Carl Schmitt needs no presentation. Yet, few people knew that this
German political and law theoretician, famous for his theorisation of
the friend-enemy distinction, had a correspondence with Julius Evola
from 1951 to 1963, until it was published by Fondazione Julius Evola
in 2000. This correspondence, which was found in the archives of the
Düsseldorff Land, comprises seven letters from Evola to Schmitt, but
doesn't contain any of Schmitt's answers to Evola, which were lost
and of which the former didn't keep a copy ; yet, it is possible to
reconstruct their content from Evola's answers.
It contains elements of great importance which allow, not only to
piece together biographic and bibliographic episodes, but also to go
deeper into the knowledge of the relations which existed between the
main representatives of the cultural tradition of 'Conservative
revolution'. As matter of fact, reference is made to some of their
common friends and acquaintances, such as Armin Mohler, Ernst Jünger,
and Prince von Rohan, with whom Evola got acquainted before world war
II.
It concerns essentially two editorial projects : the first was to
publish in Italian an essay of Schmitt on Donoso Cortès ; the second,
to publish, still in Italian, an anthology of writings of Schmitt.
None of them were achieved, at least not in Evola's lifetime. In any
case, they were both part of an attempt to give strong ideological
and cultural points of reference to the conservative circles which,
after world war II, decided to wage a political battle. Like many
authors before them, both Schmitt and Evola noticed that the modern
democratic state is characterised by its lack of transcendence,
unlike the ancient social order social. They could not accept the
dissolution of political unity into parliamentarism and permanent
deliberation, represented in Germany by the Republic of Weimar. They
were particularly hostile to political liberalism insofar as it aims
at subjecting politics to moralist, individualist and economical
imperatives.
These points of agreements can be felt, as well as a certain feeling
of belonging to a common front, in their correspondence. They could
already be felt in the three critical essays written by Evola on
Schmitt's work before world war II : 'La guerra totale', 'Modernità
di Hobbes?', and 'Per un vero "diritto europeo"'. Therefore, Jerónimo
Molina is wrong in stating that "Evola was only interested in
Schmitt as an authorised reader of Donoso Cortès" (
http://galeon.hispavista.com/razonespanola/r111-fre.htm ). As to what
Schmitt thought of Evola, in a letter to Ernst Jünger, he called him
a "quite odd" ("merkwurdiger") Italian. His interest in the modern
Western esoteric phenomenon, which was noted by A. Versluis (
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVII/Schmitt.htm ), is confirmed by
a letter in which Evola clarified on his request the initiatory
saying "l'initié tue l´initiateur".
It is worth quoting an excerpt of Verluis' study of Schmitt's views
on that phenomenon : "Schmitt's treatise on Hobbesian state theory is
also an occasion for Schmitt's diagnosis of modernity as socio-
political decline, and in this decline, (in Schmitt's view), esoteric
currents played a part. Hence he references the seminal twentieth-
century French esoterist René Guénon's La Crise du monde moderne
(1927), and specifically Guénon's observation that the collapse of
medieval civilization into early modernity by the seventeenth century
could not have happened without hidden forces operating in the
background.
"Both Schmitt and Guénon came from a Catholic background and
perspective-and Guénon's broader thesis was that the advent of early
modernity represented one stage in a much larger tableau of decline
in which modernity (representing the kali yuga or final age) would
conclude in the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the
world. In this Guénonian tableau of decline, the emergence of
individualistic Protestantism represented an important step downward
from the earlier corporate unity of Catholicism, and a similar
perspective inheres in Schmitt's work, no doubt why he alludes to
Guénon in the first place. Hence, in the important Chapter V of
Leviathan, Schmitt refers to the "separation of inner from outer and
public from private" that emerged during the early modern period, and
in particular to "secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians,
freemasons, illuminates, mystics and pietists, all kinds of
sectarians, the many "silent ones in the land," and above all, the
restless spirit of the Jew who knew how to exploit the situation best
until the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition
was turned upside down."
At this point, we can see Schmitt's perspective is implicitly
critical of the subjectification and inward or contemplative turn
characteristic of those who travel "the secret road" "that leads
inward." He opposes the split between private spiritual life and
public life, which Schmitt associates with Judaism as well as with
Protestantism and the profusion of esoteric groups during this period-
and by implication, affirms a unified, corporate inner and outer life
that is characteristic of Catholicism. Schmitt remarks that "as
differently constituted as were the Masonic lodges, conventicles,
synagogues, and literary circles, as far as their political attitudes
were concerned, they all displayed by the eighteenth century their
enmity toward the leviathan elevated to a symbol of state." He sees
Protestantism and the variety of esoteric groups or currents during
the early modern period as symptomatic-like Guénon, he sees the
emergence of modernity as a narrative of cultural disintegration."
To Schmitt as to Evola, the Jews play a great part in that cultural
disintegration.