I've been prompted by all the post-Kirk RW screeching about "the friend/enemy distinction" to read Schmitt's "Concept of the Political" again. This time round I'm really struck by what an overrated charlatan the man was. It's no coincidence, I think, that the channel through which most of those on the Right who now talk about him received his work was his enthusiastic reception, in the 70s and 80s, by the radical Left. His "arguments" display the same trait of according the status of a valid axiom to some mere arbitrary assertion that one might find, for example, in a leftist author like Derrida. That the power to declare war on an "enemy" is not just one characteristic of the notion "state" but its SOLE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC is just such an arbitrary assertion. It wasn't borne out by empirical reality at the time of Schmitt's writing and is certainly not so now. It's just some Bronze-Age-y theoretical "frisson nouveau" that Schmitt put into circulation and that the increasingly faux-bloodthirsty young online-righters of today can have their wet dreams to.