If one is to identify one pre-eminent theme in Schmitt's entire effort as a political theorist it would undoubtedly be to uncover the specifically political failings of liberalism (both internally and externally), and to trace the consequences of those failings. Schmitt consistently piques interest as the ‘foremost critic’ of liberalism. He is frequently taken as a ‘challenge’ in the renewal and repair of democratic forms of governance, and in the remedying of liberalism's most evident failings. Such a characterisation is by no means unfair. Schmitt was constantly preoccupied with the dangers, as he saw them, of liberal abstraction, legal formalism, potestas indirecta and the multiple Ent-Entungen of modern ‘politics’. In this account, Schmitt occupies a double negative position that mirrors the liberal ‘de-deings’ he attacks – he is anti-anti-politics.

So far this work has argued for a deeper understanding of the historical-theoretical aspects of that critique. Both in his detailed account of the origins of the liberal ‘problem’ and in his ideas of the irrepressible tide of liberal historicism, Schmitt displayed a complex pessimism about the prospects of the modern state and, hence, the prospect of politics in form (or, at least, in the form that we have known). The infusion of liberalism into the state is written as part tragedy, part farce, and sways between dismayed fatalism and bitter criticism of those who have blindly accelerated the process.