Democracy, freedom and social order: on authoritarian liberalism

The term authoritarian liberalism was coined by Hermann Heller to describe Carl Schmitt’s commitment to a dictatorial state in 1932. Schmitt saw the politicisation of the state as a prerequisite for a free economy and depoliticised social relations. The founding thinkers of neoliberalism argued similarly. In particular Hayek’s version of authoritarian liberalism is a mirror image of Schmitt’s own work – with the difference that Hayek advocated authoritarianism as a means of securing a depoliticised order of free economy rather than as an end in itself in the form of the decisionist authority of the state in the case of Schmitt. Beyond the contemporary political analysis that contrasts neoliberal authoritarianism with a supposedly democratically constituted capitalism of the past, the article links authoritarianism with bourgeois freedom. Its theme is authoritarianism as a prerequisite for liberty and its central thesis that social order is disorder in the mode of being denied. The state is the concentrated power of social order in bourgeois society and the organised force of its freedom.