The Concept of the Political -

Carl Schmitt, Carl Schmitt

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

2007

126 páginas

4h 12m

ISBN-13: 9780226738925

"Today we even recognize the secret law of this vocabulary and know that the most terrible war is pursued only in the name of peace, the most terrible oppression only in the name of freedom, the most terrible inhumanity only in the name of humanity. Finally, we also see through the mood of that generation which saw only spiritual death or a soulless mechanism in the age of technicity. We recognize the pluralism of spiritual life and know that the central domain of spiritual existence cannot be a neutral domain and that it is wrong to solve a political problem with the antithesis of organic and mechanistic, life and death. A life which has only death as its antitheses is no longer life but powerlessness and helplessness. Whoever knows no other enemy than death and recognizes in his enemy nothing more than an empty mechanism is nearer to death than life. The comfortable antithesis of the organic and the mechanistic is itself something crudely mechanistic. A grouping which sees on the side only spirit and life and on the other only death and mechanism signifies nothing more than a renunciation of the struggle and amounts to nothing more than a romantic lament. For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things. Ab integro nascitur ordo."