More on "our mentors may be monsters"

No one "likes" Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, but many use him,
even more since 9/11 brought out the lurking, perhaps innate, hostility
between different polities.  Thus, Susan Peterson's really good study of
the mandate system of the League of Nations (quite incisive on Churchill's
adamant imperialism and US unreliability) cites a 1932 essay by Schmitt to
good effect:


The League was founded on the principle of the equality of all civilized
states. On the basis of that civilizational claim, ‘the civilized assign
themselves the right to “educate”, that is, to rule, the less
civilized’—Article 22 of the League Covenant being ‘the most compromised
example of the legitimizing function’ of that distinction, and thus ‘the
classic summary expression of an entire epoch’. But that regime, Schmitt
insisted, was ending, not only because that ‘civilizational’ presupposition
had become ‘very problematic at least’ but also because the United States,
the coming global power, exercised domination in a different way. Behind
the universalism of the League lurked the reality of the Monroe Doctrine,
through which the United States claimed hemispheric hegemony over
ostensibly independent client states while at the same time shaping,
through its rampant economic power, the global order as a whole. Before
American power, the power to set ‘the forms of speech and even the mode of
thought of other peoples’, a German could only feel ‘like a beggar in rags
speaking of the riches and treasures of others’, but this was the model of
the future. Indeed, some seven years later, we find Schmitt justifying
Germany’s claim to a Großraum of its own.

Pedersen, Susan. The Guardians (pp. 284-285). Oxford University Press.

We can and I think must cite Schmitt, Gildersleeve, Berve, Sedlmayr and
others as we advance knowledge.  They're like criminals in our bloodlines,
there to be used, not slavishly admired.

Dan