Richard II, Bracton, and the End of Political Theology

Abstract

The most effective example and instrument of “political theology” is the medieval allegory of the king’s two bodies that was reconstructed by the historian Ernst Kantorowicz in 1957 from literary as well as legal sources. As a key term of political philosophy, political theology was introduced by Carl Schmitt in 1922 in his contribution to a Festschrift for Max Weber, whose concept of “Charisma” is clearly of theological origins. Centering around questions of state sovereignty, the ensuing debate on the theological foundations of law and politics since the 1920s included philosophers from Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Unfortunately, the methodological problems of the theological conception of the political—including the specific value of literary and legal sources from the Roman empire through the Christian middle ages to the early modernity of Shakespeare and Hobbes—has found little scrutiny, although Hans Blumenberg’s refutation of Schmitt in 1966 and the late work of Michel Foucault gave ample opportunity for both methodological concern and literary elaboration.