One would expect both, unambiguous distance and rigorous political analysis, from Chantal Mouffe, one of the most clear-headed and insightful political theorists, who recently published an article entitled "Schmitt's Vision of a Multipolar World" (/South Atlantic Quarterly/ 104:2, Spring 2003). Mouffe argues that Schmitt's geopolitical analysis in his /Nomos/ <http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1> could be usefully applied to contemporary issues. (Schmitt analyzes the nomos, or geopolitical order of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the law that regulated relations among European states between 1700 and the beginning of World War I. This inter-state law, while guaranteeing the global hegemony of Great Britain, contained war; that is, this international legal order kept wars among European states from escalating into wars of annihilation—until World War I. With World War I this system dissolved.) Mouffe is interested in Schmitt's solutions to this collapse and what he considered its most dangerous side-effect, the dissolution of the classical state with its specific form of politics. ...