‘Political Theology’: How the State Plays God
A review of ‘Political Theology’, by Carl Schmitt; Duncker & Humblot, 1922.
Carl Schmitt opens his Political Theology with the following claim: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’ What makes this so striking is that it encapsulates a whole philosophy of the state that gave Hitler the theoretical basis for his rule. It is for this rather unfortunate reason that Schmitt has mostly been dismissed by thinkers outside of Germany. But more even-handed scholars say that Schmitt was one of the cleverest men of the 20th century and even compare him to Hobbes. Reading Political Theology goes some way to showing us why this is the case.
The central argument is this. In liberal societies such as my own, the law assumes conditions of peace. If the French were to bomb London and you had to leave the city, you are not going to pay much heed to a red light, perhaps not even your fellow countrymen and certainly not your noisy neighbour. This reveals rather a problem: say order were to break down in a big way: who resolves that order has indeed broken down and — more important still — who acts to restore it?
There are thinkers like Roger Scruton who say the law is the basis of political order. In England, we have the Common Law, which works in bottom-up fashion by giving judges the power to deal with disputes as they arise. Over time, this body of case law develops into a working legal order. It is an organic system, responsive to circumstance. The ruling of the judge is written into law, and becomes precedent. Should a similar dispute take place in future, the presiding judge takes the precedent as the basis of his decision.
In England, we have the Common Law, which works in bottom-up fashion by giving judges the power to deal with disputes as they arise.
In other parts of the world — say, France or Germany — the law is imposed from above, by statute. A group of lawmakers create the draft, pass it into law, and tell the cops to enforce it. But neither the Common Law nor law by statute solve the problem Schmitt sets out. Crises happen; and though they may resemble one another, they are always unique. Given this, someone must have the right to say that a crisis is unfolding and then to deal with it. Sovereign is he who decides on this ‘exception’.
The sovereign thus stands outside the legal order. He is endowed with extra legal powers. he is to the state what God is to the world: he is over and above it, and can act on it as required — or desired. Hence for Schmitt, the sovereign is the means by which the transcendent is returned to the ruling order. Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, conceptualised the sovereign as a terrifying sea-monster from the book of Job. The irony is that Hobbes was a proto-liberal, who grounded the state in the social contract to protect the life of the individual. Schmitt, who writes of the sovereign in more neutral, more objective terms, imagines someone much more proactive.
Schmitt is not just interested in crises for their own sakes. The state of exception reveals the political order for what it really is. Institutions and law are underwritten by power. Liberalism, on the other hand, rests on endless discussion, hence why — inspired by Juan Donoso Cortés — he calls the liberal bourgeoisie la clase discutidora. But we cannot have rules without a ruler, says Schmitt: politics cannot be boiled down to debate. Because liberalism is indecision dressed up as principle, it is shown to be naked and impotent when faced with real danger. At bottom, liberalism is naïve.
The state of exception reveals the political order for what it really is. Institutions and law are underwritten by power.
For thinkers like Patrick Deneen, John Gray and Yoram Hazony, liberalism is dead after less than a century as the ruling global ideology. They give different reasons for this. Gray’s take is that liberalism rests on four ‘truths’ that are in fact half-truths: that society is composed of individuals concerned with self-preservation; that we are equal in being exposed to death at each other’s hands; that human nature is universal, and so divergent cultural identities are unimportant; and that, through reason, government can be improved. They are half-truths because self-preservation is not our only need; because we will give up our security to assert our way of life; because we sacrifice basic goods to fight for values specific to ourselves; because improvements in society can be lost.
At least part of Gray’s argument, then, has to do with claims about human nature. For Deneen, it is more about the deracinating, deenchanting character of liberalism. Hazony sees it as basically ahistorical. But for Schmitt, liberalism is anti-political. It is untrue to real life. For it tries to do away with politics, which grows out of a primitive friend/enemy distinction — we are who we are, and they are who they are they are — with procedure and compromise. And then someone invades, or order breaks down, and liberalism has nothing to say. In Political Theology, he frames liberalism as profoundly philosophically weak.
I risk digressing. Schmitt’s point in Political Theology, published amid Weimar Germany’s rolling constitutional seizures, is that the liberal order rests on theological concepts in which it no longer believes (if, indeed, it ever did). That attack entails a forensic dissection of the ideas of Hans Kelsen, whose ‘pure theory of law’ attempted to detach law from politics; and the assertion that politics is decision, that decision is theology in disguise, that to claim otherwise is to lie, and to act otherwise is to drift. The liberal faith in what Schmitt sees as free-floating institutions and procedures is suicide.
