Introduction Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, first systematically articulated in The Concept of the Political (1927/2007), remains one of the most provocative and controversial ideas in modern political theory. Rather than locating “the political” in institutions, interests, or deliberative processes, Schmitt identifies it with an existential distinction between collective “friends” and “enemies.” This framing insists that …
In recent years, commentators and scholars have increasingly turned to the work of Carl Schmitt to make sense of Donald Trump’s brand of populist politics. Schmitt, a controversial German legal theorist and critic of liberal democracy, is best known for his assertion that “the political” is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy, and …
Water flows; its flow can be used to generate electricity. What can a philosopher’s thoughts generate? A longstanding answer from the classical tradition is that philosophy is an intimate part of the good life, having something to do with generating order in the human soul and in the political community.
Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific …
Speaking of Marxism, one might think that the political framing of Italian Elite Theory is similar to the method of Power Elite Analysis, developped by New Left sociologist C. Wright Mills, but the fact is that the former predates the later, and has several key differences that make these two almost impossible to combine, given that …
