This essay sketches certain interrelations between the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss—specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace, as a ground of political authority, Enlightenment rationality with, respectively, political theology and Biblical atheism.1 These efforts originate in the respective authors’ idiosyncratically Catholic and Jewish writings from the early ‘20s, culminate in the their engagement over Schmitt’s Concept of the Political in 1932, and continue, with certain changes in orientation, into the mid-’30s, after the National Socialist Party state usurped the Weimar Republic. As is well known, Schmitt legally justified the Nazi seizure of power and then enthusiastically served the Third Reich for several years.2 Strauss, in a letter from 1933 that has recently received considerable attention,3 responded to the Nazis’ triumph and the republic’s fall by stating that he would rather live in a ghetto than bow to “the cross of liberalism.”4 In sum, unlike Heinrich Meier in his celebrated accounts of Strauss and Schmitt,5 I do not understand their differences in terms of a distinction between philosophy and theology.6 Rather, I understand the Weimar Schmitt and Strauss to be exhibiting, in general, two different forms of theologically influenced political philosophy.
Both Schmitt and Strauss were deeply affected by the early-20th-century crisis of neo-Kantian thought in Germany, a crisis exacerbated by Nietzsche’s assault on moral philosophy and by the unprecedented, palpable horrors of the Great War. This crisis is perhaps best characterized as a widespread perception that Enlightenment rationality could not ground itself: that the most sophisticated system of reason required either a leap of faith to get itself off the ground or some external motivation outside the system itself. In response to this crisis, supporters scrambled to buttress Enlightenment thought by embedding it in various historical narratives. Detractors reveled in the fact that such a “rationality” was clearly susceptible to an unprecedented kind of dogmatism that was, in fact, fundamentally antithetical to reason, substantively understood. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected “form” of any kind, fixated myopically on human capabilities rather than natural limits, and lacked any conception of the structural constraints that condition the possibility of philosophy, morality, and politics. Consequently, for both authors, Enlightenment reason obfuscates “genuine” expressions of rationality and obscures the necessity of political order as such.7
For Schmitt, specifically, Enlightenment rationality’s failure to ground itself philosophically revealed modern political thought’s parasitic reliance on premodern, transcendental forms of authority. Because the Enlightenment did not, as promised, deliver universal truths on which peaceful agreement could be based, mankind in the twentieth century was once again, after a brief hiatus of three or four centuries, searching for the substantive, extrarational, or rather prerational, foundations of political life. Whether superficially linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or economic, the post-Enlightenment basis of political existence would be, according to Schmitt, fundamentally “theological.” While liberals promoted parliamentary deliberations, or a “gapless” system of positive legal norms, or universal principles enshrined in written constitutions, Schmitt insisted that nonrational commitments were required to establish the irreducible bases of political authority.8
For Strauss, while Orthodox Judaism, with which he expresses great affinity, was, as such, no longer available as a political resource, the historical-cultural notion of “the nation” prevalent in contemporary Zionism was too dependent on late Enlightenment, German-Christian categories to serve as a singularly Jewish ground of politics. Neither religious belief associated with orthodoxy nor “timid doubt” exhibited by modern philosophic skeptics from Descartes to Cassirer—nor, for that matter, some characteristically German sublation or synthesis of the two—could, according to Strauss, provide a suitable political grounding in a post-Enlightenment epoch.9
Strauss engaged the thought of Christian anti-Semites like Paul Lagarde for inspiration and guidance in the task of purging Jewish thinking of German-Enlightenment influence. Moreover, Strauss sought to reestablish authority on the conscientious, courageous—and, to his mind, fundamentally biblical—atheism initially exhibited by the great state theorists of the seventeenth century and recently revived by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Strauss insisted that this hard-hearted political-philosophical orientation could be reducible neither to belief nor to atheism; it could be characterized as neither modern nor traditional.10
Strauss conceded that early Enlightenment figures, such as Hobbes and Spinoza, were atheistic enemies of orthodox religion and progenitors of the later unrealistically pacific and intellectually self-devouring forms of rationality associated with Kantian liberalism. Nevertheless, Strauss admired their “harsh” and “courageous” attitude toward the prerational origins of authority, even if they would attempt to legitimate this authority, after the fact, on rational grounds. Strauss attributes to their attitude of moral and philosophic “probity” the basis of an authority that could serve as an alternative to the politically soft and philosophically untenable neighborliness at the core of Enlightenment and liberal understandings of human social life.11
Schmitt’s and Strauss’s respective concepts, political theology and Biblical atheism, each connote something religious that is qualified by association with something else—something that either renders religion more concrete or draws out of apparently antireligious matter qualities that were once associated with religiosity. On the one hand, politics and atheism in each of these phrases make religion more concrete. Once the Enlightenment successfully banished religion to the interior of human conscience and God to the human heart, both Schmitt and Strauss suggest, it essentially marginalized the necessary foundation of all political order. Theology had been, before the German Enlightenment, simultaneously and inextricably religious and political, although the authors will disagree on the extent to which Christianity could be, like, Islam and Judaism, genuinely political in a fundamental way.12
The “biblical” in Strauss’s formulation of Biblical atheism recalls the authoritative and authoritarian role of the Biblical prophet who imposes law upon unruly human nature and who cultivates the fundamental psychological disposition of awe or fear necessary to make this founding possible. While God can no longer be the source of such fear or awe, a prophetic figure might still manipulate the fear that inheres in the irredeemably fragile human psyche—fear that is necessary for stable human interactions.13 Strauss observed that traditional atheisms associated with Epicureanism and Averoism were fundamentally soft; they rejected the harsh rigors of religious observance and diminished the necessity of fear of the divine. On the contrary, Strauss suggests that modern atheism, as expressed by a Hobbes or a Heidegger, confronts and embraces the harshness of human existence, accentuates the necessarily and fundamentally fearful state within which human beings exist, and accentuates the inescapable fact that human beings are in need, as such, of dominion, of being ruled.14
The “political” in Schmitt’s phrase-concept “political theology” accords with the divine-like sovereign power that executive actors must impose upon secular reality so as to save and reaffirm political order and provide the intellectual structures required for the elaboration and realization of morality in human affairs.15 Politics was fundamentally “theological” in at least three ways for Schmitt:
(1) Political phenomena are not systematically predictable. Unforeseeable “exceptions,” which he compares to miracles, inevitably confound and threaten all rationalist political frameworks. An unrestrained political actor must be authorized to identify and confront them. (2) Legitimate authority requires a transcendent source. Divine command, or something like it, rather than the fundamentally groundless rational-legal norms generated by Kantian thought, is the only worthy and stable justification for political rule. In addition: (3) A polity is constituted by a collectivity who believe in it, not by individuals for whom it provides a framework for the pursuit of rational self-interest. Humans identify with, and often kill and die for, political communities on extra-rational grounds; they do not and should not calculate costs and benefits for their own economic advancement or personal self-preservation.
Thus, while the idées générales governing European political thought and practice since the seventeenth century were justified in individualist terms, the return of concrete politics portends the preeminence of groups organized around specific “ways of life,” a point on which Strauss is in complete agreement. Likewise, in his Zionist writings, Strauss associates individualism with assimilation, not with the life of “a people” properly understood.16 However, it would be a mistake to attribute a touchy-feely communitarianism to each of the authors and their respective rejections of individualism. Zionism, according to Strauss, must be supported with “intellectual probity,” moral and psychological resoluteness, rather than mere feeling, affect, and sentimentality.17 Schmitt too was determined to distance his critique of Enlightenment politics from both romantic and organicist conservatism, insisting that his state theory was juridically rational in the highest sense and reflective of a “philosophy of concrete life.”18
Two of the most striking essays of Schmitt’s and Strauss’s Weimar careers demonstrate how strikingly similar were their views on the status of Enlightenment aspirations for perpetual peace. In “The Age of Neutralizations” essay (1928), Schmitt described how modern political thought had manifested itself in successive stages of efforts to neutralize human conflict in the spheres of ethics, aesthetics, economics, and then finally technology.19 Once the technical sphere of the twentieth century exposed the hopelessness of all efforts to render human life free of mortal conflict, Schmitt anticipated that Europe could confidently face the inevitability of war with Soviet Russia, which posed a fundamental, existential threat to the European way of life.
In his “Religious Situation of Our Age” essay (1932), Strauss complained that the Enlightenment had waged war against religious tradition in the name of tolerance, only to render tolerance—that is, the principle of love thy neighbor—the core of religious cum moral cum political life.20 Religion, morality and politics had all previously rested in no small degree precisely on “doubt about the love of the neighbor.”21 This was why even a proto-liberal like Spinoza could not speak of politics with exploring the “political-theological” condition of humanity.
Schmitt, for his part, celebrated the return of enmity as a harbinger of the reassertion of authority, the prospect that in the present moment a new world order might arise afresh.22 Strauss expresses similar exhilaration at the return of sharp distinctions among different groups of neighbors, and thereby the revival of quasi-Biblical authority. However, rather than a self-critical, quasi-liberal Biblical tradition affiliated with the Hebrew prophets, Strauss exclaims “we no longer self-evidently agree with the prophets; we ask ourselves seriously whether perhaps the kings were right. We need to begin from the very beginning.”23
These commonalities notwithstanding, there are important differences in the ways that Schmitt and Strauss draw upon theological resources. Strauss searches for the functional equivalent of a transcendent, universe-creating God who, by existing absolutely apart from humanity, on the one hand makes truly rational—that is, in a paradoxical way, theologically unpermeated—philosophizing possible, and, on the other, can stand as the source of a politically appropriate, profound form of fear and reverence in ordinary people.24 On the contrary, in the early 1920s at least, Schmitt upholds the incarnation, in his words, “the fact that God became man in historical reality,” as the quality that sets humanity apart from mere physical matter, that provides guidance on the contents of moral affairs, and that presents a model for the personal form, in a very substantive sense, that political authority should take.25 Only the sovereign, as a single, living, breathing, thinking, acting man can “decide the exception.”26
Ultimately the two thinkers may diverge most on the question of conscience and its relationship to the human need for “being ruled.” Conscience, as such, is a target for Strauss; unlike The Law, conscience is an irredeemable source of philosophical degradation and political anarchy. It possesses no inherently good moral content, and it encourages nonobservance of the law.27 For Schmitt, conscience can and should maintain a place of prominence in moral philosophy, so long as it remains subservient to the authority of transcendental divinity (made flesh in political form).28
Strauss is famous for criticizing the moral agnosticism of Schmitt’s concept of the political: the friend/enemy distinction as Schmitt describes it, Strauss charged, was morally neutral and therefore shared too much with the liberalism that Schmitt so effectively excoriated.29 As will be elaborated below, Strauss insists that Schmitt provides no criteria by which one can judge the moral quality of the difference between us and them, between friends and enemies. However, Strauss’s Weimar writings betray an acute anxiety about the lack of moral content in his own anti-liberal theory of authority. Strauss observes that the kind of contemporary nationalism necessary to justify Zionism, absent the underpinnings of orthodoxy (which was not nationalistic in any modern sense), leaves the “deeper spheres of spiritual man” empty; he concedes that his own attempt to fill these deeper spheres is “rather negative.”30 I have argued elsewhere that Strauss wishes to revive the fear generated by Biblical religion without access to the positive content that accompanied it.31
By the time Schmitt develops his renowned “friend/enemy” thesis in 1927 and publishes the definitive version of it in The Concept of the Political in 1932, he takes a much more overtly hostile stance toward liberalism than is evident in earlier works like Political Theology and Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Moreover, the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church disappears from his thinking altogether; indeed, in The Concept of the Political Schmitt formulates a definition of politics explicitly and radically divorced from both morality and theology.32 In his mid- to late-Weimar writings, Schmitt describes liberalism as the ideology behind which the bourgeois capitalist nations conceal their hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. International liberalism uses notions of universal morality, pacifism, perpetual peace, and human rights to cripple nations, like Germany, that simply attempt to decide honestly, that is without ideological subterfuge, over friends and enemies.
Moreover, the idea of “humanity,” which Schmitt identifies in the early 1920s as the moral concept shared by Roman Catholics, European liberals, and Western socialists, becomes simply an ideological weapon wielded by the Allies to expropriate and humiliate Germany. “The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion” and an excuse for behavior, exemplified by the Treaty of Versailles, corresponding with “the most extreme inhumanity.”33 The avowed realism cum nihilism of Schmitt’s new perspective would become so severe that Strauss, in his celebrated commentary on The Concept of the Political, quotes Schmitt’s own words from Political Theology to remind him that “the political idea [is] the morally demanding decision.”34
Strauss detects something odd in Schmitt’s claim that the political stands independent of other conceptual spheres, especially the moral sphere. Indeed, Schmitt explicitly and enthusiastically affiliated the moral, the theological, and the political in the earlier text.35 Schmitt’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Strauss excavates from a deeper and less apparent level of The Concept of the Political a rather profound crypto-normative agenda. Despite Schmitt’s warnings that Soviet Russia is putting the political into practice explicitly, and his complaints that the liberal Allies are doing so covertly, Strauss identifies a pervasive fear throughout the work: Schmitt’s fear that the political might disappear altogether and that this would be catastrophically consequential from a moral standpoint. If liberalism were successful in establishing a perpetually peaceful world of commercial exchange, or Russia a universal workers’ paradise, then something fundamental about humanity would be lost.
Strauss recognizes that, for Schmitt, a world without anything sufficiently important to kill and die for is a world in which nothing is important or serious. He emphasizes a passage that obviously echoes the pessimistic conclusion of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, one in which Schmitt surmises that a world without mortal combat among collective ways of life would be a world where life has become the equivalent of sport or entertainment.36 But in cordoning off the question of right and wrong to a separate sphere, Schmitt can offer no plausible motivation for the people who kill and die for the friend/enemy groupings that he describes in The Concept of the Political. In Political Theology and the works written in proximity to it, Schmitt asked Europeans to prepare for conflict with Soviet Russia over the moral principle that he was convinced separated West from East: human dignity, the fact that humanity is more than material to be manipulated technically. There he entertained the idea that liberals, for all his criticism of them, might have been enlisted as allies in this struggle. In the “Neutralizations” essay, on the contrary, Schmitt makes the same call but without the moral cause that purportedly distinguishes Europe from Soviet Russia.
Following his assertion in the main text that the enemy need not be evil, Schmitt states in the essay that Soviet Russia is beyond good and evil. He still describes it in theologically derogatory terms (satanic, demonic, etc.) for reducing mankind to manipulable matter, but he no longer anoints Europe, in contrast, as the home of the theological-moral idea of human dignity. “Humanity,” for Schmitt, is now simply ideological cover enabling the liberal nations to expand their hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Schmitt gives no substantively positive account of why Europe is worth defending from Soviet Russian domination; as Strauss observes, the European spirit or faith that Schmitt opposes to the Russian antireligious, technological spirit and faith, “it seems, still has no name.”37 What kind of person will die for a polity that is not morally good and kill those affiliated with one that is not evil?
Strauss is certainly correct in suggesting that Schmitt has not completely abandoned the moral but merely rendered it subterranean to his argument. The state, for instance, certainly seems to have moral weight for Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. By what standard, what criterion, other than morality, can Schmitt claim that the political is better managed, domestically and internationally, by the state system? Again, Schmitt claims overtly that the political should not be evaluated or governed by moral notions of good or bad, better or worse—the political should just be. Then why should he care whether the political is institutionalized efficiently or inefficiently, that is, in a way that sheds less blood or more? If his claim is that the state system better institutionalizes the political than do nomadic, feudal, or imperial arrangements—that the state best quells civil war at home and forestalls total war abroad—does not this assume that less killing is a good thing, that it is morally right?
Furthermore, if this is so, does not the “order” provided by the state take normative precedence over the facticity of the political? Shouldn’t the state, which secures good outcomes, be affirmed over the political, which may manifest itself in the most atrocious ways, most notably through genocide? Schmitt’s preference is for less, not more blood, contained rather than total war, but his definition of the political qua political sets no limit on lives expended when collectivities act on the friendenemy distinction. How far the horrors of civil war extend, whether or not the external enemy is permitted “to retreat into his borders,” is, according to the stipulations of the concept of the political, left up to the specific combatants to determine.38
Strauss also presses Schmitt on the issue of human nature. Schmitt frequently asserts that genuine political philosophies are pessimistic concerning the nature of man.39 Yet Strauss insists that Hobbes’ notion of man as dangerous but educable, on which Schmitt relies, is not pessimistic enough to justify the kind of authority that will allow Schmitt to overcome liberalism.40 The assumption that man is educable permits the expansion of precisely the kind of freedom that Schmitt thinks develops into a threat to state stability. Strauss notes Schmitt’s hesitation to adopt the position, more consistent with Schmitt’s description of Donoso Cortés in Political Theology, that humanity is morally base, period, and hence in need of dominion, rule as such. Certainly, in that work, Schmitt seemed to understand himself to be operating in a more orthodox-Catholic framework than do counterrevolutionaries like Donoso Cortés. In Political Theology, Schmitt would not fully endorse the Spaniard’s argument for the moral baseness of humanity, rightly identifying it as heresy and, perhaps, insanity.41 In The Concept of the Political it is no longer Catholic orthodoxy that prevents Schmitt from adopting the standard of moral baseness, but the fact that, following Hobbes, he has divorced the category of moral virtuebaseness from politics.
Thus Strauss elucidates, in a manner that no doubt shocked Schmitt, just how “liberal” is his compartmentalizing of the theological, moral, and political—all of which were associated together in Political Theology—and his failure to attribute moral baseness to mankind. If humans are morally base, if they are inherently sinful, if they are inclined to do wrong not only as a result of natural instincts but also because they enjoy doing wrong, then humans are in need of “dominion,” of being ruled, as such. A state that is agnostic with respect to the moral, theological, aesthetic, and soon—that is, a state that leaves judgment and action over these spheres to its subjects—does not exert sufficient authority over its subjects to forestall the civil war conditions that beset Weimar Germany and to prevent the crisis of the state in general. The standard of classical political philosophy, Strauss suggests, unlike its modern successor (of which, here, Strauss considers Hobbes the founder), taught that human beings required a “regime” in the sense of a regimen that regulated all aspects of their lives. A regime, unlike the Hobbesian state, does not merely identify internal and external enemies and satisfy the human desire for self-preservation; it instills habits of behavior with respect to art, religion, economics, and so on, such that the good life is possible. In Strauss’s estimation, only such a regime can rule a morally base humanity.
The Hobbesian state, even as reconstructed by Schmitt, allows dangerous but educable humanity to educate itself in so many supposedly nonpolitical spheres that it remains fundamentally unruly and hence inherently dangerous. Echoing a phrase that Schmitt adopted from Donoso Cortés, when the latter derided liberalism for shifting all politics “onto the plane of conversation,”42 Strauss declares that Schmitt’s critique of liberalism occurs within “the horizon of liberalism.”43 Schmitt has relegated politics to a plane where it does not belong and where it cannot long remain. In a letter following up his commentary on Schmitt’s thesis, the young Strauss pursued Schmitt on the issue of human evil, moral baseness, and the necessity of dominion. Sensing Schmitt’s hesitation, Strauss asks Schmitt whether “the ultimate foundation of the Right” does not in fact require a foundational belief in “the natural evil of man.”44 In a now notorious letter to Karl Löwith, mentioned above, penned only months after his correspondence with Schmitt, Strauss elaborated his own sense of what constituted the fundamental “principles of the Right” that even Nazism should not discredit: “authoritarian, fascist, imperial principles.”45
What accounts for the shifts in Schmitt’s thinking that Strauss detected in his commentary on The Concept of the Political? Two changes in circumstance seem to have profoundly affected Schmitt’s ideas between the publication of Roman Catholicism and Political Theology, on the one hand, and the composition of The Concept of the Political, on the other. Personally, Schmitt had broken bitterly with the Catholic Church after an embarrassing divorce and remarriage. More generally, the drastic economic, social, and political effects of the surrender terms dictated to Germany by the Allies at Versailles in 1919 had become more painfully apparent. These two situations almost simultaneously removed the explicitly Catholic, moral foundation of Schmitt’s intellectual efforts and transformed Western liberalism into an enemy of the same magnitude as Eastern anarcho-socialism.
Interestingly, Schmitt does not yet adopt a more hostile attitude toward Jews in this era. Indeed, The Concept of the Political is dedicated to a Jewish friend from Schmitt’s youth who died serving Germany in the Great War; some of the most respectful passages of the work are reserved for leftists of Jewish descent, Marx and Lukács; and, in an important lecture appended to the work, Spinoza—no less a bête noire for many anti-Semites than Marx or Freud—is placed right alongside Schmitt’s intellectual idol, Hobbes, as a chief representative of “the heroic age of occidental rationalism.”46
This orientation toward European Jews would change after Schmitt endorsed, joined, and actively served the National Socialist regime in 1933. Two points support those who insist that the instances of anti-Semitism expressed by Schmitt at this time were merely rhetorical efforts to better ingratiate himself with the Third Reich: first, he never expressed such sentiments in his pre-Nazi career; and, second, Schmitt’s anti-Semitism seems to emerge only when Schmitt comes under suspicion as a late-arriving and inauthentic Nazi and then to intensify once he is openly denounced by the SS in their publication Das schwarze Korps. Conversely, the main objections to the “opportunism” thesis can be summed up as follows: Schmitt persisted in the deplorable denunciation of Jews and Judaism in his postwar work,47 and his Nazi-era anti-Semitism is too fervent and too deeply entangled with the substance of his arguments to be considered merely cosmetic.
Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, an otherwise astounding interpretation of Hobbes’s use of symbolism, is a case in point.48 When explaining the collapse of the Hobbesian sovereign state, which he considered to be the pinnacle of political theory and practice, Schmitt assigns to the “Jewish philosopher,” Spinoza, the central role in an esoteric passion play.49 Schmitt posits Hobbes’s absolutist state as a “mortal god” that was betrayed by Spinoza on behalf of “his own Jewish people” with dramatically detrimental consequences for Christians.50 The God-become-Man Leviathan state, which came to bring peace and security to humanity, was undermined by the “liberal Jew,” Spinoza; the latter used the subjective freedom of conscience permitted by Hobbes to turn particularist societal forces against the unity of the state so as to benefit the interests of assimilating Jews.51
According to this narrative, Spinoza and the Jews effectively crucify divinity incarnate, the Leviathan state, on the cross of private conscience, unleashing chaos and disorder on the Christian world in the form of the Enlightenment, the age of revolutions, world wars, and even, at the deepest levels of the text, the mechanically oppressive and abusive Nazi state itself.52 This is no ornamental use of anti-Semitism on Schmitt’s part but rather a full-scale appropriation of it into his political-philosophical project in the mid-1930s and beyond.
Indeed, after the war, when the horrors of the Holocaust had been exposed to the entire world, Schmitt, who so enthusiastically supported the regime that perpetrated this unprecedented, unfathomable crime, nevertheless quite chillingly declared: “Verily, the assimilated Jew is the true enemy.”53 This statement shares resonances with Strauss’s stated preference, mentioned at the outset of this essay, for “the ghetto” over “liberalism” in 1933. While Schmitt came to blame the assimilation of European Jews for the corruption and undermining of the sovereign states of Christendom, Strauss in his Weimar writings blamed Jewish assimilation for erecting an insurmountable barrier between the Jewish people and Bbblical revelation. It was better to suffer prejudice, discrimination and exclusion, the young Strauss surmised, than to exchange the Law, spiritual life and love of truth—the heritage of Judaism—for civil liberties, political equality and toleration—the paltry products of a secularized Christianity masquerading as “Enlightenment.” History, experience and prudence compelled Strauss to qualify if not explicitly reject this opinion in this post-war writings.54 Schmitt, as the quote above makes painfully clear, proved impervious to learning of any kind whatsoever.55
1. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (1922; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (1923; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008); and see Leo Strauss, The Early Writings (1921–1932), ed. and trans. M. Zank (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); and Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. E. Adler, (1935; reprint, Albany: SUNY Press, 2002)
2. See Joseph Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Paul Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Propyläen, 1993).
3. See Richard Wolin, “Leo Strauss, Judaism, and Liberalism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 14, 2006) and Nicholas Xenos, Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy (Lanham: Routledge, 2007).
4. See Leo Strauss to Karl Löwith, May 19, 1933, in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften, Briefe, ed. H. Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2001), 624–25.
5. See Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. M. Brainard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. M. Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
6. I follow here the excellent work of Miguel E. Vatter, e.g., “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation between Political Theology and Liberalism,” New Centennial Review 4:3 (2004): 161–214.
7. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 66. And Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 27. And Strauss, “Biblical History and Science,” in The Early Writings, 130–38.
8. See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. E Kennedy (1923; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
9. See Strauss, “On the Argument With European Science,” in The Early Writings, 107–117.
10. See Strauss, “The Testament of Spinoza,” in The Early Writings, 216–24. And Philosophy and Law, 37.
11. This is a constant theme in Strauss’s thought from the period: from his 1921 dissertation on Jacobi (The Early Writings, 53–62) to his introduction in the 1935 Maimonides book (Philosophy and Law, 21–40).
12. See Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 73, 141, n. 25. And Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Symbol, trans. G. Schwab (1938; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14–15, n. 12. See also Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. M. Hoelzl and G. Ward (1970; reprint, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
13. See Strauss, The Early Writings, 178–80 and Philosophy and Law, 101–33.
14. See Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political,” trans. J. H. Lomax, in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition, trans. G. Schwab (1932; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 97–122. And Leo Strauss “Three Letters to Carl Schmitt,” in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. H. Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 121–29 at 125.
15. The following summation is based on Schmitt, Political Theology, Roman Catholicism, and The Concept of the Political, although I will distinguish the latter work from the former two in important respects below.
16. See Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. J Seitzer (1932; reprint, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) and Strauss, “Response to Frankfurt’s ‘Word of Principle,’” in The Early Writings, 64–74.
17. See Strauss, “Response to Frankfurt’s ‘Word of Principle,’” in The Early Writings, 66.
18. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
19. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” (1929), trans. M. Konzett and J. P. McCormick, appended to The Concept of the Political, 80–96.
20. Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” (1930) in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2: Philosophie und Gesetz, Frühe Schriften, ed. H. Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2001), 377–91.
21. Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” 387.
22. Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations,” 96.
23. Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” 389.
24. Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” 387.
25. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 19.
26. Schmitt, Political Theology, 2.
27. Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 37.
28. Schmitt, Political Theology, 57–58.
29. Strauss’s “Notes” on The Concept of the Political, 122.
30. Strauss, cited in The Early Writings, 22, 46 n. 89 and 90.
31. See John P. McCormick, “Fear, Technology and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22:4 (November, 1994): 619–52.
32. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26, 37.
33. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54.
34. See Strauss in The Concept of the Political, 115. (Emphasis added.)
35. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 65.
36. See Strauss in The Concept of the Political, 53, 115–16.
37. Strauss, The Concept of the Political, 106.
38. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 36, 27.
39. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 58.
40. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 105–7, 111–16.
41. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 57, 63, 65.
42. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 59.
43. Strauss in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 122. 44. Strauss in Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, 125.
45. See Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, 625.
46. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19, 63, 70, 83.
47. See Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–51 (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 18.
48. See Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State.
49. See Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State, 55.
50. See Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State, 60.
51. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State, 57. See Vatter, “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza,” 190–92.
52. Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State, 62.
53. See Schmitt, Glossarium, 255.
54. See Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews” (1962) in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. K. H. Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 311–58, and Strauss, “Preface to the English Edition” (the so-called Autobiographical Preface) in Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (1930; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 1–31.
55. Emblematic of Schmitt’s many unsatisfying attempts at apologia are the essays contained in his Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit, 1945–47 (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950).