18 quotes
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
Political Theology (1922)
All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.
Political Theology (1922)
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
Value has its own logic. In the constitutional state that is most clearly recognizable in the enactment of its constitution.
The Tyranny of Values (1967)
The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.
Political Theology (1922)
Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating.
The Tyranny of Values (1959)
What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy.
4
The Concept of the Political (1927)
The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.
Political Theology (1922)
That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.
5
The Concept of the Political (1927)
The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.
2
The Concept of the Political (1927)
The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.
3
The Concept of the Political (1927)
Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.
The Concept of the Political (1927)
The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.
7
The Concept of the Political (1927)