Schmitt-Political Theology I.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

XXXlX
Introduction
the role of the state as the securing of conditions under which
citizens could pursue their private wills. It is not surprising, therefore,
that he returned again and again in his writings to Thomas
Hobbes's "mutual Relation between Protection and Obedience,"
and shared with Hobbes the belief that autoritas, non veritas facit
legem. The one who has authority can demand obedience - and
it is not always the legitimate sovereign who possesses this authority.
It was this belief in the need to support the legally constituted
authority that led Schmitt to participate in the Nazi
adventure between 1933 and 1936.
This decision is critical for understanding why Schmitt is so
little known in the English-speaking world. In his endeavor to
develop for the Third Reich an authoritarian theory of the state
that would be distinctly Schmittian (and thus would bear little
resemblance to the totalitarian one-party state that was emerging
in Germany), he made a number of truly shocking compromises
with the regime. Had he not participated in the Nazi rule between
1933 and 1936, or at least not sunk to the depth to which he
did on the Jewish question, for example,4 his voluminous and
gifted intellectual output of the Weimar period would certainly
have been assessed differently.5 As things now stand, many scholars
continue to view his Weimar output from the perspective of
4. See George Schwab, "Carl Schmitt: Political Opportunist?," Intellect 103 (February
1975): 334-337.
5. See George Schwab, "Schmitt Scholarship," Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory 4/2 (Spring-Summer 1980): 149-155; also Joseph w. Bendersky, "Carl Schmitt
Confronts the English-speaking World," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory
2/3 (Fall 1978): 125-135.