The Confusions of Carl Schmitt

In this short video, Jason Blakely flags some tensions in Carl Schmitt's influential notion that politics is fundamentally about an existential face off between friends and enemies. He suggests that Schmitt is contradicted by Plato's idea of justice, Aristotle's notion of bottom-up communities of good, and Augustine's claim that the human heart is not transparent as to its allegiances. One is not infallibly and unambiguously able to discern one's friends or enemies through the decisionistic powers of the dictatorial will because the human will is itself in a state of interior conflict and confusion.