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Miguel Vatter - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt
    2020
    Co-Authors: Miguel Vatter
    Abstract:

    The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of Political Theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic Political Theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and Political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed Political Theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main Political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jürgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian Political Theology, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the Political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty.

  • Divine Democracy - Introduction: Political Theology and Democratic Legitimacy in the 20th Century
    Divine Democracy, 2020
    Co-Authors: Miguel Vatter
    Abstract:

    This chapter identifies the question of the legitimacy of democratic government as the key site in which the discourse of Political Theology intervenes. It explains why ‘legitimacy’ is necessarily a politico-theological concept that raises the problem of the representation of a People. It then contextualizes the emergence of Political Theology in the 20th century as a reaction against the theorems of secularization developed by Karl Marx and Max Weber that point towards the eventual abolition of religion in modern society. The chapter concludes with some methodological considerations derived from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg on Political Theology.

  • Cosmopolitan Political Theology in Cohen and Rosenzweig
    Philosophy Today, 2016
    Co-Authors: Miguel Vatter
    Abstract:

    INTRODUCTIONHermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig have been credited with the "renewal of Jewish religious philosophy" in the twentieth century.1 The expression is ambiguous, and it has led to a division of labor between philosophical and theological receptions of their thinking. As a consequence, the politico-theological aspect of their works has received less attention. However, under the twin pressures of a renewal of interest in Carl Schmitt's Christian Political Theology in contemporary Leftist thought, and of the growing importance of Leo Strauss within Jewish studies, Cohen and Rosenzweig have been recently associated with a form of "Jewish Political Theology."2 This article argues that Cohen's and Rosenzweig's distinct engagements with Political Theology share the aim of providing a philosophical interpretation of the Jewish messianic ideal that is oriented toward a cosmopolitan conception of democracy. Both authors seek in the so-called "diasporic" condition of Judaism those elements needed to reconstruct a conception of peoplehood beyond those offered by liberalism and nationalism.This article puts forward three theses with respect to the conjunction of Judaism and Political Theology in Cohen and Rosenzweig. The first thesis is that the Jewish messianic ideal orients the Political Theology of Cohen and Rosenz-weig towards a form of cosmopolitanism characterized by a conception of the rule of law that is no longer tied to the state or to sovereignty, and in that sense is both supranational and anarchic. In contrast, the Political Theology that Schmitt develops roughly at the same time is designed to defend the sovereignty of the national and imperialist state, and assigns priority to order over law.3The second thesis is that the Political Theology of Cohen and Rosenzweig undoes the kind of opposition between Greek and Roman "Political philosophy" and monotheistic "revealed religion" that Leo Strauss would later refer to as the problem of "Athens and Jerusalem."4 This article shows how Cohen and Rosenz-weig attempt to overcome the division between pagan philosophy and revealed religion by adopting a Platonic-Maimonidean approach to the messianic ideal that undoes the opposition between reason and faith, nature and revelation, articulated by Paul's messianism and transmitted to modernity through Christian Theology.The third thesis of the article is that both Cohen and Rosenzweig work out their idea of messianism in an explicit confrontation with Paul's antinomianism. Current post-Marxist thinkers like Badiou, Agamben or Zizek have theorized their radical conceptions of emancipatory politics by appealing to Paul's antinomian messianism, comparing it favourably with respect to Jewish messianic politics which is believed to entail an exclusivist form of cosmopolitanism. The interpretation of Cohen's and Rosenzweig's messianic thought offered here suggests that theirs may be the more radical form of cosmopolitanism because it is founded on the priority of a "natural" rule of law associated with peoplehood over the "conventional" rule of concrete state orders associated with nationhood.It is well known that Cohen and Rosenzweig were both critics of Political Zionism. The dilemma inherent in their critiques was clearly expressed by Rosenzweig in a fragment from 1920 entitled Der Jude im Staat: since on account of the Jewish messianic ideal "the state cannot be in the Jew," then "it is necessary that the Jew be in the state."5 For Cohen and Rosenzweig, the state in question was the German one, and it had to be lived in under conditions of rising nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiments, exacerbated during World War I, which would eventually bring Hitler and National Socialism to power. Thus, in both Cohen and Rosenzweig a sort of "compromise" or "symbiosis" had to be made, not only with the German state, but also with the German philosophy, from Goethe and Kant through Hegel and Nietzsche, that had accompanied the development of this state until the age of Bismarck. …

  • The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt
    Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014
    Co-Authors: Miguel Vatter
    Abstract:

    Carl Schmitt once defined himself as a theologian of jurisprudence. This chapter argues that his concept of Political Theology must be understood within the context of jurisprudence and not as a thesis concerning the use of religion within politics. In its earlier configuration, Schmitt’s Political Theology is a multifaceted response to two juridical critiques of sovereignty: those of Hans Kelsen; and those of Otto von Gierke and the English pluralist school. In this early phase, Schmitt’s Political Theology is centered on the juridical conception of representation and on the state as fictional personality, primarily as it is found in Thomas Hobbes. Through his extensive engagement with Hobbes’s interpretation of the Trinity or persons of God, Schmitt shows howjurisprudence aids in the understanding of Theology rather than the other way around. Schmitt’s later work is a defense against Erik Peterson’s critique of Political Theology, itself based on a juridical interpretation of Christology.

Goran Sunajko - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Vico’s New Science as a Political Theology
    Synthesis Philosophica, 2015
    Co-Authors: Goran Sunajko
    Abstract:

    The paper considers that Vico’s philosophy developed in the New Science is a position of what would later be labelled as a Political Theology. Therefore, paper starts from the definition of the concept of Political Theology and demonstrates the principles that will put Vico into that specific tradition of philosophical thought. In this meaning Vico’s philosophy is based on the metaphysical tradition and it is clear that it can be characterized as the Political Theology. Vico’s analysis is based on the classical typology of Political community (rule) set by Plato and Aristotle, but it includes the philosophy of history aiming to show, contrary to usual considerations, that the Political forms of government moved from the metaphysical principle of the one (monarchy), the fewness (aristocracy), the all (democracy) and finally ended in a metaphysical postulate of the one that is best expressed again in the monarchy. For this method Vico uses the classical pattern of Political Theology with the principle of divine providence in forming the Political community, because it is a central concept of the Political Theology. That is why Vico shows that the first communities were based on religious postulates, and afterword on the philosophical. The author concludes that Vico’s New Science can be defined as an important piece on Political philosophy based on Political Theology, which, in today’s conditions of material globalization, once more becomes an important position in overcoming the crisis of modern materialism of the world.

  • Vico's Political philosophy as a Political Theology
    2014
    Co-Authors: Goran Sunajko
    Abstract:

    Presentation seeks to reconstruct Vico’s Political philosophy which is based on the metaphysical tradition (regardless of his opposition to metaphysics), and to show how it can be characterized as a Political Theology. Vico's analysis is based on the classical typology of Political community (rule) set by Plato and Aristotle, but it includes the philosophy of history aiming to show, contrary to usual considerations, that the Political forms of government moved from the metaphysical principle of one (monarchy), the fewness (aristocracy), all (democracy) and finally ended in a metaphysical postulate of one that is best expressed again in the monarchy. For this method, Vico uses the classical pattern of Political Theology with the principle of divine providence in forming the Political community, because it is a central concept of Political Theology. Therefore, it is the metaphysical principle of the sovereignty of God which has been transfered into the civil sovereignty and marks the latest instance of deciding located in the metaphysical-one, which marks the sovereign Political communities regardless are they monarchical, aristocratic or democratic. This is why Vico shows that the first communities were based on religious postulates, and afterword on the philosophical. In this framework Vico tries, not entirely successfull, to oppose the modern Political philosophers, especially Bodin, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Although, for Vico the state (government) forms are not, in the formal sense, important because people (plebs) change the form of government under various circumstances, Vico’s ideal form of state is enlightened monarchy, because it is closest to the metaphysical principle of unity, modeled on the divinely established order. The author concludes that Vico’s New science can be defined as an important piece on Political philosophy based on Political Theology, which, in today's conditions of material globalization, once more becomes an important position in overcoming the crisis of modern materialism of the world.

David P. Henreckson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Cécile Laborde - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Graham Hammill - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Political Theology and early modernity
    2012
    Co-Authors: Graham Hammill, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Etienne Balibar
    Abstract:

    Political Theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of Political Theology. "Political Theology and Early Modernity" explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to show not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of Political Theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of Political Theology deepens our understanding of the early modern period.

  • The Marlovian Sublime: Imagination and the Problem of Political Theology
    The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, 2011
    Co-Authors: Graham Hammill
    Abstract:

    Political Theology might best be understood to designate a link between sovereignty and constituting power. The twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt implies this understanding in his chapter, ‘Political Theology’, in his book with the same title. Schmitt adduces Political Theology in order to ague against the eighteenth-century French writer, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes. Sieyes attempts to legitimate the role of the Third Estate in the French Revolution by drawing a fundamental distinction between constituting power, the power to make a new Political order, and constituted power, the power to preserve the already established legal system. Associating constituting power with the nation, Sieyes goes on to propose that the nation inhabits a state of nature that precedes any social or legal bonds and, therefore, has the authority and legitimacy to remake already existing social and legal bonds.1 In Schmitt’s analysis, Political Theology disproves the location of constituting power in what he disparagingly calls the ‘organic unity’ of the people.2 ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’, he asserts, ‘not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic nature’.3

  • Imagination and the Problem of Political Theology
    2011
    Co-Authors: Graham Hammill
    Abstract:

    Political Theology might best be understood to designate a link between sovereignty and constituting power. The twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt implies this understanding in his chapter, ‘Political Theology’, in his book with the same title. Schmitt adduces Political Theology in order to ague against the eighteenth-century French writer, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes. Sieyes attempts to legitimate the role of the Third Estate in the French Revolution by drawing a fundamental distinction between constituting power, the power to make a new Political order, and constituted power, the power to preserve the already established legal system. Associating constituting power with the nation, Sieyes goes on to propose that the nation inhabits a state of nature that precedes any social or legal bonds and, therefore, has the authority and legitimacy to remake already existing social and legal bonds. 1 In Schmitt’s analysis, Political Theology disproves the location of constituting power in what he disparagingly calls the ‘organic unity’ of the people. 2 ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’, he asserts, ‘not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic nature’. 3 Just as Theology needs a God who can intervene in and suspend the natural order, so too does the state need a sovereign who can stand above the law, suspend it, and decide exceptional emergency situations – that is, ‘decide where there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it’. 4 The ‘systematic nature’ of this analogy between God’s and the sovereign’s prerogative enables Schmitt to argue that the people do not and cannot have the same agency, or what Schmitt calls the decisionist character, as the sovereign. Constituting power must be located in the personal authority of the sovereign because the people as an organic unity cannot make decisions outside the bounds of the law.