Trifkovic Using Schmitt

The United States is the only major power today that insists on a deterritorialized, purely ideological, openly hegemonic definition of its interests, which now include the promotion of LGBTQ+ “rights.” Carl Schmitt helps us understand why that is. https://t.co/ii8XYTaFxy

— Chronicles Magazine (@ChroniclesMag) August 26, 2021

A Critique of Schmitt?

What we need, Schmitt urges, is a political order that can deceive its subjects as well as dominate them. Life is a ceaseless struggle to impose one’s values on others. But we can escape the terror of this struggle by ignoring or denying its existence... https://t.co/x1HuMFnFVm

— American Affairs (@AmericanAffrs) March 15, 2021

An Argument from Etymology

But is it sound? After all, ordering is through law, and it is possible for a liberal regime to legislate. One could argue that its laws are generally not valid, as they usually are not orderings to the common good. There is something to be rooted in a community and its culture, history, and tradition(s), which liberalism may claim to transcend through reason. That may be true as well. Is Schmitt's "illiberalism" worth investigating? I don't know yet.

Liberalism is a philosophical abstraction. It is alien to all societies. That is why liberalism cannot produce order, which is just another word for locating/rooting (Ordnung = Ortung).

— Carl Schmitt (@HomoHominiLupuz) June 4, 2020

An Adrian Vermeule Lecture

Church Life: All Human Conflict Is Ultimately Theological by Adrian Vermeule

Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century by John Marini

Encounter Books


AmConMag: The Dawn of Big Government and the Administrative State By PAUL GOTTFRIED
New book correctly diagnoses how non-elected agencies are running the country, but falls short on how it got this way.

Another on Carl Schmitt

Church Life: Political Theology’s Haunting of Contemporary Politics by Michael Altenburger

Erik Peterson’s Thought Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt had met as early as 1919 but became better acquainted in 1924 when Peterson took a Church History and New Testament...

Can Schmitt Be Rehabilitated?

A Disciple of Carl Schmitt

Chronicles: Brazil’s Exceptional President by Srdja Trifkovic

Adrian Vermeule v. Rod Dreher

And another opportunity for Dreher to hawk his "Benedict Option"...

Adrian Vermeule’s Ivy League Papstprinzip

Is Dreher accurately characterizing the genealogy of Vermeule's stance by pointing to Carl Schmitt? Or is there an explanation for Adrian Vermeule's Roman Catholic integralism?

Keith Preston on Carl Schmitt, Part 4

Carl Schmitt (part IV)

Part 3 of Keith Preston's series on Carl Schmitt

Alternative Right

Keith Preston on Carl Schmitt, Part 2

Carl Schmitt (Part II)

Keith Preson on Carl Schmitt

Keith Preston, Carl Schmitt (Part I)
Weimar: State of Exception 

While Schmitt was certainly a thinker of the Right, it is a mistake to group him together with proponents of the “conservative revolution” such as Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Edgar Jung, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal. There is no evidence of him having expressed affinity for the views of these thinkers or joining any of the organizations that emerged to promote their ideas. Schmitt’s conservatism was squarely within the Machiavellian tradition, and he counted Machiavelli, Hobbes, Jean Bodin and conservative counterrevolutionaries such as Joseph De Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortes as his influences.

During the Weimar era, Schmitt expressed no sympathy for the mystical nationalism of the radical Right, much less the vulgar racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazi movement. He was closer to the anti-liberal thinkers that James Burnham and others subsequently labeled as “the neo-Machiavellians.” These included Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Georges Sorel along with aristocratic conservatives like Max Weber. These thinkers expressed skepticism regarding the prospects of liberalism and democracy and emphasized the role of elites, the irrational, and the power of myth with regards to the political. Though Schmitt never joined a political party during the Weimar era, within the spectrum of German politics of the time he can reasonably be categorized as something of a moderate. He had admirers on both the far Right and far Left, including sympathizers with the Conservative Revolution as well as prominent intellectuals associated with the Marxist Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer.

Schmitt’s own natural affinities were mostly likely closest to the Catholic Center Party, which along with the Social Democrats who had led the revolution of 1918 were the most consistently supportive of the republic and the constitutional order, and which represented the broadest cross-section of economic, class, regional, and institutional interests of any of the major parties during Weimar.

 A Note on Sources on Schmitt

A Forgotten Thinker On Nation-States vs. Empire by Paul Gottfried
Google Books
Professor Gottfried has his own website. You can purchase his book on Carl Schmitt through his website (assuming that copies are still available at Amazon). The website has not been updated for some time.

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