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Carl Schmitt's Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of "the Outermost Sphere"

4:1 | © 2000 Andrew Norris [Contents][Search][Muse]

1. Abstract

2. Heinrich Meier has argued at length that Carl Schmitt's political philosophy is in fact a theological politics, one driven by a pre- or even anti-philosophical submission to what Schmitt allegedly perceived to be divine authority. This essay contests this reading of Schmitt, and argues that his famous secularization thesis should be understood not simply as an assertion of the diachronic relationship between a now-dead theological form of life and our current secular culture, but rather as an assertion of the synchronic structure of political authority. Political authority, on Schmitt's account, is located in the political decision, and his work on secularization can be properly understood only in the context of his disturbing account of the decision. When that is done we can see that politics for Schmitt is a matter of borders and the authority that creates them--authority that by definition acts and moves in excess of those very borders. Politics in other words is metaphysical, in much the same way that Kant's discussion of Grenzenand Schrankenin the conclusion of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysicsis. But with one crucial difference: in Schmitt's case, the paradoxes of the border and of "the Outermost Sphere"are applied to the living human body.

3.

Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on

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intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstance, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself a passional decision,--just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.

William James

4.

What is secularization? The word "secular"comes to us from the Latin saeculum(breed or generation) which is itself akin to serere(to sow). The Late Latin saecularisdenotes those things that come "once in an age."There are good and familiar reasons to define our own age in terms of the rise of the secular: In response to the development of modern science and to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new and distinctive mode of political life arose, one devoted to the skepticism, tolerance, and privacy that regularly goes by the shorthand "Liberalism."In considering liberalism as a mode of secularization it is instructive to recall the central lesson of Locke's Letter on Tolerance(1689): in order to secure a limited religious tolerance, Locke makes religion a private affair.[1]Though the distinction is an unstable one, he strives to locate religion "within"men and women, and to limit political authority to "outward"externals.[2]"The Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. [The two are] infinitely different from each other"(184). Though Locke describes churches as houses of "public"worship (175), this is a public that lacks all means of enforcing internal discipline. "The arms by which the members of the society are to kept within their duty are exhortations, admonitions, and advises."Should these fail, the church's only recourse is excommunication, without, however, any accompanying "rough usage of word or action"(179). It can offer and deny membership, but it cannot give this membership a political form. Significantly, the justification for this limitation is that churches remain, vis-a-vis one another and the state, private persons: "particular churches . . . stand, as it were, in the same relation to one another as private persons among themselves"(180). Indeed, Locke argues that the authority of the various churches is delineated by the authority of the private person--an authority that, of course, is trumped by that of the state. His example is significantly that of sacrifice: a private person can, under normal circumstances (but not under abnormal ones) kill a calf. Hence a church can, under normal circumstances, sacrifice a calf. But no private person, and hence no church, can ever be allowed to "sacrifice infants"(198). Only the denatured laws of nature are of political significance, as they are required



to guarantee the performance of promises, etc. that are in turn required for the security of the private individual.[3]Religious freedom is thus secured at the cost of a secularization of the political which--Locke's own religiosity notwithstanding--ultimately entails a certain trivialization of religion itself.[4]Whether we term this movement liberal or Whig[5], it is evident that the abandonment of the demand for a public enthronement of the transcendent and the sacred plays a central role in the development of conceptions of justice that center upon the protection of the rights and liberties of the individual. (Locke concludes his Letterby writing that "The sum of all we drive at is that every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others"[217].) To try to rethink the secular might then be to weigh the costs of this development of the modern, the liberal, and the disenchanted, and to ask what the secular has sown among us. Does the secular itself come once an age? Can we, in rethinking it, allow it to come again, in a new and more attractive guise?

5. Posing such questions would entail that we bracket, as it were, our commitments to the secular political order of rights. If we ask what secularism is and what price we pay for it, it is no help at all to be told that the price is well worth it. (I am reminded of a trip I once took to a small mining town in southwestern Wyoming. I asked a local where I could go swimming, and he responded that the options were to go the reservoir or to go "sluicin.'"When I asked what sluicin' was, he answered, "Some people think it's dangerous, but I think it's fun.") This epoche is all the more necessary in that it is often the critics of secularization who provide us, as it were, with a view of this movement from the outside, who achieve sufficient distance to bring the movement and its direction into focus. That is to say, it is to some extent the reactionary movement--arguably initiated in Edmund Burke's hysterical and prophetic response to the French Revolution--that allows us to discern the "progress"of secularization as such. And it is indeed a commonplace of reactionary critique that our society's privatization of religion is both the root and the bitter fruit of a corrosive individualism that impoverishes public life and in so doing trivializes the private life it seems to celebrate.

6. I referred above to Locke's no-doubt unintentional trivialization of religion. One form that this takes in his Letteris his repeated use of the word "opinion"(e.g. 205) to characterize religious faith--a usage that is consistent with the use of the word as found in Jefferson's "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom"(1777) and Mill's On Liberty(1859).[6]The assumption--or, perhaps more accurately, implicit claim--in each



case is that religious practice and ceremony are outward symbols that have no inherent meaning, but serve only to indicate the existence of a private "opinion"or mental state.[7](In his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Wittgenstein scornfully exclaims, "A religious symbol does not rest upon any opinion(Meinung). And error belongs only with opinion."[8]) As Locke puts it, "in every Church there are two things especially to be considered--the outward form and the rites of worship, and the doctrines and articles of faith"(193). In his denigration of the public aspect of religion Locke follows the Lutheran doctrine of adiaphorato distinguish between the sphere of individual conscience and that of political authority:[9]

In religious worship we must distinguish between what is part of the worship itself and what is but a circumstance. That is part of the worship which is believed to be appointed by God, and to be well-pleasing to Him. . . . Circumstances are such things which, though in general they cannot be separated from worship, yet the particular instances of them are not determined, and therefore they are indifferent. Of this sort are the time and place of worship, habit and posture of him who worships (197).[10]

7. Locke does go on to note that for Jews living in their former "absolute theocracy"(202) this was not so, and that what a contemporary Christian might see as "but a circumstance"was an essential part of the practice. He notes as well that the consecration of the "the first or seventh day"for the worship of God is not a mere circumstance to Christians.

8. But the logic of the distinction of the inner opinion and the outward circumstance has in our day exceeded the bounds Locke tried to set for it. In Goldman v. Weinburger, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor the Air Force's refusal to allow an Orthodox Jew to wear a yarmulke in a clinic in which he served on the grounds that, in Justice Rehnquist's words, "The essence of military service 'is the subordination of the desires and interests of the individual to the needs of the service.'"[11]To characterize this sort of religious practice as an expression of "the needs or desires"--or, for that matter, the "opinions"--of the individual is surely to violently impose an interpretation that does not allow the real issue to emerge. We might well wonder whether it is a coincidence that this same Rehnquist elsewhere attempts to exclude substantive moral conviction from legal debate on the grounds that



Beyond the Constitution and the laws in our society, there is simply no basis other than the individual conscience of the citizen that may serve as a platform for the launching of moral judgments. There is no conceivable way in which I can logically demonstrate to you that the judgments of my conscience are superior to the judgments of your conscience, and vice versa.[12]

9. It is hard to muster much confidence in either of the two "platforms"left to us, in so far as individual conviction and procedural norms--which of course are nothing more than the product of the "individual consciences"of the authors and ratifiers of the Constitution--are both implicitly asserted to lack any rational warrant.[13](Except in very rare cases they are not, that is, logically demonstrable.) Rehnquist's both arbitrary (that is, logically indemonstrable) and all-too-common reduction of reason to logic is particularly ironic in the present context. For it excludes precisely the kind of public debate that Mill seeks when he defines religious practices and other "experiments in living"as the expression of opinions: The liberal vision of society as a debating club is all the more attractive if all substantive commitments have already been characterized as moves in a potential debate. If there is a fundamental continuity between Mill and Rehnquist it would seem that our endless debate is empty and ultimately pointless.[14]

* * *

10. Ought we to conclude at this point that secularization is best understood as a process which presents us with a choice between a return to the public consecration of religious faith and the nihilism of alienated individuals and their helpless desires?[15]This interpretation, which is so prized by American conservatives, might seem to follow if we accept its basic assumption that secularization is nothing more than a movement--either a declining or ascending one--from religious community to irreligious individualism. But is this either-or sufficient to delineate the meaning of the secular ? Here the work of Carl Schmitt is of special interest. As a student of Max Weber, Schmitt was familiar with Weber's influential version of the history of secularization that I have sketched above, as well as the antinomies of freedom and meaning (or "warring gods") that emerge from it.[16]And, partially in response to Weber,



Schmitt developed his own version of this mournful tale of decline.[17]However, his work also suggests an alternative account of secularization, one that denies that secularization can be entirely understood in terms of a movement out of the theological. On this second account, secularization names an enduring feature of political life, one that modern individualism obscures but does not replace. Schmitt's answer to our initial question--whether we, in rethinking secularization, can allow it to come again in a more attractive guise--is thus an adamant "yes."As we shall see, secularization for Schmitt is the attempt to cover over the moment of decision, a moment that his own analysis of the secular aims to lay bear.

11. The first aspect of Schmitt's analysis of the secular is the more familiar: it is well known that Schmitt follows Donoso Cortés in his definition of the liberal bourgeoisie as "a 'discussing class' [that,] wanting to evade the decision . . . shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation."[18]And he argues in Political Romanticism(1919 and 1925) that conversation is the mode of the modern romantic who has replaced decision and commitment with fantasy. The result of the rise of this liberal/romantic class is a replacement of a politics of communal and moral authority with an economic and aesthetic system that caters to (and, as Marcuse in his early essay on Schmitt reminds us, manipulates) the desires and fantasies of the isolated, romantic individual. Schmitt's alternative account of secularization is one that we might describe as synchronic rather than diachronic. On this account secularization refers to an enduring logic of the political, one that is continuous between religious and secular political systems. Consider Schmitt's formulation of his so-called secularization thesis from Political Theology(1922 and 1934):

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development--in which (weil . . . wurden) they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver--but also because of their systematic structure (systematischen Struktur), the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts (PT 36).

12. There are a number of features of this passage which might be obscured



by the boldness of the central claim. To begin with, there are in fact two claims here, one historical and one "structural."[19]This second is of specifically "sociological"interest and import. (We recall that Schmitt describes his own procedure in this volume as "the sociology of concepts"which "aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure"of "a concept such as sovereignty."[20]) Sociology needs to recognize the "systematic structure"of secularization. "Secularization"names this structural parallel, a synchronic relation that is to be distinguished from the alleged diachronic relation of historical influence--from which it would appear to follow that the former has an independent value, and is not simply evidence for the latter. Political concepts, in other words, are secularized theological concepts not because they emerge out of a particular process, but because they share the same structure as those of theology.

13. What is the structure of theology? The full title of Schmitt's book indicates an answer: Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Where we might expect that Schmitt's discussion of sovereignty would be only one among many of "all [of the] significant concepts of the modern theory of the state [that] are secularized theological concepts,"in fact political theology--as a book and a concept--is identified here with the study of sovereignty. In 1923 Schmitt presented the first three chapters of the book--"Definition of Sovereignty,""The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision,"and "Political Theology"--under the title "Soziologie des Souveränitätsbegriffes und politische Theologie"in a volume dedicated, significantly, to Max Weber. We find here the same identification: political theology is the result of an investigation into the problem of sovereignty, which is its problem. If God is the center of the religious world, a political world that displays the same structure will center around the sovereign who occupies His "structural"position. This raises the question: If the structural position of God can, via secularization, be transferred to the modern theory of the state, is this not because that structural position was, to begin with, a political one? Here we should note that the theory of the state and the concept of the political are not necessarily the same;[21]and it may be that the synchronic aspect of the secularization thesis relies upon a distinction between the two. Politics would then be the name of the structure within which the concepts of the state andthe theological find their home. Whereas the natural reading of the diachronic aspect of the secularization thesis presents theology as the home of politics (the "significant concepts of the modern theory of the state,"which are presumably the significant



concepts of politics, are taken from their theological home), this reading of the synchronic claim reverses this equation. This would give us political theology and not, say, theological politics.[22]

14. But what might politics be here if it is not the theory of the state? We know that in The Concept of the Political(1927, 1932, and 1933) Schmitt distinguishes the two quite sharply, and in fact begins the book with the bold claim that "The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political."[23]Is this same distinction made here? In the final chapter of Political TheologySchmitt states that "the core of the political idea [is] the exacting moral (moralische) decision"(PT 65), a definition which, though it makes no explicit reference to The Concept of the Political's distinction between friends and enemies, would seem equally conceptually distinct from any consideration of the state. Similarly, in his 1934 Preface to the Second Edition of the book he notes that he has eliminated a few passages and takes care to supplement the first edition's discussion of Hobbes and its typology of legal thinking. No such correction is made concerning the relation between the state and the political. Indeed, Schmitt makes it plain that he remains committed to the views of the earlier edition, noting that it has "become clear in recent years"that the idea of political theology has if anything greater application that he had initially thought. He also refers the reader interested in what I have termed the diachronic aspect of the secularization thesis to his 1929 essay "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,"which was later published with 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political. All of this suggests that Schmitt himself perceives a continuity between the two volumes. Finally, in a claim to which we shall return, Schmitt writes in this Preface that

the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decided and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.

15. Not all theologies are political. And yet they all lie in the domain of the political, in that the "decision"that they are unpolitcal is itself a political decision. Moreover, this decision is political "irrespective of . . . what reasons are advanced."The decision is not determined (bestimmt) by criteria that might stamp one theology as necessarily lying outside the



reach of the political; in no way does the theological dictate to the political. The political is the total because it establishes borders that it can itself overrun. Indeed, as the decision that establishes a border, the political decision is always itself in excess of that border. The same cannot be said for theology, which is an object of the political decision. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty: The sovereign decision that is the subject of political theology is political. And it is as a political decision that it can assume the form of a theology or, in other words, decide that a particular theology is a political theology. In this context it is significant that the "Age of Neutralizations"essay presents the history of secularization as a flight not from religious faith, but from the danger and conflict attendant upon the decision. Secularization as an historical event or pattern of events is the (on Schmitt' account, hopeless) search for a neutral realm. If we have a political theology and not a theological politics, it would appear that this is because God is a sovereign, not because the sovereign is quasi-divine.[24]

16. This aspect of the Preface is reflected in the first chapter of the earlier text, which famously begins with the claim, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception (Ausnahmezustand).""Only this definition,"Schmitt assures us, "can do justice to a borderline concept (Grenzbegriff)"(PT 5). What is a borderline concept? Schmitt defines it negatively: it "is not a vague concept"; it is not "associated . . . with routine"; and it does not refer to "a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege."On the other hand, he asserts that it pertains "to the outermost sphere"(der äußersten Sphäre) and that refers to "a general concept in the theory of the state"(PT 5). Sovereignty operates at the outermost sphere; it is here, at the borderline, that it establishes and violates limits in the same way that we saw the Preface establish the political decision as being able to decide that something lies without its purview. The question of the sovereign is the question of the limit. If sovereignty decides upon its own limits, its decision cannot be bound by those limits. As politics is total in the Preface, so the sovereign, in the main body of this text, "must necessarily be unlimited (unbegrenzte)"(PT 7 and 12). The sovereign is the unlimited power that makes limits--or, in other words, the ungrounded ground of the law.

17. This has obvious and disturbing practical consequences: "Although [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the



constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety (in toto)"(7). The counterrevolutionary philosophy of the state is significant because it "heightened the moment of the decision to such an extent that the notion of legitimacy, [its] starting point, was finally dissolved."This "development"is in fact a logical one, in so far as no criteria govern the decision from its inception.[25]Nonetheless, it can take an historical form: "As soon as Donoso Cortés realized that the period of monarchy had come to an end . . . he brought his decsionism to its logical conclusion. He demanded a political dictatorship"(65-66). But these consequences are not solely the result of practical problems--say, with a system that unsuccessfully strives to "banish"the sovereign by dividing and balancing among political powers. Nor (if we take Schmitt at his word) are they entirely the result of Schmitt's substantive authoritarian commitments. They are also the expression of metaphysical problems and commitments. "Whether the extreme exception can be banished from the world is not a juristic question. Whether one has confidence and hope that it can be eliminated depends on philosophical, especially on philosophical-historical or metaphysical, convictions (geschichtsphilosphischen oder metaphysischen Überzeugungen)"(PT 7).

18. The metaphysical convictions relevant here are those that determine our understanding of limits and borders. Schmitt's sovereign is a creature of the border. But while it seems to range back and forth over it, this movement is in fact the oscillation of the border itself. Though it makes sense in one way to speak as I have of the sovereign overstepping the limits it lays down, in a deeper sense it isthe limit, and hence carries the limit with it in its movement as it carries itself. This why Schmitt can simultaneously assert that the decision concerns the borderline and, in the Preface, oppose decisions and borders: "To evade the necessary decision, German public law coined for such cases a saying that backfired and that it still carries as its motto: 'Here is where public law stops.'"For Schmitt the law can mark its own limit only by acknowledging the necessity for the sovereign decision on the limit, a decision that by definition exceeds the norms that regulate the normal. In identifying the limit between the normal and the abnormal or non-legal, sovereignty defines them both. "There is,"Schmitt writes, "no norm applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitively decides whether this normal situation exists"(PT 13). But what is meant here by "chaos"? A page earlier Schmitt distinguishes the exception from chaos: "What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. . . . Because the



exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails, even if it is not of the ordinary kind"(PT 12). If Schmitt is not simply contradicting himself here, that must be because he is moving from one perspective to another: When he distinguishes the exception from chaos he is writing from the perspective of the decision, which imposes a juristic order that norms and laws cannot perceive. When he later argues that "There is no norm applicable to chaos,"he is writing from the perspective of the normal--which, again, cannot discern the distinction between chaos and the juristic order of the decision. In a sense, the superiority of the decision over the norm is a function of its superior perception, its greater understanding.

19. This cognitive priority is reflected in the ontological relation between the exception and the norm. A state of emergency is the product of the collapse of the normal order; but the normal order is only the absence of a state of emergency. As Giorgio Agamben puts it,

The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule . . . The sovereign decision of the exception is the orginary juridico-political structure (struttura) on the basis of which what is included in the juridical order and what is excluded from it acquire their meaning.[26]

20. Agamben concludes from this that "What emerges in the limit figure (figura-limite) is the radical crisis of every possibility of clearly distinguishing between membership and inclusion, between what is outside and what is inside, between exception and rule."[27]Once the rule acknowledges that it gives rise to exceptions for which it cannot legislate, every case can, in principle, be understood in these terms. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to argue that, even in those cases where the rule cannot legislate, it still does legislate in some impoverished sense. One would have to argue, that is, that exceptional cases are clearly defined as such by the rule. But this is in effect to deny the reality of the exception and the need of the legal order for a sovereign decision upon it.[28]Hence Schmitt concludes that "all law is 'situational law'"(PT 13). Secularization is ultimately not so much a movement away from divine authority into freethinking autonomy as a shift within the world of the authoritative decision. In the end, Schmitt's synchronic



account of secularization amounts to a denial of the significance of secularization as an historical development.

* * *

21. Political Theology's identification of sovereignty as a metaphysical problem is anticipated in Political Romanticism, where Schmitt provides a definition of secularization that explicitly identifies it with the inescapable nature of metaphysics:

Today, many varieties of metaphysical attitude exist in a secularized form. . . . [D]ifferent and, indeed, mundane factors have taken the place of God: humanity, the nation, the individual, historical development, and even life for its own sake, in its complete spiritual emptiness and mere dynamic. This does not mean that the attitude is no longer metaphysical. The thought and feeling of every person always retain a certain metaphysical character. Metaphysics is something unavoidable, and . . . we cannot escape it by relinquishing our awareness of it. What human beings regard as the ultimate, absolute authority, however, certainly can change, and God can be replaced by mundane and worldly factors. I call this secularization.[29]

22. We find here again both what I have termed the synchronic and the diachronic versions of the secularization thesis. On the one hand Schmitt is openly concerned with tracing the contemporary importance of "humanity, the nation, the individual, historical development, and even life for its own sake"to the fact that these things have "taken the place"of God. This might lead us to identify Schmitt's conception of metaphysics with his theological conceptions or commitments. But, as I have argued above, what is decisive here is the fact that "God"is the name of a structural position, one that cannot be done away with. Human beings must regard somethingas "the ultimate, absolute authority."Secularization names a change in the dominant cultural understanding of what that authority is. But by the same token it names the continuity of authority as such. PaceHeinrich Meier, Schmitt argues here not that God is inescapable, but the metaphysical position of authority that He occupied is. We might say that in the end Schmitt's political theology reveals itself to be a political metaphysics, one that



insists upon the authority of the metaphysical and the metaphysics of authority.[30]

23. The structural or formal nature of the God of Schmitt's secularization (and hence of his political theology) drawn out by this analysis confirms Slavoj Zizek's sketch of the genealogy of Schmitt's decisonism. In his most recent book, Zizek turns to Schmitt in the course of arguing that the Hegelian concrete universal is misunderstood when it is perceived as "any kind of aesthetic organic totality."It is in fact quite the opposite, and "the true politico-philosophical heirs of Hegel"are those "who fully endorse the excess constitutive of every established Order. The exemplary case, of course, is Carl Schmitt."[31]What Zizek finds important and in fact definitively modern about Schmitt is the formalism of his decisionism: "the core of Schmitt's argumentation"is that the sovereign decision which bridges the gap between the abstractions of a pure normative order and the actuality of social life "is not a decision for some concrete order, but primarily the decision of the principle of order as such The concrete content of the imposed order is arbitrary, dependent on the Sovereign's will."Zizek traces this prioritizing of the principle of order over its concrete content back to Hobbes, and quite correctly argues that modern conservativism's commitment to this principle renders it radically anti-traditional. The legitimacy of "the old ways"is asserted, but on the authority of a sovereign that is radically distinct from them. In thereby severing legitimacy and authority, this mediation renders our relation with the substance of tradition arbitrary and uncertain--which goes some way towards explaining the violence and hysteria of modern conservativism's assertion of its commitments.

24. Zizek, significantly, refers to only one of Schmitt's books here: Political Theology. That he does so in a section entitled "Towards a Materialist Theory of Grace"might suggest that Zizek will render Schmitt's political theology as a theological politics. But in fact Zizek proposes "Christ's own 'religious suspension of the ethical' as an instance of the logic (which Zizek identifies with that of the Derridian supplement) at work in Schmitt's theory of sovereignty. When Christ comes to complete the Mosaic law, the form this takes is to suspend the law and then to reinstitute it, though now on the authority of Christ:

The universe of established ethical norms (mores, the substance of social life) is reasserted, but only in so far as it is mediated by Christ's authority: first, we have to



accomplish the gesture of radical negativity and reject everything that is most precious to us. . . . The way a Sovereign relates to positive laws involves the same paradox: a Sovereign compels us to respect laws precisely in so far as he is the point of the suspension of the laws.

25. It is true that Zizek goes on to propose Kierkegaardian Protestantism as the realization of the logic of Christianity. (What is "crucial . . . is the shift from act to sign,"that we undergo when we move from a substantive Catholic order of good deeds to a world of predestination in which deeds and successes are merely clues to the inscrutable will of the deity.) But this is no more an historical claim (of secularization) than it is a proposal that "the politico-philosophical"is an instance of the religious.

26. If Zizek's analysis does not make the political or the philosophical instances of the religious, it is nonetheless in accord with Schmitt's secularization thesis as I have described it. The accord between the two is not, however, complete. For what is surely most disturbing about Schmitt is not simply his decisionism, but the fact that he aligns this demand for the ungrounded decision with a conception of politics that revolves around the possibility of violent conflict between friends and enemies. To begin to understand the complicated relation between these two aspects of Schmitt's thought will require that we turn to his The Concept of the Political. Here we find an even more explicit statement of the priority of the political over the religious and the theological that I have argued structures Political Theologyas a book and a concept. The political community is distinguished by the intensity of the associations involved; the political entity is defined by its ability to decide upon the public enemy, and by its subsequent ability to demand that the citizen either kill or sacrifice his own life.[32]As such, the power to make war is a distinctively political capacity--one that the religious community as such lacks: "A religious community, a church, can exhort a member to die for his belief and become a martyr, but only for the salvation of his soul, not for the religious community in its quality as an earthly power. Otherwise it assumes a political dimension"(CP 48). "A religious community which wages wars against members of other religious communities is already more than a religious community; it is a political entity"(CP 37). "A war need be neither something religious (Frommes) nor something morally good nor something lucrative. War today is in all likelihood none of these. This obvious point is mostly confused by the fact that religious, moral, and other antitheses can intensify to political



ones and can bring about the decisive friend-or-enemy constellation"(CP 36). As Schmitt here and elsewhere suggests (compare CP 22 and 37-39), a religious community can become political; that is, it can make the decision upon the friend-enemy grouping, and demand of its members that they either sacrifice their own lives or take those of the enemy. But he is adamant that a religious community need not be political, and that if religious factors did produce a political grouping, they would themselves be changed in the process:

The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antitheses, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely ("rein") religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria and motives to the conditions and conclusions of the political situation at hand (CP 38).

27. According to Schmitt, this must be the case, as "It would be senseless to wage war for purely ("rein") religious, purely moral, purely juristic, or purely economic motives. The friend-and-enemy grouping and therefore also war cannot be derived from these specific antitheses of human behavior"(CP 36).[33]

28. That all said, it remains true that the political is closer in this text to the theological than it is to the other "domains (Gebieten) of human thought."Theology and politics make similarly pessimistic and divisive "anthropological"assumptions. In contrast to the aesthetic, moral, and economic categories of liberal secularization, "The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as (ebenso) does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man"(CP 65). Schmitt describes these sorts of presuppositions as anthropological rather than psychological (CP 63); and he conclues that there is a "methodological connection"(CP 65) between the theological and the political. However, he hastily adds to this, "But theological interference generally confuses political concepts because it shifts the distinction usually into moral theology. Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and often Fichte presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy."Moreover, the use of phrases such as "the connection"and "just as"indicate that the two parallel one another at points. Two things



that are parallel are, by definition, distinct from one another. This fact does not evaporate because Schmitt introduces his discussion of the anthropological by arguing that the choice between the optimistic and the pessimistic conjectures "finally lead to an anthropological profession of faith (ein anthropologisches Glaubensbekenntnis)"(58). It does, however, raise the question what Schmitt understands by anthropology and faith. The specific reference in the context is Schmitt's dismissal of the optimistic hope that, "in a world-embracing economic and technical organization . . . things would administer themselves, and that a government by people over people would be superfluous because human beings would then be absolutely free"(57). Much more significant than Schmitt's use of the word "faith"(which in any event is said to be anthropological, and not religious[34]) is the fact that he does not contest this hope of freedom, but asks after its meaning: "For what would they be free?"[35]This is the question whose answer leads to an anthropological profession of faith.

29. The section that follows does not answer this question about the meaning of freedom. But it hardly follows from this that Schmitt neglects the question altogether. In an earlier discussion of the possibility that "pacifistic hostility to war"might give rise to a war to end all wars, Schmitt writes, "if, in fact, the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has a political motive, i.e., it affirms, even if only as an extreme possibility, war and even the meaning (Sinn) of war"(CP 36).[36]Recall Schmitt's claim (which is made immediately before the passage that I have just cited) that "It would be senseless (sinnwidrig) to wage war for purely religious, purely moral, purely juristic, or purely economic motives. The friend-and-enemy grouping and therefore also war cannot be derived from these specific antitheses of human behavior."And compare to this his description of the friend/enemy distinction as "a meaningful (sinnvollerweise) antithesis"(CP 35). The meaning of war is the meaning of politics, and that is the meaning of the friend/enemy grouping. I have argued at length elsewhere that Schmitt proposes politics as a solution to nihilism: one's life is said to gain meaning when it is lived in the service of something that transcends it.[37]The citizen escapes animality--and hence gives meaning to his freedom--in the recognition that he is prepared to sacrifice his life for the community with which he identifies himself.[38]While this concept of the political privileges the possibility of war, it does not, as many assume, identify politics with war; "The political does not reside in the battle itself"(CP 37 and 33). It would be better to say that Schmitt domesticates war, by identifying the virtues of the citizen with those of



the soldier. Here a comparison of Schmitt's writings on politics with William James' ambivalent praise of war as productive of a meaningful life would be particularly enlightening.[39]

30. What is perhaps most confusing is the way in which Schmitt aligns this discussion of the "existential"and the "concrete"with his metaphysical discussion of borders and decisions. On the one hand, Schmitt argues that the denial of the political is dangerous because it does away with the borders that keep politics and war on a bearably human level: Though a war to end all war is possible, such a war bursts the bounds of the political framework, making the enemy into something inhuman. One fights then not "to preserve ones' own form of existence"(CP 27) but to rid the human world of the inhuman. To render war into an act of purification in this manner requires that one seek not only to defeat but to utterly destroy the enemy. "In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders (Grenzen) only"(CP 36). The excessive assertion of humanity leads to the denial of humanity. To avoid this we must respect and preserve the borders that mark the distinctions between (potential) friends and enemies. This might be evidence only of the need for the sovereign decision: If Schmitt is right that borders and limits are the manifestation of the sovereign decision, to say that we require borders to keep war and politics within the realm of the human is only to say that we require the sovereign decision that lays down borders and limits and norms. In this context it is worth recalling that sovereignty in Political Theologyis also said to produce a meaningful form of life: "for a legal order to make sense (damit die Rechtsordnung einen Sinn hat), a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitively decides whether this normal situation actually exists"(PT 13). In each case politics is what produces meaning, makes it possible. Schmitt's political philosophy is thus an answer to the question that Weber in The Sociology of Religionidentifies with the essence of the metaphysical: "The ultimate question of all metaphysics has always been something like this: if the world as a whole and life in particular were to have a meaning, what might it be, and how would the world have to look to correspond to it?"[40]

31. On Weber's account, the metaphysical question is raised as such by the very class whose existence and activity make the question so difficult to answer:

It is the intellectual who transforms the concept of the



world into the problem of meaning. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful.[41]

32. Schmitt's analysis of the political and the secular raises a similar paradox. More specifically, the ungrounded nature of the sovereign decision threatens to overturn the logic of sacrifice that undergirds The Concept of the Political's insistence that politics is conceptually inseparable from human mortality. For if the sovereign decision is, for Schmitt, the precondition within which political conflict remains human, the limits and borders that it draws are ironically undercut precisely by virtue of this originary act. Sovereignty is the point at which "law suspends itself"(PT 14), and as such it violates the limits it establishes in the moment in which it establishes them. This fictive aspect of Schmitt's sovereign is too often overlooked. Though one hears obvious and deeply disturbing echoes of Schmitt's language today in, say, Belgrade, "an absolute decision created out of nothingness"(PT 66) by definition undermines the validity of ethnic difference and purity even as it asserts that wars must be fought in their name. For it asserts that this difference--this border--is one that it creates, and not one whose reality it respects and attempts to preserve. (Even readers of Schmitt who approach him sympathetically often miss this point. Chantal Mouffe is a case in point, arguing as she does that Schmitt's "distinction between an us and a them is not really politically constructed; it is merely a recognition of already existing borders."[42]) The authority that demands respect is that of the decision as such, and not its content. Ironically, Schmitt thus finds himself open to the objections that Michael Sandel raises against the emptiness of the Rawlsian liberal subject. Liberal secularism's celebration of private life and private commitment is contested in favor of a conception of the public which entails sacrifice and the acceptance of a common authority--features which we associate with feudal or ancient modes of life. But, as I have argued at length, such common authority generates rather than rests upon a set of standards for the conduct and sacrifice of life. Neither tradition, nor a common sense, nor revelation provide the substance of the decision that founds and perpetuates the public life. If Schmitt shares Rehnquist's desire to deny, in the name of reason, the rationality of a discursive public life, he is far from the latter's bland reliance upon an historically stable organic



community such as "the American people."[43]The choice between moral organic communities and nihilistic individualism that we confronted in the beginning of this essay is one that Schmitt ultimately refuses.

33. Politics for Schmitt is where metaphysics meets human bodies: it is the arena of the sovereign decision, and it is the place in which human life gains meaning by transcending its bodily, animal preconditions. Is it a coincidence that the logic of sacrifice at work here so exactly parallels the conceptual aporias of the ungrounded ground of sovereignty? In each case what is asserted is undermined in its very assertion. Schmitt's emphasis upon the paradox of the limit is matched by the consistent weight that he places upon the conception of totality. The political community must be a homogenous one: every part, in other words, must be subordinated to the claims of the whole. The meaning of the individual's life is likewise found in its subordination to the whole community of which the individual makes up a part. And the sovereign is one who "stands outside the normally valid legal system [but] nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety."[44]Life is limited by death, one group by the existence of another, a legal system by a state of lawlessness. But Schmitt's politics is always found at the limit. Neither life nor death, sacrifice names a passage between the two that confounds them: the individual who sacrifices his life for the group does so because he identifies himself less with his own body than with the group in which he will live on. That group confronts another group, but the significance of the confrontation is for Schmitt the possibility of conflict between the two--that is, war, in which borders and limits are simultaneously asserted and denied in the starkest possible terms. The legal system confronts the exception, if nowhere else than in its own origin, and it is forced to assert its own transcendence. In the end, the Schmittian totality is nothing more than the constantly shifting line of its own border. And that, in the form of the metaphysics of sovereignty, is for Schmitt the truth of secularization. No doubt, as more familiar stories of secularization remind us, God for most of us is no longer the living presence that He once was. "The main line of development will undoubtedly unfold as follow: Conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people, who will settle for either a more or less clear immanence-pantheism or a positive indifference to any metaphysics"(PT 50). But for Schmitt metaphysics cannot be dismissed so easily as the liberal model of secularization suggests. The limit remains, and with it the demand for a decision.[45]



Andrew Norris, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles either in press or in print on Hannah Arendt, Kant, Locke, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Carl Schmitt. Currently he is editing a collection of essays on the work of Giorgio Agamben and writing a book on judgment and decision in modern political philosophy. He can be reached at [email protected].

[Letter to the Editors]

Copyright © 2000, Andrew Norris and The Johns Hopkins University Press, all rights reserved. NOTE: members of a subscribed campus may use this work for any internal noncommercial purpose, but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that individual's personal use, distribution of this article outside of the subscribed campus, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the JHU Press is expressly forbidden.

Notes

[1]Locke's recommendation of tolerance does not extend to atheists or to those whose religious "opinions [are] contrary to human society"such as Muslims and those Catholics who are serious about the political claims of their church. See Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration(New York: Appleton-Century, 1937), 210-213. He also recommends it specifically for contemporary Christians, while acknowledging that "the Jewish commonwealth . . . was an absolute theocracy"(202). It is important to note that though Locke's earlier Two Tractstakes a much dimmer view of religious tolerance, it criticizes this in much the same way that the Letter Concerning Tolerancewill defend it. The distinction between the religious and the political and the subsequent practical subordination of former to the latter are common to both texts, as is a distinction between the external and the internal: Religious ceremonies in particular are presented as mere outward practices without any necessary connection with belief--a distinction that allows the polity to control the former without violating the latter.

[2]See 167, 172, 173, 192, 193, and 197.


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[3]"The necessity of preserving men in the possession of what honest industry has already acquired, and also or preserving their liberty and strength, whereby they may acquire what they farther want, obliges men to enter into society with one another" (207).

[4]Locke speaks of "mere religion" (211) and at one point compares the freedom that ought to be granted to those of other sects "who mind their own business" to the freedom we grant "a spendthrift for consuming his substance in taverns" (185).

[5]The most famous objection to the characterization of this complicated movement by the term "liberal" is J.G.A. Pocock's; see, for example, "Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins," in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[6]For the former, see The Portable Jefferson Reader, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Penguin, 1983), 251-253; and in the same volume compare Query XVII from the 1780's Notes on the State of Virginia, "Religion," 207-213. For Mill, see in particular his use of the Christian and Muslim "religious creeds" to illustrate his view that, "in the absence of [free] discussion" "not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten . . . but too often the meaning of the opinion itself" (On Liberty, Norton Critical Edition [New York: W.W. Norton, 1975], 38ff and 78ff). The latter discussion is particularly noteworthy, as Mill ironically uses the Muslim prohibition on the eating of pork to demonstrate that "a person's taste is as much his peculiar concern as is his opinion or his purse" (78-9, emphasis added). Unsurprisingly, Mill reveals a typical hostility towards the Catholic Church's claims to political power (38). In general Mill's forensic model of society and his resulting discussion of opinions as things that can be true or false radically determines the course of his otherwise admirable defense of "experiments in living" (54), the point of which might otherwise be understood in a non-cognitive sense. Comparisons with Habermas are here perhaps unavoidable.

[7]The subjectivization here cannot be simply read off of the word "opinion." No doubt Locke in the Essay defines the word in a thoroughly contemporary manner--in the context of a discussion of probability--as "the entertainment the Mind gives to [probable] Propositions . . . which is the admitting or receiving [of] any Proposition for true, upon Arguments or Proofs that are found to perswade us to receive it as true, without



certain Knowledge that it is so" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 655). But the OED gives examples of the use of the word (going back to 1665) to indicate what is forced upon us by "the nature of things"; it also gives examples of use (going back to 1485) in which the word is synonymous with "think." Clearly what is decisive is how we are to characterize the entity that "thinks" or submits to "the nature of things." The privatization of faith is thus intimately bound up with the development of the Cartesian subject as the occasion of a mind/body split.

[8]Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, trans. A.C. Miles and Rush Rhess (Retford, Nottinghamshire: The Brynmill Press, 1983), 3e.

[9]See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), II. 103. As a reading of especially the second of Skinner's two volumes makes plain, every move Locke makes here is derived from a long and complicated history, one in which political developments affected the process of secularization as well as being produced by it.

[10]It is worth noting in this regard that already in Locke's defense of religious liberty there is an added emphasis upon the Protestant stress on conscience and internal experience that celebrates sincerity. Indeed, one of Locke's arguments for religious tolerance is that sincere faith cannot be coerced: "liberty is essentially necessary to that end" (194). It is good to be free because we must be sincere. By extension, inauthentic or insincere freedom is empty and, we might say, ungrounded. On the history as well as the difficulties that emerge from this position, see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Harvard University Press, 1971).

[11]Goldman v. Weinburger, 475 U.S.(1972); I follow Michael Sandel's discussion of this case in his Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 1996), 69.

[12]William Rehnquist, "The Notion of a Living Constitution," in Readings in the Philosophy of Law, Second Edition, ed. by John Arthur and William Shaw (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993), 54.

[13]The extreme difficulty of even imagining what it would look like to



"logically demonstrate" a moral conviction in itself suggests that the standard is unreasonable. One almost feels one has been called upon to square the circle. Rehnquist's own disinclination to meet it can be seen in his eager and seemingly Dworkinesque reliance upon the ahistorical identity and wisdom of "the American people" throughout this essay (e.g. 51). For a good account of the contradictions that result from this, see Robert Post, "Theories of Constitutional Interpretation," Representations 30 (Spring 1990). See also Roberto Mangabeira Unger's discussion of liberal proceduralism in Knowledge and Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1975). Unger identifies liberalism and its concern with rules with a fundamental confusion of the nature of desire: "The antimony of rules and values is the political analogue to the psychological antimony of reason and desire" (91).

[14]A comprehensive discussion of this question--which I only raise as such--would have to address Kant's identification of progressive society as a debating society in "What is Enlightenment?" Given the definitive importance of this text to European liberalism, it is surely significant that Kant here discusses the duties of a pastor to his clergy as an example of the principle that, "in some affairs which affect the interests of the commonwealth, we require a certain mechanism whereby some members of the commonwealth must behave purely passively" ("What is Enlightenment?" in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 56, emphasis added). It is striking that Kant--who in the Third Section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and elsewhere associates the passivity of mechanism with the determinism of the phenomenal realm in stark contrast to the freedom and moral dignity of the noumenal--should use this language to characterize the responsibilities of the clergy. It is even more so in so far as Kant in this essay "portrayed matters of religion as the focal point of enlightenment" in part because of his conviction that "religious immaturity is the most pernicious and dishonorable variety of all" (59). That all said, Kant's case is complicated by the fact that secularization for him involves the displacement of what had been religious into the Critical philosophy. For excellent discussions of this, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980) and Richard Velkley, Freedom and the Ends of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[15]For all of its virtues, Unger's Knowledge and Politics would appear to move within this circuit: hence its disturbing final words: "But our days pass, and still we do not know you fully. Why then do you remain



silent? Speak, God" (295).

[16]See Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and "Politics as a Vocation" and compare John McCormick's account of Schmitt's response to the same in chapter one of Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For an account of Schmitt's personal contact with Weber, see McCormick, 32, note 6.

[17]Not, however, exclusively in response to Weber. Schmitt's understanding of intellectual history moves easily from England to Germany in its tracing of the development of the contemporary European situation. Hence, for instance, in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, he notes "Locke's immediate and practical relevance today" and sets out to confront "this classical theorist of the philosophy of the Rechtsstaat" (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy [London: The MIT Press, 1988], 101, note 28, 42).

[18]Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (London: The MIT Press, 1985), 59 (hereafter PT). In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Schmitt argues that what actual political justification the system of parliamentary debate once had is now gone. With the rise of party politics, interest groups, and the influence of capital upon the process as a whole, the debate that characterizes our political culture is an empty charade. As on the nightly news and the Beltway gossip shows, most of the "lively debate" is canned and prefabricated, the "contestants" preselected to insure that nothing challenges the preconditions of the "show."

[19]The most significant attack upon the former claim can be found in Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (London: The MIT Press, 1983), 97-8. Blumenberg relates Schmitt's claim to his own theory of secularization as "reoccupation" on 89. In so far as we take Schmitt's claim to be an historical claim it seems clear that it is simply wrong. Indeed, it is incredible to find an author who is so fascinated by the need for a judgment that exceeds the law simply ignoring the influence and import of the tradition of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Plato's Statesman.

[20]In this regard we should note Schmitt's later dismissal of what is commonly taken to be his thesis: "The juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, if fact, only superficial secularizations of



the theological formulas of the omnipotence of God," The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 42 (hereafter CP).

[21]Schmitt insists more upon the centrality of the state in his early work, Political Theology included, than he does when he later embraces the National Socialist "movement"

[22]The possibility of such a distinction is denied altogether by Heinrich Meier when, in a discussion of Schmitt's political theology, he refers to St. Augustine as "one of [political theology's] greatest teachers" (The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. Marcus Brainard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 16). I will not attempt here a thorough appraisal of Meier's interpretation of Schmitt. Meier's approach is one in which a truly extreme hermeneutic of suspicion is coupled with a ready willingness to make categorical statements upon the basis of at times no apparent evidence, at others a passing remark from Schmitt's Glossarium, and at others evidence that is buried in notes a la Strauss, many of which refer to other authors altogether. The end result is that for all of Meier's mastery of the material and his undoubted insight and even brilliance, his work remains something of a world in itself. To refute or even thoroughly critically comment upon it would require one to move through it almost line-by-line. That said, my discussion should make clear that any reading of Schmitt that confuses political theology with theological politics is at odds with Schmitt's own statements and with the logic of his position.

[23]Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19; my emphasis. This claim is thus placed in the same structural position as Political Theology's claim that "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Plainly, we understand the state only if we understand the political, the sovereign only if we understand the exception; need we also understand the relation between the exception and the political?

[24]See PT 36-7, where the miracle is described as a "form" of the exception (and not vice versa), and PT 10, where Schmitt argues that "whether God alone is sovereign" is a question that is always "aimed at the subject of sovereignty, at the application (Anwendung) of the concept to the concrete situation (einen konkreten Tatbestand)." It is surely no coincidence that this language of the application of a general concept to a concrete case echoes Schmitt's own discussion of the need for a



sovereign: the law cannot apply itself. Not God but His subjects who decide for him in a political setting are sovereign.

[25]That the lack of criteria for the decision is determined by the characterization of the decision as an experience of the limit explains the relevance of Schmitt's work for those who ask after the political implications of "deconstruction." Compare in this regard Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of the decision from The Experience of Freedom: "One will say: it is without content or ethical norms. No doubt. But did it ever have any of these? Decision is the empty moment of every ethics, regardless of its contents and foundations. Decision, or freedom, is the ethos at the groundless ground of every ethics. We have to decide on contents and norms. We have to decide on laws, exceptions, cases, negotiations; but there is neither law nor exception for decision. Its 'authenticity' is not on the register of the law. Or rather, it is this law withdrawn from every form of law: the existentiality of decision, freedom, which is also the decision of existence and for existence, received well before every imperative and every law" (The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 162-163).

[26]Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18 and 19. For all of Schmitt's admiration for Bodin (most evident, perhaps, in Bodin's exclusion from "The Age of Neutralization" list of those 16th and 17th century authors who moved away from theology, a list that includes Hobbes and Suarez), it should be clear that this does not necessarily repeat Bodin's claim that sovereignty is the source of law, where law is defined as command. The source of the law need not be the sovereign; but if the sovereign does decide on the exception, then, in so doing, it decides on the norm as well. Compare, Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. and ed. Julian Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 38 and 51.

[27]Homo Sacer, 25.

[28]This is essentially the tack taken by Heiner Bielefeldt, who argues against Schmitt for a concept of precedent as something that points to "an implicit rule" and can therefore serve as "a mediating link between general norms on the one hand and the particular situation on the other" ("Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Systematic



Reconstruction and Countercriticsm," in David Dyzenhaus, ed. Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism [London: Duke University Press, 1998], 32-33). That Bielefeldt advances such claims as being Kantian in nature is ironic, given the striking similarities between Schmitt's and Kant's own discussion of the aporias of the identification of judgment with rule-governed behavior. Compare my "Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense," Polity, XXIX (Winter, 1996):165-192.

[29]Political Romanticism, 17-18.

[30]"Metaphysics," however, is a word that Schmitt uses in a number of senses. In the "Age of Neutralizations" essay, for instance, it is used to name the 16th and 17th century's denial of sovereignty and the assertion of an impersonal natural order in which the decision is neither necessary nor possible.

[31]Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 113. We might say that what John McCormick in Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism presents as Schmitt's failure to achieve a Hegelian sublation of form and content is here presented as Schmitt's central teaching. As regards Hegel himself, we would do well to avoid stock images of happy organic reconciliation, and recall that it is precisely the organic nature of the state that leads Hegel to insist upon the unavoidable nature of the monarchical decision: "The state . . . is the exhibition of all of its moments, but individuality is at the same time the bearer of its soul and its live-giving principle, i.e. the sovereignty which contains all differences in one." Hegel's characterization of this last sounds distinctly "Schmittian": "Sovereignty . . . comes into existence only as subjectivity sure of itself, as the will's abstract and to that extent ungrounded self-determination in which finality of decision is rooted. This is the strictly individual aspect of the state, and in virtue of this alone is the state one." Significantly, it in "a situation of exigency" rather than in "times of peace" that sovereignty "comes into its proper actuality"--"at the sacrifice of those particular authorities whose powers are valid at other times" (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967], addition 167, paragraph 279, and paragraph 278, remark).

[32]In part because he simply disregards the question of the political entity's legitimacy and in part because of his rejection of the individualism that traces that legitimacy back to the consent of the members of a group, Schmitt is able to swiftly cut the Gordian knot of



Political Pluralism: the political entity is qualitatively distinct from any other kind of grouping because of its claim upon the lives of its members (CP, 40-45). For an account of pluralism, see David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In his discussion of J.N. Figgis, Runciman makes the pregnant observation that Figgis takes as his model of social groups a sectarian church "with its own way of life and its own moral standards, which accepts that those standards apply to itself alone, but which believes that where they do apply they apply absolutely" (143). This assumption makes it difficult for Figgis to contend with trade unions, which "exist in order to make claims on others" (146). Though Runciman concludes from this that the "associations which most nearly fit Figgis's model are those which may be identified as avowedly non-political" (146), his discussion raises interesting parallels with Schmitt's own: if we take "moral" here to refer to any of the substantive commitments that might take the form of the political, Figgis' church might sound like Schmitt's political entity--which raises again the relation between the political and the theological. However, the decisive difference remains: the latter is not simply (or even necessarily--cf. CP 38-39) authoritative over the way of life, but it possesses the authority to decide when and if the individual members of the group must die.

[33]The presence of scare-quotes in the German here, as above, appears to make Schmitt's skepticism regarding the possibility even plainer: "Dagegen wäre ein aus (rein) religösen, (rein) moralischen, (rein) $ oder (rein) ökonomischen Motiven geführter Krieg sinnwidrig.&q$ Compare Schmitt's reference, on CP 32, to the political uses of the claim that one is non-political "in the sense of purely (rein) scientific, purely moral, purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities." However, Schmitt also affixes scare quotes to the words "Optimismus$ "Pessimismus," and "Anthropologie" with no apparent rhyme or reason, so this may be insignificant. For the important case of "Anthropologie," compare 46 and 51 of the German. (Schwab's translation registers none of this.)

[34]As other examples of the anthropological presuppositions of "the various domains (Gebieten) of human thought" Schmitt refers to an educator's assumption that man can be educated, a jurist's assumption that man is good, a moralist's assumption that people can choose between good and evil. (Only in the cases of the moralist and the jurist does Schmitt indicate that he has particular examples in mind.) To these correspond the theologian's assumption that man is sinful or in need of redemption and no longer distinguishes between good and evil (an



Augustinian or Lutheran assumption that clearly does not characterize all theology) and the pessimism of the political.

[35]The German is more emphatic: "denn es fragt sich gerade, wozu sie frei werden."

[36]Schwab gives "the reason for war" for "den Sinn des Krieges," which obscures both Schmitt's meaning and the parallels he is establishing. A sinnwidrig war is not necessarily one waged for no reason. While Schmitt may here have in mind Woodrow Wilson's characterization of American involvement in the First World War, he is just as likely referring to the (original) Kantian dream of perpetual peace under a cosmopolitan, world state.

[37]"Carl Schmitt on Friends, Enemies, and the Political," Telos 112 (Summer 1998): 68-88.

[38]For a discussion of the logic of sacrifice that is evidently at work here, see George Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," trans. by Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies, 78 [1990].

[39]"[War's] 'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zoophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valour any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!" (cited in Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 15-16).

[40]Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 59.

[41]Ibid., 125

[42]"Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Democracy," Law as Politics, 171.

[43]See note 13 above. Picking up on the temporal features of the etymological roots of the word "secular" that I noted above, Fred Dallmayr has suggested that secularization might name a passage into a new order of temporalization ("Sacred Secularity," presented at the Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association,



September 1999). This is a helpful suggestion in the present context, as the synchronic aspect of Schmitt's secularization thesis amounts to a denial that such a shift is possible: we can never abandon our relation with the eternal and the absolute.

[44]Emphasis added.

[45]I presented earlier versions of this essay in the fall of 1999 at the Culture and Politics Colloquium on European Intellectuals and the Lure of Fascism at the Center for Western European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association in Atlanta, GA. I am grateful to my fellow participants at both events and to Tom Dumm for his critical comments and editorial assistance. I would also like to thank Yasemin Ok for the help she gave me when I was finishing the piece in Düsseldorf.

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