Frank wrote on Mar 21
st, 2022 at 8:08am:
.....as a liberal journalist in Shanghai told me as we took a stroll one day, “no one will take you seriously if you have nothing to say about these two men and their ideas.” And the interest has little to do with nationalism in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. It is a response to crisis—a widely shared belief that the millennia-long continuity of Chinese history has been broken and that everything, politically and intellectually, is now up for grabs.
Yes well China is certainly at the forefront of a movement toward a new world order, and as such is subject to vigorous exploration of new ideas re national political and economic systems.
However statements such as "the millennia-long continuity of Chinese history" which allegedly " has been broken" (by the establishment of 'communist' rule) can not be allowed to stand without scrutiny.
eg, China was conquered by a very different Mongolian culture in the 13th century (just as Anglo Britain was conquered by a Norse culture in 1066).
Anyway, let's read on:
Quote:Schmitt was by far the most intellectually challenging anti-liberal statist of the twentieth century. His deepest objections to liberalism were anthropological. Classical liberalism assumes the autonomy of self-sufficient individuals and treats conflict as a function of faulty social and institutional arrangements; rearrange those arrangements, and peace, prosperity, learning, and refinement will follow. Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary. Classical liberalism sees society as having multiple, semi-autonomous spheres; Schmitt asserted the priority of the social whole (his ideal was the medieval Catholic Church) and considered the autonomy of the economy, say, or culture or religion, as a dangerous fiction.
Yet if you replace the "medieval Catholic Church" with international law upholding the UN UDHR, you can recreate Schmitt's "social whole", in the 21st century.
Quote:(“The political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision.”)
But the establishment of the Universal Catholic Church was a political decision made by Constantine....so....?
Quote:Classical liberalism treats sovereignty as a kind of coin that individuals are given by nature and which they cash in as they build legitimate political institutions for themselves;
Certainly classical liberalism proposed absurd notions of "inherent natural rights"
Quote:Schmitt saw sovereignty as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation that simply declares “thus it shall be.”
That's all 'sovereignty' ever can be, a decision by men in search of good governance, (however defined).
Quote:Classical liberalism had little to say about war and international affairs, leaving the impression that, if only human rights were respected and markets kept free, a morally universal and pacified world order would result. For Schmitt, this was liberalism’s greatest and most revealing intellectual abdication: If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/79747/reading-leo-strauss-in-beijing-china-marx Absolutely agree. If you have nothing to say about war and the need for international law, you are promoting chaos and the law of the jungle.
Now let's see what the commentators below make of all this:
Quote:Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share more than being “best, most intimate” friends, as Xi has boasted, and more than sheer authoritarian, brute-force common cause.
Now you have lost the plot; Xi hopes to gain re-election at the upcoming Party meeting later this year, on the BASIS OF HIS PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES (including progress toward "common prosperity")..... but let's read on:
Quote:They also, to a degree, think alike, for their world views and those of their coteries are driven significantly by the same, resurgent thinker – the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who was the “Crown Jurist” of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, which he joined and helped guide. Schmitt, who was born in Prussia in 1888 and died in 1985, elevated the primacy of the state to a theological level and detested representative democracy, liberalism and the rule of law. He would have applauded the invasion of Ukraine, and supported the seizure by Beijing of Taiwan.
Well then Schmitt failed to see the possibility of the expansion of the faith-based "universal medieval Church" to outcomes-based international law, in the 21st century.
As for specific leaders, Putin has been characterized as another Czar wanting to re-establish the Holy Orthodox faith over the Russian speaking peoples (west Ukraine is Catholic). Xi has no such cultural/religious aspirations; his goal is universal prosperity for the nation, regardless of ethnicity and culture.
(Cont).
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