CLAUDIO BONVECCHIO

Carl Schmitt e una interpretazione di Jürgen Habermas   

N. 1/1987

Summary - Stimulated by the Italian translation of Carl Schmitt’s works on Thomas Hobbes, Jürgen Habermas wonders at the popularity and esteem which the German politologist still enjoys, yet giving of him the usual and sterotyped negative imagine. In Habermas' analysis Carl Schmitt’s thought, on one side is undervalued as a by-product of European culture, whereas, on the other is overrated and regarded as expression of the "negative". In both cases Habermas fails to grasp the real purport of the Schmittian reflection in which takes shape a radiography of the political crisis of "modernity" disintegrated between political functions (aiming at their own reproduction) and social demands which change into conflicting corporative stimuli. The Schmittian limitation - not grasped by Habermas - is not therefore in having investigated, to the extreme consequences, the contradictions of the parliamentary democracy and of its ideologies, as in having mistaken the interpretative criteria of analysis laid down by him for an alternative political model utterly unrealizable. The outcome is the necessity of bringing back the Schmittian assumption -placing it in its historical context - to its real proportions getting rid of both the accentuation made by the author and the demonization made by Habermas. To disregard it or reduce it to a mere revival of nostalgic conservatives and of "sub-cultures with a Left past" assumes the significance of disguising the reality with ideological forms which - although nobly motivated - bring about an effect of concealment.