Schmitt treats unity and identity as given, not politically constructed.
Evidence
What leads Schmitt to formulate such a dilemma is the way he envisages political unity. The unity of the state must, for him, be a concrete unity, already given and therefore stable. This is also true of the way he envisages the identity of the people: it also must exist as a given. Because of that, his distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not really politically constructed; it is merely a recognition of already-existing borders. While he rejects the pluralist conception, Schmitt is nevenheless unable to situate himself on a completely different terrain because he retains a view of political and social identities as empirically given. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 246
Categorization
- XREF: This critique of Schmitt’s given-identity assumption connects directly to identity-construction theory in broader political theory; the reader is testing whether a constructed rather than given ‘we’ can be non-exclusionary pluralist. — connects to: Identity is a positional political choice, not an ascribed primordial given; Identity is a political claim to belonging, not a fixed trait — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2696; Political unity is constructed, not natural, and must overcome inherent faction — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 146 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Political unity is constructed, not natural, and must overcome inherent faction
#contradicts(0.90) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 146 - The people is constituted politically, not given sociologically.
#contradicts(0.90) — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 443 - Identity is a positional political choice, not an ascribed primordial given
#contradicts(0.88) - Power constitutes identities rather than acting between pre-formed ones.
#contradicts(0.87) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 97 - Identity is a political claim to belonging, not a fixed trait
#contradicts(0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2696 - The subject’s unity is an effect of social configuration, not a premise
#contradicts(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 333 - Identity is transformed by political action, not a precondition of it
#contradicts(0.83) - Political identity is learned, not an innate hidden self
#contradicts(0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 241 - Identity is constituted through representation, not expressed from lived experience.
#contradicts(0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 291