Weimar | CK MacLeod's

#Weimar

Repealing Godwin’s Law

October 5, 2013 | Posted in Featured, History, Internet, Neo-Imperialism, Politics, The Exception | Tagged with: Debt Limit, Shutdown, Tea Party, Weimar | 12 Comments ↓

As a matter of history, the administrative state, the FDR state, that the Tea Partiers are glad to shut down temporarily, and that some would like to shut down permanently, is the same state that arose contemporaneously with the fall of the Weimar Republic, in relation to common and overlapping challenges, and that was consolidated in political competition and eventually at war with its immediate successor (which technically still functioned under the Weimar constitution). A serious discussion of an actual or potential crisis of liberal democracy in the leading liberal democratic nation-state, and on the system level – the level of basic responsibilities and assumptions of government – cannot help but take into account prior, concretely related crises, even if particular circumstances initially appear vastly different.

Schmitt in Cairo (cc @ibishblog)

November 23, 2012 | Posted in Featured, History, Politics, The Exception | Tagged with: Carl Schmitt, Egypt, Hussein Ibish, Mohammed Morsi, Political Theology, The Exception, Weimar | 9 Comments ↓

One could easily – the liberalist Twitterati have shown little hesitation on this one – compare Morsi’s assumption of the right to rule by decree with acts by Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or a wide range of autocrats including Morsi’s immediate predecessor. If inclined, however, to support or excuse Morsi, one might instead invoke Franklin Roosevelt after or even before the 1941 American Declarations of War, or Abraham Lincoln suspending the Constitution to save constitutional order: Each was called tyrant, traitor, dictator by his political enemies, even amidst undoubted states of emergency. Now they are, generally but not universally, called “great.”

the included, the excluded, and the difference

September 3, 2012 | Posted in Featured, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception | Tagged with: Agamben, Arab Spring, Heinrich Meier, Kahn, Political Philosophy, Schmitt, Strauss, Weimar | No Comments ↓

Any opinion we form on the exception is an opinion we form about and for ourselves, of and in our own interest. Non-dialectical political science is purely pseudo-science on this matter that would be most important to it, if only it could ever remove itself from the inquiry, but every attempted movement away from the center of discussion converts necessarily and immediately into a new problem for the selfsame discussion, a new proposition of the included, the excluded, and the difference. The discussion is the tracking of this motion: We continue it for the sake of putting our prejudices to tests for them to fail. Suspicion or resistance on the part of the reader must also vary with his or her own also inextricably compromised position.