Let's talk about some of Hannah Arendt's disagreements with Carl Schmitt. And here, no kidding, Carl died in 1985 at the decrepit age 96 while the beautiful, upright and golden Arendt died in 1975 at the age of 69. In 1933 Carl, who was a scholar and jurist, a professor of constitutional and international law, became a member of the German Nazi Party. "And your point!" Well I'd like first to say that Arendt couldn't help but have an admiration for Carl's scholarship and his "ingenious theories" but saw in him a splendid example of what she called the kind of "absolute cooperation" and replacement of first-rate talents with "crackpots and fools" that occurs under totalitarian regimes. In other words Carl had no balls and very little imagination. Of the many disagreements Carl and Hannah had, it may be possible to summarize them all by mentioning Arendt's understanding of "Spontaneous Beginnings." The term refers to her own thinking about the moment a new political order comes into being, or if you prefer, is born into the world. The discussion usually begins with Schmitt's thoughts on what he called constituent power and sovereignty. Constituent Power, according to Carl, was unlimited power and it belonged to the people. This power was completely arbitrary, absolutely no point in looking for an underlying rationality, and to show how logical and well read he was Carl assured his readers that "constituent power cannot be deduced from any a priori cause..... It is omnipotent and exceptional.... Does not depend on any norm or value..." Carl gets very carried away and he goes on to suggest that creating a The New Constitution, new norms and values, required a "decision on the concrete form of its political life." The authority for this decision rightfully derives from Carl's absolute constituent power that has no a priori cause - nothing came before it, it's just obvious from experience. Naturally Arendt looked for dung to throw on Schmitt's walls and hunted down a shovel to sift through the soils and societies through history in her a priori insistence that new beginnings if they were to last, didn't have to derive from a Sovereign Power, an entity Carl defined as "he who decides on the state of exception." By state of exception Carl meant, whether this constituent power was creating new or suspending old, the original act of creation is an extra-legal action. Schmitt was a legal man. In other words, whether it was a psychological anomaly, a blank stare at the library, a passion for Cato the Elder, whatever the reason, it was the Power and Authority, ugliness and misery of force that tickled Carl Schmitt's tummy, gave him a sense of hope for a new world dominated by, if not a king, then a unity. Hannah Arendt's ideas about the spontaneous nature of beginnings was attached to the idea of being born, a new arrival into the world, the risk and excitement of the unforeseen, balloons in the park. For Hannah a political beginning was a shared world created by a collective promise, it was unpredictable and fragile, no two people are the same, it was an agreement, it was the founding act of a plurality. For Schmitt, a political beginning was a unity founded by an extra-legal power that determines and maintains a friend/enemy distinction. Hannah Arendt, a German citizen, had to leave Germany because of Schmitt's notion of unity.
