Kelsen für Anarchisten, Schmitt für Sozialdemokraten

The first part of the article deals with Daniel Loick’s critique of sovereignty. Loick claims to abolish the remainder of this principle (i.e. Habermas, Kelsen) and tries to positively adopt the Kantian objection to anarchy as “law and freedom without power”: beyond state authority, law without pressure would fulfil itself as an agreement, serving to align collective actions and social cooperation. Loick takes law for ‘morality’, originating not from the individual but the collective. He thereby refers to intellectual traditions of Judaism (Cohen, Rosenzweig), but remains wholly oblivious to the anti-Semitism of the society in which Jews live. This abstraction takes its toll when he attempts to universalize the question of law in Judaism – and thus offers a complementary image to the theory of sovereignty conceptualized by Chantal Mouffe. In her uncritical adaptation of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger Mouffe pursues an ontologization of the political. Her new manifesto for left-wing theory seeks to refute the cosmopolitan illusions of modern Western politics. Mouffe, too, glorifies “collective identities”, but she extends the “friend/enemy” or the “we/they” distinction to a crucial point. Adopting the geopolitical consequences of Schmitt’s “Großraumtheorie” from the early 1940s, her ontologization leads to a critique of liberalism altogether, particularly of the hegemony of the United States. Neither Mouffe nor Loick are interested in a critical concept of law (Eugen Paschukanis, Franz Neumann). Although both Mouffe and Loick refer to Marx, they fail to understand that law does not only express a particular class interest but a false universality, according to Marx’s concept of the value-form.