Sphere of I - Essay Example

Schmitt applied his radical viewpoint to the sphere of established democratic politics of the Weimar Republic. In the ‘Parliamentary Democracy Crisis’ Schmitt appreciates democracy as the system of self-rule by people (Kalyvas 223). In a democratic organization, the decisions made by leaders express the people’s will. Nevertheless, taken in the abstract, the notion of democracy is open to opposing and diverse interpretations. In political settings, the character of the ruling will with the people’s will is never simple.

Instead, it is always the outcome of a practice of identification (Negretto and Jose 1797). Whenever political decisions are undertaken through majority ballot, the majority’s will is identified with the people’s will, and every citizen is obliged to obey regardless of if he voted with the mainstream or not. However, Schmitt’s question is the foundation of this identification. Schmitt asks, “What would happen if democratic revolutionaries pursue the establishment of democracy in a society where many people oppose principles of democracy?

” In such a case, the people would not be warranted, from a democratic angle, to leave majority rule and to identify their own will with the people’s true will. Schmitt recommends that this kind of a leadership would still have to be regarded as democratic because it still appeals to the notion that political rule has to be grounded on the people’s will. Once one affirms this assertion, the implication, which Schmitt purposes to create in The Parliamentary Democracy Crisis will follow: The electoral organizations, which are usually considered paradigmatically democratic, are never, in truth and are neither intimately linked with the canon of democracy (Schmitt 28).

Schmitts obvious attempt to delink the concept of democracy from any specific approach of formation of the will fails to describe why the tradition of democracy has considered