university. Definitely, definitely. So, Schmidt's project. Right, so we know now, you've heard it for a few, hours here that like like this kind of sociological approach of max feber of neutrality um like you know that was supposed to combat social causation you know the idea that like sociology is only there to observe we don't want to define society so that we can change society um initially

Schmidt is sort of like I don't know um he he He's pretending to be on this side because it serves him well insofar that liberals and fascists both hate Marxism and hate is historical materialism. So he says in a quote, quote, and this one is pretty tricky, but you already understood where he's going with it, so maybe it's easier to understand. And I'll give an explanation. But whether the ideal matter of radical abstraction is here, the reflection of a sociological reality, or whether social reality is viewed as the result of a particular mood of thinking and hence also of acting does not come into consideration, and of quote. So by that phrase, he's just papering over the Marx quote on his tombstone

that I read way at the beginning from Lukash about whether it comes from the books to reality or from reality into the books. And he's just saying, with the stroke of a pen, it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah. And what I was referring to do with the tombstone is that, like on Mark's tombstone, it says, right, like, philosophers only tried to understand the world. Now has come the time to change it. Whereas Schmidt is trying to pretend like, no, yeah, you know,

I'm just trying to understand the world. But it's clear that, you know, sociology is here to change it as well. Yeah. And how does he want to change it? it. Well, and here we get into a little bit like about, you know, Cortez and why Schmidt is quite an original thinker. Because at the time, there is like, you know, with neocontainism, you're going to have to understand that there's like a resurgence towards the nation-building projects of the romantic era. But he is absolutely opposed to this kind of restoration ideology

that developed after the French Revolution, you know, like when the Bolshe was, wanted to reassert its power together with like maybe you know a more bourgeois aligned aristocracy you know like we can't have fucking French revolutions forever you know what's going to happen then

you know now we need to restore order you might at the first glance imagine that like Schmidt would be in agreement with that but he's not he doesn't like this idea of restoration but it's of course not from like you know a point of view

that was guiding a very young Marx when he was a journalist talking about the 1848 revolution No, no, no, no. Like, first of, he says, like, first of his critique of like romanticism proper is that in his eyes, quote,

only, it is nothing, quote, only the aesthetics Realms intermediate step between the moralism of the 18th century and the communism of the 19th century and the communism of the 19th. right so to him they are just giving a kind of yeah aesthetic flare to it and we talked about that before like if the romantics are right about anything it's maybe in their conversations about what is

beauty how do you live a life that is beautiful you know love things that rationality cannot comprehend you know like that's where you know romanticism really does give it uh pulls its greatest strengths from but yeah When I think about romanticism, you know, the exponents of romanticism that I appreciate are the artists of romanticism, right? Uh-huh. Beethoven, of course. Goia. Yeah.

And the like the painters as well, like Kaspar David Zedish, for example, like the way they managed to, yeah, like to pick this world that is disappearing. And, you know, a new world is coming into place. And to be fucking honest, like the old world is aesthetically more pleasing. Like, like rolling hills, castles and, I don't know, peasants harvesting together. I would enjoy that a hundred times more often than I would enjoy, you know, the rat-infested. No question. Shanty towns of Manchester where the world's fabric is being produced, you know. And I think everybody agrees with that.

Uh-huh. So it's not easy to see that like, you know. But like, yeah, again, Schmidt, not a nostalgic. This is not, you know, like, he doesn't think this is not it. And there is something interesting then about like how he, like, why does he pick Cortez here? Well, first of like, the interesting thing is like he thinks that the reactionary core of romantic thought, it was like outmoded you know like it's not reactionary

enough like you know like the reaction to the French Revolution is not reactionary enough for for Schmidt and initially like I mean yeah you feel like

okay so well this is a lunatic but then you start to think about it and like he says that like that like that like at this the suitable national and reactionary project was the Spanish like counter revolution

that ended the first Spanish Republic in the 1870s and instituted the reino de Spain through the grand restoration like they are the only ones in Schmidt's eyes who managed to like pull this project off and I mean that's late you know like 48 has already happened

the Paris commune has already happened but this is like the you know like the restoration had to mature beyond the romantic period because the romantic period was just nostalgia in a way and it wasn't reactionary enough like the romantic period had not yet identified properly who its enemy was but the restorationists of the first Spanish Republic they knew during the Spanish Republic like yeah what is restored is of course the monarchy not the Republic yeah and yeah so yeah this is his ideal thing

initially Juan Donoso Cortez, who was born in 1809, died in 1853. And yes, like we said earlier, he is a descendant of Cortez himself, yeah, the conquistador. And this was a project. And talk about vitalism, a guy with that short a life, right? Obviously is vital as hell. Yeah, right, right. And I think there's something interesting about like this kind of ultra-monathanism. which is like, you know, to restore in the Catholic countries,

the Pope as the sovereign. Because what I discovered and Mincebe discovered in the skullboys is that like actually it is through this project somehow. I can't summarize it perfectly because it's very difficult to understand, but somehow this is how the French reactionaries actually introduce anti-Semitism to the Aryan hypothesis, which has been growing since the romantic period. Like in the romantic period, during the romantic period,

that is when the Iarian hypothesis is born, you know, because it's like a nostalgic understanding of like, yeah, maybe once upon a time we ruled in India and it looked like Greece, but it was even better than Greece. If you want to understand this in full, you can look at that. Yeah, I know that you have listened to it, but to the listeners who hasn't, something happens here in the 1870s after the Paris commune where anti-Semitism is introduced to the Aryan hypothesis.

And we will see that this will play into the hands of Schmidt very well. Like he's not stupid for picking Cortez as his first ideal. This is going to solve a lot of the liberal problems later, of course, as we know. And somebody's so remote from the intellectual milieu of his time, right? Like, imagine a totally different country. And Spain, you know, at this time, is considered basically Africa from the perspective of the Germans, right? Like, it is non-white, it is non-advance. It's like the back country.

It's backwards and primitive. Yeah. There's nothing to be gained from looking at Spain, I think, the most German liberals and French constitutional thinkers as well, for sure. Perhaps a nice Bino de Jerez, a nice sherry. Yeah, maybe. A cask of a montalado. That's about it.

Yeah. I think a lot of French wine peasants are moving to Spain, though, at this time. Like there's been two big wine grape plagues by this time. I think isn't this like around the time that Rioja becomes like a good wine production area with exiled French peasants? I don't know if it's around this time. I might be wrong. But I feel like this is a bourgeois phenomenon.

I might be completely wrong about it. But yeah, no. Yeah, you're on point. Only to compete with the British. The British were there first. because way back in the age of the decadence of the Spanish Empire as the Spanish Empire was racking up massive debts, partly due to piracy by British pirates on the high seas against Spanish ships, the British colonists essentially came in and started buying up massive tracks of land.

That's why, you know, you have these Spanish noble families. families with names like Fitz James Stewart, right? The Dukes de Alba are of British lineage. And I suppose there's Germans in there as well. There's a lot of cross-pollination from Western Europe into Spain to essentially colonize the country as a part of the periphery of, you know, Western Europe, the imperial powers, but it wasn't certainly considered a peer to the great kingdoms of Western Europe. It was much more a peripheral country. And, you know, when Spaniards do enter the stage of political philosophy, people like Ortega and Gazette in the early 20th century that I think was also something of an influence on Schmidt that are kind of

straddling the line between monarchism and republicanism and offering to people like Schmidt that are interested in a much more traditionalist view on centers of power, it is able to hold sway in a way that like somebody like Max Weber would never clock onto because he's much more concerned with like, what are the modern powers? You know, when he's not looking to a backwater. Yeah, yeah. And he doesn't recognize his own position within the new. new ruling class.

And because he believes that, yeah, again, the neutrality the bureaucracy, so on. Whereas Cortez, and I think, like, I've said before that, like, we don't, like, the modernist project that starts to happen around this time

in the 1870s, after the Paris commune, it is, like, not really a modern project. It seems modern because it's coupled with technological development, but it's really like a neo-traditionalist project. And I think

Cortez, why Schmidt likes him, is that he sort of understood that. He understood that like achieving this break with the restoration ideology because, you know, like there are no longer any kings. So there is no legitimacy

in the traditional sense. You know, like, like what, you know, like, how can you overthrow the king if there is no king anymore? And like, how how can you return then to a better king or whatever? Like, you know, what is, I know, it's unclear what they want to achieve. But at least he's like kind of observing the fact that like, now the bourgeois classes are in power. It's not the old aristocracy.

They have been done away with. So when you're going to have like a restoration project, at least you should know like what the, you know, what's the state of the matter right now. And so Schmidt's inspired by him then, you know, he calls out right for a dictatorship to oppose the revolutionary forces, which wants to take, yeah, the project of the French revolution further. You know, he sees that as the major enemy. And Cortez and Schmidt both feel like that the bourgeoisie is a debating class within quotes. It's interesting, Lukach. pejorative. Yeah.

Like, to be clear, right? Debating class, it's not like, oh, these are dialectical guys that are hammering out their philosophical issues and they're going to arrive at some synthesis. No, it's like they don't do anything but sit around and debate. That's what he means by debating class, right? Yeah, most definitely. We're going to see in a short while, like, how Schmidt also has a soft spot for like early British parliamentarianism when there was no debate because everybody had sort of like the same

opinion on everything like that's kind of what he likes like in so far that there should be a parliament there should be a parliament only because everybody agrees with each other like only a house of Lords no house of commons please uh like yeah and um well well Cortez and smit here um like the only thing where they sort of differ on, I think, and Lukatch says this, that like, it's Cortez aimed his polemics against Prudon, you know, like, who's the great anarchist thinker, right? Like, it's the, what is the nice twist here with Marx

and Prudon? Prudon writes the philosophy of poverty, right? And then Marx writes the poverty of philosophy, right? Like, this is there, great. Yeah. And Prudon is like, you know, the symbol of anarchism, which Cortez despises. But Schmidt is annoyed or like he feels, you know, that this is lacking because of course the true enemy is who else but Marx.

And he doesn't understand why Cortez couldn't like, you know, arise to that level. Like who cares about Prudon, like, you know, unorganized anarchists, you know, like I'll take care of them. Like I can give them weapons and make them believe in a new king. these historical materialists on the other hand, they are a real problem. Well, like you said, I mean, Cortez died in 1853. He was probably too busy, like, dying of syphilis or whatever to pay much attention to Marx. Yeah, it would have been, like, a very early Marx period, right?

Now, so I think a question here develops that I formulated in some way that, like, if you are skeptical of both the end. enlightenment and the romantic rejection of that enlighten. Well, there's only one way to go then as a thinker in Weimar Germany. And that is anti-Neocantianism and a critique of their positivist legal relativist. Right. And so, I mean, of course, this doesn't become immediately clear to everybody. I understand that.

And I don't really understand what I'm talking about either. I'm going to try to make a little bit more clear. So like what is this like neocantanism and this sort of relativism, the legal positivist relativism that is like, you know, in these imperialist stages of the bourgeoisie, what purpose does this philosophy serve them? Well, and, you know, I'm so happy that I get to talk to you now, Don, because like this is going to get to get.

into a lot of like what we call in Swedish and German like Rets philosophy like the philosophy of right and like you know like what is it like no honestly what what is legality and like jurisprudence and all these very sophisticated words which we all know how to throw around to prove a point but maybe seldomly think about like you know where do we gain our authority our rhetorical pathos from when we refer to this word. Very seldom. Very seldom indeed. Right. To Schmidt, it's quite clear that, like,

if you assume that, like, right and wrong begins on the level of the individual, who, you know, as we said before, like with Kant, like it's not only about making your own schematics of right and wrong, you also have to make the absolute jump to follow it like nothing other, because there is nothing other. No, like, there's no God anymore.

There's no king anymore. You cannot retreat into paternal law. Like, you can't say that, like, this is the way it has been. And it is like this because, you know, he, the highest one, the king of kings, said so. You know, and how then do you do it as a bourgeois subject? You know, terrible state of affair. And Schmidt's critique is that, like, well, then the state just becomes. like a network of hollow

formal relations you know like that sort of like our accounting points of what it is presumed that exists in the soul of each subject you know like this this is the neo-canthian bargain you know that like let's

let's hope that the state is the will of or the the moral judgment of like what everybody feels in their heart yeah or if we say it in enough, it will be true kind of thing. Uh-huh. This is what he's going to get into, right?

Because like now we enter the law of like, the law that is built on concrete normalization, the normative law. And so he says, quote, all important ideas of man's intellectual sphere are existential and not normative, right? And it's strange here, like, because they both existential and I think normative.

normative is like a presumption of like what the collective of individual might feel and maybe existential is what each individual person might feel in a given moment about like you know why they did what they did but that's also you know both of these have a big problem right

like because you might feel that you are definitely right in the moment that you do what you do but then you know in retroactive aspect you might feel like maybe it wasn't the right you know now I have all all the cards on the table and I see that this is not the you know not the case but also at the same time like the normative notion that like

well everybody else says so you know like like this is you know I did what what everybody felt was the right thing to do that is also you know a very insubstantial position to take you know like because and and it's not always like that like the normative legislative apparatus might not always impose laws that are in favor of the majority. Like you can have like, you know, like, for example, in Swedish law, there is, you know, like the law against, you know, when you divide a family, like when there's a, when people are divorced and, like, you know,

who should kids stay with? Like, I think in many Western countries still, it's like, it's taken for granted that it should be, the woman, the mother, who takes it. And this is like a very, actually like a traditional position. But the Swedish law doesn't make any such claims. Like it actually only makes a very neo-Cantian normative claim. It's like what the decisions should be based on what is best for the child. I mean, I'm not all Western countries.

You know, Sweden is not unique in this sense. There are many Western countries which also agree with this. but you can take another example like in this case you know yeah all right like the law doesn't say anything about what is then the best conditions of the child you know that means that the judges and the jury or whatever

they have to sort of report to yeah well how do you feel or like you know what is the common opinion about what is good you know a good upbringing for a child you know like obviously there shouldn't be abuse obviously the child should be well fed it should have a house to live in and so on

you know it doesn't you know nothing is inherent in the paternal or the maternal obligation like you know like it's a matter of condition and opinions about that condition then you also have situations where the normative law might be like in the case of discriminatory laws it's a law that doesn't defend the majority it actually defends you know a minority

so the minority can you know de facto or you know the jury not be the normal people you know like it's a minority that has been defended by an opinion of the normal majority to like see their problems and put them higher or above

their own, you know, like, it's not, like, a, it's not that the strong shall conquer the weak, right? And so, so, so, so, of course, yeah, in, in both cases, there are, you know, law philosophical, uh, problems here that, like, yeah, you know, we can deal with, like, like, like, to arrive at, uh, this, uh, position of validity, like, you know, who is right. And, um, he, like, Schmidt, I don't think really debates this. What he's debating is, that in law philosophy, neocantianism overlooked that, quote, the simple jurisprudential truth, that norms only apply to normal situations

and the hypothetical normality of the situation is a statutory component of its validity. So when things are as normal, then these things operate quite well. You know, like then we can have these debates and we can behave like philosophers of law and probably the outcome will be nice and good and whatever but like we don't live in communism

things aren't going to be normal first off people are going to be like influenced by their economic interests right and above all else even though he's praising here I think the state of normality what Schmidt is really interested in is one of the big concepts right of his project, which we're going to get into in a little bit, like the Ausname Zuzdand, the state of exception. What happens when you have no fucking normative norms

to retreat to? You know, then you are left with the existential feeling of like, does it feel right to bash in the skull of this person or not? You know? Yeah. And it's exactly like to just draw back to all of the sort of biographical sketch and the intellectual upbringing of Schmidt, right? The entire critique that he was developing throughout his youth of his professors of the academic institutions where he was growing up in,

he was looking at them from the perspective of, okay, yeah, like, oh, so what? You're making all these assumptions. It's the same as any, student of economics today would look at a neoclassical economics class, right? You go to any university. You sit in economics 101 and you hear all the bullshit that they spout, like, okay, let's assume, right, ceteris paribus, all else being equal, and assuming that there's perfect information

for the investors and that there's perfect information for the actors in the economy, then supply meets demand at the efficient price point and will result in the efficient distribution of productive capacity, the efficient distribution of consumer goods, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And anybody with two brain cells looks at that and it's like, okay, but when the fuck does that happen ever in real fucking life?

Never, right? Right, right, right. You have to be a really ardent Milton Friedmanist to really be able to say that, like, as long as you do what is right for the company, you will do what is right for society, you know, like that is their solution to the Geselchavd, Gemineshaft, the conundrum, which is like, please, man, like, we know that that's not the case. You know that's not the case. I'm glad you mentioned Friedman, because it's like Milton Friedman is existing in a time when he's in the room with the imperial,

warmongers of the Nixon administration, right, and is able to impose the conditions that will lead to these assumptions being forced down the throats of the people in the imperial periphery after the conquering actions of the big empire. And so Schmidt, you know, he's actually predicting all of that shit in a way. And this is why, you know, You got to tip your hat to the guy because he's like, okay, very good. You know, thanks for all of your hypotheticals about what might happen in a world that doesn't fucking exist. What about in the real world?

Nobody has nobody, like the more formal your idea of the state is, the more concrete, like your state interventions will become. It's like, you know, basically what he's saying here. Like, you know, all these people who talk about the free market. Well, they all sit at the deciding tables of like, you know, the international monetary fund and the World Bank. And nobody has made as many state interventions into, you know, the local markets of specific countries as they have done. Even though they say, oh, the state doesn't play a role at all. But like, why are you doing all this stuff, man?

Why are you devaluating currencies? Do you think, like, people have the power to devaluate currencies in the way that you have? You know, or entrepreneurs, for that matter. Yeah. Yeah. And to bring it back to Lukash, you know, is he sets up the whole discussion of German ideology and the German strands of irrationalism that come to give rise to national socialism and the murderous ideology of the Third Reich. he talks about how the unique position of Germany in Europe, in the 19th century, they enter onto the scene as a non-imperial power with the militaristic buildup under Bismarck at the end of the 19th century that, you know, we in the United States, at least, the way that it's taught is like the scramble for Africa or, whatever, right? Like the period of time when all of the imperial powers are expanding in collective unison in this rapacious land grab and the Brits, the French, even the Italians, the Russians, they'll have a huge head start on the Germans who have no colonial possessions at this time.

And so they too, you know, in other words, Schmidt's thinking is microcosmic of the broader forces that the German nation was contending with as it entered the imperial race at the end of the 19th century, that he is also, you know, stripped of all the moralizing justifications. that say British imperialism had deployed for the better part of, you know, two centuries already at this point, coming to the table and looking at the lay of the land and saying, okay, yeah, you are applying the rules, but you are only applying the rules because you took it upon yourself to write the fucking rule book in the first damn place. Now, how do you get to do that? That's what Schmidt is interested in. That does it for this week's episode, folks. If you want to continue listening to Don and Marcus's conversation from this episode,

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