Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Thank you to

everyone that supports the show on Patreon. You can never do this without your

support. Today's episode is part two on the work of Carl Schmidt. I hope you

love the show today. So for anybody not listening to these two episodes back to

back, I want to briefly remind everyone of the end of last episode because the

discussion on this episode jumps right in immediately where the last episode

ended. Real quick, the last episode ended talking about the ambitions of

normativism. Quote, the hope of liberalism was to get rid of the sovereign. The

reality of the world is that we have long periods of normalcy where the

government does almost nothing, punctuated by rare moments of extreme action when

everything's actually need to get done. Liberalism hasn't removed the sovereign

from the political process, and the only time pieces of paper like the

Constitution prevent the sovereign from acting are doing periods of normalcy when

the sovereign wouldn't be exercising authoritarian power anyway. To Carl

Schmidt, the biggest difference between our modern societies and the ones that

existed in the pre-liberal world is that the pre-liberal societies were just a

lot more honest about the authoritarianism that was going on. Nowadays we

got this grand illusion of liberalism that puts a bunch of window dressing on

the process and pretends the world is something that it's not.

End quote. So maybe the best place to begin our discussion today is just to say

that the fact that the sovereign still exists at some level in our liberal

societies shouldn't come as an enormous surprise to people. I mean after all

...