The Theological Foundation of the Carl Schmitt’s Concept of Sovereignty. The Religious Experience of Repetition

Abstract

This article aims to determine the theological foundation of the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty. According to our hypothesis, such theological foundation belongs to the philosophy of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, who, in different works, developed concepts such as exception, decision and teleological suspension of the ethics in relation to the religious experience of repetition. As we will see, such concepts are at the base of the famous Schmittian definition of sovereignty: "It is sovereign who decides on the state of exception" and that defines the decisionism of the German jurist. Thus, by means of the concept of decision, extracted from the Kierkegaardian work and introduced into the doctrine of sovereignty, Schmitt achieves four objectives. On the one hand, it not only begins the criticism of liberal parliamentarism and the bourgeois State of Law, but also reveals the theological-existential foundation of the political unity of the modern State. Second, in the political-legal framework, it updates the fideistic theology developed by Kierkegaard in his work. Finally, in the political-theological framework, he introduces the role of decision as an actualizer of the public role of transcendence in secularized modernity as opposed to the eschatological reserve of theology. To achieve this goal, we will use the method of conceptual theological-political analogy created and applied by Carl Schmitt himself to the history of the European sovereignty.