Extending the Distinctions

because Schmitt wasn't the last word

It was only three years ago that I was introduced to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his “distinctions.”

Mainly, of course, in his book The Concept of the Political, he defines the political distinction, between friend and enemy. And that was what the book was about, to understand politics as the fight against the enemy and the cultivating of political supporters with handouts.

But if we list the full list of Schmittian distinctions they look like this:

Politics: friend vs. enemy
Morality: good vs. evil
Aesthetic: beautiful vs. ugly
Economic: useful vs. harmful

Now politics is clearly about the state and its power. Whatabout morality? Is that all about religion, or about the women in the community judging the behavior and character of other women? And the aesthetic: you know I am inclined to think that the beautiful is about sex. A beautiful person is one ready, willing, and able to produce good healthy children. That is the point of a beautiful woman: she encapsulates the promise of a new generation of healthy children. Economic? It comes from the Greek. Google AI says:

The primary Greek word for “economic” is οἰκονομία (oikonomia), derived from oikos (house/household) and nomos (management/law/rule), literally meaning “household management” or “rules of the house”.

Of course, when we extend the notion of household management to the whole universe of the market economy we are clearly not in Kansas any more. But does “useful vs. harmful” or Schmitt’s other distinction “profitable vs. unprofitable” really tell us what should be going on in the economy?

Anyway, I keep looking out for other distinctions to think about what they mean for humans and for human society.

Here are three that just popped up in a book about Jürgen Habermas:

true and untrue
real and unreal

They are distinctions that apply in the “lfeworld” of Husserl where people don’t have the power to crush other people and therefore have to be content with conversation and agreement. So let’s set up some lifeworld distinctions:

Lifeworld: true vs. untrue
Lifeworld: real vs. unreal
Lifeworld: agree vs. disagree

Whatabout some more:

Law: just vs. unjust
Law: guilty vs. not guilty

And then I think we must insert the favorite distinction of our lefty and wokey friends.

Oppression: oppressed vs. oppressor

Now, you may say that the oppression distinction belongs in the political distinction, but I think that it needs to be thought of separately, because the oppression distinction tends to moralize politics: obviously the oppressors are bad and the oppressed are good. Of course, any sensible person understands that the real oppressors are wokey liberal NGO stalwarts, and the real oppressed are the ordinary middle class that actually have to get a job to put food on the table, unlike the underclass that gets it all for free.

As I think about all this I come to believe that we need more economic distinctions. When you think about how the economy looms over all our lives, it seems to me that we need more distinctions to make sense of it all. Like:

growth vs, decline
boom vs. bust
startup vs. establishment
entrepreneur vs. monopolist
unregulated vs. regulated
debt vs. equity
subsidized vs. penalized
employees vs. employers

And many, many more.

My point is that intellectual experts have reduced the economic to simplistic distinctions like workers vs. capitalists, and today workers vs. corporations to fit their political ambitions. But in fact the economic world today is a whole universe of immense complexity. And the way to start understanding it is with a larger set of measuring sticks than a simple distinction that looks suspiciously like the political distinction of friend vs. enemy.