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The strange anti-liberalism of Carl Schmitt

Online Publication Date: 01 November 1998
To cite this Article: (1998) 'The strange anti-liberalism of Carl Schmitt', Economy
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Review article by Charles T u r n e r

The strange anti-liberalism

of Carl Schmitt
Texts reviewed
Carl Schmitt (1996) Roman Calholz~zsmand Polztzcal Form, trans. and annotated
G. L Ulmen, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, xli + 68 pp., k35.95
Carl Schmitt (1996) Leciathan in the State Theory /$Thornas Hobbes: Meaning
and Failure of' a Political Sj~mbol, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
xxxi + 121pp., k44.50
Heinrich Meier (1995) Carl Schmitt and Leo Stncuss: The Hidden Dialogue,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xvii + 136 pp., L15.95
John P. McCormick (1997) Curl Schnzitt:~Critique of' Liberalism, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, xii + 352 pp., L30
The only difficulty was that what he wrote one day he could not see the next. This
was because the pages were written without conviction
(Borges 1975)'

Introduction
T h e work of Carl Schmitt is known to English readers primarily through translations of four books: Political Roma~zticism([l9191 1985), Political Theology
([l9221 1985), The Crisis of' Parliammtarj~Democrac)~([l9281 1985) and The
Concepl of'the Political ([l9331 1076, 2nd edition, 1997). In addition, in the last
. ~ would like
decade a number of essays have appeared in the journal T e l o ~One
to think that the publication of two more translations, Roman Catholicism and
Political Forrn of 1923 (hereafter RCPF) and Leciathan in the S l a ~ e7heor.y of
Thomas Hnbbes of 1938 (hereafter L S T H ) , will be an opportunity to deepen
acquaintance with the thought of one of the century's most enigmatic legal and
political theorists. As matters stand, within Anglo-American scholarship the
debate over Schmitt's significance, and over his invol\rement in the Third Reich,
E ~ o n o m yund So~zet)lLGlurne 27 hurnber 4 ,Voz'ember 1998 434-437

0Routledge 1998

0308-5 147

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The strlznRe antz-lzberulzsm of' Carl Schnzztt

435

remains in its infancy, and is still pervaded by a context of polemic in which

Schmitt is either castigated or praised by North American conservatives for his
anti-liberalism or treated as the source of concepts and formulations which
might lead the post-Marxist left out of a theoretical impasse."ttempts at a balanced assessment of his work as a whole are rare, and for this reason alone John

McCormick's comprehensive and careful account is welcome.

l'he first noteworthy point about the Hobbes book (apart from its ludicrous
price) is that it has taken so long for an English version to appear. Indeed, it is
published here fully ten years after a translation of the first edition of Politicul
Theologj~,one of whose chapters is devoted to such forgotten figures as de Bonald
and Donoso Cortes."~ be sure, Schmitt has been better served than most
German Hobbes scholars. TGnnies, whose English editions of Elemenls of Lam
and of Behemoth are used by scholars to this day, and whom Schmitt dcscribed
as the best Hobbes scholar in Germany, still awaits an English translator for his
1896 book Thomus Hobbes: Leben und Lehre.'
T h e translation of L S T H is welcome because the book is significant in at least
two respects: 1) as a contribution to Hobbes scholarship which emphasizes the
relationship between myth and politics; and 2) as a work which, published
alongside a translation of Roman Catholicism and Politir-ul Form (even more ludicrously priced), raises the question of the relationship between the political,
theological and juridical aspects of Schmitt's thought, and that of whether
Georg Schwab's description of him as 'the Hobbes of the twentieth century' is
accurate. These texts are separated by a period of fifteen years in which Schmitt
accommodated himself to both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. If
he could do so, is such an accommodation at odds with the unity of his thought,
an indication of how his thinking changed, mendacious pragmatism or the consistent expression of a thinking whose 'unity' and coherence are of a peculiarly
flexible character?

Hobbes, r o m a n t i c i s m , Catholicism
How could an avowed Catholic, even allowing for the vagaries of commentary,
get himself called the Hobbes of the twentieth century? In what follows I will
attempt to make sense of the degree and nature of Schmitt's debt to Hobbes,
and in so doing challenge the view of Heinrich Meier who, in his Carl Schmitt
und Leo Strauss, attempts to deny any substantial affinity between Schmitt and
Hobbes. Meier's book reconstructs what he calls 'the hidden dialogue' between
Schmitt and Leo Strauss over Schmitt's best-known work, The Cotzcept of the
Polztzcal. T h e effect of this dialogue was, so it is claimed, that Schmitt was forced
to clarify his position regarding the metaphysical basis of politics, a clarification
which, according to Meier, led Schmitt to emphasize in the third, 1933 edition,
the theological dimension of his political thought, indeed its theological foundations. T h e most significant product of this clarification was a clear distinction
(1) between his own foundation for 'politics' - revelation - and that of Strauss

436

reason-based philosophical reflection on the best regime - and (2) between

either of these pre-modern accounts of politics and a mechanistic-rationalist
conception of the state associated with liberal modernity in general and with
Hobbes in particular. Meier argues that the course of this clarification took
Schmitt from an immature, defensive concept of the political in the first edition
of 1927, to a mature, positive concept of the political in the fateful year 1933.
Schmitt's critique of liberalism moved, then, from an account of how liberalism
had failed to develop a political theory which takes 'the political' seriously to an
account of the political which no longer has any need to establish its anti-liberal
credentials because liberalism now belongs to a bygone 'liberal age'.
According to Meier, Strauss had noticed that, despite its anti-liberal claims,
the first edition of T h e Concept o f the Political remained within the orbit of a
basically liberal, neo-Kantian philosophy of culture, according to which different human activities - art, economics, politics, religion, politics, ethics - are
assigned to domains or spheres each of which is 'governed' by a basic norm
which gives that activity its character. T h e largely protestant South-West
German school and the mostly Jewish Marburg School of neo-Kantianism were
both committed to a philosophy of culture of this type, though they differed in
the degree of cultural pluralism they thought such a vision implied. T h e basic
argument was exemplified by Rickert, who argued that each domain was governed by a timelessly valid value such as beauty (art), profit (economics) or
goodness (ethics). Schmitt takes this up in the first edition and notoriously
tailors his formulation to suit what appears to be an anti-liberal purpose.
Schmitt argued that, rather than being governed by an ultimate value, each
domain is governed by a value opposition - good/evil, beautiful/ugly and so on.
This then enabled him to define the political domain in terms of the notorious
opposition between friend and enemy. Leaving aside the absence of any reason
for elevating enmity above friendship rather than friendship above enmity, the
point of the opposition was to allow Schmitt to argue that the dominant 'political' doctrines of his day, liberalism and Marxism, intellectually and practically
failed to treat politics in anything other than instrumental terms - for liberalism the state is a ventilating mechanism for problems which arise elsewhere, for
Marxism it is a means to transform the production process. Neither liberalism
nor Marxism was able to comprehend the specificity of the friend-enemy
relationship, and thus neither was able to reach a position at which an understanding of politics can be said to be central to an understanding of the human
condition. Liberalism moves between the poles of a deontological subjectivity
of rights protected by a constitutional state and an individuality which is rendered determinate only through economic competition. Marxism moves
between a conception of class struggle grounded in an economic, non-political
friend-enemy relationship and the utopian vision of an end to all friend-enemy
relationships.
Meier's point is that, while Schmitt's insistence upon 'basic questions'
appears radical, the friend-enemy distinction merely reminds us of the existence
of a political relationship between constituted, sovereign states. The concept of

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Thestrange anti-liberalism of Car1 Schmitt

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enmity refers, conventionally, to foreign policy, and to the need of a state to

protect its citizens in the face of an external threat, a protection which is the
primordial condition of possibility for the economic competition or class
struggle on the basis of which liberalism and Marxism ground a theory of
society. On this account, all Schmitt is doing here is taking seriously a domain
of human action which liberalism and Marxism do not. Despite his insistence
that enmity implies 'the real possibility of physical killing', and that therefore
the friend-enemy distinction is existential rather than normative, enmity pertains only to the political sphere. For Schmitt, there cannot be economic or aesthetic or religious enmity, since these domains are not defined in existential
terms and therefore cannot become political.
This, Strauss pointed out, remains a liberal vision, and h/leier stresses this in
order to remind us that it is also Hobbes's view, and to argue that, when Schmitt
later moved away from this position, he moved away from Hobbes and towards
a clearer, more explicit account of the theological basis of his own thinking. Thus,
while in 1927 Schmitt describes Hobbes as 'the greatest systematic political
thinker', by 1933 he is merely the thinker who 'keeps political understanding
alive' (Meier 1995: 36), a cooling off which Meier interprets as significant evidence that Schmitt has taken on board Strauss's critique. In a famous passage
Strauss argued that, in order to complete the critique of liberalism, Schmitt
would have to strike at the 'founder of liberalism', Hobbes, and that, had he
understood his own thinking aright, he would have recalled that, as the founder
of liberalism Hobbes was 'the anti-political thinker' in Schmitt's terms. For
Hobbes, the state of nature was overcome and suppressed by the political society,
while Schmitt restored the state of nature, warfare, to 'a place of honour'
(Strauss, in Schmitt [l9331 1997: 90). 'Whereas Hobbes in an unliberal world
accomplishes the founding of liberalism, Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes
the critque of liberalism' (Strauss, in Schmitt [l9331 1997: 92-3). T h e advantage of this view is that the Schmitt of anti-liberalism and anti-Hobbesianism is
easier to reconcile with Catholic counter-enlightenment and counter-revolutionary theorists such as de Maistre, de Bonald and Donoso Cortes. T h e reason
for this has to do with an argument about just what the state of nature consists
in, and its consequences for the civil condition.
According to the more genteel of English Hobbes scholars, man in the state
of nature is prepared to kill, but only for the sake of his self-preservation. Man's
natural desires are akin to those of beasts, and it is this which necessitates a technical or mechanical device as the 'political' framework within which a brutish
but pacifiable creature might lead a commodious life. T h i s life would be 'secure'
because in pursuing it the individual would not be reminded of the reality of
the human situation. It would be the life, in short, of the apolitical bourgeois.
Meier points out, however, that both Schmitt and Strauss initially admire
Hobbes for not holding to such a view, and for founding his political philosophy on an anthropology of man as 'a dynamic and dangerous being', who seeks
not merely self-preservation but the annihilation of others. Where they both go
beyond Hobbes is in linking this dangerousness to man's capacity to engage in

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Charles Turner

extended chains of reasoning. Human nature is infinitely dangerous because

human evil is not the innocent evil of beasts, but a knowing evil. This evil in
turn is a consequence of original sin, and therefore the reasons behind the original need for a state cannot be hidden from man in the way they are in Hobbes's
construction of the state. A state which arises on the basis of 'original sin' would
remind its subjects of the proximity of the human situation and the constant
possibility of the emergence of a friend-enemy relationship, and would do so
in accordance with a very specific belief in what the state's metaphysical foundations were. T h e difference between Schmitt and Hobbes would lie, then, in
their accounts of the metaphysical assumptions behind the need to found a state
- knowing evil versus innocent evil. None the less, both may be reconcilable
with a foreign affairs account of 'the political', such that the significance of war
is that it remains a 'mere potentiality' whose 'function' is the preservation of
the internal peace of a determinate political community. As John McCormick
has put it:
Schmitt seeks to make the threat of conflict - of war - felt and feared not as
an end in itself. . . but rather so as to make war's outbreak all the more unlikely
domestically, and its prosecution more easily facilitated abroad. That Schmitt
aestheticised violent conflict to generate the fear necessary to prevent disorder
is not contestable - that he did so for its own sake is.
(McCormick 1994: 626)
The Schmitt of politics as foreign policy is manifestly not a theorist of 'total
mobilization' of the sort exemplified by Ernst Junger. The emphasis upon
warfare and upon the fundamental character of the friend-enemy relationship
does not issue in the glorification of the warrior. Indeed, at one point Schmitt
makes an explicit distinction between the agonal and the political.
However, Schmitt did part company with Hobbes in two respects. First, he
pushed the idea of 'politics as fate' to the point where the state as a compulsory
organization could legitimately demand of the individual that he sacrifice his life
for it in war, confronting a real friend-enemy situation and the real possibility
of death. For Hobbes, this is something a state cannot demand (and it is not the
only thing, as we will see) of a being for the sake of whose self-preservation the
state was established in the first place. Second, and more importantly, by 1933
Schmitt, encouraged by Strauss's commentary, was confident enough of his antiliberalism to argue that the political was not only foundational for the state, and
thereby restricted to a particular 'domain', but entailed a relationship which
could, potentially, emerge in any domain. By this stage in Schmitt's career, the
political relationship does not define a type of relationship opposed to other
types of relationship, but the degree of intensity of any associative or dissociative
relationship of any type.6 For Meier, this drives Schmitt's critique of liberalism
to its limits. For this critique not only conceives of the state as something which,
beyond being a mechanical device making a commodious life possible, reminds
man of the metaphysical grounds of its existence. It also extends the scope and
import of the friend+nemy relationship.

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By turning away from the conception of domains, Schmitt renders his concept
of the political 'capable of encompassing civil war'. The rise of the 'total state'
makes one's vision keener for the 'potential ubiquity' of the political, and opens
up the prospect of beating liberalism on its own turf, domestic politics.
(Meier 1995: 24)
The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it draws our attention
away from the fact that at the centre of most of what Schmitt wrote, from the
earliest essays to the Hobbes book of 1938, was the problem of sovereignty of
the polity, of the unity of the polity, the integrity of political authority, in which
the overriding purpose of political authority is the securing of internal peace and
the prevention of civil war. It gives the impression that for Schmitt 'the political'
might be an all-pervasive j i ~ t u r eof human action, when, even in late formulations of it in The Concept of the Political, and then in later works such as LSTH
and Der Nomos der Erde of 1950, it is the constitutive horizon jor action.
T h e distinction, which Meier would deny, between external warfare, for the
sake of which individual sacrifice may be demanded because it reminds man that
politics is fate, and civil war, which destroys the integrity of the political community, can be made sharper by referring to two concepts of enmity associated
with them, one of which Schmitt endorses, the other of which he emphatically
rejects. The one he endorses is 'relative' enmity, in which the enemy is conceived
of as a moral equal akin to an opponent in a duel. The one he rejects is 'total
enmity', in which the enemy (or foe) can be degraded to the status of a criminal
or a morally inferior being. A concept of the political which embraces civil war
as well as war between states conceived of as amoral enemies threatens to
degrade the enemy to a criminal and to contaminate politics with moral categories. Moreover, part of Schmitt's Aktuulztat was that, as a critic of his age, he
was seeking to restore a concept of the political which had been realized through
the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which brought to an end the confessional wars
of the later Middle Ages, the bloodiest and most destructive of which was the
Thirty Years War. Der Nomos der Erde is a laudatio for the concept of relative
enmity and the modern European states system which was the basis of the Jus
Publicum E ~ r o p a e u mThe
. ~ end of the nineteenth century and World War I were
seen by Schmitt as threatening this states system. It was threatened by the reemergence of a system of both international and domestic politics in which total
enmity threatened to triumph over relative enmity. When this occurs, the age of
the partisan and the terrorist has arrived. The apotheosis of the partisan idea, of
course, is Leninism. Thus, the attempt by some contemporary commentators to
see Schmitt as more sympathetic to Marxism than to liberalism because of the
former's acknowledgement of the inescapability of violence and the inevitability
of the friend-enemy relationship is wholly misplaced. In Schmitt's terms, the
class struggle entails an international civil war in which the enemy is degraded
to the status of a criminal.
I think, contra Meier, that it is this, and not the anti-liberalism of the third
edition of The Concept of the Political, which is the more enduring theme in

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Charles Turner

Schmitt's work, work which centres on the modern state, sovereignty, representation, and the relationship between legitimacy and legality, and authority
and power. It is these themes which figure in both the Catholicism and the
Hobbes books, and which allow us to discern a consistency of theme across
fifteen years. It is significant that Meier devotes little space to either of these
works.
To be sure, both are pieces of cultural criticism as well as systematic treatises,
and the suspicion remains that the English-speaking world is still not ready for
the rigours of Yerfassunsglehre,Legalitat und Legitzmztnt or Der Nomos der Erde.
If it was, the figure of the 'Catholic Hobbes' might be less perplexing, for the
unity of his thinking is a unity centred less on the metaphysical grounds of the
political than on his jurisprudence. While there are rather obvious grounds for
stressing the 'Catholic' dimension of Schmitt's political thought, Meier's
mistake is to formulate Schmitt's political theology in terms of the content of
Catholic belief and to see this as the metaphysical foundation for his attack on
the modern, liberal, technocratic age. Roman Catholiczsm and Political Form takes
us on to quite different terrain, terrain which Schmitt occupied before he had
had the benefit of Strauss's helpful, clarification-inducing interpretation in
1932. It is also, it should be noted, terrain on which an earlier critique of
Schmitt, by Karl Lowith, a critique I will discuss below, is most at home. The
reason for this is that, here, Catholicism is relevant less in terms of the content
of Catholic belief than in its consequences for and relationship with worldly political authority and power. It is here that Schmitt seemingly both wishes to attack
a modern age which is illegitimate because it is no longer the Middle Ages and
at the same time stresses the flexibility and adaptability of the historical Roman
Church's relationship with constituted worldly authority, including, by implication, the worldly authority embodied in and by modern states. Contra Meier,
there is nothing here on original sin, human evil or reason-versus-revelation, but
much on the institutional and sociological character of the Catholic church and
its mysteriously formulated 'capacity for form'.
This stress upon the flexibility of the Roman Church and of Catholic culture
generally towards worldly authority, its 'compromise with the world' as Max
Weber called it, written in 1923, was remarkably poignant in the light of
Schmitt's subsequent collaboration with National Socialism, and the charges of
opportunism which accompanied both Schmitt's appointment to the Prussian
State Council in 1933 (from the left) and his dismissal from it in 1936 (from the
right). Meier's stress upon the content of belief as the foundation of Schmitt's
concept of the political is unhelpful for comprehending Schmitt's active involvement with regimes of very different character. Indeed, in Meier's terms this
accommodation would have to be interpreted as either careerism or a remarkable capacity for changing one's mind. Either that, or the alleged extension of
the concept of the political to include civil war would have to imply that, both
in a situation of possible internal civil war or anarchy and in one of possible attack
by a foreign enemy, the human being is confronted directly with the consequences of original sin, and that, for these reasons, Schmitt could see in both the

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Weimar republic (anarchy) and the Third Reich (external threat plus internal
pacification) a theological^^^ significant raising of the stakes for man. But if
Schmitt believed this he took the opportunity to say so remarkably infrequently.
A different, secular-existentialist, interpretation of this collaboration was
given by Lowith in 1935, and it is one worth discussing here, because it contrasts with Meier's in crucial respects. I.6with accounted for Schmitt's collaboration by arguing that the structure of Schmitt's political thought, which at
numerous points claimed to be 'decisionistic', bore all the hallmarks of what
Schmitt himself claimed was its opposite, 'occasionalism'. His was not a political theology at all but a form of political romanticism, and Schmitt's critique of
the latter a case of the narcissism of small differences.
What is the romantic attitude which Schmitt purports to despise, and how can
an understanding of it contribute to an understanding of Schmitt's complicity?
It is characterized by Schmitt initially as an avoidance of present, concrete
reality, but an avoidance which, far from taking the form of flight, or retreat into
mystical contemplation, or suicide, manifests itself in the search for an altematize reality 'that does not disturb and negate' the individual (Schmitt [l9191
1985a: 71). In other words, the romantic's attitude to reality is an ironic one
which plays off one reality against another in order to paralyse the reality that
is actually present and limited. He ironically avoids the constraints of objectivity and guards himself against becoming committed to anything. . . . He
regards being taken seriously as a violation because he does not want the actual
present confused with his infinite freedom.
(Schmitt [l9191 1985a: 71-2)
T h e effect of this is that
Neither the cosmos nor the state, nor the people, nor historical development
has any intrinsic interest for him. Everything can be made into an easily
managed figuration of the subject that is occupied with itself.
(Schmitt [l9191 1985a: 75)
This subject might be the individual, it might be the community, history,
humanity. This style of thinking was exemplified by the politically insignificant
German romantics, who treated political reality in terms of forces which were
pre-political. Everything which happens in the world is an occasion on which a
force external to that world manifests itself. T h e structure of romantic thought
is one of pure effectivity in which there are no causes, no calculable relationships
between independently identifiable phenomena, in which all phenomena are
accorded equal weight, are equally significant instances of a given other-worldly
principle.
This attitude is nowhere better expressed than in romanticism's approach to
metaphysical dualism, a theme prominent in RCPF. T h e characteristic romantic attitude is to claim to have overcome such dualisms. But this overcoming is
another avoidance of reality. T h e dualism - soul and body, internal and external,
subject and object, man and woman - is allowed to remain. T h e romantic merely

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Charles Turner

makes it 'illusory' 'by shifting it to a comprehensive third sphere' (Schmitt

[l9191 1985a: 87).
The opposition between the sexes is suspended in the 'total human being'; the
opposition between individuals in the higher organism, the state; the discord
between states in the higher organisation, the church.
(Schmitt [l9191 1985a: 88)
But the resort to a higher third is merely a search for the nature of things in a
domain different from the one to which those things belong. 'For [Adam]
Miiller, the nature of money as an economic factor lies in the domain of law, not
in the domain of the economy, the nature of the legal does not lie in itself, but
rather in the theological' (Schmitt [l9191 1985a: 91).
In other words, the higher factor is not genuinely transcendental, but rather
any other domain, 'whatever happens to be different'. In this way, and combined
with occasionalism, the romantic accepts the world's 'nomological order' even
as he believes he is changing it. 'In commonplace reality, the intellectual revolutionary loves external order, even when he theoretically postulates tumult and
chaos' (Schmitt (19191 1985a: 98). On the other hand, since he operates without
substantive criteria of truth and justice and merely plays off different realities
against one another, he is as likely to endorse revolution as reaction:
As long as the revolution is present, political romanticism is revolutionary.
With the termination of the revolution, it becomes conservative, and in a
markedly reactionary restoration it also knows how to extract the romantic
aspect from such circumstances.
(Schmitt [l9191 1985a: 115)
In Political Romanticism Schmitt's combative rhetoric is sharper than anywhere
else. But it is directed at a style of thinking which is closer to his own than any
other. He attacks Adam Muller for failing to respect the integrity of domains, a
thoroughly liberal argument, but, later, he abandons the attack in favour of a
reduction of the political to the theological, partly in favour of a concept of the
political which 'potentially embraces every domain'. Second, Schmitt's own
history is one of accommodation to Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, in fact to any regime - reactionary or revolutionary which can be seen as the embodiment of concrete order.
The Schmittian response to the second charge would be that there is a significant difference between the passive acceptance of a reactionary restoration and
the active endorsement of it on the basis of clear criteria of what is right and just.
Schmitt was not a romantic, so the argument goes, because he had a clear commitment to a set of principles which went against a liberal 'age of neutralisations
and depoliticisations' in which a mechanistic-rational conception of the state was
dominant. Romanticism was 'anti-positivist', to be sure, but lacked the means
with which to be anti-positivist in practice, and ended in what today would be
regarded as pragmatism.8 This contrasted with the anti-modernism of, say,

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The strange anti-liberalism of Curl S ~ h m i t t 443

Burke's traditionalist conservatism or counter-revolutionary theories of the state
(de Maistre), each of which is based on principles of historical or divine right.
In Political Romanticism Schmitt clearly tries to align himself with these
thinkers. Yet Lowith's charge was that he failed to do so in practice. Had Schmitt
been a straightforward reactionary for whom the Weimar republic was to be
actively resisted, and who later in 1933 endorsed a regime which was more to his
taste, then, however repugnant his views, the charge of occasionalism would be
false. But the fact is that, as long as the Weimar Republic lasted, Schmitt,
employed officially as an interpreter of the constitution, made every effort to
preserve it. Later, as Prussian State Councillor appointed by Goring, he helped
draft the legislation legalizing the Nazi seizure of power. It is, paradoxically, the
active character of Schmitt's relationship with these regimes which marks him
off as a political romantic. Schmitt cites Burke, de Bonald and de Maistre
approving13 and seeks to align himself with them, because they 'were always
filled with the sense that they were not elevated above the political struggle, but
were instead obligated to decide in favour of what they regarded as right'
(Schmitt [l9191 1985a: 116). But Schmitt himself was a legal scholar, not a
politician, an interpreter, not a legislator. He was active rather than passive, but
active in the role of one who is freed of the responsibilities and risks of political
office which his heroes had to undertake.
T h e best example of Schmitt's attempt to identify his own fate with that of a
group which was 'always filled with the sense that they were not elevated above
the political struggle' was the 1943 essay 'The plight of European jurisprudence'. Here Schmitt gives a self-legitimating account of the relationship
between the legislator, the apolitical romantic and the interpreter. Since German
unification in 1871, the legislative process had become hitched to planning and
administration and allowed to run out of control in a flurry of laws which
amounted to decrees. This 'motorized legislation' was the product of a system
in which the law enacted within a modern parliament 'is the majority decision
of a divided legislative body' (Schmitt 1990: 48). In the face of this development,
the need had arisen for the law to be honed into a unified and objective force
independent of the legislative coercion which parliament had made possible.
Schmitt saw jurisprudence in general and himself in particular as the agent of
this unification. l0
But it was precisely in this role that Schmitt showed himself an occasionalist,
interpreting and commentating for whatever regime would have him, identifying his own subjectivity with the forces of the age, be they republican (1929-33),
national socialist (1933-42), or, as World War I1 was destined to end in
Germany's defeat and a post-war European settlement, the European Spirit.
Moreover, for Lowith, Schmitt's principles are nowhere to be found, not even
in the place in which one would most expect them, Political Theology. There,
Schmitt describes Marx and Kierkegaard as the first to oppose a decisionist style
of thinking to bourgeois or romantic existence. Yet, while Marx decided for
scientific socialism and Kierkegaard for a theologically defined 'one thing
needful', in Schmitt's case:

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It will remain to be asked: by faith in what is Schmitt's demanding moral

decision sustained, if he clearly has faith in neither theology of the sixteenth
century not the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, and least of all in the
humanitarian morality of the eighteenth century, but instead has faith only in
the power of decision?.
(Lowith 1995: 141)
As we have seen, the decisive criterion for 'the political' was one of extreme situations, the possibility of having one's own being negated by another being in war.
The concept of the political does not refer to the maintenance of one realm of
determinate Being among others, and therefore contains no implications concerning the rights and obligations of members of constituted polities. A theory
of political Being which might accommodate questions of the best regime and
the differences between democracy and dictatorship is reduced to a theory of
political existence.
Here, the enemy seeks to destroy not a particular, determinate mode of being,
but 'my naked existence' (Lowith 1995: 143). Expressed in Meier's terms, this
is the difference between the first and the third editions of The Concept of the
Political, between the Schmitt of domains in which the enemy threatens a form
of existence, and the Schmitt of an intensification model applicable to all
domains. Note here that Lowith's and Meier's interpretations of this intensification model are diametrically opposed. For Meier, Schmitt's thought shifted
from a neo-Kantian, liberal and formalist concept of culture and politics, to an
anti-liberalism founded upon substantive theological commitment. For Lowith,
it moved from an understanding of politics which might have allowed room for
substantive differences between different modes of recognizably political Being,
to one in which Schmitt's existentialist criteria of the political betray his formalism. Here, 'it cannot be specified what this intensity is an intensity o f (Lowith
1995: 150). Unlike his two decisionist forebears, Marx (a Jew) and Kierkegaard
(a Protestant) who opposed their age with substantive principles, Schmitt offers
nothing more than the capacity to be decisive, so that when Schmitt is confronted with the contingency of having to display judgement, with having to
relate the particular case to the universal principle and act, he can invoke only
the 'capacity for form' from RCPF or the capacity to decide. The latter might
imply equally an anarchic insistence upon the need to decide now or a claim that
the decisive decision has already been taken and that an existing state is the result
of such a decision. Whether that given state was imperialist, communistproletarian, theocratic, military or constitutionalist, mattered less than 'that the
state in question is an "authoritative unity"' (Lowith 1995: 150). Both of these
accounts, of the event which must occur now and of the event that has already
authoritatively occurred, were part of a devalued German intellectual currency
in those 'Years of Decision' following the First World War.'
So: Lowith sees Schmitt as a secular existentialist, Meier sees him as a
Catholic whose concept of 'the political' is Catholic, founded on a doctrine of
original sin, man's 'infinite evil' and a faith in revelation. There are problems

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with both of these approaches, as the Catholicism book and the Hobbes book
make clear. Against Meier, Lijwith's remark that The Concept of the Political
belongs to a middle phase is surely correct. It is sandwiched between what he
calls the 'extreme normativism' of the earlier phase and a 'thinking about order'
after 1933. But Liiwith himself reads Schmitt through the lense of a Heideggerian problematic, so that the political and jurisprudential dimension of his
Catholicism is underplayed in favour of questions of death and human finitude.
T h e translations of RCPF and LTH make clear, however, the centrality of the
question of the state's authoritative unity to everything Schmitt wrote. Where
they differ is in the account given of the grounds of political authority.

Roman Catholicism, political form and the juridical

R C P F opens with a passage which alerts the reader at once to the question of
his collaboration. Schmitt remarks on an accusation frequently lel-elled at
Catholicism by 'the parliamentarist and democratic nineteenth century', namely
that of 'limitless opportunism' (p. 4), and sees it as part of a widespread 'antiCatholic temper'. In response, however, he accepts that, as the heir to the Roman
Empire, the Roman Church has historically shown itself able to accommodate
itself to a wide variety of worldly powers. In relation to these powers it has not
shown itself to be a 'universalism' against which local or national powers have
developed legitimate grievances. On the contrary, and ironically, those opponents who see this as its most distinguishing feature are missing an opportunity
to deepen the anti-Catholic mood. They fail to grasp 'how much the Catholic
Church is a compiexio upposztosum. There seems to be no opposition which it will
not embrace' (p. 15): 'its history knows examples of astounding accommodation
as well as stubborn intransigence, the manly ability to resist and womanly compliance' (p. 7)' ruled autocraticall!; yet ruled by a leader elected by an aristocracy of cardinals, an aristocracy which in turn is potentially open to anyone.
Crucially, given Lowith's comments on decisionism of the Kierkegaardian sort
and Schmitt's later reference to Kierkcgaard in Political Theologj~,Schmitt formulates this cumplerio oppositovum thus: 'Old and New Testament alike are scriptural canon, and the Marcionitic either-or is answered with an as-well-as' (p. 7).
And, contru Meier, nre have:

T h e fundamental thesis to which all dogmas of a consistent anarchistic philosophy of state and society return, namely, the antithesis of man 'h!- nature
evil' and 'by nature good' - this decisive question for political theory is in
no sense answered by a simple 1-esor no in the Tridentine Creed.
In contrast to the protestant doctrine of the total depravity of natural man,
this Creed speaks of human nature as only wounded, weakened or troubled.
(Schmitt RCPF: 7-8)
-

Yet Schmitt insists that this both-and formulation is consistent with what later
comes to be called decisionism. 'This limitless ambiguity combines with the

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Charles Turner

most precise dogmatism and a will to decision as it culminates in the doctrine of

papal infallibility' (p. 8). And, even more explicitly, having noted that from a
political point of view Roman Catholicism is distinguished by a 'formal superiority to the material of human life' which makes for a substantial shaping of
human historical reality, Schmitt states that this capacity for shaping the world,
for imprinting upon it a form, 'despite its formal character, retains its concrete
existence at once vital and yet rational to the nth degree' (p. 8), a remark which
is followed immediately by an advertisement for Catholicism's political peculiarity, namely its strict adherence to what he calls the principle of representation.
Thus, in the space of the opening few pages, R C P F defines the political
import of Catholicism in terms of:
the both/and character of its reasoning
the capacity for form
the capacity for decision
its existential ethos
its strict adherence to 'representation'.
Small wonder that the question of Schmitt's Catholicism has perplexed commentators, and that Meier seeks to answer it through the circuitous route of Leo
Strauss's review of The Concept o f the Political.
Even to ask whether all this can be united through reference to an allembracing principle of unity, to Schmitt's 'oeuvre', risks misunderstanding his
claims about the Church as complexio oppositorum. The very effort to reconcile
opposites, to overcome dualisms, to resolve contradictions in a 'higher third', as
we saw, is a typically modern, Protestant and/or romantic move, which is necessary only because it accepts in the first place a modern reality which Catholicism
refuses to accept, a reality pervaded by the sorts of opposition which modern
thought expresses through dualistic categories. Confronted with the realization
that this dualism has robbed it of the capacity for decision, modern thought
exhibits decisiveness in the only manner left open to it, negation of the negation.
This contrasts sharply with the Catholic principle of decision which is referred
always to a realm beyond all dualisms and oppositions. Freedom as the negation or
transformation of such dualisms, or 'work' upon one side of them, is one of the
great figures of modern thought to which Schmitt's critique of modernity was
resolutely opposed. His decisionism, then, has nothing to do with the Lutheran
'Here I stand I can do no other', or with the pragmatic choosing of sides by
parties to dispute.
This is exemplified by the Catholic attitude to nature, where culture and nature
are continuous rather than discontinuous, a continuity which is suited to the life
of peoples with a peasant past. The Catholic in exile never overcomes feelings of
homesickness, in contrast to Protestants (and by implication Jews) who are able
to live 'anywhere on earth' by negating nature through work. If liberalism and
Marxism are rejected on the grounds of their failure to develop a political theory,
they are rejected because, concomitantly, they combine metaphysical dualism, a
modern ideology of transformative work, and a mechanistic world-view:

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The world-view of the modern capitalist is the same as that of the industrial
proletarian, as if the one were the twin brother of the other. . . . T h e big industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin - an 'electrified earth'.
(Schmitt RCPF: 13)
Crucially for the question of Schmitt's Catholicism, and its continuity or lack of
it with the Hobbes book, he opposes this economistic-mechanistic world view
to that of 'politicians and jurists' (p. 13). Thus the shortcomings of liberalism
and Marxism do not consist in the fact that they lack an understanding of radical
human evil, and the Catholicism with which Schmitt will oppose modernity is
not one which is open to the mythical, irrational or mystical aspects of the transcendent. Catholicism counters modern rationalism with a superior nltionulitjl,
which manifests itself in what he calls a 'capacity for form', but a capacity which
'resides in institutions and is essentially juridical' (p. 14). In contrast to the
objectifying logic of economism, 'Catholicism is eminently political' (p. 16).
Political in what sense? Not in a Machiavellian capacity to confront the vagaries
of international diplomacy and power politics, nor in the Church's having
accommodated itself to a mechanistic age by becoming ever more centralized
and bureaucratic. In relation to the contemporary struggle for world domination,
the Church's position is marginal. If the Church has political significance it consists in 'a pathos of authority in all its purity'.
This authority derives from the Church's status as a legal person. As such, it
is
a concrete personal representation of a concrete personality All knowledgeable witnesses have conceded that the Church is the consummate agency of
the juridical spirit and the true heir of Roman jurisprudence. Therein - in its
capacity to assume juridical form - lies one of its sociological secrets. But it
has the power to assume this or any other form only because it has the power
of representation. It represents the civitas humana, it represents in every
moment the historical connection to the incarnation and crucifixion of
Christ. . . . Therein lies its superiority to economic thinking.
(Schmitt RCPF: 19)
This ecclesiastical principle of representation had its parallel in the secular principle of representation which partly shaped feudal lordship. Here, the lord, or
prince, did not 'stand for' another body, but stood before a populace as the representative or embodiment of a higher principle. T h e same was true of other rcpresentative figures. As Jiirgen Habermas put it, drawing explicitly on Schmitt,
'When the territorial ruler convened about him ecclesiastical and worldly lords,
knights, prelates and cities . . . this was not a matter of an assembly of delegates
that was someone else's representative' (Habermas [l9621 1989: 7 ) .T h e medieval
ecclesiastical principle of representation is essentially a Catholic, juristic principle of which modern 'representation' is a pale imitation. According to this
principle, only that which is 'personified' is representative. Today's modern representatives, by contrast, are delegates, functionaries, representing sectional

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Charles Turner

interests rather than the worth associated with a particular estate. The German
distinction between Re@rasentatzonand Vertretung captures this shift of meaning.
This does not, however, mean that a modern state is incapable of representation
in principle, for Schmitt leaves open the possibility that the possible objects of
representation include not only God but freedom, justice or 'the people'. What
cannot be represented is production and consumption. A world dominated by
production and consumption, the world of liberal-marxist modernity, is also one
in which the state is conceived of and operates as a mechanism: 'once the state
becomes a leviathan, it disappears from the world of representations' (p. 21).
The emphasis upon authority at the expense of power is crucial, because it
contrasts sharply with Leviathan, which according to Schmitt reduces authority
to power. This early hostility to Hobbes will be modified in 1938 when Hobbes
is identified as a theorist of order who understood that the primary function of
the state is to put an end to civil war, that the modern state inaugurates a permanent preventive counter-revolution. Indeed, putting an end to civil war is virtually the definition of the political in that book.
Thus the two main pillars of political authority for Schmitt are legitimacy and
power, manifested in representation and a capacity for form (the source of legitimacy in R C P F ) and putting an end to civil war (the higher power of Leviathan).
T h e expression 'the authoritative unity of the state' covers both these pillars. In
the end, Schmitt found a complete political theory adequate to the modern age
in neither legitimist Catholicism nor modern state theory, and it is this which
makes reading R C P F and L S T H such a bewildering and rewarding exercise.
In the Hobbes book, the tensions in Hobbes's work, between the state as
person, as a machine, and as the sea monster Leviathan, are brought to the
surface. Here, in 1938, following the Nazi establishment of their own version of
concrete order, Schmitt comes to recognize, in a way in which he did not in 1923,
the virtue of a concentration of power capable of putting an end to civil war,
regardless of its capacity for representation, regardless of its embodying a higher
principle or not, regardless of its English or 'continental-absolutist' character,
regardless of its being in accordance with or contrary to Catholic principles.
For a Catholic political theorist this is, to be sure, a remarkable concession.
For, according to the doctrine of Papal government, the key difference between
authority and power is that authority (auctoritas) is one and indivisible, while
power (potestas) is not. And indeed, towards the end of the Hobbes book, Schmitt
brings this distinction to the fore in an account of the main point of weakness in
Hobbes's system, the point at which the command-obedience relationship
established by a concentration of power falls short of demanding a determinate
set of beliefs, leaving the individual person free to believe whatever he likes as
long as this belief finds no public expression. It is precisely because it is a power
organization, not an indivisible authoritative unity, that the modern state can fall
prey to other power organizations. The sea monster Leviathan symbolizes a
concentration of power which can never be anything other than provisional,
since the activity of such a state has the character of permanent crisis management. The modern state which is merely a power organization is permanently

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oriented to the emcrgcncy (h'otstnnd which can always intervene, not to the
exception (/lusnahme) which lies permanently beyond all organizational and
legal order.
But the point of Schmitt's political theory was to show that the secularization
which had brought with it a mechanistic-rational modern state implied something other than that the Catholic Church was obsolete, something more than
that Catholicism \\-as a mere m/ta~zschauun,gopposed to the modern age. Just as
Schmitt argues for Catholicism's relevance to a liberal age, so the Hobbes book
is far from an anti-Hobbesian tract. The problem with Hobbes was not that he
was a possessive individualist liberal thc relation between state and subject is
one of command and obedience - but that his conceptual construction of the
state was not secured firmly enough against the more pernicious versions of
liberalism which subsequently developed it in a distorting fashion. Perhaps
nothing summarizes more precisely Schmitt's compromise between a Catholic
theory of authority and a modern theorj- of power than the statement that 'every
order is a legal order; every state, a constitutional state' (p. 25). T h e continuities
of a European understanding of politics, continuities of which Schinitt saw
himself as the custodian, are the continuities of a juristic conception of concrete
human order, a conception which unites RCPF and LSTH.
Schinitt shares with writers such as Hannah Arendt the belief that to the
extent that they are modern, modern states are anti-political. And, just as Arendt
attempted to avoid classicist nostalgia for the polis, so Schmitt does not conclude
that liberal modernity has wholly triumphed over Catholicism. Rather, Catholicism might still adapt itself to a situation in which powers whose basis is economic take on the tasks of political responsibilit!; tasks whose 'political' character
can be obscured but not eliminated. Neither liberalism nor Marxism is able to
generate a theory of concrete human order, and here Catholicism can seize its
chance.
-

T h e domination of capital behind the scenes is still no form, though it can

undermine an existing form and make it an empty facade. Should economic
thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about an absolutely- unpolitical condition of human society, the clzurch wozlld remain the only
~cgencyqf political thinking and poIitU.alj)rm.
(Schmitt RCPF: 25, emphasis added)
But, by the same token and conlrrl Meier, precisely because liberalism and
Marxism are so powerful, any thinker, including the anti-Papist Hobbes, who
can 'keep political understanding alive' is regarded bj- Schmitt as an indispensable resource, whether or not he ceased to be 'the greatest systematic political
thinker'.
'There are, to be sure, passages at the end of RCPF in which Schmitt insists
upon a hierarchical relationship between Catholicism and jurisprudence, on the
grounds that Catholic political theory is oriented towards 'The Idea' while
jurisprudence is oriented to any power complex which displays 'a sufficient
minimum of form' (p. 30); that Catholicism can create new law while

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jurisprudence can only make existing law appear as a coherent unity. The history
of the Roman Church, even in its most institutional and bureaucratic phase,
which inspired the wrath of Dostoyevsky, is the history of a representative of
'Christ reigning, ruling and conquering' (p. 31).
In Schmitt's later work, however, the Christology is subordinated to jurisprudence as the defender of a principle of publicity against a modern world split
between a publicity which has degenerated into mechanistic externality and a
privatized liberal freedom. The agents of this freedom are the institutional
bearers of private rights - secret societies, esoteric associations, freemasons,
trade unions and, of course, Jews, all of whom have contributed to the destruction of a principle of an old European, Catholic, juridical principle of publicity.

Hobbes' Leviathan: person, machine, m o n s t e r

In RCPF, the link between a degenerate modernity and a set of privatizing institutions appears all the more polemical for Schmitt's refusal to give a causal
account of it, a perplexity which has him retreating from an appeal to Christ triumphant and invoking 'the West European tradition' more generally. By 1938,
as a jurist rather than a Catholic, Schmitt was ready to write a critical yet sympathetic account of the anti-Papist Hobbes. Three aspects of the immediate
context are relevant.
First, two years earlier Schmitt had been dismissed from the Prussian State
Council. The reasons have been rehearsed elsewhere, but it is clear from
Schmitt's other writings that, however slippery his principles, his conception of
the source of the state's unity was too jurisprudential and notvolkish enough for
the Third Reich. By 1938 and despite his appalling blindness to what was happening around him, he had witnessed the effect of an attempt to found a modern
state on substantive principles.
Second, the turn to Hobbes is less an exercise in political theology than an
account which purports to take seriously the mythological dimension of
Hobbes's political theory. This renewed sensitivity to political myth was
common currency in the late 1930s, among German liberals as well as the Nazis.
Cassirer's The M-yth of the State is an obvious example, and Thomas Mann saw
projects such asJoseph und his Brothers as an attempt to save myth from its misappropriation by Nazism. Gunther Maschke, in the afterword to the German
edition of LSTH, even describes Schmitt himself as a political mythologist and
the Hobbes book as 'the puzzling key to his life's work' (LSTH p. 202 orig.).
Third, there is the context of anti-Semitism. LSTH contains numerous gratuitous references to the 'Jewish' background of certain thinkers, and to the
Jewish-liberal character of modern institutions and practices which would
earlier have been called merely liberal. There is probably little point in asking
whether this amounts to a genuine hardening of Schmitt's anti-Semitism over
fifteen years, because a) if it did, it would not be exceptional for the times; and
b) there is strong evidence that Schmitt's appeal to the juridical left him open

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to the opportunism with which he has most frequently been charged. He had
after all, in the true spirit of European jursiprudence, helped confer upon the
Nazi seizure of power 'a modicum of form'. T h e anti-Semitism is no less awful
- in its consquences for coming from the pen of an opportunist jurist rather
than from that of a principled Catholic anti-Semite.
LSTH places Hobbes's political theory in a field of tension defined by three
rival images of the state's authoritative unity. According to the first, the state is
a person; according to the second, it is a machine; according to the third, it is
the mythical sea monster Leviathan. Schmitt's purpose is to show that Hobbes's
conceptualization of the state's unity is ultimately an heroic failure, partly in its
own terms, but partly because it left a space open which subsequent Jewishliberal thought and practice was able to exploit. Hobbes's failure was the failure
of an attempt to restore a unity between politics and religion which the JudaeoChristian tradition had destroyed. This search, in effect for a way of reducing
authority to power, for 'an original political unity' (p. 21) took Hobbes away from
the Catholic personalist principle of authoritative representation, towards the
construction of the state as a power mechanism devoid of all political-theological
elements. But in the course of the search he appealed to a mythological image of
a Biblical sea monster. Schmitt seizes on this because it shows Hobbes being
unable to maintain a consistently secular, mechanistic state construction. Thus:
-

the question must be whether the myth of leviathan created by Hobbes is a

genuine reestablishment of an original life unity, whether it has guaranteed
itself as a political-mythical image in the struggle against the judaeo-Christian destruction of a natural unity, and whether it is fitted to the hardness and
malevolence of this struggle.
(Schmitt LSTH: 22-3)
Moreover, despite his mechanistic construction of the state, Hobbes holds to the
belief that Jesus is the Christ and that the monarch is God's Lieutenant. Yet his
philosophy is inconsistent with such beliefs, which he could defend only through
agnosticism. No traditional or customary conception of monarchy was available
to him. T h e nearest he comes to it is in his transfer of the Cartesian idea of man
as a mechanism with a soul to the 'great man', the state. Here, the state is a
machine 'beseelte' by a sovereign representative person. But this ensoulment is
the antithesis of the genuinely personalist idea of representation. It is true that:
That which emerges beyond the social contract, the only guarantor of peace,
the sovereign representative person, comes into existence not through, but on
the occasion of consensus. T h e sovereign representative person is incomparably more than could be generated by the accumulated force of all participating individual wills.
But 'the inner logic of the artificial product "state" leads not to a person, but to
a machine. It is a matter not of the representation through a person, but of the
factual present achievement of real protection' (pp. 52-3). In this sense it is a
prototypical work o f a new technical age. T h e personalism which seems to lie at

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Charles Turner

the heart of the idea of the state as a man does not halt the process of technification, but completes it. Even the soul is only a component of a machine created
by man. Finally,
his concept of the state therewith becomes a factor in the great four century
process in which, with the help of technical ideas, a general 'neutralisation'
occurs and the state in particular is turned into a technical neutral instrument.
(Schmitt LSTH: 62)
But it is only a factor. Which brings us to anti-Semitism.
To read Schmitt's Hobbes book is to read an account of the internal decay
of the thought of the one modern thinker who came closer than anyone to a
genuinely political conception of human order. T h e decay seems inevitable,
however, for from the start Schmitt alerts us to the fact that Hobbes did not
have available to him a symbolism with the modernity to match the modernity
of his conception of the state. Here there are palpable continuities of theme
with RCPF. There, one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the modern age
was 'incapable of representation' was the fact that the future-oriented Soviet
Union, striving for an electrified earth, employed as its state symbolism the
hammer and sickle, instruments appropriate to a medieval mode of production.
Hobbes too is seen as having to draw upon pre-modern symbolism. This
foreign element, introduced into an essentially mechanistic construction from
the outside, was not only pre-modern, it was mythological. Moreover, it was
drawn from an Old Testament myth which had as much resonance in the kabbalist tradition as in seventeenth-century Puritanism. In the book ofJob, the
sea monster Leviathan and the land monster Behemoth appear as pagan,
earthly powers upon whom, at a final messianic banquet, Israel is destined to
feast. While the kabbalistic tradition anticipates this banquet, Schmitt argues
that the nineteenth century made it a reality when the forces or 'indirect
powers' of contemporary civil society - associations, trade unions, interest
groups in general, Jews - began to promote sectional interests and threaten the
unity of the state.
This, for Schmitt, was the long-term consequence of an attempt to reduce
authority, which is indivisible, to power, which is not. A concentration of power
is only ever provisional, forever at the potential mercy of those powers which
might oppose it. A state conceived of in these terms lacks the form-giving,
society-shaping capacity Schmitt attributed to the Catholic Church, whose
unity was assured by the personalist principles of authority and representation.
In Hobbes's case, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that Leviathan treats
religious belief as a purely private matter. The relationship between state and
subject is one of external protection and external obedience. T h e problem with
Leviathan, then, is not its mechanistic-neutral character alone, but the fact that
it grants to its subjects freedom of conscience, the origin, according to Jellinek
and Weber, of modern, secular, private freedoms. The privatization of religion
gives rise to the sacralization of the private. This argument had already been
made in RCPF, and it is repeated here in 1938 with an anti-Semitic twist.

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Freedom of conscience, as set down in the chapter of Leaiathan devoted to

miracles, in which miracles are whatever the state says miracles are, but only
for public purposes, was the crack in Hobbes's ostensibly gapless system. It was
this gap, according to Schmitt, which subsequent liberal and Jewish thought
exploited. Reinhardt Koselleck's Critique rrnd Crisis is, for all the priase heaped
upon it, an extended elaboration of the Schmittian point that the history of
enlightenment is the history of the expansion of this crack within an absolutist state to the point where a morality of private conscience becomes the criterion from which to judge and possibly condemn existing political
arrangements.
It was 'the first liberal Jew', Spinoza, who seized upon the Hobbesian separation of inner and outer and reversed the priority, developing out of it the basic
principle of freedom of thought and expression of opinion, a basic principle
which was not be protected b,y the state, but was to be thefi)undation of the state.
Thus 'a small switch of thought deriving from Jewish existence, and carried with
plain consistency, in a few years seals the fate of Leviathan' (pp. 88-9).
T h e absolute state can demand everything, but only externally. T h e bearers
of the inner freedom which had been allowed to remain surreptitiously were:
secret societies and organisations, rosicrucians, freemasons, illuminists,
mystics, pietists, sectarians of all sorts, the many 'silent in the country', and
above all here once again the shifting spirit of the Jew, who knew most precisely how to assess this situation to the point where the relationship between
public and private, behaviour and conviction, was turned on its head.
(Schmitt LSTH: 92)
It was Moses Mendelsohn who understood that the undermining of the state
meant the emancipation of his people. His writings gave rise to 'the first great
and true opposition between German wisdom and the Jewish tactic of making
distinctions'.
A worldly god which is merely a public power has only the simulacra of divinity on its side. Any recognition of the opposition between inner and outer is
already a recognition of the superiority of the inner. This superiority has many
forms, but whether it is in 'masonic lodges, conventicles, synagogues or literary
circles' (p. 95) they are all opponents of Leviathan. T h e effect of this, since the
eighteenth century, is that Hobbes's great man has become something inhuman
and subhuman, destroyed from the inside by parasites. It lived on in the nineteenth century, but only in the form of the positivist Gesetzstaat, a state open to
the legislative coercion which Schmitt described in 1943 as 'motorized legislation'. Such legislation coincided with the triumph of Leviathan's old opponents, indirect powers which threaten the state's unambiguous power to provide
protection in return for obedience.
It is of the essence of an indirect power that it blurs the clear connection
between state command and political danger, between power and responsibility, protection and obedience, and out of the irresponsibility of a

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Charles Turner

domination which is no less intense for being indirect, enjoys all the advantages and faces none of the dangers of political power.
(Schmitt LSTH: 117)
The upshot was that Leviathan broke apart on the distinction between state and
individual freedom. The organizations which now represent that freedom have
come to resemble the guests at the kabbalists' messianic banquet. They are
merely 'the knife with which anti-individualist forces cut up Leviathan and
divided the flesh amongst themselves' (p. 118). It is worth noting, too, that this
relationship between the modern state as a power organization and those powers
which act in a state-related fashion in a competition for resources is the staple
diet of modern political sociology, for which the problem of authority is largely
non-existent.
The anti-Semitic tone continues with Schmitt's treatment of Friedrich Julius
Stahl. Stahl (1802-61) was a Bavarian Jew who converted to Protestantism, an
advocate of Prussian conservatism grounded in the idea of a Christian state, who
had changed his name from Jolson. In earlier works Schmitt had referred to him,
conventionally, as E J. Stahl. But by the 1930s he had become Stahl-Jolson.ll
Stahl is described here as merely the cleverest of those members of a nineteenthcentury 'Jewish Front' which includes Marx, Heine and the Rothschilds. Unlike
them, baptism provided him not only with entrke into society, but also with
entree into the sanctuary of a German state which was still highly stable [sehr
solzde]. From the position of high office he was able to ideologically deceive
and spiritually paralyse the innermost workings of this state - monarchy, aristocracy, and the Lutheran Church.
(Schmitt LSTH: 108)
Believing himself a conservative, Stahl defended the monarchy against parliamentarianism. But the monarchy he defended was a constitutional monarchy,
and it was, according to Schmitt, constitutionalism which ultimately weakened
the 'Prussian military state' from within and led to the defeat of 1918.

Conclusion
There is not the space here to enter into the complexity of Schmitt's position
in 1938, to trace the relationship between his Catholicism and his anti-Semitism, not least because Schmitt was at his most anti-Semitic when he was least
Catholic. That a positive reference to the solidity of a Prussian state founded
upon Lutheranism could have come from the pen of one who had written that
the modern, non-Catholic world is incapable of representation and has reduced
authority to power is proof enough of Schmitt's enigmatic status. Perhaps his
work is best summed up by saying that his account of the modern world is pervaded by a sense of what the modern world lacks, and by his search for the next
best thing. It was a search which sometimes led him to contrast the modern

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The strange anti-liberali.~mof Car1 Schmitt

455

with the pre-modern political world, but which also produced a theory of secularization in which pre-modern theological concepts live on in modern secularized form. His interest in Hobbes does not make him the Hobbes of the
twentieth century, and to this extent Heinrich Meier is surely right. But in
Hobbes Schmitt saw a political theory which, while it mistakenly reduced authority to power and made of the state a preventive mechanism, saw the ultimate
purpose of the state as the prevention of civil war and the maintenance of peace,
a theme which has obvious continuities with medieval Furstenspzegel literature.
Had Schmitt restricted his account of Hobbes to this theme, as he does implicitly in Der Nomos der Erde, the reference to 'failure' in the title would have been
omitted. But Schmitt chose to focus, in 1938, less on the theme of maintaining peace as such, than upon those forces which, according to Hobbes, constituted a threat to the state's unity, what Hobbes called the equivalent of 'wormes
in the entrayles of a natural man'. Hobbes himself was thinking of sects of one
sort or another. Schmitt meanwhile drew an analogy between threats to the
unity of the state in the seventeenth century and the sorts of associations, clubs
and interest groups which both liberal democratic and social democratic theorists have long seen as central to the unity and stability of a modern polity. With
no reference at all to the sociology of social groups, nor to the magisterial work
of the legal historian Gierke o n these matters, Schmitt simplistically maps one
type of group o n to another. Moreover, he attempts to write the empirical
history of the modern state as though it can be understood in terms of elements
of Hobbesian political philosophy, in such a way that the development of nineteenth-century liberal institutions and interest groups is theorized as the cruel
exploitation by Jewish-liberal thinkers of weaknesses in Hobbes's system. T h u s
any intermediate organization or association is a potential threat to the unity of
the modern state. T h e consistent if not social-philosophically acute conclusion
of this kind of reasoning is that the suppression of such organizations in a world
in which the pursuit of power is a zero-sum game is to be welcomed. T h e suppression of civil society organizations is thus an act which ensures 'concrete
order'. At least, this was the way matters appeared in 1938. For a Catholic conservative the great irony of this is that, if it makes him the twentieth-century's
Hobbes, it also makes him one of its Rousseaus.

University o f Warwick

Notes
1 'A theologian in death', in A Unioersal H2stor.y of Injamy, London: Penguin, 1975,
p. 103.
2 'The legal world revolution', Glos 52 (Summer 1987); 'The plight of European
jurisprudence', 7210s 83 (Spring 1990); 'The constitutional theory of federation', Elos 9 1
(Spring 1992); 'Appropriation/distribution/producrion:toward a proper formulation of
the basic questions of any social and economic order', Telns 95 (Spring 1993); 'The age
of neutralizations and depoliticizations', Glos 96 (Summer 1993).

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Charles Turner

3 See Holmes (1993: ch.2); Gottfried (1991); and, from the left, Ulmen (1991) and
Mouffe (1993).
4 On Donoso Cortes (1808-53) see Cortes (1888); J. T. Graham (1974); on De Bonald
(1754-1840), see Laski (1919: ch.2); Nisbet (1986).
5 E Tonnies, Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre, 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Frohmann, 1925;
'Hobbes und das Zoon Politikon', Zeitschr!ftfur Vulkerrecht 12 (1923), pp. 471-88. For
Schmitt's remark on Tonnies as a Hobbes scholar, see 1950: 65.
6 This is in itself hardly original. See, for instance, Plessner:
There is politics between husband and wife, client and service staff, teacher and
pupil, doctor and patient, artist and patron, and in whatever private relationship
we care to mention, just as in the public realm there is a legal, economic, cultural
and religious politics, and a social politics alongside that of state and party.
Plessner [l93 l] (1981: 194-5)
7 On this, see Der Nomos der Erde, pp. 12343, 200-12.
8 See, for instance, Richard Rorty's advice (1982) to 'accept the metaphysics of the day'.
9 See Spengler (1928); von Krockow (1990).
10 For an account of this distinction, see Zygmunt Bauman's Legislators and Interpreters
(1987), one of a series of anti-liberal, anti-modernist texts which have marked Bauman's
later years. His elevation of the postmodernist-pluralist interpreter above the modernistlegislator is quite different from Schmitt's appeal to jurisprudence, which is at the same
time an appeal to the continuities of European history. Bauman's position implies as much
disdain for the juridical interpreter, preserving the unity of the law's will, as for the
'motorized' legislator, whose laws amount to decrees.
11 Embarrassingly, in his introduction to Political Romanticism Guy Oakes refers
uncritically to Schmitt's apparent resurrection of 'the obscure Jewish figure Stahl-Jolson'
(see Schmitt 1985a: xxxiv).

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