Here's what I take from this:
1. Strauss thinks Schmitt's formulation of the political in _The Concept of the Political_ isn't sharp enough...
4. "Welcome to Weimar" means: we're in a transitional stage between a society with formal freedoms and tolerance to an authoritarian one based on ideological homogeneity and a constant state of war. Strauss' more-Schmitt-than-Schmitt concept of the political is the theoretical blueprint for this.
Curtiss
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Yup. Stunning isn't? The deeper I go into the mind of Strauss, the darker it gets. In case the list doesn't know who Schmitt was... well, look him up. There is plenty on him. He was a theology and law professor who was appointed to the bench by the Third Reich because of his political theology and thorough going anti-Semiticism, the legal litmus test of the times. But alas he wasn't quite pure enough so the SS denounced him in 1938-9. Whether that meant his appointment was rescinded or just that he had to take a lower profile in public I don't know. After WWII he reconstructed himself as a Catholic theologian. Nice huh?
Chuck Grimes