Political Theology was originally published in 1922 and it represents Schmitt’s most important initial engagement with the theme that was to preoccupy him for most of his life: that of sovereignty—that is, of the locus and nature of the agency that constitutes a political system.
“Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. . . . There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological ones” (PT, 65). In 1929, Schmitt will lecture on Barcelona on this topic as “The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticization.”
Schmitt published his most well-known and influential work, The Concept of the Political, in 1927 (revising it for republication in 1932). From its opening line – “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political” – Schmitt seeks to define what “the political,” and therefore the business of the political state, actually is. His answer is straightforward: the political is no less and no more than distinguishing between one’s friends and one’s enemies.
For Schmitt, the essence of politics is not parliamentary debate, or building consensus, or setting tax policy, or even determining who gets to be in charge of running things. Instead, “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism.” It is “the ever present possibility of combat” that comes into existence whenever one “collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.” Such a divide between groups may begin over religious, moral, cultural, economic, or even completely trivial differences, and continue to always be dressed up in those terms. But all such non-political differences are pushed aside at the precise moment that they become strong enough to “group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy,” and are thereby subsumed into the political.