C. Schmitt and F. Hayek on democracy: Elective affinities?

The present paper aims at highlighting Schmitt’s and Hayek’s converging interpretations of the concept of parliamentary democracy. Identifying Hayek’s neoliberal thinking with Schmitt’s theoretical justification of fascism would apparently be an a-historical overgeneralization. While Schmitt develops a model of absolute sovereignty relying on the sovereign’s decision on the state of exception, Hayek envisages the historical realization of those conditions allowing the market competition to flourish. Schmitt’s model subjugates market to an omnipotent state whereas Hayek conceives of the latter as an engine abetting the free market competition. A closer reading however, would discern affinities behind the seemingly opposed models of the two thinkers. Both degrade democracy to a mere form devoid of content, and a technical procedure of the representatives’ election via the majority principle. The preponderance Hayek attributes to the a priori and non-negotiable rules of a constitution assigned with the task of securing the unhindered reproduction of market competition nullifies in fact the division of powers by weakening the legislature and reinforcing government. I will try to argue that Hayek’s forceful rejection of any form of state intervention in the economy and society, which, for him, is the hallmark both of fascism and socialism, results in its very opposite: Supporting the idea of the state as the guarantee of an unadulterated market competition, Hayek ironically abrogates his thesis on “non-intervention” in its own name. Paradoxically enough, the state itself incessantly mediates to ward off any possible intervention which takes the form of the social welfare state. If C. Schmitt’s sovereignty model is therefore, grounded upon a decisionism which gives flesh and blood to a visible and omnipotent Leviathan, F. Hayek’s constitutionalization of the neoliberal principle of world market competition establishes the power of an “invisible” Leviathan, i.e., the global financial markets, which feed off the maximization of their profits, and as the pre-modern sovereign, may decide over the life and death of over-indebted and “superfluous” populations.