What does Veeky Forums think of Carl Schmitt and where to start with him?

why not?

His work is a dagger in a heart of liberalism. So there's a minor industry, fueled by liberalistic angst, trying to discredit Schmitt. Despite this, he is still widely studied and applied. His work is simply so rigorous that it can't be ignored.

Strongly recommended: ALL of Schmitt's work.
I also have his letters with Kojeve (who referred to Schmitt as "the Master").

Liberalism or democratic liberalism?

Any ground by definition, for it to be a ground, is transcendent and theological. The idea that normativity, the kind of normativity that legal positivists want and Hegel wants, could be self-grounding and determined only immanently, i.e., could constitute its own transcendent ground, is nonsensical. You end up in paralysis. This pic says it better than I ever could.

Political theology isn't just diagnostic. Once you realise the impossibility of self-grounding, self-transparent reason, you start to think about how genuine transcendent grounds work - and how new theological origins might then disclose the possibility of new temporal understandings. Once you hit that point, you can either become nihilistic by denying the possibility outright of new grounds or of the meaningfulness of their disclosure, monotheistic and literally theological by seeking out new grounds, or you can become "polytheistic" by immanentizing the ground into the Other, into communicative rationality.

Schmitt's letters with Junger are great too if you can read German.

Start with The Concept of the Political but read everything because it's all top-tier and kind of flows into one another.

> Interesting note: Schmitt in 1942 said that Guenon was the most interesting thinker in Europe, and hung out with Evola.

Not that I doubt you but you got a source on that? I know of the apocryphal anecdote where Schmitt may have met Mussolini and told him that Hegel's spirit resided not in Berlin or Moscow but in Rome.

> Schmitt's letters with Junger are great too if you can read German.

I am very jealous. They need to be translated. As does his Glossarium.

It's quite possible within the next decade, with the surge of interest in translating Jungers work into english at the moment, Heideggers correspondence was of big interest in the academy.

Why is Junger more in vogue now? More interest in right wing thinking?

Guenon was the most interesting thinker indeed

How's Theory of the Partisan?

Schmitt is a lot of fun.
I'm rather fond of this look at nomos

Defs for the Greeklets

>Schmitt may have met Mussolini and told him that Hegel's spirit resided not in Berlin or Moscow but in Rome
kek what a retard

Why? It pleased Mussolini greatly and it appears Schmitt was always more interested in Mussolini as a leader than Hitler.

Because he couldn't see behind the propaganda. Fascist Italy was a corrupt and inefficient state. Honestly I don't blame him, he was probably referring to Gentile's idealism.

>he was probably referring to Gentile's idealism.

Yes, no shit.

Can you just jump into Schmitt's work or is there a specific list of philosophers you would need to read before getting to him?

I found that Guenon helps with the theological aspect of Schmitt's work, and how he perceives modern politics as just the secular crystallization of theology.

Just jump in. The Concept of the Political is usually where people start. He's not difficult to read but he's dense and gives you a lot to think about. It's not like reading Hegel or Derrida.

>Not that I doubt you but you got a source on that?

the quotation is listed on Guenon's wiki page and is given this citation as a source:

Mircea Eliade’s The Portugal Journal, trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2010), see also Grottanelli Cristiano. Mircea Eliade, Carl Schmitt, René Guénon, 1942. In: Revue de l'histoire des religions, tome 219, n°3, 2002. pp. 325-356.

Are you saying that Schmitt isn't a decisionist? His theory of sovereignty is predicated on a decisionist framework ...

he's right, do your homework

Enlighten me

I read his SEP entry, but I still don't understand shit
People are different, so they form groups and must kill eachother to further the dialectic? wtf am I reading?

I assume you're referring to the friend/enemy distinction? Schmitt believes that the political is fundamentally exclusionary in the sense that the "business" of politics is to decide who is and who is not part of the in-group, to use contemporary language. The killing thing is because politics is dependent upon the threat of war. That's the brainlet basic rundown.

but what is so radical/profound about it?

can anyone elaborate on this?

New translations of his fiction.

No. You can jump right in. The language is simple enough.

But if you want to read his work on Hobbes, you'd want to read Hobbes first.

Literally how can you say to someone to read Guenon first about anything. If someone can read Guenon, they'd probably have already enough skill to read Schmitt.

What's so difficult about Guenon? I found him to be pretty easy to understand if you take your time to read him.

The math parts. Very likely that people into political philosophy, won't that well read into mathematics.

Sure but it's not really fundamental to his religious views. Even in The Reign of Quantity, Guenon seems to build more on metaphysics than mathematics.

His and his brothers thought in technology is considered an important context to Heideggers but also in its own right. Further to that, there remains an enduring interest on his theory of total Mobilisation and the figure of the worker across the spectrum, a lot of academic work actually comes of the left or post left on this, he's like Schmitt that way

What was their thought on technology? Similar to Spengler's?

In Der Waldgang he repeatedly criticizes the adoption of technology by the masses as an unhealthy preference for comfort rather than freedom. He uses the Titan as a metaphor: the passengers are quite comfortable on the ship and their comfort comes at the price of both not having a say on the route the ship is going (his criticism of passivity and contemporary states) and being helpless as soon as the ship goes down, because since their relinquishment of the control of the ship their ability to function as true free individuals has athropied.He also talks about how it's basically a distraction from existential questions.
I've still got to read his brother's "the perfection of technique" which I've heard is quite good but it's 30 fucking euros.
If OP or anyone else is still around and interested in talking about him, I'd love to have a discussion on Schmitt, I'm quite fond of him.

Yeah i am. Why is Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction regarded as so profound, when it seems to be very basic?
Also has Schmitt's criticism of liberal democracy been refuted, or was it really a "dagger in its heart"?
Are you a fascist?

Why is the friend-enemy distinction still ignored in politics today? Why is political theology shunned in preference for political philosophy?

Also, Schmitt wasn't really a fascist. There's some authoritarian tendencies but the Nazis arguably were not his first-choice and there's a lot in Schmitt where he tries to come to terms with his mistake of endorsing the Nazis and relates it to Hobbes failed project, the Herman Melville novella "Benito Cereno" and Schmitt's own concept of the Christian Epimetheus. Paul Piccone probably has the most fair break down of Schmitt's relation with the Nat Soc.

Sure, but he was rather fond of Mussolini and Gentile iirc. And can you go a bit deeper on how his distinction was really revolutionary?

It's revolutionary in the sense that Schmitts very DEFINITION of politics was antithetical to the existing liberal order at the time, as liberalism, by its nature, obfuscates the political. For Schmitt liberalism is a totalizing, depoliticizing force rejecting this basic distinction and thus breaks down political order. When a state fails to properly observe this distinction, it Is depoliticized and no longer capable of perpetuating itself. Liberalism will then inevitably lead to conflict and/or dissolution of the state due to its failure to properly distinguish between friend and enemy.

Can you elaborate on Schmitt's notion that liberalism is against the friend-enemy distinction?

> can you elaborate on...

at this point you just need to read him, he's not even that long

not him but where do i start with him

Liberalism is predicated on openness and individualism, ideals which are incongruous with such a distinction. It is inherently anti-political.
"The systematic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the state. For the purpose of protecting individual freedom and private property, liberalism provides a series of methods for hindering and controlling the state's and government's power. It makes of the state a compromise and of its institutions a ventilating system and, moreover, balances monarchy against democracy and vice versa."

Concept of the Political. Read the Intro and Preface in the Schwab translation.

The Concept of the Political and Political Theology are his most famous I guess. Henrich Meier has some good secondary source material and Balakrishnan's The Enemy is a good book.

Which writers should I read before Schmitt? Hegel?

If liberalism is the denial of this distinction, and Schmitt is neither a communist nor a nazi, then what alternative does he propose? A democratic dictatorship? Then why not just adopt fascism? I always got the impression that he was more a bona fide Italian fascist, with his admiration for Hegelian idealism.

Just so you know, the user who responded to you earlier wasn't me.
>when it seems to be very basic
It's not at all basic, only if you're superficially looking at it.
It's not merely saying that political opponents are enemies, which is of course quite basic and everyone already knew this.
What he said was that the concept of the political isn't a matter of qualitative difference, such as there is a religious matter and then an economic matter and so on and so forth and then a political matter. No, isntead "political" is a matter of the degree of disagreement on any given matter. Subjects become politicized or are depoliticized throughouth history depending only on this, how much are the people who hold really disagreeing with each other or in other words, are they ultimately willing to kill each other based on this conflict of ideas? If yes, they're enemies and the subject is political.
>Also has Schmitt's criticism of liberal democracy been refuted, or was it really a "dagger in its heart"?
It depends on who you ask. I think it hasn't at all, most of the work done subsequently is the same as before schmitt, that is both trying to put under a carpet the problem of the state of exception and trying to justify liberalism by way of stating that all subjects are or are going to be depoliticized, which of course isn't really possible because as long as there are people there is going to be disagreement, which means there's inevitably going to be at least one political subject.
>Are you a fascist?
I'm not a fascist as I don't like totalitarianism, modernist ideologies and I don't have a fetish for violence.

Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Cicero, Aurelius, Aquinas, Avicenna, Macchiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Stirner, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Adorno, Lukacs, Lacan, and maybe Zizek

Does the concept of the political require the willingness to do violence? I thought it was just a matter of disagreement between two parties.

>Does the concept of the political require the willingness to do violence?
The willingness to ultimately resort to violence.
>I thought it was just a matter of disagreement between two parties
Sure, that's why you thought it was banal.
The amazing thing about this definition of the political is that it also changes what war is: war isn't a consequence of politics or a way in which politics is carried about but the very presupposition of politics.
Also, Schmitt explains how the pretense of neutrality on political topic or depoliticization (is that even a word in english?) is mostly moot: by trying to depoliticize itself, a community either subjects itself to another political entity or simply disappears. As for neutrality: a state that is neutral as in indifferet just means that it's devoid of content; a state that is neutral as in just an instrument, an apparatus is a state incapable of telling apart friends and enemes; a state that is neutral as in it gives everyone equal access to pwoer is just giving others the opportunity to rewrite it. In other words, all of these forms of neutrality are transitory.

You said that you thought Schmitt wasn't a true convinced nazi, but it's obvious that he was rather reactionary. What do you think his personal political views were? What would his ideal system be?

>You said that you thought Schmitt wasn't a true convinced nazi,
I've never said that, another user said that. My posts are and >it's obvious that he was rather reactionary
Definitely, after all he was one of the figures belonging to the conservative revolutionary movement.
>What do you think his personal political views were? What would his ideal system be?
That's not easy to say. I

>tfw user died before he could finish his post

hahahaha, that "I" is just what remains from "I can not easily tell what the man thought since I did not know him".
Anyway, you can tell that he's pretty partial to a system of jurisprudence as a structure rather than a decision or even worse a law. It's also obvious that he didn't like legislative states much, preferring either a state of government or an administrative state.

I see, and I agree with that statement, but I don't see how / why this should want us propose nationalism and war, instead of politically diverse policy per country (whatever that may require), or anarchism, or simply technocracy / rule by experts instead of people to prevent interest groups and limit "out-group" as small as possible?

>Schmitt believes that the political is fundamentally exclusionary in the sense that the "business" of politics is to decide who is and who is not part of the in-group

I am retarded but I still do not see how this is different from Hayek's view on social justice, yet he came to conclusion of ordoliberalism (limited democracy) and schmitt to.... whatever neoconservative thing its called.

What is his argument against liberalism, apart from in-out group?