V. V. Zubov
The article explores the political and ontological features of the views of the 20th century German political thinker and legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Using the methods of narrativization, classification, logical-philosophical reflection, analysis, clustering, political-conceptual comparativism and historical analogy, the author characterizes Schmitt’s interpretation of the metaphysics of power as a confrontation between “friends” and “enemies”, explicates the concepts of the Sovereign and the state of exception, and offers logical-philosophical reminiscences of C. Schmitt’s political worldview based on the theoretical and political discourse of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is established that C. Schmitt’s ontology of politics appears as a condition of permanent struggle between conflicting forces seeking to acquire or retain power, which prescribes the complete subordination of all political phenomena – from institutions themselves to ethical evaluations of the political – to the continuity of the confrontation between “friends” and “enemies”. It is noted that the ideal of the Sovereign occupies a crucial place within Schmitt’s system of political ontology, since it is the Sovereign who acts as the driving force of the existential processes of power relations, understood as a clash of antagonistic actors, brought to the extreme of disagreement. Referring to E. Gentile’s concept of political religion, G. Morgenthau’s realistic theory of international relations, and contemporary approaches to the analysis of political manipulation, the author observes that C. Schmitt’s political-ontological construct, in explicit or implicit form, was in demand both in 20th century political science and in contemporary political and international relations theory. In conclusion, it is concluded that the world of political Carl Schmitt can be described in the most general terms through the category of extreme.