In the 1987 Telos special issue devoted to Carl Schmitt, G. L. Ulmen and Paul Piccone asked “Why Schmitt? Why Now?”—attempting to respond to the outrage sparked by this journal’s serious engagement with a thinker associated with Nazi Germany. In the intervening two decades, the censorious resistance to Schmitt has not subsided, but the urgency of his ideas has dramatically increased. With the replacement of the Cold War by the War on Terror and the ICBM with the suicide bomber, game-theory calculations and the realism of missile counts have given way to efforts to understand the enemy. [1] Culture precedes politics, life precedes law, theology precedes order. Ergo Schmitt.

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