ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt especially commended Lowith's implication that the modern theories of progress articulated since the age of enlightenment had merely secularized but never truly superseded, Christian eschatology. Just as in the 1920s, Schmitt had drawn on Kierkegaard's existentialism to develop a theory of political decisionism, now he took inspiration from Toynbee to elaborate a form of historical existentialism. Schmitt's articles from the 1950s can be read as a crusade against the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union. Therein he formulated a sweeping critique of the way in which the superpowers had altered the old world order just to replace it with what he regarded as a global civil war. He branded the American-Soviet dualism as the main factor preventing the establishment of a new nomos for the postwar era, a nomos which should have been grounded, instead, on a new division of the earth and a new drawing of boundaries
