Carl Schmitt

Political Romanticism is fundamentally a work of moral theology. Like the old scholastic moral manuals, it shows a persistent concern about vanity, which Aquinas identified with the appetite for novelty. Fascination with the new introduces an anarchic principle whose intellectual productions tend increasingly to the fantastic, until grasping the reality of world events becomes impossible, and political security is lost. The Romantic is a fabulist whose artifice threatens the viability of the community to function politically, and once more, vanity earns its place amongst the deadly sins.

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