Crisis and Decision: Lenin and Schmitt

Abstract

The Enlightenment and the French Revolution witnessed the placing to the fore in political theory of the concept of crisis. Reinhart Koselleck has argued that the notion of crisis underwent a fundamental transformation from the late eighteenth century. It ceased to denote a set of circumstances or a condition in which a judgement or decision is unavoidable and rather served to represent a permanent state of conflict and civil war that could only be overcome through a radical and irreversible break with the past.1 This understanding of crisis as an ongoing feature of social and political life, rather than a moment of decision, reflected the scepticism in important currents of Enlightenment thought and nineteenth-century radicalism not just about particular leaders or forms of government, but about the very conditions that made political decision possible. Anarchist thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin argued that there was no form of compulsory political organisation that could be consistent with human freedom. But this rejection of or deep antipathy toward political organisation was not just confined to anarchism. Both liberalism and Marxism saw the ultimate crisis and solution to the problems of modernity lying not in the political, but the social and economic spheres.KeywordsSocialist EconomyPolitical OrganisationLegal OrderRadical AttitudeSocialist RevolutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.