Cutting to the Chase: Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg on Political Theology and Secularization

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pini Ifergan
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Hans Blumenberg

scholarly journals Political Theology Revisited: Carl Schmitt's Postwar Reassessment

Konturen ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter U. Hohendahl
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
The Relationship

The essay examines the pronounced theological turn of the late Carl Schmitt, especially in his Politische Theologie II (1970). He aim is to understand what Schmitt meant by a “Catholic intensification” in the relationship between theology and political theory. The essay gives equal attention to Schmitt’s polemic against the theologian Peterson, who denied the possibility of political theology, and the dialogue with the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who had severely criticized Schmitt’s conception of secularization. The essay shows that in both instances the opposition merely encouraged Schmitt to sharpen and clarify his own theological position, which includes heretical Gnostic elements.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Democratic Government ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
Theological Concept

This chapter identifies the question of the legitimacy of democratic government as the key site in which the discourse of political theology intervenes. It explains why ‘legitimacy’ is necessarily a politico-theological concept that raises the problem of the representation of a People. It then contextualizes the emergence of political theology in the 20th century as a reaction against the theorems of secularization developed by Karl Marx and Max Weber that point towards the eventual abolition of religion in modern society. The chapter concludes with some methodological considerations derived from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg on political theology.

LIBERALISM AND HISTORY AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR: THE CASE OF JACOB TAUBES

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMIE MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
Theological Critique ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Second World

Before his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes played an important role in postwar German academic philosophy and religious thought. Best known for his leftist political theology and scholarship on the history of Western eschatology, Taubes's thought was influential on mid-twentieth-century debates in Germany about secularization and modern political theology. Outside his relationship with Carl Schmitt, however, Taubes has received little attention in histories of postwar European thought, and few attempts have been made to understand his idiosyncratic work on its own terms. This essay presents new contexts for understanding Taubes and his political-theological critique of the ideological dominance of liberalism in postwar Germany. By analyzing Taubes's thought through the lens of his intellectual quarrel with Hans Blumenberg over secularization, it reassesses his contributions to postwar debates about the political temporality appropriate to a secular and non-utopian social theory, and the consequences of these debates for broader critiques of political liberalism.

Legitimacy of the Modern Age?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Schmitz
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The One

The opposition between religiosity and secularism is the key to both a discourse-historical epochal threshold and the question of the self-understanding of Western modernity. The controversy between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg constitutes one episode in the long-term, many-faceted debate over secularization. At the core of the controversy is the question of how modern science on the one hand and rational law on the other hand can be differentiated as autonomous realms. At the same time, the anthropological framing conditions for a technologized life world are here at issue. Carl Schmitt began the controversy in the afterword of his last book, which criticized Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age in a basic way. Political Theology II thus also became Schmitt’s testament, in which he formulated instructions about how to read the continuity and identity of his life and work.

Secularization, History, and Political Theology: The Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt Debate

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celina María Bragagnolo
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Adequate Treatment ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractConsidering the enormous outpouring of scholarly work on Schmitt over the last two decades, the absence of an adequate treatment in English of Schmitt’s concept of history and the problem of secularization is quite surprising. After all, it is Schmitt himself who claims that “all human beings who plan and attempt to unite the masses behind their plans engage in some form of philosophy of history,” such that the attempt to make sense of Schmitt’s program remains incomplete without a serious treatment of his philosophy of history. This article is an attempt to address this problem by means of his exchange with Hans Blumenberg who, more than any other critic of Schmitt, was privy to the political intentions behind Schmitt’s metaphorical use of theology. While their discussion is extensive and wide-ranging, I focus here on their diverging philosophies of history, precisely that aspect that is most relevant to gaining a more expansive understanding of Schmitt’s arguments, and indeed the relationship between political thought and historical thought.

Divine Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
The Public Sphere

The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed political theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jürgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian political theology, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty.

scholarly journals Czas biednych diabłów. Carla Schmitta krytyka współczesnej mu epoki w drugim dziesięcioleciu XX wieku oraz jego narodziny jako myśliciela politycznego

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 211-234
Author(s):  
Wojciech Engelking
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The Times ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Original Thinker

The author examines the critique of the epoch, which German philosopher of law and political theoretician Carl Schmitt worked out in the 1920s. Since this topic is present in most of Schmitt’s works from that period, author chose to discuss three, in which this subject isn’t considered on the margins, but on the foreground: a text  concerning the poem by Theodor Däubler Nordlicht, Political Romanticism and Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations. While the latter is well known in Poland, the first two – a little worse, as well as the whole reflection and biography of Carl Schmitt in that period. The consistency with which Schmitt engaged in the criticism of the times in which he lived, allows us to show how he was born as a political thinker: main ideas of his political theology have their source in the criticism of the era. In addition, the author presents criticism created by Schmitt on the background of that one developed by other thinkers, to point out the differences between this two approaches to the same epoch. The aim of the study is, first, to bring Polish reader closer to the not-so-well-studied period of Schmitt’s reflection and biography (by reaching beyond the above-mentioned works also to the journal of Carl Schmitt, as well as his youthful literary work Schattenrisse, written together with Fritz Eisler), secondly: to present Schmitt as an original thinker of his era.

Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Jürgen Fohrmann ◽  
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Carl Schmitt

Introduction

Living Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Higher Law

This chapter situates Jewish political theology as a discourse developed in the 20th century, mainly by German Jewish thinkers. It sets out the basic differences between this analysis and the discourse on political theology developed by Carl Schmitt, centered on the need for absolute sovereignty to “restrain” disorder and revolutionary upheavals. The chapter argues that Jewish political theology offers an alternative conception of divine sovereignty and its implications for democracy and revolution. Jewish political theology is both republican and anarchic, attached to the idea of a higher law above human sovereignty and to the egalitarian ideal of a politics beyond domination. This chapter presents the two analytical-conceptual guiding-threads of the investigation. The first is concerned with Max Weber’s category of charismatic leadership and the problem of its functioning within a constitutional idea of democratic legitimacy. The second guiding-thread is concerned with the process of secularization. This chapter argues that Jewish political theology reconceives divine providence in order to criticize the assumption of human progress in and through history.

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