Peter Thiel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Last week, I was teaching my graduate class, and a bunch of them asked me, “Why is it we keep on hearing about Carl Schmitt now?” I’ve tried to explain that to them, but why do you think there’s now a resurgence of interest in Carl Schmitt? For you, what are the valuable insights in Schmitt? Carl Schmitt was one of this group of thinkers who came to prominence in the 1920s in Weimar, Germany. Obviously, there were a lot of things that went very haywire with many of these people that, in some ways, Schmitt got somewhat entangled with the Nazis. He distanced himself a few years later, but it was some very bad judgment in certain ways. But the thing that I think is interesting, dangerous about looking at the Weimar thinkers, somehow, it was in the aftermath of World War I. Germany had lost. You couldn’t go back to the throne and altar, the empire of the Hapsburgs. You didn’t really want to go forward with liberal democracy. There were all these people who had these fairly deep critiques. In some ways, it was going back to these questions of political theology, political philosophy that had been whitewashed and set aside since the Enlightenment. Again, there were things about it that were dangerous. One way to think of the Weimar period was, it’s like the dwarves in Moria where they dwelled too deep, and finally, they awakened the nameless terror of the Balrog. I don’t think we’re ever in a cyclical world, but there are certainly certain parallels in the US in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s, where liberalism is exhausted. One suspects the democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window. What is it you think that Schmitt missed that’s very important?…

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