The Concept of the Political Quotes

“The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief. Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self-determination, and education: moral perfection. In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress. To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain - they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis [is] that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity . . . "Humanity" thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as "human being" thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby "asymmetrical.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“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.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Whoever knows no other enemy than death and recognizes in his enemy nothing more than an empty mechanism is nearer to death than life.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The process of continuous neutralization of various domains of cultural life has reached its end because technology is at hand. Technology is no longer neutral ground in the sense of the process of neutralization; every strong politics will make use of it. For this reason, the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology. How ultimately it should be understood will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“We always live in the eye of the more radical brother, who compels us to draw the practical conclusion and pursue it to the end.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Karl Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat. This antithesis concentrates all antagonisms of world history into one single final battle against the last enemy of humanity. It does so by integrating the many bourgeois parties on earth into a single order, on the one hand, and likewise the proletariat, on the other. By so doing a mighty friend-enemy grouping is forged. Its power of conviction during the nineteenth century resided above all in the fact that it followed its liberal bourgeois enemy into its own domain, the economic, and challenged it, so to speak, in its home territory with its own weapons. This was necessary because the turning toward economics was decided by the victory of industrial society.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The eighteenth-century humanitarian concept of humanity was a polemical denial of the then existing aristocratic-feudal system and the privileges accompanying it. Humanity according to natural law and liberal-individualistic doctrines is a universal, i.e., all-embracing, social ideal, a system of relations between individuals. This materializes only when the real possibility of war is precluded and every friend and enemy grouping becomes impossible. In this universal society there would no longer be nations in the form of political entities, no class struggles, and no enemy groupings.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“It would be ludicrous to believe that a defenseless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of a resistance”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove that pacifism truly possesses political energy . . . this appears to be a peculiar way of justifying wars. The war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity. Such a war is necessarily intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. . . the feasibility of such a war is particularly illustrative of the fact that war as a real possibility is still present today.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“Op grond van het feit dat een volk niet langer de kracht of de wil heeft zich in de sfeer van het politieke te handhaven, verdwijnt het politieke niet uit de wereld. Het enige wat verdwijnt is een zwak volk.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Consequently, the reverse is also true: the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word. Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Mientras un pueblo exista en la esfera de lo político, tendrá que decidir por sí mismo, aunque no sea más que en el caso extremo - pero siendo él también quien decida si está dado tal caso extremo -, quién es el amigo y quién el enemigo. En ello estriba la esencia de su existencia política. Si no posee ya tal capacidad o voluntad de tomar tal decisión, deja de existir políticamente. Si se deja decir por un extraño quién es el enemigo y contra quién debe o no debe combatir, es que ya no es un pueblo políticamente libre, sino que está integrado en o sometido a otro sistema político. El sentido de una guerra no está en que se la haga por ideales o según normas jurídicas, sino en que se la haga contra un enemigo real.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“The war against war will then be undertaken as “the definitively final war of humanity.” Such a war, however, is “necessarily especially intensive and inhuman” because in it the enemy is fought as “an inhuman monster…that must be not only fended off but definitively annihilated” (36; 37). But humanity cannot be expected to be especially humane and, therefore, unpolitical after having just put behind it an especially inhumane war. Thus the effort to abolish the political for the sake of humanity has as its necessary consequence nothing other than the increase of inhumanity.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“the political” is found “not in fighting itself…but in a behavior that is determined by this real possibility”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The political must first be brought out of the concealment into which liberalism has cast it, so that the question of the state can be seriously put.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“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.8”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Yet technology can do nothing more than intensify peace or war; it is equally available to both.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain. Scientific thinking was also unable to achieve peace. The religious wars evolved into the still cultural yet already economically determined national wars of the nineteenth century and, finally, into economic wars.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“At the core of this astounding shift lies an elemental impulse that has been decisive for centuries, i.e., the striving for a neutral domain.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition

“The succession of stages—from the theological, over the metaphysical and the moral to the economic—simultaneously signifies a series of progressive neutralizations of domains whose centers have shifted.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition