Maybe im misunderstanding him...

Maybe im misunderstanding him, but i dont see how Schmitt's notion that politics is ontologically about us/them is so profound. Havent people realized that ever since the dawn of states, or is this something that has become so ubiquitous that i cant conceive of anything otherwise?

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A lot of people is saying it isn't about us or them to trick their personal them. It's not as much profound as it is good to remember.

It isn't groundbreaking, but it does run counter to the universalism and implicit cosmopolitanism of Liberalism. His most influential ideas come from pic related, not Concept of the Political.

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>but it does run counter to the universalism and implicit cosmopolitanism of Liberalism
How does it really run counter to that? It can easily be reconciled with those streams if you consider that they really wish for the resolution/aufhebung of politics altogether. Schmitt himself even considered that to be the case, iirc.

Yeah, that's true. I suppose if liberalism's telos completes it will be the end of politics.

Is it worth reading?

Schmitt is never not fascinating assuming you share his interests.

You really have to understand it in the light of his earlier work. He's erecting a very subtle philosophical anthropology based on elegantly few initial premises.

He's arguing that the essence of the "political" dimension of human existence is simply whatever allows for the mobilization and administration of human beings at a fundamental level which cannot be abrogated by arbitrary individual abstention from the "social contract," meaning essentially, the sovereign's ability (whether the sovereign be an assembly, a moot, a monarch, and so on) to mobilize citizens for war against external threats, which also means necessarily the capacity to decide what constitutes an external threat and when such a threat has appeared, meaning, i.e., the sovereign is he who decides in the exception. The concrete historical content of the political in any given context is simply that which manifests politically, at the higher level (of philosophical anthropology) Schmitt is describing. That means that any "spiritual" formation (in the German sense, roughly "cultural-historical") can be or become the basis of the political in a given era. For example the political, once it has manifested, might emerge from what contemporaries consider to be an economic basis, like class warfare and class consciousness. Or it could manifest as a religious or cultural difference, or an ideological difference, or ethnic, etc. The concrete content is effectively irrelevant. What matters is that the political can emerge from any sphere. It can even emerge from "the political" sphere, in the liberal sense of the term politics, so for example in a state with a decrepit but ongoing parliamentary tradition, where "politics" essentially doesn't matter and has become mere bureaucracy, a new and vigorous party or movement capable of founding a genuine political order could emerge from concrete divisions within the decrepit, merely "political" order.

What would happen if that happened? If the motion of civil society were merely brownian and bureaucratic, atomized and "depoliticized," and then suddenly a vigorous new movement appeared capable of mobilizing people (mobilizing them for what?). If they didn't simply sweep the decrepit, formless era away by virtue of imposing their new form on the previous formlessness, it would only be because they were opposed by latent elements of the civil society. Maybe the bureaucrats don't want to be dislodged. Well, now the conflict has taken on genuinely political dimensions. Now it's effectively a war, even if it hasn't been carried out through violence yet, because the political is defined by the capacity to mobilize people in one "way of life" (however defined or perceived by those people, concretely) against a contrary way of life, which is necessarily an existential situation, i.e., an emergency, which necessarily involves delegating to a sovereign body the power to decide politically, which is irrevocable, which thereby constitutes a polity.

To the extent that liberalism seeks the resolution of all conflict, it also seeks the dissolution of the possibility of politics. He talks about this explicitly in the Concept of the Political essay. He says, one could imagine a global society with one "world politics" and nobody in conflict. But that would be, strictly speaking according to Schmitt's philosophical anthropology, no longer political. It would be "managerial," or "administrative," which is an interesting way in which Schmitt's outlook dovetails with the pessimism of Max Weber, the Frankfurt School, and many other thinkers like James Burnham and Paul Piccone (who ran Telos).

The greatest fear of Schmitt and his fascist milieu was the "letzte Mensch," the last man, the utterly managed and administered (Ted K.: "oversocialized") human animal, no longer capable of meaningful life, merely existing. Schmitt was trying to show that the global cosmopolitanism liberalism is not only ugly and not only creates such ugly post-human creatures, but is actually not even a solution to the political, since the political can simply emerge again from whatever differences exist.

The neo-liberal solution to this is to advocate constant difference mediation, constant negation of negativity in the Hegelian sense of the term. This is the philosophical foundation of multiculturalism, and it's why it is strongly opposed to nationalism and ethnocentrism. Schmitt and his friends supported nationalism and ethnocentrism because they wanted political "unities" capable of resisting Nietzsche's "levelling." Multiculturalists by contrast think that a level humanity will be a happy humanity, and instead of being like a sea with great waves (national or ideological wars, e.g.), it will instead be like a kind of constant simmer, constant little micro-differences being produced and melding into one another (so that novelty doesn't die, and humans will never truly become gray little automata). The problem with this view is that if you want to commit to it, you have to commit to leveling: leveling all racial, cultural, national, religious differences away, sanding them down to be no longer capable of "standing against" the "general consensus" (liberal cosmopolitanism), which would in effect be what Schmitt means by the political. Schmitt thinks the cessation of the political that is the liberal utopian vision will create a docile, pointless herd.

It gets more frightening when you combine this critique with the fact that all the prescriptions of well-meaning neo-liberal philosophers like Habermas also dovetail perfectly well with the leveling and deracinating tendencies of late capitalism, which wants an entire planet full of identical consumers and rationalized resources to shuffle around.

you a philosopher?