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The Misinterpretation of Violence: Heideggers

Reading of Hegel and Schmitt on Gewalt
Robert Bernasconi

Pennsylvania State University

Abstract
In the winter semester 193435 Heidegger used the occasion of an introductory seminar on Hegels Philosophy of Right as the context for a sustained confrontation with the
legal theorist Carl Schmitt. In this paper, I establish the context for Heideggers confrontation with Schmitt from 1933 to early 1935; I explain why Heidegger chose Hegel as
the context for his discussion; and above all, I demonstrate how their various attempts
to make sense of the seizure of power by the Nazis was combined with a systematic
neglect of the pervasive violence of the times.

Keywords
division of powers liberalism national socialism violence Georg Hegel Martin
Heidegger Carl Schmitt

I
What do we choose to see of violence in a world saturated with it? What means
do we have at our disposal to recognize violence when it is hidden within institutions and cloaked by claims to legitimacy? To what extent are we each implicated in the violence of those with whom we are associated? Whereas theorists
like Sartre and Fanon focused on exposing the violence inherent in colonial,
capitalist, and fascist systems, theorists such as Hobbes, Hegel, and Schmitt
sought to legitimate and even conceal systemic violence by convincing people that the violent regime under which they lived was protecting them from
real or worse violence. Schmitt is an especially interesting case. He defined
the political in terms of the relation of friend and enemy and in such a way
koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 5|doi 10.1163/15691640-12341309

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that the political is more intense to the degree that the antagonism between
friend and enemy becomes more intense. He also argued that in order to limit
the violence between states, a measure of violence would be necessary within
any given society.1 There were occasions when he quite clearly sought to convince his audience that measures that appeared to be violent should not be
regarded as such. This led him into frequent dialogue with both Hobbes and
Hegel, who attempted to do the same.2 In this essay, I show how Heidegger
through his reading of Schmitt was drawn back to Hegels Philosophy of Right,
and that it was in his engagement with both of these authors that we get the
clearest insight into how he approached philosophically the political events of
the decisive years 19321935.
In the remainder of this section I will examine Hegels use of the term Gewalt
so as to highlight the ambiguity of the term. In the second part of this paper
I take up Carl Schmitts The Concept of the Political through the central, but
often neglected, discussion of violence to be found there.3 In the third part of
the paper, I outline Heideggers argument against The Concept of the Political.
Schmitt would have known about the critiques of his approach by some of
1 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (1932), 1417, hereafter cited as BP; translated by
George Schwab as The Concept of the Political 2629, hereafter cited as CP. For complete
bibliographic information, see the Abbreviations list at the end of this essay.
2 On Schmitts relation to Hobbes, see Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des
Thomas Hobbes (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938); translated by George Schwab
and Erna Hilfstei as The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1996), and also John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism,
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24989. On Schmitts relation to Hegel,
see Jean-Franois Kervgan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt. Le politique entre speculation et positivit
(Paris: PUF, 2005), and with special reference to The Concept of the Political, Udo Tietz,
Anthropologischer Ansatz politischer Theorien, in Carl Schmitt. Der Begriff des Politischen.
Ein kooperativer Kommentar, ed. Reinhard Mehring (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 12338.
3 There are a number of useful essays on Heidegger and Schmitt: Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger
and Carl Schmitt: The Historicity of the Political, Heidegger Studies 20 (2004): 8399, and
21 (2005): 7594; Dieter Thom, The Difficulty of Democracy: Rethinking the Political
in the Philosophy of the Thirties (Gehlen, Schmitt, Heidegger), in Nazi Germany and the
Humanities, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinach (Chicago: One World, 2007), 75100;
Georg Waite, Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss, Cultural Critique 69 (2008), 11340; and Peter
Trawny, Heidegger und das Politische, Heidegger Studies 28 (2012): 4766. Of these, only
Trawnys essay was published late enough to address Heideggers text on Hegels Philosophy
of Right, which, now that it is available, is the best source for our knowledge of Heideggers
critique of Schmitt. See now also the essays by Peter Trawny, Susanna Lindberg, and Michael
Marder in On Hegels Philosophy of Right: The 193435 Seminar and Interpretive Essays,
hereafter cited as HPR.

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Heideggers former students, but he would not have been aware of Heideggers
polemic against him, which was confined to lectures, seminars, and private
manuscripts, which found their way into print only recently.4 There was the
lecture course Being and Truth from 193334 which was first published in 2001,
the seminar Nature, History, State from the same semester, which was not
published until 2009, and the seminar Hegels Philosophy of Right from the
semester 193435, which first appeared in 2011.5 The last two texts in particular
present significant hermeneutical challenges because they consist largely of
reports written by students. However, in the same volume that published the
student notes deriving from Heideggers seminar on the Philosophy of Right are
also included Heideggers notes for his own private use.6 These are especially
valuable; many of these notes relate to a text that Schmitt wrote at the end
of 1934, State, Movement, People, in order to justify constitutionally the Nazi
takeover.7 I will consider Heideggers response to that text in the fifth part, but
before doing so, I will, in the fourth part, present Schmitts argument in this
text in some detail as a way of contextualizing their discussion. In the sixth
and final section of my paper, I will examine why Heidegger decided to confront Schmitt in the context of a few select passages from Hegels Philosophy
of Right and what emerges from his decision to do so. The fact that Heidegger
conducted his main confrontation with Schmitt through a reading of parts of
Hegels Philosophy of Right enables us to see how reference to Hegel, far from
clarifying the situation for him, promoted a certain inability to see the violence
taking place around him for what it was.

4 For an overview of these critiques, see Reinhard Mehring, Formalisme, dcisionnisme,

nihilism. Les tudiants juifs de Heidegger critiques de Heidegger et de Schmitt (Strauss,
Kuhn, Lwith, Arendt), in La dette et la distance, ed. Marie-Anne Lescourret (Paris: ditions
de lclat, 2014), 87113.
5 Martin Heidegger, ber Wesen und Begriff von Nature, Geschichte und Staat in Heidegger
Jahrbuch 4, pp. 5388 (hereafter NGS); translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as
Nature, History, State, 1364 (hereafter NHS); Mitschrift Wilhelm Hallwachs (hereafter
Hallwachs) and Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie WS 34/35 Protokolle (hereafter Protokolle), in
Seminare Hegel-Schelling, vol. 86 of Gesamtausgabe (hereafter GA 86), 549611 and 613655,
respectively.
6 Martin Heidegger, Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie (hereafter HR), in GA 86: 55184/HPR, 101200.
7 Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, hereafter cited as SBV; translated by Simona Draghici as
State Movement, People, hereafter cited as SMP. I have also consulted the French translation
by Agns Pilleul, tat, Mouvement, Peuple (Paris: ditions Kim, 1997). Heidegger seems to
have thought that the themes of SMP should be juxtaposed with those of his seminar Nature,
History, State. See the diagram at Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 121)/HPR, 147.

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We often talk as if Gewalt was the German word for violence. Of course,
it sometimes is. There are cases when Gewalt is translated as force but could
be translated as violence equally well, if not better. So, for example, in the
Science of Logic Hegel wrote: Die Gewalt ist die Erscheinung der Macht, oder
die Macht als usserliches: which has recently been translated as Violence
is the appearance of power, or power as external.8 Hegel also wrote in the
Encyclopedia, and it is a passage cited by Heidegger, that For although the
state may arise by force it does not rest on force; force, in producing the state,
has brought into existence only what is justified in and for itself, the laws, the
constitution.9 Nevertheless, it is not an error that the English word violence
appears scarcely at all in translations of Hegels Philosophy of Right, even
though much of the discussion is about Gewalt. In that book Gewalt tends to
mean something much more like force or power. Hannah Arendts strict
distinction between violence (Gewalt) and power (Macht) has had the effect
of encouraging commentators to see a clearer differentiation between these
two terms, but it has rightly been described as an original departure from
the meaning of the word as previously understood, and we must be careful
not to read it back into earlier texts.10 Whereas the term Gewalt is too broad
to be translated as violence in most cases, the term Gewaltttigkeit can be
translated more reliably as violence, even though its strong connotations of
brutality and arbitrariness make it narrower than the English word violence.11
8

G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objective Logik (1812/13), ed.
Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. 11 of Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1978), 405; translated by George di Giovanni as The Science of Logic (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 501 (Hegels emphasis).
9 G. W. F. Hegel, Encyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Dritter Theil. Die
Philosohie des Geistes, Bd. 7.2 of Werke (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1845), 278,432;
translated by W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, revised by M. J. Inwood as Philosophy of Mind
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159, cited by Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 123)/HPR, 149.
10 Marc de Launay, Macht, Gewalt, in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 608. See Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New
York: Harcourt and Brace, 1970); translated by Gisela Uellenberg as Gewalt und Macht
(Munich: R. Piper, 1970).
11 Heidegger explains that the word Gewaltttigkeit ordinarily means mere brutality
[Roheit] and arbitrariness (Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, vol. 40 of Gesamtausgabe
[Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1983], 159; translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
as Introduction to Metaphysics, rev. ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014], 167). On
this passage, see Gregory Fried, Heideggers Polemos (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 14244. Elsewhere Heidegger identifies Gewaltttigkeit with the word Brutalitt
(Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, vol. 69 of Gesamtausgabe [Frankfurt a.M.:
Klostermann, 1998], 195), hereafter GA 69.

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For this reason, the word serves Hegels purpose well when he wants to deny
the presence of violence in the relation of the state to its subjects, which he
does in paragraph 219 of the Philosophy of Right. While rejecting Carl Ludwig
von Hallers account of courts of law as a gracious but capricious act on the part
of monarchs, on the grounds that it failed to look at these institutions from the
point of view of reason, Hegel there dismissed as crude the view according to
which the administration of justice represents an improper use of violence
[Gewaltttigkeit], a suppression of freedom, and a rule of despotism.12 That
was the perspective of the liberal individual. Hegels own position was the
following: The administration of justice should be regarded both as a duty
and as a right on the part of the public authority (Macht), and as a right, it is
not in the least dependent on whether individuals choose to entrust it to an
authority (Macht) or not.13 Such sentiments lent themselves to appropriation
by the Nazis.
II
Scholars of Schmitts The Concept of the Political have tended to focus on the
discussion of friend and enemy in its opening pages, but the largely neglected
conclusion of the book makes the claim that the future, and certainly the
future of Germany, depended on how one understood the German word
Gewalt. Schmitt tells his readers that liberals understand every encroachment,
every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competition
is called repression and is eo ipso something evil.14 The word George Schwab
translated as repression was Gewalt, although the word violence might have
served better. It should be noted that this passage cannot be found in the first
version of Carl Schmitts The Concept of the Political, which appeared in 1927 as
a twenty-six-page article.15 It was included only in 1932 when the article was
expanded to form the short book or pamphlet that in this version became his
best known work.
12 G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Bd. 14.1 of Gesammelte Werke,
183, 219, hereafter abbreviated as GW 14.1; translated by H. B. Nisbet as Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, 252, hereafter cited as EPR (trans. modified).
13 Ibid.
14 Schmitt, BP, 57/CP, 71.
15 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Archiv Fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
58 (1927): 133. This version was reprinted the following year in Probleme der Demokratie
(Berlin: Grunewald-Rothschild, 1928), 134.

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Schmitt used the 1932 version of The Concept of the Political as the occasion
to reject liberalisms critique of the power of the state (Staatsgewalt).16 Instead
of understanding Staatsgewalt as state power, liberalism understood it as state
violence: The word Gewalt is utilized in liberal theory as a reproach against
state and politics.17 In liberalism, as Schmitt saw it, the notion of Gewalt had
been demilitarized, depoliticized, and replaced by a perspective in which
ethics and economics ruled. His response was not to defend that power as such
but to argue that the way liberalism perceived what it called Staatsgewalt was
in error. Or, more precisely, it belonged to a time that was over: liberalism had
reached its historical end and no longer had anything to do with the world as
it then existed. Schmitt must have felt in some way vindicated in his historical
judgment when, during 1933, the Weimar Constitution was suspended, but he
himself was under suspicion from the Nazis because of his close association
with the now discredited general, Kurt von Schleicher.18
For this reason Schmitt quickly issued a revised edition of The Concept
of the Political clearly designed to make the text more attractive to the Nazi
Party.19 The revised edition was printed in Fraktur, but there were further,
more important changes. For example, in the 1932 edition, which Heidegger
claimed to be familiar with and which is the text most often read today, the
ethnic was included alongside the religious, the moral, and the economic.20
In the 1933 edition, which Schmitt sent to Heidegger on its publication in the
summer of that year, the term ethnic (ethnisch) was changed to vlkisch as
part of a general effort to rewrite the book in a form more in line with Nazi
sensibilities.21 Nevertheless, Heidegger continued to use the 1932 edition,
16 Schmitt, BP, 37/CP, 70.
17 Schmitt, BP, 60/CP, 73.
18 George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception, 2nd ed. (New York: Greenwood Press,
1989), 1517 and 97100.
19 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933).
20 Schmitt, BP, 25/CP, 37. Martin Heidegger, Letter to Carl Schmitt, 22 August, 1933, in
Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, vol. 16 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.:
Klostermann, 2000), 156; translated as Heidegger and Schmitt: The Bottom Line, Telos 72
(Summer 1987): 132.
21 Schmitt, BP, 25/CP, 37. There is a misprint so that in CP the translation ethnisch is translated
as ethical, not ethnic. Compare Der Begriff des Politischen (1933), 20. According to
Reinhard Mehring, the contact between Heidegger and Schmitt began when the former
sent the latter a copy of his Rectoral Address and they met in September 1933 in Berlin
(9 September 1933 im Kaiserhof? Zur scheiternden Kooperation von Martin Heidegger
und Carl Schmitt in Berlin, in Kriegtechniker des Begriffs. Biographisce Studien zu Carl
Schmitt [Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014], 99109).

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which was more philosophically developed. So in 1933 Schmitt omitted the

first two sections of the book, where the claim that [t]he concept of the
state presupposes the concept of the political was to be found. This sentence
had served as Heideggers invitation to pursue the ontological problems of
Schmitts account. In 1933 Schmitt also dropped the sentence in which Schmitt
described the political enemy as the other, which Heidegger related back
to Hegels dialectic of self-recognition by saying Enemy (according to Carl
Schmitt) a being-otherwherein the entire threat of the other in regards to
being is a not-recognizing [Nicht-anerkennen]the struggle againstthe disqualifying [Ab-erkennen] of the mightiness of beingthe presupposition here
with friend and enemycare.22 Here and elsewhere Heidegger was at pains
to insist that Schmitt had failed to root his concepts ontologically and that,
had he done so, he could have taken advantage of Heideggers own account of
Daseins self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung), an indication that even after he had
resigned the Rectorate, he had not yet abandoned one of the central terms of
the Rectoral Address.23
Schmitts attempt to pander to Nazi sensibilities in the 1933 edition was
most apparent in an addition made to one of the key passages on violence,
part of which I have already quoted. In 1932, he polemicized against the liberal
understanding of violence: All liberal pathos turns against Gewalt and lack
of freedom. Every encroachment, every threat to individual freedom and private property and free competition is called Gewalt and is eo ipso something
evil.24 In 1933, at this point in the text, Schmitt added an additional sentence
in which he indicated that if one follows state law and economic regulations
then the state must not interfere even when thousands of peasants are driven
into poverty by the usurers bailiff.25 In the context of the time, the intention
seems clear: to indicate that Jewish usurers were a threat to the very backbone
of German society. Although Schmitts anti-Semitic tendencies have often
been discussed, I do not believe this early instance of it has been noted, and
it is significant that it occurs in the context of a rejection of the liberal understanding of violence.26
22 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 174)/HPR, 186.
23 Heidegger, Hallwachs (GA 86: 6089), and Protokolle (GA 86: 655).
24 Schmitt, BP, 5758/CP, 71. In the 1927 version the sentence continues or indeed, as Locke,
the authentic founder of the Rechtstaat, liked to say, something animal-like (Schmitt,
Der Begriff des Politischen [1927], 28).
25 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (1933), 51.
26 Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000); translated by Joel
Golb as Carl Schmitt and the Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

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III
Heidegger began his confrontation with Schmitt in the 193334 lecture course
Being and Truth, taking his lead from a claim that he made during the previous semester that the ethnicity and language of the Greeks and the Germans
shared a common provenance (Herkunft).27 Heidegger set himself the task
of bringing to mastery the fundamental possibilities of what he here called
our proto-German [urgermanisch] ethnic essence [Stammeswesen].28 In the
context of an interpretation of Heraclitus fragment 44 concerning ,
Heidegger set about establishing his Nazi credentials with a radicality that
exceeded Schmitts attempt to do the same. Heidegger embraced Schmitts
language of friend and enemy but set it in his own framework to the point
where he could say that the enemy has attached itself to the innermost roots
of the Dasein of a people.29 However, he continued by insisting, in a phrase
that would still have been absolutely scandalous even if it was not so overdetermined by the context, that more burdensome than coming to blows with
the enemy was bringing the enemy into the open so as to prepare the attack
looking far ahead into the goal of total annihilation (Vernichtung). Following
an interpretation of Platos allegory of the cave in which Heidegger emphasized the violence of the liberation described there, he insisted that the meaning of National Socialism lay not in a doctrine but in a total transformation of
human Dasein, one that would transform the German world and perhaps the
European world as well.30
At this point in the text, Heidegger attacked those Nazis who vociferously
opposed liberalism but at the same time promoted what amounted to a liberal form of National Socialism.31 It is likely that he was already thinking of
Schmitt, as in the following year Heidegger did not hesitate to call the friendenemy relation typically liberal in spite of Schmitts own conviction that he
was a critic of liberalism. Although Schmitt was against liberalism, not least
27 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundfragen der Philosophie, in Sein und Wahrheit, vol. 36/37 of
Gesamtausgabe, 6 (hereafter GA 36/37); translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as
Being and Truth, 5 (hereafter BAT).
28 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in (GA 36/37: 89)/BAT, 71.
29 Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (GA 36/37: 91)/BAT, 73.
30 Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (GA 36/37: 14344, 119, and 225)/BAT, 113, 93, and 17172.
Heidegger had made a similar point about liberation in the context of the allegory of the
cave in his lectures from 193132, adding that in this context violence (Gewalttigkeit) did
not mean brutality or arbitrariness (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, vol. 34 of Gesamtausgabe
[Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1988], 42 and 8182).
31 Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (GA 36/37: 119)/BAT, 94.

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because it took its starting-point in the interests that the individual maintains
in private property and personal freedom, Heidegger considered Schmitt a
liberal because from his perspective Schmitt adopted the standpoint of the
individual with the result that he misunderstood the notion of the state and
thought of politics as a sphere.32
In the same semester that Heidegger was delivering the lecture-course
Being and Truth, he also held the seminar recently published as Nature, History,
State. He observed there that Schmitts account of the friend-enemy relation
was grounded in the view that the possibility of the struggle for decision,
which can also be fought out without military means, sharpens present oppositionsbe they moral, religious, or economicinto radical unity as friend
and enemy.33 This reading seems to be Heideggers interpretation of Schmitts
claim about the necessity of a pluralism of a world of states, a pluralism that
excludes the possibility of a world-state. He wrote: Political unity [Die politische
Einheit] presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence
with another political unity.34 Heidegger added correctly that in Schmitt this
political unity does not have to be identical with the state and the people,
and this would seem to be in line with Heideggers own conception that one
cannot found the political on the state.35 But Heidegger was also explicitly
differentiating Schmitts concept of the political from his own, according to
which the political is a way of Being of human beings and what makes the
state possible, where the state is the way of Being of a people.36 Heideggers
objection was that Schmitt had failed to tie his account of the political into an
account of the Being of the state and of the people of the kind that he himself
gave when he argued that [t]he Being of the state is anchored in the political
being of the human beings who, as a people, support this statedecide for it.37
In the following semester, the summer of 1934, Heidegger would enrich the
account he had already given of the state with an account of the Being of the
people.38 Heidegger accused Schmitt of not thinking sufficiently deeply about
32 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 174)/HPR, 186.
33 Heidegger, NGS, 74/NHS, 46.
34 Schmitt, BP, 41/CP, 53 (my translation). The sentence about the pluralism of a world of
states is missing from CP, the translation.
35 Heidegger, NGS, 71/NHS, 52.
36 Heidegger, NGS, 74 and 72/NHS, 46 and 43.
37 Heidegger, NGS, 73/NHS, 45.
38 Martin Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, vol. 38 of Gesamtausgabe, 15166 (hereafter GA 38); translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna
as Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 12537 (hereafter LCL). See
also Robert Bernasconi, Who Belongs? Heideggers Philosophy of the Volk in 193334, in

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the nature of a people. Although it is is not clear precisely when Heidegger

read Schmitts State, Movement, People, when he did he found there an account
of the people that was richer than the one he had found in The Concept of
the Political. This led him to adopt a different approach during the semester
193435 in a seminar on Hegels Philosophy of Right.
IV
Heideggers interest in Hegels political philosophy seems to have been a result
of the constitutional crises of 1933. It was widely believed that the so-called
liberal separation of the executive and legislative imposed by the Weimar
Constitution had contributed to the inability of successive governments to
address Germanys economic crisis that had opened the door to communism. It
was that perspective that had led many of the German people to look to Hitler
as, in the words of the famous poster, Unsere letzte Hoffnung. Hitler used
this support to concentrate power in his person. Schmitts main preoccupation
in State, Movement, People was to legitimate the repeal of the liberal constitutional separation of the executive from the legislative that had taken place
through a series of laws enacted during 1933. He highlighted a number of the
laws from that time, and in his notes Heidegger listed three of them as if it was
his intention to consult them.39 The first and most important piece of legislation was the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People, also sometimes known
as the Enabling or Empowerment Act (Ermchtigungsgesetz). It was passed on
24 March 1933 and contained a provision according to which the Reich Cabinet
was also authorized to pass laws.40 The second piece of legislation recorded
by Heidegger from Schmitts text was the Reichsstatthaltergesetz, the Second
Law for the Coordination of the Federal States under the Reich. It was passed
on 7 April 1933 with the aim, which would not reach full fruition until the
following year, of concentrating power centrally. Schmitt himself played a role

NHS, 10925. In 193334 Heidegger had explicitly postponed the question of the people
(NGS, 74/NHS, 46).
39 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 75)/HPR, 11213).
40 Reichsministerium des Innern, Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich
Vom 24 Mrz 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt (Berlin, Reichsverlagsamt), Teil 1, nr. 25 (1933): 141;
translated as The Ennabling Law, in Documents on Nazism 19191945, ed. Jeremy Noakes
and Geoffrey Pridham (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 195.

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in writing it.41 The last of the three laws noted was designed to secure the unity
of the party and the state and was supposed to be accomplished in part by
including the deputy of the Fhrer and the Chief of Staff of the Sturmabteilung
(i.e., the SA or Brownshirts) as members of the Reich Government.42 The
dominant idea behind this piece of legislation from 1 December 1933 was that
the Nazi Party was the bearer of the concept of the German State. Schmitt,
applying his threefold schema, interpreted this law as saying that the National
Socialist Party was the leading body and that it underlay both the State and
the People.43 In consequence, neither the Nazi Party, including the SA, nor the
Fhrer principle to which it held, was to be understood as subject to the courts,
and Schmitt recognized that this meant that the Party had to set its own standards from within itself: The courts are just as little permitted on any pretext
to interfere in the internal problems and decisions of the Party organization,
and violate its leader-principle from without. The internal organization and
discipline of the Party, carrier of State and People, are its own business. It must
develop its own standards on its own strictest responsibility.44 Schmitt reaffirmed this formulation later at a time when the vicious nature of the new
regime was even clearer, but even at this early point he understood that with
this conception the whole danger of the political was in play.45
Because the Enabling Law had been passed by a Reichstag parliament
elected according to the old rules, Schmitt was concerned that it might seem
that the Weimar Constitution was the source of the legitimacy to the National
Socialist State. Schmitt wanted to resist this conclusion, not least because
this would suggest that the Weimar Constitution was still in force, especially
as the Empowering Law was only temporary and needed to be reaffirmed
after three years. For Schmitt it was inconceivable that the National Socialist
State could be derived from the liberal-democratic framework that from his
perspective had already collapsed. The Enabling Law had to be shown to be
a bridge from the old foundation (Grundlage) to a new one, through which
41 Reichsministerium des Innern, Zweites Gesetz zur Gleichschaltung der Lnder mit dem
Reich. Vom 7 April 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt, 1, 33 (1933): 173; translated in Documents on
Nazism, 23940. Schmitts role is discussed at William L. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt. The
End of Law (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 15.
42 Reichsministerium des Innern, Gesetz zur Sicherung der Einheit von Partei und Staat
Vom 1 Dezember 1933, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 135 (1933): 1016; translated in Documents on
Nazism, 233.
43 Schmitt, SBV, 20/SMP, 21.
44 Schmitt, SBV, 22/SMP, 23.
45 Ibid.

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the Weimar Constitution had been overcome (berwinden).46 The idea of ethnic identity was foundational for the new order and the Weimar Constitution
did not allow for any distinction between the friends of the state and foreigners (Artfremde).47 Schmitt insisted that without the principle of ethnic
identity (Artgleichheit), the German National-Socialist State cannot exist.48
He repeated the same point in the pamphlets last sentence: all the questions
and answers flow into the exigency of an ethnic identity (Artgleichheit) without which a total leader-state could not stand its ground a single day.49 This
was a clear endorsement of Hitlers racial policies at that time, such as the
Law for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service of 7 April 1933, according to
which officials of non-Aryan descent were to be retired.50 Nevertheless, even
if he now specified the homogeneity was to be understood in terms of kind or
variety (Art), the argument in favor of homogeneity was not new and so cannot be understood simply as another part of his attempt to ingratiate himself
with the Nazis. In 1930 Schmitt already expressed a concern with the need for
unity to balance the pluralism of races and peoples, of religions and cultures,
of languages and legal systems.51 This unity could come either from above
through power and command or from below from the substantial homogeneity of a people, or more likely from both. Even earlier, in 1926, citing the example of the expulsion of the Greeks by the Turks and Australias restrictions on
immigration to the right type of settler, he insisted that democracy requires
first homogeneity and secondif the need ariseselimination or annihilation (Ausscheidung oder Vernichtung) of heterogeneity.52 There is no reason to
believe that Heidegger knew this text, but it is not by accident that they were
both drawn to the word Vernichtung as they tried to develop an account of the
Volk. To be sure, Schmitt did not distance himself from biological understandings of the Volk in the way that Heidegger did, even though at one of the places

46 Schmitt, SBV, 78/SMP, 67.

47 Schmitt, SBV, 56/SMP, 4.
48 Schmitt, SBV, 42/SMP, 48.
49 Schmitt, SBV, 46/SMP, 52.
50 Schmitt, SBV, 44/SMP, 50.
51 Carl Schmitt, Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat, Kant-Studien 25, no. 1 (1930): 3537;
translated by David Dyzenhaus as Ethic of State and Pluralistic State, in The Challenge of
Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999), 2034.
52 Carl Schmitt, Vorbemerkung, in Die geistesgeschichtlichen Lage des heutigen
Parlamentarismus (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), 14; translated by Ellen Kennedy
as The Crisis of Parlamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 9 (translation
modified).

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where he joined in discussion with Schmitt, he referred to the historical Dasein

of a people as a stock (Stamm), or a tribe (Sippe).53
Schmitts argument was that although the Ennabling Law was passed
by the parliament, this was the new parliament put in place following the
German federal elections of 5 March 1933, and so it was, in effect, the result
of a plebiscite.54 Overlooking the fact that the results of the election were
influenced by the burning of the Reichstag and the consequent purging of the
Communist Party, Schmitt argued that it was not the Weimar Constitution but
the people who legitimated the new measures. He cited the principle enunciated by Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party: Alle Gewalt geht vom
Volke aus. All power comes from the people.55 But the Party was still the leading body. Hence, for Schmitt, the issue was not the relation of the state to the
people, which is how Heidegger saw it, but the relation of state, movement,
and people, where the state is the total state conceived qualitatively, not
quantitatively, where the movement was the Nazi Party conceived dynamically, and where the people was the German people considered in terms of a
homogeneity based on ethnic identity.
The new question that these events provoked was that of how the triadic
organization of political unity into state, movement, and party impacted the
traditional division of powers (Gewaltenunterscheidung) into the legislative,
the executive, and the judiciary. The division had been introduced within liberalism to allow the non-statal society to rule and effectively control the State
executive, that is, the reality of the State command, which it did through parliament as a representative body whose task was to protect the basic rights
and freedoms of society conceived of as composed of free private individuals.56
That is to say, on Schmitts account, liberalism is organized around a direct
confrontation between the state and private individuals and a belief in the
need to erect a whole edifice out of the protective legal means and institutions, in order to protect the helpless and defenceless, poor and isolated
53 Heidegger, Hallwachs (GA 86: 608). On Heideggers use of the terms Stamm and Sippe,
see Robert Bernasconi, Race and Earth in Heidegggers Thinking during the Late 1930s,
The Southern Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 1 (2010): 4966, esp. 5758 and 6364.
54 Schmitt, SBV, 7/ SMP, 5.
55 Rudolf Hess, Der Kongress des Sieges, in Reichstagung in Nrnberg 1933, ed. Julius
Streicher (Berlin: Verlag C.A. Weller, 1933), 32, cited at Schmitt, SBV, 9/ SMP, 7. As Schmitt
observed, this was almost identical to a formulation found in the first article of the Weimar
Constitution: Die Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus, Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs
vom 11. August 1919 (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, n.d.), 7.
56 Schmitt, SBV, 23/ SMP, 25.

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individual person from the powerful Leviathan, the State.57 Schmitt rejected
this account because it seemed to him that it did not accord with the facts:
the non-statal and apolitical sphere is occupied not by individuals but by
strong collective formations or organizations such as people, society, free
citizenry, productive proletariat, public opinion. They occupy the non-statal
and apolitical sphere of freedom, but they are not themselves apolitical and
so they represent a challenge to the state.58 This confusion was avoided insofar
as under the new arrangements state, movement, and people were brought
together in the Fhrer, and the old liberal division between the executive, the
legislative, and the judicial were thereby transcended.
Heidegger followed closely Schmitts attempt in State, Movement, People to
rethink the new unity of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial under
the Fhrer. A brief note under the title Legislative Power (Gesetzgebende
Gewalt) reads:
How today?
The possibilities of legislation.
Cf. Carl Schmitt, p. 10
They lie in governing as leadership.
Legislative and executiveno longer severed.59
This was not Heideggers own position but his step-by-step reconstruction of
Schmitts argument from State, Movement, Power, according to which the liberal severing of the executive from the legislative has been overcome through
the political leadership exercised by Adolf Hitler.60 Heidegger did not accept
Schmitts solution in part because he did not consider the terms state, movement, and people as metaphysically established in the way Schmitt used
them. Nevertheless, Heidegger agreed with Schmitt that only strong leadership could resolve the problems focused by the Weimar governments where
the executive and legislative powers had been at war with each other.
In 193334 Heidegger had embraced the idea of the Fhrer bringing the people into unity: Only where the leader and the led bind themselves together to
one fate and fight to actualize one idea does true order arise.61 In the notes for
57 Schmitt, SBV, 24/ SMP, 26.
58 Ibid.
59 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 72)/HPR, 110.
60 The reference is to Staat Bewegung Volk and not, as the editor of the volume suggests, to
Legalitt und Legitimitt. See Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 72)/HPR, 195n4.
61 Heidegger, NGS, 77/NHS, 49.

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his seminar, the following year Heidegger asked specifically what precedence
could mean in Schmitts claim that the precedence of political leadership
is the basic law within the new law of the state.62 Furthermore, he rejected
Schmitts idea that this leadership could arise in a self-grounding,63 in favor
of a grounding back into the people that is a grounding ahead into its historical sending (Sendung).64 Nevertheless, Heidegger continued to celebrate the
Fhrerprinzip, albeit in an abstract way, as if focusing on the principle rather
than the man occupying the office. He wrote about a Fhrer who is in thinking
king and lord, but in action a servant.65 He continued his idealized portrait as
follows: The leader thus not leader through his persuasive personality (liberal-aesthetic) or through cunning and violence (Gewaltttigkeit)rather on
the basis of ametaphysical correspondencewhich occurs groundingly
where the people attain to such a being (Sein) andthoroughly shape itas
state. This statement could be read as a criticism of Hitlers constant use of
violence to secure his leadership, but before jumping to that conclusion one
has to ask whether Heidegger followed Schmitt in refusing to see the use of
force by the state as violence.
V
The specific question that united Schmitt and Heidegger, beyond their shared
rejection of liberalism and failure to question the regime, was that of whether
what the Nazis were doing constitutionally and politically could be assimilated
to familiar modes of thought or whether their actions called for new ways of
thinking, or even, as Heidegger argued in the summer of 1934, a transformation of Dasein.66 It was this question that led them both to return to Hegel,
although Schmitt had already introduced Hegels doctrine of the division of
powers in an addition to the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political that
belonged to a part of the text that was dropped in the following year. There
Schmitt referenced a brief discussion by his friend Rudolf Smend, who had
suggested that Hegels discussion of the division of powers (Gewaltenteilung),
on Treschers interpretation of it, provided a valuable model that could be used
62 Schmitt, SBV, 9/SMP, 89.
63 Schmitt, SBV, 22/SMP, 23.
64 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 170)/HPR, 183.
65 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 169)/HPR, 182. The word king could be a reference to Heraclitus
.
66 Martin Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (GA 38: 57)/LCL, 50.

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to help to save Germany from the chaos of Weimar.67 The important point here
is that Smend had already in 1928 alerted Schmitt to the possibility of having
recourse to Hegel in justifying a wholesale rejection of the Weimar constitution. Smend had given the name integration theory to the approach that
he found reflected in Hegel, but Schmitt associated it with the relatively new
label of the total state. The meaning of the phrase total state is a great deal
more complex than is usually recognized. Not all Nazis embraced the idea.68
Schmitt himself accepted the idea in its minimal sense but rejected it in its
more common usage. Whether one should associate Hegel with the total state
and, more generally, what one should mean by the Hegelian state is in play
in trying to understand Schmitts famous proclamation that with Hitler Hegel
had died.69
Schmitts claim in State, Movement, People was that on 30 January 1933,
the day President Paul von Hindenburg swore in Adolf Hitler as Chancellor
67 Schmitt, BP, 13/CP, 25. Rudolf Smend relied on Hildegard Treschers account of Hegels
approach to the division of powers in Stephan Geidel, Montesquieus Einfluss auf
die philosophischen Grundlagen der Staatslehre Hegels (Inaugural-dissertation zur
Erlangung der Doktorwrde bei der hohen philosophischen Fakultt der Universitt
Leipzig, Altenburg, 1917), 98105. See Smend, Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht (Mnchen:
Duncker und Humblot, 1928), 9697. For a more recent interpretation, see Ludwig Siep,
Hegels Theorie der Gewalteinteilung, in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie in Zusammenhang
der europischen Verfassungsgeschichte (Stuttgart-Bad Constant: Frommann-Holzboog,
1986), 387420. Heidegger also referenced Montesquieu, but it seems unlikely he went
back to Trescher (GA 86: 71/HPR, 109).
68 In fact, the Nazi State may not have been a total state in the full sense (Ernst Fraenkel, The
Dual State, trans. E. A. Shils [New York: Oxford University Press, 1941]). Similarly Alfred
Rosenberg, in the 9 January 1934 issue of the Vlkischer Beobachter, rejected the model
of the total state as a way of thinking what the Nazis were attempting to create, because
he associated it with the absolutist state of 1871 and 1918 and because under the Nazis
the state had been reduced to an instrument of the National Socialist Weltanschauung
(Totaler Staat?, in Gestaltung der Idee, ed. Thilo von Trotha [Munich: Franz Eher,
1936], 21).
69 Schmitts hesitation before the idea of a total state is most clearly reflected in Die
Wendung zum totalen Staat, Europische Revue 7, no. 4 (April 1931): 24150, and in
Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staates in Deutschland, in Positionen und Begriffe im
Kampf mit WeimarGenfVersailles, 19231939 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlasanstalt,
1940), 18590. See also Schmitts discussion of a quantitatively total state in terms of its
areas of interventions, which is nevertheless fragmented and pluralist in terms of political
parties: Legalitt und Legitimitt (Mnchen: Duncker und Humblot, 1932), 9394,
translated by Jeffrey Seitzer as Legality and Legitimacy (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004), 9293.

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of Germany, Hegel died.70 The protocols for Heideggers seminar on Hegels

Philosophy of Right show that he responded to Schmitt by saying that Hegel had
not yet lived.71 On closer examination things are more complicated. Schmitt
specified that Hegels idea of a political leadership standing above the selfishness of societal interests and much else remained intact in the new form.72
It seems that when Schmitt said that Hegel died, he meant only that the forms
of the Hegelian state of civil servants that corresponded to the nineteenthcentury state were at an end. In other words, what had died was the liberaldemocratic state, and furthermore, this was necessary if the German State was
to find the strength to crush Marxism, its enemy.73 Heidegger contested this
reading of Hegel: If one takes Hegel in terms of the philosophy of the state as a
metaphysics of the bureaucratic state (the state is spiritbecause the officials
are learned and scientifically educated (gebildet)), then everything becomes
senselessthis is a mistaking of the essential motif of the Hegelian idea of the
state with the facts.74 In other words, Schmitt might well have been factually right that the bureaucratic state, with which Hegels name had come to be
associated, had lost its vitality but that was not what Hegel meant by the state,
which Heidegger was at pains to understand in terms of a richer conception
of spirit, spirit as knowing will. But this is not all Heidegger meant when he
declared that the announcement of Hegels death was premature. Heideggers
own notes for his seminar on Hegel explain: On 30.1.33 Hegel diedno! he
had not yet lived!there he has first come alivejust as even history comes
alive, i.e. dies.75 This enigmatic claim could be understood as an early form of
the idea that Hegels philosophy fulfills itself only in a completion that opens
up the possibility of what Heidegger would in 1935 begin to call another beginning. Hegel came into his own for Heidegger who at this time presented Hegel
as the completion (Vollendung) of philosophy.76 For Heidegger, a confrontation
with Hegel was a confrontation with the whole of Western philosophy and,
even more importantly, an opportunity to demonstrate what a metaphysical

70 Schmitt, SBV, 32/SMP, 35. On the interpretation of this sentence as a lament, see Gnther
Rohrmoser, Der Hegelsche Staat ist tot, in vol. 6 of Schmittiana (Berlin: Duncker &
Humboldt, 1998), 15152.
71 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 606).
72 Schmitt, SBV, 32/SMP, 35.
73 Schmitt, SBV, 3132/SMP, 3536.
74 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 85)/HPR, 120.
75 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 85)/HPR, 119.
76 Heidegger, Hallwachs (GA 86: 550 and 569), and Protokolle (GA 86: 644).

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examination of the state would look like, an observation clearly intended as

a contrast to Schmitts account that did not rise to the level of metaphysics.77
In any event, Schmitt and Heidegger could agree that what had died definitively was a misreading of Hegel. Schmitt still went to Hegel for help in addressing liberalisms dualism of a bureaucratic machine, on the one hand, and a free
civil society, on the other. Specifically, he turned to Hegels account of the corporations as the transition from civil society to the state.78 Even so, Heidegger
would criticize Schmitts reading of Hegel on this point, because Schmitt did
not think dialectically: Cf. how Hegel searches for something essential in the
corporationsnot simply here the individual and here the state, but rather
dialectically and that means here however the return into the originary
essence of both.79 Heideggers objection against Schmitt was thus that he too
was still far too external in his approach.80 Perhaps this was what he meant
when he complained that Schmitt thinks liberally.81
Schmitt was aware of the conceptual obstacles to thinking state, movement,
and people in such a way that each was distinguished from the others without
being severed (getrennt), linked but not fused.82 The requirement to do so came
out of an attempt to describe their interaction within the context of the new
regime: Three formations move side by side in their own order, meet in certain decisive points, particularly at the apex, have distinctly different contacts
and direct links with each other, which however are not allowed to cancel the
distinctions, and as a whole, effected by the carrying series, all shape the constitution of the political unity.83 This perhaps can be understood as Schmitts
attempt to formulate an alternative to Smends appeal to Hegels account of
the division of powers. Heideggers response seems to have been to argue that
Hegels conception provided the better model when thought with dialectical
rigor. Heidegger agreed with Schmitt that the three powerswhich he now
identified as the legislating, the administrating, and the judicialshould not
be seen as severed, as in liberalism, but Heidegger insisted that they were not
fused but sublated.84 We do not know if Heidegger was fully aware of Schmitts
nuanced position on the total state, but when he accused Schmitt of being far
77 Heidegger, Hallwachs (GA 86: 6078), and Protokolle (GA 86: 644).
78 Schmitt, SBV, 28/SMP, 31.
79 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 73)/HPR, 111.
80 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 74)/HPR, 111.
81 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 174)/HPR, 186.
82 Schmitt, SBV, 21 and 32/SMP, 22 and 36.
83 Schmitt, SBV, 12/SMP, 11.
84 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 71 and 73)/HPR, 109 and 111.

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too extrinsic and then went on to criticize those who thought of the total state
in terms of the addition of forces, rather than starting from the whole, such
that the parts could be said to partition themselves from the totality, he again
probably had Schmitt in mind.85
VI
We have seen how Heidegger rejected the idea of a Fhrer who led through
cunning and violence, but he also seems to have supported Hegel in his belief
that conflict (Widerstreit) is necessary for the sublation that releases the strictures that advance the individual to true freedom and selfhood.86 There is
further evidence that he, like Schmitt, was willing to turn a blind eye to the violence of the regime on philosophical grounds. In his reading of the Philosophy
of Right, Heidegger encountered Hegels rejection of the liberal conception
of violence in terms that echoed the similar rejection of violence by Schmitt
in The Concept of the Political. Commenting presumably on paragraph 219 of
Hegels Philosophy of Right where Hegel rejected the crude view according
to which the administration of justice represents an improper use of violence (Gewaltttigkeit), a suppression of freedom, and a rule of despotism,87
Heidegger wrote: Force [Gewalt]in the misinterpretation of violence
(Gewaltttigkeit) namely as unjustified interventionimpairment of personal freedom, of private property and its interests of free competition.88 He
understood very well Hegels rejection of liberalisms tendency to see whatever
interferes with the individuals wish to be aloneeven if it takes the form of
wild impulse, licentiousness, or addictionas violence against the individual, whereas these misuses of the will in fact run counter to the higher will.
Heidegger commented that the peoples licentiousness together with their
indolence can be overcome only if mastery (Herrrschaft) over them is asserted
and orders of rank imposed.89 This interpretation of Hegel was presented
in terms that very clearly recall Schmitts attack on the liberal conception of
violence. He wrote: And since this is the good (liberal), that is the evil and
despicable, becausein accordance with the individuated wish to be alone,

85 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 7374)/HPR, 11112.

86 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 131)/HPR, 154. See also HR (GA 86: 120)/HPR p. 146.
87 Hegel, (GW 14.1: 183)/EPR, 252 (trans. modified).
88 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 72)/HPR, 110.
89 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 73)/HPR, 11011.

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through this a counter will against every higher will occurswhich thus necessarily appears as violence.
It is important to understand the context in which Heidegger held his
seminar on Hegel. The situation had changed a great deal between the time
Schmitt wrote State, Movement, People and the beginning of Heideggers seminar on Hegel, which had its first meeting on 7 November 1934. Heidegger had
resigned as Rector of Freiburg University on 1 April 1934, but this did not stop
him from joining with Schmitt, among others, in signing a letter supporting
the proposal, put to a plebiscite on 19 August 1934, to bring together the office
of Chancellor and that of President, which had been held by Field Marshall
Paul von Hindenburg until his death.90 Even more telling, the so-called Night
of the Long Knives had taken place, which began on 30 June 1934, when the
SS crushed the SA, assassinating its leader and Hitlers Deputy, Ernst Rhm,
among many others.91 Karl Jaspers, when assessing Heideggers involvement
with National Socialism, argued that any change of heart that might have
placed him in the anti-Nazi camp meant little unless it occurred immediately
and decisively after the events that day.92 The evidence of the seminar is that
it did not.
Even in the face of the Night of the Long Knives, Schmitt continued with
his attempt to make the violence associated with Hitlers attempts to maintain power appear legitimate and thus disappear as violence. In The Fhrer
Protects the Law [Recht], an essay that included a long defense of Hitlers
actions during the Night of the Long Knives on the grounds that in moments
of danger he was the highest leader (oberster Gerichtsherr), Schmitt quoted
extensively from his own account in State, Movement, People, in the context
of his own insistence that the Party and the Fhrer were not governed by the
collective responsibility article of the Weimar Constitution.93 He repeated
the argument that This mighty (gewaltige) task, in which is concentrated the
90 The letter is reprinted in Victor Farias, Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt:
S. Fischer 1989), 26162, translated by Paul Burrell as Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1989), 19192. It is worth noting that Nicolai Hartmann, who is
sometimes praised for not having compromised himself, was also a signatory.
91 Paul R. Maracin, The Night of the Long Knives (Guilford: Lyons Press, 2004), 114.
92 Karl Jaspers, Letter to Friedrich Oehlkers, 22 December 1945, in Hugo Ott, Martin
Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), 317; translated by
Allan Blunden as Martin Heidegger. A Political Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 340.
93 Carl Schmitt, Der Fhrer schtzt das Recht, in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit
WeimarGenfVersailles, 200; translated by Timothy Nunan as The Fhrer Protects
the Law, in The Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 66.

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entire danger of the political cannot be taken away from the party or the SA
by any other institution least of all by a juridically proceeding civilian court.
Here the task stands by itself.94 That is to say, Schmitt had already, in State,
Movement, People, drawn the clear conclusion that the Party was not subject to
the state, with the clear consequence that the state no longer had a monopoly
on legitimate violence, a conclusion that some have argued could already be
drawn from the claim that the concept of the state presupposed the concept of
the political.95 It is quite possible that Heidegger did not know Schmitts text
published in Deutsche-Juristen Zeitung on 1 August 1934, but he should have
been able to see the implications of the argument that Schmitt had used in
State, Movement, Power, and one of his notes suggests that he possibly did so.
Addressing the topic of the powers [Gewalten] in the national-socialist state
and leadership and asking the question of what it meant to talk about the
distribution of the legitimate authority of the government, Heidegger wrote,
Responsibility precisely the reversenow there is gathered and originally
preservedin leadership; not used up.96
Was this Heideggers own view at this time? Or was he just paraphrasing
Schmitt? There are indications that it was Heideggers view. According to the
seminar protocol, Heidegger embraced obedience to the state when conducted within the necessary limits of our German essence. Each defection
[Abfall] from the essence of the people is a betrayal of the constitution and
of the state even if this is not graspable juridically.97 He continued by making
the argument that where the constitution of the state no longer functioned
as the ethical bond in the life of the individual, state and people are exposed to
decline and consigned to history.98 For all their disagreement on other matters
including how the balance of powers was to be thought, on this central question about violence it seems most likely that they agreed.
Subsequently the tenor of Heideggers reflections on Gewalt would change.
His question about the origin of forceWoher die Gewalt selbst?99was
pursued in Introduction to Metaphysics, and texts from the late 1930s attempted

94 Schmitt, SBV, 22/SMP, 22, quoted in Der Fhrer schtzt das Recht, 200/The Fhrer
Protects the Law, 66.
95 Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy. An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso,
2000), 186.
96 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 171)/HPR, 183.
97 Heidegger, Protokolle (GA 86: 640).
98 Heidegger, Protokolle (GA 86: 641).
99 Heidegger, HR (GA 86: 71)/HPR, 109.

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to transform the way in which the term Gewalt is heard.100 But the evidence
that I have presented here suggests that Heideggers conception of violence
in the crucial period from 1933 to early 1935 is the same as that to be found in
Schmitt. It was a rejection of the liberal conception of violence, and it served to
conceal the violence of the Nazis. In the context of 1933 in Nazi Germany, how
one understood violence determined who was liberal and who was genuinely
Nazi, and in that context Schmitt and Heidegger employed Hegel in support
of the Nazis.
Abbreviations

EPR

Works by G. W. F. Hegel
Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
GW 14.1
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Vol. 14.1 of Gesammelte
Werke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2009.

BAT

Works by Martin Heidegger

Being and Truth. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
GA 36/37
Sein und Wahrheit. Edited by Hartmut Tietjen. Vol. 36/37 of
Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2001.
GA 38
Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache. Edited by Gnter
Seubold. Vol. 38 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann,
1998.
GA 69
Die Geschichte des Seyns. Edited by Peter Trawny. Vol. 69 of
Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1998.
GA 86
Seminare Hegel-Schelling. Vol. 86 of Gesamtausgabe. Edited by
Peter Trawny. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2011.
Hallwachs Mitschrift Wilhelm Hallwachs. In GA 86: 54961.
HPR
On Hegels Philosophy of Right. Edited by Peter Trawny, Marcia
S Cavalcante Schuback, and Michael Marder. Translated by
Andrew J. Mitchell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

100 For example, Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, vol. 69 of Gesamtausgabe, 8. See
Krzysztof Ziarek, The Nonviolent Enjunction of Being: Heidegger on Ge-walt, The New
Centennial Review 14, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 6578.

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LCL
NGS
NHS
Protokolle

BP
CP
SBV
SMP

Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language.

Translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna. Albany:
SUNY Press, 2009.
ber Wesen und Begriff von Nature, Geschichte und Staat. In
Heidegger Jahrbuch 4, Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus I:
Documente. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2009.
Nature, History, State. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard
Polt. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie WS 34/35 Protokolle. In GA 86: 61355.

Works by Carl Schmitt

Der Begriff des Politischen. Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1932.
The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlag, 1935.
State, Movement, People. Translated by Simona Draghici. Corvallis,
OK: Plutarch Press, 2001.

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