Chapter 2 reinterprets Schmitt’s concept of the political. Schmitt argued that Weimar developments, especially the rise of mass movements politically opposed to the state and constitution, demonstrated that the state did not have any sort of monopoly over the political, contradicting the arguments made by predominant Weimar state theorists, such as Jellinek and Meinecke. Not only was the political independent of the state, Schmitt argued, but it could even be turned against it. Schmitt believed that his contemporaries’ failure to recognize the nature of the political prevented them from adequately responding to the politicization of society, inadvertently risking civil war. This chapter reanalyzes Schmitt’s political from this perspective. Without ignoring enmity, it argues that Schmitt also defines the political in terms of friendship and, importantly, “status par excellence” (the status that relativizes other statuses). It also examines the relationship between the political and Schmitt’s concept of representation.