> "The idea that liberalism is mediocre, unheroic, and without martial
> vigor
> is an old battle-cry of the anti-liberal European right. That is what
> such
> disparate figures as Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, the eminent jurist who
> justified the Nazi state, and indeed Leo Strauss believed. Schmitt and
> Jünger advocated an authoritarian state of heroic citizen-warriors,
> bound
> together by their constant struggle against outside enemies. Leo
> Strauss was
> a refugee from Nazism. Nevertheless, in a letter to Carl Schmitt, he
> expressed a similar idea: "People can only be unified against other
> people."[3] But neither Strauss nor Schmitt, let alone Jünger, would
> have
> called themselves liberals. This is where the neoconservatives and old
> leftists, such as Paul Berman, are different. Their radical vision of
> an
> American state, filled with revolutionary élan and military steel,
> battling
> heroically and alone with outside enemies, is anti-liberal, yet they
> call it
> liberalism-tough, militant American liberalism, as opposed to the
> homebody
> European variety. Berman invokes the spirit of Lincoln. To have
> mentioned
> Carl Schmitt might have hit the spot better."
Or "game theory": "heroic citizen-warriors, bound together by their constant struggle against outside enemies"; "'People can only be unified against other people.'"; People "filled with revolutionary élan and military steel, battling heroically and alone with outside enemies".
Or "a will to power is acted out in all that happens".
What is Zizek's view of the ideas associated here with Jünger, Schmitt and Strauss?
Ted