Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the notion of friendship in Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political. Most commentators and interpreters of the German lawyer and political philosopher focus on enmity. This is because, seeing the growing pacifist, universalist and apolitical trends, Schmitt devotes more space in his writings to an enemy endangered by these trends than to a friend. To be coherent, Schmitt’s theory requires a friend to be not only a reflex of an enemy, but also an equal ontological subject. Friendship as the negation of political dissociation is tantamount to a condition of political unity. The condition of political unity is the absence within a given nation of entities which could become political, i.e. those that could provide security for obedience, expecting its members to sacrifice life for the good of the community.