The essence of the political is the ability to make a distinction between friend and enemy as applied to activity in relationship to power. Power is a relation of control between two similar organisms and the sole function of human society is the production and reproduction of power.
Much has been written about the nature of what qualifies, in contemporary discourse, as political science, that is, the study of politics as a methodology, as something can be measured, tested, replicated. Untold gallons of ink have presumably been spilt in the attempt to codify a precise definition of the political, with the result being, as to be expected, the attempt to justify the existence of one political ideology or doctrine over another.
However, most attempts on the part of political scientists have ended, not with a working definition of what constitutes the essence of the political, but rather, what is specific to the nature of politics. Politics is activity relationship to power, and the essence of the political is the ability to create a friend/enemy disjunction. As such, we cannot speculate over the specifics of how politics might be organized in one State or another, or between different political parties or special interest groups within that State. For our purposes, questions about the differences between political theories, international relations, political methodologies, or comparative politics have nothing to do with the topic at hand and have little interest to us, unless they deal with varying degrees in power relations.
First, to explain what the political is, it would be better to attempt to answer this question apophatically, by explaining what the political is not. The political represents its own realm of human thought and action; therefore, it is not economics, ethics, aesthetics, religion, or law. Each of these realms of human thought and action are independent of one another, and while one sphere may occasionally overlap with another sphere, they do not cease to maintain their own autonomy apart from one another. Every human sphere of thought and action must rest upon its own distinctions so that they might be able to be characterized in their own specific ways. For the moment, let us assume that the distinction between these different spheres is as follows: the primary distinction upon which the economic rests upon is the degree of separation between what is utile and inutile, or, with the advent of the Market Revolution and industrialization, what is profitable and unprofitable; to the ethical, the distinction between good and evil; to the aesthetic, beautiful and ugly; to law, what is licit or illicit; to religion, the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy.
However, as we have said in the above, the essence of the political is the ability to establish a dichotomy between friend and enemy. Therefore, its essence cannot be said to derive from economics, or law, or religion, or aesthetics or morality. The political, which represents the domain of power in all human affairs, must therefore exist independently and, more to the point, prior to all the other domains of human thought and action.
What then are we to say? That all other forms of thought and action cannot overlap with the political in anyway? Of course not. However, what needs be said is that the political, because its essence lies in the distinction between friend and enemy, must represent a possibility that exists a priori in relationship towards all other human affairs. This is because the political, and only the political, presupposes the existence of a radical demarcation—of a complete separation between true friend and true enemy.
“The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their real concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed in and weakened by economic, moral and other conceptions.”¹ What gives the political its essence, its meaning, is that somewhere there exists a real possibility of violence. There are no “true enemies” in the other domains of human thought and action as they are understood from the viewpoint of the political. The economic knows no true enemies, only business rivals and competitors. Likewise, the ethical only understands the degrees of tension between human beings in the form of debate opponents and reduces every possibility of conflict to essay writing. In the religious sphere, there may exist certain degrees of antipathy between one group of believers towards unbelievers, or even between fellow believers of one religion towards another heterodox sect of like believers. But unless there exists a real possibility of violence between believers and unbelievers, or between the orthodox and the heterodox, such distinctions cannot be said to possess a political character. Carl Schmitt writes that,
“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may 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” (Schmitt 27).
As Schmitt clearly demonstrates, “an enemy only exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.”² The enemy, then, is hostis, not inimicus; πολέμῐος (polémios), not ἐχθρός (ekhthrós). The enemy here is a public, not a private enemy. He is not a neighbor where personal grievances, antagonisms, and conflicts are concerned. The true enemy is an existential enemy; he is a figure whose existence alone disrupts the status quo of the State. The true enemy can only be a figure where there exists a real possibility of violence.
To prove his point, Schmitt cites the well-known Bible passages of Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27 where Jesus commands his followers to “Love your enemies” as pertaining only to private, not public, enemies. In the Latin Vulgate, the passage reads, “diligite inimicos vestros,” and not “diligite hostes vestros.” Never in the 800-year struggle between Western Christendom and the Dar al-Islam was it ever conceived that European Christians should have abandoned the fight and thrown open the city gates of Europe to the invading armies of Saracens, Berbers, Turks, and Moors out of a supposed commandment to “love” a horde of foreign conquerors who sought to impose their religion at the expense of Christianity.
The true enemy does not presuppose personal antagonisms between one or more rational agents, but the possibility of real enmity. War follows from enmity, and war is the existential negation of the enemy.³ The oft misquoted passage in Clausewitz’s Vom Krieg of “war as a continuation of politics by other means” does not mean that military fighting is a continuation of politics. This is simply not the case. Military science has within its own possession a particular logic, rationale, stratagems, and motives. War never has a motivation of its own—as this is supplied by politics.
Does this mean that all political activity must, ipso facto, consist of a constant state of war or military intervention? No, for the possibility of neutrality always exists. But hidden within neutrality as a fact of international relations is the political reality that such a state of “being neutral” must presuppose the existence of more than one State. In other words: The State always holds a monopoly on political decision. “War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction between friend and enemy.” ⁴
Every non-political grouping of whatever kind, be it religious, moral, ethical, legal, economic, has the potential to assume a political dimension if it is sufficiently strong enough to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.⁵ A religious community which has the capacity to wage war against its unbelieving neighbors is already more than a religious community. For example, while he was in Mecca, the Prophet Muhammed was nothing more than an itinerant street preacher. After his expulsion from the city by the elders of Mecca and his subsequent exile to Medina, he became both a theocrat and a warlord able to muster an army of his disciples to inflict a crushing victory over the Quraysh. The same can be said for all his successors. The moment that Abu Bakr was able to personally decide on what countries and peoples belonged to the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb he ceased to be a religious leader of a mere “church” and became, de facto, a political sovereign.
A class in the Marxian sense ceases to be something purely economic and assumes a political dimension when it too reaches this decisive point. ⁶ The Marxist approach toward class struggle, the “General Strike” in Situationism, syndicalism and industrial unionism, are meant to be political weapons for the purpose of overthrowing the Capitalist class and establishing a proletarian State. The reality of economic classes ceases to be a sociological reality, merely, and begins to be reorganized as political factors once the underclasses in a given social hierarchy become radicalized, or in Marxian terms, assume a “class consciousness,” and begin to conceive of those above them in the social hierarchy as class enemies.
Should a religious community, a federation of labor unions organized as a revolutionary worker’s party, or any non-political human grouping assume the position of a social majority; then it would have ceased to be merely a religious, an economic, a social or legal category of organizing human beings and instead would have established itself as a State; viz., a vehicle for the exercising of power. A proletarian state, a military state, a theocratic state, an ethnostate, a bureaucratic or civil service state is by no means incapable of wielding political power any less than our democratic states in the Contemporary Era.
“The political can derive its energy from the most varied of human endeavors, from the religious, the economic and moral.”⁷ However, the political does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, ethnic, economic or belonging to any other non-political category that can affect the intensity in which human groupings join together or separate themselves. ⁸ Again, the political presupposes these degrees of intensity between all possible forms of human groupings. The essence of the State is that within its territory it excludes the possibility of such groupings into friend and enemy. However, if such a breakdown does occur, then that State has effectively ceased to exist as a political unit, as Schmitt notes,
“If the political power of a class or of some other group within a State is sufficiently strong to hinder the waging of wars against other States but incapable of assuming or lacking the will to assume the State’s power and thereby decide the friend-and-enemy distinction and, if necessary, make war, then the political entity is destroyed” (Schmitt 38).
As we have said in the above, it is the State, and the State alone, which possesses a monopoly on all political decision making. The nature of all States, regardless of how they are structured, is peace within and struggle without. The only other alternatives are civil war, being reduced to the position of a vassal or a protectorate by a much more powerful suzerain, or the dissolution of that State as political entity.
Human beings, by their very participation within a society belong, either directly or indirectly, to a pluriverse of social entities and organizations. A man might be both a husband and father, he might belong to a church, come from a particular ethnic background or nationality, he might be a member of a labor union, an Elk or Lion’s club, a freemason, or any other plethora of associations and fraternities which might demand of him his time, his money in the form of a membership fee or annual contribution, or require any other obligation from him.
Any one of these different associations might demand more of his efforts, or possibly his obedience, than the others. Masonry would impose upon him to take a vow of silence to protect the secrecy of their rites, his church may demand of him to leave his masonic lodge altogether. However, none of these associations can be said to be the decisive entity, an entity to which obedience can be said to be absolute. Above all else, it is the State which remains the sole decision-making entity. The State has the power impose upon him the burden of taxation, demand that he pledges allegiance to its flag, adhere to the laws set down by its constitution and enforced by its courts and peace officers and, finally, when the prospect is war, put on its uniform and compel him to fight and die for the continuation of its own existence. “The political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity.”⁹
We should be careful to make the mistake, as so many often do, to confuse what concretely belongs to the State as what passes for mere government. To government belongs such things as administration, bureaucracy, checks and balances, separation of powers, elections, the passage of bills into law, raising or lowering the marginal tax rate, etcetera; to the State belongs the ability to undertake the decisive action, to decide upon who is friend and who is enemy and to declare war and make peace.
Any non-political human grouping has, in ovum, the ability to take on a political dimension if the varying degrees of separation between them creates a hostility deep enough to categorize one human grouping against another as enemies. Schmitt writes,
“If, in fact, the economic, cultural, or religious counterforces are so strong that they are in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility of from their viewpoint, then these forces have in actuality become the new substance of the political entity” (Schmitt 39).
Sometimes, although rarely, two or more non-political groupings will join to band together against the power of an existing State. Such was the case during the height of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf when labor unions and the Catholic Church formed a united front against the Prussian chancellor. Other times, economic interests might overlap into the political sphere as they did in the earlier to mid-20thcentury with the sweeping rise of Marxist-Leninism and the establishment of the “people’s democracies.” Or, as in our own time in the nascent decades of the 21stcentury, the power of many States might be weakened for the benefit of international finance and multinational corporations. Again, to stress the point, the decline of the power of one State, or of a government, does not mean the abolition of the concept of the State as political fact. “The concept of the State presupposes the concept of the political.”¹⁰
This was, and continues to be, the great error of all anarchists since ever since the State has existed as a form of political reality. The abolition of government does not mean the cessation of the State as a political entity. The collapse of Siad Barre’s government in January 1991 marked the beginning of long, grueling civil war in which Somalia had no legally recognized government until 2006 when the Transitional National Government was established. To this day, Somalia is cited as a contemporary example of what a “stateless society” might look like, but a closer examination of the situation in 1990’s Somalia paints a different picture.
As we have said, the State, as an entity, and in fact it's being the decisive entity, rests upon its political character.¹¹ Following a brief transition towards a clan-based, semi-pastoralist way of life, much of the legal system fell into the jurisdiction of local Muslim clerics who united to form the Islamic Courts Union. The Union was immediately confronted by local rebels and brigand leaders, who themselves being sovereign over their own domains, resisted the attempt of the Islamic Courts Union to impose a new juridical order over the country. This did not mean, as many libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have often touted, that Somalia had reclined back into a more authentic mode of existence keeping in touch with the non-aggression principle and “natural law.” Somalia had, ipso facto, descended into a state of warlordism where the most powerful, cunning or influential strongman with the most guns was effectively able to carve out a pocket for himself out of the territory that had once been under the domain of the Somali Democratic Republic.
The famous Aristotelian phrase that “nature abhors a vacuum” was put to the test with the advent of modern astronomy; however, the expression remains true in the field of political science. The collapse of Somali Democratic Republic meant that political sovereignty was simply more diversified than it had been when the Supreme Revolutionary Council held power. Politics is the sum of human activity in relationship to power; the political is the ability to make a friend and enemy distinction, this together forms, what has been so hotly debated in both modern and contemporary legal discourse, the concept of sovereignty.
Sovereignty is ability to decide upon the exception,¹² especially where the law has receded, and the juridical order has been either suspended or abolished. In the case of Somalia, it was impossible to speak of juridical order in any meaningful sense, and the rule of law had effectively become localized. As we have said, the concept of the State presupposes the concept of the political. The political is ability to create and friend/enemy disjunction, and such an ability need not be limited to the existence of the State. Between 1991 and 2006, politics continued to abound in Somalia, even in the absence of the State.
But such an absence cannot last forever, politics abhors a vacuum. The alliance between the spheres of law and religion which culminated with the rise of the Islamic Courts Union would mark an end to the statelessness of Somali society. Even after the defeat of the Islamic Courts Union by a coalition between neighboring Ethiopia and the intervention of outside powers, Somalia would again find itself organized under a State-society in the form of a Transitional government.
The example of 1991-2006 Somalia is meant to demonstrate that the political represents the pure sum of human existence, even in the absence of the State. Thus, even when the State has declined into infirmity, has had its power constrained by law, or has even slid into oblivion, this does not mean that human society, and with-it human affairs, becomes organized by pure law or pure economics or any other form of non-political mode of association.
Sovereignty continues in the absence of law, politics in the absence of the State. The abolition of the State can never imply that the essence of the political itself has been abolished. Anarchists, utopians, and liberal philosophers have continued to put forward, and will presumably continue to do so until the end of time, personal theories, and postulations about what a stateless society might look like. We conceded, such ideations strike us as marvelously interesting.
Recently, there have even been plans to reorganize human social relations in the form of a “listening society” or according to the principles of First Economics. We say with regards to the former that an attempt to reshape human society in the from a democratically organized, socio-psychological administrative apparatus is truly innovative. To the later, with its emphasis on personal value creation, of putting dasein at the absolute center of human affairs in ways that not even Alexandr Dugin and the Fourth Political theorists have attempted is striking in its boldness and originality. While both plans put forward an attempt to reorganize human society are groundbreaking, we say to both of their creators that none of them have anything to do with the political whatsoever.
“Politics means games for power”, as the author of The Listening Society rightly admits. And behind every game for power are factions divided amongst themselves into friend and enemy. What both of these two thinkers imagine are scenarios where human beings’ needs have been, or will, be readily met; that their physical requirements for food, shelter, clothing, companionship and sexual gratification or their ability to express themselves authentically, either to be true to whom they imagine themselves to be or to express themselves “politically” in a democratic, inclusive forum are presumed to have already been fulfilled.
Both writers make the mistake of confining human affairs to a society. “Society” is not a not a political concept, it is an aggregate of non-political human groupings which may or may not itself be organized politically. Neither of these two writers ever seem to imagine, or perhaps push away at the prospect, of the real possibility of violence.
“To the State as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from that entity.”¹³ War is politics at its highest intensity, and as long as one group of politically united people is prepared to fight for its existence, freedom or self-preservation, there a State has come into existence. The State is the form of a nation prepared for action.
This fact alone should disprove all the fantastic imaginings on the part of anarchist and classical liberal thinkers. The anarchist and the liberal seek a world that is fundamentally depoliticized, where the social, the economic or the ethical have superseded the political in its own sphere; but such a world is, put simply, impossible, as this necessarily implies that the distinction between friend and enemy has, as such, been abolished. Schmitt observes that,
“The State as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own member readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies. The endeavor of a normal State consists above all in assuring total peace within the State and its territory. To create tranquility, security, and order and thereby establish the normal situation is the prerequisite for legal norms to be valid. Every norm presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation” (Schmitt 46).
For a moment, let us put away our own prejudices. Perhaps in the distant future such a world might exist. Perhaps, with the passage of time, a world economic consortium or a listening society or a worker’s utopia may one day be a reality. But in such a world it would be impossible to speak of States, only mutual associations between human beings. In such a world, the State would cease to be a political reality, because such a world implies a cessation of human groupings into friend and enemy. This world of our current imaginings, the dream of every utopian, libertarian and anarchist, would imply that the totality of human affairs would be administered in more or less the same way as an electric company or a traffic control system on a global scale. As such, it suffices to say that such a world remains an impossibility. Schmitt comments,
“For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case—and whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it—determine by itself the distinction between friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its political existence.”
It would be utter insanity for an economic-oriented society to compel its members to fight and die so that the economy as a whole might experience a burst in growth or that the rest of its members might enjoy a higher standard of living. A society founded on the ideals of pacifism would eventually have to confront the reality that not all its neighbors might share the same commitment to its own standards of peace. Paradoxically, a pacifistic society would hence have established itself as a State to confront aggressors abroad or militarists within its own borders. If the hatred of paternalism was severe enough that it bound feminists together into open conflict with non-feminists, then, at least hypothetically, a political unit would have been established.
The possibility of a world without States raises some very interesting scenarios for what might constitute the newest potential friend and enemy groupings. Would the optimists band together against the pessimists? Which side would that place the realists on? However, “because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with anthropological optimism.”¹⁴
We agree with Agamben that violence exists as the pure political object, as the “thing” of politics. ¹⁵ “War cannot altogether be outlawed, but only specific individuals, peoples, States, classes, religions, etc., which, by being outlawed, are declared to be the enemy.” ¹⁶ A world without war, and thus the friend/enemy distinction, would be a world where the political has ceased to exist. But as we have continued to say, ad nauseum, politics is activity in relationship to power, and the State, as the decisive entity, is the conclusive object through which political power is effectively exercised.
Hoppe’s vision of world consisting of “a million Lichtenstein’s,” where every man exists as a micronation unto himself, is and remains a fantasy. The non-aggression principle, which forms the central dogma of libertarianism is an untenable moral precept and nothing more than a negation of political reality. All ideologies derived from classical liberalism or anarchistic canon seek to do away with the ever-present possibility of a state of exception, where law recedes, and the juridical order is abolished or suspended. The anarchist, and especially the liberal, do away with this demerit of legal thinking by appealing to the supposed “goodness” of human nature. Humanity, they say, is naturally good; it is government that is source of human evil.
Catchwords such as “reciprocity,” or “natural law” are meaningless and empty phrases that completely ignore specific certainties with respect to the political dimension. The establishment of “mutual covenants” for the respecting of private property rights between one rational agent and another does not imply a situation where the State would cease to be. Property belongs to the domain of civil law and therefore cannot be said to be a political concept. The State is a instrument for the exercising of power; power is a relationship between one or more human beings. Activity in this regard is the essence of politics. “The existence of the State is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of every legal norm.”¹⁷
Even if a situation arose that allowed for the world to decentralize into countless micronations, this would not in any way signal the death of the political. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe, and as long as one State exists, there will always be in the world more than one State.¹⁸ Moreover, we advance that the State is the only entity large enough to allow for decentralization of any kind to occur.
The political pluriverse represents an ecosystem unto itself and, as with any ecosystem, there are predators and there are prey organisms. Libertarians should understand this analogy well, as it can also be applied to reality of the market. A marketplace of whatever industry or trade has its competitors; some are winners, others are losers, even more are absorbed into larger and much more successful companies and corporations. The market represents a domain of the struggle, so too with the political pluriverse.
However, in the case of the political struggle, the domain does not represent the acquisition of profit or goods, but power, and the struggle is not one between competitors that happen to occupy the same area of commerce, but an existential struggle between friend and enemy. The existence of one political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. ¹⁹
Even if the political pluriverse was reduced to a situation where human society was delineated along the lines of every man and his property, or between a mutual collective of communes, bioregions or intentional communities, this would not imply that the death of the State, or of the political, has come to pass. In every human relationship, there exists a degree of control between two or more similar organisms acting reciprocally between one another. A state of equality can only exist among equals, in all other human affairs, the relationship is one of protection and obedience.
This brings us to our last point, that the protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the State.”²⁰ Any political theory or ideological doctrine that does not become aware of this fact remains woefully inadequate and should not be taken seriously by students of political science. A pluriverse of intentional communities and micronations would not be one of mutual respect and reciprocity. Eventually, one of these entities would use its size, its monopoly of a certain resource, or the strength of its civil militia or private defense agencies for its own advantage and to the disadvantage of its neighbors. Already, we see the potential beginnings for a friend and enemy conflict.
Protection is not kindliness; it is acquisition of power. Obedience is not gratitude; it is submission for whatever reason. If one organism’s power increases, another organism’s or organisms must therefore naturally decrease. This is what that misunderstood genius Yockey called the Law of Constancy and Inter-Organismic Power.
The liberal thinkers of the 19th and early 20thcenturies sought to do away with political problems by substituting them with economic, ethical, or legalistic answers. We in the beginning of the 21stcentury no longer have the luxury for making such an erroneous mistake. Schmitt, who made the same claim in his own time, goes on to write,
“The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consistent individualism, leads necessarily to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces and forms of State and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of State, government, and politics. As a result, there exists a liberal policy in the form of a polemical antithesis against State, church, other institutions which restrict individual freedom. There exists a liberal policy of trade, church, and education, but absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics. The systematic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the State” (Schmitt 70).
Already the early 21st century is proving itself to be an age of absolute politics, where every question concerning human hierarchies, power structures and political activity is taking on an extreme dimension, one where the dividing lines between friend and enemy, between ingroup and outgroup, between the historical oppressors and the historically oppressed are finally reaching their natural and obvious conclusions.
Leo Strauss, in his notes on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political remarked that “the political is a basic characteristic of human life; politics in this sense is destiny; therefore man cannot escape politics.”²¹ The rationalistic ethos that emerged in the 19th century which has attempted to subjugate the political, to depoliticize human affairs and to neatly do away with the unpleasant certainty of mankind’s propensity for violence is at last having its remaining tautological inconsistencies exorcized by the reality that the 21stworld situation rests upon the of the democratization of tribalism.
“There is no rational purpose, no norm however correct, no program however exemplary, no social ideal however beautiful, no legitimacy or legality that can justify men’s killing one another for its own sake.”²² To believe anything else is insanity. The subjects of the domain of the struggle, and thus the political pluriverse, are totalities, not individuals. Nothing can validate taking the lives of other human beings other than the acquisition of power and the fight to maintain one’s own existence.
Politics is not ethics or morality; it is not concerned with questions about whether the killing of one’s enemy was good or evil; the only question is whether the organism will choose existence or non-existence.
What we have put forward is not meant to be a truculent advocation for militarism, imperialism, or a cynical attempt to dismiss the possibility that a more just, peaceful, and kindlier world is at all possible. What we are attempting to do is fundamentally get to the question of what is, and as such, are uninterested with questions about what could be. Idealistic abstractions and normative prescriptions are for us, fictions. The political is constituted by reference, by the very thesis of man’s dangerousness.²³
In conclusion, what we have attempted to do is to put forward a rubric that will allow future students of political science to endeavor towards a better understanding of the political that will avoid all of the academic pitfalls, the meaningless and ultimately unproductive mind games that have been wasted on so many shallow and unprofitable political theories, models and doctrines and redirect those intellectual energies toward a new, genuine and authentic form of political praxis.
- Schmitt, Carl. "The Concept of the Political." The University of Chicago Press, 2007. p. 27.
2. Ibid. p. 28.
3. Ibid. p. 33.
4. Ibid. p. 35.
5. Ibid. p. 37.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid. p. 38.
8. Ibid. p.38.
9. Ibid. p. 43.
10. Ibid. p. 19.
11. Ibid. p. 44.
12. Schmitt, Carl. "Political Theology." The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p. 6.
13. Schmitt, Carl. "The Concept of the Political." The University of Chicago Press, 2007. p.45.
I4. Ibid. p. 64.
15. Agamben, Giorgio. "State of the Exception." The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p. 59.
16. Schmitt, Carl. "The Concept of the Political." The University of Chicago Press, 2007. p. 51.
17. Schmitt, Carl. "Political Theology." The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p.12.
18. Schmitt, Carl. "The Concept of the Political." The University of Chicago Press, 2007. p. 53.
19. Ibid, p. 53.
20. Ibid. p. 52.
21. Strauss, Leo. "Notes on The Concept of the Political."
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
