F

ew 20th-century political philosophers have caused as much of a stir in the early 21st century as the controversial German legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Notorious for his intellectual and personal entanglements with the Third Reich, Schmitt has gained increasing popularity on both sides of the political spectrum. Whilst the European new right has hailed him as a source of inspiration in their struggle for a pan-European civilization, the left has applauded his deep comprehension of sovereignty and liberal imperialism. Others, however, have been much more critical as to the theoretical and political purchase of Schmitt’s work. It is within this ongoing debate that we need to situate Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan’s On Schmitt and Space.

Published with the innovative “Interventions” series at Routledge, Minca and Rowan set out to present Carl Schmitt not primarily as a philosopher or legal scholar—but as a spatial thinker. They argue that space is more than just a conceptual theme that Schmitt developed in the later stages of his career, but a crucial interpretive key to Schmitt’s entire oeuvre. This conceptual discussion is cleverly contextualised both with reference to Schmitt’s biography and the political evolution of the German state in which Schmitt lived and wrote.

In developing the argument about the inherent spatiality of Schmitt’s thought, the authors take us on a roughly chronological journey from Schmitt’s earlier work on the concept of the political via his critique of liberalism to his late work on spatial revolutions and the nomos (spatial order). We are informed about the ways in which Schmitt defines sovereignty in relation to the exception, and about the difference between telluric and motorised partisans. We learn about his problematic attempt to legitimate Nazi expansion through his concept of Grossraum (greater space) as well as his inability to comprehend the post-WWII world and his subsequent retreat into theology.

Whilst On Schmitt and Space thus serves as a (very readable) grand tour of Schmitt’s thought, the book offers much more than just an introduction. Firstly, it traces meticulously the recent renaissance of Schmitt in academic circles and highlights some of the fascinating ways in which Schmitt is claimed on different sides of the political spectrum. Secondly, it prompts us to consider Schmitt as a biopolitical thinker. It reveals how he defined the political as a boundary producing practice that functions to form the body politic by including some forms of life and excluding others. In marking this move as biopolitical, Minca and Rowan make it difficult to disassociate the earlier and later parts of Schmitt’s oeuvre from the project of racial annihilation that the Nazis unleashed in the name of the Volk (people). Although much of the book presents Schmitt as a tragic figure whose concepts are either too slippery or too politically tainted to be useful today, Minca and Rowan do note the allure and usefulness of some of his ideas.

Whilst my reactions to this book are thus overall very positive, I would like to share a few critical reactions that arose when reading On Schmitt and Space. The first of these concerns the role of the spatial in Schmitt’s political philosophy. After all, many of Schmitt’s concepts, are also thoroughly temporal in ambition. His spatial revolutions and nomoi, for instance, function as periodizations that slice history into more or less neat chunks in ways that charge his narrative in particular ways. As the authors acknowledge, Schmitt was not only a theorist of modernity, but his writing was moreover permeated by the eschatological language of Katechon and anti-Christ. This invites the question as to what it is that makes us think of Schmitt as a spatial rather than a temporal thinker. Is it just that he dealt with time less explicitly than he did with space—or is it because his musings on temporality are ultimately unconvincing?

The second reflection concerns Schmitt’s relationship with geopolitics and political realism. Whilst Minca and Rowan do highlight commonalities and tensions between Schmitt and other German Grossraum thinkers, they fail to explore the fact that the biopolitical is a much more noticeable theme in the work of Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Haushofer or the Swede Rudolf Kjellén (whose work is yet to be translated into English) than it is in Schmitt. The latter, after all, did not read the state as an organism, did not draw on zoology to understand the rise and fall of nations, and he largely stayed away from the biological language of lebensraum, too. The authors also miss an opportunity to compare and contrast Schmitt’s worldview with that of other political realists of his time. E. H. Carr, for instance, shared Schmitt’s critique of the post-1919 settlement and especially the League of Nations. This leaves the reader wondering as to what made Schmitt’s thought on interwar politics more original, insightful and indeed more spatial than that of his contemporaries. The authors partially acknowledge this lacuna in their conclusion, but it is nevertheless surprising for a book published in an international relations series not to engage with this question.

Thirdly, whilst reading On Schmitt and Space, I could not help but notice the ambivalent feelings that the two authors seem to harbor towards Schmitt. Whereas they frequently denounce the most discredited parts of his writing (such as his anti-Semitism) and highlight the vagueness of some of his ideas, they are also curiously enthralled by some facets of his work. Indeed, they see both limitations and utility in Schmitt, and write admiringly of his ability "to speak directly to the tension of the moment, cutting through the paralyzing ideological fog and hitting precisely on the raw mechanisms of global power" (page 3). It is in particular Schmitt’s apparent applicability to the post-9/11 American war on terror that has lured them into his world. Schmitt for them is someone who may not have got all the answers right, but who certainly asked the right questions.

But what makes Schmitt’s questions stand out from other geopoliticians, such as Karl Haushofer or Friedrich Ratzel, both of whom are still overwhelmingly treated as intellectual personae non gratae? What makes Schmitt a thinker we learn from rather than just about? What, for instance, is the purchase of Schmitt’s conception of the spatial revolution, first introduced in his essay "Land and Sea"? Surely, it rests precisely on the problematic sea/land binary that geographers have so long critiqued in the work of Halford Mackinder and others. And what about the notion of the nomos, which Minca and Rowan hail as a potentially “provocative starting point for interdisciplinary investigations” into contemporary world politics (page 253)? Whilst the authors concede in their conclusion that the nomos denotes an abstract and flat notion of space, they fail to notice that it also lacks an understanding of man-made materiality. Much like Ratzel, Haushofer or Kjellén, Schmitt has no more than a passing interest in questions of architecture and urban planning and therefore fails to tell us much about the ways in which humans are transformed into subjects of a particular spatial order.

Ultimately, however, On Schmitt and Space is a much needed contribution both to ongoing debates on the utility and limits of Schmitt’s thought and to the longstanding debates on the history of German geopolitical thought. By insisting that space is the key to Schmitt’s philosophical universe, the authors inadvertently throw up the question as to whether Schmitt should be included in the geographical canon—even though he was not a geographer.

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See Ian Klinke's most recent contribution to Society & Space: The Bunker and the Camp: Inside West Germany's Nuclear Tomb