Lessons from Carl Schmitt: Political Theology, Executive Power and the "Impact of

Political Events"
There can be little doubt that Carl Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty (1922) has turned out to be one of the most important texts in modern
political thought--for better or for worse. In a broad attack on both traditional state law theory
and philosophical liberalism, Schmitt seeks to ground the political order of the modern state
in what has aptly been called a "metaphysics of existence."[1] Postulating a structural
analogy between jurisprudence and theology, Schmitt introduces a concept of sovereignty
that is not derived from basic constitutional norms, as in the case of left-liberal legal scholars
in Weimar Germany like Hans Kelsen.[2] Instead, Schmitt defines sovereignty almost
exclusively from the perspective of the state of emergency--"the exception," as he notes (p.
5). Political order, in other words, cannot be safeguarded by constitutional provisions, but by
an extra-legal authority, that is, by that which by definition cannot be part of constitutional
arrangements (pp. 7, 11-12).[3]
Given the much-discussed crisis of liberalism in the late twentieth century, which ironically
emerged contemporaneously with the end of the cold war, Schmitt's theories continue to fall
on much fertile ground, even though most scholars are cautious enough to point out that they
do not share the implications of Schmitt's thought.[4] Indeed, Schmitt himself--despite his
rhetoric of Eigentlichkeit, his rhetoric of expressive authenticity--was well aware that his own
thought was in many ways marked by the political surroundings of the early 1920s. Only a
few years after its inauguration, the Weimar Constitution had proved increasingly fragile.
While external political and social circumstances made it difficult to realize many of the
central constitutional provisions, and while the presumed unity of the new German state after
the First World War was threatened by a great variety of interest groups and radical political
parties, many scholars of public law in Germany were critical about the validity of the
constitutional provisions.[5] In contrast, for instance, to Kelsen, whose neo-Kantian legal
positivism led him to assume that constituonal order could be derived from a "basic norm"
entirely void of any actual political content, Schmitt opted for a radicalized version of the
Hobbesian paradigm: emphasizing that the authority of the state is based on the "exception"
and on the sovereign's "monopoly to decide," he concluded, "authority proves that to produce
law it need not be based on law"(p. 13) With this step Schmitt distanced himself both from
Max Weber and from Kelsen, whose position he attacked in much detail in Political
Theology (pp. 18-24).[6]
It is interesting to see, of course, that the first edition of Political Theology was published
shortly after the Weimar Constitution showed signs of distress and that the slightly revised
second edition, published in 1934, came out after a series of political events that had entirely
dissolved the constitutional provisions of the Weimar Republic: the "coup against Prussia" in
1932, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, and the so-called Rhm Putsch of 1934, which
allowed Hitler to eliminate any competition for power within the NSDAP.[7] The
disappearance of the Weimar Republic frames Schmitt's theoretical speculations about the
origin of political order. As he noted himself: "When theories and concepts of public law
change under the impact of political events, the discussion is influenced for a time by the
practical perspectives of the day. Traditional notions are modified to serve an immediate

purpose. New realities can bring about ... a reaction against the 'formalistic' method of
treating problems of public law" (p. 16).
Clearly, the German editions of Political Theology were part of this process, but it is also
interesting to realize that the same can be said with regard to its English translations. When
George Schwab's first translation was published by MIT Press in 1985, the cold war was at its
height and the political realities of a world dominated by Pershing and SS-20 missiles
suggested a global version of Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction favored in The Concept of
the Political (1932) that flew in the face of political idealism.[8] Schmitt himself died in April
1985. When the second English edition, with an added foreword by Tracy B. Strong, was
published last year, these realities had changed once again. Schmitt's thought proved to be
enormously adaptable and, after September 11, was repeatedly used to show how central
"concepts of public law change under the impact of political events," as he put it in 1922 (p.
16).
Seen against this background, the new edition of Political Theology is noteworthy more for
Stong's new foreword, running over 29 pages, than for the translation itself. As far as I am
aware, the translation has not been revised or updated in any way and is identical to the 1985
edition. Schwab follows Schmitt's German with much accuracy and delivers an elegant
translation that leaves nothing to be desired. The translation itself is based on the second
German edition of Schmitt's text from 1934, which notoriously omits some passages from the
1922 edition, in which Schmitt cited favorably from the work of the German-Jewish legal
scholar Erich Kaufmann (p. 1) At the same time, it is important to note that Schmitt does not
(not even in his foreword to the 1934 edition) explicitly endorse the National Socialist
movement. Schmitt's precise relationship to the National Socialist establishment, together
with his antisemitism, is a matter of debate among Schmitt scholars. Possible responses range
from an outright denial of Schmitt's antisemitism, as in Gopal Balakrishnan's The Enemy
(2000), to a reduction of Schmitt's thought as exclusively antisemitic, as in Raphael Gross's
study on this subject.[9]
As is often the case, Schmitt's own position becomes much clearer once we take into account
which understanding of public law he criticizes: "liberal normativism and its kind of
'constitutional state'"--largely the position of Kelsen, but also the Weimar Constitution as a
whole--are described as "distorted," "deteriorated" and "degenerate" (pp. 1, 3). Although
Strong also cites these passages, he does not note the rhetoric of degeneration that marks
Schmitt's foreword to the second edition of Political Theology (pp. vii-xxxv, xxiii )--a
rhetoric that cannot be found in the first edition of 1922.
The alternative to what Schmitt regards as a degenerate normative liberalism can be found in
a passing reference to the "elements of the political unity"--that is, "state, movement,
people"--which, needless to say, is a less direct way of simply noting that the ideal political
order is a one-party state (p. 3).[10] Ironically, however, Schmitt himself, striving for a strong
authoritarian state, does not realize that the identity of state, movement and people actually
replaces the very concept of the modern state with a "vlkisch" notion of political unity.[11]
But back to Strong's foreword, which--as I have noted earlier--is the most interesting part of
this new edition of Political Theology. Much of what Strong has to say is, of course, of an

introductory nature and intended to make a wider audience familiar with Schmitt's thought.
For students who first encounter Schmitt's ideas this particularly welcome contribution
situates Political Theology in the wider debates of modern political thought. Indeed, Strong's
new foreword is more concise and balanced than George Schwab's original introduction,
which is also included in this edition. Although the bibliographical references in the footnotes
were obviously compiled in a hurry and often lack precise page numbers, places of
publication, and so on, this well-written and well-researched introduction reaches far beyond
Political Theology. It might be doubted that Schmitt really was the "leading jurist during the
Weimar Republic"--at least it seems so from our own point of view at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, when Hugo Preuss and Kelsen are rarely read in any detail (p. vii).
Schmitt clearly was the most controversial and most public of the Weimar jurists and, as a
consequence, Strong is particularly interested in Schmitt's transition from conservative public
lawyer in 1922 to outspoken member of the NSDAP between 1933 and 1936.
Schmitt's alliance with the National Socialists is a tricky issue, especially since it tends to
polarize much recent scholarship along ideological faultlines not always fruitful with regard
to a better understanding of Schmitt's political and legal thought. Strong himself opts for an
interpretation that seeks to take into account the ambiguities of Schmitt's own remarks on this
matter before, during and after the Second World War. Precisely because it is certain to be
controversial, and precisely because it nevertheless seeks to achieve a more neutral ground, I
should like to quote his interpretation at length: "The present volume, reissued with a new
foreword but otherwise 'unchanged' in a second edition in November 1933, after Schmitt had
joined the Nazi party, can ... be read on one hand as a document relevant to Schmitt's decision
to see himself as allied with the NSDAP, and what that allegiance meant. To see the choice
that Schmitt (or Heidegger, or many other German philosophers, theologians, artists, as well
as people from all walks of life--not just in Germany, and not just then) made as blind or
ignorant or born from venal ambition, is, I think, to misunderstand their thought and their life.
It is also to sweep under the table what appeared as the appeal and apparent necessity of such
a movement, and to avoid serious engagement with why it appeared as such.... Schmitt came,
as did Heidegger, from a rural, Catholic, petit-bourgeois upbringing" (pp. x-xi; xxix).
At least to some extent, then, Schmitt's background influenced his attraction to a radical
expression of power that could be found in the absolutism of Catholic doctrine as well as in a
certain understanding of the political that already gained shape in the final years of the
Wilhelmine Empire. Indeed, this attraction to power becomes obvious in his recently
published diaries from 1912 to 1915.[12] But once he had positioned himself more clearly as
a constitutional lawyer critical of the Weimar "Parteienstaat," Schmitt's Catholicism, coupled
with a fascination for authority, shaped a body of constitutional thought, the implications of
which brought him ever closer to a political order that was diametrically opposed to liberal
parliamentarism. Strong thus concludes: "[I]t is the reality of taking power and manifesting
sovereignty in the use of power that attracted Schmitt: his understanding of law required that
he support Hitler" (p. xxxi).[13] Schmitt's thought between 1922 and 1934 is characterized by
a remarkable continuity that remains a central aspect of his writings even after the Second
World War. But, Strong, as we shall see, is also interested in why Schmitt remains relevant
today.

Written in April 2005, Strong's foreword presents us with a detailed account of both current
Schmitt scholarship and the main trends of the current reception of Schmitt's thought by both
left-wing and right-wing interpreters. This foreword is written with verve and clarity, looking
back at Schmitt's definition of sovereignty from the perspective of a post-9/11 world, in
which a number of liberal democratic states have introduced a new set of emergency powers,
often bypassing constitutional arrangements and directly strengthening executive power.
Defining state sovereignty from the point of view of a decision that needs to cover the
exceptional case not anticipated by existing constitutional provisions, Schmitt famously
noted: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.... The assertion that the exception is
truly appropriate for the juristic definition of sovereignty has a systematic, legal-logical
foundation. The decision of the exception is a decision in the true sense of the word. Because
a general norm, as represented by an ordinary legal prescription, can never encompass a total
exception, the decision that a real exception exists cannot therefore be entirely derived from
this norm.... It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that
is, the whole question of sovereignty. The precise details of an emergency cannot be
anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case, especially when it is
truly a matter of extreme emergency and how it is to be eliminated. The precondition as well
as the content of jurisdictional competence in such a case must necessarily be unlimited....
The most guidance the constitution can provide is to indicate who can act in such a case" (pp.
5-7).
Given the debates surrounding the validity of the Weimar Constitution and the status of the
Reichsprsident's power to issue emergency decrees, the direction of Schmitt's argument,
which both describes and contributes to a political crisis par excellence, is obvious: the
auhority of the state, crystallized in the person of the (Reichs-)president, can only be derived
from the latter's ability to decide first what constitutes a state of emergency and, at the same
time, how to address this emergency. The double meaning of Schmitt's German phrase
("Souvern ist, wer ber den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet") is a vexing problem for any
translation into English or French, which Strong makes clear in an admirably insightful
discussion (pp. xi-xiv).[14] At the same time, and following an observation made by
Schmitt's French translator Jean-Louis Schlegel, Strong rightly notes that Schmitt's definition
of what actually constitutes an Ausnahmezustand is notoriously vague (p. xiii).[15] In fact,
Schmitt himself often equates a number of terms--Ausnahmenzustand, Ausnahmefall,
Notstand, Notfall, and so on--without paying much attention to the fact that their meaning in
state law theory is slightly different in each case (p. xiii).[16] But while Strong merely asserts
the ambiguity of Schmitt's expression, it would be wothwhile to ask whether Schmitt (who
must have been aware of these historically and theoretically different meanings) opts for a
rhetorical strategy that ultimately makes political order as a whole dependent on something
that lies outside this order--even though Schmitt superficially suggests that "[f]or a legal
order to make sense, a normal situation must exist" (p. 13). By programmatically
emphasizing that the "exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology," and
by rejecting Kelsen's theory of a basic norm as inviting political relativism, Schmitt renders it
obvious that he has little interest in the normal situation (pp. 36; 18-23; 41-42).
Leaving aside the historical and philosophical details of Schmitt's account of the structural
analogy between theology and law, it is noteworthy that one of the examples for the way in
which this structural analogy has survived in modernity is the United States. Even though

Schmitt, quite in contrast to Weber, repeatedly attacks the "economic-technical thinking" that
marks the world of "American financiers" and "industrial technicians" as an "onslaught
against the political," he nevertheless points to the continued presence of a quasi-theological
foundation for American democracy, which in contrast to European liberalism supposedly
highlights the deficiencies of secularization (p. 65):[17] "It is true, nevertheless, that for some
time the aftereffects of the idea of God remained recognizable. In America this manifested
itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of
God"(p. 49). The idea of God allows for a broad resistance against the secularization of the
political, Schmitt claims, since the latter remains "the cause and end of all things, as the point
from which everything emanates and to which everything returns."[18] Schmitt's counterrevolutionary Catholicism, which becomes particularly manifest in the fourth and final
chapter of Political Theology, is structurally analogous to his idea of an executive power in
the state that derives its authority not from constitutional provisions and that, therefore, can
safely disregard such provisions.
Indeed, Schmitt's vision of the Reichsprsident as safeguarding the constitution through
extra-constitutional authority ties in almost perfectly with current proposals by some public
lawyers, at least in the United States, for what is often termed a "unitary executive." Strong
makes this connection clear in his foreword, thus underlining the continued relevance of
Schmitt's thought as a warning against hollowing out constitutional provisions: "One can only
note in this day and 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 all
aspects of this country. The present US administration has ruled that certain prisoners in the
'war against terrorism' have in effect no status at all, not even that of a person charged with a
crime" (p. xxxiii).
In April 2005 it was, of course, far from obvious that the U.S. Supreme Court would
successfully intervene in the interpretation of such emergency powers with regard to socalled enemy combatants by ruling that "the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of
Law that prevails in this jurisdiction," that is, the United States.[19] It is, as Schmitt himself
noted, "the impact of political events" that changes our understanding of public law. But
constitutional norms can also resist such changes--although it remains to be seen whether the
U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld will have any consequences.
Against this background, the new edition of Schmitt's Political Theology is timely in an
uncanny way. Most important of all, though, scholars of law and political theory and
historians of the Weimar Republic once again have easy access to one of Schmitt's most
important texts, which was out of print for a number of years and could only be purchased
second-hand for a rather handsome amount. Better still, Strong's new foreword provides
much-needed clarification of some of the most tricky issues in Schmitt's text.

Notes over Chapter 1 of Political

Theology
Posted on January 24, 2011 by hufarrel | Leave a comment
Brief notes on Chapter 1 of Schmitts Political Theology.
P. 2 Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution allowed the President of
the Republic legislative powers under emergency conditions. It was
the legal framework under which von Hindenburg turned over power to
Hitler in 1933.
P. 9. Jean Bodin The Republic
The sovereign Prince is only accountable to God.
The liberal state, on the other hand, invokes popular constitution
and a separation of powers to conceal the question of sovereignty.
(p. 11)
P. 12, The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its
superiority of over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees
itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute.
The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right
of self-preservation, as one would say.
P. 13, The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies
general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically
juridical formal element: the decision in absolute purity.
Generally, Schmitt emphasizes the importance of the very principle of
exception. The quote from Kierkegaard that ends the first chapter
seems to serve this purpose. There is a fundamental division between
those who privilege the norm or the exception. Schmitt
prioritizes theoretically the exceptions that push to the outermost sphere.

The exception is that element which undermines the rationalist claims

of the liberal constitutional state. State-builders in this vein
write various provisions into the constitution attempting to foresee
crisis and simultaneously enable and prescribe the mode of exception,
but the emergency situation cannot be foreseen and exceeds all
rational prediction (P. 6-7).
P. 13, Schmitt later focuses on decisionism as a school of juridical
thought. To quote him later, in an extreme definition of decisionism:
Der Fhrer has made the law, der Fhrer protects the law.
The passage here at the bottom P. 13 seems to summarize and introduce
the principle.
Despite their extreme political disparities, Schmitt and Walter Benjamin corresponded with
and respected each other. Here is Benjamin on the state of exception, written shortly before
his death in occupied France in 1940:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of
exception in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept
of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that
the task before us is the introduction of a real state of exception;
and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Notes on Carl Schmitts Political Theology,

Ch. 2 and 3
Posted on January 24, 2011 by ltaylor | Leave a comment
Political Theology (1922), Carl Schmitt
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Carl Schmitt (18881985) was a conservative German legal, constitutional, and political
theorist. Schmitt is often considered to be one of the most important critics of liberalism,
parliamentary democracy, and liberal cosmopolitanism. But the value and significance of
Schmitts work is subject to controversy, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active
involvement with National Socialism.
Ch. 2 Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form of the Decision
In this chapter, Schmitt continues to explore the meaning of sovereignty and its relationship
to the state and to law. He summarizes and deconstructs the several liberal theories of
sovereignty, and concludes with an embrace of Hobbes and a decisionist model of law and
the state.
He responds to several different political philosophers, contemporaries of his, including
Kelson, Hugo Krabbe, Otto von Gierke, and Kurt Wolzendorff. In general, the first two

emphasize the rule of law as the defining feature of the state. Von Gierke goes a different
direction, stating that the state expresses the will of the people. Schmitt points out a variety of
problems in his contemporaries theories, from a false sense of unity in Kelson to a risk of
authoritarianism in Wolzendorff. He ends with a critique of objectivity as a characteristic of
the state and law:
The multifarious theories of the concept of sovereignty those of Krabbe, Preuss, Keslen
demand such an objectivity. They agree that all personal elements must be eliminated from
the concept of the state. For them, the personal and the command elements belong together.
(29)
All these objections fail to recognize that the conception of personality and its connection
with formal authority arose from a specific juristic interest, namely, an especially clear
awareness of what the essence of the legal decision entails. (30) Schmitt then points out that
the aforementioned theorists do not address who has the authority to execute the law.
He finishes the chapter by coining a new term, decisionist, to refer to Hobbes: The form that
he sought lies in the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority. In the
independent meaning of the decision, the subject of the decision has an independent meaning,
apart from the question of content. What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides.
Chapter 3 Political Theology
Schmitt starts this chapter by explaining that the modern theory of the state is continuous
with and has replaced theology: The omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver.(36)
With this shift, he also makes the analogy between the miracle in theology and the state of
exception.
He goes on to explain how Enlightenment rationality rejected the exception in every
form.(37) He later explains, the sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if
conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has
been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself. (48)
Despite the rejection of the state of exception, the state is omnipresent:
whoever takes the trouble of examining the public law literature of positive jurisprudence
of its basic concepts and arguments will see that the state intervenes everywhere. At times it
does so as a deux ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the
independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution; at other
times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves by pardons and amnesties his
supremacy over his own laws. There always exists the same inexplicable identity: lawgiver,
executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution. (38)
If viewed from this perspective of the history of ideas, the development of the nineteenth
century theory of the state displays two characteristic moments: the elimination of all theistic
and transcendental conceptions and the formulation of a new concept of legitimacy. The
traditional principle of legitimacy obviously lost all validity Since 1848 the theory of
public law has become positive, and behind this word is usually hidden its dilemma; or the
theory has propounded in different paraphrases the idea that all power resides in the pouvoir

constituant [constituent power] of the people, which means that the democratic notion of
legitimacy has replaced the monarchical. (51)
Schmitt concludes with a return to Hobbes and Cortes, pointing out that for Cortes, there
was thus only one solution: dictatorship. And, finally, Schmitt repeats the Latin quote from
Hobbes, Autoritas, non veritas facit legem, or Authority, not virtue makes the law.

Schmitt defines the essence of sovereignty as the decision over what is an exception and
decide the measures taken to eliminate such an exception. The state of exception is both the
monopolistic domain of the sovereign and reveals the sovereign itself. But sovereignty, too,
then, is also he who defines whats the normal. As Schmitt writes, for a legal system to
make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether
this normal situation actually exists (13). The preservation of the normal is precisely the
rationale for which the exception is instituted. As such, sovereignty is an inherent theory of
the state: The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of selfpreservation, as one would say (12). Our coupling of law and order (Law and Order
soundtrack: bom pom pom pom puuuum) are completely unbundled by Schmitt (12).
Decision is the key conceptual/practical hinge for his political theory. Since the political for
Schmitt is exercised on the basis of a friend/enemy distinction (both between and within
states), sovereign power has to be monopolized by a single actor that is simultaneously
outside the legal system, but still part of it (7). The Forward cites Schmitt other book on
political theology: today one can no longer define politics in terms of the State, as I would
argue Weber did, on the contrary what we can still call the State today must inversely be
defined and understood from the political (xv). Otherwise, the friend/enemy political is
mired as a Hobbesian war of all against all. But sovereignty (and thus the state itself) resides
in deciding this controversy, tat is, in determining definitively what constitutes public order
and security, in determining when they are disturbed, and so on (9). The exception is almost
an escape hatch to reset the conditions in which the political can proceed without putting the
state itself under threat.
In distinction from the liberal view, Schmitt explicitly argues against the states role being the
eliminator of conflict and the political, but rather the means through which order and security
are not the cost of these antagonistic relations. He writes: Today nothing is more modern
than the onslaught against the political, finding socialists, anarchists, and liberals all guilty
on this point. Sarcastically parroting them, he continues, There must no longer be political
problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological ones (65). Another
reason Schmitt argues against the liberal view is that he says liberal normativism (namely
constitutions) cannot foresee the contingent events that necessitate the suspension of the law
in the interest of preserving the state itself. The most a constitution can provide is a
delineation of who decides (7).

However, an important point to note is that Schmitt claims at the end of the book that the
exception is not dictatorial because it still has some legitimate basis. He gives legitimacy a
democratic spin (51). He credits Donoso Corts with basically saying that people are so vile
that they cannot be expected, much less collectively as in the liberal frame, to be afforded
such democratic privileges. Bourgeois liberalism, Donoso Corts said, was simply a bunch of
people talking their ears off, never coming to the critical moment of decision. Schmitt cuts
the book off at a point in which he would logically provide an alternative, but doesnt.
And it is the legitimacy question that seems to be what his later book the Nomos of the Earth
is trying to answer: What makes a sovereign legitimate? He answers the question by pointing
to the bracketing of war by states and the related centrality of land-appropriation in creating a
secure spatial order, a nomos. A stable (though not conflict-less) nomos is seen by Schmitt as
both an internal (to Europe, to states) and an external order (between states and continents).
Quoting from Schmitts Concept of the Political, the translator notes, Every norm
presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation.
As long as a state is a political entity, this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical
situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy (p. 46).
Schmitt credits the emergence of statehood as what accomplished the singular achievements
of both the securalization of theological concepts into political ones (Political Theology) as
well as the bracketing of war (Nomos of the Earth) and the distinction between (just) enemies
and criminals or rebellion. Without the constitution of just enemies, war would remain a
military relation of annihilation.

The full title of Schmitts crucial work Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der
Souvernitt puts forward a thesis on the relation between the concept of sovereignty and
political theology, which was also clearly emphasized in his earlier essays. Analogies
between theology and jurisprudence are already present in the short essay on the relation
between state, law and individual ( Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen ),
written in 1914. Three first parts of Politische Theologie were published in a Festschrift for
Max Weber under the title Soziologie des Souvernittsbegriffes und politische Theologie
(Schmitt, Soziologie des Souvernittsbegriffes). The core of Schmitts program was
sketched in the third part of the essay. Interestingly the very phrase political theology
occurs rarely and never describes his own theory, but the theories of the so-called doctors of
counterrevolution from the period of the Restoration, i.e. Ambroise de Bonald, Joseph de
Maistre and J uan Donoso Corts, and the changes in jurisprudence which resulted in the
normativism of Hans Kelsen.
The core part can be summarized as a set of the following hypotheses:
1. All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological
concepts (Political Theology 36).
2. In order to understand the changes in politics and law we need a new, sociological
approach (sociology of concepts = political theology).
3. The social structure of society is analogous to its metaphysical vision of the world
(Political Theology 42-43, 45).
As Schmitt states, all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized
theological concepts. This analogy has a sinchronic and diachronic character on the one
hand, it means the historical evolution of concepts (history of concepts); on the other, the
similarity of the structure of concepts in both fields (Mehring 146). An example of this kind
of analogy is the exception, which was transferred to law from the miracle in theology.
Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the
philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries, especially the concept of
sovereignty (Schmitt, Political Theology 36).

Schmitt begins the description of his approach with two critital steps, rejecting earlier
attempts. This polemical attitude is very characteristic to Schmitts way of thinking and
writing, when his views often are expressed in confrontation with another standpoint. The
polemical character of the concept is of interest also for the sociology of concepts, as all
political concepts, ideas and descriptions have a polemical meaning. They concern the
concrete situation of conflict. Schmitt begins then with decribing what sociology of concepts
is different from.
Firstly, it differs from materialism and spiritualism, both of which make the same mistake of
assuming that two spheres, the spiritual and the material, in the end reduce to one another. In
Schmitts view it would be equally impossible to reduce all phenomena to the material, what
is done by Marxists, or to the spiritual, what was tried by German idealism.
Secondly, Schmitts sociology of concepts is not like Max Webers theory presented in
Rechtssoziologie. Webers sociology aims at indicating the typical group of people who
arrive at certain ideological results from the peculiarity of their sociological situations
(Political Theology 44). Schmitt thinks of this as psychology. While ascribing a concept to a
specific social group is a sociological problem, this is still not a sociology of a legal
concept (44) because it is based on human motivations rather than on the concepts
themselves.
The third step is positive. The aim of sociology of concepts is to find the basic radically
systematic structure of legal concepts, which could be compared to the social structure of an
epoch and its conceptual changes (45). Although Schmitt spent almost the whole of his life
fighting against the conception of law represented primarily by Hans Kelsen, he also
appreciated his observations showing the methodological affinity between theology and
jurisprudence (Schmitt, Political Theology 40, Kelsen 208). Schmitt seems to leave aside the
question of whether concepts are the reflection of reality or reality is created by concepts. He
states only that both spheres are analogous or strictly speaking that the metaphysical
image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world
immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization (Schmitt,
Political Theology 46). A sociological approach to the concept is to define this identity.
For example, a good sociology of concepts would never state that the monarchy of the
seventeenth century is characterized as the real that is mirrored in the Carthesian concept of
God (45), but that the historico-political status of the monarchy correspond[s] to the
general state of consciousness that was characteristic of western Europeans at that time
(45) . In the first case the direction of the relation is clearly indicated, whereas in the second it
is not. The practical dimension of Schmitts approach is to compare the lexicons and always
ask: what does this term mean in this moment, where and for whom? (Koselleck 187).
In Politische Theologie Schmitt sketches the main transformations in understanding God,
state and law since the 17 th century, which were reflected in changes within the system of
concepts. In the theory of state of 17 th century sovereigns, the state has a position exactly
analogous to that attributed to God in the Cartesian system of the world (Political Theology
46). This idea was modified when the place of a theistic approach was taken over by the
deistic, which resulted in the image of ruler who sets the machine of laws and then does not
interfere. Even during the Enlightenment, the vision of a sovereign dominated, although it
gradually had been losing its influence. While for Hobbes the personal and decisionistic
aspect of the sovereign was crucial (Leviathan), for Rousseau only the people could be

sovereign. This meant the destruction of the theological justification of political power, as
power was thought to come from below and not from above (i.e. from God). Since the 19 th
century, we have been witnessing, as Schmitt says, the process of immanentisation, which
comes out in two characteristic elements: the removal of all theist and transcendent ideas
from politics and the introduction of a new understanding of legitimacy. When all
transcendent references are excluded, then legitimacy based on the will of God, where God is
the ultimate source of political power, has to be modified and transformed into an immanent
version.
Those general remarks were applied to the analysis of the changes in the concept of
dictatorship, which Schmitt had realized in a book-length work, Dicatatorship. In this
book, he examined dictatorship from antiquity until the turn of 18 th and 19 th centuries, with
special attention to the period between the 14th and the 19th century. The history of
dictatorship began in ancient Rome when, during times of danger and riots that could threaten
the state, the Senatus Romanus appointed a dictator, who was an institution within the
republican system designed for its defence. He was appointed for a defined period of time (up
to six months), but usually the person resigned earlier, in order to remove the threat. His
position was based on the existing law; he could neither revoke the laws, nor enact his own. It
was therefore clearly an instrument designed to protect the political order of the Roman
republic. This understanding, which prevailed until the Renaissance, was not applied to the
political orders of early modern states, but existed within the history of ancient civilizations.
Scholars and glossators saw dictatorship rather as a historical institution than a problem in the
field of law. Nonetheless, Machiavelli observed the crucial aspect of dictatorship in his
commentary on the History of Rome by Titus Livius, although he still declared dictatorship an
institution typical of the Roman republic.
Schmitts suggestion that dictatorship is strongly connected with the concept of sovereignty
had been taken from Bodins description of the duties and nature of the office of
commissar. Schmitt takes over this observation, but goes further. The first commissars
were sent in the 13 th century by the pope. All acts of the commissars were regarded as acts
of the pope himself and were based on a special task (commisio), unlike the acts of ordinary
church officials, which were based on law (lex). During the 14 th century the idea of
commissar was taken over by the late medieaval states, and already from the 15 th century
on, dictatorship was understood as a kind of commisio given by the ruler or king. In those
cases commisio was about the highest war command during campaigns (e.g. Wallenstein, who
fought for the German emperor during Thirty Years War) . It was commonly accepted that
God is the source of all power, constantly intervening in the world, so the king in the state
had the same position and his commissars were only the instruments of intervention.
With the coming of the Enlightenment, the vision of God has been steadily changing towards
the deistic view (Descartes, Malebranche): God created the world, set its laws, and since then
the world has been functioning independently as a great and complicated machine. With this
rationalism in the metaphysics, the vision of the state and dictatorship also changed. As a
consequence, the idea of despotisme rational came into existence. If the enlighted knew the
truth, they should bring real (!) freedom to those who would never achieve it by themselves,
with the help of violence when needed. In this regard the division between the legislative and
executive (the balance of powers) made no sense, since it put an obstacle before reasonable
actions. At the turn of the 17 th and 18 th centuries in France the classical understanding of
dictatorship had moved from the commissar type to the sovereign type. According to Mably,
a commissar is not bound by the laws, and during his activity laws are silent. Rousseau

claimed that volont gnrale (general will) had a moral, not a real nature and that the people
are the real sovereign. It can of course happen that the will of most of them is not in
conformity with the general will. During the French Revolution, the difference between the
commissar dictatorship, which was based on the existing laws and constitution, and the
sovereign dictatorship became clearly visible. Sovereign dictatorship denies the value of the
existing political and social order and aims at
introducing the new, true and right one, which would make possible the existence of a real
constitution. The real constitution exists therefore only in the future, but at the same time is
the basis for the actions of a dictator. The shift from this kind of dictatorship to a dictatorship
of the proletariat postulated by Marxist theory was possible because of Rousseau, who in the
place of one dictator put the people as a whole. The people are the real sovereign, who can
always in every given moment change the political order; they are pouvoir constituant, not
pouvoir constitu (this idea is cleary the secular copy of natura naturans and natura
naturata). The image of God from the 19 th century was in contrast to the earlier, rational
version more objectively unexplained and the same fell to pouvoir constituant of the
people. Although during the French Revolution the word dictatorship was not used (since it
belonged to the old terminology), the National Assembly is a typical example of sovereign
dictatorship, seeing its task in introducing a new political order.
In the end, the growing influence of the liberal view of the state led to the restriction of
dictatorship by means of a law describing both the conditions of a state of exception (which
replaced the concept of dictatorship) and all means that might be used when it is proclaimed.
This vision is far from the earlier version that assumed the impossibility of specific
regulations because it is impossible to predict all the situations that could pose a threat to the
state and political order.
This short description of Schmitts line of thought gives us the opportunity to see the core
idea of the sociology of concepts. He traces the changes in meanings of words and puts them
in the context of shifts in the metaphysical view of the world. This approach inspired
Reinhart Koselleck, now considered the most important representative of Begriffsgeschichte
(differences between Begriffsgeschichte and Ideengeschichte are extremely interesting on the
methodological level, but will not be discussed here).