The Concept of the Political

Lore & Background

For Schmitt, the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction arises from the fact of human diversity: identities and practices, beliefs and way of life can, in principle, be in conflict with one another. Schmitt attacks the 'liberal-neutralist' and 'utopian' notions that politics can be removed of all warlike, agonistic energy, arguing conflict is embedded in existence itself, likewise constituting an ineradicable trait of anthropological human nature. Schmitt attempts to substantiate his ideas by referring to the declared anthropological pessimism of 'realistic' Catholic theology. Schmitt considers the anti-perfectibilist pessimism of Traditional Catholic theology to be esoterically relevant to the inner ontological being of politics and political activity in the contemporary world, where modern people subconsciously secularize theological intellectual ideas and concerns. Schmitt criticizes political 'radicals' as ignorant, deluded, pseudo-messianic in mentality, and oblivious to the stark, hard knowledge of unveiled human nature, its esse, encoded in ancient theology, wherein Original Sin held central, axial place, intertwining his own ideas of metapolitics with a reformulated 'metaphysics of evil'.

Reader's Guide

Some people have argued that this interpretation lacks credibility, and contrary to Meier's opinion, Karl Löwith argued that the revision from the second to the third edition was not a reaction to Strauss, but an opportunistic attempt following Schmitt's membership in the Nazi Party. According to Reinhard Mehring, Schmitt's biographer, in The Concept of the Political, interpreted the 'political' as the most intense of human relations, characterized by friend-enemy relations, 'there is no underlying Catholic theme'. According to Mehring, among the critics who were outraged by this work were Catholic theologians. Mehring questioned whether Schmitt's book actually had anything to do with Catholic doctrine.

Did You Know?

• The book was published in the last days of Weimar Germany.
• Some scholars dispute whether revisions to the book were a response to Leo Strauss or an opportunistic move after joining the Nazi Party.

Defining the Genre and Its Core Characteristics

Creative nonfiction occupies a distinctive space in the literary landscape, demanding that a text be both factually grounded and crafted with deliberate attention to literary style. The genre has been called by numerous names over the years—belles lettres, literature of fact, literature of reality, verfabula—though the origin of the term "creative nonfiction" itself remains untraced. What sets it apart from academic, technical, or journalistic prose is its commitment to entertainment through prose style, even as it remains rooted in verifiable truth. Lee Gutkind, who founded the magazine bearing the genre's name, framed the writer's task as communicating information the way a reporter would, yet shaping it so that it reads like fiction. The publication's own compact summary—"True stories, well told"—captures this duality. Literary critic Barbara Lounsberry identified four pillars: documentable real-world subject matter, exhaustive research that grants novel perspectives and credibility, the use of scene to revivify context beyond objective reportage, and a polished literary prose style. Phillip Lopate added reflection as essential, urging writers to capture the mind at work.

Forms, Structures, and Narrative Possibilities

The genre resists a single fixed form, encompassing memoir, diary entries, travel and food writing, narrative journalism, chronicles, personal and hybridized essays, and even certain biographies and autobiographies. Critic Chris Anderson proposed dividing it into personal and journalistic essay subcategories, yet the genre is ultimately defined more by its absence of rigid conventions than by any established template. Book-length works that follow a story-like arc are sometimes labeled narrative nonfiction, as seen in Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart and Virginia Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst, both of which adopt the structure of traditional fiction narratives. Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs borrow narrative momentum, rhythm, and poetic cadence to lend their prose a literary quality. At the other extreme, creative nonfiction can abandon conventional narrative boundaries entirely: Natalia Ginzburg's bittersweet essay "He and I," John McPhee's hypnotic wanderings through Atlantic City in In Search of Marvin Gardens, and Ander Monson's playful, experimental pieces in Neck-Deep and Other Predicaments all demonstrate how the genre thrives when it refuses to be contained by a single structural logic.

The Ethics of Truth and the Fact-Fiction Boundary

A persistent tension in creative nonfiction involves how much imaginative reconstruction a writer may employ while still honoring the truth of events. Writers frequently address the limits of memory and the boundaries of creative invention to justify their methods. Melanie McGrath, whose Silvertown recounts her grandmother's life in what she calls a novelist's idiom, explained in her follow-up Hopping that known facts serve as a canvas upon which she embroiders, reimagining scenes where verification is no longer possible while believing this literary tinkering preserves the deeper truth. Nuala Calvi, author of The Sugar Girls, made a parallel argument: where interviewees' memories of events over half a century old left gaps, she used research and imagination to fill them, insisting the essence remained true because it came from first-hand experience. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola explored this fact-versus-fiction dynamic in their book Tell It Slant. Yet the genre has also faced serious ethical challenges.

Evolution, Experimentation, and the Digital Frontier

Creative nonfiction has always been a genre that invites structural and formal experimentation, and that impulse has accelerated in the digital age. Writers have embraced new technologies and online platforms as tools for shaping their texts, and dozens of new journals—both print and digital—now feature the genre prominently. The existence of a dedicated MFA program and a flagship publication bearing the genre's name underscores its institutional recognition, even though the precise origin of the term remains unknown. However, the rise of artificial intelligence has introduced a new and pressing challenge. An article from Duke Trinity College of Arts and Sciences warns that when writers offload the generation of ideas, images, and language to a large language model, they are, in the words of Duke professor Thoman Pfau, "actively ceding agency" to a machine, thereby depriving themselves of the inherent goods that come from exercising their own creativity. This concern sits in sharp contrast to the genre's founding spirit, which demands that a writer's unique perspective, research, and literary craft be the engine behind every narrative. The tension between technological convenience and creative autonomy now stands as one of the most significant questions facing the genre's future.