12 quotes
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)
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.
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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)
That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Concept of the Political (1927)