Schmitt & the Comintern

There's an interesting paper to be written on the relation between Carl Schmitt's conception of the Catholic Church's political role in his Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form and the actual political operations of the Comintern. Political institutions (or jurisdictions) which transcend nations and hence can play dirty Machievellian games in national politics.

Democratic tragedy

It's taken me a while since I have been writing my paper on E.M. Forster's Howards End off and on for six months, but at last (after giving it at Yale) I realise that the key to the novel is a perceived opposition between the spirit and the letter of democracy, which in literary terms can be regarded as tragic. Democratic will relies on feelings and connections that political democracy undermines. In political and social terms that is the tragedy to which the fiction reverts.