Carl Schmitt: political theology and the concept of the political

Abstract

Political Theology, first published in 1922, represents Carl Schmitt's most important initial engagement with the theme that was to preoccupy him for most of his life: that of sovereignty, that is, of the locus and nature of the agency that constitutes a political system. Die Diktatur is a theory of dictatorship; Political Theology, however, is a theory of sovereignty and an attempt to locate the state of emergency in a theory of sovereignty. More importantly, Political Theology discusses that which for Schmitt underlies the commissarial and sovereign dictatorship and makes both of them possible. Schmitt's insistence on the necessarily and irreducibly human quality of political and legal actions is a key. Those who would elaborate a set of rules by which decisions can be made take the politics out of human life; Schmitt is concerned to keep them in human life.