The Political Theology of Charisma: Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as Case Study
Charisma and populism are what Carl Schmitt described as limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe), concepts “pertaining to the outermost sphere” of a system: the sphere of exceptions, ruptures, transformations, and (re)foundations capable of suspending and restructuring the system itself. As in Schmitt’s day, contemporary liberalism—the ideology of democratic-parliamentary procedure and social science—cannot conceive of such limits because its claim to legitimacy rests upon a limitless capacity to assimilate and subordinate the exceptional. If “[t]he exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology,” then liberalism is analogous to natural religion, for which theology is the science of immanently rational nature.[1] For liberalism, exceptions are not true exceptions, nor limitations on knowledge true limitations. They are only relatively so, for fuller knowledge of the system would reveal its rational totality. It is no accident that Spinoza, the philosopher of immanent rationality par excellence, is the spiritual father of liberalism—of freedom of thought and the “right to argue,” whose premise is the progressive reconciliation of all viewpoints in a final (even if practically unreachable) harmony of opinion.
The purpose of Schmitt’s political theology was not to critique this metaphysical position but liberal forgetfulness that it is a metaphysical position. Schmitt also distinguished liberal rationalism from the democratic principle of legitimacy, which he derived substantially from Rousseau’s “general will.” The democratic principle is not monistic, like the liberal ideal, but dualistic: an internal homogeneity (“the people” and its institutions) is set against an external heterogeneity. It is also premised on a series of mediating “identities”: the people as both governed and governing, subject and object of the law, etc. Again unlike liberalism, these identities are not conceived as collapsing into a single identity over time, a universal community of enlightened cosmopolitans, but as a continuous process of mediation between a particular popular will and its contingent instantiations. Because elective delegation is a practical political necessity, what is really essential for the democratic principle is that the people’s representatives—its lawmakers, laws, institutions, enforcers, and even its leaders—are ultimately responsible to the people, and can be dissolved at will.
Aside from this, “democracy” is ambiguous. As Schmitt notes, it is not antithetical to dictatorship, nor election by acclamation. All institutions are democratic if they are understood as emanating from the popular will, and legitimised in these terms. Furthermore, all democratic institutions involve the practical exclusion of minorities, as somehow deficient with respect to manifesting the popular will. It is even possible for a polity to be regarded as democratic while being governed by a minority or radical vanguard, so long as the latter is defined as the true guardian of the people, and justifies its disenfranchisement of the remainder in these terms (for example, by regarding them as politically immature or corrupted).
Democracy thus has no necessary connection with liberalism or its rationalist metaphysical premises. Although in the nineteenth century the democratic principle frequently aligned with liberal institutions in supplanting the monarchical principle, it entered only a contingent alliance with liberalism. Indeed many anarchists and socialists saw themselves as the inheritors of the democratic principle while opposing liberal institutions. These movements viewed parliamentary progressivism as an ideological smokescreen for the reactionary bourgeoisie. It was more democratic to subvert such institutions, with their mere pretense of democracy, than to support them. Right-wing movements soon followed suit with their own theories of völkisch or “organic” democracy and charismatic leadership. Whether left- or right-wing, radicalism is just this willingness to act “metapolitically,” i.e., to redraw the political superstructure to bring it into truer accordance with the base, however defined.
From the perspective of political theology, populism is simply an appeal to the democratic principle of legitimacy. If something is done for the sake of the people, on behalf of the people, it is (democratically) legitimate. To be meaningfully distinct from normal democratic procedure (which always involves an implicit appeal to the people), populism must be palingenetic and revolutionary, proposing a renewal or revision of national life, and consequently the bypassing or suspension of existing norms regarded as impediments. (For example, the expansion of the franchise against the wishes of an elite now considered oligarchical, hence illegitimate.) It is a limit concept because it operates within the overall norm of democratic legitimacy—it is not an overthrow, but an invocation of the principle—while demanding extra-normative decisions about the validity of previously unchallenged institutions and practices.
Similarly, charisma is a limit concept because (in its original formulation by Max Weber) it attributes ineffable, i.e., extra-rational and extra-normative, authority to political actors. Because the populist appeal to the volonté générale invites a decision on the validity of existing norms, it must call upon an authority which is irrational (or arational) from the normal perspective of the system—not irrational tout court. Such authority may be religious, cultural, related to personal “genius,” etc. The utility of the charisma concept lies not in its description of a psychological or biological phenomenon, but its designation of the fact that an appeal to such an ineffable authority has been made, at least potentially abrogating the normal authority of some institutions in the name of the popular will. A charismatic populist is, simply put, a successful populist. He succeeds at least as far as invoking a decision, even if the decision does not go his way (e.g., he and his constituents are destroyed by reactionary elements).
Liberal political and social scientists also thematise charisma as ineffable, and populism as somehow pertaining to an invocation of the popular will. But because they share the rationalist metaphysics of liberalism, with its assumption that irrationality is only ever relative, to be reconciled through more rational discourse, they are blind to the liminal dynamics revealed by political theology. From the liberal perspective charisma is an intrusion in the political process. Ultimately the “marketplace of ideas” ought to decide regardless of the personal qualities of politicians. Populism fares even worse, as a merely aesthetic or emotive appeal to the popular will. (Emotions and aesthetic displays may accompany reasons, but they are not reasons.) From the liberal perspective, progress can only be realised through rational discourse and reform. Radicalism is ultimately incoherent; if the radical’s demands are reasonable, by definition the political process will reflect and eventually assimilate them. Those who persist in seeing themselves as radicals despite the invitation to participate in the marketplace of ideas are not politically “other,” but personally deranged; not enemies, but lunatics requiring “therapy” and criminals requiring “rehabilitation.” As Wittgenstein put it: “At the end of reasons comes ‘persuasion’. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)”[2]
This metaphysics, rarely justified or even explicitly stated, is the source of the “modernisation thesis” underlying most studies of illiberalism since the 1950s. Derived from Weber’s theory of rationalisation, the thesis posits a “normal” teleology for modernising states, against which “abnormal” states are judged. Unsurprisingly normalcy is defined by the adoption of reasonable liberal politics and economics, which amounts to the idea that it is rational to accept the modern (i.e., rational) process of rationalisation. Weber’s dualism, of cultural values and instrumental reasons, is interpreted to mean that the ultimate value is instrumental rationality—the sort of rationality that can distinguish between objective reasons and subjective “reasons” (whims), albeit without “judging” the latter (whatever that may mean).
Weber’s rather illiberal dualism is thus transformed into a liberal, indeed bourgeois distinction between subjectivity (private, personal, emotive) and objectivity (public, political, rational). As with the political demotion of the inimical to the merely illicit, subjective whims that defy the teleology of liberal modernisation are not seen as incommensurable with it, but as regrettable and temporary disturbances. Nativism becomes atavism; fascism a kind of fever dream. Sociological explanations take the form of ad hominem fallacies: “perhaps had they not been dislocated from their traditional comforts so quickly…,” “perhaps had they not been held back by residual ‘feudal’ values and institutions,” “perhaps had they been allotted a greater share of the fruits of capital…,” etc.
My project is a study of one neglected context in which the modernisation thesis breaks down entirely: the mystic fascism of interwar Romania’s Legion of the Archangel Michael, or Iron Guard, and its leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Codreanu’s charismatic appeal to the Romanian national essence was a deliberate metapolitical strategy. Adapted partly from the tactics of the revolutionary left, it was designed to effect a rupture with liberal institutions by turning democratic principles against them. Codreanu sought, in his words, to “conquer the government by peaceful means—the same as Hitler—through elections [and] obtaining a majority in parliament.”[3] Romania’s fascist experiment was thus not a deficient, but an alternative modernity—not a lapse in judgment or objectivity, but a decision made with full knowledge of the stakes.
[1] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, transl. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, transl. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), §612.
[3] Quoted in Rebecca Ann Haynes, “Reluctant Allies? Iuliu Maniu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu against King Carol II of Romania,” The Slavonic and East European Review 85:1 (2007): 114.