The Sacred Quality of The Political Hobb

The Sacred Quality of the Political:
Reflections on Hobbes, Schmitt and Saint Paul
Der sakrale Geist der Politik:

Bemerkungen über Hobbes, Schmitt und Paulus
By Tracy B. Strong*
Überall freilich geht diese Annahme, die ich Ihnen

hier vortrage, aus von dem einen Grundsachverhalt:
daß das Leben, solange es in sich selbst beruht und
aus sich selbst verstanden wird, nur den ewigen Kampf
jener Götter miteinander kennt, – unbildlich gespro
chen: die Unvereinbarkeit und also die Unaustragbar
keit des Kampfes der letzten überhaupt möglichen
Standpunkte zum Leben, die Notwendigkeit also zwi
schen ihnen sich zu entscheiden.1
(M. Weber. „Wissenschaft als Beruf“ –
Wissenschaftslehre 550)
11] Man ruft zu mir aus Seïr: Wächter, ist die Nacht
bald hin? Wächter, ist die Nacht bald hin?
12] Der Wächter aber sprach: Wenn auch der Morgen
kommt, so wird es doch Nacht bleiben. Wenn ihr
fragen wollt, so kommt wieder und fragt.
(Jesaja xxi: 11–12)2
* This essay was originally prepared for a Meisterkurs on “Politische Theologie,”

organized at the Institut für Philosophie of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin by
and with the participation of Professor Dr. Volker Gerhardt. The other participants
were Professor Dr. Enno Rudolph, Professor Dr. Angelo Bolaffi, Professor Dr. Claus
Öffe. I am grateful to each for their comments as I am to the students who partici
pated actively in the course.
1 “The assumption that I am offering you here is based on a fundamental fact.
This is that as long as life is left to itself and is understood in its own terms, it
knows only that the conflict between these gods is neverending. Or, in nonfigura
tive language, life is about the incompatibility of ultimate possible attitudes and
hence the necessity to decide between them.”
2 “One calls to me from Seir: Watchman, is the night almost gone? Watchman,
is the night almost gone? The Watchman said: Even if the morning cometh, it is still
2 Tracy B. Strong
To read Carl Schmitt in the context of Paul and Hobbes is, among other
things, to raise the question of the relation of significant elements of the
Western tradition to the thought and political choices of Carl Schmitt. If
Schmitt joined the NSDAP by mistake – not clear what it was, thinking it
merely a more effective form of German nationalism – then it is hard to
account for his remaining in the Party and his silence about it after the
defeat. If he joined it by accident – thinking that this happened to be the
best path to his advancement and for his career, then his thought will at
most be only contingently relation to National Socialism. This we can re
ject: too many people have seen links for us, again in the face of Schmitt’s
postwar silence, for us simply to excuse or overlook.3
We are left with the fact that reading Schmitt in the context of thinkers
such as Hobbes and St. Paul raises that there are many paths to take from
within what are apparently our best traditions.
I. Introduction: The Nature of Modernity for Carl Schmitt
As a preliminary, we should distinguish a “political theology” from a

theology that has politics. Liberation theology4, as it was practiced espe
cially in Latin American until Pope John Paul crushed it, is a theology that
has a politics: as such there are many antecedents both in Protestant and
Catholic thought. The “Social Gospel” teaching of such men as Walter
Rauschenbusch5 that was important around the turn of the last century in
the United States is only one instance of such creeds: its proponents sug
gested not that the Second Coming of Christ would make everything right,
but that Christ would not come until human beings had brought justice and
peace to human relations.6
remains night. If you wish to inquire, then come again and inquire.” (Isaiah, xxi,
11–12).
3 See Volker Neumann, “Carl Schmitt: Introduction,” in: Arthur Jacobson / Bern
hard Schlink (eds.), Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis, University of California
Press, 2000, p. 282. On the distinction of “mistake” and “accident” and the moral
difference it makes, see J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in his Philosophical
Papers, Oxford, Clarendon, 1963.
4 See e. g. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salva
tion, Revised edition: Orbis books. New York, 1988.
5 See Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, New York, Mac
Millan, 1908, chapter Seven (“What To Do”).
6 Heinrich Meier has argued that Schmitt has a theological politics and contrasts
Schmitt to Leo Strauss’ philosophical politics. (Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl
Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political
Philosophy, trans. Marcus Brainard, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. I
think rather that Schmitt has a political theology, that is that the way in which he
Reflections on Hobbes, Schmitt and Saint Paul 3
As opposed to this, it is central to any notion of political theology that

the experience of politics requires a “theology” to be viable – that is, poli
tics must rely on a source of authority that has the quality of being beyond
question. I do not mean that people may not resist it – but that is different
than questioning it. For something to be beyond question means that one
must find that authority in oneself such that one can do no other than ac
knowledge its claims. To speak of a political theology thus means to speak
of a politics in which it is held that problems cannot be resolved by univer
sally agreed upon procedures. The justification of a policy cannot be made
in personneutral terms but must and can only be made authoritatively. If
the liberal dream is the rule of law and not of men, then political theology
says that this is a vain dream.
So a central question of a political theology must be of the status of the
authority on the basis of which decisions are taken. In the West (at least)
such theological authority has typically been associated with a particular
event that is authoritatively formulated, sometimes as a text whose meaning
requires interpretation.7
1. The Fate of Authority in Modern Times: Technicity
The question of authority under conditions of modernity can only be ap

proached on a bias – from the side as it were. For Schmitt the political
realm was, as it had been for Weber, the realm of relations between human
beings, persons as opposed to roles: “die Ordnung der menschlichen
Dinge.”8 And persons, for Weber as for Weber, made up whatever world
there was that was not entzaubert – “demagified.”9 As Weber says, “[g]
änzlich versagt hat die Beamtenherrschaft da, wo sie mit politischen Fragen
befasst wurde.”10 Politics has to do with persons, bureaucracy with roles.
thinks about politics is political and is a secularization of theological concepts. See

Andrew Norris, “Carl Schmitt’s Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of ‘The
Outermost Sphere’ Theory and Event (2000) 4. 1 (online only).”
7 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 2003, refers to this as the “ChristEvent.” (chapter eight) by which
he means the resurrection.
8 Carl Schmitt, “Das Zeitalter der Neutraliserung und Entpolitisierung”, in: Carl
Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Berlin. Duncker & Humblot, [1932] 2002, p. 95.
Henceforth “BP xx” in text. English edition as The Concept of the Political, trans.
George Schwab, with a foreword by Tracy B. Strong, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1996. Page numbered in text as BP xx / yy. This article is cited as BPZN.
9 Schmitt, ibid, pp. 94–95.
10 Max Weber, “Parliament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” Ge
sammelte Politische Schiften [GPS], Mohr. Tübingen, 1971, p. 351.
4 Tracy B. Strong
The political realm – and thus the reality of the human – was, for Schmitt,
in danger of disappearing. In modern times he saw it being replaced by two
realms. One realm was the supposedly neutral space of scientific technique, in
which rational and logical conclusions – neutral with regard to human beings
– were attainable. “Heute ist nichts moderner als der Kampf gegen das Poli-
tische. … Es soll nur das organisatorish-technische und Ökonomisch-soziolo-
gische Aufgaben, aber keine politischen probleme mehr geben.11” In 1929,
Schmitt will lecture on Barcelona on this topic as “Das Zeitalter der Neutral-
isierungen und Entpolitisierungen”12 The decline or disappearance of the po
litical is itself always for Schmitt a “political matter,” as he makes clear in the
preface to the second edition of PT. If, however, the political is in danger of
disappearing as a human form of life, this can only be because sovereignty as
Schmitt understands it is increasingly not a constituent part of our present
world. Thus in his 1938 book on Hobbes, he will write “die Mechanisierung
der Staatsvorstellung hat die Mechanisierung des anthropologischen Bildes
vom Menschen vollendet.”13 Schmitt, with explicit reference to Max Weber,
sees danger in the increasing sense of the State as “ein grosser Betrieb.”
(PT 69 / 65) Increasingly this plant “läuft jetzt von selbst [und] dadurch geht
das dezisionistische und personalistische Element des bisherigen Sou-
veränitätsbegriffes verloren.”14 (PT 52 / 48) Schmitt sees it as his role to re
cover that element for the contemporary period.
The Barcelona lecture was published in 1930 and was added to the 1932
edition of The Concept of the Political: Schmitt thought of it as part of his
general argument in that book. As the political is for Schmitt the realm of
that which is truly human,15 his distress is that the West is loosing touch
with that which gives life human meaning. As he develops his argument in
this article, the contemporary West stands at the end of a series of “central
11 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, Berlin. Duncker & Humblot, [1022] 2004,
p. 68. Henceforth “PT xx” in the text. English edition as Political Theology, trans.
George Schwab with a Foreword by Tracy B. Strong, Chicago, University of Chi
cago Press, 2005. Page numbers in text as PT xx (German) / yy (English): “Today
nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political … There must be
no longer be political problems, only organizationaltechnical and economicsocio
logical ones.” (English PT 65).
12 BPZN 79–95.
13 Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und
Feldschlag eines politischen Symbols, Stuttgart, KlettCotta, 1995, p. 60 “… the
mechanization of the conception of the State has ended by bringing about the
mechanization of the anthropological understanding of human beings.”
14 “A huge industrial plant” … “runs on its own … [and] the decisionistic and
personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty is lost.”
15 See Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” par. 1, in: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of
the Political, Chicago, 1995, p. 83. See footnote 7 above.
spheres of thought.” “Central spheres” function here pretty much in the

manner that Thomas Kuhn understood paradigms. Thus “[i]st ein Gebiet
einmal zum Zentralgebiet geworden, so warden die Probleme der anderen
Gebiete von dort aus gelöst und gelten nur noch als Probleme zweiten
Ranges, deren Losung sich von selber ergibt, wenn nur die Probleme des
Zentralgebiets gelöst sind.” (BPZN 85)16”
There have been five “central spheres” since the Renaissance, each
loosely identified with a century. As he lays it out in the Barcelona lecture,
the history of the last 500 years shows a common structure, even though as
the controlling force has changed, so also have what counts as evidence, as
well as what was the social and political elite. Thus in the XVIth century
the world was structured around an explicitly theological understanding
with God and the Scriptures as foundational certainties; this was replaced
in the next century by metaphysics and rational (“scientific”) research and
in the eighteenth by ethical humanism with its central notions of duty and
virtue. In the XIXth century economics comes to dominate (although Sch
mitt is seen as a man of the Right he always took Marx completely seri
ously) and, finally, in the XXieth century technicity is the ordering of the
day. And this is at the core of his claim that ours is an age of “neutralisation
and depoliticization”: whereas all previous eras had leaders and decision
makers – what he calls here “clercs,” – the era of technology and techno
logical progress has no need of individual persons.17
Schmitt uses the French clerc and no doubt has in mind the 1927 book
by Julien Benda, Le trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals)18.
But whereas Benda had seen the clercs as mistakenly turning away from
spiritual and eternal values to temporal and political activity, Schmitt, tac
itly opposing Benda, sees the clerc as the person who most centrally grasps
and formulates the core of a particular central sphere.19
16 “If a sphere of thought becomes central, then the problems of other spheres
are solved in terms of the central sphere – they are considered secondary problems
whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central
sphere are solved.”
17 This periodisation can be also be found in shorter form in the 1934 preface to
Politische Theologie, pp. 1–2. The stages are well discussed in Henning Ottmann,
“Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und EntTotalisierungen: Carl Schmitts Theorie
der Neuzeit,” in: Reinhard Mehring (ed.), Carl Schmitt. Der Begriff des Politischen.
Ein Kooperativer Kommentar, Akademie Verlag. Berlin, 2003, pp. 156–169. See the
more extensive discussion in my foreword to Political Theology.
18 A contemporary edition is Julien Benda, Le trahison des clercs, Les cahiers
rouges. Grasset, 2003.
19 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford, Stanford UP, 2004),
writes that “He [Schmitt] is a clerk, and he understands his task not to be to estab
lish the law but to interpret the law.” (p. 103).
6 Tracy B. Strong
The central quality of all transformations that have led to our present
stage – “technicity” – is the “striving for a neutral sphere.” For Europe, the
attraction of a neutral sphere is that is seemed to provide a solution to the
conflicts that had grown up out of quarrels over theology. It transformed the
concepts elaborated “in vielen Jahrhunderten theologischen Denkens” into
what are for Schmitt “jetzt … Privatsachen.” (BPZN 89)20 However, each
stage of neutralization became, in Schmitt’s analysis, merely the next arena
of struggle. Thus what someone like John Rawls sees as one of the most
important achievements of the West – religious toleration – is for Schmitt
merely the prelude to another form of conflict.
The central question now therefore is what conflicts will arise when the
central sphere is technicity, which, “eben weil sie jemand dient, ist … nicht
neutral.” (BPZN 90)21 Here Schmitt finds himself in opposition to thinkers
like Weber, Troeltsch and Rathenau, whom he reads as in despair before the
“Entzauberung der Welt”. If one follows them, Schmitt says, one will de
spair, for the world will appear only as what Weber called a “stahlhartes
Gehäuse” with no way out, not even a look.22 This leads to quietism or
despair, the most important danger now confronting Europe. This danger
arises because it is Russia (i. e. the USSR) who has understood and seized
technicity and made it its own in the new arena of conflict. Only in Russia
does one now find a sense of a new “strong politics.”
Schmitt writes somewhat chillingly in Der Begriff des Politischen that
“[d]adurch, dass ein Volk nicht mehr die Kraft oder den Willen hat, sich in
der Sphäre des Politischen zuhalten, verschwindet das Politische nicht aus
der Welt. Es verschwindet nur ein schwaches Volk.”23 He thus closes his
Barcelona article with a truncated citation from Vergil’s “Fourth Eclogue”:
Ab integro nascitur ordo. The full line is “Magnus ab integro seclorum
nascitur ordo” which translates as “a great order of the ages is born from
the renewal.” Schmitt’s abbreviated line means “an order is born from the
renewal.”24 The eloquent two closing paragraphs of Schmitt’s article are in
20“By centuries of theological reflection …” “private matters”.

21“Precisely because it serves all … is not neutral”.
22 Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist der Kapitalismus, in: Re
ligionssoziologie I, Tübingen, Mohr 203. The standard English translation as “iron
cage” is thus misleading: not only can you not get out but you cannot even see out.
23 BP 54: “When a people no longer has the strength or the will to hold itself to
the realm of the political, the political does not thereby disappear from the world.
It is only a weak people that perishes.”
24 It is worth noting both that this line served as the origins for the motto (“novus
ordo saeculorum”) on the Great Seal of the United States as devised by Charles
Thompson (an eminent Latinist), and that the following lines in Vergil speaks of the
coming of a new child, which was understood by medieval Christianity to be a
effect a call for the West to be equal to the need for this renewed conflict
and to oppose the forces of Communism. (Here Schmitt shares concerns
with Heidegger). And this is at the core of his claim that ours is an age of
“neutralisation and depoliticization”: whereas previous eras still had leaders
and decisionmakers, the era of technology and technological progress is
different in that increasingly it has no need of actual individual persons.25
What is wrong with technicity? The danger and problem with technicity
is that it claims to have personneutral ways of solving disputes. The “or
ganisationtechnical” method is characterised by three epistemological pre
suppositions. The first is that one can make a clearcut conceptual separation
between facts and values and that, in consequence, values were subjective,
not of the world, and could be kept apart from ones analysis of social real
ity. This was not a denial that values were “important” but it was a denial
that values were objects of knowledge.26
A second claim was parent to the first. It was a claim that propositions
about the world could and should be made to speak for themselves – thus
that propositions about the world should have a validity independent of he
or she who advanced them. One could and should clearly separate the
speaker from the spoken, for if one did one’s work right not just empirical
claims about the world but concepts themselves would stand independently
of the speaker. In its simplest form, the claim was that a statement like
“mass equals force times acceleration” was true independently of who said
it and of when and where it was said.
The third claim derived from the first two. It held that certain forms of
discourse (claims to knowledge) were responsible and responsive to the
real world in ways that other forms (one might think of them as emotive,
or expressive) were not.27 In the first but not the second, the expectation
was that the world would correct mistakes is an erroneous analysis.
prophecy of the coming of Christ. The last entry in Schmitt’s Glossarium (published
in 1991) reads: “Mit jedem neugeborenen Kind wird eine neue Welt geboren.” He
goes on to hope that the child will be an “Aggressor.”
25 This periodisation can be found explicitly in the Barcelona address and is
implicit in the first several pages of chapter three of PT; it is made explicit in
shorter form in the 1934 preface to PT, pp. 1–2. The stages are well discussed in
Henning Ottmann, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und EntTotalisierungen: Carl
Schmitts Theorie der Neuzeit”, in: Reinhard Mehring (ed.), Carl Schmitt. Der
Begriff des Politischen. Ein Kooperativer Kommentar, Akademie Verlag. Berlin,
2003, pp. 156–169.
26 See James Conant, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say,” in: Paul Guyer /
Hilary Putnam (eds.), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, esp. p. 252–253.
27 See the discussion in Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School, Chicago, 1984,
36.
8 Tracy B. Strong
On the basis of these presuppositions, Technizität seemed to provide a

model of a neutral resolution to disputes and this was its attraction. These
presuppositions are central to political liberalism: they ground the possibil
ity of rational agreement. (Political liberalism does not, of course, think that
all humans will behave rationally at all times; but it does think that ration
ality has a compelling quality such that resisting it is a sign of perversity
or ignorance.)
2. The Fate of Authority in Modern Times: Aesthetic Subjectivity
Along with science, and perversely companion to it, Schmitt saw the
arising of a second realm, the realm of aesthetic subjectivity. The transition
to the Technizität sphere is made possible, Schmitt argues by an “Ästheti-
sierung aller geistigen Gebiete [aestheticization of all sectors of the spirit].”
(BPZN 83) This is the epistemological basis for his critique of liberalism
as a clasa discutora, unable to come to any decision on anything because
all decisions appear the same. If the scientific realm held out a method for
resolving some disputes, the aestheticization of the rest of the world – of
that portion not amenable to scientific resolution – subjectivized it and held
that was no way to resolve those disputes if they could not be resolved by
science.
Thus liberal scienticism and romanticism come together – two sides of
the same modern coin. From this we get his lapidary sentence from The
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy: If a liberal is asked “Christ or Barra
bas, he responds with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a committee of
investigation.”28
Responding to the double bind of modern society, Schmitt argues that in
such a context the recovery of the political realm must of necessity come
from outside the liberalromantic world, that is, it cannot be justified in
terms of the categories of that world. It must come, as Herbert Marcuse
argued, from a state whose only “justification is its existence”29 – or rather
its practice. Justification must be ontological rather than epistemological.
a) Aesthetic Authority (Intermezzo)
But how can something come to have the quality of being convincingly
present to us, such that it serves as an authority? I believe the model for
Schmitt’s approach to these questions has its origin in Kant’s Kritik der
28 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, MIT, 1985, 62.

29 H. Marcuse, Negations, Boston 1968, p. 31.
Urteilskraft. It is here that Kant introduces the concept of “genius.”30 With

this concept, Kant seeks to account for the very existence of something that
has the quality of being a work of art. This account actually marks the
beginning of an important shift in aesthetic theory. Generally speaking
prior to the end of the XVIIIth century, examples of the aesthetic had been
sought in that which existed naturally. Thus the “sublime” for instance, was
generally instantiated with reference to a storm, or a sunset, or some such
natural phenomenon. By the late XVIIIth century – let us say by the “storm”
section of Beethoven’s Third Symphony or by D moll sequence that marks
the arrival of the Commendatore in the next to the last scene in Don Gio-
vanni – the sublime was also clearly a human product. The geniusartist
creator has become part of the accepted world.31 By introducing the idea of
the genius Kant focuses on human creation, thus accomplishing a transfor
mation that started with the XVIIth century.
The aesthetic quality is held by Kant “von allem Zwange willkürlicher
Regeln so frei scheinen”32 It appears as natural – that is as given in and of it
self. Such is “beautiful art” – art which Kant says is both purposive and with
out an end. As such the origin of that which we experience as art must be
without apparent foundation as it is grounded in precisely the incomprehensi
ble.33 So the question naturally arises as to how the work of art comes into
being. Since such a work is the work of “subjective universality” (that makes
a judgment of beauty without referring to any concept)34 Somewhat later in
the section Kant differentiates between the perceiver of beauty and its creator,
and clearly thinks that accounting for the creation of beauty a more difficult
matter. It is this that leads Kant to introduce the idea of genius.
30 “Genius” is one of the topoi of nineteenth century thought. See the account in
Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des GenieGedankens in der deutschen Literatur,
Philosophie und Politik, 1750–1945. 2 volumes, Darmstadt, 1985, which covers
thinkers from Klopstock and Lessing, through Kant to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
the twentieth century, albeit not always unconventionally. On Kant see also Giorgio
Tonelli, “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius (1770–1779): Part I,” in: Journal of the
History of Philosophy, v. IV (1966): 10931 and “Part II,” in: ibid., v. V, pp. 209–24.
Thanks to Jackob Pyetranker for calling these articles to my attention.
31 See for instance, F. Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, # 105. I am in
debted here to several conversations with Professor Alexander Rehding of the Har
vard Music Department.
32 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [henceforth KU] § 45, Akademie edition: 5.306.
33 As Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1992, writes: “We must … wonder how
understanding, in its lawfulness, can enter a situation that cannot be elucidated by
reference to the constitutive usage of the categories and that precludes general con
cepts.” (p. 47).
34 KU § 6 (5.211).
10 Tracy B. Strong
“Genie ist das Talent (Naturgabe), welches der Kunst die Regel giebt.”35
The genius has the complete freedom of incomprehensibility. “Der Urheber
eines Products, welches er seinem Genie verdankt, selbst nicht weiß, wie
sich in ihm die Ideen dazu herbei finden, auch es nicht in seiner Gewalt
hat, dergleichen nach Belieben oder planmäßig auszudenken und anderen
in solchen Vorschrifte.”36 This is originality, which means for Kant that
what the genius accomplishes cannot be confined to, nor explained by, any
systematic understanding or procedure. In the Anthropology, Kant is clear
that the word applies only to an “artist” and only to the artist who does
something original. Later in that book he can write that “Das Genie glänzt
daher als augenblickliche, mit Intervallen sich zeigende und wieder ver-
schwindende Erscheinung nicht mit einem willkürlich angezündeten und
eine beliebige Zeit fortbrennenden Licht, sondern wie sprühende Funken,
welche eine glückliche Anwandelung des Geistes aus der productiven Ein-
bildungskraft auslockt.”37 Here it is worth noting that even Newton does not
count as a genius for what he did could be set out for all to understand and
thus could in principle have been discovered by others.38
It seems to me clear from this that the actual operation of genius remains
a bit of a mystery for Kant. Thus he must ascribe it to a “happy seizure of
the spirit.” This mysterious quality is all the more important in that Kant
thinks that a work of art (of true art) has the quality of providing grounds
for others to judge and of at the same time providing the structure – as we
might call it – for their mutual comprehensibility. Kant will say that “Die
Einbildungskraft (als produktives Erkenntnisvermögen) ist nämlich sehr
mächtig in Schaffung gleichsam einer andern Natur, aus dem Stoffe, den ihr
die wirkliche gibt”39 Thus Novalis will in the last decade of the XVIIIth
KU § 46 ff (5.307ff).
35
KU § 46 (5. 308) “He does not know himself how the ideas for [the beautiful
36
work of art] come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such
things at will or according to plan, and to communicate to others precepts that
would put them in apposition to produce similar products.”
37 Anthropologie (5.318n) “Genius … glitters like a momentary phenomenon
which appears and disappears at intervals, and vanishes again. It is not a light that
can be kindled at will and kept burning for a period of one’s choosing, but it is
rather like a spark scattering flash which a happy seizure of the spirit entices from
the productive imagination.”
38 KU § 47 (5.309).
39 Ibid § 49 (5.314). “the imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is,
namely, very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material
which the real one gives to it.”
I suspect that it is in response to this that Nietzsche can write in “Vom Nutzen
und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben” (HL 3 WKG III1 p. 261): “Denn da wir
nun einmal die Resultate früherer Geschlechter sind, sind wir auch die Resultate
century define genius as “the capacity to describe imaginary objects as if

they were real and to act upon them as it they were real.”40
What Kant calls genius is pretty much like what might produce what
Schmitt understands as the sovereign decision on the exception.41 (Kant’s
aesthetics are of course not subjectivist). Kant says that the act of genius
imparts “another nature” to the world. So also the sovereign gives the rule
in a condition where what to do and be is not previously defined. It is also
a pretty accurate description of what happens with the creation of the Le-
viathan, except that for Hobbes there is apparently no single creative genius
for we all make the Leviathan. Where there was nothing there is now some
thing. Yet what is that something? I propose that we see what happens with
the creation of the Leviathan as an instance of incarnation. Here Luther’s
“eingefleischt” catches the sense of embodiment better than Inkarnation. To
further explore Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, I turn to a consideration of
Hobbes.
ihrer Verirrungen, Leidenschaften und Irrthümer, ja Verbrechen; es ist nicht möglich

sich ganz von dieser Kette zu lösen. Wenn wir jene Verirrungen verurtheilen und
uns ihrer für enthoben erachten, so ist die Thatsache nicht beseitigt, dass wir aus
ihnen herstammen. Wir bringen es im besten Falle zu einem Widerstreite der er
erbten, angestammten Natur und unserer Erkenntniss, auch wohl zu einem Kampfe
einer neuen strengen Zucht gegen das von Alters her Angezogne und Angeborne,
wir pflanzen eine neue Gewöhnung, einen neuen Instinct, eine zweite Natur an, so
dass die erste Natur abdorrt. Es ist ein Versuch, sich gleichsam a posteriori eine
Vergangenheit zu geben, aus der man stammen möchte, im Gegensatz zu der, aus
der man stammt – immer ein gefährlicher Versuch, weil es so schwer ist eine Grenze
im Verneinen des Vergangenen zu finden, und weil die zweiten Naturen meistens
schwächlicher als die ersten sind. Es bleibt zu häufig bei einem Erkennen des Guten,
ohne es zu thun, weil man auch das Bessere kennt, ohne es thun zu können. Aber
hier und da gelingt der Sieg doch, und es giebt sogar für die Kämpfenden, für die,
welche sich der kritischen Historie zum Leben bedienen, einen merkwürdigen Trost:
nämlich zu wissen, dass auch jene erste Natur irgend wann einmal eine zweite Natur
war und dass jede siegende zweite Natur zu einer ersten wird.”
40 Novalis, Pollen, in: F. Beiser, Writings of the Early German Romantics, Cam
bridge UP, p. 12.
41 See Peter Bürger, “Carl Schmitt oder die Fundierung der Politik auf Aesthe
tik,”, in: Zerstörung, Rettung des Mythos durch Licht (ed. Christa Bürger) Frankfurt,
1986. I owe the reference to Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s
Decision,” Representations (Summer 2003, 83), pp. 67–96. I came across this article
after writing mine and am pleased that she starts hers with some of the same con
siderations I use.
12 Tracy B. Strong
II. Thomas Hobbes
The frontispiece to the Leviathan is justly famous and has recently been
subject to an important commentary by Horst Bredekamp.42 Let us note
some additional qualities of the engraving:
− The giant who appears on the horizon has the quality of always being in
view. When one comes out for ones newspaper in the morning, the Le
viathan is there, just as it was when you went to bed.
− The body of the giant is composed of individually distinguishable beings
all of who face towards the giant; like a theater audience they have an
intransitive relationship to that which they behold. You see their backs
just as one does when seated in the theater. (Their orientation is, inciden
tally, a change, requested by Hobbes, from an earlier version where the
artist drew them facing outwards).
− Under the picture is a double escutcheon (Schild); the banner uniting
them proclaims this to be a book about a “Commonwealth Ecclesiastical
and Civil.” The important word there is the “and” which joins the instru
ments of civil power on the left to the ecclesiastical ones on the right.
Thus Rousseau in the Contrat Social (iv, 8) writes that Hobbes “[d]e tous
les Auteurs Chrétiens … est le seul qui ait bien vû le mal et le remède,
qui ait osé proposer de réunir les deux têtes de l’aigle, et de tout ram-
ener à l’unité politique, sans laquelle jamais Etat ni Gouvernement ne
sera bien constitué, qui a su réunir les deux têtes de l’aigle.”43
− Over everything there is a citation from Scripture, the book of Job (Hiob):
“Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur. (Auf Erden ist nicht
seines gleichen).” The verse continues to say that the Leviathan is “with
out fear.”
42 Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes: visuelle Strategien. Der Leviathan: Urbild

des modernen Staates. Werkillustrationen und Portraits, Berlin, Akademie Verlag,
1999. He argues that the body of the Leviathan draws upon the corpus hermeticum
(p. 61 ff). See also my discussion of the frontispiece in “How to Write Scripture:
Words, Authority and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 1993 (20:1)
pp. 128–159 and “When Is a Text Not a Pretext? A Rejoinder to Victoria Silver,”
pp. 172–178 in the same issue.
43 J. J. Rousseau, Du Contract Social, livre 4, chapitre 8, in: Œuvres Complètes,
Paris. Gallimard, 1964, volume 3, p. 463. “Of all Christian authors [Hobbes] is the
only one who has correctly seen both the disease and the remedy, who has dared to
urge the reuniting of the two heads of the eagle and to bring everything back into
political unity, without which neither the state nor the government will ever be
properly constituted, who has known how to reunite the two heads of the eagle.”
The passage from Hiob comes at the end of a sequence that begins in
book 38 with a comparison of God to a geometer or an architect.
[1] Und der HERR antwortete Hiob aus dem Wettersturm und sprach:
[2] Wer ist’s, der den Ratschluß verdunkelt mit Worten ohne Verstand?
[3] Gürte deine Lenden wie ein Mann! Ich will dich fragen, lehre mich an
[4] Wo warst du, als ich die Erde gründete? Sage mir’s, wenn du so klug bist!
[5] Weißt du, wer ihr das Maß gesetzt hat oder wer über sie die Richtschnur
gezogen hat?
[6] Worauf sind ihre Pfeiler eingesenkt, oder wer hat ihren Eckstein gelegt,
[7] als mich die Morgensterne miteinander lobten und jauchzten alle Gottessöhne?44
I do not think it an accident that Hobbes places Scripture over everything.
The particular citation is a citation that describes what would be an absolute
and unquestionable authority, as least on this earth. (It is thus significant
that Hobbes was a Christian mortalist, i.e that he believed that the soul died
with the body and would be reborn together only at the Last Judgment. If
there were an independently existing soul the thisearth focus would be
called into question – cf Lev. 38, 44).
Put these points about the frontispiece together and we find that the Com
monwealth requires (1) a single, absolute power in and as which we all
exist; (2) that the Sovereign has no fear (of death, especially45); and (3) that
the existence of the commonwealth is brought about by art – poiesis.
The need for this single absolute power derives from the fact that Hobbes
knows there to be two kinds of knowledge. The first is natural or mathe
matical and as he says in the dedication to Humane Nature is “free from
controversy.” (English Works 4.xiii). The second kind of knowledge of
which Leviathan is possibly a first exemplar is also knowledge, but knowl
edge in which profit and pleasure intervene. About such knowledge there
44 1. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
2. Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
3. Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou
me.
4. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast
understanding.
5. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the
line upon it?
6. Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone
thereof;
7. When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
45 It is worth noting that Hobbes spent a lot of time convincing people that they
were in fact afraid of violent death, something that the history of the preceding
quartercentury called into serious question.
14 Tracy B. Strong
must be controversy, controversy that cannot be eliminated by any neutral

procedure. As Hobbes notes: “The doctrine of right and wrong is perpetu
ally disputed both by the Pen and the Sword; whereas the doctrine of lies
and figures is not so; because men care not in the subject what be truth, as
a thing that causes no mans ambition, profit or lust.” (Lev. 11). The sover
eign has no fear of death because although the being who holds the place
of the sovereign can die, the Sovereign itself, as a human construction, will
be constantly reborn: it is a ‘mortal God.’
It is thus not the case that civil philosophy is a model of “scientific
politics,” nor is Hobbes’ philosophy a “subdepartment of physics,” as some
have claimed (Watkins, Goldsmith). Yet Hobbes does say that the model of
truth for the second kind of knowledge, as well as for the first, is geometry
(“the only Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on man
kind.” – Lev. 28).
1. The Poietics of Theology and Geometry
If the model is geometry, where is the theology? The reference in the

passage from Hiob to “Worten ohne Verstand”, to the founding of the Earth,
and the attribution of these to God’s quality as the geometer of the Earth
are important, given Hobbes’ appreciation of geometry. Here one must pay
close attention to what Hobbes understood Geometry to be (and indeed to
what “science” meant in the XVIIth century)46. Geometry has for Hobbes
three qualities: it is, as I just indicated, God given; it depends on human
agreement; they must agree on the correct definition of words. As a prac
tice, it is Godgiven but – or rather, and – it depends on explicit human
agreement; it is conventional and it makes error impossible for him who
practices it. Hobbes is at the same time a conventionalist, an essentialist,
and a theist all at once. “Where the causes are know,” says Hobbes, “there
is place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for. Geom
etry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we
reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is de
monstrable because we make the commonwealth ourselves.”47 (The special
epistemological status of that “which we make ourselves” was already
present in books like Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle and will form the
46 See Ted H. Miller, “The Uniqueness of Leviathan,” in: T. Sorrell (ed.), Levia
than After 350 Years, Cambridge UP, 2001, as well as Douglas M. Jesseph, Squar
ing the Circle: The War Between Hobbes and Wallis, Chicago. University of Chi
cago Press, 2000.
47 T. Hobbes, “Six Lessons for the Professors of Mathematics,” English Works,
Molesworth Edition, volume 7: 184.
basis of the development of modern aesthetics with Baumgarten in the

XVIIIth century).
“We make the commonwealth ourselves.” Why does this not open the
door to relativism? How does this give us authoritative assurance? “Auctori-
tas, non veritas fecit legem” notes Schmitt citing the Latin edition of Le-
viathan, chapter 26 (a point Hobbes reinforces in chapter 42) where he
relates command and authority to the acts of actual human beings. “Truth
of doctrine,” says Hobbes, must rest on authoritative acts and not on “facts.”
Nor can it owe nothing to tradition. (Lev. “Review”). I note here that for a
Protestant the truth of Scripture does not depend on knowing what Its au
thor meant (for God cannot be known). Scripture is authoritative in and of
itself, not because we know the intentions of the author. As for facts and
tradition, they are well known sources of error to Protestants.48 It is worth
noting that the rather sharp interrogating secretary at Luther’s trial in Worms
fastened on this point, arguing that Luther’s doctrine of conscience would
destroy the Church: Luther’s response was that conscience should generate
a Church, with ultimate authority being located in what was written as
Scripture, hence not of human authorship.
Hobbes argues that Christians do not know but they do believe Scripture
to be the word of God and they believe this because “they have been taught
it from their infancy.”(Lev. 43) The authority here is precisely from the fact
that there is no available author. It is not a problem for Hobbes that we are
taught from infancy: were we not, Scripture could never have authority.
After all we are taught grammar from our infancy and that does not make
it any less authoritative.49 The problem for Hobbes is then not the question
of the authority of the Scriptures – everyone knows that God is their author.
Likewise the question is not precisely to know what they mean but only by
what they become law. And the answer to that is for Hobbes the Sovereign.
Leviathan, chapter thirtythree:
48 See e. g. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Dedication to Fran

cis I.”
49 In the “An Answer to Bishop Bramhall” Hobbes writes: “To obey is to do or
forbear as one is commanded, and depends on the will; but to believe, depends not
on the will, but on the providence and guidance of our hearts that are in the hands
of God Almighty. Laws only require obedience; belief requires teachers and argu
ments drawn either from reason, or from some thing already believed. Where there
is no reason for our belief, there is no reason we should believe. The reason why
men believe, is drawn from the authority of those men whom we have no just cause
to mistrust, that is, of such men to whom no profit accrues by their deceiving us,
and of such men as never used to lie, or else from the authority of such men whose
promises, threats, and affirmations, we have seen confirmed by God with miracles.”,
English Works, volume 4.
16 Tracy B. Strong
It is a question much disputed between the divers sects of Christian religion, from
whence the Scriptures derive their authority; which question is also propounded
sometimes in other terms, as, how we know them to be the word of God, or, why
we believe them to be so: and the difficulty of resolving it, ariseth chiefly from
the improperness of the words wherein the question itself is couched. For it is
believed on all hands, that the first and original author of them is God; and
consequently the question disputed, is not that. Again, it is manifest, that none can
know they are God’s word, (though all true Christians believe it,) but those to
whom God himself hath revealed it supernaturally; and therefore the question is
not rightly moved, of our knowledge of it. Lastly, when the question is pro
pounded of our belief; because some are moved to believe for one, and others for
other reasons, there can be rendered no one general answer for them all. The
question truly stated is, by what authority they are made law.
From what and how is the commonwealth made? Hobbes criticizes the
Descartes’ development (in the “Second Meditation”) of the cogito from the
act of thinking to a “spirit, a soul, an understanding, a reason.” Hobbes is
perfectly happy to say that he is a thing that thinks (that is a body) but he
resists Descartes’ move to selfconsciousness by arguing that Descartes
would thereby commit himself to an endless regress.50 Hobbes must refer
the act of thinking to a corporeal, material, thisworldly being. He makes
these moves as early as 1640 in De Corpore but they are central to his
notion of sovereignty as an artificial soul, existing only when the Leviathan
is animated by living persons.
We find that this Leviathan is brought into existence in a manner analo
gous to God’s creation of the world. This is poiesis.
“For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, (in
Latin Civitas) which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength
than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended;” (L.
Introduction).51
What makes this art possible? In the “Introduction,” Hobbes gives us the
means:
[T]here is a saying much usurped of late, that wisdom is acquired, not by reading
of books, but of men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most
part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to show what they
think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their
backs. But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might
learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, nosce
50 See Descartes, Philosophical Works, Cambridge University Press, 1976, vol

ume 2: 61. This is part of Hobbes’ refusal of any form of dualism.
51 It is worth noting here that Hobbes’ analogy of the various institutions to parts
of the body politic draws in part upon a strand of medieval thought that goes from
John of Salisbury’s “Policraticus” (a fact noted by Schmitt at the end of PT II) to
Fortescue’s “De Laudibus Legem Angliae”.
teipsum, read thyself: which was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance,
either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage
men of low degree, to a saucy behaviour towards their betters; but to teach us,
that for the similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man, to the thoughts
and passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he
doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear, &c. and upon what grounds;
he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other
men upon the like occasions.52
The art of bringing the Leviathan into existence is based on reading
oneself; indeed, the most stunning part of this declaration of intention is
Hobbes’ translation of nosce teipsum. It clearly means “know thyself” yet
Hobbes gives it immediately and pointedly as “read thyself.”53 Such reading
he goes on to say will cause the characters to become legible. When we
have read we will have read what is in the heart of each of us. We will
have read ourselves as we construct of artificial man who is the Sovereign
and the commonwealth.
How can this happen that I find a text I myself, that I know that I am a
text? How then can I know that you have found the same text and thus that
we have found each other as we found ourselves, that this text is the au
thoritative base of our commonality? It is not easy: in the “Appendix” to
the Latin edition of Leviathan, Hobbes writes:
“Natural law is eternal, divine and inscribed only in human hearts. But there are
very few men who know who to examine their own heart and read what is writ
ten there? Thus it is from written laws that men know what they must do or
avoid.”54
Hobbes understands his book as that which he has read in his and thus
in our heart: most of us cannot so read. What is in my heart is what is in
yours and Hobbes has made us a present of it and made us present to it by
his book. What if he is wrong? Here his position is like that of Luther on
conscience: if we can convince him that he is wrong, he will change his
52 Hobbes may have in mind the poem “Nosce Te Ipsum” by Sir John Davies
(English lawyer, Speaker of the Irish Parliament, and Lord Chief Justice who lived
from 1569 to 1626). See Ted H. Miller, “The Uniqueness of Leviathan,” in: T. Sor
rell (ed.), Leviathan After 350 Years, Cambridge. Cambridge UP, p. 97
53 For a more extensive discussion see my “How to Write Scripture: Words, Au
thority and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 1993 (20:1) pp. 128–159
and “When Is a Text Not a Pretext? A Rejoinder to Victoria Silver,” pp. 172–178 in
the same issue. See also Gary Shapiro, “Reading and Writing in the Text of Hobbes’
Leviathan,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 18 [April, 1980], 147–157.
54 See Thomas Hobbes, Léviathan (ed. F. Tricaud) Paris, Siley, 1988, p. 700.
I note that Davies’s poem contains the lines:
We interpret lawes, which other men haue made,
But reade not those which in our hearts are writ.
18 Tracy B. Strong
mind.55 (As we known, Hobbes was somewhat hard to convince that he was
wrong as he produced over ten proofs for the squaring of the circle).
What however is inscribed as the Leviathan? It is words that are in our
(each of us) heart. At the beginning of the gospel of John we find that “Im
Anfang war das Wort … Und das Wort ward Fleisch und wohnte unter uns.”
Christ is thus an incarnation of the word. The Leviathan is also a making
flesh – more precisely a making of artificial flesh, at once God, Man, mon
ster, and machine – of the words that are in our heart. Hobbes was worried
that he might be thought to be making a mere automaton – only a machine
– and he explicitly places the Leviathan on a higher level than a mere au
tomaton. (“Art goes yet further [then automata], imitating that rational and
most excellent work of nature, man”). The creature that is made is in fact
the civilphilosophical equivalent of Christ in that he / she / it is a “mortal
god” and a man.
Thus I do not think that Hobbes is best understood as being about “agree
ment,” as is often argued. Hobbes wants his readers to acknowledge – the
covenant is the acknowledgement – that the conditions laid out by him in
Leviathan are in fact in each of us, and that as they are mine so also are
they yours. That we resist them is the secular equivalent of original sin and
the source for our legitimation of a power over us. The move may appear
secular but it has a sacral structure.
2. The Sovereign as the People and the People as Sovereign
What this means is that for Hobbes the Leviathan is the incarnation of
the words in our hearts – and what is in our hearts is material that we find
hard to read and to acknowledge. The Leviathan is an incarnation (albeit
poietic) of words that are in each of us but which will ordinarily only be
recognised when it is made visible such that we can read it in the laws and
words of the Sovereign. (Thus Hobbes wanted the Leviathan to be taught
in the universities, much as Scripture was taught in church. Leviathan is, to
draw upon Wittgenstein, intended as the “grammar” of the political). What
is attained with the Leviathan is our recognition of our commonalty with
all those others who have given themselves the common text of each. The
Sovereign is us, is what is in each of our hearts, something that Hobbes has
read even if we have not been able to. (Hobbes is then not so much the
author of the Leviathan as its transcriber).
55 Lev. 5: “For who is so stupid, as both to mistake in geometry, and also to

persist in it, when another detects his error to him?” See Martin Luther, “An Open
Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” in: Martin Luther, Three
Treatises (Philadelphia, 1947), pp. 22–23.
This is the key passage:

The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from
the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure
them in such sort, as that by their own industry, and by the fruits of the earth,
they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to confer all their power
and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all
their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to
appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own,
and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their
person, shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common
peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their
judgments, to his judgment. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real
unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man
with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I
authorise and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this as
sembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and author
ize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person,
is called a Commonwealth, in Latin Civitas. This is the generation of that great
Leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that mortal god, to which we
owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given
him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much
power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is enabled to form
the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies
abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the commonwealth; which (to define
it,) is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with
another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the
strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and
common defence. (Lev. 17 – my emphases).
There are several noteworthy elements to this passage:

1. A common power requires covenanting on the part of all concerned;
2. those who do not covenant are considered “foreigners” and enemies (as
with Schmitt). They are not part of the “we” that is formed as the Le
viathan (note that it is only that they did not covenant that makes them
such). What the Leviathan is does not exist prior to the covenanting:
there is no preexisting Geist;
3. that which is the result of the covenant is singular (even if it be com
posed of many individuals);
4. the existence of the common power requires the acknowledgment by
each that s / he is the author of whatever that power does, i. e. that the
Sovereign’s acts are my acts, that the Sovereign is my sovereign and the
state my state. In effect the Leviathan allows us to read a text of which
we are the author, but which we have been unable to read;
20 Tracy B. Strong
5. This produces what Hobbes calls a “real unity,” what is called homothu-
madon (“with a common thumos”), a doctrine associated with the corpus
mysticum doctrine of the Church by Roman Catholicism and taken over
by Hobbes for the commonwealth;56
6. Finally if the Leviathan is a “mortal god” then it is the Christ – at least
in the matters with which civil philosophy is concerned.
What Hobbes has done is to combine a tradition of covenanting that
derives from Protestantism with the Catholic tradition of the corpus mysti-
cum. In this way an act of will produces an unquestionable and authoritative
unity.57 The reason that the sovereign cannot be questioned is that the sov
ereign is my incarnation of myself, of a self that I most often wish to avoid.
I am the author of the acts of the Sovereign and they are thus my acts. For
Hobbes humans become human, or realise their humanity, accede to some
thing more than what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” only when they
submit themselves to an authority that they have themselves authorized. The
state is a consequence to the convenant and is a katechon in that it holds
back the civil war which threatens constantly.58
a) Christianity on Earth
Hobbes proclaims on over 20 occasions that “Jesus is the Christ” and he

holds this to be the single most important statement defining Christianity.
To say “Jesus is the Christ” is to say that He is the Messiah, that is He is
anointed and appointed by God to lead a people. It is thus also to say, as
does Hobbes in De Cive, xviii, 10: that Jesus is the King who makes soci
ety possible. In Lev. 42, discussing excommunication, he notes: “Therefore
56 See e. g. Acts 1.14; 2.46; Romans 15.6. See James Edwards, “Unity Not of
Our Making,” Christianity Today, Aug 6, 2001 (Vol. 45, No. 10) pp. 48–50. See also
Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 11: “Strengthened in holy Com
munion by the body of Christ, [the faithful] manifest in a concrete way the unity of
the people of God that this sacrament aptly signifies and wondrously causes”. It may
also be the case as Bredekamp argues, that Hobbes draws on the tradition of the
Gnostic corpus hermeticum. But although that tradition did indeed have many rep
resentations of bodies making up a body, it is also the case that such detailed rep
resentations were common at the time.
57 As Jacques Maritain was to put it: “Either sovereignty means nothing, or it
means supreme power separate and transcendent – not at the peak but above the
peak – and ruling the entire body politic from above. That is why this power is
absolute (absolute, that is nonbound, separate) and consequently unlimited.” (Mar-
itain, Man and the State, 47).
58 Wolfgang Palaver, “Hobbes and the katechon” theol.uibk.ac.at / cover / conta
gion / contagion02_Palaver.pdf.
a true and unfeigned Christian [ie one who truly proclaims Jesus to be the
Christ] is not liable to excommunication: nor he also that is a professed
Christian, till his hypocrisy appear in his manners, that is, till his behaviour
be contrary to the law of his sovereign, which is the rule of manners, and
which Christ and his apostles have commanded us to be subject to. For the
Church cannot judge of manners but by external actions, which actions can
never be unlawful, but when they are against the law of the commonwealth.”
It turns out in Lev. 43 that the proclamation of Jesus as the Christ entails
obedience to the laws of the sovereign even if that sovereign be “an infi
del.” So Jesus as the Messiah entails the reestablishment of the earthly
kingdom and thus sovereignty. As Hobbes says in Lev. 41:
If then Christ whilst he was on earth, had no kingdom in this world, to what end
was his first coming? It was to restore unto God, by a new covenant, the king
dom, which being his by the old covenant, had been cut off by the rebellion of
the Israelites in the election of Saul. Which to do, he was to preach unto them,
that he was the Messiah, that is, the king promised to them by the prophets …
Schmitt picks up on this and in the Glossarium (23.5.49) draws a severe
conclusion:
Der wichtigste Satz des Thomas Hobbes bleibt:
“Jesus is the Christ”. Die Kraft eines solchen Satzes wirkt auch dann, wenn er in
Begriffssystem des gedanklichen Aufbaus an den Rand, ja scheinbar dogar ausser
halb des Begiffkreises geschoben wird. Diese Abschiebun ist ein des Verkultung
Christi analoger Vergang, wie ihn der Grossinquistitor Dostojewskis vornimmt.
Hobbes spricht aus und begründet wissenschaftlich, was Dostojewskis Grossin
quisitor tut: die Wirkung Christi im sozialen und politischen Bereich unschädlich
machen; das Christentum entanarchisieren, im aber im Hintergrunde eine gewisse
legitierende Wirkund zo belassen und jedenfalls nicht darauf zu verzichten. Ein
kluger Tatiker verzichtet auf michts, es sei denn restlos unverwetbar. Soweit war
es mit dem Christentunm noch nicht. Wir können fragen: wer ist dem Grossin
quisitor Dostokewskis näher: die romishce Kirche oder der Souverän des thomas
Hobbes? … Nenne mir Deinen Feind, und ich sage Dir, wer du bist. Hobbes und
die römische Kirche: der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt.59
59 Carl Schmitt, Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951. Berlin.

Duncker & Humblot, 1991. [entry by date]. “The most important sentence of Hob
bes remains: Jesus is the Christ. The power of such a sentence also works even it
is pushed to the margins of a conceptual system of an intellectual structure, even if
it is apparently pushed outside the conceptual circle. This deportation is analogous
to the domestication of Christ undertaken but Dostojewski’s Grand Inquisitor. Hob
bes expresses and grounds scientifically what Dostojewski’s Grand Inquisitor does:
to neutralise the effect of Christ in the social and political sphere; to deanarchize
Christianity, while leaving it at the same time as a kind of legitimating effect and
in any case not to do without it. A clever tactician gives up nothing as long as it is
not completely useless. Christianity was not yet spent. Thus we can ask if the grand
Inquisitor of Dostojewski is closer to the Roman church or to Hobbes’ sovereign …
22 Tracy B. Strong
Schmitt, it should be noted, defended the Inquisition as a model of fair

ness (at least in theory).
It was a terribly humane measure when Pope Innocent III created the “Inquisito
rial Law.” The Inquisition was probably perhaps the most humane institution
conceivable, since it came from the standpoint that no one accused could be
condemned without a confession. When, in the course of a century, the practice
of the Inquisition degenerated into torture, because one wanted a confession, and
had to extort it, that is indeed a dark chapter of cultural history, but seen in terms
of legal history, even today the idea of Inquisition can hardly be touched.60
He notes, as had Hobbes, that there is in Christianity a dangerous ten

dency to introduce rebellion into the political realm. Hobbes and Hegel in
particular try to tame this tendency and make use of it in the political realm,
by linking religion to the State. Schmitt’s approval is strong: Hobbes and
Hegel are what he calls “katechontes”, defined by St. Paul in 2 Thessaloni-
ans, ii: 6–7 as “those who hold” back the Apocalypse, thus for Schmitt
those who slow down the complete neutralization of what is important
about religion for the State.61 The greatest katechon has been the Catholic
Church and Schmitt thus finds himself in alliance with the Grand Inquisitor
in Dostojewsky.62
What is striking here is that Hobbes thinks the Leviathan (as mortal God,
hence as Christ / Messiah) holds back the kingdom of God on this earth or
at least makes no move to bring it about. This is why this is a political
theology and not a theological politics. Hobbes is clear that once the
Tower of Babel destroyed the unity of the human species and the Hebrews
elected Saul as king there would and could be no actual kingdom of God
on this earth until the Second Coming. Until that time that ends time – the
eschaton – the kings of this earth were in effect Christs and they should
therefore be obeyed in the manner that one would obey God as King.
Earthly Kingdoms thus are Godly in that they hold back human instincts
Name your enemy and I will tell you who you are. Hobbes and the Roman Church:
the enemy is our characteristic question as form.”
60 Carl Schmitt, Der Angriff, 1 September 1936, quoted from Gopal Balakrishnan,
The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, Verso, 2000, p. 203.
61 The katechon reappears in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer but not as a
being exempt from sin as he tends to in Schmitt’s work. See the discussion in
Wolfgang Palaver, “Collective Security. Opportunities and Problems from the Per
spective of Catholic Social Teaching,” in: Peace in Europe – Peace in the World:
Reconciliation, Creation and International Institutions. Ed. by Iustitia et Pax – Öster
reichische Kommission, Iustitia et Pax Dokumentation 4, Wien: SüdwindVerlag,
2003, 86–102.
62 I am helped in part of this by the work of Wolfgang Palaver cited in note 55.
See the citation from Tertullian below, footnote 137.
towards anarchy and chaos until the Second Coming. If Jesus as God will
be absent until He returns, we need all the more a Jesus of this earth – a
Sovereign – until then. Jesus as God plays no real role in Hobbes’ vision
of politics (as long as people do not act contrary to the commands of the
mortal God they can think privately what they want). Like the Grand In
quisitor, Hobbes’ secularization of theology keeps the anarchic truth of the
God Jesus away from this world. I note that Nietzsche had the same insight
in his pun on “Christ und Anarchist.”63
When Christ comes in Ivan’s story in The Brothers Karamazov, it is not
the end of the world: He has merely come back, for a visit as it were. It is
this that the Grand Inquisitor sees as dangerous.64 Jesus thus plays no real
role in Hobbes’ vision of politics (as long as people do not overtly blas
pheme the can believe what they want). What is important here is that
Hobbes (and Schmitt) are extremely anxious about the role of Christ as
Redeemer. Any political theology must therefore legitimate only the role of
Christ as Messiah.65
What does it mean to find oneself on the side of the Grand Inquisitor? It
is to claim that the political Right has gotten the problem of modern politics
correct, even if what it has sometimes proposed to do about it (as with
Maistre, Bonald and Cortes) has not always been on target or on the only
target. But with this, what now? One can only note in this day an age that
the United States today has on its books a sufficient number of emergency
powers, established sine die, to allow the executive free hand at the rule of
many aspects of my country. The present US administration has ruled that
63 F. Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung – Streifzüge … # 34.

64 In Chapter 36 of “The Brothers Karamazov”, Dostojewski has the Inquisitor
say: “Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy? Thou wast warned.
… Thou hast had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou didst not listen to
those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be made
happy. But, fortunately, departing Thou didst hand on the work to us. Thou hast
promised, Thou hast established by Thy word, Thou hast given to us the right to
bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou canst not think of taking it away.
Why, then, hast Thou come to hinder us? … I too was striving to stand among Thy
elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting ‘to make up the number.’ But I
awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those
who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the
happiness of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion
will be built up. I repeat, tomorrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at a
sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall
burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is
Thou. Tomorrow I shall burn Thee. Dixi.”
65 One finds the same problem in Calvin and any theory of the deus absconditus.
24 Tracy B. Strong
certain prisoners in the “war against terrorism” have in effect no status at

all, not even that of a person charged with a crime.66
Finally and even more striking is what Hobbes thinks will happen at the
Second Coming. In Leviathan, chapter thirtyseven, he writes that the king
dom of God will itself be a “civil commonwealth,” such that when God
returns to earth (now not as the Messiah but as God) the kingdom of God
will be established as a commonwealth on this earth. Effectively all that
will happen is the God will become the Sovereign and will function in the
same manner as the present Sovereign does. In effect, for Hobbes, there is
no difference between a commonwealth ruled by a poietic Sovereign and
one ruled by God.67 This is why the quality of politics in Hobbes remains
sacred.
III. Carl Schmitt
Hobbes closes his discussion of the necessary qualities of sovereignty in

Lev. 18 by asserting that a “a kingdom divided in itself cannot stand:”
Schmitt, in his testimony to the court for von Papen on the Preussenschlag
case of 1932 (where, after the Altonauerblutsonntag, von Papen had tried
to dismiss the Prussian SPD government for opposing Article 38 commis
sarial dictatorship) closes his brief with a citation from Lincoln to the effect
that a “house divided cannot stand.”68 (Lincoln was of course citing the
Bible: Luke xi, 17: Jedes Reich, das mit sich selbst uneins ist, wird ver-
wüstet, und ein Haus fällt über das andre). As with Hobbes, the body
politic must be one.69
66 Agamben, The State of Exception, p. 4, compares their situation to those of

Jews in Nazi concentration camps.
67 Hobbes does allow that this doctrine might seem strange: “But because this
doctrine (though proved out of places of Scripture not few, nor obscure) will appear
to most men a novelty; I do but propound it; maintaining nothing in this, or any
other paradox of religion; but attending the end of that dispute of the sword, con
cerning the authority, (not yet amongst my countrymen decided,) by which all sorts
of doctrine are to be approved, or rejected; and whose commands, both in speech
and writing, (whatsoever be the opinions of private men) must by all men, that mean
to be protected by their laws, be obeyed.” (Lev. 35). See also Lev. 33: “But the
church, if it be one person, is the same thing with a commonwealth of Christians;
called a commonwealth, because it consisteth of men united in one person, their
sovereign; and a church, because it consisteth in Christian men, united in one Chris
tian sovereign.”
68 See the account in the excellent Peter Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the
Crisis of German Constitutional Law, Duke University Press. Durham and London,
1997, pp. 164–176.
69 Hobbes thus must think of the Trinity as one being and three persons.
Political Theology was originally published in 1922 and represents

Schmitt’s most important initial engagement with the theme that was to
preoccupy him for most of his life: that of sovereignty, that is, of the locus
and nature of the agency that constitutes a political system. The core of a
political decision, Schmitt tells us, is a “anspruchsvolle moralische Ent-
scheidung [demanding and moral decision].” (PT 69 / 65) The first sentence
of Political Theology is famous: it locates the realm in which Schmitt as
serts the question of the centrality of sovereignty. Schmitt places the sen
tence as the complete initial paragraph to the body of the book. He writes:
“Soverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet [Sovereign is he
who decides on the exceptional case].”70 (PT 13 / 5) The decisive matter
comes from the fact that the “über” may be thought to be potentially am
biguous: it can mean “he who decides what the exceptional case is” or “he
who decides what to do about the exceptional case.”71 Yet the fact that this
may appear ambiguous should not detain us in a misguided manner: retain
ing the apparent ambiguity is centrally important to grasping what Schmitt
wants to say. Schmitt is saying that it is the essence of sovereignty both to
decide what is an exception and to make the decisions appropriate to that
exception, indeed that one without the other makes no sense at all.
It is thus not only the case that “exceptions” are obvious, as they would
be if we think of them as when produced by severe economic or political
disturbance. It could appear natural to read what Schmitt says in Germany
back through the years of hyperinflation or the economic depression of
1929. Political Theology, however, was published in March 1922 and can
not be understood as simply the response to these, or any other, develop
ments. (Hyperinflation hits only in 1923).
70 “Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case.”

71 This is noted also by John McCormick, in “The Dilemmas of Dictatorship:
Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers,” in: Dyzenhaus (1998), p. 223.
McCormick sees this, too strongly for me, as a move by Schmitt away from con
servatism towards fascism (p. 218). See the following discussion. For the problem
in French see the discussion by Julien Freund, a friend of Schmitt and a contributor
to his Festschrift, in the rightwing French journal “La nouvelle école”, 44, Spring,
1987, esp. p. 17. Freund opts in French for lors (during, on the occasion of) as the
translation of über. This judgment is refused by Jean-Louis Schlegel, the editor of
the Gallimard French edition of Théologie politique, Gallimard. Paris, 1988, p. 15,
who gives “décide de.” See my discussion of rightwing, leftwing and liberal uses
and misuses of Schmitt, in “Dimensions of the New Debate Around Carl Schmitt,”
Introduction to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1996. For a recent defense of Schmitt by the French Right see Alain
de Benoist, “Carl Schmitt et les sagouins, [a sagouin is a person who does shoddy
work]” Eléments n°110, septembre 2003, available on line at http: / / www.grecefr.
net / textes / _txtWeb.php?idArt=180.
26 Tracy B. Strong
A second issue with the opening sentence comes from the understanding
of Ausnahmezustand. What the first question might seem to reinforce (the
absolute and dictatorial and unlimited quality of the decision), this second
concern might seem to mitigate. It is the case that Schmitt sometimes uses
more general words when speaking of this question, including “state of
exception (Ausnahmefall),” crisis or state of urgency (Notstand), and even
more generally “emergency, state of need (Notfall).”72 The idea of a “Aus-
nahmefall,” however, has more of a legal connotation: it is more confined
than an “exception.” Thus the same issue is raised as with the “über”: can
the understanding of what counts as an “exception” be defined in legal
terms, or is it more of what one might think of as an open field?73
Note here that he is not talking simply about dictatorship. In Die Dik-
tatur, published one year before PT, Schmitt differentiates between “com
missarial dictatorship” –he cites Lincoln in the Civil war as an example
– and “sovereign dictatorship.” The former defends the existing constitu
tion and the latter seeks to create the conditions for a new one, given the
collapse of the oldone might think to some degree of DeGaulle in 1958.
Die Dikatur is a theory of dictatorship; PT, however, is a theory of sov
ereignty and an attempt to locate the state of emergency in a theory of
sovereignty. More importantly, PT in effect discusses that which for
Schmitt lies under the various kinds of dictatorship and makes both of
them possible74
I again do not think this linguistic glide on Schmitt’s part to be acciden
tal. Rather than seeking to determine what precisely an “Ausnahmezustand”
(or an “Notfall” or a “Notstand”, etc.) is, the problem should be looked at
from the other direction. It is importantly the case for Schmitt that no pre
existing set of rules can be laid down that will tell anyone if this situation
“is” in actual reality an “exception.” It is of the essence of Schmitt’s con
ception of the state that there can be no preset rulefixed definition of
Schlegel, idem.
72
One should note here that this question bedevils all situations in which consti
73
tutions provide for an exception. For a brief history of XIXth and XXieth century
constitutional provisions for exception, including the French 1814 Constitution,
World War One in France and Switzerland, the 1920 Emergency Powers Act in
England, Lincoln at the beginning of the Civil War [noted by Schmitt, in: Die
Diktatur, Munich, Duncker & Humblot, 1921, p. 136], the United States under
Wilson during World War One, Article 16 of the French Fifth Republic, etc. … See
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005,
pp. 11–26.
74 I thus resist John McCormick’s conclusion that PT “repudiates much of what
is of value in the book published before it” in his “Dilemmas of Dictatorship,” in:
Dyzenhaus (1998), p. 241.
sovereignty.75 Why not? What is clear here is that the notion of sover
eignty contains, as Schmitt tells us, his general theory of the state. (PT 13 / 5)
The nature of the sovereign, he remarks in the preface to the second edition
(1933) is the making of “eine echte Entscheidung [genuine decision].”
(PT 8 / 3) Thus it is not simply the making of a decision, but of a “genuine”
decision that is central. The obvious question is what makes a decision
“genuine” and not simply an emanation of a “degenerierter Dezionismus
[degenerate decisionism].” Schmitt is never “simply” a decisionist, if by
that one means simply that choice is necessary and any choice is better than
none.76
What constitutes a “genuine decision” is a complex matter in Schmitt. To
understand his position one must realize why politics (or here, “the politi
cal”) is not the same for Schmitt as “the state,”77 even if the most usual
framework for the concretization of politics in modern times has been the
state.78 In PT II (1969) taking up the themes of PT, Schmitt writes “Man
kann das Politische heute nicht mehr vom Staate her definieren, sondern
das, was man heute noch Staat nennen kann, muss umgekehrt vom Poli-
tischen her bestimmt und begriffen werden.”79 Underlying the state is a
community of people – necessarily not universal – a “we” that, as it defines
itself necessarily in opposition to that which it is not, it presupposes and is
75 Thus the exception is part of the “order” even if that order is not precisely
juridical. Schmitt engaged in an exchange about this with Walter Benjamin over
violence. See Benjamin, “Towards a Critique of Violence,” in: Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings, volume I, Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 1996. See the
discussion in Agamben, op. cit., 52–64.
76 I note here that there seem to be strong elements of Schmitt quietly present in
much of Henry Kissinger’s analyses of international politics. See for instance his
“The Necessity for Choice”, New York, Harper, 1961.
77 This is a theme from Schmitt’s earliest work, including his Habilitationsschrift,
Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen, Hellerau, 1917. See Rein-
hard Mehring, Carl Schmitt. Zur Einführung, Hamburg, Junius, 2001, pp. 19–21.
78 Cf Max Weber’s definition of the state: “Heute dagegen werden wir sagen
müssen: Staat ist diejenige menschliche Gemeinschaft, welche innerhalb eines bes
timmten Gebietes – dies: das ‘Gebiet’ gehört zum Merkmal – das Monopol legi
timer physischer Gewaltsamkeit für sich (mit Erfolg) beansprucht.” (Max Weber,
Politik als Beruf, Politische Schriften, 397. See also Max Weber, The Vocation Lec
tures, David Owen / Tracy B. Strong (eds.) p. xlix. If is important that this is the
definition to which the “nowadays” compels us and that Weber here flies directly in
the face of those (like the Georgkreis and others) who placed emphasis on the “na
tion,” on “blood and soil.” See below.
79 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, II, Duncker & Humblot, 1969, 1996, p. 21:
“[T]oday one can no longer define politics in terms of the State; on the contrary
what we can still call the State today must inversely be defined and understood from
the political.”
28 Tracy B. Strong
defined by conflict.80 It derives its definition from the friendenemy distinc

tion. That distinction, however, is an us / them distinction, where the “us” is
of primary and necessary importance.
This claim is at the basis of Schmitt’s rejection of what he calls “liberal
normativism,” that is, of the assumption that a state can in the end rest on
a set of mutually agreedto procedures and rules that trump particular claims
and necessities. Pluralism is thus not a condition on which politics, and
therefore eventually the state, can be founded. Politics rests rather on the
equality of its citizens (in this sense Schmitt is a ‘democrat’, although not
a liberal!) and thus their collective identification distinguishing them from
other such groups: this is the “friendenemy” distinction, or more accu
rately the distinction that makes politics possible. It is, one might say, its
transcendental presupposition.81
Politics is thus different from economics, where one has “competitors”
rather than friends and enemies, as it is different from debate where one has
“Diskussionsgegner (discussion opponents).” (BP 28 / 28) Nor is it a private
dislike of another individual. Rather it is the actual possibility of a “battling
totality” (kämpfende Gesamtheit) that finds itself necessarily in opposition
to another such entity. “The enemy,” he notes, “is hostis (enemy) not in-
imicus (disliked) in the broader sense; polémios (belonging to war) not
exthrós (hateful).” (BP 29 / 29)82
These considerations are made in the context of several other arguments.
The first comes in his discussion of Hans Kelsen. At the time that Schmitt
wrote Politische Theologie, Kelsen was a leader in European jurisprudence,
a prominent Austrian jurist and legal scholar as well as a highly influential
member of the Austrian Constitutional Court. A student of Rudolf Stammler,
Kelsen was a neoKantian by training and temperament and shortly before
80 One finds the influence of Schmitt for instance thus in what might appeared
to be a far removed locus, e. g. Bertram de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics,
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964.
81 This is confirmed explicitly in a letter from Leo Strauss to Schmitt, September
4, 1932. It is printed in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden
Dialogue, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 124. Meier’s book is an
insightful analysis of the difference between political theology and political philoso
phy – between Schmitt and Strauss. For an attempt at a critique of Meier’s complex
political rapprochement of Strauss and Schmitt, see Robert Howse, “The Use and
Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt Revival on the German Right – The Case of
Heinrich Meier,“ (forthcoming) a draft of which is available on line at http: / /
faculty.law.umich.edu / rhowse / Drafts_and_Publications / Meierbookrev.pdf.
82 Translations are mine as Schmitt quotes in Latin and Greek. Schmitt will on
the next page read “Love thine enemy” as referring to inimicus, which it is in
Latin although in Greek it is exthros.
the publication of PT had published Das Problem der Souveränität und die
Theorie des Völkerrechts,83 in which he set out the foundations for what he
would later call a “pure theory of law,” a theory of law from which all
subjective elements would be eliminated.84 Kelsen sought, in other words,
a theory of law that would be universally valid for all times and all situa
tions.85 It is worth noting here that this quarrel is analogous to the quarrel
between Heidegger and Carnap, between thought with its feet in the earth
and what one might call “freischwebende Gedanken.”
Against this Schmitt insists that “alles Recht ist Situationsrecht [all law
is situational law].” (PT 19 / 13) What he means by this is that in actual
lived human fact it will always be the case that precisely at unpredictable
times that “In der Ausnahme durchbricht die Kraft des wirklichen Lebens
die Krusste einer in Wiederholung erstarrten Mechanik [the power of real
life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become stiff by rep
etition].” (PT 21 / 15) Schmitt, in other words, requires that his understand
ing of law and politics respond to what he takes to be the fact of the ulti
mately unruly and unruled quality of human life. And if life can never be
reduced or adequately understood by a set of rules, no matter how complex,
then this means that in the end rule is of men and not of law, or rather that
the rule of men must always existentially underlie the rule of law. For
Schmitt, to pretend that one can have an ultimate “rule of law” is to set
oneself up to be overtaken by events at some unpredictable but necessarily
occurring time and it is to lose the human element in and of our world.86
This is a powerful and important theme in Schmitt. It is not a claim that
law is not centrally important to human affairs but that in the end human
affairs rest upon humans and cannot ever be independent of them. In his
83 Hans Kelsen, Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts,
Tübingen, Mohr, 1920. (The Problem of Sovereignty and the Theory of Interna
tional Law). See the articles on Kelsen, in “European Journal of International Law,”
IX. 2 (1998), especially that by Danilo Zolo.
84 A volume of articles comparing Schmitt and Kelsen has appeared: Dan Din-
er / Michael Stolleis (eds.) Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt: A Juxtaposition, Schriften
reihen des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, University of Tel Aviv, 1999.
85 After 1933 Schmitt was apparently instrumental in the removal of Kelsen from
the Law Faculty of the University of Köln. See David Dyzenhaus, Legality and
Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller, Oxford: Clarendon,
1997, p. 84.
86 One might in fact see much of the philosophical debates in the 1920’s and
1930’s as between those who sought to develop understandings that were independ
ent of time and place and those who argued that all understanding needed to be
grounded in concrete historical actuality. One might see Max Weber as the pro
genitor of both approaches. See the exceptional book by Michael Friedmann, A
Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Chicago. Open Court, 2000.
30 Tracy B. Strong
discussion of Locke, for instance, he criticizes Locke for saying that while
the “law gives authority,” he (Locke) “sieht nicht, dass das Getzetz nicht
sagt, wem es Authorität gibt. Es kann doch nicht jeder. …” (PT 38 / 32).87
Schmitt contrasts this to Hobbes’s discussion (and in doing so brings out
qualities often overlooked in discussions of Hobbes). As noted, he cites
Leviathan, chapter 26 to the effect that sovereign power and not truth makes
laws.88 And he then drives the point home by citing Hobbes to the effect
that “For Subjection, Command, Right and Power are accidents not of Pow
ers but of Persons.”89 “Persons,” for Hobbes, are beings constituted or au
thorized to play a certain role or part.90
Schmitt’s insistence on the necessarily and irreducibly human quality of
political and legal actions is key. Those who would elaborate a set of rules by
which decisions can be made take the politics out of human life: Schmitt is
concerned to keep them in human life. (It is for reasons like this some object
to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and even more to his Political Liberalism
fpr what appears to them as Rawls’ overly legalistic reliance on courts.91) Hu
87 “Did not recognize that the law does not designate to whom it gives authority.
It cannot be just anybody …” One might have thought here that Schmitt would have
referred to Locke’s discussion of the prerogative. Thus in the Second Treatise on
Government, paragraph 156, Locke writes: “What then could be done in this case
to prevent the community from being exposed some time or other to eminent haz
ard, on one side or the other, by fixed intervals and periods, set to the meeting and
acting of the legislative; but to entrust it to the prudence of some, who being present,
and acquainted with the state of public affairs, might make use of this prerogative
for the public good?” and in para 160: “This power to act according to discretion,
for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against
it, is that which is called prerogative.” Paragraphs 160–168 form a section entitled
“Of Prerogative”. There is a lot of secondary literature on this. See e. g. Clement
Fatovic, “Constitutionalism And Contingency: Locke’s Theory Of Prerogative,” His
tory of Political Thought, 2004, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 276–297 as well as the discussion
of prerogative, in: J. Dunn, The political thought of John Locke: an historical ac
count of the argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’, London, Cambridge
U.P., 1969. See the short discussion in McCormick, op. cit. 237–238.
88 Schmitt quotes the Latin Leviathan, probably because the formulation is more
succinct: “auctoritas, non veritas fecit legem.” The corresponding passage in English
is: “… though it be evident truth, is not therefore presently law; but because in all
commonwealths in the world, it is part of the civil law: For though it be naturally
reasonable; yet it is by the sovereign power that it is law …”
89 Leviathan, chapter 42. The context is the relation of civil to ecclesiastical au
thority.
90 See my “Seeing the Sovereign: Theatricality and Representation in Hobbes,”
in: Stephen Schneck (ed.), Letting Be. Fred Dallmayr’s Cosmopolitan Vision, Notre
Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
91 See e. g. Sheldon S. Wolin, “Review of Rawls, ‘Political Liberalism’,” in:
Political Theory XXIV.1 (February, 1996).
man society can thus never be made to rest on the determination and applica
tion of rules to individual situations. Decisions and judgments would always
be necessary. In this Schmitt can be thought to be an initiator (albeit not rec
ognized or known to be such) of contemporary developments such as both
Critical Legal Studies on the left and the Law and Economics movement on
the right.
Thus for Schmitt, the state is not cofounded with the legal order, and in
exceptional situations the juristic order that prevails is “keine Rechtsord-
nung [not of the ordinary kind]”92 (PT 18 / 12) and “normativ betrachtet [ist]
aus einem Nichts geboren.” (PT 38 / 31) The point therefore of this notion
of sovereignty ultimately unconstrained by formal rules is “Recht zu schaffen
[create a juridical order]” under conditions that threaten anarchy.93 Only
when freed from normative ties is the authority absolute. This is why this
is a political theology – God is neither good nor evil in Himself and his
authority is not ethical. The sovereign must decide both that a situation is
exceptional and what to do about the exception in order to be able to create
or recover a judicial order when the existing one is threatened by chaos.
Ethics and the juridical order are grounded in das Nichts. And it was from
das Nichts that God created the world.
The necessarily extraordinary quality of sovereignty is made clear in the
analogy he uses to explain his point. He writes: “Der Ausnahmezustand ist
wie das Wunder für die Theologie. [The exception in jurisprudence is
analogous to the miracle in theology.]” (PT 43 / 36) What does it mean to
refer the “exception” to a “miracle?” Clearly, this has to do with “political
theology.” To move towards an answer one should look first at the author
who remained Schmitt’s touchstone. In the third book of Leviathan, Hobbes
first identifies a miracle as an occurrence when “the thing is strange, and
the natural cause difficult to imagine” and then goes on to define it as “a
work of God, (besides his operation by the way of nature, ordained in the
creation,) done, for the making manifest to his elect, the mission of an
extraordinary minister for their salvation.”94 Hobbes’ definition is apposite
to Schmitt, as for him the “exception” is the occasion for and of the revela-
tion of the true nature of sovereignty. Thus the sovereign does not for
Schmitt only define the “exception” – he is also revealed by and in it,
which is why Schmitt must refer to a “genuine” decision.
92 See the discussion in R. Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship – and Back

Again,” in: David Dyzenhaus (ed.), Law as Politics, Duke university Press. Durham,
1998, pp. 60–65.
93 PT 13. I have modified Schwab’s translation which is “to produce law.”
94 Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 37.
32 Tracy B. Strong
What would be wrong with at least trying to rest human affairs on the
rule of law?
Schmitt finds two major problems. The first comes from the epistemo
logical relationship between the exception and the norm. Sovereignty is
what Schmitt calls a “Grenzbegriff,” a limiting or border concept.95 It thus
looks in two directions, marking the line between that which is subject to
law – where sovereignty reigns – and that which is not – potentially the
space of the exception. (PT 13) To look only to the rule of law will be to
misunderstand the nature and place of sovereignty. For Schmitt we only
understand the nature of the juridical order by understanding sovereignty,
that is, understanding that which opens on to the province of the excep
tion.96 This is because, he asserts, “die Ausnahme ist interessanter als der
Normalfall [the exception is more interesting than the rule].” (PT 21 / 15) As
with the citation from Kierkegaard that Schmitt uses to support this claim
argues, this is not because one cannot think about the rule or the “general,”
but because one does not notice anything in the general worth thinking
about and thus our thought in this realm would be “nicht einmal mit Lei-
denschaft [in no case with passion].” (PT idem) The point here, I believe,
is that the exception engages the human being in the way that the normal
routine does not.
Secondly, it is important to realize that one can only have an exception
if one has a rule. Therefore the designation of something as an exception is
in fact an assertion of the nature and quality of rule. If, as director of the
program I say “I am going to make an exception in your case and let you
go on the exchange program to Germany despite the fact that you did not
have the required grades,” I am affirming both the rule and the fact that the
rule is a human creation and hence does not control us automatically. I am
also making a judgment that in this case, at this time, the good of all con
cerned, indicates the need for this exception (and thus that I am not taking
a bribe). There can thus be no exceptions without there also being a rule.
What though am I affirming in affirming the human quality of the rule?
The claim about the exception and thus the grounding of rules on human
actions is part of what Schmitt sees as the need to defend the political. As
noted earlier, when Max Weber described the workings of bureaucracy he
asserted that in no case are bureaucratic (rationalized, rationallegal) rela
95 Thus the exception is both part of and not part of the juridical order. See the
useful discussion in Agamben, op. cit., 24–26.
96 See the striking and informative discussion in William Scheuerman, Between
the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, Cam
bridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994. pp. 330 and passim.
tions, relations between human persons, between human beings. Bureauc

racy is the form of social organisation that rests on norms and rules and not
on persons. It is thus a form of rule in which there is “‘objective’ discharge
of business, …; accordingly to calculable rules and ‘without regard for
persons’.”97 What he meant is that it was in the nature of modern civiliza
tion to remove the nonrational from societal processes, replacing it by the
formalism of abstract procedures. (He did not think everything was always
already like this – merely that this was the tendency). The disenchantment
of the world is for Weber the disappearance of politics, hence the disappear
ance of the human, hence the lessening of the role that the nonrational and
rule governed play in the affairs of society. “Bureaucracy,” he will proclaim,
“has nothing to do with politics.”
This, as we have seen above, is Schmitt’s theme also. The five stage
development laid out in the Barcelona lecture is at the core of his claim that
ours is an age of “neutralisation and depoliticization”: whereas all previous
eras had leaders and decisionmakers, the era of technology and techno
logical progress has no need of individual persons.98 It to call attention to
this progression that Schmitt starts chapter three of PT with the second most
famous sentence of the book: “Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen
Staatslehre sind säkularisiesrte theologische Begriffe.”99 (PT 43)
What does this mean? Key here is Schmitt’s understanding of “secular
ised.” Schmitt, who had been a student of Max Weber, accepts the idea of
the “demagification” or “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of the world. To
say that all concepts in modern state theory are secularised theological
concepts is not to want to restore to those concepts a theological dimension,
but it is to point to the fact that what has been lost since the XVIth (“theo
logical”) century has amounted to a hollowing out of political concepts.
They thus no longer have, as it were, the force and strength that they had
97 Max Weber, Economy and Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 1967, p. 975.
98 This periodisation can be found explicitly in the Barcelona address and is
implicit in the first several pages of chapter three of PT; it is made explicit in
shorter form in the 1934 preface to PT, pp. 1–2. The stages are well discussed in
Henning Ottmann, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und EntTotalisierungen: Carl
Schmitts Theorie der Neuzeit,” in: Reinhard Mehring (ed.), Carl Schmitt. Der
Begriff des Politischen. Ein Kooperativer Kommentar, Akademie Verlag, Berlin,
2003, pp. 156–169.
99 “The central concepts of modern state theory are all secularized theological
concepts.” (PT 36) “As translator, George Schwab was faced with the difficult task
of rendering ‘prägnanten’ – it means ‘concise, succinct’ which is only partly caught
by Schwab’s ‘significant’.” I have gone (with thanks for a consultation to William
Arctander O’Brien) for what I believe to be the meaning rather than for a literal
equivalent.
34 Tracy B. Strong
earlier and are unable to resist the dynamics of technology. The conse
quence of Schmitt’s notion of secularisation is to try and restore to the
concepts of sovereignty and political authority in a secular age the qualities
that they had earlier.
The modern age is importantly one in which an analogue for transcendent
authority must be sought for “bei der Masse der Gebildeten alle Vorstel-
lungen von Trancendenz untergehen [all conceptions of transcendence will
no longer be credible to most educated people].” (PT 54 / 50) Any theory of
decisionism must therefore rest on immanent criteria. This is the essence of
what Schmitt considers the political matter: to find the secular analogue to
the sacred. Such was the achievement of Hobbes, who, by creating an arti
ficial yet transcendent sovereign, provided the model for the solution to the
problem of modernity as Schmitt posed it.
These thoughts help explain the last chapter of PT. There Schmitt argues
that Maistre, Bonald and Cortes exaggerate evil. They exaggerate evil in
that they fail to see that the humans striving for power not only renders
people capable of great evil but also makes possible the domination of a
certain class of leaders. There is nothing necessarily wrong with domination
for Schmitt. Thus while the decision will emanate from nothingness (das
Nichts) it must always be sanctioned by “die Willen des Volkes – the will
of the people.” (PT 69 / 66) Thus one might say that Schmitt is not a
counterrevolutionary in a reactionary sort of way. He accepts that legiti
macy in this age must be in some sense democratic – it certainly cannot be
monarchical. Thus although it is clear that he thinks that Maistre, Bonald
and Cortes got the problem right, their solutions (monarchy for the French
men and dictatorship for the Spaniard) are unacceptable. As he notes on the
last page of PT: “[J]ener gegenrevolutionären Staatsphilosophen … steigern
das moment der Dezision so stark dass es schiesslich den Gedanken der
Legitimität, von dem sie ausgegangen sind, aufhebt. … Das ist aber we-
sentlich Diktatur, nicht Legitimität. [Those counterrevolutionary philosophers
of the state … heightened the moment of the decision to such an extent that
the notion of legitimacy, their starting point, was dissolved … This [deci
sionism] is however essentially dictatorship, not legitimacy.” (PT 69 / 65–66)
While Schmitt has sympathies for these theorists over and against the
bourgeois liberal thinkers that Cortes and he had stigmatised as a “clasa
discutidora” (PT 66), the point of the analysis of the centrality of the excep
tion for sovereignty is precisely to restore, in a democratic age, the element
of transcendence that had been there in the XVIth and even the XVIIth
centuries – Hobbes, Schmitt believes, understood the problem exactly: he
dealt with the problem of transcendence in an age when theological con
flicts had made any claim to transcendence apparently inherently question
able. Recall that for Hobbes the sovereign was each of us and that the
sovereign’s authority was established by a creative covenant that placed
what was written in hearts (the same in each heart) beyond question – it
was an absolute authority, like that of Scripture for Protestants.
Failing such an accomplishment, the triumph of nonpolitical, nonhuman
Technizität – of liberalism and the aestheticization of human judgment –
will be inevitable. There is thus in Schmitt a challenge to those who would
argue that politics in a democratic age can rest on (rational) discussion.100
Such a claim is for him the privilege, as we saw, of the bourgeois “discuss
ing classes.”
Political concepts are secularized theological concepts. The task for poli
tics in the present is to find an immanence that does for politics what
transcendence had done in the past. For Schmitt, the secularization of theo
logical concepts in the realm of sovereignty is to be understood as corre
sponding to the greatest progress in human rationality, progress that has
occurred in and because of the State. This is “the distinction between enemy
and criminal and from that the only possible foundation for a theory of
State neutrality at the time of wars between other states.”101 Secularisation,
in other words, has made it possible for conflict to occur between enemies
and not between the legal and the criminal.102 Schmitt is claiming here that
the modern state based politics is in fact potentially more moderate than a
situation in which the opposition is between state and nonstate, i. e. crimi
nal. As humanity can have no enemies (barring an invasion form another
planet), the idea of a “crime against humanity” is tellingly problematic in
that it would involve a change from “friendenemy” to “humancriminal.”
And then anything goes.
What is consequent to this understanding of secularisation?103 Three ele
ments are involved. First of all, is his understanding of power. Political
power is to be understood on the model of God’s creation – which is how
Hobbes had understood it. Power is to make something from that which is
not something and thus to be above or not subject to laiddown laws. This
understanding of power clearly draws upon medieval theology but it is the
point of Schmitt’s last chapter in PT to show that it is basically a modern
100 See the discussion in Chantal Mouffe, “Carl Schmitt and the Paradoxes of
Liberal Democracy,” in: Dyzenhaus (1998), 165–168.
101 Schmitt, The Crisis of Liberal Democracy, p. 86.
102 Schmitt will towards the end of his life write on “Die Theorie des Partisans”
in an insightful analysis of the transformations in warfare in the postcolonial period.
103 I am conscious in the next three paragraphs of the general influence of
Etienne Balibar, “Introduction” to Carl Schmitt, Le Leviathan dans la doctrine de
l’état de Thomas Hobbes, Paris, Seuil, 2002.
36 Tracy B. Strong
understanding, most clearly formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth

century by the French counterrevolutionary thinkers Joseph de Maistre,
Louis de Bonald and the Spanish theorist of dictatorship and authority, Juan
Donoso Cortes. These theorists wrote in the conscious intent to create the
philosophical basis for opposition to the Enlightenment, which had; in their
eyes, led to the chaos of the French Revolution and the disorders of moder
nity.
This points to the second element in Schmitt’s conception of secularisa
tion. The French revolution is the historically concrete manifestation of kind
of revolutionary myth, the myth of the creative power of the democrati
cally equal populace. This is the basis of his criticism of Rousseau, that the
“general will” is substituted for the human will of a sovereign. (PT 51 / 46)
To these understandings, it was necessary to oppose a myth of a hierarchi
cally ordered and unified people, which the exceptional acts of the sover
eign would instantiate. One might think of this as a kind of rightwing
Leninism, where the Party is replaced by the Volk and the sovereign be
comes the Partyinaction. The sovereign embodies and expresses the “po
litical total will of the German nation” and thus its actions guard and protect
that nation.104 The sovereign is the action of “us” against “them” – friends
versus enemies.105 Indeed Jacob Taubes notes that Schmitt could have been
a Leninist.106 This confrontation, however, must take place at the meta
physical level – that of one faith against another. For this reason the con
frontation is one of “political theology.”107
The last point indicates another element in Schmitt’s conception of secu
larisation. Schmitt is, in political matters, a realist, one of the reasons that
people like Hans Morgenthau, the GermanAmerican theorist of the pri
macy of “national interest” in international relations, found him important.
Schmitt here continues the line of thought initiated by Carl von Savigny.
Savigny, an important legal theorist in the first half of the XIXth century,
argued that civil law acquired its character from the Volksbewusstsein – the
common consciousness of the people – and was thus the product of the
particular historically given qualities that a people might have. Hence, for
104 Carl Schmitt, Hüter der Verfassung, Tübingen. Mohr, 1931, p. 159. See the
discussion of this passage in Caldwell, op.cit., 115
105 All this, one should note, is quite consonant with a reading of Hobbes. See
my “How to Write Scripture: Words and Authority,” in: Thomas Hobbes, Critical
Inquiry, Autumn, 1993, and Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Tho
mas Hobbes. Sinn und Feldschlag eines Symbols, Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, Stutt
gart, 1993 (1938).
106 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford, 2004, p. 102.
107 See the discussion in Hermann Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and “The
Concept of the Political,” Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 77.
him there was, in the Germany of that time, with its common language and
customs, no real basis for different systems of law.108 For Savigny, the
sovereign or legislator was the expresser of the Volksbewusstsein.109 Schmitt,
as we have seen, gives this part of Savigny’s thought very strong emphasis.
And in the present age, if we think in terms of ‘national interest” we are
thinking in terms that are Schmittian.
Schmitt’s original understanding of the Volk in his 1928 Verfassungs-
lehre, conceived of the Volk as that which was represented in the Sovereign
in the State.110 It is precisely in being represented that that which had not
had form (the mass of people) acquires what Schmitt calls Existenz. While
the notion of a people carries here some of the sense that the Greeks had
of the polis as the attunement of a group of people to a land, Schmitt tends
after 1933, especially in Staat Bewegung, Volk (1934), to give a much more
racial meaning, a meaning that is embodied in the idea of Führung and thus
the Führer.111 It is important to note that Hobbes has no need of the concept
of Volkbewusstsein and is thus close to the earlier Schmitt but not the latter:
there is a territorial notion of the state but not an ideological or racial one.
In this Hobbes is oddly closer to Max Weber than is Schmitt. When Weber
proclaimed in Political as a Vocation that: “Heute dagegen werden wir
sagen müssen: Staat ist diejenige menschliche Gemeinschaft, welche inner-
halb eines bestimmten Gebietes – dies: das ‘Gebiet’ gehört zum Merkmal
– das Monopol legitimer physischer Gewaltsamkeit für sich (mit Erfolg)
beansprucht”112 he was insisting against people like Stefan George (and the
later Schmitt) that the state was not to be understood as geistlich.
Taken together these elements in Schmitt’s thought casts light on what
we can surmise was the attraction of National Socialism. Schmitt came, as
did Heidegger, from a rural, Catholic, petitbourgeois upbringing. He de
scribes his childhood, adolescence and youth – the latter lasting for him
until the end of World War I during which he served as an officer and at
108 See the discussion of von Savigny, in: Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde.
109 This may make the question of Schmitt’s antiSemitic writings more complex.
One might speak of antiJudaism, meaning by that that Schmitt saw in German
Judaism the kind of pluralism that he found incompatible with the commonalty of
the Volk that he saw as essential to the political. In practice, however, certainly in
the Third Reich, one could not be opposed to Judaism without being opposed to
Jews …
110 Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1965 [1928],
p. 207. See the interesting discussion in Bernhard Radloff, “Heidegger and Carl
Schmitt: The historicity of the Political (part two).”
111 As Rudolf Hess proclaimed at Nuremberg: “Hitler ist Deutschland.”
112 Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” Politische Schriften, Tübingen, Mohr, 1968,
p. 397.
38 Tracy B. Strong
the end of which he was thirty years old – as periods of getting rid of
various influences: his Catholicism is “entortet [displaced]” and “enttotal-
isiert [detotalised]”; greater Prussianness is “enthegelianisiert [deHege
lised]”. Likewise during his “manhood,” Weimar Germany is “entpreusst
[dePrussified].”113 While Catholicism was always to remain important to
Schmitt, it is important to see in this self description the portrait of a person
whose ties to his various traditions are negative and are not replaced by a
liberal faith in the future or in progress.114 One has to read therefore his
attacks on liberalism in conjunction with the accumulation of “ent” verbs.115
What remains when one has lost most of that one was?
What then was the source of his attraction to Hitler? It was pretty
clearly not an admiration of the particular qualities that the man had: even
if one discounts the occasion, the disdain he expresses during his interroga
tion at Nuremberg is palpable.116 One might rather say that Hitler appeared
to him something like the entity God had sent to perform a miracle – as in
the citation from Hobbes above – and the miracle was the recovery of a
thisworld transcendence to sovereignty and thus the human realm of the
political. From this understanding, the person Hitler was nothing important
and Schmitt’s relation to it could only be the relation one has to a miracle:
acceptance or rejection.
This is all the more likely as very rapidly Hitler seemed to many to be
have like as a true statesman in times of exception, legally elected but / or / and
capable of making the hard, extralegal decisions that were necessary. When
Hitler and Goering ordered on June 30–July 1 and 2 the execution of all of
the leadership of the SA, within two days almost all the press was con
gratulating them on having saved the country from civil war. Hindenburg
sent (or was led to send) a telegram of thanks to the new Chancellor. Sch
mitt published on August 1, 1934 a newspaper article entitled “Der Führer
113 This is Schmitt’s account in his contribution to H. Quaritsch (ed.), Com

plexio Oppositorum. Über Carl Schmitt, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1988), p. 105.
See the discussion in Mehring, Carl Schmitt, pp. 12–15 to which I owe this refer
ence.
114 Schmitt is of course not the only person to be in this situation, nor was
Heidegger. For a representative sense of the times, one can still profitably read J. B.
Bury, The Idea of Progress; an inquiry into its origin and growth, London, Macmil
lan, 1920.
115 And thus while leftwing antiliberals can “learn from” Carl Schmitt, it is not
completely clear that it is Carl Schmitt that they are learning. See Paul Picco-
ne / G. L. Ulmen, “Introduction to Carl Schmitt,” Telos 72 (Summer, 1987), p. 14.
See the material cited in Strong, op. cit. footnotes 5–7.
116 Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivate Salus. Experiences des années 1945–1947. Textes
et commentaires, A. Doremus (ed.), Paris, Vrin (2003), p. 41; “He (Hitler) was so
uninteresting to me that I don’t even want to talk about it.”
schutzt das Recht [The Führer protects the legal order]” defending Hitler’s
actions.117 Thus it is the reality of taking power and manifesting sover
eignty in the use of power that attracted Schmitt: his understanding of law
required that he support Hitler. It was not a question of succumbing to the
charisma of a prophet, true or false.
Schmitt thus, in his 1938 book on Hobbes, attacks Hobbes for allow
privacy of belief. This destroys, he says, the Leviathan from inside. The
privacy of belief in the end, Schmitt argues, will put an end to the katechon.
Hobbes’ sovereign, while of the same structure as Schmitt’s, is much more
restrained: as noted above there is no potential Volksgeist waiting to be
awakened.118 And perhaps this is the reason that Schmitt will think Toc
queville to be the most important contemporary historian. Tocqueville un
derstood the irresistibility of the democratic spirit of equality. For Schmitt,
as for Max Weber, there are only the words of Jesaja that stand as an epi
graph to this article.
IV. St. Paul
By declaring that the exception in jurisprudence analogous to the “mira

cle” in theology, Schmitt reaffirms and recuperates for modern political and
legal thought a secularized understanding of sovereign power analogous to
the overtly theologically based understanding of the middle ages. His work
calls to mind the doctrine of “Christcentered kingship” that we find in a
work like Kantorowicz’s The Kings Two Bodies. It is important to note that
the grounding of legal power on nonlegal sources is not unique to Schmitt,
nor indeed to the Middle Ages. Whether or not theorists of the law locate
sovereignty in a particular individual (be that an actual person, or an artifi
cial one, as in Hobbes), they very often derives it authority from a source
figured as “outside of,” “prior to,” or “beyond” the law. Thus we have God
inscribing the tablets for Moses on Sinai (twice in fact); we have Rous
seau’s Legislator (who needs to, “pour ainsi dire, changer la nature hu-
117 The matter is a bit more complex. Ellen Kennedy, mainly on Schmitt’s testi
mony, argues that he was forced to do so. Schmitt was identified with some ele
ments of the SA and there is some evidence that he was specifically exempted from
the purge by Goering. In a somewhat selfpitying and selfaggrandizing poem he
wrote for his sixtieth birthday, Gesang des Sechzigjährigen, he notes that he has
been “three times in the belly of the fish.” The first is 1934; the second, the attacks
on him in 1936 in the Gestapo organ “Das schwarze Korps” (a moment he identifies
to his interrogator in Nuremberg as when he “foreswore the devil”) and the last his
interrogation after the war when he appears to believe that he might be hung. See
Schmitt, Glossarium entry for 12.1.48.
118 See George Kateb, “Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics,” Political Theory,
17, 3 (August, 1989), pp. 355–391.
40 Tracy B. Strong
maine”). Sieyes has recourse to the pouvoir constituant and de Sade calls
upon “Mother Nature.” Bataille associates sovereignty with killing. Writing
around the same time as Schmitt, Freud suggests that even the most egali
tarian social arrangements cannot function without some implicit or ex
plicit invocation of an exceptional figure: In Totem and Taboo he invokes
a primal figure; in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego this be
comes the leader; in Moses and Monotheism, the nation of Israel is found
ed by a nonHebrew.119
Political theology is thus concerned not only with the appeal to a source
of legitimation figured as “beyond” the law, but with the fact that the Law
has the quality of seeking to annihilate or displace the lawless authority of
the law’s “beyond.” What Schmitt shows in his critique of “normative” law
is that there is necessarily a “gap” in the law such that it is in its nature
incapable of addressing such lawless – anomic – situations as revolution or
a general strike. It is the case that a spontaneous arising can, as Hannah
Arendt argues, give rise momentarily to what Aristide Zolberg has called a
“moment of madness” in which “the people” appear to take power and from
which there arise various egalitarian groups (the soviets, councils etc).120
But such moments are fleeting and unless a sovereign acts to close this gap
in the law by preserving its “spirit” against its “letter,” suspending the con
stitution to maintain the order of law (or the existence of the state as such)
nothing will be achieved.
It is thus the case that the archetype of the strategy of the exception is
Paul’s account of Christ as the “fulfillment of the law,” the living logos who
consigns the “old” written law to obsolescence, and who actualizes in his
person the transcendent Kingdom of God. Calvin, in the Institutes, rails
against those who would live by the Law and insists that with God we live
in love. Both Schmitt and Hobbes take up the terms of Paul’s or Calvin’s
polemic against the Mosaic law. It is thus the case that, as Hobbes himself
remarks, that Jesus is the Christ is the foundation of all of Paul’s thought:
“Besides, this article, that Jesus is the Christ, is so fundamental, that all the
rest are by St. Paul … said to be built upon it.” (De Cive 18.9)
Paul, a Jew, found himself in struggle with not only the disciples who
saw Jewishness a prerequisite to Christianity – who thus wanted to limit the
119 I am indebted here to some conversations with Professor Jason Frank of Cor
nell University. On Freud see my Psychoanalysis as a Vocation: Freud, “Politics and
the Heroic,” Political Theory (February, 1984).
120 Aristide Zolberg, “Moments of Madness,” Theory and Society (1972), esp.
p. 172. See also Sidney Tarrow, “Cycles of Collective Action: Between Moments of
Madness and the Repertoire of Contention,” Social Science History, Vol. 17, No. 2
(Summer, 1993), pp. 281–307.
extent of Christianity – but as importantly also with the very foundation of

the pax romana. To get some idea of the revolutionary threat that Paul
posed, consider the following letter from Pliny the Younger to the imperator
Trajanus. Around 111 AD the emperor received a letter from Pliny endors
ing the request of the citizen of Biythnia (where Pliny was governor) to
form an association (collegium) to be a fire brigade as there had been nu
merous fires in the region. Aside from the fact that permission had to be
gained from Rome for such a group, the emperor’s response is important.
He writes: “we must remember that it is societies like these which have
been responsible for the political disturbances in your province, particularly
its towns. If people assemble for a common purpose, whatever name we
give them and for whatever reason, they soon turn into a brotherhood.”121
In another letter, Pliny relays a petition from the free city of Amisos to form
“benefitsocieties.” In this case, Trajanus allowed the formation of these
groups provided that the groups were “not used for riotous and unlawful
assemblies, but to relieve cases of hardship among the poor.”122 In other
cities, however, over which Rome had direct jurisdiction, this was not to be
permitted.
Trajanus has a clear understanding of the dangers of dividing sover
eignty. And the spread of the Christian churches must have over time ap
peared to the Roman Empire as destructive of the principle of its authority.
Instead of all things going through Rome, the Churches were in extensive
and ideological communication with each other on a horizontal level. What
Trajanus did not grasp is that Paul also sought to replace the universalism
of the pax romana with a new universalism resting on the churches compos
ing the Church as the mystical body of Christ.123
The key text here is the First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 12,
12–27. Paul there argues that just as the body (soma) is composed of
many members (méle) so also is the Church composed of many diverse
elements but is still one, even as the members remain each individual. (I
Cor. 12. 12 and 27: Denn wie der Leib einer ist und doch viele Glieder
hat, alle Glieder des Leibes aber, obwohl sie viele sind, doch ein Leib
121 Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.34.1: Sed meminerimus provinciam istam et
praecipue eas civitates eius modi factionibus esse vexatas. Quodcumque nomen ex
quacumque causa dederimus iis, qui in idem contracti fuerint, hetaeriae eaeque brevi
fient.
122 Pliny, op cit, 10.9394: non ad turbas et ad illicitos coetus, sed ad sustinen
dam tenuiorum inopiam utuntur. In ceteris civitatibus, quae nostro iure obstrictae
sunt, res huius modi prohibenda est.
123 Thus Paul’s founds the Christian Church. Cf Wittgenstein’s remark in “Cul
ture and Value”, p. 35: “The spring that flows quietly & clearly in the Gospels
seems to foam in Paul’s Epistles.”
42 Tracy B. Strong
sind: so auch Christus. … Ihr aber seid der Leib Christi und jeder von
euch ein Glied.) Paul’s description of the church would, if sketched, look
very similar to the portrait of the Leviathan that opens Hobbes’ book. But
this vision of the Church is universalistic for there is no principled reason
why a given member cannot be of the body. It is thus a threat to the
Empire and its claim to be the creator of pax. The Roman word pax tends
to refer to a state of affairs achieved and preserved by arms. It is thus
political and consists in separating the Roman Empire off from those who
are not so pacified. However, in the wellknown passage from the Letter
to the Galatians, Paul allows no finality in differentiation. (Gal 3.23: Hier
ist nicht Jude noch Grieche, hier ist nicht Sklave noch Freier, hier ist
nicht Mann noch Frau; denn ihr seid allesamt einer in Christus Jesus.)124
For Paul, it is precisely the resurrected Christ, the occurrence of something
from beyond the realm of possibility which is affects everyone, regardless
of their sex, race, ethnicity and so forth, a Lacanian Real that annihilates
the normal, that engenders a new universality. As Nietzsche writes: “Pau-
lus wusste nichts Besseres seinem Erlöser nachzusagen, als dass er den
Zugang zur Unsterblichkeit für Jedermann eröffnet habe. …”125 Paul is
responding to the promise that he sees instantiated in Jesus’ resurrection,
an Event the Truth of which can in no ways be proven but can only be
believed. Just as the Real cannot be represented, language itself, Paul as
serts, would diminish the promise of the resurrection (I Corinthians 1.17).
It is not surprising that the Athenian philosophers refer to Paul as a sper-
mologos – a babbler – Acts 17.18.
Were the Church to remain a subdivision sect of the Jews, it would not
be a threat – the Jews were wellknown to the Romans as an odd people,
but one that generally kept to itself. Thus the Church as Paul envisages it
is thus an epistemological threat to the Roman Empire, but one to which
the Romans will respond politically (by persecuting them – the grounds are
laid out in the correspondence between Pliny and Trajanus discussed above).
All relations and authority is now to be mediated by and in Christ: to be a
disciple of Christ one must hate one’s family and even one’s own life (Lu
kas 14.26). Christ and the Church function as what Schmitt called a Grenz-
begriff. Jesus says in Matthew 5.17: “Ihr sollt nicht meinen, daß ich ge-
kommen bin, das Gesetz oder die Propheten aufzulösen; ich bin nicht ge-
kommen aufzulösen, sondern zu erfüllen.”126 For Paul, Christ reasserts the
124 It is to this dismemberment that Nietzsche points in the “Von der Erlösung”
chapter in Zarathustra II.
125 Nietzsche, Morgenröte, # 72.
126 “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come
to destroy, but to fulfill.”
Law precisely and only by going beyond it. Thus Romans 13:10: “die Liebe
[ist] des Gesetzes Erfüllung (Love is the fulfillment of the Law).”
While a number of passages oppose love and the gospel to the Law (e. g.
John 1.17; II Cor 3.611: Denn der Buchstabe tötet, aber der Geist macht
lebendig),127 overwhelmingly the texts place the law and love into a com
plex relationship. What seems to me clear in Paul is what Zlavoj Zizek
points out: “the very act of fulfilling the Law undermines its direct
authority.”128 This was also Nietzsche’s position, as he writes in Jenseits
von Gut und Böse (Sprüche und Zwischenspiele 164) “Jesus sagte zu seinen
Juden: ‘das Gesetz war für Knechte – liebt Gott, wie ich ihn liebe, als sein
Sohn! Was geht uns Söhne Gottes die Moral an!’ [Jesus said to his Jews:
‘The law was for servants – love God as I love him, as his Son! What is
morality to us sons of God!’]” While the love of God fulfills the law it is
by definition not covered by the law. Thus being a Christian means always
living a Grenzbegriff – living as both exception and law. It is thus inherent
in the structure of a Church that it both invokes and resists the realm that
is beyond the Law. When Paul says “So ist nun die Liebe des Gesetzes
Erfüllung,” he is saying that inherent in the foundation of a Church is the
opening to that which is beyond the law. The Church is the fulfillment of
the Law but that fulfillment is always from beyond the Law.
How did Paul bring his vision about? In the epistles that we are rela
tively sure Paul wrote, he always begins them by instantiating his authority.
Paul had not been a disciple; he had never known Christ. Indeed, his early
career was spent in the persecution of those who followed Christ. It was on
the road to Damascus that he becomes who and what is is. [Cf. I Cor 15.10:
“Aber durch Gottes Gnade bin ich, was ich bin.”] We find a clue in the
very first line of the letter to the Romans. Luther renders this as: “Paulus,
ein Knecht Christi Jesu, berufen zum Apostel, ausgesondert, zu predigen
das Evangelium Gottes.”129 The Greek, however, gives us: “Paulos doulos
Christou Iesou, kletos apostolosaforismenos eis euangelion Theou.” The key
is doulos – slave130. Paul, a Jew, a Roman, describes himself here by ap
127 The relation of love and law is a matter of considerable dispute in Christian
theology. Some separate the two radically, others refer to a “law of love” which is
the same as a “law of grace.”
128 Zlavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London, 2000, p. 115. My para
graph here is indebted to pp. 113–116 of this book.
129 “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the
gospel of God.” Of the seven epistles reliably attributed to Paul, he invokes his
authority as doulos in three (Romans, Philippians and Philemon) and as apostolos
(I and II Corinthians, Galatians, and I Thessalonians) in the others.
130 Greek distinguished between a slave proper (doulos) and a slave taken in war
(andrapodon).
44 Tracy B. Strong
propriating a term for precisely those who are at the bottom of the Roman
world – slave. And this designation is used as the source of his authority.
Why should being a doulos be a claim to authority? Jacob Taubes, in:
“Die politische Theologie des Paulus” argues that the true founder of Chris
tianity was Paul and not Christ.131 In this he picks up on Nietzsche, who in
Morgen 68 sees Paul as “the First Christian.” Paul overcomes the law pre
cisely because he comes to revalue what it meant to die on the cross. In
stead of being shameful, that death is the prerequisite to living outside the
law, thus to living beyond sin. Nietzsche will analyze this more generally
in Jenseits and Zur Genealogie: slave morality consists in taking that which
had designated the base and shameful and turning it into an instrument of
power. Paul thus sought nothing less than to recast the entire Roman system
by taking what Romans had despised and rendering it the most worthy of
admiration. Slavery to the law is replaced by the transcendent slavery –
doulos – to Christ. We find in Romans 8: 2–4:
[2] Denn das Gesetz des Geistes, der lebendig macht in Christus Jesus, hat dich
frei gemacht von dem Gesetz der Sünde und des Todes.
[3] Denn was dem Gesetz unmöglich war, weil es durch das Fleisch geschwächt
war, das tat Gott: er sandte seinen Sohn in der Gestalt des sündigen Fleisches und
um der Sünde willen und verdammte die Sünde im Fleisch,
[4] damit die Gerechtigkeit, vom Gesetz gefordert, in uns erfüllt würde, die wir
nun nicht nach dem Fleisch leben, sondern nach dem Geist.132
This slavery is the authority by which he sets out the promise of the
resurrection. It is precisely because he is a slave that he has authority as
being called, as apostolos. The incarnation is of little importance to Paul
(and likewise to Hobbes).
Life after death – the resurrection – is the promise that the Law is unable
to accomplish. And this inability shows the limits of the Law and why Love
is the fulfillment of the law. And the question then becomes what are we
to be until we pass beyond death. What is required is the Church, the as
sembly of those who are all similarly summoned by this call. Paul’s vision
of the Church is remarkably like that we find in Hobbes. Each individual
is individual and yet part of the whole. One soon finds similar sentiments
in those who follow Paul. Tertullian, in his Book of Apology Against the
Heathen will write: “We are a body formed by our joint cognizance of
Religion, by the unity of discipline, by the bond of hope. We come to
gether in a meeting and a congregation as before God, as though we would
in one body sue Him by our prayers. This violence is pleasing unto God.
131 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford, 1997, p. 41.
132 See also I Corinthians 6. 15–17; I Corinthians 10. 15–17; I Corinthians 12.
We pray also for Emperors, for their ministers and the powers, for the
condition of the world, for the quiet of all things, for the delaying of the
end.”133 Tertullian sees the Church as had Paul, and as will Schmitt, as a
katechon, that delays the eschaton.
Such is the Church for Paul: how is it legitimated and against what is it
defined? For Schmitt, Paul defines the Church against its enemies, which
Schmitt understands as the Jews. The enemy is something “existentially
other and alien” As I noted, he remarks that “Feind ist hostis nicht inimicus
im weiteren Sinne; polémios, nicht echthrós.” (BP 29 / 28) TO understand
this the key passage is again from Romans: “Im Blick auf das Evangelium
sind sie zwar Feinde um euretwillen; aber im Blick auf die Erwählung sind
sie Geliebte um der Väter willen.”134 The Latin Vulgate is “secundum evan-
gelium quidem inimici propter vos secundum electionem autem carissimi
propter patres;” The Greek is “Kata men to euangelion echthroi di humas,
kata deten eklogen agapetoi dia tous pateras.”
For Schmitt it is important that the Church be the “friend” and that it
have an enemy, here the Jews who insisted on circumcision as a prerequi
site for becoming Christian and hence denied the universalism that Paul was
seeking. Schmitt sees the enemy as hostes and polémios. In this passage,
however, Paul (and his Latin translator) refers to them as inimici and ech-
throi. Thus in Schmitt’s nomenclature Paul’s understanding of the relation
of the Church to the Jews is not what Schmitt wishes it to be. The key here
is how the “enemy” is defined. For Schmitt, inimicus and echthros are en
emies in a private sense (we are thus enjoined to love them by Jesus).
Hostes and polémios are enemies in a public sense: they are our enemies
and, remarks Schmitt, we are never enjoined to love them, to welcome the
Saracens’ capture of Jerusalem, for instance. In Schmitt, the enemy (here
the Jews) of the Church is defined politically – and thus we get an insight
into Schmitt’s antiSemitism or rather his antiJudaism.
However, Paul, in this passage, does not define the Christian relation to
the Jews politically but rather defines it theologically. While it is clear that
concerning the Gospel the Jews (that is those who hold Judaism to be a
prerequisite for Christianity) are enemies, it is also clear that they are be
loved of God. In my analysis, which leans heavily on Karl Barth and par
ticularly on Jacob Taubes, one is to love ones enemy because since God has
revealed himself as the Other in the enemy, by loving the enemy we bring
133 Tertullian, Book of Apology Against the Heathen, Oxford, Parker, 1842, sec
tion xxxix, page 80.
134 Romans 11.28: As concerning the gospel, indeed, they are enemies for your
sake: but as regards the election, they are beloved of the Father.
46 Tracy B. Strong
ourselves into the presence of God.135 In Romans 13:8–9 Paul basically

says that the only important thing is to love your neighbor as yourself and
that everything else follows as it were (including loving God). Against
Schmitt, we might call this a social theology rather than a political one
What appears in Paul is that loving one’s neighbour, including one’s
enemy, is in fact to love God. When Paul condensed the two command
ments into one (Romans 13.9: Denn was da gesagt ist: “Du sollst nicht
ehebrechen; du sollst nicht töten; du sollst nicht stehlen; du sollst nicht
begehren”, und was da sonst an Geboten ist, das wird in diesem Wort
zusammengefaßt: “Du sollst deinen Nächsten lieben wie dich selbst.”) he
was establishing a social theology. Love of the neighbour was an instantia
tion of love of God. One is tempted to conclude that Schmitt’s political
theology is not a Christian political theology.136
V. Concluding Remarks
What might one say at the end? The friendenemy definition of politics
that underpins Schmitt’s analysis has the advantage of keeping combatants
from seeing their enemy as criminal. He writes in “Der Begriff des Poli
tischen”: “Die Menschheit also solche kann kein Krieg führen, denn sie
had keinen Feind, wingstens nicht auf diesem Planeten. Der Begriff der
Meschheit schliesst den Begriff des Feindes aus, wiel auf der Feind nicht
aufhört, Mensch zu sein und darin keine spezifische Unterscheidung liegt.
…“ (BP 54–55 / 54) Should however a conflict occur where one group con
ceives of itself as fighting for humanity, then its opponents will be under
stood as criminals and a danger to “humanity.” At the end of his book he
tells us: “Der Gegner heisst nicht mehr Feind, aber dafür wird er als
Friedensbrecher und Friedensstörer hors-la-loi und hors l’humanité ge-
setzt. …” (BP 77 / 79) Schmitt wrote these words in apparent response to
the “war to end all wars” as conceived by Woodrow Wilson. They antici
pate however the accusation of “crimes against humanity” that has become
increasingly standard fare since the trials at Nuremberg. The grounds for
this universalism, however, are laid in the Pauline universalism, the uni
versalism that claims to affect everyone in the same way. If the political
requires friends, enemies and conflict, then in the end Jesus’ life under
135 In Matthew 5.4445 Jesus orders that one love one’s enemies:
[44] Ich aber sage euch: Liebt eure Feinde und bittet für die, die euch verfolgen,
[45] damit ihr Kinder seid eures Vaters im Himmel. Denn er läßt seine Sonne auf
gehen über Böse und Gute und läßt regnen über Gerechte und Ungerechte.
136 This raises another large question. For an initial entry to it, see Tristan Storme,
Carl Schmitt et le marcionisme, Paris. Editions du Cerf, 2008.
mines Schmittian politics – which is why Schmitt is on the side of the

Grand Inquisitor.
Whether or not one accepts his model of the Church, the strength in
Schmitt’s theory is that he recognizes that human beings will respond to the
possibility of a vigorous public sphere. It is for this reason that the Volk
legitimates and is legitimated by the Sovereign. Liberalism, with its neutral
ity towards final claims, is incapable of providing this. Here one thinks of
the work of John Rawls, who explicitly denies that his theory of justice
requires a notion of truth and is composed only of that to which reasonable
beings with a similar history will rationally consent.137
There are, however, also consequences to construing matters as does
Schmitt. The first appears in the Schmitt makes available the kind of justi
fication that the present American administration offers in relation to the
“war on terror.” Since any terrorist attack is by definition an exceptional
case, the President can claim to act with Emergency powers. And indeed,
on September 14 and 23, 2001, President Bush invoked the National Emer
gencies Act138 and has since then justified his actions (such as spying on
individuals without court orders) because “it is a necessary part of my job.”
(News conference as per Associated Press, December 19, 2005). Jay Bybee,
head of the Legal Council of the Justice Department, said in 2002 that “The
President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commanderin
Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces” and a
memo from February of that year argued that “detainees have no inherent
protection under the Geneva Convention – the condition of their imprison
ment, good, bad, and otherwise, is solely at the discretion of the President.”
The actions of the present US administration are thus entirely consonant
with Schmitt’s doctrine of exception and of the kind of justification that the
sovereign can offer for his acts in such cases. Indeed, it would seem to
follow that the nature of modernity is to increasingly make all situations
exceptional.
The second consequence comes with the difference between Hobbes and
Schmitt. For Hobbes conflict in the state of nature is individual and not
137 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Collected Pa
pers, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 395. This matter is more
complex however. One should reflect carefully on the difference and similarity of
the usage by each of “the political.” For both it can take place in a realm that is not
Law governed – for Schmitt in the state of exception and for Rawls in the original
position. See Miguel Vatter, “The Idea of Public Reason and the Reason of State:
Schmitt and Rawls on the Political,” Political Theory (April 2008) 239–271.
138 See Harold Relyea, “Terrorist Attacks and National Emergencies Act Declara
tions,” for the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (RS21017)
January 7, 2005.
48 Tracy B. Strong
political. Hobbes is very clear that that which is political is “institutive”

– what I have above called poietic. (E.g. De Cive, XI, 1; VII, 14; V, 12;
Lev. XVII). For Hobbes it is the conflict in the state of nature that neces
sitates the institution of political relations. This means that the political is
a solution to the problems of that which is not political. Here Giorgio
Agamben has recovered some of Hobbes’ approach. For Schmitt that
which lies before the political is of no human account. (And thus in rela
tion to political society is effectively criminal). Agamben, however, starts
his considerations before society with “bare life”, the exclusion of which
is also the work of sovereignty and the state of exception.139 Whereas
Schmitt builds the state around the friendenemy distinction, Agamben
builds it around the homo sacer – a figure in early Roman religion, a
“sacred man” who was expelled from the city and who could be killed
(but not sacrificed) by anyone. The Sovereign thus shows that he can de
termine those who are of no account to the community, not even worthy
of being sacrificed to the Gods.
What does Schmitt miss by grounding his thought on the importance of
the political, conceiving of it as he does as friendenemy?140 First, I think,
is the fact that in modern times it has become increasingly difficult to in
principle exclude anyone from membership in a polity. Thus the foundation
of the political on that which was not deemed worthy of inclusion is under
mined. This means, however, that all are members or can claim to be. One
thinks here of the struggles in America over those coming across the border
for work, or those in Europe who seek asylum in Germany, or Denmark, or
the Netherlands.141 Here Paul’s understanding of what one owes them under
God is applicable – but it is not political and that gives us some indication
as to the problems these situations pose and as to why we have difficulty
is finding our way with them.
Secondly, in our modern age decisions are made by the state on a whole
range of issues that are simply what Agamben calls “zoe”. These include
genetically modifying crops, medical technologies, surrogate mothering,
cloning and so forth. Biological life itself is presently becoming subject to
sovereignty. The domain of the political is thus dramatically extended by
technology. It may prove feasible in the not too distant future to clone or
gans as replacement parts. We are here well beyond the slogan in the Chi
139 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998;
State of Exception, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005.
140 I am again indebted here to conversations with Professor Jason Frank of Cor
nell University.
141 See here, J. L. Nancy, “La Comparution / Compearance,” (trans. Tracy B.
Strong) Political Theory (November 1991).
nese Cultural Revolution that “latrines are political” as we are the watch
word of the “Sixties” that “the personal is political.”
Lastly, as noted briefly above, the modern world has produced a whole
new kind of people: these may come from what we call “failed states”; or
they may be asylum seekers from culturally oppressive regimes; they may
be “illegal aliens” in search of employment that cannot be found “at home”;
they may be prisoners at Guantanamo. None of this is easily covered by
Schmitt’s analysis and is to some degree covered over by the idea of po
litical theology.
On the other hand, Schmitt will avoid the path that we find in someone
like Bataille, where the exercise of sovereignty becomes only a recovery of
the nonrulebound, the immediate and the noninstrumental. Bataille calls
this the “animality that we perceive in sovereignty” and he is in favor of it.
He writes that “… we may call sovereign the enjoyment of possibilities that
utility doesn’t justify (utility being that whose end is productive activity).
Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty. … What is sovereign in
fact is to enjoy the present time without having to anything else in view but
this present time.”142
On this score it is interesting and important to note something to which
Heinrich Meier has already called attention: Schmitt’s distaste for Nietzsche.
In the Glossarium he scorns the idea of eternal return as in fact making
impossible the idea of the katechon. He writes on 26 / 9 / 49 (s. 272) that “if
there was an end it would be here so there is nothing to wait for.” He also,
interestingly, sees Nietzsche as the forerunner not only of fascism but also
of bolshevism, relating him to Trotsky (Glossarium 13.6.48 (s. 163). What
Schmitt dislikes in Nietzsche, I think, is later found in Bataille: a distrust
of the will and a valuing of what he calls necessity. Thus, drawing an
analogy between sovereignphilosophers and artists, he will say of them that
“gerade dann, wo sie Nichts mehr ‘willkürlich’ und Alles nothwendig
machen, ihr Gefühl von Freiheit, Feinheit, Vollmacht, von schöpferischem
Setzen, Verfügen, Gestalten auf seine Höhe kommt, – kurz, dass Noth-
wendigkeit und ‘Freiheit des Willens’ dann bei ihnen Eins sind.”143
Lastly, there may be something too strong in Schmitt’s reduction of law
to normativity and thus his rejection of it as destructive of sovereignty. For
Benjamin, the written law of both the Greeks and the Hebrews was a de
fence against the “tyranny of mythic states.” In the Seventh Seminaire,
142 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, MIT Press. Cambridge, MA, 1993,
volume 3 (“Sovereignty”), chapter one.
143 F. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, # 213. In the next paragraph I again
owe a debt to Professor Jason Frank.
50 Tracy B. Strong
Jacques Lacan argues that the Ten Commandments are “nothing other than
the laws of speech,” and that speech is the “distance between the subject
and das Ding.” Thus written law is not so much a punishment for offense
as a way of erecting a barrier against das Ding – that is, against that which
is a cathexis of the death drive and all that represents it: God, the mother
of the incest prohibition, the neighbor, etc. If these thoughts are on the right
track, then law is not only concerned with norms and procedures and petri
fied regularities – what Badiou dismisses as the logic of “particularism.”
The realm of law is also the realm of speech and the symbolic and the way
in which humans inscribe a barrier against the tyranny of absolute power
that the law may also want to claim. Such would be to reclaim Paul from
Schmitt and join him to Hobbes.

The Sacred Quality of The Political Hobb

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The Sacred Quality of the Political:

Reflections on Hobbes, Schmitt and Saint Paul

Der sakrale Geist der Politik:

Überall freilich geht diese Annahme, die ich Ihnen

* This essay was originally prepared for a Meisterkurs on “Politische Theologie,”

I. Introduction: The Nature of Modernity for Carl Schmitt

As a preliminary, we should distinguish a “political theology” from a

As opposed to this, it is central to any notion of political theology that

1. The Fate of Authority in Modern Times: Technicity

The question of authority under conditions of modernity can only be ap­

thinks about politics is political and is a secularization of theological concepts. See

spheres of thought.” “Central spheres” function here pretty much in the

20“By centuries of theological reflection …” “private matters”.

On the basis of these presuppositions, Technizität seemed to provide a

2. The Fate of Authority in Modern Times: Aesthetic Subjectivity

a) Aesthetic Authority (Intermezzo)

28 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, MIT, 1985, 62.

Urteilskraft. It is here that Kant introduces the concept of “genius.”30 With

century define genius as “the capacity to describe imaginary objects as if

ihrer Verirrungen, Leidenschaften und Irrthümer, ja Verbrechen; es ist nicht möglich

II. Thomas Hobbes

42 Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes: visuelle Strategien. Der Leviathan: Urbild

must be controversy, controversy that cannot be eliminated by any neutral

1. The Poietics of Theology and Geometry

If the model is geometry, where is the theology? The reference in the

basis of the development of modern aesthetics with Baumgarten in the

48 See e. g. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Dedication to Fran­

50 See Descartes, Philosophical Works, Cambridge University Press, 1976, vol­

2. The Sovereign as the People and the People as Sovereign

55 Lev. 5: “For who is so stupid, as both to mistake in geometry, and also to

This is the key passage:

There are several noteworthy elements to this passage:

Hobbes proclaims on over 20 occasions that “Jesus is the Christ” and he

59 Carl Schmitt, Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951. Berlin.

Schmitt, it should be noted, defended the Inquisition as a model of fair­

He notes, as had Hobbes, that there is in Christianity a dangerous ten­

63 F. Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung – Streifzüge … # 34.

certain prisoners in the “war against terrorism” have in effect no status at

III. Carl Schmitt

Hobbes closes his discussion of the necessary qualities of sovereignty in

66 Agamben, The State of Exception, p. 4, compares their situation to those of

Political Theology was originally published in 1922 and represents

70 “Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case.”

defined by conflict.80 It derives its definition from the friend­enemy distinc­

92 See the discussion in R. Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship – and Back

tions, relations between human persons, between human beings. Bureauc­

understanding, most clearly formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth

113 This is Schmitt’s account in his contribution to H. Quaritsch (ed.), Com­

IV. St. Paul

By declaring that the exception in jurisprudence analogous to the “mira­

extent of Christianity – but as importantly also with the very foundation of

ourselves into the presence of God.135 In Romans 13:8–9 Paul basically

mines Schmittian politics – which is why Schmitt is on the side of the

political. Hobbes is very clear that that which is political is “institutive”

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The question of authority under conditions of modernity can only be ap

48 See e. g. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Dedication to Fran

50 See Descartes, Philosophical Works, Cambridge University Press, 1976, vol

Schmitt, it should be noted, defended the Inquisition as a model of fair

He notes, as had Hobbes, that there is in Christianity a dangerous ten

defined by conflict.80 It derives its definition from the friendenemy distinc

tions, relations between human persons, between human beings. Bureauc

113 This is Schmitt’s account in his contribution to H. Quaritsch (ed.), Com

By declaring that the exception in jurisprudence analogous to the “mira