Wolfgang Palaver

Carl Schmitt on Nomos and Space

Unlike in Europe, in the US Carl Schmitt remains relatively unknown. His involvement with the Nazis made him an outlaw in academic circles and prevented a proper evaluation of his work. Thus, only a few of his books and articles have been translated into English. Yet, Schmitts work clearly influenced political realists such as Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. Morgenthau dealt with Schmitts The Concept of the Political in his doctoral dissertation and he even met Schmitt once. This meeting, however, was a disappointment. Although afterwards Morgenthau felt he had met “the most evil man alive,” this did not prevent him from appreciating Schmitts scholarly work.

Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism

One of the main differences between liberalism and communitarianism is their attitude to sacrifice. The communitarian critique of liberalism resembles very much Carl Schmitts critique of liberalism during the first decades of this century. In fact, Schmitt may be regarded as an early “communitarian” critic of liberalism. Along with many contemporary communitarians, Schmitt convincingly demonstrated the importance of religion to social life. His positive reading of sacrifice and his critique of liberalism are deeply rooted in his Catholicism. But ultimately liberalism is also an offspring of Christianity. The liberal rejection of sacrifice has its foundation in Christian theology. How can Christianity be both the root of the liberal rejection of sacrifice and the theological foundation of a communitarian critique of this position?

Leopold Kohr: Prophet of a Federal Europe?

Since 1991, more than a dozen states have become independent in Europe, resulting in drastic changes in the continents political map. These developments bother West Europeans attempting to unify Europe. But is disintegration necessarily incompatible with integration? Fifty years ago Leopold Kohr, an Austrian-born economist, published an article in which he called for the disintegration of the large and powerful European nations as a precondition for a federal Europe. To gain more attention he used a pseudonym (Hans Kohr) in the hope that readers would think the better-known historian Hans Kohn had written the article. The title was inspired by Clarence Streits best-selling book, which argued that a union of democracies was the best way to confront Hitler.

A Girardian Reading of Schmitt's Political Theology

One of the more intriguing things in Carl Schmitts Political Theology (1922) is the parallels he draws between Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853). According to Schmitt both are representatives of decisionism: “Donoso Cortes, one of the foremost representatives of decisionist thinking and a Catholic philosopher of the state … concluded in reference to the revolution of 1848, that the epoch of royalism was at an end. Royalism is no longer because there are no kings. Therefore legitimacy no longer exists in the traditional sense. For him there was thus only one solution: dictatorship. It is the solution that Hobbes also reached by the same kind of decisionist thinking, though mixed with mathematical relativism. Autoritas, non veritas facit legem.”

Violence and Religion: A Complex Relationship

Terrorist attacks by religiously motivated people have led to an identification of violence with religion. We just have to remember the attacks of 9/11, the two attacks in Paris that happened in 2015, or many other recent acts of terrorism that have been committed all over the world. This identification of violence with religion strengthens a widespread bias against religion in the Western world.

Girard and Burkert: Hunting, Homo Necans , Guilt

Rene Girard and the German Classics Professor Walter Burkert developed the most important theories on the relationship between violence and religion in the twentieth century. In 1972, each published, completely independent from the other, their seminal works on the role of violence in archaic religions. In the following, I highlight similarities and differences between these two thinkers.

René Girard and Charles Taylor: Complementary Engagements with the Crisis of Modernity

Girard distanced himself from philosophy so strongly most of the time that only a few philosophers engaged with his mimetic theory. Besides philosophers committed to mimetic theory and Gianni Vattimo, Charles Taylor is one of the few philosophers who has taken Girard’s work seriously. Girard and Taylor are among those contemporary thinkers who address the crisis of modernity without ending up in a fundamentalist antimodernism. Taylor is less apocalyptic, but also does not discount the crisis of modernity, as the original title (The Malaise of Modernity) of one of his books attests. He comes closest to Girard’s apocalyptic attitude when he follows Ivan Illich’s interpretation of modernity as a perversion of Christianity.

Monotheism and the Abrahamic Revolution: Moving Out of the Archaic Sacred

According to Girard, it was the biblical revelation that led from the archaic sacred to the holy: “The God of the Bible is at first the God of the sacred, and then more and more the God of the holy, foreign to all violence, the God of the Gospels.” This difference is at the center of Girard’s theory of religion. His comparison of archaic myths with biblical revelation led him to the discovery of an “essential divergence” or the “biblical ‘difference.’” Following Thomas Mann’s lecture on his Joseph novels at the Library of Congress in 1942, which emphasized the importance of the biblical rejection of human sacrifice, I call Girard’s distinction between archaic myths and biblical revelation the “Abrahamic Revolution.”