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Category Archives: Carl Schmitt
A History of Carl Schmitt Studies
Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) studies never became a normal subfield. From the beginning, the study of Schmitt doubled as a test of the academy: how do universities handle a thinker of the first rank who put his gifts in the service … Continue reading
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Covenant Against Empire: The Project of Yoram Hazony
Part Two Yoram Reuben Hazony (b. 1964) belongs to a small group of contemporary thinkers who build not only books but movements. He writes philosophy, founds institutes, recruits donors, organizes conferences, and places himself at the center of a global … Continue reading
Posted in Amy Wax, Benjamin Netanyahu, Carl Schmitt, Epistemics, Leo Strauss, Nathan Cofnas, Nick Fuentes, Orit Arfa, Steve Sailer, Tucker Carlson, Yoram Hazony
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Schmitt Under Mercier and Doris
Carl Schmitt built a political theory that assigns constitutive force to sovereign decision, mythic mobilization, and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt recognized the prior political existence of the people as the ground any decision operates on. Constitutional Theory places pouvoir constituant … Continue reading
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What Then Shall We Do: The Work Schmitt Left
Gregory Cochran occupies a distinctive space in modern intellectual life as a physicist who treated human history as a branch of biology. His work represents a departure from the consensus that human evolution slowed to a crawl once culture took … Continue reading
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The Borrowed Functioning of Schmitt Scholars
I first saw the term “borrowed functioning” in David Schnarch’s book Passionate Marriage, and I’ve kept repeating it ever since because it is such a concise summary of a painful reality. In my case, I’ve often added a friend or … Continue reading
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Serotonin and the Sovereign
Allan V. Horwitz’s (b. 1948) argument, developed in Creating Mental Illness and later in All We Have to Fear with Jerome Wakefield, is that American psychiatry systematically misclassifies normal emotional responses to difficult circumstances as pathological conditions requiring treatment. Grief … Continue reading
Posted in Allan V. Horwitz, Carl Schmitt
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The Emotional Economy of the Exception: Randall Collins, Carl Schmitt, and the Affective Failure of Liberal Order
Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception is almost always read as a claim about law. The sovereign decides when normal legal order no longer applies and thereby reveals the ground on which every constitutional arrangement rests. This reading is accurate … Continue reading
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The Traumatized Sovereign: Jeffrey Alexander, David Pinsof, and the Ritual Reception of Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt argued that the sovereign decision never disappears. It migrates. What he could not have anticipated is that one of its most revealing migrations would occur within the institutions devoted to his reception. The academic encounter with Schmitt is … Continue reading
Posted in Alliance Theory, Carl Schmitt
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Tacit Sovereignty: Stephen Turner, Carl Schmitt, and the Sociology of Convenient Power
Carl Schmitt’s assault on liberal constitutionalism is one of the most searching acts of political demystification in the twentieth century. In Political Theology (1922) and Constitutional Theory (1928), Schmitt argued that liberalism survives by denying the very condition of its … Continue reading
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The Philosopher of the Primate Brain: Alliance Theory and the Naturalization of Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt thought he had discovered the essence of politics. What he discovered was the surface expression of evolved coalition psychology. His framework feels compelling because it resonates with how we are wired. David Pinsof, Martie Haselton, and Douglas Sears, … Continue reading
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