Rousseau and Carl Schmitt. Intellectual and elective affinities in the substantive foundations of politics

Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate how both Rousseau and Schmitt elaborated a common material concept of politics within their democracy and popular sovereignty doctrines. First, it focuses on proving how they both developed a common anti-formalist reaction in response to the liberal ideology and the political forms that were contemporary to them. In order to do so, the preference for a methodological approach attentive to contextual semantics and the history of concepts is justified. Thus, while Rousseau focuses on the critique of methodological individualism, Schmitt contests liberal attempts to conceal the political as the core of politics. Next, we will analyse how both thinkers advocated a reconstruction of political structures in accordance to a substantive democratic criterion, where Schmittian reception of Rousseau needs to complement the contextual orientation with a textualist approach. Accordingly, Rousseau would propose a restoration of sovereign authority based on collective moral regeneration. For his part, Schmitt would advocate a sovereign and material intervention of political power in a new scenario of mass democracy.