You’ve telegraphed your refusal to read Schmitt (and there is no reason, I suppose, why you should read anyone, Schmitt included) in the second sentence; viz., “why I should be interested in a Nazi political theorist.” It would seem there is nothing that can be said to convince you once you’ve made this determination – and you haven’t really made this determination: you’ve “heard” and you “haven’t read”! From a position of complete ignorance, you’ve already written him off.

The two most frequently cited works of Schmitt are Political Theology and Concept of the Political. Both predate his Nazi involvement. His intellectual production during the Nazi regime was quite limited and clearly reveal – as accused by the S.S. – that he was an opportunist rather than a believer. Clearly Schmitt, as an individual, desired power and influence. This lead to a series of rather unfortunate decisions that can only be characterized as stupid and crass. (You might think of Schmitt as the Cass Sunstein of his day – he’ll say anything to get that Supreme Court appointment.)

Now, that he wrote these two works prior to his Nazi involvement (both, by the way, are clearly written as Weberian political sociology) should lead us to the question – paraphrasing ADA Paul Robinette’s eternal question – is Schmitt a Nazi legal theorist or a legal theorist who was a Nazi? I’d put my money on the latter.

Of course, this is all a red herring: whether he was a Nazi or a good liberal has little bearing on whether or not his analysis is correct. Reducing the question to political affiliation is a refusal to engage with ideas.

The same argument works relative to your comparison to Yoo. I disagree with Yoo, therefore I can reject Schmitt. This is sloppy and lazy – and it is why Yoo, Rumsfeld and Cheney are always going to win.

Your claim seems (I don’t know – “anticipates” is rather vague) that Schmitt is both responsible for the Nazis and responsible for rendition, indefinite detention, and torture. This, of course, is complete lunacy born out of ignorance. (Although if this were true, it would be a pretty damn compelling reason to read Schmitt – although you’ve already written him.) Schmitt is not paving the way for the replacement of legality by illegality or of normalcy by the exception, but providing a warning about both. Schmitt’s point is that liberal democracies are structured such that they have no effective means of combatting developments such as these. The legal question Schmitt is asking is how are these situations created. This is different from the political question of whether they should be created or not. The point he underlines is that liberals are unable to address that these gaps exist in the law and the legal order – recently called “constitutional black holes” in reference to the US. He isn’t advocating Guantanamo, he’s warning us about it. He’s telling us that positivist and post-positivist legal theory is unable to account for the existence of this problem and, therefore, cannot provide an analysis of the problem at all. (Positivist refusal to engage in this problem is seen, for instance, in Hart’s ridiculous attack on Austen. The question of violence in relation to law is one that must be bracketed in order to discuss the normal operation of the law.)

Last point about Schmitt – my cereal is gone and my coffee is getting cold! – is that I’ll be the first to admit that most “uses” of Schmitt (including many of those in, say, Telos) aren’t very good and provide poor interpretations of Schmitt and are limited to a small number of his texts. But, this isn’t so much a symptom of Schmitt-scholarship as it is a symptom of the structure of academic practice: “theory” is “applied” to “data” with the result that most academic work is little more than proof-texting.

Finally, I guess by your standard we shouldn’t read – say – Rawls or Kant because they are both dead except in philosophy departments. Pretty shoddy.

I know I’m being snarky here, but if you can point me to any reason at all why I should think of Schmitt as having something of value to offer the left, I’ll happily look at it.

Craig, I’d definitely agree that they seem to have misjudged Agamben’s relationship with Schmitt. It’s particularly telling (I think) that Foucault doesn’t seem to pop up much in that conversation at all. But it seems to me that Agamben’s reading of Foucault (and biopolitics more generally) is pretty crucial to his use of Schmitt and may even supplement those parts of Schmitt which their quoted section finds attractive.

Some of those comments really do seem rather uninformed.