Πολιτική θεολογία. Τέσσερα κεφάλαια γύρω από τη διδασκαλία περί κυριαρχίας

Politische Theologie #1

by Carl Schmitt, Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης (translator)

Περιεχόμενα

ΣΗΜΕΙΩΜΑ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΕΚΔΟΣΗ
ΠΡΟΚΑΤΑΡΚΤΙΚΗ ΠΑΡΑΤΗΡΗΣΗ ΣΤΗ ΔΕΥΤΕΡΗ ΕΚΔΟΣΗ
Ι. ΟΡΙΣΜΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΡΧΙΑΣ
ΙΙ. ΤΟ ΠΡΟΒΛΗΜΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΡΧΙΑΣ ΩΣ ΠΡΟΒΛΗΜΑ ΤΟΥ ΝΟΜΙΚΟΥ ΤΥΠΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΩΣ ΠΡΟΒΛΗΜΑ ΤΗΣ ΑΠΟΦΑΣΗΣ
ΙΙΙ. ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ ΘΕΟΛΟΓΙΑ
IV. Η ΑΝΤΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΤΙΚΗ ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΚΡΑΤΟΥΣ (DE MAISTRE, BONALD, DONOSO CORTES)
ΣΗΜΕΙΩΣΕΙΣ ΤΟΥ ΜΕΤΑΦΡΑΣΤΗ
ΕΠΙΛΕΓΟΜΕΝΑ

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Law, Nonfiction, Religion, Theology, Theory

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Carl Schmitt's early career as an academic lawyer falls into the last years of the Wilhelmine Empire. (See for Schmitt's life and career: Bendersky 1983; Balakrishnan 2000; Mehring 2009.) But Schmitt wrote his most influential works, as a young professor of constitutional law in Bonn and later in Berlin, during the Weimar-period: Political Theology, presenting Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, appeared in 1922, to be followed in 1923 by The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, which attacked the legitimacy of parliamentary government. In 1927, Schmitt published the first version of his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, defending the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy. The culmination of Schmitt's work in the Weimar period, and arguably his greatest achievement, is the 1928 Constitutional Theory which systematically applied Schmitt's political theory to the interpretation of the Weimar constitution. During the political and constitutional crisis of the later Weimar Republic Schmitt published Legality and Legitimacy, a clear-sighted analysis of the breakdown of parliamentary government Germany, as well as The Guardian of the Constitution, which argued that the president as the head of the executive, and not a constitutional court, ought to be recognized as the guardian of the constitution. In these works from the later Weimar period, Schmitt's declared aim to defend the Weimar constitution is at times barely distinguishable from a call for constitutional revision towards a more authoritarian political framework (Dyzenhaus 1997, 70–85; Kennedy 2004, 154–78).

Though Schmitt had not been a supporter of National Socialism before Hitler came to power, he sided with the Nazis after 1933. Schmitt quickly obtained an influential position in the legal profession and came to be perceived as the ‘Crown Jurist’ of National Socialism. (Rüthers 1990; Mehring 2009, 304–436) He devoted himself, with undue enthusiasm, to such tasks as the defence of Hitler's extra-judicial killings of political opponents (PB 227–32) and the purging of German jurisprudence of Jewish influence (Gross 2007; Mehring 2009, 358–80). But Schmitt was ousted from his position of power within legal academia in 1936, after infighting with academic competitors who viewed Schmitt as a turncoat who had converted to Nazism only to advance his career. There is considerable debate about the causes of Schmitt's willingness to associate himself with the Nazis. Some authors point to Schmitt's strong ambition and his opportunistic character but deny ideological affinity (Bendersky 1983, 195–242; Schwab 1989). But a strong case has been made that Schmitt's anti-liberal jurisprudence, as well as his fervent anti-semitism, disposed him to support the Nazi regime (Dyzenhaus 1997, 85–101; Scheuerman 1999). Throughout the later Nazi period, Schmitt's work focused on questions of international law. The immediate motivation for this turn seems to have been the aim to justify Nazi-expansionism. But Schmitt was interested in the wider question of the foundations of international law, and he was convinced that the turn towards liberal cosmopolitanism in 20th century international law would undermine the conditions of stable and legitimate international legal order. Schmitt's theoretical work on the foundations of international law culminated in The Nomos of the Earth, written in the early 1940's, but not published before 1950. Due to his support for and involvement with the Nazi dictatorship, the obstinately unrepentant Schmitt was not allowed to return to an academic job after 1945 (Mehring 2009, 438–63). But he nevertheless remained an important figure in West Germany's conservative intellectual scene to his death in 1985 (van Laak 2002) and enjoyed a considerable degree of clandestine influence elsewhere (Scheuerman 1999, 183–251; Müller 2003).

Unsurprisingly, the significance and value of Schmitt's works

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 1 out of 5]

Exceptional Nonsense; And Exceptionally Dangerous

Political Theology is the constitutional playbook for fascism. Written in the 1920’s, the book succinctly establishes the ultimate (that is to say theological) rationale for radical authoritarian nationalism. It remains a favourite text for more recent theoreticians, especially those with populist and evangelical tendencies, like Steve Bannon, in the United States.

For Schmitt, the sovereign, that entity in government beyond which there is no appeal, is “he who decides the exceptions.” That is, the person who can both define what constitutes an exceptional case in law, as well as what the disposition of that case will be, is the foundation of the state.* To understand the import of this claim, one only need contrast it with the governmental philosophy of separation of powers contained in the U.S. constitution.

The ‘exception’ in Schmitt’s conception is equivalent to a period of ‘emergency’. During this period, the sovereign may not only suspend the constitution, as sovereign dictator he may amend it to suit the situation, that is, to meet a pressing need. ‘Whose need?’ Is of course the central issue. Schmitt defines it as ‘ours’; ‘us’ being defined negatively as not ‘those who are against us’. In short ‘we’, the people who constitute the state which is subject to sovereign power, are those who subscribe to the concept of the sovereign dictator. One is either friend or enemy. Each category defines the other. The logical loop is airtight.

Politics, therefore, has a rather peculiar meaning within this framework. It cannot mean pluralistic conflict and debate to arrive at some compromise because ‘friends’ cannot be in conflict with each other and ‘enemies’ are there to be overcome.

Similarly, there cannot be any fixed ‘rule of law’ since all law is situational and needs to be adapted to the needs of the people and the threats against them, that is their enemies. Human beings, Schmitt believes, cannot be made subject to a set of political rules or universal laws because as human beings the content of their lives and threats to those lives cannot be anticipated. Any insistence on law as such imperils the very existence of the people as well as their state.

In short: rules are essential for public order and the existence of the state. But, critically, rules are there to be broken as necessary to ensure the health and welfare of the state. Not broken by just anyone of course, only by the sovereign, the dictator, the leader, the Fuhrer. The political must be eliminated and replaced by organizational and technical rationality in order to prevail against the enemy.

What do these claims have to do with theology? Schmitt believed that we have entered a secular age which is dominated by ‘hollowed-out’ Christian institutions that have lost the power they had at the height of European Christianity in the 16th century. His aim is to restore the legitimacy and strength of power held by medieval, of course Christian, monarchs to the leaders of the modern state. An up-to-date version of L’etat c’est moi.

This may sound alien to anyone brought up in modern democratic state. But it is a theory that has been promoted consistently by not just the Catholic Church but by most Protestants sects. This theory is that the source of all power, including political power, is God. Power is distributed, like grace, from this source through various institutions of church and government as if in a series of waterfalls. Each level is granted what they need to carry out their duties, and passes on the degree of power necessary for subordinate levels to do the same.

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the Catholic Church fought bitterly against democracy and in favour of monarchy, specifically on the basis of this theory of power. Schmitt, a Catholic, was acutely influenced by Catholic philosophers and theologians who were reacting primarily to the dislocation of ecclesiastical power brought about by the French Revolution. [see my review of East West Street for details: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...]

Today it is Trump and his band of evangelical supporters who are carrying the flag of sovereign dictatorship. Trump’s clear attempt to eliminate not just his political opponents, but politics itself is evidence of his intent. Similarly his persistent efforts to define real Americans as not immigrants nor as Muslims, nor as black people, nor even as members of the Democratic Party, are tactics taken straight from Schmitt. Trump’s recent claim to be above the law, to be able to pardon himself, is perhaps the clearest example of his intention to take control of the ‘exception’ in Schmitt’s sense.

This also explains why so many American Evangelicals are so intensely attached to an obviously vile, mendacious, and corrupt leader. He has, in their view, been appointed by God to clean the stables, to drain the swamp, to overturn the money-changers who are all engaged in the un-godly practice of politics. It is politics which these religious enthusiasts despise, particularly politics which contradict their beliefs in their own Christian superiority.

So if you have wondered about what the connection is between Bannon (lapsed Catholic), Pence (evangelical Catholic), Barr (Traditionalist Catholic) and many others surrounding 45, check out Schmitt’s little book. If what is happening appears to be a religious war, this is not illusory. Theology is most powerful where it is least challenged, that is among true believers.

But it is a war sparked not by Muslims or immigrants, or black people. Rather it is created by something that has become embedded in the fabric of modern Christianity: the belief that power is and should be controlled by ‘us’, the community of believers, the Christian Ummah. It is after all a matter of divine right. As a cradle Catholic myself, I point this out with deep regret. So it goes.

* I suspect that Schmitt’s inspiration for this formulation is the 11th century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury. His ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God defines God as "aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit": that which it is not possible to think of anything greater. This is the political equivalent of Schmitt’s proposition and provides a convenient surrogacy for God in the role of sovereign dictator.

Postscript 14/08/20. Carl Schmitt lives in Trumpian law: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01...

[W. C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forget the neoconservatives. Their bogus neo-Platonism predicated on the noble lie was a merely half backed version of their somewhat inscrutable master, Leo Strauss. No, here it is---the description of the realm of realpolitik as it is practiced by our current administration. Back in the 1920’s, Schmitt formulated what is to my mind the most succinct version of the nature of the political in its raw form: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Such is the first line of the book and the general view of politics. By ‘exception’, Schmitt means those moments when normal laws and codes of action are thrown out the door, such as, for the U.S., 9/11. The key to the argument is that power resides in the ability to be extra-legal, to change the rules by using moments of confusion to overpower them. No wonder, then, that Mr. Schmitt, writing this text in the absurd days of Weimar Germany, would then go on to endorse and continue to think and write for the Nazis.

Schmitt is someone everyone ought to read because he provides a precise formulation to what happens when powerful people see themselves as privileged to do with power what they will above and beyond mere laws. Read it with fear, trembling, and recognition.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” Among serious students of political philosophy, at least on the Right, these may be the most famous words of the twentieth century. That sentence opens this work, Political Theology, which consists of four linked essays, bound by the theme that most exercised Carl Schmitt in the early 1920s—the edge cases of sovereignty. In the post-World War II decades, such questions seemed very remote and theoretical, part of the turmoil of a benighted age we had left behind. But we were wrong, about all of it, and Schmitt was right, that this topic is universal and timeless. Thus, from Schmitt we can learn much that we can be sure will be directly applicable to the 2020s.

Political Theology, published in 1922, is generally regarded as background and backdrop for Schmitt’s 1927 The Concept of the Political, in which Schmitt more precisely lays out his own mature political positions, including the friend-enemy distinction and the need of a legitimate state to bring stability and order. Yet this book should not be under-rated; in particular, Political Theology contains the essence of Schmitt’s core political theory, decisionism, which rejects that any system can contain within itself all tools necessary for governance, and thus ultimately one supra-legal authority must decide questions not covered by existing law. “[T]he decisionist implements the good law of the correctly recognized political situation by means of a personal decision.”

In his 1921 work Dictatorship, Schmitt had explored states of emergency, states of siege, and states of exception (which for him are not identical, though they are similar), primarily through a historical lens. These are the crucial “recognized political situations” on which he focuses in Political Theology; thus this book underpins and reinforces Schmitt’s analysis in his earlier book, even as it departs from it in some ways. Exceptions result where there exists a constitutional order or other legal form of government, but it is incapable of meeting some unexpected contingency, and a political problem has therefore torn through the legal norms of governance. A gap has appeared in the law, and it must be filled; this filling is inherently political. This is true regardless of whether the constitutional order itself provides some mechanism for addressing exceptions; the Weimar Constitution famously did, but an ambiguous one, creating no end of interpretive headaches, and in any case, for Schmitt, an exception is always possible, if not inevitable, and it ruptures any formal legal structure.

As with most of Schmitt’s works, the great upheavals in Germany at the time lie mostly unmentioned in the background, but can be glimpsed in the interstices. Here, Schmitt was living within the early, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, though before hyperinflation and depression, and he spent a great deal of time thinking about how, and within what frame, decisions could be made in a polity faced with exceptional situations—and everyone expected such situations. He was very much aware of the threat to the Republic posed by extremes of left and right, and this rumbles beneath the surface of his analysis.

Schmitt begins by focusing on the definition of sovereignty—not in its “routine” form, but in the “borderline case.” But the definition resulting is to be one of general application, not simply one created ad hoc for a particular emergency. Not every emergency is an exception; only when there is the exercise of “unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order” is an exception created. “In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes.”

Out of the gate, Schmitt explicitly rejects that how to address an exception can ever be entirely derived from “a general norm, as represented by an ordinary legal prescription.” This is the crux of Schmitt’s rejection of the then-dominant strain of legal thought in Europe. The “preformed law” does not and cannot address the exception, which is necessarily “a case of extreme peril” such as “a danger to the existence of the state.” When this happens, what is called for is not the incapable norm, which offers only a dead end, but a decision. Who makes the decision is sovereign—and it quickly becomes clear that for Schmitt, the sovereign is both he who decides whether there is a state of exception, and what to do about it. The decision is therefore really two decisions, within one sovereign—and this is the correct definition of sovereignty.

Regardless of its ultimate origin, God, the estates, or the people, sovereignty only exists in relation to a concrete situation. The question of sovereignty has been blurred by liberalism, which attempts to substitute mere procedures, mechanisms such as separation of powers, for clear lines of decisional authority. These are just more ultimately futile attempts to substitute legal norms, a legal frame, in order to squeeze sovereignty out of the political picture. But when an exception exists, sovereignty bursts back into the frame. “The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. . . . [T]he norm is destroyed in the exception. . . . There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”

Thus Schmitt, in a bit of subtlety, rejects the Weberian definition, much favored by today’s libertarians (and recently endorsed by Elon Musk) that the state is that entity with a monopoly on violence, a monopoly on coercion. Rather, what defines sovereignty, and therefore ultimately the state, because no state can exist if it is not sovereign (though the state may be suspended, rather than destroyed, during a period in which it lacks sovereignty), is the monopoly to decide—to produce law that is not based in law. This is not extra-legal; the sovereign making the decision is making law (and will necessarily re-establish an order, a set of norms, at some point). It just takes place outside the formerly supreme legal norms. “The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid through repetition.”

Schmitt admits that sovereignty as reflected in public law, something that first began to be studied by Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century (as Schmitt analyzes at length in Dictatorship), has not developed logically or linearly. He says that most definitions focus on sovereignty being the “highest, legally independent, underived power”—but that this definition is wholly inadequate, because “infinitely pliable,” and because it blurs legality and power, in essence begging the question whether the sovereign’s power is derived from law. This definition relies on “tautological predicates,” and is therefore inferior to Schmitt’s own.

Schmitt then turns to an extended attack upon Hans Kelsen, a German legal scholar of his time. He was a legal positivist, who advanced theories of sovereignty centering around legal norms, where “the state is nothing else than the legal order itself.” Kelsen, in typical Schmittian fashion, merely stands in as an exemplar of the positions Schmitt wants to abuse. Kelsen implicitly denies that an independent decision must be made by an individual man, instead positing that the system of norms can invariably generate a decision dictated by the norms, which are “positively given.” Schmitt rejects this as form of question-begging which essentially negates the question of sovereignty and disregards that the state can be separate from the existing law. Kelsen pretends that the law itself is sovereign; he believes the state may make the law, but it is the law that is sovereign, not the state. And for Kelsen, the state was obliged in some vague way to reflect the desires of the people in the content of its laws, at the same time eliminating any personal elements in the concept of the state. For Schmitt, this is all a jumbled and offensive contradiction in terms (at one point, he snidely, or arrogantly, refers to a confusion among his opponents as “another expression of those eternal mix-ups that are responsible for making the history of philosophy so monotonous”). He also attacks Kelsen as “neo-Kantian,” meaning endorsing Kant’s view that “emergency law was no law at all.” But on the contrary, says Schmitt, emergency law is the most law-like of all law, because it embodies the raw essence of the decision, which is the beating heart of sovereignty.

Kelsen naturally did not believe in, or did not want to believe in, the exception. He thought a system of positive law could be constructed such that all questions could be answered within the system. Schmitt thought not only that this was impossible, but that an individual, a person, must ultimately be the solution to problems that superseded the system. For Schmitt, one cannot leave out, or ignore, the personal element in law. Such ignoring is what the “liberal constitutional tradition” attempted; it does not work. Rather, Schmitt endorses the famous phrase of Thomas Hobbes (of whom he was a great admirer): “auctoritas non veritas facit legem”; it is authority, not truth, that makes the law. Hobbes is thus, in Schmitt’s analysis, a decisionist. He recognized that “What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides.” The important question is who is competent to do so; this cannot be answered, in states of exception, by looking to legal norms.

Only in the third chapter, itself titled “Political Theology,” does Schmitt (who was putatively Catholic but had a very troubled relationship with his religion) actually turn to theology, and really, he uses it as a springboard, not a serious attempt to completely theologize modern theories of state and power. Nonetheless, this chapter also opens with a famous line, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. . . .” Schmitt means this in a dual sense—more obviously, that the historical development of the theory of the state flows directly from theological concepts, such as God as the “omnipotent lawgiver” (something explicit in Hobbes), and less obviously, that the “systematic structure” of modern theories is theological in nature. So, most notably, “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.”

Deism rejected miracles; in the same way, constitutional liberalism rejected “the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order.” “The rationalism of the Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form.” Schmitt notes that it is primarily by examining the thinking of the Enlightenment’s critics that we can see this—notably Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés. Schmitt makes an explicit link between Kelsen-type conceptions of the state as “natural-scientific,” which ignores that “[t]he difference between the substance and the practice of law . . . cannot be grasped with concepts rooted in the natural sciences,” and democracy, which “is the expression of a political relativism and a scientific orientation that are liberated from miracles and dogmas and based on human understanding and critical doubt.” This is not a compliment to democracy, because in a correct view of political life, miracles, in the form of the exception, do exist, whether we like it or not, and democracy’s rejection of this is a fatal error. Democracy, inherently self-crippled, is therefore inherently inadequate.

Deism has faded from the scene, leaving no analogizable connection to an omnipotent lawgiver. In its place concepts such as the general will became viewed as sovereign, “which means that the people became the sovereign,” resulting in the loss of the “decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty.” But when this element was removed, the state, meant to stand in for God, could no longer be a unity, and all theistic analogies to the state failed—even though they are central for understanding the development of thinking on sovereignty, and even though, especially in America, the concept that the voice of the people is the voice of God substituted for a while. It is no coincidence, although the exact causal relationship is opaque, that atheism became commonplace, especially among political thinkers, at the same time that the constituent power (something Schmitt also discusses at length in Dictatorship) came to be viewed as residing in the people, “which means that the democratic notion of legitimacy has replaced the monarchical.”

Finally, Schmitt turns to the implication of this changed notion of legitimacy, examining (without quite exactly endorsing, and sometimes characterizing as “extremist”) the view of several “counterrevolutionary” figures. These are de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Donoso Cortés. The common thread among these men is that the deficiencies of democracy, tied to eternal principles of politics, including Schmitt’s own decisionist philosophy, strongly imply that dictatorship is the only viable alternative. (It is interesting that this is necessarily a sovereign dictatorship, in Schmitt’s frame of commissary and sovereign dictatorships, whereas in Dictatorship Schmitt expressed more sympathy for commissary dictators.) Schmitt admires these men, not only for the substance of their thought, but for rejecting “everlasting conversation” as a substitute for concrete political action (he wrote a whole book attacking such conversation, Political Romanticism), realizing that their times (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) needed a decision.

These men viewed much of politics through a theological lens, or rather through analogies to theology, including doctrines such as papal infallibility and concepts such as the depravity of man. They realized that the liberalism of their time had no idea what it wanted; it was essentially incoherent. “Donoso Cortés considered continuous discussion a method of circumventing responsibility and of ascribing to freedom of speech and of the press an excessive importance that in the final analysis permits the decision to be evaded.” “The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.” In Schmitt’s evocative summation, Donoso Cortés saw “humanity as a boat aimlessly tossed about on the sea and manned by a mutinous, vulgar, forcibly recruited crew that howls and dances until God’s rage pushes the rebellious rabble into the sea so that quiet can prevail once more.” The apocalyptic nature of this is something Schmitt does not endorse; his is a drier analysis, and his goal is avoiding the apocalypse, although it was visited on Germany in due course. De Maistre and his philosophical allies opposed not only the eternal conversation, but also the attempt to turn political problems into technical/managerial problems. This attempt also evades “the core of the political idea, the exacting moral decision.” Politics requires decision, not mere administration (perhaps the total politicization of today’s administrative state flows from this reality). The decision, in all circumstance and all times, must be made, and someone must make it.

And there Schmitt leaves us. What can we derive for application today? No surprise, Schmitt offers a clear philosophical basis for Caesarism, something about which I have written twice recently. We await only the appearance of an exception, and the man who will declare it to be an exception. Whether and when that will happen, we will see. Certainly, the feeling of a hollow core, of drift, of merely waiting for the irruption of circumstance to demand a decision, permeates all of our politics. But the future will reveal itself.

More abstractly, Schmitt’s analysis fruitfully lets us consider the rule of law. In the West, far back into medieval times, the rule of law has long been seen as the objective of good governance, something nearly sacrosanct, if often honored in the breach (though Enlightenment liberalism has long falsely attempted to claim for itself the creation of the rule of law). It is necessarily true, however, that Schmitt rejects that the rule of law is the paramount commandment of governance; the sovereign who decides on, and what to do about, the exception necessarily, if only for a moment, stands outside the existing law, and thus above it. If one admits, or claims, as does Schmitt, that a pre-existing system of legal norms can never answer all political questions, the rule of law can never be actually supreme. We can hope that the decision will be just, but that is not immediately Schmitt’s concern. This seems to fly in the face of what we tend naturally to believe, especially in the Anglosphere, inheritors of the common law and the limited monarchy. What nice person can oppose the rule of law?

However, let’s think about it, not within Schmitt’s framework, which is clear enough, but within the America of 2021, soon 2022. We have no rule of law. We are governed by anarcho-tyranny, most notably that of the federal government, but also present on many lower levels of government, down to the municipal. Nothing better exemplifies this than the regime’s approach to the Wuhan Plague.

One might wonder . . . [review completes as first comment].

[Tuncay Özdemir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bu kitap önemli çünkü hukukun evrensel bir ilke değil, "güçle" askıya alınabilen bir araç oolduğunu açıkça gösteriyor. Hukukun ne zaman geçerli, ne zaman “istisna” olacağına maalesef egemenler karar veriyor ve bu da anlatıda korkunç bir asimetri ortaya çıkarıyor. Yaşadığımız coğrafyada ve en yakından da Filistin'de olanlar mesela.

Okurken biraz canımı sıkmıştı. Ama bazen canınızın sıkılması gerekiyor. Çünkü bu yazarlar olması gerekeni değil, gerçekte olanı anlatıp okuyucuyu yani sıradan insanı eğitiyorlar, sadece biz farkında değiliz.

[Mesoscope]

I won't rate this book, as it falls outside my ordinary spectrum of valuation to comparatively rank a complex and sometimes-vexing work written by history's most prominent Nazi jurist. Sometimes one must descend into the mire in order to understand the larger conversation, and Schmitt is too significant to ignore. Thus, after despising his Concept of the Political, I came around to this work, the wellspring of Schmitt's important concept of the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency, which was implicitly or explicitly taken up by wide-ranging figures including Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Jacob Taubes.

In comparison to Concept of the Political, which I found to be completely without value, Schmitt's analysis in Political Theology is extremely subtle and makes some provocative and illuminating points. Not least, the book is helpful for understanding the mindset of reactionary decisionists, such as the kind who populate the Roberts Supreme Court today. I thought of them several times reading this short treatise, and ended up convinced that the court's far-right majority sees itself as in a unique position to save what it no doubt regards as the core of American civilization from the existential threat posed by radical leftists.

Schmitt is often termed a political realist, and this can be seen in his efforts to locate the essence of the state in something actual, rather than in norms, rules, procedures, and laws. By a complex path of argument, he asserts that the actual authority of the state ultimately devolves to the sovereign capacity to make decisions precisely in circumstances that cannot be procedurally addressed - that is to say, states of exception, which is perhaps better translated as "states of emergency," though both registers are subsumed by this discussion.

Schmitt's political realism is tied, as it so often seems to be, to a dour historical pessimism of a Hobbes variety; one which views the state as the only thing that keeps human beings from eating one another alive. The final function of the state in Schmitt's view is defend us from internal or external threats, and the nature of those threats cannot be exhaustively formalized in any conceivable set of procedures. It will always require human judgment and human agency to decide when the state of emergency has begun, and when it has ended.

Section three ties this central argument to the his concept of political theology, and here Schmitt lost me a bit. He argues that our collective political, metaphysical, and theological constructions of reality are mutually entangled, and that generally imply one another, and he warns against crude attempts to reduce these terms to one of the members, such as Marx tried to do in his ideology critique. This is not a particularly novel idea, and I'm not entirely clear on how it relates to his larger argument, other than in the indirect sense that our political theories always entail implicit and/or covert moral, metaphysical, and theological judgments. This argument does sort of heat up the final section, when Schmitt reviews the arguments of the horrifying Catholic reactionary Donoso Cortés, who understood the battle between decisionism and atheist anarchism in explicitly eschatological terms.

It's tiresome to wade through the abstruse works of highly-objectionable thinkers, but sometimes it's necessary. For someone trying to get a handle on Carl Schmitt, I would much sooner recommend this book than The Concept of the Political, for what it's worth.

Update 2025: This work launched back into relevance to a degree I could not have anticipated even six months ago. Schmitt warned urgently against fake emergencies (Scheinausnahmezustände) as a pretext to wield unconstrained power, and today I read in the New York Times:

Trump Says He Will Put 100% Tariff on Movies Made Outside U.S.

Declaring foreign film production a national security threat, the president said he had asked his top trade official to start the process of imposing a tax on Hollywood.

[Baher Soliman · Rating 3 out of 5]

الحقيقة أن تاريخ كارل شميث متوافق تمامًا مع ميراثه الفكري= فهو يُعتبر قوميًا متعصبًا خصمًا لدودًا لدولة القانون مؤيدًا للاستبداد، وهو من رجال العهد النازي كان معجبًا بالفاشية الإيطالية�� مبررًا لكل مذابح هتلر، ومع ذلك يظل الجدل الذي أثاره شميت بنظرياته السياسية في نقد النظرية الليبرالية مهم لفهم بنية الدولة الحديثة، فكتابه يدور حول جدل الشرعية والمشروعية في الدولة الحديثة، وحول طبيعة القرار السياسي في علاقته بمسألة السيادة، والمشكلة المفهومية للسيادة وهو يرى أنه مصطلح مر بمراحل تطور فيه مفاهيميًا وهو ارتبط بصراعات السلطة السياسية في القرن السادس عشر عندما تفككت أوروبا إلى دول قومية، ومن صراع الحكام المطلقين مع المقاطعات.

شميت يدافع عن دولة سيادية قوية تدور في فلك " الزعيم" الذي هو حاكم سيادي، وهو في بداية الكتاب يُعرف الحاكم السيادي بأنه هو الذي يقرر في الحالات الاستثنائية، فكأنما كلام شميت عن السيادة لصوغ حالة الاستثناء تلك، فهو يُكرّس لمفهوم " سلطوي" يحول الدولة من جهاز لتطببق القانون وحمايته إلى جعلها هي القانون نفسه، لكن الجزء المهم في هذه النظرة الدولاتية الليبرالية هو تركيزه على أن لكل شعب وجوده السياسي الخاص وثقافته الخاصة، وهي رؤية مصادمة لفكرة النموذج الواحد للأيديولوجيا الليبرالية التي تؤسس لفكرة الدولة العالمية.

شميت بحث عن نظرية سياسية- قانونية تجابه خطر العدو السياسي للشعب الألماني بعد انهيار جمهورية فايمار= وهي الجمهورية الفيدرالية التي تأسست في 1919في ألمانيا لتحل محل الإمبراطورية الألمانية، سيكون بناء هذه النظرية على فكرة [ اللاهوت] ، فهو يرى أن مفاهيم الدولة الحديثة هي مفاهيم لاهوتية معلمنة، فاعتبار الإنسان ابن الخطيئة في اللاهوت المسيحي هو ما يقابله في المعيار السياسي ادخال الشر في الغعل السياسي، فيرى أن التقابل الديني بين " الله" و " الشيطان" يقابله في السياسة التقابل بين " العدو" و " الصديق"، لكن الركيزة الأساس المبطنة داخل لاهوت شميت هنا هي [ حالة الاستثناء] التي تُكرّس للديكتاتورية السيادية، فحالة الاستثناء تلغي القانون ، وهي نظرية لا يدعمها أي تفكير قانوني، ومن هنا لجأ شميت إلى اللاهوت وإلى فكرة المعجزة التي تجعل الرب مطلق الإرادة، فمجهود شميت كان منصبًا على صوغ مفهوم جديد للسيادة من تصور القانون الليبرالي بوصفه سلطة مطلقة إلى تصور لاهوتي للسيادة يربطه بالحاكم المستبد.

فحالة الاستثناء هنا هي تنظير حول السيادة، ولذلك رأي ولتر بنيامين أن حالة الاستثناء هي عنف محض، بينما شميت يرى أنها حالة قوة شرعية، فتعريف شميت للدولة بما هي وضعية سياسية لجماعة بشرية ترتبط بسلطة تقر حالة الاستثناء= يعني أن الدولة هي التي تشرع مجسَدة في صاحب السيادة [ الديكتاتور]، ومن ثم أي قرار من صاحب السيادة يأخذ وصف السيادة، فالسيادة السياسية تقابل سيادة اللاهوت.

الحق رغم كل المؤاخذات على فلسفة الدولة الحديثة الليبرالية إلا أن فلسفة شميت السياسية تكرّس لمعنى أكثر غشومية، إذ تجعلنا حالة الاستثناء أمام فضاء عاري من أي معيار أو مرجعية إلا القوة حيث يتماهى صاحب السيادة مع الإله، كما أنه عند التدقيق لا أجد فروقًا جوهرية بين فكر شميت الرجعي وبين الليبرالية الديمقراطية، غاية ما فعله شميت- بتصوري- أنه نزع استبداد الشخص الاعتباري [ مؤسسات الدولة] ليعطيها للحاكم الفرد السيادي، كما أن مفاهيمه عن حالة الاستثناء والسيادة هي مفاهيم عامة لا تقوم بدونها أي دولة حديثة، فأهمية فكر شميت هنا ليس لأنه بديل مثالي للدولة الليبرالية الحديثة، بل لأن فكره مهم لفهم بنية هذه الدولة.

[Mohammad Ali Shamekhi · Rating 2 out of 5]

نمره ی واقعی: دو و نیم

کارل اشمیت فیلسوفی است سیاسی که بیش از همه در سطح عموم به خاطر همکاریش به نازی ها شناخته شده است

اصل حرف اشمیت در این کتاب اینه که باید به وضع استثنایی به عنوان مبنای فهم چیستی و کیستی حاکمیت توجه کرد. اصولا همیشه موقعیت استثنایی باعث می شود که ما لایه های بنیادی تر امور را ببینیم وگرنه روال عادی و بهنجار ما را در سطح امور نگه می دارد. نگریستن به وضع استثنایی در حوزه ی حاکمیت ما را متوجه زمانی می کند که به قول اشمیت دولت هست اما قانون نیست. در وضع در هم شکستن قانون، تنها یک راه برای تأمین نظم وجود دارد: اصالت تصمیم. تصمیمی که به هیچ کس جز خودش پاسخگو نیست و تنها خودش مشخص می کند که کی وضع استثنایی پایان یافته و اوضاع می تواند به وضع بهنجار باز گردد

او به دیدگاه های لیبرال و عقل گرایی قرن هجدهم - از جهت نادیده گرفتن وضع استثنایی و تلاش برای کاستن همه چیز به وضع بهنجار - حمله می کند. او کسانی را که در پی یکی کردن دولت با نظم قانونی - و پس زدن حاکمیت به عنوان میراث سلطنت - هستند پس می زند، همینطور کسانی را که حاکمیت را چیزی جز همان نظم قانونی نمی دانند و دولت را بدون نقش حقوقی بنیادین لحاظ می کنند. او با رجوع به تفکر سیاسی قرن هفدهم از یک سو و جریان کاتولیک مخالف انقلاب فرانسه از سوی دیگر کسانی را مطرح می کند که به اهمیت تصمیم و محوری بودن وضع استثنایی واقف بوده اند

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اما نظر من در مورد کتاب

کتاب کتابی است حقوقی-فلسفی و اولین کتابی است که من در ارتباط با حقوق می خوانم - پس طبیعی است که خیلی حرف ها و ارجاعات را نفهمم ( حتی ارجاع به فلاسفه هم از حیث کارهای حقوقیشان بر من پوشیده است ). تقریبا هیچ کدام از آدم های مذکور در این کتاب برایم آشنا نبودند. در مورد اصطلاحات هم این حیرانی همچنان وجود داشت - تا آنجا که فصل دوم که به بحث فرم حقوقی و فرم فنی و ... می پرداخت از دسترس عقل من خارج ماند

پس طبیعی است که صرفا بخشی از کتاب را که اشمیت حرف خود را مستقیم زده فهمیده ام و بر مبنای آن قضاوت می کنم

نوعی مسحور کنندگی در باب این کتاب هست برای من و آن هم تازگی حرفی است که مطرح کرده - به طور خاص در افق سیاست و همچنین در حوزه ی ارتباط برخی دیدگاه های فلسفی ای پیشاپیش شنیده با ظهورشان در عرصه ی سیاست. اما اگر این مسحورشدگی تقریبی اولیه رو نادیده بگیریم، کتاب از سطح ادعا فراتر نمی ره. یعنی استدلال خاصی وجود نداره و جنبه های فلسفی قضیه تحلیل نمی شه - صرفا مؤیدی ذکر می شه و جوری رفتار می کنه که انگار الان دیگه قضیه مسلمه. به همین دلیل نوعی فریب در این کتاب هست اینکه آدم درگیر خطابه ای زیرکانه می شه و یادش می ره خیلی حرف ها نیازمند دلیله

البته باید توجه کرد که اشمیت این کتاب رو در میانه ی دو جنگ جهانی در جمهوری وایمار نوشته. در شرایطی پرستیز که هرکس در طرفی و طرفدار مکتبی بوده. این اصالت تصمیم تمهیدی بوده برای درآمدن از آن آشفتگی "لیبرال". که البته هیتلر هم با همین تصمیم آلمان رو در دست خودش گرفت

[Hagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are merely waiting for the appearance of an exception. Whether this will occur and when, remains to be seen. Undoubtedly, a sense of emptiness, aimlessness, and passive anticipation for circumstances to force a decision pervades our political landscape. The future will unfold in its own time.

Idk if I agree with Schmittian politics, but this was incredible. Felt like it was the exact right time to read this.

"All law is "situational law." The sovereign produces and par- antees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision. Therein resides the essence of the state's sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide. The exception reveals most dearly the essence of the state's authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law."

"A Protestant theologian [Kierkegaard] who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century stated: "The exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.""

[Count Gravlax · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition."

Who said Law can't be well written?

[/Fitbrah/ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feel like I've already read about this sort of stuff from other traditionalist/neo-reactionary writers, so the information did not seem overall new.

Despite that, as I've been reading about the French revolution, this book seemed surprisingly pertinent and it was engaging the whole way through.

[Squolle]

"Die Ausnahme ist interessanter als der Normalfall."

[Felix · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is pernicious and intellectually lightweight. Couching ugly ideas in academic language does not make them more valid. Political Theology is so thinly-veiled in its admiration for tyranny, that I’m uncertain as to whether I can even really call it ‘veiled’. Maybe Schmitt is just a writer that can bury his views in such dense academic language that even his shopping list could start looking like a treatise.

Fundamentally, Schmitt’s view boils down to this: sovereignty is the process of exemption. The state springs not from law and regulation, but from the ability to circumvent and ignore law and regulation. The legal system, he argues, is fundamentally a farce, and true power stems not from working with it, but exerting dominance over it and sidelining it.

Politics, Schmitt proposes, is fundamentally structured similarly to theology, in the sense that all politics is a method of explaining and rationalising natural orders. As a result, liberal democracy and absolute monarchy are fundamentally similar in the sense that both are treated as manifestations of natural order, and then rationalised after the fact.

However, the focus of natural order, he posits, should be different. Rather than looking on the state as the manifestation of a social contract, it should be looked upon as an arbiter akin to God. Democracy attempts to restrain state power, but the state is only acting as the state when it is suspending law and order.

Democracy, to put it simply, is a sham - it is just a system which is accepted due to the imposition of the power of the state, and when the democratic state is acting truly in accordance with law, the state is not performing the function of the state. The state is the necessary entity - the democratic component is irrelevant, and a democratic state is only acting as a state when it discards the restraints on its power, and rules by exception.

In the absence of a centre to the state - a sovereign figure - after, for example, a constitutional revolution, overthrowing an absolute monarch and establishing a system of laws and checks and balances, it is only by ruling on exceptions that the system can self-perpetuate. Constitutionalism is only capable of this in extreme scenarios, and for the most part, abdicates the central duty of the state as the state (which is to suspend law and order when necessary).

Therefore, a kind of imperial figure is needed: someone who can play the role of God in the theology of the state, and resolve issues by issuing exceptions and suspending the order. Schmitt argues that the more natural system is the system which embraces this role, but in a positive paternal way, rather than allowing the system to constrain itself, only calling upon suspension in the most extreme circumstances.

And now I will step outside of the book and look at Schmitt meta-textually. Who did the historical Schmitt propose as the arbiter to stand at the head of the political theology of state?

It was Adolf Hitler.

This book makes me feel drained. It’s just such an obvious apology for fascism. There’s no reason, in my view, why the need for exceptions cannot be resolved by new laws, or by the acknowledgement by courts that times have changed during their process of reinterpreting historic legislation. And if those reinterpretations are unpalatable to the parliament, then resolved by introduction of new legislation to clarify them.

I know legal bureaucracy is boring, but when the alternative is literally violent arbitrary dictatorship, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing.

---

A few further notes since I've discussed this text with others:

The issue I take with this text is not that it is evil, but that it is incorrect.

An individual or institution does not become more sovereign by ruling on exceptions. This is not the definition of sovereignty.

In my view, a leader or governing institution is obligated to perform their role in fulfilment of the social contract. Be this a monarchy or a parliamentary democracy, the leader still has a contract with the people to fulfil good governance. Whether this contract is the same as the constitution is irrelevant (they may well differ in key areas), but the contract exists regardless of any legal text.

Alike to the divine right of kings, this contract is based on the fulfilment of the national will, not on the ability to issue brute power.

This leader may or may not need to resolve exceptional cases (more likely, exceptional cases will be diffusely resolved by different institutions in a modern democracy - but in an absolute monarchy, the monarch will be called upon to do this frequently).

A leader which handles more exemption and exceptions from the law, is more powerful, since they wield more literal power. However, there is no connection between this and sovereignty. More power can be wielded simply through brute force (and often is), but this does not mean that this is done in accordance with the national will or social contract. A warlord with life and death power over all those around him is not more ‘sovereign’ than a popular prime minister acting within the strict limits of a robust constitution.

By the logic of Schmitt, the leader of a petty colonial administration is ‘sovereign’ even as he ‘leads’ a people who despise him and are barely responsive to his will at all. He rules exclusively by a technological imbalance and his able to force his will using violence - but he can resolve any exception, and create new exceptions freely at any time.

Rather than being more sovereign, this theoretical entity, I would argue, is less sovereign, because it has no outlet for the national will of its people. It is an ugly tyranny.

There are other frameworks to understand what Carl Schmitt is writing about. I understand what he is saying, but I think he is wrong.

I would argue that a state is more sovereign when the leader is better able to fulfil the demands of the social contact, not when the leader is able to issue more exceptions. I certainly do not believe a state is more sovereign when it is able to rule on exceptions outside of its borders. That state is not more sovereign; it is more belligerent, which is a different question entirely.

The worldview that ruling on exceptions is synonymous with sovereignty leads necessarily to the belief that legitimacy is connected to the ability to suspend the restrictions placed on rulers. I would argue that the opposite is true. Being able to fulfil the needs of the populace without breaching the restrictions makes a leader more sovereign.

If sovereignty is to be accepted along the lines that Carl Schmitt lays out, then sovereignty is a social evil which must be prevented from emerging. Sovereignty is essentially synonymous with tyranny.

I do not accept that sovereignty is a social evil, nor do I believe that it stems from ruling on exceptions. Therefore, I reject his hypothesis.

[شريف مراد · Rating 4 out of 5]

اول تلات فصول من الكتاب مهمين جدا

[Filip Wijnings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heerlijk leesbaar, helder en toch evocatief, plus een nieuwe filosoof op de leeslijst (Donoso Cortés)

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book laid out a distinct political program that helped lead the way to the Third Reich's lunatic dictatorship and underpins the rationalization of any leader who acts outside the law (including several of the last American Presidents, various mob bosses, vigilantes, and world leaders all over the globe). I say all this first, lest we forget the potential dangers of this kind of thinking. But there is a solid and undeniable truth in what Schmitt says on page 30, "Every concrete juristic decision contains a moment of indifference from the perspective of content... because the circumstance that requires a decision remains an independently determining moment." In short, it is an essential reality about legal and political situations that someone removed from the specific situation must eventually make a decision. The personal is inherent and cannot be removed, and Schmitt argues that only his Decisionist policy fully accepts and fully utilizes that reality. All other political theories try to avoid and disguise this reality in 'comprehensive' legal structures and/or democratic voting systems and/or anarchic rejection of law, but all of these systems fail to deal with radical exceptions properly because none of these systems allows for one person to make an informed and rapid decision for the State when a crisis is looming. I, for one, was raised on the argumentative joys of political gridlock and political pacifism, so this is all very hard to swallow... but their is a brutal logic that is hard deny, and just writing it off as 'evil' is no solution. Everyone should read this book, to know its arguments, and to make their own more informed.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to know whether to give this 5 stars or 1 star.

It's an incredibly clear headed mediation on the deep problems of liberalism and democratic government. Almost like an instruction manual for aspiring authoritarians.

[Gareth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who decides is king. Without a decision the political is lost. The political is the decision. To decide on who decides and when to decide is the foundation stone of any practical realisation of the political...

[Gustav Gutschke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hab nicht verstanden, worauf Schmitt hier hinauswill. Der erste Satz „Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet“ ist eingängig und zitierfähig, aber der Rest ist argumentativ enttäuschend, wenn man Staatstheorie erwartet. Zwar gelehrsam in der Ideengeschichte der Souveränität und unterhaltsam polemisch in den Spitzen gegen die liberale Bourgeoisie als die „diskutierende Klasse“. Was daraus für den Staatsaufbau, für Herrschaft und Legitimität folgt, bleibt unklar.

Dabei ist das - vermutlich - aufgeworfene Problem drängend: Wer entscheidet, wenn die Verfassung keine Zuständigkeit geregelt hat, weil es sich um eine nicht vorhergesehene Situation handelt? Dem Rechtsstaat entspricht der Versuch, den Ausnahmezustand so weit wie möglich zu verschieben - durch gegenseitige Kontrolle der Organe, Aufzählung der Befugnisse, oder zeitliche Beschränkung. Hier scheint es, als würde Schmitt nicht nur deskriptiv das Problem benennen, sondern die herrschaftliche Entscheidungsgewalt von jeder Legitimitätsüberlegung befreien wollen. Denn: DASS entschieden werde, sei wichtiger als WIE entschieden werde. Das bedeutet, wie im letzten Kapitel festgestellt, dass die Diktatur die einzig moderne Staatsform sei, nachdem alle sonstigen fraglosen Entscheidungsinstanzen weggefallen sind. Damit endet freilich alles Nachdenken über die gute Ordnung. Die Diktatur wird auch nicht weiter rationalisiert, es scheint um Herrschaft um der Herrschaft willen zu gehen - insgesamt für mich ein Text, der mich ratlos zurücklässt.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carl Schmitt's seminal work, "Political Theology," first published in 1922, offers a thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between sovereignty, politics, and religion. Schmitt's examination of the concept of political theology provides a profound critique of liberal democracy and offers an alternative framework for understanding the nature of political authority. In this academic review, we delve into the key themes, strengths, limitations, and enduring significance of Schmitt's influential exploration of political theology.


"Political Theology" delves into the intricate relationship between sovereignty and politics, challenging prevailing conceptions of secular governance. Schmitt argues that political decision-making rests on the foundation of an ultimate authority, which he calls the "sovereign." He contends that sovereignty is inherently theological, and that political power operates in a similar manner to religious concepts of divine authority.

One of the strengths of Schmitt's analysis lies in his ability to expose the limitations and contradictions of liberal democratic ideals. He provocatively critiques the liberal tendency to evade decision-making, emphasizing the importance of decisive action and the necessity of a sovereign authority to maintain order and stability. Schmitt's examination of the state of exception, where the normal rules of law are suspended, highlights the crucial role of the sovereign in times of crisis.

Moreover, Schmitt's engagement with theological and philosophical concepts enriches his analysis, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the dynamics of political authority. His exploration of the relationship between friend and enemy in politics, and the concept of the political as the defining criterion of collective identity, offers valuable insights into the nature of power and conflict.

However, it is essential to acknowledge the limitations and controversies surrounding "Political Theology." Schmitt's association with the Nazi regime and his involvement in justifying authoritarian practices raise ethical and political concerns that cannot be overlooked. Additionally, his characterization of political decision-making as necessarily grounded in a singular authority may neglect the pluralistic and diverse nature of contemporary political systems.


"Political Theology" stands as a significant and influential work that challenges traditional understandings of politics and sovereignty. Schmitt's deep engagement with theological and philosophical concepts lends credibility and depth to his analysis, stimulating critical thinking and prompting scholars to reevaluate prevailing assumptions about political authority.

The enduring significance of "Political Theology" lies in its capacity to shape and inform discussions on the nature of sovereignty and politics. Despite its controversial associations, the book remains a vital resource for scholars and intellectuals interested in the complexities of political power, decision-making, and the dynamics of authority. Schmitt's provocative insights continue to fuel debates and inspire further scholarship on the nature of politics and the role of sovereignty in contemporary societies.


Carl Schmitt's "Political Theology" presents a challenging and thought-provoking analysis of the interplay between sovereignty, politics, and religion. While acknowledging its limitations and controversies, this academic review recognizes the enduring significance and intellectual depth of Schmitt's work. By shedding light on the intricate dynamics of political authority and the contested nature of decision-making, "Political Theology" serves as a valuable resource for scholars and individuals seeking to engage with the complex relationship between power, religion, and politics.

GPT

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third and the fourth essays are much more accessible and offer trenchant insights into
1) the sociology of the concept of sovereignty (the science of drawing out the structural homology between theology and modern theory of the state),

2) the nature of liberalism as both a class and as an attitude towards the moment of decision (the liberals want to dissolve the moment in an endlessly drawn out discussion) and

3) how in the modern state the political is being increasingly swallowed up by techno economic managerialism first diagnosed by Max Weber.

The fourth essay in particular provides a good overview of the conservative/reactionary thinkers of the 18th century to whom Schmitt is intellectually indebted

Despite some shortcomings, this book has certainly piqued my interest in Schmitt

[Mladen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the crucial works about modern political thought. Carl Schmitt gives an interesting critique of liberal democracy and it's failings, promoting a sort of dictatorial system. While I don't agree with the previous, I do find Schmitt's views on sovereignty interesting and relevant. His most important point is related to the problem of a state of exception where he states that a true sovereignty within a system can be detected only when it is visible who defines and regulates states of exception. If you take into consideration the contemporary state of exception, related to the post 9/11 war on terrorism and security issues you can see that Schmitt's insights can still be useful today.

[Bookshark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The core idea of this book is so simple and straightforward that it is sufficiently captured in the two most famous passages - the first sentence of the first chapter and the first paragraph of the third chapter. The rest of the book is just elaboration upon these points in relation to the ideas of various legal theorists and philosophers, notably Hobbes, Rousseau, and the anarchists. If you're reading this to get a background in Schmitt so that you can use him in your contemporary work, proceed; but if you're just trying to familiarize yourself with his ideas, you don't need to read much of it to get the point.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three stars for illuminating my understanding of juridical theory and political sovereignty in Weimar Germany. Negative two stars for literally espousing fascism. I look forward to using Schmitt in the future, and was very pleased to read him firsthand after a semester of coming across him in dimly lit footnotes and editorial asides, but Christ, come on. Still--still! Fascinating, compellingly argued, and VERY elegantly written. I can see why Benjamin kept up a correspondence with the guy. Gotta get around to De Maistre some time.

[Colm Gillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short treatise which is so crammed with great quotes. Schmitt offers an explanation for the development of the state and sovereignty in conceptual terms. The polemical tone of the text, while it greatly enhances the points he at times makes, also means that some observations are not fully explored. Schmitt likes to write tersely, but I think this could have done with being expanded a little bit. Nonetheless, a tour de force.

[Akis Kexas]

It is a very helpfull book for our view in political theology

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.5/10-nonfiction

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy"
- Billie Joe Armstrong

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

I'm surprised to find such a strong aftertaste of Derrida's "Limited Inc." in this first sentence, what with the prioritization of the exception above the rule. Like Derrida, Schmitt argues that not only is the exception more interesting, but it's in a sense more important than the rule; if not taken into account, the norm becomes incomprehensible. He goes so far as to state "the norm is destroyed in the exception," which sounds a lot like a reformulation of Derrida's "iteration," which destroys writing in its mutative re-production. The ramifications of Schmitt's claim echo out into politics similarly to how Derrida's echo into language: Schmitt says "All law is 'situational law'," while Derrida says "all meaning is fundamentally indeterminable" (Ltd Inc. back cover). Schmitt goes so far as to make a 1:1 analogous argument against norms:

It would be consequent rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme.

Quite surprisingly, one page later, Schmitt reaches the opposite logical conclusion to Derrida: instead of claiming exceptions invalidate the rule, they complete the rule, prove it, make it whole:

The exception can be more important than the rule...because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition

I'm actually shocked no one else seems to have noticed this parallel, because throughout Derrida's book, he vociferously argues for exceptions and against idealism and binaries which favor the rule; I fear they both come to opposite political conclusions because they've largely presupposed their conclusions and have merely argued circularly (which is nearly impossible to escape). But Schmitt also quotes Kierkegaard to back up his point, which proves interesting:

The exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.

Derrida admits that his linguistic theorization is at root political, whereas Schmitt not only admits that his politicization is theological at root, but he claims that all politics are theological at root. This is what Derrida and so many other leftists misunderstand about politics and worldviews in general. Since Schmitt didn't make it explicit, I will: it is impossible to meaningfully escape prioritization, which is essentially theological ("you shall have no other gods"). The Christian God demands monotheism from his people, but many today are unconscious polytheists who suffer psychological dissonance as long as they deny the fact that humans must worship something (so instead they wander in a theological desert, worshiping trends). Not thinking about something doesn't make it go away; it's the same with theology as with mortality.

What are we to make of these exceptions then? Schmitt sees in them the rightful place of the sovereign, i.e. the one who decides when things are in a state of emergency, an exceptional state. In such a state, the sovereign can subvert the constitution and be temporarily above the law. I wonder if what Derrida does is really any different. Schmitt does this ostensibly to maintain strict order, while Derrida does it to break out of strict order and binaries. Curious how the political spectrum resembles a horseshoe like that...

Schmitt's second chapter largely talks about juridical power and sovereignty, and I'm ill equipped either to understand let alone comment upon it. It seems he sets up quite a few other people's stances, and I'm unclear how he responds (or if he even does?). In fact, this starts a trend throughout the book of too much quotation and too few original ideas: he keeps laying out someone else's view and then leaving it ambiguous as to whether he agrees or not. It's rather annoying (either that, or I'm rather stupid).

The third chapter is where the fireworks start again: "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." He then continues to show how theism leads to monarchy, how deism leads to democracy, atheism leads to anarchy, and by the very end he pits "dictatorship" against "anarchy" (religion vs irreligion). The reason why dictatorship is "necessary" is that monarchy is dead; no one believes in it, and the places where it continues (like Great Britain) show that today it is vestigial, a mockery of its former glory. Because of a heightened sense of fear from liberalism and communism and anarchy creeping in, Schmitt urges government to be "decisive," which can most easily be done if one person has authoritarian power. The shortcomings of this are obvious and born out though history: by Hitler's disastrous winter campaign in Russia, by Mao's disastrous "Great Leap Forward," and many more.

Schmitt's criticisms of liberalism especially felt sharp; he claimed "dialogue" is an attempt to delay and/or minimize the "need" to "decide." I agree more generally with such complaints (especially concerning the view of man as "good" (or at least reformable), which is at the root of liberalism and anarchism), but I disagree with the fearmongering urgency with which Schmitt concluded the text. I appreciated especially his distinction between the Catholic view of man as merely sick/injured, whereas Lutheranism views mankind as "dead to sin," and thus the approaches to politics within each religion/denomination vary.

Returning briefly to the concept of the exception, he says that "the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology," which is why "the rationalism of the Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form" (which is why liberalism forever delays and displaces the "decision," through discourse (freedom of speech)). But when he makes points such as this, many people today merely snort at him and walk on. He feels this pressure, but doesn't bow to it. "In a positivistic age it is easy to reproach an intelectual opponent with the charge of indulging in theology or metaphysics." This is little more than an insult and a diversion, rather than seriously answering any points; this is precisely what the top reviewer on this book has done, and his review proves to be a quaint time capsule of leftist fearmongering.

Most surprising of all, the author of that review doesn't actually contest any of the book's contents, but instead states merely his distaste with speculative contemporary parallels. Ultimately, his objection ends up smelling like that of the men who wrote the "green book" in Lewis' "The Abolition of Man," i.e. a statement of opinion, rather than anything which pertains to the objective world outside of subjective opinion. Embarrassingly enough, I'm not completely convinced that the reviewer even read the book, because in it he does not outline in any detail his concept of "enemy" (the most I could detect was the phrase "the theology of the foe;" "enemy" doesn't even show up in the index at the end). According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Schmitt didn't elaborate on this notion until 5 years after "Political Theology," in a work named "The Concept of the political" (1927). This sloppiness betrays that the reviewer was less reviewing the text at hand than projecting his own distaste for its ideas.

This is not unlike rating "Mein Kampf" 1 star after not reading it. I read it, and I ended up giving it 1 star, but that was because I refuted its points, not simply because I disagreed with it. Unfortunately for that anti-Christian reviewer of this book, I used primarily theological arguments against Hitler, which the reviewer may be surprised to find out can actually work extremely well against totalitarianism. I'm disappointed but not surprised at such "reviews," because they're indicative of a larger, more dangerous trend. Though fascism certainly is dangerous, blase dismissal of it is far more dangerous. What this agnosticism and indifference (theologically, and thus politically) has led to is an embarrassing political landscape, one where most antifascists today couldn't give a convincing rational argument against fascism, let alone accurately define it (hence, the "punch a Nazi" trend).

The unitary power of monotheism is an extremely powerful one (the Shahaddah, the Shima Yisrael, and the Nicene Creed all attest to this), and to write off its political ramifications without a serious argument is pure folly. Whether or not there is a God is irrelevant; the idea's political ripples remain powerful and must be adequately explored, not dismissed with insults. Insults obscure in two ways: they prevent actual counter-argumentation, and they incense your opponent, giving them justification to mistreat you. It would be good to learn from this, but increasingly, contemporary secularists merely assume God out of the room, hoping that that's enough to banish him. What these bourgeois theoreticians often forget is that the unwashed masses (the proletariat) are largely religious, and they are willing to die for God, unlike the washed elites. I wonder who would win, who would eat who. Schmitt via Donoso Cortes wonders the same thing:

He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a "discussing class," una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political acticity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict.

If the political climate in America and elsewhere continues its current trend into abject stupidity, this may finally come true. I certainly hope (and pray!) that it doesn't, but in the meantime we would be best to remember that all politics are derivatives of theological assumptions. In this, Schmitt is radically correct. His solution, however, is radically wrong. As always, the solution is the same, a difficult return to first principles, to true and renewed religiosity. We must make a decision ourselves before it is made for us (by a tyranny, which by that time we will have deserved).

[Diego · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA SOBERANÍA SEGÚN CARL SCHMITT

Soberano es el que decide (sobre) la excepción. La excepción, por tanto, es indisociable del concepto de soberanía, ya que no sólo explica la norma, sino que es la fuente y justificación última de toda soberanía.

“The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.”

Schmitt entendía que la excepción, respecto al orden legal válido, no podía ser codificada en una norma pre-existente. No obstante, el soberano (el que decide) no es por ello ajeno al orden legal vigente en condiciones normales.

TEOLOGÍA POLÍTICA

Carl Schmitt defiende que todo concepto relevante en la teoría moderna del Estado consiste o deriva de una secularización de conceptos teológicos. La decisión, en la teoría del Estado, equivale al milagro en teología. Tener claro este proceso es clave para entender la evolución de la filosofía política moderna.

La idea moderna de Estado constitucional (liberal) se desarrolló y triunfó junto con el deismo. Esta nueva metafísica, que niega cualquier transgresión de las leyes de la naturaleza vía intervención directa (de Dios), implica asimismo la negación de la intervención directa en un orden legal válido. Según Schmitt, el racionalismo de la Ilustración niega la excepción en cualquiera de sus iteraciones y, en consencuencia, rechaza la decisión.

"ON THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY OF THE STATE"

El elemento decisivo para los pensadores contrarrevolucionarios de la filosofía del Estado (De Maistre, Bonald o Donoso Cortés, entre otros), a los que Schmitt llama “decisionistas”, es la máxima importancia que atribuyen al momento de la decisión, en detrimento del concepto mismo de legitimidad. Estos autores, especialmente De Maistre y Donoso Cortés, entendían el fundamento metafísico de la política. Su filosofía política está determinada por su pesimismo antropológico propio de la teología cristiana (pecado original).

Estos teóricos contrarrevolucionarios, aunque aportando distintas interpretaciones de las mismas, identificaron las contradicciones del liberalismo constitucional, como también hicieron otros revolucionarios (Marx y Engels, especialmente).

"Although the liberal bourgeoisie wanted a god, its god could not become active; it wanted a monarch, but he had to be powerless; it demanded freedom and equality but limited voting rights to the propertied classes in order to ensure the influence of education (…) ; it abolished the aristocracy of blood and family but permitted the impudent rule of the moneyed aristocracy, the most ignorant and the most ordinary form of aristocracy; it wanted neither the sovereignty of the king nor that of the people. What did it actually want?"

ALGUNOS COMENTARIOS SOBRE DONOSO CORTÉS

(Es el autor al que Schmitt le dedica más atención en el último capítulo de este libro)

Según Donoso Cortés, la discusión es el elemento característico del liberalismo burgués. Llegando a definir a la burguesía como la “clase discutidora”. En este sentido, Schmitt sentencia:

"A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict."

La discusión continua (el diálogo), no era más que un método para eludir la responsabilidad. Los liberales otorgaban la mayor importancia a la libertad de expresión y de prensa precisamente porque les permitía evadir la decisión política. La dictadura, por contra, es lo opuesto a la discusión.

Donoso Cortés entendió que la era de la monarquía había llegado a su fin. Ya no quedaban reyes y, por tanto, la legitimidad en un sentido tradicional había dejado de existir. En este contexto, y llevando su decisionismo a sus últimas consecuencias, el español reivindicó la dictadura como forma de gobierno.

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent some intellectual time with Carl Schmitt during the first few months of this year. Not a sign that things are going well in the world. One doesn’t read the “Crown Jurist of Fascism” on a lark, nor should one read him without a balancing work; I have been plowing through Aurel Kolnai’s “The War Against the West” simultaneously, and boy, he had a bone to rightly pick with Schmitt. The overt support of Nazism and racism isn’t present in the books that I read, but again, that balance is important. For all that, Schmitt has some relevant things to say.

In the introduction by George Schwab, Walter Bagehot’s “The English Constitution” is quoted to the effect that the political machine is based on the assumption that the people is one in its ends and so can safely disagree about the means. This is the politics I grew up on. This is the politics I hoped to hand down to my children. But for the last five or six years, I’ve come to understand that Bagehot’s assumption is false, that Alasdair MacIntyre was correct, and that we do not have a foundation, a metaphysical foundation, upon which to build the superstructure of society.
That puts us in a much more frightening and potentially violent arena of politics. We are not debating which path puts us to the goal best, but rather which goal is worth achieving at all. But we are also creatures of habit, and the old ideas and virtues were still enough to keep us together as a political unit.

And then COVID happened. I think this is where it is all going to break down.

Back to Schmitt: the Classical Liberal distinction between what is a political issue and what is not a political issue, a constant sore point for conservatives who want areas in life not to be politicized, is itself a political issue. Again, because we used to have a common metaphysics, we commonly agreed on what should be discussed politically, what should not, when it should not (once upon a time, it was considered rude to talk about politics in public). We mistakenly believed that division between political and nonpolitical was an actual reality and not a politically made decision, but the radicals correctly saw through that.

The big concept out of this work is, of course, the State of Exception, which Cicero beautifully summed up ”silent enim lēgēs inter arma.” Our Civil War is a great example. A true existential crisis might force a state to sacrifice its own laws in order to preserve its existence. Much of modern political philosophy tries not to take that into account; if we can but just design a good enough system, it will run without exceptions. And in normal times, this works, and we live by laws that are relatively impersonal. But then something insane happens, like COVID (seriously, how has nobody mentioned this in their reviews yet?). Now the government has assumed powers we probably would not assume they had back in 2019 and will continue to do so as long as the emergency exists. A classic state of exception: the powers of the government are defined not by time, but by the event. And who declared it? The various sovereigns, of course. One might have thought such things did not exist before this crisis, but that is a fault of our nominalism. A dictator isn’t a dictator if his title isn’t dictator, right? Meanwhile, tens of millions of desperate Americans hang on Anthony Fauci’s every word to see if their lives can go back to any semblance of normal.

For Schmitt, sovereignty is the highest, legally independent underived power. Traditionally, Americans would have assumed We the People constituted that power, but the concept of We the People is horribly clumsy. It isn't unitary enough to actually accomplish anything. An example: nearly everyone thinks either the 2016 or 2020 elections were stolen one way or the other. I don’t believe that about either, but let us assume that they were. What, exactly, could The People do about it? What did they do? Nothing, in both cases. Now, again, I think both were legitimate, but there were tens of millions of people out there who didn’t, and they did nothing in response. The People are so unwieldy that I cannot even type “The People is” without screwing up my face. There is no power here, and so sovereignty is located somewhere else. The COVID crisis brought out some elements of that. Governors and local officials discovered strength they probably never even imagined; and how would you explain to someone politically active in 2010 what role Dr. Fauci is playing today? No, this is not pure sovereignty, but it certainly has shades of it. We’re also seeing extraordinarily powerful individuals in the market flex their muscles in political ways never before seen.

An aside: in Catholic thought, there could be no such sovereign except God. Our more secular understanding has individuals with power that have neither a positive end to achieve nor a negative consequence for failure, but power for its own sake. I don’t care for it.

To us who were hung up on the Constitution and those of us whose inertia had not pushed us into this radical view of politics before 2020 (and I would say that was 95% of folks), what is happening now is the political equivalent of a miracle, a very evil miracle. Things are occurring now that we would be hard pressed to explain to ourselves if we could travel back 20 years. Concept s like citizenship, nationhood, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, checks and balances, and the peaceful transfer of power are warped beyond recognition. Schmitt is correct: our jurisprudence, our laws, our rules are a reflection of our metaphysics. The nation’s metaphysics isn’t changing so much as it is changed; this radical change was facilitated by the Internet, among other causes. We are now experiencing the upheaval of everything built upon those old metaphysics as the new jurisprudence, new rules of the new metaphysics of society take over.

So, we find ourselves with an incredible short-term State of Exception combined with medium-term revolution in meaning. The real miracle right now is that we made it through last year.

Schmitt’s last chapter is on the various Catholic counterrevolutionaries of the 19th Century. Donoso Cortes is correct that every political position is a commentary on the nature of man, but is a strange thing to say man is good and at the same time deny that good exists. I’m with Cortes is seeing Original Sin as the driving force of politics. Where I don’t stand with our modern political folks is in believing we can use politics to solve it, though perhaps I credit them too much in actually believing their own hype. From what I have seen, it seems most of these growing number of radicals are believing what they believe and doing what they do more as a form of entertainment than anything else. Anything, anything to avoid the Void. Cortes saw this and foresaw disaster before the 20th Century when everyone else was hyping the Progress of Man.

Last point: Schmitt discusses the idea of Flattening, that much of modern politics is a search for technical solutions. Our economy certainly works that way now. We have our influencers and our algorithms whose purpose is not to enlarge our individual experience but rather to fit it into boxes many others already fit into. That makes governing and controlling much, much easier. But it also takes much of the meaning out of life. People will, are, turning to radicalism just for the sake of doing something meaningful. Bread and Circuses will work for but so long, I fear. Then we might have a truly interesting State of Exception.