{"id":1816,"date":"2021-04-28T12:46:25","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T16:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/?page_id=1816"},"modified":"2021-04-28T12:53:24","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T16:53:24","slug":"brandon-deadmans-project-summary","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/brandon-deadmans-project-summary\/","title":{"rendered":"Brandon Deadman\u2019s Project Summary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Political Theology of Charisma: Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as Case Study<\/em><\/h2>\n

Brandon Deadman<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Charisma <\/em>and populism <\/em>are what Carl Schmitt described as limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe<\/em>), concepts \u201cpertaining to the outermost sphere\u201d of a system: the sphere of exceptions, ruptures, transformations, and (re)foundations capable of suspending and restructuring the system itself. As in Schmitt\u2019s day, contemporary liberalism\u2014the ideology of democratic-parliamentary procedure and social science\u2014cannot conceive of such limits because its claim to legitimacy rests upon a limitless capacity to assimilate and subordinate the exceptional. If \u201c[t]he exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology,\u201d then liberalism is analogous to natural religion, for which theology is the science of immanently rational nature<\/em>.[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<\/em>, is the spiritual father of liberalism\u2014of freedom of thought and the \u201cright to argue,\u201d whose premise is the progressive reconciliation of all viewpoints in a final (even if practically unreachable) harmony of opinion.<\/p>\n

The purpose of Schmitt\u2019s political theology was not to critique this metaphysical position but liberal forgetfulness that it is <\/em>a metaphysical position. Schmitt also distinguished liberal rationalism from the democratic principle of legitimacy, which he derived substantially from Rousseau\u2019s \u201cgeneral will.\u201d The democratic principle is not monistic, like the liberal ideal, but dualistic: an internal homogeneity (\u201cthe people\u201d and its institutions) is set against an external heterogeneity. It is also premised on a series of mediating \u201cidentities\u201d: 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\u2019s representatives\u2014its lawmakers, laws, institutions, enforcers, and even its leaders\u2014are ultimately responsible to the people, and can be dissolved at will.<\/p>\n

Aside from this, \u201cdemocracy\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

Democracy thus has no necessary <\/em>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 <\/em>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 v\u00f6lkisch <\/em>or \u201corganic\u201d democracy and charismatic leadership. Whether left- or right-wing, radicalism is just this willingness to act \u201cmetapolitically,\u201d i.e., to redraw the political superstructure to bring it into truer accordance with the base, however defined.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>the overall norm of democratic legitimacy\u2014it is not an overthrow, but an invocation of the principle\u2014while demanding extra-normative decisions about the validity of previously unchallenged institutions and practices.<\/p>\n

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 volont\u00e9 g\u00e9n\u00e9rale <\/em>invites a decision on <\/em>the validity of existing norms, it must call upon an authority which is irrational (or arational) from the normal perspective of the system\u2014not irrational tout court<\/em>. Such authority may be religious, cultural, related to personal \u201cgenius,\u201d 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 <\/em>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, <\/em>even if the decision does not go his way (e.g., he and his constituents are destroyed by reactionary elements).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmarketplace of ideas\u201d 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\u2019s demands are reasonable<\/em>, 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 \u201cother,\u201d but personally deranged; not enemies, but lunatics requiring \u201ctherapy\u201d and criminals requiring \u201crehabilitation.\u201d As Wittgenstein put it: \u201cAt the end of reasons comes \u2018persuasion\u2019. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)\u201d[2]<\/p>\n

This metaphysics, rarely justified or even explicitly stated, is the source of the \u201cmodernisation thesis\u201d underlying most studies of illiberalism since the 1950s. Derived from Weber\u2019s theory of rationalisation, the thesis posits a \u201cnormal\u201d teleology for modernising states, against which \u201cabnormal\u201d 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\u2019s dualism, of cultural values <\/em>and instrumental reasons, <\/em>is interpreted to mean that the ultimate value is <\/em>instrumental rationality\u2014the sort of rationality that can distinguish between objective reasons and subjective \u201creasons\u201d (whims), albeit without \u201cjudging\u201d the latter (whatever that may mean).<\/p>\n

Weber\u2019s 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<\/em> fallacies: \u201cperhaps had they not been dislocated from their traditional comforts so quickly…,\u201d \u201cperhaps had they not been held back by residual \u2018feudal\u2019 values and institutions,\u201d \u201cperhaps had they been allotted a greater share of the fruits of capital…,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n

My project is a study of one neglected context in which the modernisation thesis breaks down entirely: the mystic fascism of interwar Romania\u2019s Legion of the Archangel Michael, or Iron Guard, and its leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Codreanu\u2019s 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 \u201cconquer the government by peaceful means\u2014the same as Hitler\u2014through elections [and] obtaining a majority in parliament.\u201d[3] Romania\u2019s fascist experiment was thus not a deficient, but an alternative <\/em>modernity\u2014not a lapse in judgment or objectivity, but a decision made with full knowledge of the stakes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>[1] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty<\/em>, transl. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty<\/em>, transl. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), \u00a7612.<\/p>\n

[3] Quoted in Rebecca Ann Haynes, \u201cReluctant Allies? Iuliu Maniu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu against King Carol II of Romania,\u201d The Slavonic and East European Review <\/em>85:1 (2007): 114.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Political Theology of Charisma: Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as Case Study Brandon Deadman \u00a0 Charisma and populism are what Carl Schmitt described as limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe), concepts \u201cpertaining to the outermost sphere\u201d of a system: the sphere of exceptions, ruptures, transformations, and (re)foundations capable of suspending and restructuring the system itself. As in Schmitt\u2019s day, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-1816","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry","6":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1827,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1816\/revisions\/1827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}