Hobbes, Schmitt, and the paradox of religious liberality

Abstract

Research into the connection between Hobbes and Schmitt is still both needed and worthwhile, because Schmitt’s criticism and appropriation of Hobbes not only show Schmitt’s categorical anti‐liberalism, but also highlight what is currently a hot topic of political theory: the compatibility of politics and religion, especially the preconditions for religious liberality. Thus, the present article begins by examining the complicated relationship between religion and politics that underlies Hobbes’s and Schmitt’s different approaches to politics and religion. While Schmitt rightly recognized Hobbes’s role in founding the liberal approach to politics and religion, he misappropriated Hobbes’s liberalism for his own anti‐liberal political theology. Yet, despite its distortions, Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes also forced him to confront the universality of the Western model and the paradox of religion within the liberal system by which religious liberality, for the sake of political liberality, cannot be the result of coercion but must result from a contingent evolution within religion itself. This leads to some concluding questions about the prospects of a religious liberality.