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The Limits of the Political: Transcendent Passions and Carl Schmitt’s Failure in Providing a Theory of Political Stability

Carl Schmitt’s theorizing has been dominated by attempts to secure the state as a bulwark against looming socio-political disintegrations. This paper articulates some important insights as well as limitations of Schmitt’s arguments. The basic assumption of this paper is that political stability requires not just bare peace but peace with a transcendent quality. I take two opposing solutions that Schmitt has offered in regard to achieving ultimate political stability – one neglected in comparison with the other. First, Schmitt proposed the political idea of Catholicism imagined as a transcendent anchor against social fragmentation along with its entailed critique of economic rationalism. Later on, during the 1930s, he abandoned this transcendent grounding for the concept of the political together with the protection-obedience axiom. In this paper I seek to explore the fallacy and limitations of this turn, supplementing my analysis by using the case of Antigone as a paradigm of the fragility of a political order that disregarded the problem of the transcendent, and by drawing on Hobbes as Schmitt’s alleged theoretical model. I suggest that Schmitt failed both in providing a blueprint for political stability, by not taking, unlike Hobbes, transcendent passions seriously enough, as well as in replicating the Hobbesian model for political order, and thus ending up in the totalitarian theoretical framework.

political stability ; transcendent ; political ; protection-obedience ; Schmitt ;

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