ABSTRACT
The recent revival of interest in the writings of Carl Schmitt suggests a frustration with liberal democracy, at least among those legal philosophers, political scientists and scholars of international relations who have been in the vanguard of his reassessment. Their anxieties are in one sense under - standable. In the smoothed out, globalised world of the early twenty-first century, where wars and conflicts should more easily be controlled, the ‘international community’ that Schmitt so deplored has manifestly failed to resolve political and economic problems previously attributed to the brutal divisions of the Cold War. Meanwhile, ostensibly democratic states act exactly like nineteenth-century empires, justifying disastrous military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere by reference to supposedly universal humanitarian values, another of Schmitt’s favourite targets. In these messy and tragic circumstances, is it any wonder that some are drawn to an antiliberal, anti-democratic thinker such as Schmitt who, despite his unappealing political views, offers prescient and perceptive observations that speak directly to the ironies and dilemmas that have beset the post Cold War world, particularly since 9/11?
