Excerpt

We must recognize there is always a threat, always an enemy.… Because there is no such thing as universal peace.… The central function of government is the creation and enforcement of security.—Jon Meacham, “A Case for Optimistic Stoicism”¹

Toward the very end of his life, Carl Schmitt was confident that a major discussion of his work was about to begin, lamenting that he would not live to experience it. In 1983, that wishful expectation appeared as overly optimistic as it was improbable that such a discourse would be significantly inspired and accelerated by a leftist intellectual forum in the…