Abstract
The focus of this chapter is Schmitt’s work on Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1938. My aim is to show that from an analysis of this work we can not only better understand the nature and limits of Schmitt’s admiration for Hobbes, but also, and more importantly, we can gain a better understanding of Schmitt’s conception of hostility and politics. Textual analysis will show that Schmitt strongly approved of Hobbes’s attempt to make domestic hostility impossible and to ensure internal peace, but believed that Hobbes failed to deliver on his promise.
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Notes
See M. Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life: Carl Schmitt and the Political Thought of Late Modernity (New York: Lang, 2006).
Schmitt singles out Machiavelli as a precursor of the nationalist myth famously described by Mussolini in October 1922 before the March on Rome. See C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988), p. 76.
C. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, [1938] 1996), p. 85.
L. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, [1936] 1952), p. 26.
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by E. Curley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, [1651] 1994), p. 36.
See S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1960] 2004), p. 245.
T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (London: Frank Cass, [1642] 1969), p. 139.
E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity (Baskerville: MIT Press, 1996), p. 47.
Schmitt regarded C.E. Vaughan as ‘a distinguished English authority on Hobbes’, C. Schmitt, op. cit., quoted from E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, [1952] 1987), p. 21.
C.E. Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau, Vol. One (Manchester: Manchester Press, 1925), p. 23.
E. Van der Zweerde, ‘Friendship and the Political’, Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy, 10:2 (2007) 147–265
C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Baskerville: MIT Press, [1922, 1934] 1985), p. 5.
C. Schmitt, Concept of the Political (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [1932] 1996), p. 38.
‘Nirgendwo anders ist die Trennung von Innen und Auβen bis zu dieser Beziehungslosigkeit von Innen und Auβen getrieben worden. Die innerliche, restlose Gleichschaltung [...] einer derartigen Bildungsschicht ist ebenso schwierig, wie ihre äuβerliche Gleichschaltung glatt und einfach vonstatten geht’, C. Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, [1950] 2002), pp. 18–19.
An interesting discussion of Hobbes and Schmitt on democracy and the case of exception can be found in T. Sorell, ‘Schmitt, Hobbes and the Politics of Emergency’, Filozofski Vestnik, 24:2 (2003) 223–41.
J. Locke, Two Treatises on Government, 1690 quoted by C.J. Friedrich, Tradition & Authority (London: Pall Mall Press, 1972), p. 66
I. Hampsher-Monk and K. Zimmerman, ‘Liberal Constitutionalism and Schmitt’s Critique’, History of Political Thought, 28:4 (2007) 678–96
W. Scheuerman, ‘The rule of law under siege: Carl Schmitt and the death of the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, 14 (1993) 265–80
W. Sheuermann, ‘American Kingship? Monarchical origins of modern presidentialism’, Polity, 37:1 (2005) 24–53.
Clement Fatovic, ‘The Political Theology of Prerogative: The Jurisprudential Miracle in Liberal Constitutional Thought’, Perspectives on Politics, 6:3 (2008) 487–501
Clement Fatovic, ‘Constitutionalism and contingency: Locke’s theory of prerogative’, History of Political Thought, 25:2 (2004) 276–97
Pasquale Pasquino, ‘Locke on king’s prerogative’, Political Theory, 26:2 (1998) 198–208.
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© 2009 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2009). On Domestic Hostility. In: Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234673_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234673_3
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