Ricerc@Sapienza

This essay analyses the «Notes on the Concept of the Political » that Leo Strauss wrote in 1932 as a commentary on the "Begriff des Politischen" by Carl Schmitt. The first part briefly expounds Strauss's main thesis concerning Schmitt's work - Carl Schmitt proposes «a liberalism with the opposite polarity » - while the second part discusses this thesis, in an attempt to show that the distance between Schmitt and Strauss is far more radical than it might seem.

The focus of my commentary is two-fold. First, I discuss what appeared to me as the central theoretical focus of the article; the possibility to create a space, if at all, for integrating post-colonial theory into the broader research field of social and psychological studies of the consequences of colonial past.