Antinomies of Technical Thought: Attempting to Transcend Weber's Categories of Modernity

Abstract

In his cultural-political treatises from the years 1916 to 1923, Schmitt attempts to formulate a critique of modernity that properly apprehends technology's role within it, without either aesthetically valorizing or fearfully fleeing from it – responses characteristic of many of his contemporaries. His first effort at this, in his commentary on the poem “Northern Lights” in 1916, is followed by another socioliterary study from 1919, Political Romanticism . He then takes up this task more rigorously in Roman Catholicism and Political Form in 1923. Schmitt confronts the problem that modernity seems to have two opposite intellectual poles: the one, economic-technical thought, the abstractly formal rationality associated with economics, technology, and positivism; the other, the many strands of romanticism, the highly subjective and aesthetic enrapture with specifically concrete objects. For the early Schmitt, the task of a rationality not beholden to either one of these particular opposites of modernity would be one that understands their interrelatedness in the specific historical moment of the present and attempts to move beyond them in practice, as we will see, in a particular understanding of political practice. It is noteworthy that in the same year as the publication of Roman Catholicism and Political Form , the centerpiece of Schmitt's early cultural-political confrontation with technology, Georg Lukacs published History and Class Consciousness , a Marxian attempt to deal with much the same problem. Yet the relationship between the two works and the two authors themselves is generally overlooked.