Political Theology Without Sovereignty: Some 20th Century Examples (Voegelin, Maritain, Badiou)

Abstract

Is political theology necessarily a discourse on sovereignty – as Schmitt argues? This paper questions such an assumption and presents three alternative conceptions of political theology which advance a critique of sovereignty and suggest the possibility of a “democratic” political theology. Voegelin, Maritain and Badiou – three very different thinkers – can be read as carrying out a critique of Schmitt’s conception of political theology in that they question the theory of representation that undergirds Schmitt’s account. For Voegelin, as for Schmitt, a people can only exist as a political actor if it is represented: but Voegelin argues that such “existential” representation is not the only form of representation that matters politically – to the contrary, he argues that the sovereign, “existential” representative needs to stand under the philosopher and the religious thinker as representatives, in the political sphere, of a more universalist idea of truth and salvation than the one made possible by political representation. Maritain, for his part, advances a theory of democracy for which the representatives of the people must not be sovereign, but instrumental to the achievement of a common good that is understood in terms of a charter of universal human rights. The bearer of such universal human rights is, in Maritain, a conception of human “nature” which is also evidently theological in nature. Lastly, Badiou’s reading of Paul’s political theology argues that radical democratic universalism can only take the form of a fidelity to an “impossible” event that comes to be “true” in the posterior building of a community of faith. The purpose of this paper is then three-fold: a) to show that a non-sovereign political theology is possible; b) to discuss the critiques by Voegelin, Maritain and Badiou to the early modern (Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau), sovereignty-centered conceptions of political representation; c) to show the ways in which an alternative discourse on political theology functions within a variety of universalist discourses on democracy.