Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T13:46:06.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The Racial Sovereign

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2010

Austin Sarat
Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

A dominant theme in post-9/11 scholarship on national security law has been the somber elaboration of necessary and rational trade-offs, or balancings, brought about by the urgently reconstituting relationship between sovereign emergency reality and civil liberty aspiration. This discourse has been critiqued as “Schmittean” for its decisionistic effects, but the core of liberal legal thinking of the period actually remains in tension with “proto-realist” writers like Carl Schmitt, who famously framed sovereignty through the notion of the exception, that is, a politico-legal dynamic that takes hold during times of emergency and calls forth sovereign suspensions of law. Schmitt thought that liberal rule of law could not stand in the way of an effective sovereign and that entertaining such a fantasy could create instability in the underlying political order itself. Paradigmatic Schmittean “decisions on the exception” by sovereign holders of state power were thought to reveal a fundamental myth and potentially fatal fl aw of liberal democratic constitutionalism. This perspective would, in fact, subject many forms of post-9/11 liberal legal balancing discourse to a kind of realist razor that looks to effective power and constraint for its insights. Or, it could push us to look more deeply at the relationship between such liberal rule of law “decisionism” and underlying questions of political economy and social order “stability.”

Schmittean realism describes and endorses the order-seeking world of early twentieth-century inter-imperial rivalry, but its rejection of liberal “ultrapolitics” and faux universalism as well underlines for critical scholars the socially infl ected, identity/ideology-driven basis of the liberal imperialist security state.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×