/lit/ - Literature

There's a burgeoning movement of right-leaning anons on /lit/ who think that Schmitt and his book, the Concept of the Political, is able to refute the grounds of cosmopolitan liberal democracy. I sympathize with them, truly. It's hard to stomach clown world as it is, and it's poised to only get worse. But I think few of these neo-Machiavellians realize that, with his enshrining of the friend-enemy distinction, Schmitt merely turns back the clock to the founding of modern liberalism, 17th century England, without offering a suitable alternative. Writing in an era of boundless political and religious bloodshed, motivated over quibbling legal and theological concerns, Hobbes sought in Leviathan a political science to permanently end concerns over sovereignty forever.

Schmitt returns to Hobbes by retracing his footsteps to the state of nature, but as Leo Strauss points out, Schmitt fails to abandon the path that leads to the "horizon of liberalism." Schmitt accepts the Hobbesian state of nature, that we are destined for conflict, but he does little to interpret said idea nor discuss its implications. No war is ever fought for its own sake. Why do we go to war? To preserve our resources, our customs, our ways of life, and our understanding of the good... and ultimately to seek peace. But what fundamentally *grounds* the good? Schmitt, in his modernist approach to religion, has no answer to this question, except to repeat the Machiavellian idea that there is an ideology of religious character behind every political order. In essence, Schmitt only advocates for another form of nihilism.

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>dear jannies, philosophical discussion is allowed with references to books. I have referenced two here, Concept of the Political and Leviathan, and I am striving to cultivate a high quality literary discussion. Please allow this thread to stay up.