The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political was published in the last days of Weimar Germany. Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the year after its publication.

Summary

For Schmitt, the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction arises from the fact of human diversity: identities and practices, beliefs and way of life can, in principle, be in conflict with one another.

Schmitt attacks the "liberal-neutralist" and "utopian" notions that politics can be removed of all warlike, agonistic energy, arguing conflict is embedded in existence itself, likewise constituting an ineradicable trait of anthropological human nature. Schmitt attempts to substantiate his ideas by referring to the declared anthropological pessimism of "realistic" Catholic theology. Schmitt considers the anti-perfectibilist pessimism of Traditional Catholic theology to be esoterically relevant to the inner ontological being of politics and political activity in the contemporary world, where modern people subconsciously secularize theological intellectual ideas and concerns. Schmitt criticizes political "radicals" as ignorant, deluded, pseudo-messianic in mentality, and oblivious to the stark, hard knowledge of unveiled human nature, its esse, encoded in ancient theology, wherein Original Sin held central, axial place, intertwining his own ideas of metapolitics with a reformulated "metaphysics of evil".