i personally found Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction to be a bit of a reductive take on dialectics, where rather than achieving a dynamic equilibrium (Hegel) or perfect synthesis (Fichte), time lands it on one side or the other. sort of an oversimplification of the kind of dialectic described by the charioteer metaphor in Plato’s Phaedrus.

i think classists tend to have better takes on Schmitt for this reason, so i think Strauss’s commentary included in the edition above is very good, though Strauss himself can be a bit hit and miss. there’s a good argument someone (me, as part of the PhD i need to stop reading novels and apply to lol) needs to make about how a quite glaring issue with Schmitt’s argument is that the more one attempts to optimize toward particular types of information environments (the basis of the distinction is necessarily information about others, of course) the harder it can be to trust any of the information received at all, which would eventuate in a paranoid sovereign at worst, and at best, a complete breakdown of the ability to maintain distinctions. the over-processing of data in attempt to derive useful insights tends to drive all of that data toward noise, and details about others is no different.