(np) Schmitt reviews

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

The Concept of the Political:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13761

Political Theology:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12384

Dictatorship:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/03/11/book-review-dictatorship-by-carl-schmitt/

Constitutional Theory:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25214

The Nomos of the Earth:

https://journals.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/CCR/article/viewFile/13026/12889

Hamlet or Hecuba:

http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/marioschmitthamlet

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"/Thus democracy appeared to have the self-evidence of 
an irresistible advancing and expanding force. So long as it was 
essentially a polemical concept (that is, the negation of established 
monarchy), democratic convictions could be joined to and reconciled with 
various other political aspirations. But to the extent that it was 
realized, democracy was seen to serve many masters and not in any way to 
have a substantial, clear goal. As its most important opponent, the 
monarchical principal, disappeared, democracy itself lost its 
substantive precision and shared the fate of every polemical concept. At 
first, democracy appeared in an entirely obvious alliance, even 
identity, with liberalism and freedom. In social democracy it joined 
with socialism. The success of Napoleon III and the result of Swiss 
referrenda demonstrate that it could be conservative and reactionary, 
just as Proudhon prophesied. If all political tendencies could make use 
of democracy, then this proved that it had no political content and was 
only an organizational form; and if one regarded it from the perspective 
of some political program that one hoped to achieve with the help of 
democracy, then one had to ask oneself what value democracy itself had 
merely as a form. The attempt to give democracy a content 
by transferring it from the political to the economic sphere did not 
answer the question./"

? Carl Schmitt, /The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy/ (Duncker & 
Humblot, 1923; MIT Press, trn. Ellen Kennedy, 1985) extract from page 24.


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