The Critique of Liberal Neutrality and the Concept of Neutralization

This chapter discusses two critics of liberal neutrality, the leftwing political theorist Mouffe and the problematic rightwing legal theorist Schmitt. Schmitt’s criticism of liberal neutrality should be taken seriously, not despite, but precisely because of Schmitt’s resulting catastrophic turn towards fascism, which he understood as a form of non-neutral politics particularly suited to the technological age (Sects. 5.1 and 5.2). Schmitt’s theories are interpreted as a form of realism directed against liberal universalism (Sect. 5.3) and informed by theological voluntarism, coinciding with Mouffe’s Freudian, non-rationalist anthropology (Sect. 5.4). A focus is placed on Schmitt’s speech on neutralization where he emphasized the linkage between technology and liberal neutrality and predicted the collapse of liberal neutralization in the technological age (Sect. 5.5). Applying Schmitt to the digital age, the chapter argues that digital technologies undermine the human element of political representation and promote binary friend-enemy hyperpolitics that challenge state neutrality (Sect. 5.6).