Carl Schmitt Quotes on Politics
Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922), The Concept of the Political (1932), and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) gave Weimar-era political philosophy its most rigorous and disturbing statement of the philosophical foundations of political authority. The central commitments — that the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, that the political is constituted by the friend-enemy distinction, and that liberal parliamentary democracy systematically misrecognizes the constitutive decisional moments of political life — articulate a position whose subsequent association with Schmitt’s collaboration with the Nazi regime has shadowed but not displaced its philosophical force. The framework, recovered for postwar political theory by both the conservative and radical-left engagements with Schmitt, shaped the contemporary debate over sovereignty, exception, and the political through Agamben, Mouffe, and the broader continental engagement with the limits of liberal political philosophy.
Quotes
-
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
p.5 -
“The political is the distinction between friend and enemy.”
The Concept of the Political -
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”
Political Theology -
Attributed to Carl Schmitt:
“Every political concept is a polemical concept.”
-
Attributed to Carl Schmitt:
“Where there is a real enemy, there is a real politics.”
-
“To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.”
Wikiquote -
“The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.”
Wikiquote -
“The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”
Wikiquote -
“The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.”
Wikiquote -
“A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories.”
Wikiquote -
“That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“Value has its own logic. In the constitutional state that is most clearly recognizable in the enactment of its constitution.”
"The Tyranny of Values" (1967) -
“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927) -
“As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.”
The Concept of the Political(1927)