Benji’s Reviews > Carl Schmitt and The Buribunks: Technology, Law, Literature > Status Update

Schmitt’s decisionist philosophy is nothing but the apotheosis of late romanticism. The Sovereign is simply the romantic ‘other’ – God or Nature or Spirit or Genius – in human guise. If Schmitt dismissed political romanticism as ‘the sovereignty of the ego’, he substituted for it the egotism of the sovereign.

Wit and contempt forever jostled for pre-eminence in his writing. A liberal Pontius Pilate would simply defer the choice between Christ and Barrabas to a committee, he suggested; the liberal dream of a war to end all wars was like ‘eating the last cannibal’. These literary manoeuvres are surprising, disorienting and confounding.