Carl Schmitt, _Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty_, trans. George Schwab

TOGETHER, TRANSLATOR GEORGE Schwab's introduction and Tracy Strong's foreword take up about fifty pages, only about ten fewer than the text itself. First published in 1922 and then revised in 1934, Political Theology is, Schwab notes, "perhaps the piece that best serves as an introduction" to Schmitt's thought, and since Schmitt joined the Nazi party in 1933, one promptly grasps why this key text may need a contextualization almost as long as the text itself. Whatever insight a Nazi political scientist may afford, you had best handle that insight with care.

I've heard that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe led the way in the rediscovery (and reclamation, we might say) of Schmitt, but I wound up here mainly because of Giorgio Agamben. The "state of exception," a crucial concept for Agamben's Homo Sacer project, is a Schmittian one; further, in addressing "political theology" in The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben often cites not only Schmitt himself, but also Erik Peterson, a theologian contemporary with Schmitt who engaged with Schmitt's thought in a very striking essay from 1935 that I just read last month, "Monotheism as a Political Problem." Clearly it was high time I looked at this book.

The "state of exception" idea arrives early, first sentence of chapter one: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." That is, logical as it may be to say simply that the party that gets to make the rules is that community's sovereign, the true sovereign is whoever it is that can decide to suspend the rules--that party has higher authority than the rules themselves.

Whose authority outranks that of the rule-makers? God's, people might have said once, or that of the church, which speaks for God. Not these days, though, a history I have been learning about as I attempt to scale the mountain that is Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Nonetheless, insofar as a society acknowledges and obeys an authority higher even than the authority of the rule-makers, it is trafficking in theology, even if there are no overt evocations of God. Hence the short book's other grenade, in the opening of chapter three:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development--in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver--but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.

That is, our secularization was not a thoroughgoing top-to-bottom new building, but a remodeling of the powerful structure that was already there. One consequence would be a willingness on our part to let an as-it-were god suspend, with impunity, our laws and constitution, as Hitler did.

Would we let Trump do this? A few of his supporters may see him that way, but I agree with what David Runciman wrote in the LRB just weeks after Trump's election in 2016, that the voters' "behavior too reflected their basic trust in the political system with which they were ostensibly so disgusted, because they believed it was capable of protecting them from the consequences of their choice." That is, folks voted for Trump to send a message of disgust with Washington, but do not actually want him to be sovereign, and are counting on Washington to make sure he doesn't become one. This all goes for Boris Johnson as well, of course.

Theologized politics also gives us an elect and a preterite--and we know how that is working out, do we not?