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Roman Catholicism and Political Form
The relationship between economic and political thinking has reached a crisis at the end of the 20th century. Already at the beginning of this century, in "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," Carl Schmitt juxtaposed a juridical interpretation of religion oriented to the political sphere to Max Weber's sociological interpretation oriented to the economic sphere in "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."
According to G. L. Ulmen, translator of "Roman Catholicism and Political Formjus publicum Europaeum" and the Eurocentric epoch of world history began to decline.
Asserting that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt felt the need to address the question of what political form might replace the state. It was in this context that he wrote "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," which presupposes an affinity not only between the Church and the state, but between Catholicism and political thinking. Once the state began to lose its monopoly of politics and, thereby, its legitimacy, Schmitt looked to the other side of the occidental equation--the Catholic Church--in search of a new form of the political. His argument proceeds from the assumption that there is a structural identity between the metaphysical image of the world a particular age creates and the form of a political organization.
According to G. L. Ulmen, translator of "Roman Catholicism and Political Formjus publicum Europaeum" and the Eurocentric epoch of world history began to decline.
Asserting that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt felt the need to address the question of what political form might replace the state. It was in this context that he wrote "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," which presupposes an affinity not only between the Church and the state, but between Catholicism and political thinking. Once the state began to lose its monopoly of politics and, thereby, its legitimacy, Schmitt looked to the other side of the occidental equation--the Catholic Church--in search of a new form of the political. His argument proceeds from the assumption that there is a structural identity between the metaphysical image of the world a particular age creates and the form of a political organization.
112 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1923
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May 18, 2022
If, as Carl Schmitt asserted in Political Theology, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” what does that imply for political forms? This book, written immediately after Political Theology, addresses that question. Schmitt analyzes a political form that originated as theological but has adopted many different secular roles—the Roman Catholic Church. I have to say that Roman Catholicism and Political Form, even by Schmittian standards, is a difficult read. Nonetheless, it rewards close attention and thought, because what Schmitt says is, as all things Schmitt are, surprisingly relevant to our situation today.
What he definitely does not advocate is that the Church should rule. Schmitt, the seer of sovereignty, would vomit at the cut-rate, ahistorical, fed-friendly “integralism” that, most prominently, Adrian Vermeule likes to push, and he would think little more of the somewhat more sensible modern men who think that what we really need now is an updated Pope Innocent III. Rather, Schmitt believes the political form of the Church is instructive for a Europe in turmoil (he is only concerned about Europe here), and that the Church can play a key role in European governance. No more, and no less.
It does not matter that the Church analyzed by Schmitt in this book, that is, its political form (and most of its theological form, though that is beside the main point), is dead and gone in the Year of Our Lord 2022. What matters is the insights in this book, which can be read as a perceptive and preemptive attack on managerialism, a system that turned out to be the main organizing principle of the twentieth century. Thus, to my surprise, this book is closely tied in substance to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. A complete comparison of the two books would try my readers’ patience, and is probably beyond my mental capacity, so I will not do that today, though the reader might benefit from reading the two books together. I will merely point out Schmitt does not disagree that managerialism, what he calls “economic-technical thinking,” is on the rise. Rather, he thinks it inadequate to meet the political needs of the future, unlike Burnham, who thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) that managerialism was the inevitable solution to modern complexity. Burnham, who rejected any role for any moral or religious thought in political forms, necessarily offers a much less sophisticated (if easier to understand) view of political institutions than does Schmitt.
Roman Catholicism and Political Form is obscure, first translated into English only in 1996, and issued in only one edition (even though it is more of a long essay than a book). Unlike many of Schmitt’s other works, you will find little third-party commentary on this book, at least in English. The translator and annotator, G. L. Ulmen (a man of immense erudition, about whom I can find no other information other than that he has done many Schmitt translations—I am not even sure if he is still alive), says that this book forms a bridge from Schmitt’s earlier works that analyze the sovereign state, towards his later conception of “ ‘the political,’ that is, the friend-enemy grouping,” as more important, more existential, than the state itself. This is plausible, but mostly I think Roman Catholicism and Political Form stands alone as a glimpse into how, in Schmitt’s own mind, personal religiosity intersected with his political theories.
Roman Catholicism and Political Form is the only one of Schmitt’s books in which his Catholic religious belief materially colors his political analysis. Schmitt was, for many purposes, an admirer of Thomas Hobbes, and he often used Hobbes as a type of sounding board for his own thought. Hobbes was not a wholly orthodox Christian, but it is key to Schmitt’s thinking here what he said much later (in a quote offered by Ulmen, from an otherwise untranslated article): “The most important statement of Thomas Hobbes remains: Jesus is the Christ. Such a statement retains its power even when it is relegated to the margins of an intellectual construct, even when it appears to have been banished to the outer reaches of the conceptual system.” At root, it seems, Schmitt believed not only that the Roman Church was a crucial political form, but that it was unique, because what it says is true. You cannot understand this book unless you grasp that claim.
This religious cast enhances, rather than limits, the book. One of the many intellectual inheritances we lost over the course of the twentieth century was a proper appreciation of the intersection of religious thinking and politics. The assumption today is either that the two are irrelevant to each other, or that religion poisons politics. Tedious and false histories of religious wars are offered to show we must be ruled by so-called liberal democracy, which is anti-religious in its nature, and therefore nobody explores what religion, both historically and intellectually, means for politics. Except for Schmitt—who in this as in everything else, isn’t even on the same planet with modern political philosophers, mostly mentally-defective nobodies such as John Rawls.
The immediate political backdrop is also important here. Catholicism was, in a way not comprehensible to modern Americans, a major political force in 1920s Germany. Most explicitly this was through the Centre Party, with which Schmitt was associated at the time, and which was an open vehicle for applied Catholic thought. Aside from the Centre Party, however, Catholics as Catholics were very highly influential in all areas of ruling class intellectual life—not just in politics, but in everything from art to history. We now think of a “Catholic thinker” as a thinker focused on religion; but Catholic thinkers were, before the great wave of apostasy swept the continent, a key part of all intellectual discussion in every European country, and their Catholicism was not in any way a bar to their relevance. Therefore, when Roman Catholicism and Political Form attempts to justify the role of the Church in European politics, as a separate, but compatible and mediating, force on the continent, Schmitt’s argument was not jarring to his readers in a way a comparable, updated claim would be today.
Schmitt begins by noting the fear that the papacy has inspired, in everyone from the Orthodox to Cromwell to Bismarck, a fear of “the incomprehensible political power of Roman Catholicism.” This is the result of its political form, a term Schmitt does not precisely define, but by which he means the visible manifestation of an organization bound by internal rules, the excessive violation of which, by implication, would destroy the form. The Church’s rules, and thus its political form, are completely alien to most modern thought, and in general never match up to any secular political form. In its nature, therefore, the Church stands apart, and has always stood apart.
Schmitt notes that the idea of the Roman Church having a political form at all is not palatable to many, but he rejects their distaste. He cites Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, and denigrates Dostoevsky’s “fundamentally anarchistic (and that always means atheistic) instinct.” “In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity.”
The Church is often found allied with secular political forms, sometimes closely, sometimes tensely. Schmitt tells us that what seems to the opponents of the Church like opportunism, with the Church now on the side of reactionaries, now on the side of democrats, is not at all opportunism, but rather a sign of the Church’s pivotal position, its “political universalism.” For Schmitt, “[e]very imperialism that is more than jingoism embraces antitheses.” At the same time, the existence of antheses blurs the political form of the Church. The key, in the modern era, is the embrace of papal infallibility (declared at the First Vatican Council, in 1870), which overarches any ambiguities with “the most precise dogmatism and a will to decision.” (We see here part of Schmitt’s core political idea of decisionism.) And the key to the claims embodied in infallibility is “the principle of representation,” which is the “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today.”
What is representation? It is reflecting in a political form what were once called “estates”—the natural groupings of a nation’s people. Schmitt argues that the political organizations which dominate a society are necessarily naturally drawn from the metaphysical views of those who live in that society. By representation, Schmitt does not mean variants on parliamentarianism, which he derided elsewhere as “endless conversation.” His is not the concern that drove, for example, the revolutionaries who built America, that the people have a voice in the halls of government. He means something deeper, the projection of inherent human tendencies into political form.
Here Schmitt pivots to directly attack “economic-technical thinking,” the basis of all post-World War I European political forms. He means, although he does not use the word, the techniques of managerialism (often combined with the emancipatory beliefs of the Enlightenment, more or less what Schmitt usually meant when he referred to “liberalism”). Economic-technical thinking aspires to universality; it is dominant over both the modern capitalist and the industrial proletarian. “The big industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin—an ‘electrified earth.’ They disagree essentially only on the correct method of electrification.” Economic-technical thinking rejects representation; it offers technocracy, and through that both economic and military power.
The Church, in contrast, has neither. Instead, it has “an absolute realization of authority” gained through “its capacity to assume juridical form” and “because it has the power of representation . . . of the Person of Christ Himself: God become man in historical reality.” The Church is therefore the sole remaining representative entity, that is, an institution that organically represents a crucial tendency in all human societies, such as “the emperor, the monk, the knight, the merchant,” who earlier each had their own representations, embodied in varying political forms. Representation is the result of authority, however, not just a projection of some group, and so it cannot exist without authority. This is why none of these representations, save the Church, exist any more in any political form. “Once the wheels of modern industry began to turn, [those groups] increasingly became servants of the great machine”—and “the machine has no tradition,” upon which political form must ultimately be based to be authoritative. (The logical progression of this machine, at which Schmitt would probably express no surprise, is Paul Kingsnorth’s Machine, a totalizing political form that purports to subsume all humanity within its frame.)
Because the Church is representative, it is something deeper than the machine, which cannot represent and therefore cannot be truly authoritative, and thus it is impossible that the Church should fully align itself with “the present form of industrial capitalism,” even though it can ally, and always has allied, with other political forms. Catholicism is fundamentally opposed to economic-technical thinking, in large part because it necessarily provides for a broader range of human needs than does economic rationalism. “Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can ‘satisfy.’ ” It does not matter if those are “for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever.” “[A] mechanism of production serving the satisfaction of arbitrary material needs is called ‘rational’ without bringing into question what is most important—the rationality of the purpose of this supremely rational mechanism.”
However, Catholicism is also rationalism—not the narrow, blinkered rationalism of the natural sciences, but “a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical logic and whose focus of interest is the normative guidance of human life.” The thinking of Catholicism is not limited in the way that economic-technical thinking is, yet contrary to what moderns would have us believe, it is highly rational, the result of absorption of Roman law and institutions. It is “essentially juridical,” which for Schmitt is the highest compliment.
Yes, the form of Catholicism has become more rigid, more “Jesuitical,” since the sixteenth century. This is not so much a reaction to Protestantism, but more “a negative reaction to the mechanism of the age”—that is, economic-technical thinking as reified in political form, of absolute monarchy and mercantilism. The Church erected a “protective shell,” but not as a means of retaining power. “No political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief.” That ethos offered by the Church is one that offers something “other than production and consumption.” The implication is that technical-economic managerialism is doomed by its very nature, although Schmitt does not here purport to say how or why its end will come.
Yet the Church can co-exist with technical-economic systems, while the latter still exist. For after all, they are ghosts, compared to the Church’s solidity. In every age, the Church will “align itself with [a] new order, as it has with every order,” because the Church is inherently a political form, and were the state to be unpolitical, the Church would remain political. Nonetheless, it is better for both Church and state to be political forms, and to thereby act as a type of partners, for their spheres are obviously fundamentally different—as shown by that the change to economic-technical thinking has in no way changed the essence of the Church. (This claim was true in 1923, but we all are now aware that economic-technical thinking has not only changed the essence of the Church, but bids fair to defeat it entirely, unless the odious Jorge Bergoglio is shown the door, together with his minions.)
The fundamental juridical nature of the Church implies a “foundation on the public sphere,” as opposed to liberalism’s foundation on the private sphere, which it exalts beyond all reason. The jurisprudence developed by the Church is the foundation of the political form of the Church, but it “goes further because it represents something other and more than secular jurisprudence—not only the idea of justice but also the person of Christ—that substantiates its claim to a unique power and authority.” In some ways, Schmitt says, this is analogous to “an international court of justice,” which “represent[s] something autonomous vis-à-vis the state”—something very much in the air in 1923, and ironic, given that all subsequent such courts of justice, from Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court, are not in the least autonomous, but represent either victors’ “justice,” or are slavishly subordinate to the ideology of the jurists, today the religion of globohomo, the end-stage of economic-technical thinking.
To return to where we started, Schmitt’s criticism of Dostoevsky as anarchistic, and therefore atheistic, is perhaps the key to Schmitt’s thinking in his essay. Anarchism is the worst of all possible human political arrangements. Economic-technical thinking, whether as industrial capitalism or as Communism, preaches the fading away of the state, one in favor of a self-executing technocracy, the other in favor of the proletarian utopia. Both in fact are abdication of the need to create political forms, and lead to anarchy, which is a great evil. (It is beyond the scope of this essay, and something I will discuss in my upcoming thoughts on Schmitt’s next book, The Concept of the Political, but anarchy is the polar antithesis of Schmitt’s core political idea, decisionism. Thus in most of his writings Schmitt takes great pains to slag anarchism, and anarchy.) But “this formlessness may contain the potential for a new form that might also give shape to the economic-technical age. Having withstood everything, the Catholic Church need not decide these questions. Here, also, it will be the complexio of all that withstands. It is the inheritor.”
It did not turn out that way. If the Church could have, but ultimately did not, perform the mediating role in Europe (and perhaps the broader world) envisioned by Schmitt, what can do that now? Nothing, of course. Europe is over, and economic-technical thinking as master is dying around the globe. It is somewhat of a debility that Schmitt is so focused, in all his works, on Europe, because he did not see it was fated to die, and this gives some of his works an anachronistic feel. What will replace Europe’s once-peerless civilization? I wish I knew. I suspect, however, that if the continent is not absorbed by primitive hordes from the south, whatever replaces Europe will be a throwback. In Schmittian terms, it will offer authority based on representation, and will denigrate economic-technical thinking in all its manifestations, including managerialism. Maybe the Church will even have something to do with it—or maybe the Orthodox Church, a much different political form, but still very much a political form, will have something to do with it.
On a less depressing note, though related . . . [review completes as first comment].
What he definitely does not advocate is that the Church should rule. Schmitt, the seer of sovereignty, would vomit at the cut-rate, ahistorical, fed-friendly “integralism” that, most prominently, Adrian Vermeule likes to push, and he would think little more of the somewhat more sensible modern men who think that what we really need now is an updated Pope Innocent III. Rather, Schmitt believes the political form of the Church is instructive for a Europe in turmoil (he is only concerned about Europe here), and that the Church can play a key role in European governance. No more, and no less.
It does not matter that the Church analyzed by Schmitt in this book, that is, its political form (and most of its theological form, though that is beside the main point), is dead and gone in the Year of Our Lord 2022. What matters is the insights in this book, which can be read as a perceptive and preemptive attack on managerialism, a system that turned out to be the main organizing principle of the twentieth century. Thus, to my surprise, this book is closely tied in substance to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. A complete comparison of the two books would try my readers’ patience, and is probably beyond my mental capacity, so I will not do that today, though the reader might benefit from reading the two books together. I will merely point out Schmitt does not disagree that managerialism, what he calls “economic-technical thinking,” is on the rise. Rather, he thinks it inadequate to meet the political needs of the future, unlike Burnham, who thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) that managerialism was the inevitable solution to modern complexity. Burnham, who rejected any role for any moral or religious thought in political forms, necessarily offers a much less sophisticated (if easier to understand) view of political institutions than does Schmitt.
Roman Catholicism and Political Form is obscure, first translated into English only in 1996, and issued in only one edition (even though it is more of a long essay than a book). Unlike many of Schmitt’s other works, you will find little third-party commentary on this book, at least in English. The translator and annotator, G. L. Ulmen (a man of immense erudition, about whom I can find no other information other than that he has done many Schmitt translations—I am not even sure if he is still alive), says that this book forms a bridge from Schmitt’s earlier works that analyze the sovereign state, towards his later conception of “ ‘the political,’ that is, the friend-enemy grouping,” as more important, more existential, than the state itself. This is plausible, but mostly I think Roman Catholicism and Political Form stands alone as a glimpse into how, in Schmitt’s own mind, personal religiosity intersected with his political theories.
Roman Catholicism and Political Form is the only one of Schmitt’s books in which his Catholic religious belief materially colors his political analysis. Schmitt was, for many purposes, an admirer of Thomas Hobbes, and he often used Hobbes as a type of sounding board for his own thought. Hobbes was not a wholly orthodox Christian, but it is key to Schmitt’s thinking here what he said much later (in a quote offered by Ulmen, from an otherwise untranslated article): “The most important statement of Thomas Hobbes remains: Jesus is the Christ. Such a statement retains its power even when it is relegated to the margins of an intellectual construct, even when it appears to have been banished to the outer reaches of the conceptual system.” At root, it seems, Schmitt believed not only that the Roman Church was a crucial political form, but that it was unique, because what it says is true. You cannot understand this book unless you grasp that claim.
This religious cast enhances, rather than limits, the book. One of the many intellectual inheritances we lost over the course of the twentieth century was a proper appreciation of the intersection of religious thinking and politics. The assumption today is either that the two are irrelevant to each other, or that religion poisons politics. Tedious and false histories of religious wars are offered to show we must be ruled by so-called liberal democracy, which is anti-religious in its nature, and therefore nobody explores what religion, both historically and intellectually, means for politics. Except for Schmitt—who in this as in everything else, isn’t even on the same planet with modern political philosophers, mostly mentally-defective nobodies such as John Rawls.
The immediate political backdrop is also important here. Catholicism was, in a way not comprehensible to modern Americans, a major political force in 1920s Germany. Most explicitly this was through the Centre Party, with which Schmitt was associated at the time, and which was an open vehicle for applied Catholic thought. Aside from the Centre Party, however, Catholics as Catholics were very highly influential in all areas of ruling class intellectual life—not just in politics, but in everything from art to history. We now think of a “Catholic thinker” as a thinker focused on religion; but Catholic thinkers were, before the great wave of apostasy swept the continent, a key part of all intellectual discussion in every European country, and their Catholicism was not in any way a bar to their relevance. Therefore, when Roman Catholicism and Political Form attempts to justify the role of the Church in European politics, as a separate, but compatible and mediating, force on the continent, Schmitt’s argument was not jarring to his readers in a way a comparable, updated claim would be today.
Schmitt begins by noting the fear that the papacy has inspired, in everyone from the Orthodox to Cromwell to Bismarck, a fear of “the incomprehensible political power of Roman Catholicism.” This is the result of its political form, a term Schmitt does not precisely define, but by which he means the visible manifestation of an organization bound by internal rules, the excessive violation of which, by implication, would destroy the form. The Church’s rules, and thus its political form, are completely alien to most modern thought, and in general never match up to any secular political form. In its nature, therefore, the Church stands apart, and has always stood apart.
Schmitt notes that the idea of the Roman Church having a political form at all is not palatable to many, but he rejects their distaste. He cites Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, and denigrates Dostoevsky’s “fundamentally anarchistic (and that always means atheistic) instinct.” “In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity.”
The Church is often found allied with secular political forms, sometimes closely, sometimes tensely. Schmitt tells us that what seems to the opponents of the Church like opportunism, with the Church now on the side of reactionaries, now on the side of democrats, is not at all opportunism, but rather a sign of the Church’s pivotal position, its “political universalism.” For Schmitt, “[e]very imperialism that is more than jingoism embraces antitheses.” At the same time, the existence of antheses blurs the political form of the Church. The key, in the modern era, is the embrace of papal infallibility (declared at the First Vatican Council, in 1870), which overarches any ambiguities with “the most precise dogmatism and a will to decision.” (We see here part of Schmitt’s core political idea of decisionism.) And the key to the claims embodied in infallibility is “the principle of representation,” which is the “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today.”
What is representation? It is reflecting in a political form what were once called “estates”—the natural groupings of a nation’s people. Schmitt argues that the political organizations which dominate a society are necessarily naturally drawn from the metaphysical views of those who live in that society. By representation, Schmitt does not mean variants on parliamentarianism, which he derided elsewhere as “endless conversation.” His is not the concern that drove, for example, the revolutionaries who built America, that the people have a voice in the halls of government. He means something deeper, the projection of inherent human tendencies into political form.
Here Schmitt pivots to directly attack “economic-technical thinking,” the basis of all post-World War I European political forms. He means, although he does not use the word, the techniques of managerialism (often combined with the emancipatory beliefs of the Enlightenment, more or less what Schmitt usually meant when he referred to “liberalism”). Economic-technical thinking aspires to universality; it is dominant over both the modern capitalist and the industrial proletarian. “The big industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin—an ‘electrified earth.’ They disagree essentially only on the correct method of electrification.” Economic-technical thinking rejects representation; it offers technocracy, and through that both economic and military power.
The Church, in contrast, has neither. Instead, it has “an absolute realization of authority” gained through “its capacity to assume juridical form” and “because it has the power of representation . . . of the Person of Christ Himself: God become man in historical reality.” The Church is therefore the sole remaining representative entity, that is, an institution that organically represents a crucial tendency in all human societies, such as “the emperor, the monk, the knight, the merchant,” who earlier each had their own representations, embodied in varying political forms. Representation is the result of authority, however, not just a projection of some group, and so it cannot exist without authority. This is why none of these representations, save the Church, exist any more in any political form. “Once the wheels of modern industry began to turn, [those groups] increasingly became servants of the great machine”—and “the machine has no tradition,” upon which political form must ultimately be based to be authoritative. (The logical progression of this machine, at which Schmitt would probably express no surprise, is Paul Kingsnorth’s Machine, a totalizing political form that purports to subsume all humanity within its frame.)
Because the Church is representative, it is something deeper than the machine, which cannot represent and therefore cannot be truly authoritative, and thus it is impossible that the Church should fully align itself with “the present form of industrial capitalism,” even though it can ally, and always has allied, with other political forms. Catholicism is fundamentally opposed to economic-technical thinking, in large part because it necessarily provides for a broader range of human needs than does economic rationalism. “Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can ‘satisfy.’ ” It does not matter if those are “for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever.” “[A] mechanism of production serving the satisfaction of arbitrary material needs is called ‘rational’ without bringing into question what is most important—the rationality of the purpose of this supremely rational mechanism.”
However, Catholicism is also rationalism—not the narrow, blinkered rationalism of the natural sciences, but “a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical logic and whose focus of interest is the normative guidance of human life.” The thinking of Catholicism is not limited in the way that economic-technical thinking is, yet contrary to what moderns would have us believe, it is highly rational, the result of absorption of Roman law and institutions. It is “essentially juridical,” which for Schmitt is the highest compliment.
Yes, the form of Catholicism has become more rigid, more “Jesuitical,” since the sixteenth century. This is not so much a reaction to Protestantism, but more “a negative reaction to the mechanism of the age”—that is, economic-technical thinking as reified in political form, of absolute monarchy and mercantilism. The Church erected a “protective shell,” but not as a means of retaining power. “No political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief.” That ethos offered by the Church is one that offers something “other than production and consumption.” The implication is that technical-economic managerialism is doomed by its very nature, although Schmitt does not here purport to say how or why its end will come.
Yet the Church can co-exist with technical-economic systems, while the latter still exist. For after all, they are ghosts, compared to the Church’s solidity. In every age, the Church will “align itself with [a] new order, as it has with every order,” because the Church is inherently a political form, and were the state to be unpolitical, the Church would remain political. Nonetheless, it is better for both Church and state to be political forms, and to thereby act as a type of partners, for their spheres are obviously fundamentally different—as shown by that the change to economic-technical thinking has in no way changed the essence of the Church. (This claim was true in 1923, but we all are now aware that economic-technical thinking has not only changed the essence of the Church, but bids fair to defeat it entirely, unless the odious Jorge Bergoglio is shown the door, together with his minions.)
The fundamental juridical nature of the Church implies a “foundation on the public sphere,” as opposed to liberalism’s foundation on the private sphere, which it exalts beyond all reason. The jurisprudence developed by the Church is the foundation of the political form of the Church, but it “goes further because it represents something other and more than secular jurisprudence—not only the idea of justice but also the person of Christ—that substantiates its claim to a unique power and authority.” In some ways, Schmitt says, this is analogous to “an international court of justice,” which “represent[s] something autonomous vis-à-vis the state”—something very much in the air in 1923, and ironic, given that all subsequent such courts of justice, from Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court, are not in the least autonomous, but represent either victors’ “justice,” or are slavishly subordinate to the ideology of the jurists, today the religion of globohomo, the end-stage of economic-technical thinking.
To return to where we started, Schmitt’s criticism of Dostoevsky as anarchistic, and therefore atheistic, is perhaps the key to Schmitt’s thinking in his essay. Anarchism is the worst of all possible human political arrangements. Economic-technical thinking, whether as industrial capitalism or as Communism, preaches the fading away of the state, one in favor of a self-executing technocracy, the other in favor of the proletarian utopia. Both in fact are abdication of the need to create political forms, and lead to anarchy, which is a great evil. (It is beyond the scope of this essay, and something I will discuss in my upcoming thoughts on Schmitt’s next book, The Concept of the Political, but anarchy is the polar antithesis of Schmitt’s core political idea, decisionism. Thus in most of his writings Schmitt takes great pains to slag anarchism, and anarchy.) But “this formlessness may contain the potential for a new form that might also give shape to the economic-technical age. Having withstood everything, the Catholic Church need not decide these questions. Here, also, it will be the complexio of all that withstands. It is the inheritor.”
It did not turn out that way. If the Church could have, but ultimately did not, perform the mediating role in Europe (and perhaps the broader world) envisioned by Schmitt, what can do that now? Nothing, of course. Europe is over, and economic-technical thinking as master is dying around the globe. It is somewhat of a debility that Schmitt is so focused, in all his works, on Europe, because he did not see it was fated to die, and this gives some of his works an anachronistic feel. What will replace Europe’s once-peerless civilization? I wish I knew. I suspect, however, that if the continent is not absorbed by primitive hordes from the south, whatever replaces Europe will be a throwback. In Schmittian terms, it will offer authority based on representation, and will denigrate economic-technical thinking in all its manifestations, including managerialism. Maybe the Church will even have something to do with it—or maybe the Orthodox Church, a much different political form, but still very much a political form, will have something to do with it.
On a less depressing note, though related . . . [review completes as first comment].
February 6, 2020
The main thesis of Carl Schmitts 1923 pamphlet "Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form" is that political catholicism in essence is "einer spezifisch formalen Überlegenheit über die Materie des menschlichen Lebens, wie sie bisher kein Imperium gekannt hat" (p. 14). This formal prevalence is grounded in a strict application of the principle of (personal) representation, in consequence of which the catholic Church is political in an eminent sense (p. 27). Because of this, it is superior to the dominating ideologies of our time (capitalism, socialism, communism), which are subject to the laws of economic rationalism.
The difference in opinion between Schmitt and me is not political: He laments the exploitation of the earth by industrialism, and the ascent of ideologies which are antithetical to everything I stand for. Although many evaluations are still very hypothetical and dubious, the root difference is theological. You could call it an ecclesiological difference. To Schmitt, the Church is a political body, representing Christ in earthly glory and power (see p. 36, 53). To me, this is a view which devaluates the Church, a 'holy assembly of true Christ-believers' (Belgic Confession 27), "made perfect in weakness". If the strength of the Church must be looked for in political power, then it is unavoidable that it is subservient to the same laws of economic rationalism that have subjected earthly governments. Luckily, the strength of the Church is not measured by any human measure, but God puts these to shame by letting his people 'glory in their infirmities, so that the power of Christ may rest upon them.' (2 Corinthians 12.9, paraphrased).
This fundamental difference also makes me doubtful about many other assumptions and implications of Schmitts rendition of political catholicism, such as his theory that catholics have an intrinsic connection to the earth, because they are mostly farming people (p. 17). I suggest that this is an internalization of certain anti-catholic prejudices present in early 20th-century Germany.
My final evaluation is not altogether negative: there are some interesting ideas in this book, for example that a worldview can use all political forms and possibilities as in instrument for its own realization (it looks like he does not consistently apply this) and on the privatization of religion (which he turns naively on its head). I will continue by reading Die Tyrannei der Werte, which is hopefully better.
The difference in opinion between Schmitt and me is not political: He laments the exploitation of the earth by industrialism, and the ascent of ideologies which are antithetical to everything I stand for. Although many evaluations are still very hypothetical and dubious, the root difference is theological. You could call it an ecclesiological difference. To Schmitt, the Church is a political body, representing Christ in earthly glory and power (see p. 36, 53). To me, this is a view which devaluates the Church, a 'holy assembly of true Christ-believers' (Belgic Confession 27), "made perfect in weakness". If the strength of the Church must be looked for in political power, then it is unavoidable that it is subservient to the same laws of economic rationalism that have subjected earthly governments. Luckily, the strength of the Church is not measured by any human measure, but God puts these to shame by letting his people 'glory in their infirmities, so that the power of Christ may rest upon them.' (2 Corinthians 12.9, paraphrased).
This fundamental difference also makes me doubtful about many other assumptions and implications of Schmitts rendition of political catholicism, such as his theory that catholics have an intrinsic connection to the earth, because they are mostly farming people (p. 17). I suggest that this is an internalization of certain anti-catholic prejudices present in early 20th-century Germany.
My final evaluation is not altogether negative: there are some interesting ideas in this book, for example that a worldview can use all political forms and possibilities as in instrument for its own realization (it looks like he does not consistently apply this) and on the privatization of religion (which he turns naively on its head). I will continue by reading Die Tyrannei der Werte, which is hopefully better.
October 20, 2011
"From the standpoint of a world-view, all political forms and possibilities become nothing more than tools for the realization of an idea. Some of what appears inconsistent is only the consequence and manifestation of a political universalism." (6)
"No political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea, beacuse there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief." (17)
"It is not surprizing that the economic age first succumbs to beautiful externals, for it is most of all lacking in beauty." (22)
"What continually provoked Bakunin was their [Marx and Engels'] intellectualism. They had too much of 'the idea,' too much 'grey matter.' The anarchist can onlu utter the word 'cervelle' [brain] with sibilant fury. Behind this word he rightly suspected the claim to authority, discipline, and hierarchy. To him, every type of cerebralism is hostile to life." (36)
"No political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea, beacuse there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief." (17)
"It is not surprizing that the economic age first succumbs to beautiful externals, for it is most of all lacking in beauty." (22)
"What continually provoked Bakunin was their [Marx and Engels'] intellectualism. They had too much of 'the idea,' too much 'grey matter.' The anarchist can onlu utter the word 'cervelle' [brain] with sibilant fury. Behind this word he rightly suspected the claim to authority, discipline, and hierarchy. To him, every type of cerebralism is hostile to life." (36)
December 5, 2014
*claps slowly*
March 30, 2023
«La Chiesa è una "persona giuridica" ma ben diversa da una società per azioni [...] è la concreta rappresentazione personale di una personalità concreta. [...] Nella sua capacità di forma giuridica sta uno dei suoi segreti sociologici. Ma la forza di attuare questa forma, come ogni altra, la Chiesa la possiede solo in quanto ha la forza della rappresentazione. La Chiesa rappresenta la civitas umana, rappresenta in ogni attimo il rapporto storico con l'incarnazione e con il sacrificio in croce di Cristo, rappresenta Cristo stesso in forma personale, il Dio che si è fatto uomo nella realtà storica. Nel rappresentare sta la sua superiorità su di un'epoca di pensiero economico (p. 38)».
Una società basata su principi economici perde la propria capacità di rappresentanza giuridica, perché è basata non su una rappresentanza ma su dei vuoti principi. Questo darebbe potere alla Chiesa stessa che invece ha una forte rappresentanzione personale. Qualsiasi idea mondana di umanità inoltre, sostiene Schmitt, soggiace ad una dialettica di realizzazione e quindi deve disumanamente cessare di essere semplicemente umana. Per questo motivo, sostiene Schmitt, la Chiesa non ha alcun avversario in Europa tranne la massoneria, perché anche le organizzazioni che promuovono la pace lo fanno in nome di un calcolo e di un fine utile. L'oggettività del capitalista è prossima alle convinzioni del comunista radicale.
Citando Karl Kautsky fa notare che la religione non è tanto un affare privato - come la società moderna ha voluto insinuare - quanto un affare di cuore. Si presenta quindi non tanto come un'istanza privata quanto come un'istanza originale e universale.
Una società basata su principi economici perde la propria capacità di rappresentanza giuridica, perché è basata non su una rappresentanza ma su dei vuoti principi. Questo darebbe potere alla Chiesa stessa che invece ha una forte rappresentanzione personale. Qualsiasi idea mondana di umanità inoltre, sostiene Schmitt, soggiace ad una dialettica di realizzazione e quindi deve disumanamente cessare di essere semplicemente umana. Per questo motivo, sostiene Schmitt, la Chiesa non ha alcun avversario in Europa tranne la massoneria, perché anche le organizzazioni che promuovono la pace lo fanno in nome di un calcolo e di un fine utile. L'oggettività del capitalista è prossima alle convinzioni del comunista radicale.
Citando Karl Kautsky fa notare che la religione non è tanto un affare privato - come la società moderna ha voluto insinuare - quanto un affare di cuore. Si presenta quindi non tanto come un'istanza privata quanto come un'istanza originale e universale.
July 25, 2025
A difficult text to assess. On the one hand it is a kind of rejoinder and theoretical counterpart to Weber's Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism (which is, incidentally, a far better text). On the other hand, it contains many of the original ideas concerning the nature of sovereignty, political theology, and the basis for the supremacy of the sovereign that will mark Schmitt's later political work; and it provides a further insight into the essential philosophical/religious conceptions of the nature of sovereignty that would colour his laying the foundations for the suspension of the Weimar Constitution and the groundwork of the Nazi regime. I would say that the criticism of contemporary Marxist theorists is quite devastating, but honestly most of it is riffed from Weber's analysis of socialism, and Walter Benjamin rose to the task of criticising Schmitt in his Toward the Critique of Violence in the form of a destituent politics. That being said, whether any theory of *constituent* politics can overcome Schmitt's critique of his contemporaries is tenuous.
May 18, 2024
Considerada desde un punto de vista histórico, la "privatización" empieza en el ámbito de los fundamentos, en la religión. El primer derecho individual en el sentido del orden burgués fue la libertad religiosa [...]. Pero póngase donde se ponga lo religioso, muestra en todos los sitios su efecto absorbente, absolutizador, y cuando lo religioso es lo privado, lo privado es también, consecuentemente a la inversa, sacralizado como algo religioso [...]. El hecho de que la religión sea una cuestión privada da a lo privado una sanción religiosa; es más, la garantía, a prueba de todo riesgo, de la propiedad privada absoluta solo existe, propiamente, donde la religión es una cuestión privada.
July 4, 2020
Interesting, well-written.
January 23, 2024
One of the greatest insights into political theology. Totally evil.
December 14, 2024
Schmitt does not like Dostoevsky here :( Oh how things will later change...
April 11, 2025
La primera mitad es impactante.
October 13, 2014
Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) é um autor de referência do pensamento contra-revolucionário, antiliberal e antidemocrático. Dizer só isto, aliás, é dizer pouco. Schmitt foi um nazi desde cedo; e apesar de algumas divergências, traduzidas em ataques de sectores do nacional-socialismo (em nazismo não se pode dizer "mais radicais"...), a verdade é que o autor leccionou na Universidade de Berlim entre 1933 e 1945 -- ou seja, em todo o período em que o führer e os seus sicários estiveram no poder.
Este ensaio de 1925 pretende reagir ao ataque à Igreja Católica, que ele então denunciava, definindo-a como efectiva representação de Cristo no Mundo: «Ela representa a civitas humana, ela apresenta a cada instante a união histórica entre o devir humano e o sacrifício de Cristo na cruz, ela representa o próprio Cristo pessoalmente, o Deus que se tornou homem na realidade histórica. No representativo assenta a sua supremacia sobre uma época de pensar económico.» (p. 33) E, como seria de esperar, põe nos antípodas duma sociedade regida pela política e pelo direito (oh, ironia...), tanto capitalismo como bolchevismo, alegadamente pólos opostos duma mesma mundivisão: «O grande patrão não tem nenhum outro ideal senão o de Lenine: o de uma "terra electrificada".» (p. 28)
Schmitt oferece, portanto, a referência de um elemento não racional -- a divindade representada pela Igreja Católica -- em oposição a um sistema que não o pode contemplar -- a perspectiva demo-liberal: de um lado, como de costume, os vectores deletérios: a "técnica" e a "economia"; do outro, o institucionalismo da política estribada no direito, com as dicotomias do costume: matéria-espírito, pragmatismo-idealismo, revolução-tradição.
Da visão da Igreja como figuração de Deus, não posso deixar de extrapolar para uma ideia de Estado à imagem daquela, logo do "chefe" desse Estado como equiparado, senão ao próprio Deus, pelo menos soberano dessa mesma Igreja, o vigário do Deus. Daí ao endeusamento do chefe (do führer a haver), vai um pequeno passo.
Interessante como leitura e exercício, é ideologicamente intragável.
Este ensaio de 1925 pretende reagir ao ataque à Igreja Católica, que ele então denunciava, definindo-a como efectiva representação de Cristo no Mundo: «Ela representa a civitas humana, ela apresenta a cada instante a união histórica entre o devir humano e o sacrifício de Cristo na cruz, ela representa o próprio Cristo pessoalmente, o Deus que se tornou homem na realidade histórica. No representativo assenta a sua supremacia sobre uma época de pensar económico.» (p. 33) E, como seria de esperar, põe nos antípodas duma sociedade regida pela política e pelo direito (oh, ironia...), tanto capitalismo como bolchevismo, alegadamente pólos opostos duma mesma mundivisão: «O grande patrão não tem nenhum outro ideal senão o de Lenine: o de uma "terra electrificada".» (p. 28)
Schmitt oferece, portanto, a referência de um elemento não racional -- a divindade representada pela Igreja Católica -- em oposição a um sistema que não o pode contemplar -- a perspectiva demo-liberal: de um lado, como de costume, os vectores deletérios: a "técnica" e a "economia"; do outro, o institucionalismo da política estribada no direito, com as dicotomias do costume: matéria-espírito, pragmatismo-idealismo, revolução-tradição.
Da visão da Igreja como figuração de Deus, não posso deixar de extrapolar para uma ideia de Estado à imagem daquela, logo do "chefe" desse Estado como equiparado, senão ao próprio Deus, pelo menos soberano dessa mesma Igreja, o vigário do Deus. Daí ao endeusamento do chefe (do führer a haver), vai um pequeno passo.
Interessante como leitura e exercício, é ideologicamente intragável.
March 23, 2016
This is one of those books that I probably need to re-read. This was amazing. I can't put my finger on why though, it just is. It's late though, which is probably why this review is basically useless.
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