Federalism and Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political: Political Unity and Federal Pluralism (Fédéralisme Et Le Concept Du Politique Chez Carl Schmitt: Le Problème De L'Homogénéité De L'Unité Politique Et Le Pluralisme Fédéral)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Federalism, these days, is mainly justified as a means to deal with certain forms of political diversity. Some take the optimistic view that federalism allows for diverse political communities to unite while retaining their autonomy, thus allowing them to survive and flourish. Others take the dim view of federal arrangements as being a tragic compromise - the lesser of many evils - available to political communities that cannot come together to form unitary States by reason of conflicting political identities. In both cases, federalism is not only thought to be possible in the context of political heterogeneity, it is in fact imagined as an institutional solution to certain forms of political diversity. The dominant view appears to be that political heterogeneity is federalism’s first cause. Political identities would thus be the main driver in regime choices and issues of economic efficiency would be relegated to secondary concerns. This paper will not attempt to validate or invalidate the hypothesis that political identities take precedence over issues of economic efficiency when regime choices are made. However, we will explore the more general assumption that federalism is a political form well adapted to political pluralism. In order to question that assumption, we will use Carl Schmitt’s contrary claim that for a federation to exist, it must be based on a substantially homogeneous population. That conclusion is the product of Schmitt’s complex set of views on the nature of the political, of pluralism and the State, of sovereignty, of democracy and of federalism. After having reconstructed Schmitt’s argument against the heterogeneity of federations, we critically assess his reasoning. In particular, we draw from a specific aporia in his concept of the political - the problem of multiple and coordinated political identities - to show where his reasoning goes wrong.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".