Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at All Soul's College, Oxford, points out in his recently published A Dangerous Mind, that attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that Schmitt's spirit pervades Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as the writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, recently much in the news because of his decision to turn down a position at New York University as a protest against America's decision to fingerprint overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).

Telos, in particular, developed a fascination with neofascist thinkers and movements in Italy

If all that sounds defeatist, at least for liberal causes, Schmitt, inadvertently, offered a reason for hope. Searching for examples of liberalism to dismiss, he happened upon Thomas Paine and the American founders. Here, in his view, were liberals typically afraid of power; indeed, he wrote with some astonishment, they naïvely tried to check and balance it through the separation of powers. In that, Schmitt was correct. John Locke, not Thomas Hobbes, was the reigning social-contract theorist of the American experience. Our tradition owes more to Montesquieu than to Machiavelli, and even when we relied on the latter, we were influenced more by his thoughts on the Florentine republic than by his apologia for The Prince. America, Schmitt seemed to be saying, is the quintessential liberal society, a point rendered with great gusto, long after Schmitt's Concept of the Political appeared, in Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Liberal to its very core, the United States has never been as attracted to the realpolitik tradition in political thought as the Germans; in fact, our best thinkers in that tradition, Hans J. Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, were immigrants from Germany. Because he showed so little appreciation for the American liberal tradition, Schmitt, supposedly a theorist of power, misunderstood the most powerful political system in the world.

Die Kontrastierung mit Machiavelli ist recht hübsch, denn dieser könnte tatsächlich die Politik mit einem illusionslosen Blick beschrieben haben, um Leuten mit guten Zielen die entsprechenden Werkzeuge an die Hand zu geben (Herr M steht auf der Leseliste ...). Schmitt hingegen war ein bekennender Nazi und Gehilfe selbiger bei der Machtübernahme (Stichwort Preußenschlag alias Papenstreich); sein "illusionsloser Blick" ist erfüllt von Zwangsvorstellungen eines in jeder Hinsicht souveränen Staates, einer Politik der Messerstecherei, der metaphysischen Fundierung irdischer Institutionen und der Gottesgnade des Führertums.