Original scientific paper
The Limits of the Political: Transcendent Passions and Carl Schmitt’s Failure in Providing a Theory of Political Stability
Hrvoje Cvijanović
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Carl Schmitt’s theorizing has been dominated by attempts to secure the state
as a bulwark against looming socio-political disintegrations. This paper articulates
some important insights as well as limitations of Schmitt’s arguments.
The basic assumption of this paper is that political stability requires not just
bare peace but peace with a transcendent quality. I take two opposing solutions
that Schmitt has offered in regard to achieving ultimate political stability
– one neglected in comparison with the other. First, Schmitt proposed the
political idea of Catholicism imagined as a transcendent anchor against social
fragmentation along with its entailed critique of economic rationalism.
Later on, during the 1930s, he abandoned this transcendent grounding for the
concept of the political together with the protection-obedience axiom. In this
paper I seek to explore the fallacy and limitations of this turn, supplementing
my analysis by using the case of Antigone as a paradigm of the fragility of a
political order that disregarded the problem of the transcendent, and by drawing
on Hobbes as Schmitt’s alleged theoretical model. I suggest that Schmitt
failed both in providing a blueprint for political stability, by not taking, unlike
Hobbes, transcendent passions seriously enough, as well as in replicating
the Hobbesian model for political order, and thus ending up in the totalitarian
theoretical framework.
Keywords
political stability; transcendent; political; protection-obedience; Schmitt; Antigone; Hobbes
Hrčak ID:
99496
URI
Publication date:
28.3.2013.
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