Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt Thomas Hobbes, the English 17th century philosopher, and Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s ‘crown jurist’, a political thinker and authorof an enigmatic bookon Hobbes, are increasingly relevant today for two reasons. First, they address the problemof political order, so important when wewitness failed states, the privatisation of war, and the rise of political violence that does not derive from the state. Secondly, they are both crucial sources for the use of mythol- ogy in politics; moreover, they address the key issue of our time, namely, the relation betweenpolitics and religion. This collection ofimportant newessays addresses Hobbes and Schmitt as political thinkers, their importance for pre- sent-day politics and society, their conceptions of myth and politics, and Schmitt’s use of Hobbes in (and some say against) the Third Reich. When myth, violence and revelation re-emerge as political forces, it is important to understand Hobbes’s and Schmitt’s answers to the problems of their time – and to those ofours. This book was based on a special issue of the Critical Review of Interna- tional Social and Political Philosophy. Johan Tralau teaches Politics at Uppsala universitet, Sweden. 234 x 156 HARDBACK This page intentionally left blank Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt The Politics of Order and Myth Edited by Johan Tralau Firstpublished2011 byRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,Oxon,OX144RN SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanada byRoutledge 270MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NY10016 RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness ©2011Taylor&Francis ThisbookisareproductionoftheCriticalReviewofInternationalSocialandPolitical Philosophy,vol.13,issue2-3.ThePublisherrequeststothoseauthorswhomaybecitingthis booktostate,also,thebibliographicaldetailsofthespecialissueonwhichthebookwasbased. TypesetinTimesNewRomanbyTaylor&FrancisBooks Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedorutilisedinanyform orbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,nowknownorhereafterinvented,including photocopyingandrecording,orinanyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem,without permissioninwritingfromthepublishers. BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary ISBN13:978-0-415-46264-8 Disclaimer Thepublisherwouldliketomakereadersawarethatthechaptersinthisbookarereferredtoas articlesastheyhadbeeninthespecialissue.Thepublisheracceptsresponsibilityforany inconsistenciesthatmayhaveariseninthecourseofpreparingthisvolumeforprint. Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements 1 1. Introduction: Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and three conceptions of politics Johan Tralau 3 2. Schmitt’s Behemoth Tomaž Mastnak 17 3. Hobbes and Schmitt on the name and nature of Leviathan revisited Patricia Springborg 39 4. Re-imagining Leviathan: Schmitt and Oakeshott on Hobbes and the problem of political order Jan-Werner Müller 59 5. Hobbes’s paradox redux Roberto Farneti 79 6. The liberal slip of Thomas Hobbes’s authoritarian pen Gabriella Slomp 99 7. Does Hobbes have a concept of the enemy? Stephen Holmes 113 8. From Roman Catholicism to mechanized oppression: on political-theological disjunctures in Schmitt’s Weimar thought John P. McCormick 133 9. Hobbes, Schmitt, and the paradox of religious liberality Karsten Fischer 141 10. The significance of Hobbes’s conception of power John Dunn 159 v CONTENTS 11. Order, the ocean, and Satan: Schmitt’s Hobbes, National Socialism, and the enigmatic ambiguity of friend and foe Johan Tralau 177 Index 195 vi Notes on Contributors John Dunn studied history at Cambridge and Harvard. He is a Fellow of King’s College and Professor of Political Theory in Cambridge. His books include The Political Thought of John Locke (1969), The Politics of Soci- alism (1984), Locke (1984), The History of Political Theory (1996), and Setting the People Free (2005). He has been avisiting professor in Ghana, India, Japan, Canada, Italy, and the United States (Tulane, the University of Minnesota, Yale). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, chaired its Political Studies Section from 1994–1997 and served on its Council from 2004–2007. He is also Foreign Honorary Member of the American Acad- emy of Arts and Sciences. Roberto Farneti is Assistant Professor of Politics at the School of Economics and Management of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano and the reci- pient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the J.W. Goethe Uni- versität, Frankfurt am Main. His work has appeared in peer-refereed journals such as History of Political Thought, Critical Inquiry, Polity, Theory&Event,Philosophy&SocialCriticism, TheReviewofPolitics,and Philosophia. He is the author of the book Il canone moderno: Filosofia politica e genealogia (Turin, 2002). Karsten Fischer studied political science, philosophy and public international law at the Universities of Bonn and Frankfurt am Main; 1998 Dr. rer. soc. at Humboldt-University Berlin; 1998–2002 Postdoctoral Research Fellow and coordinator of the interdisciplinary research group ‘Common Good and Civic Spirit’ at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences; 2003– 2006 Assistant Professor; 2006–2009 Associate Professor; 2009–2010 Visit- ing Professor for Political Science at Humboldt-University Berlin. Since 2010, he has held the position of Full Professor (Chair) for Political Theory at University of Munich (LMU). His main focus in research and teaching is political theory, history of political ideas, politics and religion, theories of statehood, democratic theory, politics and law. For his pub- lications, see http://www.gsi.uni-muenchen.de/personen/professoren/fischer/ publikat_fischer.html. vii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Stephen Holmes is Walter E. Meier Professorof Lawat New York University School of Law. Tomaž Mastnak is Director of Research in the Institute of Philosophy, Slo- veneAcademyofSciences andArtsinLjubljana.HeiscurrentlyaVisiting Fellow at the Critical Theory Institute, University of California at Irvine. His field of research is history of Western political thought, with special focus on Hobbes and his Behemoth; the historyof the idea of Europe; and Europe and the Muslim world. He is currently working on Schmitt’s cri- tique of Hobbes. His publications include Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (2002; Arabic translation 2003; Croatian translation 2005); and Evropa: istorija politickog pojma [Europe: history of a political concept] (Belgrade, 2007). John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chi- cago, is the author of Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (1997), Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State (2006), and Machiavellian Democracy (2010), all published by Cambridge University Press. Jan-Werner Müller teaches in the Politics Department at Princeton Uni- versity. He is the authorof Constitutional Patriotism (2007), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought (2003) and Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (2000). He is completing a new history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe. Gabriella Slomp isSenior Lectureratthe UniversityofStAndrews.Sheisthe author of Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory (Macmil- lan Palgrave, 2000) and of Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Vio- lence and Terror (Palgrave, 2009); she is editor of Thomas Hobbes (Ashgate, 2008) and co-editor (with R. Prokhovnik) of After Hobbes International Political Theory (Palgrave, 2010). She has contributed several articles on Hobbes and Schmitt to journals such as History of Political Thought, PoliticalStudies,JournalofMoralPhilosophy,Telos,andCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. Patricia Springborg, formerly Professor in Political Theory at the University of Sydney, is now professore ordinario in the School of Economics of the FreeUniversityofBolzano,Italy.AmemberoftheAustralianAcademyof the Social Sciences, she has been a Visiting Fellow at research institutes in Berlin, Oxford, and Uppsala, and was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award, taken up at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. She is the author of The Problem of Human Needs and the Critique of Civilization: Patriarchal Monarchy and the Feminine Prin- ciple; Royal Persons; Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince; Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, and three editions of viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Mary Astell’s writings. She is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, and co-editor of the first critical edition of Hobbes’s Historia eccesiastica (Honoré Champion, 2008). Johan Tralau teaches politics at Uppsala universitet. He has been a visiting scholar in Tokyo, Berlin, at the New School of Social Research, in Rome, and in Hanover. In 2007–2008, he hosted his own TV show, Kanon-TV, on the Swedish channel Axess TV. His publications include his books, Män- niskoskymning (2002, German trans. 2005), and Draksådd. Den grekiska tragedin som politiskt tänkande (2010); his work has been (or will shortly be) published in journals such as Political Theory; Philosophisches Jahr- buch; Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft; European Journal of Political Theory; and History of Political Thought. ix