Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Schmitt, Carl

  • The Presidential Power of Pardon: A Political-Theological Theme

    According to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example,…

  • Schiller contra Schmitt

    Freude, Schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuer-trunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum! Deine Zauber binden wieder, Was die Mode streng geteilt; Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt. Joy! A spark of fire from heaven, Daughter from Elysium, Drunk with fire we dare to enter, Holy One, inside your shrine. Your magic power…

  • Carl Schmitt on Political Romanticism as a Form of Occasionalism

    Another in a Substack series.

  • Carl Schmitt on Compassion

    I'm on a Schmitt jag. Top o' the Stack.

  • Who is the Enemy? More on Carl Schmitt

    Commenter Ben wrote: Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a "citizen of the world" and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen . . . That's right. I'll add that while we are enjoined to love…

  • The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

    With a little help from Carl Schmitt. Top o' the Stack.  Ben wants to talk about Schmitt. This article will serve as an introduction. You say Schmitt was a Nazi? So was Heidegger. Frege, according to Michael Dummett, was an anti-Semite. And Sartre was a Stalinist. You won't read these thinkers because of their distasteful…

  • Just over the Transom from Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,   My neighbor didn't call me a Trumper to my face, but mentioned (back in April) to my wife that he had the impression that I was one. (I felt obliged to unpack the assertion in a post.)   The Cape has a lot of Dems, but most of the working people out here…

  • Stackman Strikes Again!

    Here

  • Neither Piety nor Polemic

    Neither piety nor polemic belong in philosophy proper. …………………………….. Commentary: 0) No proper aphorism is an aphorism if it explains itself  or gives reasons for its own truth. And yet a good aphorism is the tip of an iceberg of thought susceptible of commentary. 1) So when I, as a philosopher, speak of God, I…

  • A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

    Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt.  Excerpt: Political existentialism? Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from…

  • The Enmity Potential of Thought

    A meditation on Carl Schmitt. 

  • A Note on Beccaria and Kant on Capital Punishment

    Here: According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence. Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals…

  • The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

    It is a plain fact that humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups. Why then is there so much politically correct resistance to this truth? It is because it flies in the face of a central dogma of the Left, namely, that deep down we are all the same, want the…

  • Juan Donoso Cortés on Never-Trumpers as Una Clasa Discutidora

    I have on several occasions referred to Never-Trumpers as yap-and-scribble do-nothings who think of politics as a grand debate gentlemanly conducted and endlessly protracted and who think of themselves as doing something worthwhile whether or not their learned discussions in well-appointed venues achieve anything at all in slowing the leftist juggernaut.  It now occurs to…

  • Carl Schmitt on Romanticism as a Form of Occasionalism

    One of the theses advanced by Carl Schmitt in his Political Romanticism (MIT Press, 1986, tr. Guy Oakes; German original first appeared in 1919 as Politische Romantik, 2nd ed. 1925) is that romanticism is a form of occasionalism. As Schmitt puts it, “Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism.” (PR 17) In this set of notes I attempt…