Did early modern European states make themselves sacred? The historian Paolo Prodi insisted that they did, whereas for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben sacred and secular power were so indistinguishable that the question was moot. This group of articles seeks to explain and explore the approaches of these two accomplished Italian scholars to the problem of early modern sacralisation. This introduction reviews the context in which Prodi and Agamben worked, sketches brief biographies, and describes the arguments that they advanced which are (...) most relevant to early modern history. Their work emerged from the debate on secularisation in the German-speaking lands, the confessionalisation thesis as it was advanced by German historians of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Catholic Reform, and twentieth-century Catholic thought about the relationship between religion and totalitarian states. Both Prodi and Agamben belonged to traditions that sat at an angle to the liberalism that underpins historical and philosophical thought in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

This article recounts how Neo-Scholastic international lawyers navigated the complex political landscape of the 1920s and 30s, combining universalism, nationalism and religious belief. Participating in the contemporary re-engagement of Catholics with modern politics, they re-imagined the international legal order in Catholic terms. They argued that a universal morality, overruling the extremes of state sovereignty, was the only solid basis for just and stable global legal relations. While the contribution of Catholics to the establishment of the post-war world order and the (...) rise of human rights is widely acknowledged, the interwar genealogy of these developments is not. Reading these thinkers’ universalist legal tenets in conjunction with their political trajectories provides a relevant frame to understand the moral charge characterizing international law in the early years of the Cold War. (shrink)

In the last years, a theological turn had a pervasive influence in the reception of Carl Schmitt’s writings. According to this view, his thought has a strong, substantial religious foundation. With regards to understanding not only Schmitt’s position but also his current influence in authoritarian countries, this essay argues that this interpretation is misleading and proposes a different and comprehensive analysis of Schmitt’s concept of political theology that replaces it in a political-legal framework. Against the theological reading, it argues that (...) Schmitt’s concept of “political theology” refers to his own conception of legal theory as an attempt to relegitimize authority in a secular context. As “political theology,” this legal theory is designed to overcome normativism and parliamentarism by “substantializing” the legal form. Using Schmitt’s post-1933 works as an example, the essay shows that, as theology translates faith into a written doctrine, legal theory must, according to Schmitt, substantialize the legal form by translating the political idea into jurisprudence. Hence, this article concludes that Schmitt’s theory might be described as “political theology” but only in a formal, ideological sense. It is part of an authoritarian theory that is not religious but uses theology to revive an appearance of absolute legitimacy. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt sees the 1933 Nazi seizure of power as a revolution that inaugurates an entirely new era of political-legal order. Analyzing Schmitt’s rarer Nazi-texts, diaries, and correspondence, I argue that from 1933 to 1936 Schmitt attempts to theorize the Nazi revolution by developing an entirely new political language of Nazism, cleansed from non-German ways of thinking, especially nineteenth-century liberalism. I focus on three conceptual transformations through which Schmitt understands the remaking of the German state: The shift from the liberal (...) democratic neutral state to a new one-party state or a Führer-state dominated by a movement – a shift symbolized by the “death of Hegel”; the transformation of sovereign power into Führertum, represented by the symbolical deaths of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, whose thought cannot comprehend the totality of the Nazi movement, and the perversion of the liberal-democratic equality before the law to the völkisch equality of the race as the basis of all Nazi political–legal life. Criticizing previous interpretations of Schmitt’s Nazi thinking, I demonstrate that when Schmitt abandons his own decicionist thought in favor of concrete order thinking in 1933/1934 the idea of race becomes the basis of his political–legal thought. (shrink)

Growing interest among historians and social scientists in the work of Karl Polanyi has yet to produce detailed historical studies of how Polanyi's work was received by his contemporaries. This article reconstructs the frustration of Polanyi's attempts to make a name for himself among English socialists between his arrival from Vienna in 1934 and his departure for New York in 1947. The most obvious explanation for Polanyi's failure to find a following was the socialist historians’ rejection of his unorthodox narrative (...) of the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in The Great Transformation. But this disappointment was anticipated in earlier exchanges revealing that Polanyi's social theory, specifically his conception of the self and its social relations, differed markedly from the views prevailing among socialists of R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole's generation. As well as casting new light on the intellectual history of English socialism and variegating our understanding of the contexts in which conceptions of the human person were invoked in the interwar period, this article seeks to illuminate by example the importance of deep-seated, often tacit, commitments to particular conceptions of the self and its social relations in structuring mid-century intellectual life. (shrink)

Barth scholarship, largely theological in focus, has highlighted his lifelong political engagement, emphasising his early socialist activism, his resolute opposition to the Great War and nationalis...

Straipsnio tikslas – Carlo Schmitto politinės teologijos statuso analizė. Siekiama įrodyti, kad Schmitto pristatyta koncepcija negali būti suprasta kaip teisės sąvokų sociologija, kaip ją kai kuriuose darbuose apibūdino pats autorius. Ji taip pat negali būti aiškinama kaip teologijos dalis, kaip tai daro daugelis dabartinių interpretuotojų. Schmittas „politinės teologijos“ vardu pavadino politikos teorijai priskirtiną projektą, pagrįstą teologinių prielaidų įvedimu į filosofiją. Tai primena XIX a. katalikų reakcio­nierių Josepho de Maistre’o, Louiso de Bonaldo ir Juano Donoso Corteso politinę filosofiją.

Does democracy end in terror? This essay examines how this question acquired urgency in postwar French political thought by evaluating the critique of totalitarianism after the 1970s, its antecedents, and the shifting conceptual idioms that connected them. It argues that beginning in the 1970s, the critique of totalitarianism was reorganized around notions of “the political” and “the social” to bring into view totalitarianism's democratic provenance. This conceptual mutation displaced earlier denunciations of the bureaucratic nature of totalitarianism by foregrounding anxieties over (...) its voluntarist, democratic sources. Moreover, it projected totalitarianism's origins back to the Jacobin discourse of political will to implicate its postwar inheritors like French communism and May 1968. In so doing, antitotalitarian thinkers stoked a reassessment of liberalism and a reassertion of “the social” as a barrier against excessive democratic voluntarism, the latter embodied no longer by Bolshevism but by a totalitarian Jacobin political tradition haunting modern French history. (shrink)