Schmitt, Sovereignty, and the Political Decision

Abstract

Along with his definition of the political, Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty is the most famous and influential aspect of his thinking. While this influence alone would warrant a discussion of it, it is also important for our purposes because it is the location where the political, legal, ethical, and theological aspects of his thinking meet. As a consequence of its importance, it is, perhaps, not surprising that Schmitt’s account of sovereignty is significantly more developed than Levinas’s. While Levinas depends upon a notion of sovereignty to develop his account of prophetic politics, he never outlines what it entails to anywhere near the degree that Schmitt does. This is perhaps not surprising given that Levinas’s interests lie primarily in ethics and metaphysics, whereas Schmitt’s are in political and legal theory, but without an understanding of sovereignty it is difficult to know just what Levinas’s notion of prophetic politics entails and, crucially, how it functions. While it is tempting, therefore, to suggest that, on this battle, Schmitt wins, such simplistic point scoring betrays the way that their respective thinking complements one another. By rooting sovereignty in the normless decision of the constituting power and pre-conceptual face-to-face relation, Schmitt and Levinas agree that the foundational aspect of social existence is implicit and non-rational. By appealing to the normless decision of the constituting power, Schmitt seems to offer a way in which Levinas’s thinking on the immediate pre-conceptual meaning of the face-to-face encounter can be developed into an account that explains how the constitution of a state is created and legitimized. By showing how social relations ‘operate’ at the pre-conceptual level of society, Levinas seems to bring to the fore the differentiated forces and dynamics at play in Schmitt’s conception of the constituting power. In other words, Schmitt’s thinking on the normless decision of the constituting power is strong at explaining the way the normless decision of the populace is made explicit in institutional state structures, but weak at explaining how the populace comes to the decision in the normless state. Levinas, in contrast, is the strongest at explaining the ‘mechanics’ of the pre-conceptual level of social interaction, but weak at explaining how this pre-conceptuality becomes manifest in institutional structures. While their thinking does appear to be fundamentally different, if we actually examine them closely, we see that aspects of their thinking do complement one another, especially on the fundamentally non-conceptual nature of social life. Fully exploring the complementary nature of their thinking would require another study based on a number of normative assumptions, but pointing to these issues shows that the Schmitt–Levinas encounter can stimulate further thought.