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Title: The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt, George Schwab, Leo Strauss, Harvey J. Lomax, Tracy B. Strong ISBN: 0-226-73886-8 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: April, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (6 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Good ideas, but very densely written
Comment: It takes a lot of effort to understand the ideas in this book, simply because it is very densely written. That doesn't mean you shouldn't learn about Schmitt, just that you would be best of doing so through secondary sources.
Rating: 5
Summary: The paradox of the enemy recognition
Comment: The other reviews of this book already give the potential reader a good insight into what they are buying, and so I will comment on a fascinating conceptual tension within the book. Like all political realists (or so Schmitt would claim), Schmitt begins his theorizing from the empirical fact that "man is a dangerous and dynamic being". Schmitt allows that the nature of man may not be evil, but man's nature is inarguably problematic. Schmitt then inquires as to how man's problematic nature reveals itself conceptually. His answer is the enemy recognition. We know man is evil because he is prone to locating in the stranger, the other (that person or group who holds inimical aesthetic, religious, ethical beliefs), a potential source of violent conflict. A tension (there are many in the book!) then materializes when Schmitt speaks of the necessity of the state to make the proper enemy recognition if peace and security are to be maintained. It is of course a perilous folly if the state fails to make the proper enemy recognition (see Hindenburg's 1933 alliance with Hitler, Neville Chamberlain's appeasement, and Stalin's secret pact with Hitler for three failed enemy recognitions before WWII). But how does the state make the proper enemy recognition, and not simply needlessly multiply conflict in order to root out the enemy? Thus, the Soviet archives tell us that Stalin erroneously viewed the West as a threat (particularly a rebuilt Germany) after WWII, and so seized Eastern Europe as a buffer zone. The tension of the enemy recognition is that it is the source of all of our troubles, but yet it must be made when necessary. Sounds like the stuff of which politics is made...
Rating: 5
Summary: This is so Troy.
Comment: Politics is just the wooden horse in this book. Schmittian political theory treats killing as the unthinkable monstrosity which it usually is, but allows the state to have a monopoly on declarations of war, which is about the only thing that might be considered important by those who only permit it when they have an enemy. The things in this book apply so well to the Greeks who were camped outside Troy all those years, wondering why they couldn't win when they were so obviously right, that the kind of politics in this book might be considered classic. Schmitt was in a little trouble once, after World War II, when people wondered if he should be treated like a war criminal for openly thinking about the logic of this kind of thing as a German, who published this as Der Begriff des Politischen in 1932. There is a possibility that some of the people who won World War II didn't want politicians to think this way: "The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping." (p. 29). Honestly, the things people think can get them in a lot of trouble, which is probably why you never see much thinking on television.
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Title: Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) by Carl Schmitt, Ellen Kennedy ISBN: 0262691264 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 22 June, 1988 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt by Gopal Balakrishnan ISBN: 185984359X Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, Margaret Canovan ISBN: 0226025985 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.87 |
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Title: Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer, John Cumming, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno ISBN: 0826400930 Publisher: Continuum Pub. Date: April, 1976 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Law As Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism by David Dyzenhaus, Ronald Beiner ISBN: 0822322447 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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