1. adam_tooze is a thinker & writer of the highest quality. His intellectual historical insight, combined with laser-like focus on the key events that define the sweep of meaning in history, is exactly what is needed - a sort of negentropic hopefulness.
2. This article “After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics”, is well worth reading ... & re-reading. Contrary to the sense of terminal fragmentation that some political theologians assume is our destiny, he offers a vision of consolidation & consensus. e-flux.com/journal/114/36…
3. Politics is beginning to move in subtly consensual directions, he claims, even on the climate. Not by baptising a metaphysical paymaster that can prematurely unify disparate actors by force, but because human agents are realising this is a form of life that makes sense.
4. “Latour’s Gaia is making its force felt”: Tooze likens this coming-of-age of politics to the regulation provided for us by the autopoetic, metabiotic Earth system that Bruce Clarke so wonderfully describes. upress.umn.edu/book-division/… 
5. Tooze then contrasts this to the stunted & deficient vision of politics offered by Schmitt, with its insistence on zero-sum friend-enemy encounters. His magnificent wheel diagramme shows how Schmitt’s politics leads either to totalization or annihilation. Nothing in-between.
6. Instead, he write, "let us situate diplomacy in a circle of modalities of order—or perhaps a compass—that can be traveled in either direction, and which also allows cords to be drawn across, a circle”.
7. I am with him, yes. But I also wonder if this is underplaying the resources that are available in Schmitt’s own political theology to come to the same conclusions – to achieve the very same “diplomatic encounters” for which Tooze himself is eagerly scanning the horizon.
8. Schmitt too feared the forces of totalization and annihilation, & to combat this sought to delineate an anthropology, even a psychology, of the human individual who could participate in precisely these real diplomatic encounters that Tooze describes.
9. Contrary to the claim of some rather banal interpreters of his work, Schmitt’s concern was always to outline the “dignity” of individual human subjects. Schmitt believed this "dignity" could only be secured politically.
10. I use the word “dignity” in light of a comment Schmitt made in his early work, his habilitation thesis, Der Wert des Staates, where he states the following: ....
11. “durch die Zurückführung des Wertes des Individuums auf seine Ausgabe und deren Einfüllung ist daher nicht die Würde des Einzelnen vernichtet, sondern erst der Weg zu einer gerechtfertigten Würde gezeigt”
12. My trans. “the derivation of the value of the individual from its task and from the fulfilment of that task does not destroy the dignity of the individual, but rather it opens up the possibility of a justified dignity in the first place”.
13. Schmitt’s understanding of politics facilitates an ontology of plural representation, that is, it provides a conceptual framework by which individual units can occupy a whole that is representative of their own being.
14. Schmitt’s political theology, properly understood, goes on to argue that religion can be the life-giving force that equips individuals to fulfil this vocation for "dignity" within larger structures, without having recourse to authoritarian exceptionalisms.
15. Tooze seems surprised that @BrunoLatourAIME allies with Schmitt. But Latour is providing the more subtle reading. The true question is: how can we achieve the diplomatic encounters that Tooze desires *without* going through the Nazi jurist. That's the brain-scratcher!
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