"More serious consideration must be given to the conceptual definition of the political offered by a well-known Roman Catholic exponent of Constitutional Law, Carl Schmitt. In his view the political has its own criterion, which cannot be derived from the criterion of another realm. It is the distinction between friend and foe which in his view corresponds to “the relatively autonomous criteria of other oppositions, good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic, and so on”. The eventuality of a real struggle, which includes the “possibility of physical killing”, belongs to the concept of the foe, and from this possibility the life of man acquires “its specifically political tension”. The “possibility of physical killing” — really it should be “the intention of physical killing”. For Schmitt’s thesis carries a situation of private life, the classic duel situation, over into public life. This duel situation arises when two men experience a conflict existing between them as absolute, and therefore as capable of resolution only in the destruction of the one by the other. There is no reconciliation, no mediation, no adequate expiation the hand that deals the blow must not be any but the opponent’s; but this is the resolution. Every classic duel is a masked “judgment of God”. In each there is an aftermath of the belief that men can bring about a judgment of God. That is what Schmitt, carrying it over to the relation of peoples to one another, calls the specifically political. But the thesis rests on an error of method."