“In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.”

In what sense Michael?

What in your view was it in Nietzsche that Schmitt never came to terms with?

Do you mean Will to Power in terms Political, as in the Political expression of a people?

From my reading of Nietzsche he never meant Will to Power in anything other than an individual sense, simply because he was using himself as a reference point, and with reason. Since, up until the time he was publishing, no one – not one single individual who had left a record of his experience – had gone as far as Nietzsche. In fact, a thought in passing, one of the most touching things about reading him is that he knew this about himself and wanted others to know it too – and that one of the things that accounts for the shrill tone of his later work is that he knew no one would until he was long gone.

Either way this is why he’s often called the Father of the Modern Age – though I prefer to call him the First Son of Romanticism.

So he only really had himself as a reference, though there were certainly other people that he admired, other literary or historical figures, such as Geothe for example, that he seemed to think served as powers of example for the kind of human being he was interested in talking about.

Nietzsche, in my view, was concerned with cultural transcendence and self-transcendence – the two go together. I believe that his political expression of this (political in the sense you seem to be using here) was “a collective of individuals” and I regret to say I can’t locate the source, but I am sure he’s used it (perhaps it’s in The Gay Science).

These are individuals who have experienced cultural and self transcendence because they came to recognize and accept one of the major themes of Romanticism – alienation – as central to any solution to the problem of value, a problem that arises when the values of the present system are no longer tenable.

This is useful, in fact, all important, for us to know. As my guess is that as Intellectuals and as White men, Alienation is something many of you gentlemen know something about.
And to a man you are all concerned with values and their eventual expression in a political context.

This is one reason why I would argue that in terms of historical periods we are still firmly in the period of cultural history known as Romanticism. Never the less, it’s also clear that we have yet to fully transcend the Enlightenment.

In any event, I think it’s important to make a careful distinction between the Individuality of the Enlightment and the Individuality of Romanticism – and how the Individuality of Romanticism can help us politically in a way that nothing else could match.

Mr. O’Meara, your overview inspired me to finally purchase that copy of Concept that has been collecting dust at the finest bookstore in Sydney yesterday. I’ve read Concept quite a few times now, but have been lazy in purchasing Schmitt’s works. Shame on me, especially since I consider myself a serious student of Schmitt’s. I picked up the expanded edition. Funny how the English translation is always of the second edition. Perhaps the third edition has a swastika at the bottom of every page coupled with Heil Hitler!

Nothing beats the text itself! I’ll type a few of my favorite key passages that correspond to passages from this text.

From page 48.

Under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society, whose order in the economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations. To justify such a demand on the basis of economic expediency would contradict the individualistic principles of a liberal economic order and could never be justified by the norms or ideals of an economy autonomously conceived.
…
To demand seriously of humans beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. It is a manifest fraud to condemn war as homicide and then demand of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there will never again be war.

From page 61.

Yet it remains self-evident that liberalism’s negation of state and the political, its neutralizations, depoliticalizations, and declarations of freedom have likewise a certain political meaning, and in a concrete situation these are polemically directed against a specific state and its political power. But this is neither a political theory nor a political idea. Although liberalism has not radically denied the state, it has, on the other hand, neither advanced a positive theory of state nor on its own discovered how to reform the state, but has attempted only to tie the political to the ethical and to subjugate it to economics. It has produced a doctrine of the separation and balance of powers, i.e., a system of checks and controls of state and government. This cannot be characterized as either a theory of state or a basic political principle.

As can be seen, there’s a reason why Schmitt is such a classic. The left have been trying to use him to either, a) strengthen liberal democracy, or, b) gut him for other purposes. Usually those that come under b) are quasi-anti-liberals, usually former Marxists, that can’t bring themselves to become liberals so after searching for a new god post-Wall found Schmitt. They generally miss the point.

Remember this gentlemen, one cannot evade the political. When a people gives up its ability to distinguish friend from enemy the political does not disappear from history; only a weak people.

The allegedly divine right, supposedly endorsed by Christ, was replaced with a clearly infernal tyranny, definitely endorsed by Satan.

On a more serious note, I strongly disagree with the following:
‘The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.
…
Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.‘
Consider the examples of Pythagoras and Socrates. Pythagoras was quite stern enough to demand his followers die for their way of life (although the few Pythagorean martyrs may have been misunderstanding the doctrine) and Socrates famously drank hemlock to make a philosophical and political point.
The “political” power of Pythagoras and Socrates did not depend on any kind of “state,” so far as I can tell. Socrates was involved with an attempted rebellion, but that was not the source of his authority. Pythagoras was a cult leader, but his authority was not mere charisma nor mere intellectual distinction.
The very human affections between genetically related individuals are of course much nobler than the exploitative opportunism of usurers, pimps, and slave-traders. But stronger than shekels, stronger even than human genetic affinity, is the connection between each human soul and archetypal reality.
‘In the Iliad, Book 8, Homer relates a story in which Zeus boasts to the other gods about his strength, saying that if one were to hang a golden chain from the sky, and attach the earth, the sun, and the moon, and the sea and all the other gods to it, he will be able to pull them up, and yet all of them combined would not be able to pull him down out of heaven.’
http://vinyl2.sentex.ca/~tcc/FAQ/FAQ_AZ.html#Homer
Neopagan whites will say that this Prime Mover is Zeus or Odin; materialist whites will say that this Prime Mover is the reality of physical law; yogically inclined whites will merely repeat Tat Tvam Asi; Heraclitean philosophers will stress that which dynamically lives and Parmenidean philosophers will stress that which has unchanging being.
All of these dualities – neopagan versus technocratic, Heraclitean versus Parmenidean, are resolved by what Minos sang to Zeus:

But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

The Christian Apostles thought so highly of this pagan truth that they quoted it in the 17th chapter of their Acts.

Such archetypal truths are stronger than material conditions, stronger than politics, stronger than circumstances of wealth and accidents of health. Even if Bruno was burned at the stake, Carl Gustav Jung revived alchemy for the modern world. Such archetypal truths are stronger than materialistic nihilism, even without a pro-white state to protect those who teach archetypal truths.