This looks like a very interesting issue -- I think I will be making an effort to get my grubby paws on a copy.

TELOS 142 (Spring 2008)

In the 1987 Telos special issue devoted to Carl Schmitt, G. L. Ulmen and Paul Piccone asked "Why Schmitt? Why Now?"—attempting to respond to the outrage sparked by this journal's serious engagement with a thinker associated with Nazi Germany. In the intervening two decades, the censorious resistance to Schmitt has not subsided, but the urgency of his ideas has dramatically increased. With the replacement of the Cold War by the War on Terror and the ICBM with the suicide bomber, game-theory calculations and the realism of missile counts have given way to efforts to understand the enemy. Culture precedes politics, life precedes law, theology precedes order. Ergo Schmitt.

My interest in Schmitt stems from (amongst other things) his critique of liberals. Liberals are not just annoying little tits and arseholes but are also representative of something bigger and much more important - a cowardly retreat from politics and passion into a jealously guarded little private sphere - which is the worst form of conservatism (and as such should be fought tooth and nail).

Something that comes to mind is from Carl Schmitt's 'Concept of the Political' -- of which see this very good summary by Alan Wolfe here.

"In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics."

"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary."

Half the problem (and more than half of the wider problem of liberalism) is that liberals genuinely do not understand that politics is not a game but involves real enemies fighting about real things in the here and now.

Schmitt was a cunt of the highest order and its a great shame that the Russians didn't catch him and string him up in 1945 - but an absolutely honest and clear sighted cunt for all that.

Wolf's article is very good but also has problems - arguing as it does (for example) that in the US, conservatives are hegemonic because at some level they instinctively understand Schmitt and see themselves as engaged in a dualistic life and death struggle (this obviously begs the question -- why are other conservatives elsewhere not 'hegemonic' to the extent they are in Yankland)?

In particular:

"Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil."

This aspect has problems for me as a socialist - one who - like I said here - thinks as Camus did when he wrote that "the revolutionary's 'real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present'. This grows from an intense love for the earth, for humanity, and for justice. Socialists embrace this principle. By giving to the present we reject fear, despair and defeat and in Camus' words struggle to 'remake the soul of our time'"... thus -- I do not accept Schmitt's premiss at all - optimism about human nature does not translate, necessarily, into ignorance about the 'nature of men'.

Back to Wolf:

"Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it."

Anyway - back to Telos:

The political events of the last two decades have demonstrated the failings of both an abstract universalism and a narrow-minded realism. The Schmittian thesis of a cultural basis of politics presents a compelling alternative. Gorbachev's decision that the West was no longer an enemy was a sovereign termination of a state of exception. Ending the discourse of enemy--which Putin is apparently trying to resurrect--ended the Soviet Union. Ethnopolitics returned. The 1990s confusion in NATO also followed a Schmittian dynamic as the dissolution of an enemy led to an identity crisis among friends, until a new enemy volunteered. September 11 proved that the dream of the end of history had ignored how political conflicts are grounded in cultural differences, not rational calculations. Most recently, the conflicts in Iraq have been a painful reminder of the Schmittian idea that a political entity requires a degree of homogeneity--shared values--grounded in a popular will. Schmitt's theories, developed in a similar situation of violently warring factions within Weimar Germany, seem to be especially suited to deciphering the situation in Iraq as a state of exception involving a conflict between multiple political-theological frameworks, all vying to establish sovereignty by defining the "real" enemy. The proposals to impose a trisection of Iraq on the basis of ethnic and religious segregation unwittingly echo the Schmittian ideal of homogeneous communities. What is clear, however, from Schmitt's cultural-political perspective is that the decision over a liberal democratic (and presumably Iraqi nationalist), a Sunni, a Shiite, or a fragmented situation of sovereignty will not be decided by military force alone but through developments of popular will to power, when specific cultural commitments become so important that enough Iraqis decide to risk their lives defending them.