Sadly, Hamilton has become somewhat smitten with the Schmittians.
As the attraction of Scylla recedes, Professor Clive Hamilton finds himself drawn towards Charybdis. But as liberal reform of the global economic system seems less likely, do we really have to accept doom-laden reaction?
Hamilton’s Negotiating the End of the World: Kant, Schmitt, and the Global Climate Struggle is an original, ambitious and equally impassioned examination, through the lens of philosophy, of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) process that had manifestly failed to deliver us from climate calamity.
The professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia, uses Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804), the European Enlightenment philosopher known for the categorical imperative, as a stand-in for “common interest, universal moral duties, multilateralism, and the preeminence of science”. Kant’s “vision of a voluntary federation of states in a ‘league of nations’ anticipated the structure of the UNFCCC.”
Glossed
And pitted against him is Carl Schmitt (1888 to 1985), the intellectual of Nazism, who is here the poster boy for the aspect of humanity which, in Hamilton’s words, “leans towards disorder, violence, conflict, and chaos.” Thus, “Schmittians emphasize state sovereignty, strategic competition, and deals struck between the powerful few”. He also adds: “Schmitt never renounced or expressed regret about his engagement with the Nazis.”
Hamilton’s conceit is that the COPs - from the founding of the UNFCCC at the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992 through to the most recent climate jamboree in Brazil just last November - has been an enormous contest between these two conflicting ways of being human. He argues that “all of us are the often-unwitting puppets of ideas…” Participants at the COP conferences, and by extension all those involved in climate discourse, “have been wrestling unwittingly with the conflict between Kantian and Schmittian viewpoints.”
His radical, and sobering, conclusion is that the universalist, internationalist, cooperative vision articulated through Kant has failed to materialise. The global experiment draws to a close, and the results cannot be avoided. Humanity has fundamentally failed to unite and save itself. Unfortunately, Hamilton’s summary of both Kant and Schmitt is perhaps too perfunctory to be generally useful, or as he says: “I have glossed over complexities and contradictions in their thought”. Kant's vulgar and explicit racism is ignored.
Oil
The dark conclusion that we must confront is that Schmitt and others like him have been vindicated and the world is naturally dominated by great powers who operate through a friend-enemy mindset. We as human beings would rather fight over resources - wealth, power, status, and nature’s gifts - right up until the point that this conflict destroys everyone and everything.
Sadly, Hamilton has become somewhat smitten with the Schmittians.
Sadly, Hamilton has become somewhat smitten with the Schmittians. He was a self described “green left cosmopolitan” but now feels he had “excessive faith in the countervailing power of liberal institutions”. He has undergone a “transformation” to become a “left Schmittian”. He adds: “[H]is theory of how global politics works is a more convincing account than the global cosmopolitan vision to which I had always been committed.”
Hamilton describes how world leaders are increasingly coming under the influence of Schmitt’s paranoid vision of humanity - and becoming “right Schmittians”. The main claim of the book is that this political shift explains the failure of the COP meetings over the last decades. He therefore argues that it is the change of ideas, rather than material vested interests such as those of the oil industry, that has secured our dependence on oil.
Gracious
Further, the Schmittian hypothesis is about to become a self fulfilling prophecy. Climate breakdown is itself about to create the world that Schmitt assumed to be our fate. The leaders of the main geopolitical blocs - the United States, China, Europe - will increasingly war over limited and decreasing resources, such as food and clean water.
Hamilton came to my attention when his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change was published in 2010. It struck me as the first, and then only, serious book that not only accepted the fate of climate breakdown that was most likely to befall us, but asked what we as sentient, caring human beings, could do to process - even accept - that reality. It was such an important book that I bought hundreds of copies and sent them to anyone of influence who I thought might heed this powerful message and actually do something to prevent this fate.
However, Hamilton has in his new book taken some serious missteps. He has fallen for Schmitt's simplifications. Luckily, Hamilton is gracious and generous enough to provide ample evidence in his own book to undermine his own conclusions.
Sinophobia
The first mistake is to frame his story in such a Schmittian fashion. Hamilton has succumbed to friend-enemy thinking. The highly complex philosophical - or ideological - belief systems are simplified into two great, opposing forces. Kant is wholly good. Schmitt is wholly evil. It is only the first claim I have a problem with, but it’s a problem that cascades through the theoretical system of the book. Kant, after all, argued that “world peace is enhanced by the spread of trade and investment…”
The second, related, problem is that Hamilton then has to flatten geopolitics in order to make the various blocs fit within his scheme. The European Union is presented as Kantian, as universalist, as good. Against this, we are told that the Chinese elite, including Xi Jinping, has become smitten with Schmitt and therefore takes up the position of bad. The COPs are a battle between good and bad, and bad is winning.
The evidence of Schmitt's influence on elite thinking in China is alarming and revealing. The idea that China would move further from any kind of socialism and towards a modern National Socialism is really troubling. I have no love for the Chinese government. But Hamilton goes too far, exhibiting only what can be described as Schmittian Sinophobia. He describes China’s “chronic anxiety and paranoia” and claims that “under Xi Jinping’s rule, China has increasingly taken on the characteristics of a fascist state” and aims to build “a new Sinocentric world order”.
Stockpiles
Hamilton’s central claim - that Schmitt is gaining influence and this undermines climate action - is directly contradicted. The Chinese ecological civilisation, Hamilton is forced to propose, only proves a deeper cynicism on the part of the Chinese government. Hilariously, he spends quite some time attacking the Chinese leadership for looking to its national history for philosophical grounding for the ecological civilisation - in this book that reduces all global thought to a battle between two German thinkers.
His interpretation is undone by his own description of China’s radical adoption of climate policies and development of a renewables industry after the failure of the Copenhagen COP. Yes, China now has the highest emissions. But as Hamilton describes, it is leading the world on renewable and low carbon technology, including electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels.
He is, in the closing chapter, forced to admit that “Beijing understands that China is extremely vulnerable” to climate breakdown, is ruled by a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “dominated by engineers and long term thinking” and has advanced plans for mitigation and adaptation, including strategic food stockpiles. The funniest and most revealing sentence is: “CCP leaders are obsessed with food security, understandably.”
MAGA
As well as foregrounding the apparent malevolence of the Chinese state, Hamilton is guilty of exaggerating the sometimes benevolence of the US state. The claim - which occasionally bubbles to the surface but is implied throughout - is that the Democratic governments of the US were serious about climate.
We then see how the United States has also been taken in by Schmitt’s schema. We hear how JD Vance “studied Schmitt at Yale” while the tech titans have also been reading the antisemitic German philosopher. As a result the great US-of-A has moved from the light and into the dark. Once a champion of climate action, it now seems intent on hastening climate breakdown.
It is obviously the case that Donald Trump and the Republicans have exited and done everything they can to undermine the Paris Agreement, and that the Democrats when back in power always rejoin. There is no doubt that Trump, the MAGA movement, and his ICE paramilitary force, represent “fascism with American characteristics”. Trump is the personification of a US administration that has been driven stark raving mad defending the oil industry in the face of the obvious existential threat posed by climate breakdown.
Breakdown
But not enough is said about how the Democrats are also captured by the oil companies. Obama’s original sabotage of the Paris Agreement is explained away - indeed blamed on the Chinese. Joe Biden presided over the highest rates of oil extraction and exploitation in US history.
More broadly, the genocide in Gaza - in a book about good and evil - goes unmentioned. The war in Ukraine is not particularly well understood. The more recent bombing of Iran - and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz - is not in any way anticipated. These are all clearly and directly related to the US oil industry, the US imperial and hegemonic project which continues whether Republicans or Democrats are in power.
The claim that the EU represents the light and the good when it comes to climate breakdown is equally over simplified. Indeed, Hamilton is soon forced to concede that Britain has succumbed to right wing lunacy in the form of the Reform Party, and Brexit, and the attacks on net zero policies.
Infantile
He also logs how Hungary, under the climate denying demagogy of Viktor Orbán at the time of publication, is equally hard right. Even Germany, a beacon of progressive environmentalism, acts in the interests of its legacy fossil fuel car industry rather than the interests of the global atmosphere. There is not much of Europe left as a bastion of universalism and sound climate policy.
The same story could - and has been - told with different dramatis personae. Hamilton is an economist and the more obvious choice would have been the battle of ideas between John Maynard Keynes, in the universalist corner - and Friedrich Hayek - in the self interest corner. Keynes and Hayek had a well documented influence on the think tanks behind climate policy and climate denial, respectively. But that story is well told.
The failure is - throughout - the reduction of complex geopolitics to a simple antinomy. Good versus evil. This is the “splitting’ brilliantly described by Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory. The infantile mind divides the self, objects and experiences into extremes, the only-good and the only-bad. Schmitt based his entire philosophy on such a division. This flattening also means his interrogation of the COPs lacks a sociological grounding. The COP process itself is not designed to hold power, nor is it a neutral space or fair playing field. The COPs section of the book is a summary of the major events that contorts the facts to fit his schema.
Brazenly
The opposite of splitting is integration. The fact is Kant and Schmitt have more in common than most would like to admit. Both assumed that capitalism was the only way to run an economy, and therefore the only way we could run the planet. Kant argued that capitalism could be reformed, or contained. We could have capitalist states that cooperate when capitalism itself is under threat. Schmitt knew capitalism to be about war, exploitation, competition: a zero sum game.
But Hamilton’s approach “challenges economistic explanations that reduce the talks’ failure to the blocking power of the fossil fuel lobby.” He does, however, admit in his introduction that the Kant-Schmitt dualism excludes any real engagement with a third dead German philosopher, Karl Marx.
“Kant and Schmitt were concerned with states and did not pay much attention to the role of capital,” Hamilton observes. “Those who put fossil fuel corporations at the centre of the history of the climate struggle owe more to Marx’s political economy.” Later in the text he notes that “the neglected third force of this book’s story came brazenly into view at Dubai in 2023…fossil fuel power represented by the petrostates.”
Reintegrate
Marx obviously has not had a direct influence over elite thought - especially the elites that populate and dominate the COP conferences. But rather than this meaning Hamilton can completely ignore any Marxist analysis of state power and capitalism, this very ignorance could be understood as a significant part of the problem.
Marx argued that capitalism required an accumulation of wealth, and this very accumulation would necessarily result in increased extremes of social inequality. This social inequality in turn creates a world of ruthless competition, a propensity for conflict, and a justification of cruelty. It creates an economy where a few exhaust nature, while the many are seemingly powerless to prevent calamity. Marx made the point that none of this is inevitable. Through deliberate effort, it can be prevented.
Further, Marx desired the very thing that would stop the Schmittian nightmare becoming everyone’s lived reality: integration. Marx wanted to get rid of the economic system that drove social inequality and turned people into two classes whose interests were directly opposed. The project was to reintegrate the human species, and indeed to reintegrate society and nature. Had this been achieved, Kant’s universalism could be more thoroughly universal - and climate breakdown would have been all but an impossibility.
Sabotaged
What Hamilton has shown us - and this is an invaluable insight - is that Kant / Keynes did not provide a philosophy that reveals and fundamentally challenges the logic of capitalism. As such, it cannot explain the willingness of today’s global elites to allow climate breakdown to happen. It cannot explain the propensity to war. So where does excluding Marx take us? Hamilton concludes: “Perhaps the choice is no longer whether to be a Kantian or a Schmittian but whether to be a left Schmittian or a right Schmittian.”
Scylla is here the many-headed attempts to convince us that capitalism is the only possibility, and that capitalism can and must be reformed to avert climate catastrophe. This is the point of the COPs, and this is why the COPs proved to be pointless. Hamilton shows great courage in arguing that such a Scylla is a mere illusion and no longer holds any power over us. But he over-generalises to conclude that climate and environmental breakdown is “the decisive refutation of Kant’s belief in the progressive unfolding of reason and human moral development”.
But then Hamilton is immediately drawn into Charybdis, the whirlpool of doom and reaction. He ends the book imagining our near future “when Schmitt prevails”. Here climate breakdown is inevitable. Here fascism is inevitable. And here the worst instincts of humanity - the propensity to war and greed - are naturalised and normalised. “Schmitt’s dystopian outlook matches that of growing numbers who see the climate fight as lost.”
This defeatism is moral abdication. Despondency prevents Hamilton from learning the lesson hidden in plain sight in his own account of the climate struggle. We need to orient ourselves towards a clear and precise understanding of capitalism, the function and activities of the oil industry, and how supporters of both have sabotaged climate science, climate policy and the climate movement. Otherwise, we will be left adrift between, and at the mercy of, Scylla and Charybdis.
This Author
Brendan Montague is an editor of The Ecologist.
