Month: December 2021

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Carl Schmitt)

“Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” Among serious students of political philosophy, at least on the Right, these may be the most famous words of the twentieth century. That sentence opens this work, Political Theology, which consists of four linked essays, bound by the theme that most exercised Carl Schmitt in the early 1920s—the edge cases of sovereignty. In the post-World War II decades, such questions seemed very remote and theoretical, part of the turmoil of a benighted age we had left behind. But we were wrong, about all of it, and Schmitt was right, that this topic is universal and timeless. Thus, from Schmitt we can learn much that we can be sure will be directly applicable to the 2020s.

Announcement: Discussion between Navarra Confidencial and Charles

Now available is my discussion with Navarra Confidencial, a Spanish news and opinion site! For better or worse, I speak no Spanish, so it is all in English. We talk politics, religion, and many other of the sorts of things one used to be discouraged from talking about. (You can also see the true horror of the Wuhan Plague, from which I was suffering at the time this was filmed.) You can find the episode here in video, or embedded below, with improved camera work on my end!) You can follow Navarra Confidencial on YouTube, on Twitter, and on Telegram, as well as directly on their site.

America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928 (Jeremy Beer)

A hundred years ago, Booth Tarkington was probably the most famous and successful author in America. But today, even in Indiana, his birthplace and the state with which he is forever associated, and where I live, Tarkington is forgotten. Purdue University has a dormitory, Tarkington Hall, at which my late father was a faculty advisor. Pathetically, the Hall’s website says of Tarkington only that he was “a Purdue student of two years who as an alumnus, made multiple generous donations to Purdue.” Time has left Tarkington behind. Perhaps this is fitting, though, because he was entranced and bound by nostalgia, an understandable but ultimately pointless guiding principle.