A demented world: Politics without politics, state without state

Date01 September 2018
AuthorMassimo La Torre
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12288
Published date01 September 2018
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A demented world: Politics without politics, state
without state
Massimo La Torre*
Abstract
Johann Huizinga, the great Dutch historian, wrote: We are living in a demented world. And we
know it, pointing to the Schmittian nationalist irrationalism. Nevertheless, this expression might
be accommodated to stress a contemporary form of dementia: the dementia of marketing. We are
obsessed, made demented, by consumption, and we know it because we go and hunt for it. Classical
economics in its neoliberal shift becomes, now, bioeconomics. The institutional venue where this
kind of biopolitical commitment has been strongest is that provided by the European Union. The
European Union has failed to halt the process of depoliticisation underway in the government of
public affairs, contributing, on the contrary, to its encouragement and acceleration. The picture that
emerges seems to have thrown us back 100 years, overrunning the defences of the Welfare State
against the excesses of the free market and financial capitalism.
1|EUROPE AS ONE BIG MARKET
Wij leven in een bezeten wereld. En wij weten het(We are living in a demented world. And we know it). This is the
incipit of a book by Johann Huizinga, the great Dutch historian. That book, entitled In de schaduwen van morgen, was
translated into English (by his son Jacob Herman Huizinga), and published with the title In the Shadow of Tomorrow
(W.W. Norton, 1936). We are in 1935 and the dementiaHuizinga points out to is nationalist irrationalism that
would, before long, sink Europe into the abyss of world conflict. With acumen and intelligence, Huizinga clearly sees
what's coming, and in that lucidly argued book the adversary is above all Carl Schmitt, whom the Dutch historian
singles out unhesitatingly as the enemy of democratic and liberal European civilisation. I know of no sadder or
deeper fall from human reason than Schmitt's barbarous and pathetic delusion about friendfoe, Huizinga would later
write in his principal theoretical work, the 1938 Homo Ludens.
1
We could say our age too is dementedand we know it. While the dementia may not be exclusively about ethnic
community, there is nevertheless a worrying resurgence of nationalism and identitarism, triggered also by loss of
memory. We are obsessed, made demented, by consumption, and we know it because we go and hunt for it. We feed
on it; we live to consume. A Republic founded on work (article 1 of the Italian Republican Constitution of 1948) has
*
Professor of Philosophy of Law, University of Catanzaro, Italy.
Paper presented to the Conference on Europe in Hard Times: What's to Be Done(University of Tallinn, 89 February 2018).
1
Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), at 209.
DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12288
Eur Law J. 2018;24:247256. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj 247

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