The Concept of the Political

A short essay by the German jurist, first published in 1927 and expanded as a book in 1932. Schmitt seeks the criterion that marks out the political from morality, economics and aesthetics, and finds it in the distinction between friend and enemy. The enemy is a public enemy that may, in the extreme case, have to be fought, not a private adversary. Any antagonism becomes political when it grows intense enough to group people into friends and enemies, and the state is the unit that decides who the enemy is and can demand that its citizens risk their lives. Schmitt argues that liberalism tries to evade the political by turning conflict into economic competition and moral debate, and that appeals to humanity can deny opponents their standing. The political world is a pluriverse of states, not a universe. Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and critics see his concept as excusing authoritarian rule, though thinkers on both left and right have taken up his critique of liberal neutrality.

It is the sharpest twentieth-century challenge to liberal ideas of politics as compromise, and it helps readers understand populism, emergency powers and polarised politics.