Political Theology

Introduction

Schmitt published this short book of four chapters in 1922, in the crisis years of the Weimar Republic, whose constitution gave the president emergency powers under Article 48. The first chapter defines sovereignty through the exception. The third argues that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts: the omnipotent lawgiver mirrors the omnipotent God, the state of exception the miracle. The last chapter sides with Catholic counter-revolutionaries such as Donoso Cortés against liberal “discussion”. The theologian Erik Peterson and later Hans Blumenberg criticised this secularisation thesis; Giorgio Agamben’s work on the state of exception takes it up.

Connections

Builds on

• Leviathan1651 · Thomas Hobbes

Taken up in

• Homo Sacer1995 · Giorgio Agamben

More works by Carl Schmitt

• 1927The Concept of the Political