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Carl Schmitt. He was a German political philosopher who was quite critical of the Enlightenment ... He points out that once the Treaty of Westphalia and the French Revolution had diminished or eliminated religious discourse from political life, politics became a religion and those who dissented from approved political ideas became heretics worthy of persecution. Enforced religious uniformity became enforced political uniformity.

This is quite interesting given that he apparently was very much preoccupied with the notion of "Jewishness" and the "Jews" and alined himself with the Nazis -- up until the defeat in 1945, after which he apparently undegone a "transformation." Are these facts correct?

I've actually done some inquiry into this. He never aligned himself with the Nazis as other German academics, notoriously Heidegger, did.

Basically, he was staunchly anti-Communist throughout the 1920s and critiqued the parliamentary system of Weimar Germany very harshly. He advocated invoking the famous 48th article of the Weimar Constitution - a provision allowing the President to declare himself a dictator in order to deal with a domestic crisis (specifically, in Schmitt's fears, a Communist coup d'etat).

When Hitler seized power, he basically ignored (as so many others did) his anti-Semitic rhetoric and hoped that he would avert the horror of a Bolshevik takeover of Germany.

When Hitler made good on his anti-Semitic rhetoric and enacted the Nuremberg laws, Schmitt basically exited public life. He was automatically suspect because his wife was a non-German Slav and a foreigner and his little daughter was of mixed blood. He decided at that point not to draw any attention to himself and went into semi-retirement.

it should be noted that his favorite student, Leo Strauss, was Jewish and Schmitt pulled strings to get him an academic scholarship in America and the visa that enabled him to escape the Nazi regime. Strauss always defended Schmitt for this reason and said that he was not an anti-Semite.

After the war, Schmitt claimed that he was always secretly opposed to Nazism and that's why he was not active in public life after 1935. In reality, he was probably fearful for his wife and daughter and too cowardly to risk losing his academic career.

I've read many of his articles from the 1920s and I don't recall any that discuss Jews or Judaism in any detail.

Understand that I'm not making excuses for his cowardice. He should have taken a stand and he did not. He should have openly opposed the regime and he failed to.

I just find it amusing that so many academics on the left, including Hannah Arendt, are willing to make excuses for Heidegger - who openly allied himself with the Nazis, gave public speeches in support of the regime and never apologized for advocating it - while they damn Schmitt for not having the courage to speak up. To this day, Heideggerian philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze dominate the academy.

The main reason: Schmitt never stopped vocally opposing Communism and, both before and after the war, advocated parties like the Catholic Center and the Christian Democrats who were more classically conservative in the American sense of the word.