When I read Schmitt (and it&#x27;s been many years!), I can&#x27;t disentangle the concept of the state of exception from his insistence that politics are fundamentally about the friend-enemy distinction, and that, as he says, the qualitative element of that distinction is its ability to flare into violence.<p>So it&#x27;s hard for me to see Schmitt&#x27;s theory as anything other than the normalization of the diktat to resolve political conflicts; if the state demands orthodoxy amongst its &quot;friends,&quot; and the executive is empowered to punish deviant &quot;enemies,&quot; and the executive&#x27;s decision to impose an exception is unreviewable (which is a Schmittian prerequisite for executive power), then the state of exception essentially never ends -- as Germany found out with the Reichstag emergency.<p>What are your thoughts -- am I taking him too far? Can he be read a bit more kindly, perhaps as a more formal and rigid version of the old saw, &quot;the Constitution is not a suicide pact?&quot; Or was he, like Machiavelli, more descriptive than prescriptive in his assessments?<p>As I said, it&#x27;s been years since I read Schmitt, but I found him to be, ah, <i>bracing</i> as a thinker, a kind of prebuttal to the concept of a negotiated society that would later preoccupy thinkers like Habermas. I&#x27;d just rather live in a Rawlsian or Habermasian world than one in which political disagreements are treated as a flashpoint for war.