68 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
so, and if Schmitt takes up the authoritarian position, Buber might be the con-
temporary of Schmitt’s who best assumes the parallel anarchist position.
Schmitt, who may have attended Weber’s public lectures in Munich, also
came to center violence in his concept of the political. This is stated most fa-
mously in the “friend-enemy” criterion of Concept of the Political (1932), but it
can be seen already in Political Romanticism (1919), which, while ostensibly con-
cerned with the correct understanding of an eighteenth-century literary phe-
nomenon, can easily be seen as an oblique response to contemporary political
circumstances. Schmitt argues that political romanticism is found on both the
left and the right. It occurs wherever one seeks to evade a final political decision,
since romanticism aesthetically prefers to avoid confining reality within the lim-
its of the single outcome that attends any decision: “In commonplace reality, the
romantics could not play the role of the ego who creates the world. They preferred
the state of eternal becoming and possibilities that are never consummated to the
confines of concrete reality. This is because only one of the numerous possibili-
ties is ever realized.”^31 For the political romantic, Schmitt claims, decision itself
is violence and therefore must be avoided. This is the origin of the preference for
“eternal discussion,” the critique of which will soon become a theme of Schmitt’s
attacks on liberal parliamentarianism.
The most extreme embodiment of antiparliamentarian, antiromantic will
to decision is the dictator, and Schmitt made dictatorship the topic of his next
major work, Die Diktatur (Dictatorship, 1921). The book was timely in light of the
failed Kapp Putsch of March 1920, in which right-wing nationalist and monar-
chist forces within the military attempted to reverse the results of 1918–1919 and
sent the Berlin government into exile; the attempt was met with a general strike
and an armed revolt, the Ruhr Uprising, which sought to establish a dictatorship
of the proletariat. Thus multiple parties had enacted or promised dictatorships
in their contest for power.^32 Here, as in his book on romanticism, Schmitt la-
ments the general confusion surrounding the concept in question and offers as
an antidote a history of the concept of dictatorship that would distinguish it from
absolutism, despotism, and tyranny. For Schmitt, the fundamental characteristic
of any dictatorship is that dictatorship is “an exception that remains in func-
tional dependence upon that which it negates,” namely the normal situation. The
norm is negated by the dictatorship, but the dictatorship also draws its authority
from the norm and seeks to guard and protect it. In essence, then, what separates
dictatorship from “arbitrary despotism” is that it pursues the goal of restoring
the norm, seeking to make itself redundant; whatever extraordinary measures it
takes are “determined from the perspective of the intended success.”^33 Schmitt
then distinguishes two types of dictatorship: “The commissary dictator is the un-
conditional commissar of action of a pouvoir constitué [constituted power], and
sovereign dictatorship is the unconditional commission of action [Aktionskom-
mission] of a pouvoir constituant [const ituent power].”^34 In other words, the for-