If you want to understand the shared vision between the US neocons and the Christian Right and where they are taking us, you will find this letter fascinating.
Chuck Grimes
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Hohenzollernkorso 11 Berlin-Neutempelhof September 4, 1932
Dear Professor Schmitt:
I have reflected once again in the past few days on the ideas you have expressed in your Concept of the Political and also on my objections, which have in the meantime been published in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft. In the course of those reflections, two points have occurred to me that I would like to report to you by letter because I can no longer present them in my review.
As far as I have seen from various conversations about your book, your thesis is particularly subject to misunderstandings because you occasionally express yourself more or less as follows: political opposition is the highest degree of intensity of all possible group oppositions. These formulations invite the misunderstanding that the political always presupposes the prior existence of human oppositions that in themselves have an unpolitical character, in other words that the political is something subsequent or supplementary. But if I have correctly understood your opinion---admittedly taken more from an oral exchange than from your text---it leads precisely to the conclusion that there is a primary tendency in human nature to form exclusive groups.
In attempting to analyze your text more thoroughly, one gets the impression that the polemic against the Left, a polemic that at first glance appears completely unified, collapses into two incompatible or at least heterogeneous lines of thought. The opposition between Left and Right is presented (1) as the opposition between internationalist pacificism and bellicose nationalism and (2) as the opposition between anarchistic and authoritarian society. No proof is needed to show that in themselves these two oppositions do no coincide. In my review I have explained why the second opposition (anarchy versus authority) appears to me to be the more radical and, in the final judgment, the only opposition that comes into consideration. But it goes without saying that one cannot rest easy with the foregoing observation. After all, the coincidence, at first merely empirical, of bellicose nationalism an sympathy for authoritarian order can hardly be wholly accidental. Does it accord with your understanding to explain the connection between ``authoritarianism'' and ``nationalism''---allow me for now these abbreviations---as follows: The ultimate foundation of the Right is the principle of the natural evil of man; because man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified, only in a unity against---against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men. The tendency to separate (and therewith the grouping of humanity into friends and enemies) is given with human nature; it is in this sense destiny, period. But the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of ``order'' but only the condition of the state. Now this relationship of rank between the political and the state does not emerge sufficiently, I believe, in your text. Your statement ``The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political'' is ambiguous: ``presupposing'' can mean constitutive principle or condition. In the first sense the statement can hardly be maintained, as the etymology (political-polis) already proves. The reviewer of your text probably meant to make this objection in the Rhein-Mainische Volszeitung (July 5), when he charged you with ``sociologism.''
I close with the request that6 you take note of this supplement to my review with the same forbearance you show with respect to the review itself.
Respectfully yours,
Leo Straus