(np) Schmitt reviews

[David Morris]

*Demos*:  The common people.

*Mob*:  a crowd of unruly people.
*Origin: *1680–90;  short for Latin mōbile vulgus  the movable (i.e.,
changeable,inconstant, fickle) common people.

Doesn't Pynchon use the term the "Great Mobility" as a label for the common
people?  "Mobilus," moveable.  But who, or what is the source of
the impetus? And to what aim?

The US founders worried about the dangers of mob-rule, and put a few
safeguards into place at the start, the most important being the Bill of
Rights (!!!). Beyond that were the "checks & balances" of the three-branch
system, as well as the two-branch Congress.  But with enough impetus of
whatever kind, all of these safeguards can be made null.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/idiocracy/
Idiocracy (2006)

When a man wakes up 1,000 years in the future, he discovers that world is
so dumbed down that he's the smartest person on earth.

On Friday, July 18, 2014, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> “*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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