Friends, Enemies, Partisans: Schmitt and Kojève, the Cold War and the End of History

While as early as the second edition of The Concept of the Political (1932), Carl Schmitt had speculated on how the depoliticization of the political may reduce the international state system to a world of "entertainment." It has been little remarked upon that Schmitt was in direct correspondence with Alexandre Kojève in the mid-1950s. This is unfortunate considering that not only are many of the ideas and issues they discussed novel in Schmitt's oeuvre, but they would become pronounced in several articles and lectures leading up to and finding fulfillment in his much-neglected work, Theory of the Partisan (1963). This essay will throw light on this insufficiently noticed strand in Schmitt's later thought, namely, the implications of Kojève's Hegelian thesis that history was at an end and that they were now living in a stage of post-history. For Schmitt, the optimism generated by this idea had not only contributed to the Cold War being an "intermediate condition between war and peace," but to the rise of partisan warfare as a central component of geopolitics. While both agreed that the state had come to an end, they disagreed profoundly on what that end entailed. Where Kojève saw Hegel's Phenomenology as ushering in the end of history and an ensuing "universal and homogenous state," Schmitt saw instead the concrete and historical-philosophical creation of the partisan, whose very existence is to challenge, and more importantly reject, such a state. This will be shown through their diverging conceptualizations of the state, the political, and history, as well as their opposed understandings of the philosophical-anthropological question of human being.