Political Theology II E-Book

Carl Schmitt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 220

Beschreibung

Political Theology II is Carl Schmitt's last book. Part polemic, part self-vindication for his involvement in the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), this is Schmitt's most theological reflection on Christianity and its concept of sovereignty following the Second Vatican Council. At a time of increasing visibility of religion in public debates and a realization that Schmitt is the major and most controversial political theorist of the twentieth century, this last book sets a new agenda for political theology today. The crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to an increased interest in the study of crises in an age of extremes - an age upon which Carl Schmitt left his indelible watermark. In Political Theology II, first published in 1970, a long journey comes to an end which began in 1923 with Political Theology. This translation makes available for the first time to the English-speaking world Schmitt's understanding of Political Theology and what it implies theologically and politically.

Leseprobe

Contents

Editors’ Acknowledgements

Editors’ Introduction

Guideline for the Reader

Introduction

1 The Myth of the Ultimate Theological Closure

1 The Content of the Myth

2 Hans Barion’s Critique of Political Theology

3 The Contemporary Significance of the Myth of Closure (Hans Maier – Ernst Feil – Ernst Topitsch)

2 The Legendary Document

1 The Genesis and the Historical Limitation of the Matter

2 Politico-Theological Interpolation: le roi règne et ne gouverne pas

3 Limitation of the Matter and Question from the Political Side: Monarchy

4 Limitation of the Matter and Question from the Theological Side: Monotheism

5 Eusebius as a Prototype of Political Theology

6 The Confrontation between Eusebius and Augustine

3 The Legendary Conclusion

1 The Claims of the Conclusion

2 The Assertive Power of the Conclusion

Postscript: On the Current Situation of the Problem: The Legitimacy of Modernity

Appendix: ‘Peterson’s Conclusion and Concluding Footnote’

Notes

Index of Subjects

Index of Names

First published in German as Politische Theologie II © Duncker & Humblot GmbH, 1970This English translation © Polity Press, 2008; ‘The Editors’Introduction’ © Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4253-6ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4254-3(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3178-3ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3179-0(pb)

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Editors’ Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we want to thank Alice Schubert from Duncker & Humblot and Manuela Tecusan from Polity Press for their professional assistance, and George Schwab for his comments on our translation. We would also like to thank the following, from the University of Manchester, for their comments, observations and assistance: Alison Sharrock for her help with the Latin; Stephen Todd and Todd Klutz for their insights into the Greek; Peter Scott for volunteering to go through the manuscript; and Alan Williams for his advice on metrics. Of course, any errors or mistakes are entirely our own.

Editors’ Introduction

Look at the author most precisely

Who speaks of silence oh so nicely;

For while he’s speaking of quiescence

He outwits his own obsolescence.1

Schmitt composed this telling rhyme as a personal reflection, in the notes he wrote in his prison cell at Nuremberg, in 1946, and published it as part of his book Glossarium in 1952. The verses reinforce an unconfirmed myth according to which his last conversation with Robert Kempner, the chief attorney of the Nuremberg trial, who was interrogating Carl Schmitt, ended with the following exchange:

Kempner: What are you going to do now?

Schmitt: I will retreat into the security of silence.2

Schmitt was interrogated and imprisoned for thirteen months, suspected of having been an active promoter of Hitler’s politics of expansion. Subsequently, he was released from prison without any charges being levied against him. He gave up his Chair in Berlin, returned to his parents’ home in Plettenberg and ostensibly retreated to a house he then named San Casciano. San Casciano was the name of the town near to the farm where Machiavelli ‘exiled himself ’ after his expulsion from public life by the Medici. It was also the place where he composed his most famous political works, The Discourses and The Prince. But the name Schmitt gave to his home, San Casciano, also alludes to Saint Cassian, the last martyr of Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, who was stabbed to death by his students with a stylo.3

Schmitt’s experience at Nuremberg served to intensify the central questions he was asking throughout the earlier part of his career; questions which continue to dominate the concluding section of Political Theology II: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur? Who will judge? Who will interpret? Ultimately, these are not Schmitt’s questions but those of Thomas Hobbes. They articulate and raise concerns that are historical, sociological, juridical, political – but also hermeneutical. On the one hand, in every one of these concerns, what is treated is concrete circumstances. The questions arise from, and the answers offered are responses to, situations of immediate practical import. They are the key questions of Realpolitik. On the other hand, because they concern herme-neutics, these questions invite metaphysical speculation. For they are about judgement, authority and legitimacy, while also being grounded in Schmitt’s own experience from the end of the Weimar Republic, from his career during the early years of the Nazi regime (1933–6) and, as we have already mentioned, throughout the Nuremberg trials. But these three concerns – judgement, authority and legitimacy – are bound up with a concrete historical situation and an ideological structure which, to a greater or less extent, informs all interpretation. What is self-evident in one generation can be rendered questionable in another; the interpretations that seem valid in one context are not necessarily valid in another. Change is not automatically for good, but time transforms even the most substantive issues and makes judgements which have already been passed to stand in need of new interrogation. The passage of time is intimately associated with the question: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur? We have to bear this in mind as we approach Political Theology II – a text written by a man over eighty years old, reflecting back on his public, intellectual and political engagement almost half a century earlier.

There is a tendency in secondary literature on Schmitt to concentrate on the work of the inter-war period (1919–39). There is a number of reasons for this. First, some see his writings during this period as representing his most important academic contribution. Secondly, Schmitt’s membership of the Nazi party made him, maybe still makes him, a persona non grata after 1945 – someone who can be read, but not cited without mentioning the author’s past. Thirdly, his later work presents a certain literary obscurantism with references made to arcane sources, oblique hints, suggestive undertones, double meanings, crafted ironies and symbolic figurations. This style of writing opens itself to different, even contradictory, interpretations. And it was intended to do so. It is the style of someone who had retreated into the security of silence. For example, Political Theology II concludes with a Latin epigram which seemingly judges and interprets the contemporary situation pessimistically:

Eripuit fulmen caelo, nova fulmina mittit

Eripuit caelum deo, nova spatia struit.

Homo homini res mutanda

Nemo contra hominem nisi homo ipse

[He snatched the thunder ball from heaven, and sends out new thunder balls.

He snatched away heaven from God and spread out new realms.

Man is an interchangeable thing to man;

No one is against man except man himself.]

But is the epigram Schmitt’s, or does its allusive rhythm, conforming to, and then breaking with, the hexameter, point to Schmitt’s adoption of an ancient source? And what is the sense we should attribute to it, with respect to all that precedes it?

Whatever the reasons for this academic concentration on the work of the inter-war years, its effect has been to distort the understanding of Schmitt’s oeuvre by interpreting all of it through the narrow focus of certain selected texts from this period.4 At least three times in the post-war period, Schmitt deliberately returns to and recites titles from his earlier work, as if wanting to give an overall shape to a lifetime’s intellectual labour. And the texts he chooses for such treatment are, arguably, his most important ones. In 1950, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Ius Publicum Europaeum can be viewed as a reflection on his controversial treatise from 1939, Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventions-verbot für raumfremde Mächte: Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht [Order in International Law and the Prohibition of Intervention for External Powers: A Contribution to the Concept of Reich in International Law]. In 1963 he rethought The Concept of the Political (first published in 1928) in his book Theory of the Partisan: Notes on the Concept of the Political. And in Political Theology II: The Legend of the Closure of any Political Theology, published 1970, he revisits his 1922 volume Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Doctrine of Sovereignty, which Heinrich Meier (among others) view as the key to understanding Schmitt’s thinking.5 In none of these later texts are we simply dealing with sequels of earlier works, in the sense of continuations of earlier narratives. As a close reading of the titles (and subtitles) demonstrates, what we have in these texts are new investigations of important earlier concepts in different contexts – contexts that develop, extend and reinterpret what was presented in those previous studies.

Political Theology II as a Rereading of Political Theology

In the ‘Guideline for the Reader’ at the opening of Political Theology II, Schmitt gives his own interpretation of the relationship between the two books: ‘The thematic development of my political theology from 1922 takes a general direction which departs from the ius reformandi of the sixteenth century, culminates in Hegel and is evident everywhere today: from political theology to political Christology.’6 But, in fact, Political Theology from 1922 contains only a very limited amount of theology. The ‘theology’ provided in the text is incidental rather than systematic, and the word is used synonymously with ‘metaphysics’. There are no dogmatic, moral or pastoral questions addressed. Moreover, Schmitt has decided to use the same grammatical construction for his title as he did for his book Political Romanticism, published in 1919. This suggests that political theology and political romanticism could also be interchangeable: they both name historical periods in which certain beliefs and convictions were taken for granted by specific communities. This can be supported by Schmitt’s idea of ‘the sociology of juridical concepts’, a methodology outlined in chapter three of Political Theology. ‘The metaphysical idea’, he writes, ‘of the world produced by a certain epoch has the same structure as the form of its unquestioned political organisation. The expression of this identical correlation is exactly the sociology of the concept of sovereignty. In fact it proves, as Edward Caird said on Auguste Comte, that metaphysics is the most intense and clearest expression of an epoch.’7 With ‘the sociology of juridical concepts’, Schmitt suggests a methodology which is distinct both from that of Karl Marx’s thesis of the social predominance of economic structures and from that of Max Weber’s thesis of the predominance of the specific ideas of a certain group. When he states that there is a correlation between the discourse of a particular form of political organisation and the metaphysical discourse of that epoch, Schmitt seeks to find an intermediate position. In fact, the proposed ‘sociology of juridical concepts’ can be understood in structuralist and determinist terms.8 Because the metaphysical discourse, according to Schmitt, determines the possibility for the conditions of the ideological acceptance of a particular form of political organisation, e.g. parliamentary democracy, absolute monarchy, commissary dictatorship and so on.

But let us look more closely at the composition and origins of Political Theology. As the subtitle indicates – Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty – the book is comprised of four essays on the problem of sovereign power. The first two essays are a critique of Hans Kelsen’s normative understanding of pure law; the third one, the most theoretical of the essays, explores the systematic and historical resemblance between theology and law as academic disciplines. Essays one, two and three were first published as a contribution to a Festschrift for Max Weber entitled Sociology of the Concept of Sovereigntyand Political Theology.9 In this contribution Schmitt makes two bold statements for which he later became remembered and of which he himself said that at that time he started to publish books which could be of greater significance and of interest to a wider audience.10 The opening line of essay one, ‘The Definition of Sovereignty’, reads: ‘Sovereign is the one who makes the decision on the state of exception/emergency.’11 And the third essay, entitled ‘Political Theology’, opens with the statement: ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts.’ The tension between the definition of sovereignty and Schmitt’s account of secularisation, which he saw as intrinsic to his proposed sociology, is resolved in the concluding fourth essay, which was added later, for the publication of Political Theology in 1922. In that fourth essay he gives an account of the political theology of the Catholic Counter-Revolution that was closely related to his short but influential treatise Roman Catholicism and Political Form published in 1923.12 This fourth essay raises the problem of sovereignty again from a specific political and ecclesial angle. It is only possible to understand the nature of the resolution that the fourth essay provides to the tension in the other three if we follow Schmitt’s remark, made in Political Theology II, on the significance of the thinkers of the Counter-Revolution for the origins of sociology and its underlying normativity.13

This is a typical example of the way Schmitt, in his later work, rereads what he wrote earlier. But one has to be careful about identifying political theology just with a ‘sociology of juridical concepts’ and to appreciate ‘political theology’ as the name given to a specific evaluation of secularisation. This view of secularisation sees modernity as a process of decay and is deeply informed by a cultural pessimism prevalent among intellectuals of his generation. That is to say, political theology is neither just a specific sociology, nor just another name for a complete rejection of liberalism and its modern convictions and beliefs. We will examine this further in Schmitt’s critique of ‘new political theology’, which was emerging at the time of the publication of Political Theology II.14

The Structure of Political Theology II

Political Theology II is much more explicitly theological than Political Theology. In his earlier work, ‘theology’ was understood in terms of a history of ideas and was therefore interchangeable with metaphysics. Here, at least in the final paragraphs, Schmitt outlines a specific theological speculation: a Christology based on the ambivalent concept of stasis. The book begins with – and is, for the most part, orientated towards – the critique of a thesis proposed by a leading German theologian, Erik Peterson, and dedicated to a more controversial theologian, Hans Barion.15 Barion was a foremost German critic of the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council and the editor of a Festschrift for Schmitt, on his 80th birthday, bearing the enigmatic but telling title Epirrhosis – which means both strengthening and, in a rhetorical sense, intensification.16 Peterson, a church historian who developed a close relationship with Karl Barth at the University of Bonn, eventually became a Catholic convert from Protestantism. It was at the same university that he met Carl Schmitt. He attended Schmitt’s marriage to his second wife, then they visited Rome together and a number of letters were exchanged between 1925 and 1949. In other words they were friends, and Political Theology II must be read in the context of a friendship which eventually broke up.

The main argument put forward in Political Theology II is of an apologetic and defensive nature. In 1935 Peterson published a short book called Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem [Monotheism as a Political Problem], which concludes17 with an apodictic statement on the theological impossibility of any political theology. According to Peterson, political theology is theologically impossible for Christians because the trinitarian dogma does not allow a correlation between a political reality and a theological belief. Moreover, the legitimating of any political reality by theological means is unacceptable. For Christians, Peterson emphasises, political reality has to be met with an eschatological reservation. That is, all human, political and contingent reality must be understood as provisional, never as the fulfilment of God’s will. Peterson’s phrase ‘eschatological reservation’ became the central notion for Johann Baptist Metz’s project of a ‘new political theology’; a project beginning to emerge at the time of the publication of Political Theology II. This emphasis on the eschatological nature of true Christian belief, by Metz as well as by Peterson, has to be understood, in the case of the latter, in the context of his conversion: that is, of his rejection of a specific form of Protestantism that assimilated, and ultimately identified itself with, Kultur on the one hand, and the enthusiastic reception of Nazism by Catholic conservatives on the other. The former was the object of Karl Barth’s trenchant critique of all onto-theology.18 This is important for the understanding of the apologetic style of Political Theology II because it concerns Schmitt personally and impacted on his friendship with Peterson.

Schmitt refers in Political Theology II to a ‘Parthian attack’. This phrase,19 used by Barion, illustrated how Peterson attacked Schmitt in a decisive moment, when Peterson was already running away. Throughout Political Theology II, the reader can sense Schmitt’s personal hurt when he says that Political Theology II should ‘rip the arrow from its wound’. But the Parthian tactics are also the tactics Schmitt employs for his defence throughout this volume. He feels the need to defend himself again and to correct the meaning of ‘political theology’. Following the grammar of a Parthian strategy, his defence also implies an attack, which is a counter-attack. This becomes evident in his ‘Postscript’ to Political Theology II, when he seeks to demonstrate that Christian theology is essentially political because the substructure of revolution has been set out in the Christian teaching on the Incarnation. This counter-attack is, at the same time, a critique of technological progress, modernity and liberalism. As such, if we compare the four chapters of Political Theology from 1922 with the four chapters of Political Theology II, the essay on the political theology of the Counter-Revolution (i.e. on de Maistre, Bonald and Donoso Cortés) must be read as the key to the Christological speculations of the ‘Postscript’ and its political implications. We will elaborate on this further, when we discuss the reasons why Schmitt, in the upheaval of the late 1960s, refers in his last book back to political theology, and therefore to the very question of sovereignty.

Article 48 and 1968

After the Second World War, the new constitution of Germany was modelled on the constitution for the Weimar Republic, but it did not contain the clause concerning emergency powers – that is, the legal regulation for a case of emergency, as it was laid down in Article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic. The article on the state of exception became paradigmatic for Schmitt’s political theory (namely for his notion of decisionism) and for the understanding of sovereignty as defined in the opening line of Political Theology (1922). The Weimar constitution [Reichsverfassung] declares in Article 48 (1) that, if a county does not fulfil its duty, the Reichspräsident is entitled to use armed force to compel it to do so; and (2) allows the Reichspräsident to suspend ‘entirely or in part the fundamental rights guaranteed by the 7 articles of the constitution: 114 (personal freedom), 115 (inviolability of property), 117 (privacy of letters), 118 (freedom of expression and in particular freedom of the press), 123 (freedom of congregation), 124 (freedom of association), 153 (the requisition of private property), to restore public security and order by the means of armed forces, if necessary.’20

In Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre from 1928, we can read his interpretation of article 48 of the Weimar constitution:

The suspended constitutional norm has no validity for the time it is suspended. The limitations for the executive implied by this norm are suspended for every institution: neither the constitutional regulations nor their subsequent norms can restrict institutional action. Therefore, the suspension does not mean the breach of the law in an individual case (because no valid legal regulation has been violated); moreover, its validity has been sublated. Nor does it mean an amendment, because after the end of a suspension of law, which is only possible as a suspension within certain temporal limits, the law regains its normativity.21

Schmitt’s interpretation is followed by a long, explanatory footnote22 in which he emphasises that Article 48, para. 2, s. 1 declares that it is the Reichspräsident who is empowered in a state of emergency to restore public security and order by suspending personal rights. Furthermore, Schmitt declares that Article 48 defines a regulation which is ‘typical for a dictatorship’.23 For Schmitt, dictatorship is not necessarily a negative term. In his book Die Diktatur. Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf [Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to the Class Struggle of the Proletariat], published in 1921, he seeks to demonstrate that the office of the dictator was introduced to protect the republic in times of crisis. The so-called commissary dictator was given extraordinary powers to suspend individual rights written down in the constitution for the sake of the very existence of the republic. The dictator, Schmitt emphasises, does not act beyond the legal framework of the constitution, because he is bound by three preconditions:24 first, the state of emergency must have been declared; secondly, the content and range of extraordinary power must have been defined; and, thirdly, the dictatorship is always limited to a certain period of time – that is, the dictatorship ends with the end of the state of exception.25 During the years following 1945, Schmitt concentrated on the problem of the right interpretation of Article 48, which culminated in a controversy between the two most eminent legal theorists of the twentieth century concerning the question of the status of the president of the Reich [Reichspräsident] and of the constitution. In 1931 Schmitt published a book called Der Hüter der Verfassung [The Safeguard of the Constitution], in which he defines the Reichspräsident as the neutral power (pouvoir neutre) acting in times of crisis and, in particular, in a looming civil war. His office supersedes the status of competing parties, and it is he who ultimately has to make the decision to declare a state of exception.26 According to the definition of sovereignty in Political Theology from 1922, for Schmitt the ultimate sovereign is not the parliament but one single person, namely the Reichspräsident, who becomes the protector of the constitution by his act of sovereign decision-making.

Schmitt’s interpretation of the sovereign power which proves itself in times of a crisis and is vested in a single person is, in fact, close to Jean Bodin’s definition of sovereignty as the divine right of kings and to an understanding of constitutional monarchy which, in the end, opens the room for an absolute monarchy which, finally, might result in dictatorship (in the negative sense). Following Schmitt’s own suggestion, outlined in Chapter 3 of Political Theology from 1922, the proposed interpretation of Article 48 and its corresponding form of political organisation is tied to a specific, in this case Catholic, metaphysical worldview. ‘One God – One king’ summarises the metaphysical worldview which is the precondition for Schmitt’s interpretation of Article 48. It is therefore not surprising that in the same year, 1931, Schmitt published Der Hüter der Verfassung [The Safeguard of the Constitution]. Hans Kelsen immediately responded with a harsh criticism of Schmitt’s interpretation. According to Kelsen – who, following Paul Laband, perfected legal positivism and associated himself with the Vienna Circle – such a metaphysics was not only nonsense but also dangerous. The sovereign, so Kelsen thought, can never be one single individual, because the constitution can only be protected by a supreme court which legitimates acts of sovereignty and/ or the suspension of constitutional rights. Kelsen accuses Schmitt of disguising his real political interests by introducing the concept of pouvoir neutre, a notion rooted in constitutional monarchy. In the end, says Kelsen, the president appears as the monarch in a republic, and it is he who guarantees the common will of the people. But this implies that the ‘monarch’ is above and beyond parliament; for parliament only produces, according to Schmitt, differences of opinion and interest.27

Hans Kelsen’s objections to Schmitt’s view did not only stem from Kelsen’s anti-metaphysical position. In moral terms, his legal positivism was directed against the possibility of a dictator who crosses the Rubicon being legalised and legitimated by the constitution. In 1933 Schmitt proved that Kelsen’s concerns were justified: he interpreted Hitler’s rise to power as legal by the so-called Ermächtigungsgesetz, which he was determined to relate back to Article 48.28 One year later he published an essay claiming the legality and even legitimacy of the so called Rhömmorde, that is, Hitler’s ordering of the assassination of his political enemy Ernst Rhöm, at that time the leader of the SA and a serious contender for the leadership of the Nazi party. In his essay, called ‘The Führer Protects the Law’,29 Schmitt juxtaposes the bureaucratic ‘emptiness of the state’ in the Weimar Republic, which lacked both morality and substance, with the heroism of the Führer, who had the courage to declare the state of exception and take action. It is undisputed that Schmitt’s essay ‘The Führer Protects the Law’ follows the rhetoric of the party of which he was by now a member. The Reichspräsident, the pouvoir neutre, the commissionary dictator who was seen as a protector of the constitution became a tyrant. Politically, this was the end of the Weimar Republic, and it came about legally and in accordance with the constitution. This is a memory which, in post-war Germany, the socialists and, in particular, the Liberal party have never forgotten.