Duncan Kelly

Bio: Duncan Kelly is an academic researcher from University of Cambridge. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Intellectual history. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 31 publications receiving 265 citations. Previous affiliations of Duncan Kelly include University of Sheffield.

Carl Schmitt's Political Theory of Representation

Abstract: I. Political Representation"Representation means the making present of something that is nevertheless not literally present."1 This definition, provided by Hanna Pitkin in her celebrated book on the subject, contrasts strongly with most modern discussions of political representation which regularly delimit their focus to technical questions of election and accountability.2 Even theorists who see in representative government the classical virtues of a necessarily "chastened" (public) authority rely on impoverished notions of political representation in the sense of the definition outlined above.3 As Pitkin herself suggested, political representation explores the way in which "the people (or a constituency) are present in governmental action, even though they do not literally act for themselves."4 This paper examines Carl Schmitt's "solution" to this quandary of political representation, which suggests that representation can bring about the political unity of the state, but only if the state itself is properly "represented" by the figure or person of the sovereign.5In assessing and explaining the centrality of representation to Schmitt's political thought-an area often excluded from discussion6-I focus upon his attempted reconciliation of a starkly "personalist" and then Hobbesian account of representation that would justify support for the Reichsprasident under the Weimar Republic, with insights drawn from the constitutional republicanism of the Abbe Sieyes that placed the constituent power of the people at the basis of representative democracy. The argument develops and modifies Bockenforde 's hypothesis, that Schmitt's well-known concept of the political-first presented in a lecture of 1927-provides the "key" to understanding his more substantial constitutional theory, Verfassungslehre, published the following year.7 Instead, Schmitt's concept of representation provides the key with which to understand his densely structured constitutional argumentation.8 Therefore, after outlining the early theological and personalist roots of Schmitt's account of representation in order to show his long-standing concern with the issue, the central arguments of Sieyes and Hobbes concerning representation are next outlined, and their impact on Schmitt's political and constitutional theory discussed.9 Such a structure places in sharp relief the political implications of his ideological appropriation of the language of modern representative democracy in order to justify support for the presidential leader.II. Capitalism, Rationality, and Representation: The Figure of the RepresentativeIn his 1923 essay "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," Schmitt claimed that the technical-economic rationality of modern capitalism and its dominant political expression, liberalism, stood at odds with the truly political power of the Catholic Church.10 Schmitt was concerned to illuminate the particularly "representative" character of the Catholic Church as a complexio oppositorum, in contradistinction to its typical appearance as the unworldly "other" to an ascetic and industrious Protestantism, so as to counter the "anti-Roman temper that has nourished the struggle against popery, Jesuitism and clericalism with a host of religious and political forces, that has impelled European history for centuries."11Even the "parliamentary and democratic nineteenth century" was an era where Catholicism was defined as "nothing more than a limitless opportunism." It was Schmitt's contention, however, that this missed the fundamental point of such a complex of opposites, which was that the "formal character of Roman Catholicism is based on the strict realisation of the principle of representation. In its particularity this becomes most clear in its antithesis to the economictechnical thinking dominant today."12 Schmitt contended that something peculiar to Catholic representation allowed it to "make present" the true essence of something by "representing" it. …

The Strategic-Relational View of the State:

Abstract: This paper seeks to highlight the main elements of the ‘strategic-relational’ approach to (Marxist) state theory, developed particularly by Bob Jessop. The legacy of Nicos Poulantzas in particular is singled out for its importance in laying the foundations for such an approach. This is followed by a discussion of Jessop and his development of many ideas bequeathed by Poulantzas, culminating in various moves toward a strategic-relational analysis. These moves are then critically assessed, with some wider thoughts on the approach offered in conclusion

The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann

Abstract: The State of the Political offers a broad-ranging re-interpretation of the understanding of politics and the state in the writings of three major German thinkers, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. It rejects the typical separation of these writers on the basis of their allegedly incompatible ideological positions, and suggests instead that once properly located in their historical context, the tendentious character of these interpretative boundaries becomes clear. The book interprets the conceptions of politics and the state in the writings of these three thinkers by means of an investigation of their adaptation and modification of particular German traditions of thinking about the state, or Staatsrechtslehre. Indeed, when the theoretical considerations of this state-legal theory are combined with their contemporary political criticism, a richer and more deeply textured account of the issues that engaged the attention of Weber, Schmitt and Neumann is possible. Thus, the broad range of subjects discussed in this book include parliamentarism and democracy in Germany, academic freedom and political economy, political representation, cultural criticism and patriotism, and the relationship between rationality, law, sovereignty and the constitution. The State of the Political is based on extensive consideration of primary and secondary materials, and is held together by a general focus on the importance to these authors of distilling an adequate account of the state and the political - largely because this could bolster their subsequent criticisms of contemporary politics. The study attempts to restore a sense of proportion to discussion of their writings, focusing on the extensive ideas that they shared rather than insisting on their necessary ideological separation. It is a detailed re-appraisal of a crucial moment in modern intellectual history, and highlights the profound importance of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann for the history of European ideas.

Revisiting the Rights of Man: Georg Jellinek on Rights and the State

Abstract: A century has passed since the publication in Germany of a now famous essay on the rights of man by the Heidelberg professor of public law, Georg Jellinek. Over the course of that century, although a “rights revolution” has undoubtedly taken place, numerous practical problems remain in trying to enforce the basic proposition that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Such problems have led one recent commentator to suggest that perhaps the only meaningful defense of human rights is one based on “moral reciprocity” and secular humanism because any attempts to prioritize human rights on either religious grounds, for example, or that of intrinsic human value, are doomed to failure.

Social limits to growth

Abstract: One in a while, every twenty years perhaps, a book appears that makes one see a whole area of human experience in a new light. Once pointed out, the new insights are sp obvious that one cannot understand how one could have missed them before. In the broad area of the political economy of western society, J.A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was one such book. So, with all its faults, was J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1957). Fred Hirsch's Social Limits to Growth (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977) is another.

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957

Abstract: Who thought of Europe as a community before its economic integration in 1957? Dina Gusejnova illustrates how a supranational European mentality was forged from depleted imperial identities. In the revolutions of 1917 to 1920, the power of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanoff dynasties over their subjects expired. Even though Germany lost its credit as a world power twice in that century, in the global cultural memory, the old Germanic families remained associated with the idea of Europe in areas reaching from Mexico to the Baltic region and India. Gusejnova's book sheds light on a group of German-speaking intellectuals of aristocratic origin who became pioneers of Europe's future regeneration. In the minds of transnational elites, the continent's future horizons retained the contours of phantom empires.

Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India

Abstract: Whilst greatly valuing recent critiques of the vertical imaginary and reified ontology of scale theory, and of the unfettered flows of network theory, this paper argues against a human geography without scale. Rather, four propositions from the theoretical literature are used to provide a tool-kit to analyse the practical negotiation of scalar politics, namely that: scales should be considered as effects, not frames or structures, of practice; networks must be considered in all their complexity and heterogeneity; networks can be interpreted as assemblages, the more re-territorialising and re-scaling of which can be analysed as apparatuses; and that state apparatuses work to create the impression that scales are ahistorical, hierarchical and possess exclusive relationships. These propositions are used to explore a period of history when the scalar constitution of the world was under intense debate. The interwar era saw the imperial scale clash with that of the international, both as ideological worldviews, and as a series of interacting institutions. The assemblages of internationalism and imperialism were embodied by apparatuses such as the League of Nations and the colonial Government of India respectively. Attempts by the League to encourage the abolition of tolerated brothels in an attempt to reduce the trafficking of women and children led to intense debates between the 1920s and 1930s over what constituted the legitimate domains of the international and the ‘domestic’. These explicitly scalar debates were the product of League networks that threatened the scalar sovereignty of the Raj, most directly through the travelling Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East in 1931.

Reconstituting sovereignty: the Young Turks’ efforts to secure external recognition and the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, 1908 - 1923

Abstract: This thesis addresses the question of how states, meaning organised political communities, were historically able to secure their sovereignty through gaining the recognition of other states. As sovereignty refers to the presence of a state’s authority, its existence is premised on states and other internal and external actors recognising claims to sovereignty. Therefore, states, such as the Ottoman Empire, which historically had a different understanding of legitimacy, faced challenges to their sovereignty following the emergence of new global understandings of sovereignty in the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman Empire was distinct in that it was the only Islamic state that was not subject to and was able to avoid completely falling under the influence of then-dominant European states. However, the Ottoman Empire still experienced European intervention and there was a desire to end forms of European extraterritorial jurisdiction. Ottoman elites, who were affiliated with the reformist Young Turks, sought to secure recognition of their state’s sovereignty by reconstituting it along novel international standards of legitimate statehood. These standards were based on the concepts of “civilised”, “militarist”, “popular” and “national” statehood, and were reinterpreted by the Young Turks in the course of their efforts to secure the recognition of European powers. These efforts included diplomacy with European powers, institutional reform and conceptual innovation. However, it also involved engaging in practices associated with sovereignty such as the control of territory. In all of these areas, the Young Turks reinterpreted aspects of the existing Ottoman legacy of statehood and international norms, to secure their claim to sovereignty. Therefore, the Ottoman state elites sought to convey an impression of governing a state that could be recognised as sovereign by other European powers. Ultimately, the remnants of the Young Turks, secured international recognition of their state, reconstituted as the nation-state of Turkey in 1923.