Review of Hitchens autobio thru Carl Schmitt Lens

[rich]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n12/david-runciman/its-been-a-lot-of-fun

What he most resembles, to an almost uncanny degree, is a particular
kind of political romantic, as described by Carl Schmitt in his 1919
book Political Romanticism. Schmitt was ostensibly writing about
German romanticism at the turn of the 19th century (the intellectual
movement that flourished between Rousseau and Hegel) but his real
targets were the revolutionary romantics of his own time, including
two of Hitchens’s Trotskyite heroes, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht. For Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the
quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for
excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want
something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be
at the heart of things. As a result, political romantics often lead
complicated double lives, moving between different versions of
themselves, experimenting with alternative personae. ‘Reversing one’s
position between several realities and playing them off against one
another belongs to the nature of the romantic situation,’ Schmitt
writes. Political romantics are ostensibly self-sufficient yet also
have a desperate need for human comradeship. ‘In every romantic we can
find examples of anarchistic self-confidence as well as an excessive
need for sociability. He is just as easily moved by altruistic
feelings, by pity and sympathy, as by presumptuous snobbery.’
Romantics loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping
power itself, sometimes indiscriminately: