more Carl Schmitt

Remember Alan Wolfe's brain-damaged article on Carl Schmitt in _The
Chronicle of Higher Education_ a while back? It included a gratuitous
smear of Paul Gottfried. Gottfried's response is now online.

Interestingly, it turns out that Wolfe had earlier reviewed one of
Gottfried's books for the _New Republic_ -- not Gottfried's
intellectual biography of Schmitt, but nevertheless a book which
included a critical discussion of Schmitt's work.

Anyway, the _Chronicle_ didn't print Gottfried's letter, but it's at

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried58.html

I was going to cut and paste excerpts, but the letter's only five
paragraphs long, so just read it if you're interested in Carl Schmitt.
Comments welcome, of course.

My previous post included a link to Gottfried's (rejected) letter to
the _Chronicle_ after the journal slandered him. Now he's written
about his unsuccessful attempt to get them to print his self-defense.
It's at <URL:http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried59.html>.

Here's the main part:

On April 5, the _Chronicle_, which is a widely distributed
publication aimed predominantly at academics and university
administrators, featured a long commentary by Boston University
sociologist Alan Wolfe. This screed made questionable points,
none of which was even minimally documented: e.g., that German
legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in May
1933, has had a profound and continuing influence on the American
Right as well as on the European Left, that Leo Strauss, who
shaped the thinking of neoconservatives directly or through his
students, idolized the "fascist" Schmitt, and that my works on
Schmitt typify the American far Right's attraction to a European
extremist. Although it would have taken reams of paper to address
all the factual and conceptual inaccuracies contained in this
article, I did feel impelled to send the _Chronicle_ a short
self-defense....

Because of a warning that its editors would not publish a long
rejoinder, I limited myself to three sparse paragraphs, filled
with factual corrections. But no sooner had my response gone off
via email then I learned from an editorial assistant that the
_Chronicle_ would not publish my letter unless there was
"documentation" for certain controversial views, to wit, that the
German newspaper _Junge Freiheit_, which Wolfe had characterized
as a very far right German weekly for which I had written, was not
"extremist," and that there were American journalists who, unlike
Carl Schmitt, upheld the moral value of an American "global
democratic" empire. In order to convince the editors that _Junge
Freiheit_ was not a neo-Nazi rag, I faxed per request multiple
pages from German legal experts underlining the highly partisan
nature of the accusations made against the weekly by the
"anti-fascist" Left. But no matter what I sent off, the
documentary evidence did not suffice to change the editors' minds.
I then proposed to the assistant that her bosses drop the
offending sentence and publish the rest of my response. The
editors, she made clear to me, were under no obligation to print
my defense. Nor did they feel under any obligation to get back to
me. What made this incident particularly galling was the double
standard being applied. Wolfe was allowed to call me a fascist or
anything else he wanted, without having to supply any proof. I,
on the other hand, could never meet the standards of
substantiation necessary to defend myself against his slanders --
and against those of the publication that showcased his
invectives.