In this challenging book, Carl Schmitt analyzes the modern state through the life and death of the Leviathan state of Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, the “mortal god,” dominated the early modern era, but contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, the shattering of the unified all-powerful state into the dual spheres of private and public posited by liberalism. This work is not primarily a critique of liberalism, however; Schmitt covers that in many of his other works. Rather, it is a criticism that in the modern state, the degenerate successor of Leviathan, men are drawn to deny the primacy of the political. Instead, they exalt government as administrative machine, deliverer of soulless technique. And this is destructive, because the state becomes alienated from the life of a nation, which undermines the unity of a people.
As always with Schmitt, to understand his thought in any given writing, you must place him very precisely in his time. The 1920s and 1930s, when Schmitt produced the majority of his work, were the hinge of fate for Germany. He published The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, with its revealing subtitle, Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, in 1938. In 1936, Schmitt had barely survived his opportunistic embrace of National Socialism, and had been exiled from his brief (since 1933) elevation to an important legal role in the German state. Perhaps as a result, this book can be read (and Schmitt unsurprisingly insisted, after the war, that it should be so read) as criticism of the direction in which Adolf Hitler had taken Germany.
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What got Schmitt in trouble was his conception of the state. In the previous decade, in several crucial books, notably Political Theology and The Concept of the Political, as well as a crucial article (“State, Movement, People,” of which there is no good English translation), Schmitt tried to generate a coherent theory of the desired unity of a people and state (although as always with Schmitt, a distinct protean quality in his thought prevents a total coherence). The problem for Schmitt was that his focus on the people and the state did not leave any real place for, much less primacy of place for, the specific leader of that state. This was anathema to a political movement that saw itself as being wholly subservient to one leader, the Führer (which, for those keeping score at home, means “leader”).
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt had said, “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the State.” That is, by parallel to René Descartes in his analysis of mind and body dualism, the core claim of legitimacy, even of existence, for the modern state is that it obliges obedience because it protects. “If protection ceases the state too ceases and every obligation to obey ceases.” Such a claim is obviously derived, at least in part, from Hobbes’s Leviathan. But this claim is incompatible with a state that focuses not exclusively on obedience as the touchstone of protection, but rather also on race, just as it is incompatible with any state that focuses on other characteristics, notably class, instead of actions. In retrospect, it is obvious that Schmitt was always going to run afoul of National Socialism.
Schmitt tried to deflect criticism, starting in 1934, by adopting a strident anti-Semitic stance. But this fooled few, given his longstanding philo-Semitic (though anti-Judaic) tendencies and many Jewish friends and students. He was soon attacked in the official publication of the SS, for being an opportunist, a Catholic, and a fake anti-Semite—all easy cases to make, especially given that he had earlier written extensively about how the Weimar state could and should keep the National Socialists from power, and that their racial theories were ludicrous. As a result, in 1936 Schmitt was expelled from the positions to which the National Socialists had appointed him in 1933 and 1934, and was only able to avoid more severe consequences through the personal intervention of Hermann Göring.
Schmitt does not explicitly acknowledge, although it was pretty clearly in his mind, the life-situation parallels between himself and Hobbes. The Englishman wrote, as did Schmitt, in a very specific time and place, also potentially dangerous for politically-oriented writers—during the English civil wars, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Leviathan was published in 1651, shortly before Oliver Cromwell ascended to Lord Protector, at a point where it was unclear who would hold supreme power in England, which in any case shifted several times over the following decades. Schmitt does acknowledge that Hobbes wrote in an esoteric manner, which suggests that the reader should also understand Schmitt’s writing here as esoteric, more so than in his other writings. Usually I am skeptical of esoteric readings, because they tend to encourage prideful Gnosticism in the one doing the analyzing, but in this case it is probably warranted, at least to some degree.
Schmitt’s admiration for Hobbes, which shows up in many places in his work, was not due to anything as simple as mere preference for authoritarianism, although certainly Leviathan is compatible with authoritarianism. Rather, Schmitt saw that Hobbes recognized the political was crucial for every people (which is not the same as saying the people should be political). Depoliticization, the attempt to remove politics, not in favor of libertarianism or anarchy, but in favor of putatively neutral “technique,” what we today call the managerial state, was for Schmitt opposed to the life of a people. Along similar lines, Schmitt abhorred (and wrote a whole book about) what he called political romanticism, the “endless conversation” that never resulted in actual political action, which reinforced modern tendencies toward administrative, rather than political, government. Politics is necessary. Politics are not separate from the rest of life, but, ultimately, the way in which a political community determines its destiny, in opposition to those who hold incompatible beliefs, through violent conflict if necessary. And the essence of this line of thought is Schmitt’s famous distinction between friend and enemy.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The core of this book is the intersection of religion and politics, arguably also the main underlying theme of Leviathan. Tracy B. Strong, sometime Schmitt translator who wrote one of the Forewords to this edition, notes that “When Schmitt says [in Roman Catholicism and Political Form] that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is the most important sentence in Hobbes, he is attributing to Christianity a political quality. It is to claim that the integrity or unity of political society is of central importance.” This unity is the thread that binds all of Schmitt’s major political works together, and here it is unity of religion, and what that says of state power and capability, which receives the focus.
Schmitt begins, however, with pure symbology, which he derives himself, then applies to Hobbes. Leviathan, as conceptualized by Hobbes, is a maximally “provocative” symbol. Concepts of the “unity of a political entity” as a “huge man” date back to Plato; they are not original to Hobbes. But only with Hobbes was the symbology of the most powerful of sea creatures, Leviathan, brought forward from sources such as the Book of Job to characterize something created by men, and combined with the symbols of both man and machine to create a new type of Leviathan.
Among ancient pagans, the image of the all-powerful sea creature was seen as containing within itself numerous variant symbols, many positive, notably that of a powerful dragon. Both Jews and Christians, however, were hostile toward the symbol of Leviathan. The Jews saw Leviathan as symbolizing their enemies, to be defeated at the end of history. The Christians saw Leviathan as the symbol of Satan attempting (and failing) to devour Christ, the Man-God, as shown by icons of Christ’s cross being the fishhook on which Leviathan was caught. This symbolic conflict between Christians and Leviathan is crucial; it is not coincidence that Julian the Apostate, during his brief reign, on his battle banners replaced the Chi Rho, one of the quintessential Christian symbols and the one adopted by Constantine as the symbol in hoc signo vinces, with a purple dragon. Rather, the conflict is emblematic of Judaism and Christianity, or rather certain forms of Christianity, notably Roman Catholicism, destroying the “original and natural heathen unity of politics and religion.”
Hobbes was the first to map this ancient symbol onto political theory. Here Schmitt turns to Leo Strauss, his former student, at that point already in exile, citing Strauss’s then-recent work on Hobbes approvingly (although most of the book, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, was actually an attack on Hobbes, and effectively a rebuke of some of Schmitt’s thought). In Strauss’s reading, Hobbes “regarded Jews as the originators of the revolutionary state-destroying distinction between religion and politics,” because the Jews first wholly subsumed politics to religion. The Christians, or more precisely the Roman Catholics, throve “on the state-destroying separation of the spiritual and the secular power.” The “actual meaning of Hobbes’ political theory” is to “overcome the Roman papal church’s division between a ‘Kingdom of Light’ and a ‘Kingdom of Darkness.’ ” Hobbes’ symbol of Leviathan is, properly viewed, “a struggle against political theology in all its forms.” That is, it is an argument that religion should be subsumed to politics. It is an attempt to make “a faithful restoration of the original unity of life.” (Schmitt, it seems, approves of Caesaropapism.)
But is Leviathan, as conceived by Hobbes, actually “a faithful restoration of the original unity of life”? Did Leviathan, in fact, withstand “the test of being the politico-mythical image battling the Judeo-Christian destruction of the natural unity?” No, is Schmitt’s answer, and the rest of this short book, originally a series of lectures, explains why Schmitt believed not.
Everyone remembers the famous cover of Leviathan, with the gigantic sovereign’s body composed of many individuals, standing guard over a peaceful city. What few note is that in one hand the figure carries a sword, and in the other a crozier, a bishop’s staff. What almost nobody notes (I certainly never did) is that below each are five symbols, representing under the sword secular power, and under the crozier religious power. “These illustrations represent the characteristic means of using authority and power to wage secular-spiritual disputes. The political battle, with its inevitable and incessant friend-enemy disputes that embrace every sphere of human activity, brings to the fore on both sides specific weapons. . . . The important realization that ideas and distinctions are political weapons, in fact, specific weapons of wielding ‘indirect’ power, was thus made evident on the first page of the book.”
After quite a bit of such musing about the symbology of Leviathan, both in the abstract and as conceived of in the mind of Hobbes, citing everything from Jean Bodin’s Of the Demon-mania of the Sorcerers to the Talmud, Schmitt asks the crucial question, “But what is the significance of the image of the leviathan in the intellectual context and in the conceptual and systematic construction of Hobbes’ theory of the state?” He lays out the well-known state of nature as perceived by Hobbes, the war of all against all. “The terror of the state of nature drives anguished individuals to come together; their fear rises to an extreme; a spark of reason flashes, and suddenly there stands in front of them a new god.” He is a god because he performs the miracle of bringing peace and security where there was none—though he is a mortal god, deus mortalis, in the words of Hobbes, which recur throughout this book, suggesting this is the central concept around which Schmitt revolves his analysis of Hobbes.
While the phrase is resonant, Hobbes never makes exactly clear what he means by it. Schmitt sees its use primarily as polemical, rather than philosophical, a way for the proponents of a sovereign state, supreme in all areas of human life, to resist the religious claims of “papists and Presbyterians,” who would separate religion and state power. In an inversion of divine right, Hobbes claims that the supreme power of the state is itself a type of divine power, but derived wholly from men themselves, not granted by the actual God. The new god “is much more than the sum total of all the participating particular wills”; it “is transcendent vis-à-vis all contractual partners of the covenant and vis-à-vis the sum total, obviously only in a juristic and not in a metaphysical sense.” But because the mortal god is “nothing but a product of human art and human intelligence,” “the leviathan thus becomes none other than a huge machine, a gigantic mechanism of ensuring the physical protection of those governed.”
Schmitt analogizes this to Descartes (who wrote shortly before Hobbes) and his dualist conception of the human body as machine animated by a soul. If Leviathan is but a “huge man,” it is no long logical leap to view him as pure machine. And the mechanization of the state, a characteristic of modernity, “with the aid of technical developments, brought about the general ‘neutralization’ and especially the transformation of the state into a technically neutral instrument.” “By extension, therefore, the machine, as all of technology, is independent of every political goal and conviction and assumes a value-and-truth neutrality of a technical instrument.” Such neutrality made some sense in the early modern period, fraught with religious conflict. “Despair about the religious wars led the well-known originator of the modern concept of sovereignty, Jean Bodin, to become a decisionist in the sense of sovereign state power.” But today, it is opposed to politics, and thus to the lifeblood of the people.
Here we have the connection to Schmitt’s core principle of the state, to which he returned again and again—decisionism. A neutral state “separates the religious and metaphysical standards of truth from standards of command and function and renders them autonomous.” State neutrality, however, is not tolerance. “A technically neutral state can be tolerant as well as intolerant.” What matters is its legal commands, its decisions, made without reference to outside standards. “Right” and “truth” are merely the “performance and function of the state”—whose only obligation is that it “guarantees me the security of my physical existence.”
Schmitt also here touches on another preoccupation of his, the “right of resistance.” The medieval state recognized the “right to resistance” towards an unlawful ruler. In the Hobbesian state, however, “resistance as a ‘right’ . . . is factually and legally nonsensical and absurd.” True, the “state can stop functioning and the big machine can break down because of rebellion and civil war. This development, however, has nothing to do with a ‘right to resist.’ ” We will return to the importance of this line of thought.
Continuing with the focus on the intersection of religion and politics, as part of the all-powerful nature of the state, Hobbes ascribed to the state the right and power to decide whether a miracle exists. Miracles, wonders defying nature’s laws performed through religious power, were a preoccupation of early modern thinkers, but not exactly in the sense that we think of them. When moderns today think of miracles, they think primarily of healings. The miracle par excellence in the seventeenth century, however, was transubstantiation—the changing of bread and wine through liturgy into the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Whether this miracle, or any miracle, in fact occurred was a matter, in Hobbes’s view, for the state to command—in other words, the state should decide which religious belief was to prevail. If the state said transubstantiation existed and was therefore a miracle, so it was, and all citizens must so confess, because that is the nature of the Leviathan state. Nonetheless, “in a barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the sovereign state,” Hobbes allowed that an individual might exercise his private reason whether to believe or not to believe, in this or any other miracle. He could “preserve his own judgment in his heart,” so long as he complied with the external dictates of the state.
This admission, in Schmitt’s view, destroyed Leviathan and its majestic internal coherence, by making it more machine and less mortal god, which necessarily creates a tendency towards neutral technique, the administrative/managerial state. Baruch Spinoza, already in 1670, realized this, and expanded this crack “into a universal principle of freedom of thought, perception, and expression, with the proviso that public peace and the rights of the sovereign power would be respected.” Spinoza, that is, made the private primary, and the public a proviso. This devolves the state to a mere police force, “which is restricted to maintaining ‘public’ calm, security, and order.” The inner man is no longer subject to the state. “Public power and force may be ever so completely and emphatically recognized and ever so loyally respected, but only as a public and only an external power, it is hollow and already dead from within.” Leviathan is no longer a god, but a monster, and so Hobbes’s symbol became viewed during the eighteenth century by all major political thinkers.
Thus, the state passed from absolute power to become “the nineteenth-century bourgeois constitutional state.” State power became justified by legality, which conferred legitimacy, rather than only by the state’s claim to protect. Schmitt therefore views Hobbes, contrary to popular perception, not as the theorist of the modern totalitarian state, but as the herald of the bourgeois constitutional state. If absolute protection ceases, so does the requirement of absolute obedience, and this “permits a very good reconciliation with the concepts and ideals of the bourgeois constitutional state.” In the nineteenth-century state, the private sphere thereby largely swallowed the public sphere, and in the parliamentary system, divisive and undesirable heterogeneity as embodied in the party system became the norm (something Schmitt discussed at length in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy).
And this led to the potential destruction of the state, Schmitt’s major preoccupation in the 1920s and 1930s. “The wonderful armature of a modern state organization requires uniformity of will and uniformity of spirit. When a variety of different spirits quarrel with one another and shake up the armature, the machine and its system of legality will soon break down. The institutions and concepts of liberalism, on which positive law rested, became weapons and power positions in the hands of the most illiberal forces. In this fashion, party pluralism has perpetrated the destruction of the state by using methods inherent in the liberal law state. The leviathan, in the sense of the myth of the state as the ‘huge machine,’ collapsed when a distinction was drawn between the state and individual freedom. That happened when the organizations of individual freedom were used like knives by anti-individualistic forces to cut up the leviathan and divide his flesh among themselves. Thus did the mortal god die for the second time.”
It does not take much imagination to map this onto the situation of 1920s and 1930s Germany, where Schmitt had spent the years prior to the ascension of the National Socialists vigorously advocating for decisive action to prevent both the Communists and the National Socialists from destroying the German state, a goal both of them openly declared. This type of statement was obviously dangerous in 1938, which no doubt explains the esoteric flavor. For the same reason, presumably, he also accompanies it with various negative statements about Jews, or rather about specific thinkers as Jews, and the reference to “divide his flesh” is a reference to an earlier discussion about Jewish apocalyptic thought, in which God would feed His people with Leviathan himself. But Schmitt’s core point is clear—allowing any weakening of Leviathan is ultimately fatal to the security of the people, which can only be preserved as a unity.
In the final chapters, Schmitt acknowledges the irony that the Leviathan state never actually emerged in England, only on the Continent. It could have, perhaps, if Cromwell’s path had been pursued, or if Stuart absolutism had been allowed to flourish. The English, due to their seafaring paramountcy and commercial focus, instead adopted a more open state, and in any case, “The decisionism of absolutist thinking is foreign to the English spirit.” As a result, the English adopted a mixed government, not a unitary government. Nor did the English adopt Hobbes’s solution to the religious wars; rather, they led the way to a liberal bourgeois state, a constitutional monarchy.
Thus, Hobbes’s symbol failed, and Hobbes instead became “the revolutionary pioneer of a scientific-positivistic era.” The modern state exercises a form of indirect power, rather than the pure, unalloyed power of Leviathan. Schmitt does not like, and he never liked, “the nineteenth-century law state,” by which he primarily means the Prussian Rechtsstaat, the emergence of which he ascribes to Hobbes, though he says Hobbes is denied the credit. Schmitt’s objection to indirect power is that it “demands obedience without being able to protect, that [it] wants to command without assuming responsibility for the possibility of political peril.” Indirect power is undesirable because it stands opposed to Schmitt’s core political theory of decisionism—the idea that what matters, above all, to the legitimacy of a decision is not its content, or its tie to some underlying document or system, but that it be made by a clearly-recognized legitimate authority. Schmitt’s core belief was in a form of authoritarianism, the rejection of excessive centrifugal forces within a state. In today’s America, centrifugal force is, we can all agree, a problem. Whether authoritarianism is the answer—well, we will see, won’t we?
What does all this say about the modern Western state? The most obvious conclusions revolve around technique and the managerial state, but before we get there, we should ponder how Schmitt’s conception of the security offered by the state differs from ours. When Schmitt says that the state, as conceived of in Leviathan, commands obedience because it protects, and only to the extent it actually does protect, the citizenry, this protection is protection from one’s fellow man. Schmitt has little to say about protection from the state itself.
Perhaps this is because before the twentieth century, and the rise of all-encompassing ideologized states, it was not conceivable to most that the mass of citizenry could need protection from the state itself. But upon reflection, this does not ring true. Certainly tyranny has been a philosophical and practical focus in the Western tradition for thousands of years, and while the actual reach of the state, and the sovereign, is far greater in modern times, incidents such as the forced signing of Magna Carta show that earlier generations were very aware of the need for protection against the state. And in the circumstances in which Schmitt was writing, after two decades of Bolshevik terror and himself living through the early years of National Socialist attacks on the Jews, he could not have but been aware of how in some circumstances great swathes of the citizenry would need protection against the state itself.
This puzzle is solved, I think, by Schmitt’s frequent, but again tightly masked, references to the “right of resistance.” He is certainly correct that the Leviathan state cannot permit such a right, but this is merely another way of saying that the actual, as opposed to symbolic, death of the Leviathan state is a possible result of its failure to not only protect the citizenry against each other, but against the state itself. No doubt it would have been highly unwise of Schmitt to follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion, but a hundred years later, we are free to do so.
A secondary matter is that Schmitt would have recoiled in horror at what the shadowy agents of today’s state, whether it is a Leviathan state or not, conceive of as “protection.” He meant the violence that man does to man, but our state conceives of protection through a feminine lens, where protection means safety at any cost, accompanied by feminine demands such as “inclusion” and “equity,” where comfort of the individual, at the cost of the destruction of excellence, is included within the new, twisted definition of protection. Schmitt would probably have had a good deal to say, for example, of the American state’s ludicrous reaction to the Wuhan Plague, destroying the fiber of the citizenry and the futures of our children in order to keep old people alive a few months longer. I intend to read Giorgio Agamben’s 1998 Homo Sacer, with its pillorying of the modern focus on “bare life,” and to relate that to Schmitt. Maybe soon, after I have finished reviewing all of Schmitt’s major published works (the last two remaining are The Nomos of the Earth and Hamlet or Hecuba, though I will probably also do Ex Captivate Salus, a type of memoir, Land and Sea, and Dialogues on Power and Space).
Finally, we should touch on, though a complete treatment would need another lengthy article, Schmitt’s abhorrence of technique. He laid various modern ills at the feet of technique, including legal positivism, a consistent bête noire of his. In Schmitt’s frame (and really in any frame that makes sense), sovereignty stands above the positive law. This is the key element of decisionism; “sovereign is he who decides the state of exception.” Positivism is a key element of the liberal state, and Schmitt loathed the liberal state. Liberalism offers only a critique of politics, not a form of politics, because it denies the friend-enemy distinction, instead offering only feeble and second-order attempts to control the state, dissipating its energies focusing on economics and ethics, while at the same time inviting the politicization of everything (which leads effectively to totalitarianism).
The key philosopher of technique in this context (and it would be very valuable to fit his and Schmitt’s work together) is Jacques Ellul, in particular in his book The Technological Society. Not that I have read any Ellul (you can learn a great deal of Ellul in summary/analysis by the pseudonymous Kruptos on his Substack, however), and to cover this topic properly one would need to bring in many other twentieth-century thinkers, such as James Burnham in his The Managerial Society. Very broadly speaking, however, the political argument made, and one with which Schmitt would probably agree, is that government-by-technique destroys the unity of a people, who become mere cogs in the machine, consumption units viewed cadastrally by the state (as James C. Scott famously said in Seeing Like a State). The philosophical argument made, or one made, is that technique corrupts the souls of men. As C. S. Lewis said, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.” But all that is for another day.
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