A genealogy of the Krisis: the theological roots of modernity

According to Plato the fundamental characteristic of the ‘politéia’ is to tend towards unity. For, ‘can we think of any greater evil for a city than what tears it apart and turns it into many cities instead of one? Or any greater good than what unites it and makes it one?’Footnote ¹⁸ Yet this ideal unity to which the Republic should aim is basically a ‘dual unity’. In fact, politics in general and the polis in particular can only be a reflection/representation (mimesis) of the original purity of the Idea. We therefore already find in Plato, the problem of the ‘political’ developed as a complexio of unity and duality. Politics is a spurious unity because of the incommensurability between Idea and reality, transcendence and immanence, foundation and movement. This is the reason why, according to Plato, it is the duty of the philosopher, who spends ‘his time with what is divine and ordered’, to mediate between the two worlds, between the Idea of good and social plurality, thus establishing harmony.Footnote ¹⁹ The classical world was imbued with this duality. When, for example, the Stoic philosophers use the term ‘cosmopolis’, they mean precisely the transcendental order (kòsmos) reflected in the immanent and political one of the polis.Footnote ²⁰ Political harmony is a mirror of the universal harmony. For even the City ‘is born representing itself as a “world” that reproduces the sacred order of the universe on a small scale’.Footnote ²¹ Its boundaries enclose an indivisible order made up of space, sacredness and politics. It is no coincidence that this ‘cosmos’ is endowed with meaning through omens and auspices, even through ritual sacrifices.Footnote ²² Yet with the advent of Christianity, something changes forever. ‘God become man in historical reality’Footnote ²³ and what had hitherto been conceived as a symbiosis of eternal and temporal, this world and the hereafter, was transformed into a friction between transcendence and immanence, sacred and profane, ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘kingdom of Caesar’. This is the beginning of ‘Political Theology’ in a proper sense as well as of the ‘fundamental dualism that has dominated the world since the beginning of Christianity’.Footnote ²⁴ For, unlike the ‘dual unity’ which characterises the classical world, Christianity seems to represent itself as a ‘unitary duality’ in which ‘this world’ is significantly devalued compared to the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This separation can be traced back to St. Paul, but it was St. Augustine who clearly divided the two kingdoms, the ‘civitas Dei’ and the ‘civitas terrena’, following Christ's maxim ‘my Kingdom is not of this world’.Footnote ²⁵ Christianity had presented itself by then as ‘peregrina in saeculo’Footnote ²⁶ (stranger in the secular world) but at the same time, it had always to consider itself with the ‘realm of sin’ by establishing relationships (not merely conceptual) between God, Church, and Empire.

It is in such a problematic bond of space, politics, and sacredness – in the two dimensions of verticality (that is, openness to transcendence) and horizontality (closure of political unity) – that Carl Schmitt's theological-political thought is rooted. Since his first works in the 1920s, Schmitt has speculated about how to solve the link between transcendence and politics but above all, the subsequent historical break between these two dimensions that marks the beginning of the modern age.Footnote ²⁷ For Schmitt, modernity is born out of a crisis, or better, out of a spatial revolution that reverberates on the other two fundamental dimensions of social life: politics and the sacred.Footnote ²⁸ On the one hand, this crisis is cosmological as result of the ‘Copernican Revolution’, and of the momentous shift from the closed world to the infinite universe;Footnote ²⁹ on the other hand, it is a geo-political crisis triggered by the discovery of the ‘New World’ which marks a radical change of the global image of the earth which over time would oust Europe from the centre of the world.Footnote ³⁰ But the revolution that takes place between the sixteenth and seventeenth century is primarily ‘the theo-political crisis of the res publica cristiana spurred by the Lutheran Reformation’.Footnote ³¹ It represents both a momentous and paradoxical transition. If, on the one hand, the Reformation is the fragmentation of the Christian unitary ethos and an unleashing of the productive energies of the Protestant individualism,Footnote ³² on the other hand, it brings back the theological-political problems in all their violence, thus mixing together the two dimensions, civitas Dei e civitas terrena, (religion and politics) without any recourse to the mediation of the Church. Therefore, the civil wars of religion are, according to Schmitt, the obvious corollary of this crisis out of which modernity and its political form – the state – emerge. The principle ‘cujus regio ejus religio’ is the result of such a fragmentation of the originary unity because the crucial problem remains the same: political unity and its form. As he writes ‘substances must first of all have found their form; they must have been brought into a formation before they can actually encounter each other as contesting subjects in a conflict, that is, as parties belligérantes’.Footnote ³³ For, according to Schmitt, to maintain political unity within a space it is necessary to have an idea of good. The more it is shared, the greater the unity of form and politics; the more transcendent it is, the more it is able to coagulate political immanence within its borders. But he is aware that the unity broken by the civil wars of religion is no longer theologically reassembling, but rather it begets violence precisely because the various formless ideas of good fight and oppress each other, escaping from a common ethos and enter the energetic field of the ‘political’. The State, therefore, at the beginning of its historical-conceptual formation, was created to restore unity in the European fragmentation triggered by the Reformation; it reproduces an internal homogeneity and an external balance between entities that are considered equal.Footnote ³⁴ Accordingly, ‘theology, the former central domain, was abandoned because it was controversial, in favor of another – neutral – domain’.Footnote ³⁵ This is the beginning of a new (apparently) detheologised epoch marked by Alberico Gentile's ‘juridical cry’ Silete thelogi in munere alieno! (Theologians, mind your own business!) and by ‘the rational and human cultivation of war between states’ in the International law.Footnote ³⁶ The birth of the European state system, the jus publicum Europaeum as defined by Schmitt, was first and foremost just that: the restriction of civil and religious wars that turned into state wars (la guerre en forme), following the order imposed by the political boundary inside/outside (police/army) and by the non-discriminatory mutual recognition of that border/right.

The new order, however, both within the state and outside (in its the inter-state relations), is not pacified but unstable. It is neither a perfect balance nor a well-closed form, but rather it is a field of forces that contains within itself the violence of its origins, the disorder from which it was generated. This is due to the fact that the state has indeed restored order by removing the ‘political’ from the theological through law, but at the same time, it suffers the lack of a foundational substance. It pays a price in order to establish itself in the ‘shadow of transcendence’. For Schmitt, compared to the experience of the Church, the state both lacks and tries to reproduce something fundamental: the capacity of public representation. The Church, in Schmitt's Roman Catholicism and Political Form, is ‘a unity-in-plurality, which clearly has both a metaphysical structure and a concrete significance’.Footnote ³⁷ It is able to represent and mediate in a public manner (repraesentatio is Repräsentation not Vertretung)Footnote ³⁸ between transcendence and immanence, Idea and reality, publicity and individuality. It is therefore a perfect complexio oppositorum (complex of opposites) that realises and solves the disunity mentioned earlier between sacred, space and politics; that is, between veritas, auctoritas and potestas.Footnote ³⁹ But for Schmitt, once the state that he sees as a necessary political form (in fact, for him history can never go back) ‘becomes a leviathan, it disappears from the world of representations’.Footnote ⁴⁰ For political modernity, in which the state is the vital core, is ‘acephalous’. It is structured in the absence of a transcendent and foundational substance – cutting its ties with an idea of good – but in order to survive, it cannot do without it and thus imitates its forms. Hence, for Schmitt the historical process of secularisation, understood here as a temporal dimension, deforms, but does not transform, the sacred into the secular. The relation between these two dimensions is structured by analogy, not in the sense of an analogy entis but rather as an analogy that is a constant presence-in-absence.Footnote ⁴¹ On the one hand, modern politics is structured ‘in the absence of a “divine substance” as opposed to theology but, on the other hand, it reproduces, although only in a formal-rational way, the same monistic governing function’.Footnote ⁴² The monarchical formula ‘One God-One King’ has been replaced with the democratic one ‘One God-One People’ and over time has transformed into ‘One God-One Nation’, even into ‘One-God-One Humanity’.Footnote ⁴³ For Schmitt, in short, the link between transcendence and power lingers on not only in space but also in time. This permanency is an absence-presence, an aporia that the liberal-individualistic thought wants to delete but cannot exclude, and in which indeed it invariably ends up getting conceptually stuck.

This relationship of formal continuity and substantial discontinuity between politics and theology emerges clearly in the concepts of the doctrine of the state. Where Schmitt writes ‘the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’,Footnote ⁴⁴ he means precisely that the exception is the secularised name by which the modern political science from HobbesFootnote ⁴⁵ onwards calls the lack of a founding principle of the state. At the origin of the state, then, according to Schmitt, there is neither a rational mediation nor a contract which encapsulates political unity for good. The realisation of law (Rechtsverwirklichung) that takes place through the state form is a ‘cut’, a ‘jump’, an originary decision that eradicates politics from the ‘political’, the primeval violence from which the state emerged. For, ‘because the legal idea cannot realize itself’ but needs a particular form before ‘it can be translated into reality’, through the decision ‘authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This means, according to Schmitt, that the legal normativism à la Kelsen which equates state and law remain in ‘the antechamber of jurisprudence’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This approach remains silent vis-à-vis the true origin of the state-form and the fact that, normatively, the ‘decision emanates from nothingness’.Footnote ⁴⁸ At the origin of modern politics (which is essentially a vacuum of substance), the state must precipitate the Idea of Justice within the order of its borders, transforming it into law. This is the task of the sovereign decision. Nonetheless, it does not mean that Schmitt is against the rule of law, nor a warmonger always open to the exception – for ‘both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the juristic’.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the contrary, he believes that to maintain order it is necessary to recognise that at the origin of modernity there is disorder, not the ‘nirvana of law’, violence and not the contract, the ‘political’ and not politics. The state then removes crisis to the ‘political’; the primeval decision creates a new secular order. This is the meaning of Thomas Hobbes's dictum ‘authoritas, non veritas, facit legem’.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘The truth does not execute itself; it requires executable commands. These are the potestas directa, which – in contrast to the indirecta potestas – authenticate the execution of the command, require obedience, and are able to protect those who obey.’Footnote ⁵¹ For these reason, the state, and therefore those who govern it, must not forget its origins; that is to say that for Schmitt, the state, in order to survive, must remain open to conflict, to the political and not to pretend to remove it through discursive reason. ‘A political order can be based only on openness to disorder: the state of nature must be abandoned but it is impossible.’Footnote ⁵² To sum up, the state, because of its groundlessness, can act as katechon Footnote ⁵³ only if it can live with its insecurity, remaining open to the exception from that was generated: the possibility of violence, the enemy and the ‘political’.

Schmitt's thought, therefore, even if purified from its reactionary and anti-liberal ideology, reveals a fundamental point of crisis in modern political reason that never succeeds in closing on itself completely. He points out how the political form is always exposed to the ‘unformed’, to an ‘originary rest’, to the exception. This ‘point of indifference’, the exception, explodes the rationalistic scheme which conceives politics and the state as being self-grounded on themselves, without the need for external or transcendent support. He suggests that the contingency cannot govern itself but needs a higher Idea. Schmitt is thus critical of liberalism, which claims that everything is self-governing and relies on private subjectivity for the construction of a public architecture. For him, in the private plurality, there is room only for conflict and the tyranny of values.Footnote ⁵⁴ Modern individualism and its corollaries (capitalism and technology) are not capable of giving rise to a stable political form but instead serve to break the existing ones: Christianity first and then the state. At this historical level, therefore, Schmitt sees the state as an historical necessity but also as an unfounded form constantly exposed to the risk of the ‘political’. As we shall see, precisely because of the closure of the immanent order to itself, according to Schmitt, the state initiates an entropic process through which it is overwhelmed by the industrial and technological forces that will lead to a new spatial revolution and thus to the re-emergence of a new relationship between sacredness, space, and politics.

Within and beyond the unity: universes and pluriverses

Schmitt's Political Theology is a reflection on the origins of modern political form and of its necessary openness to the transcendental idea. But at the same time, the analysis opens another dimension: the (apparent) closure of the state and the problem of maintaining its political unity. Again, Schmitt does not consider the relation between transcendence and immanence, religion and politics, ethics and state as polar dimensions. He contrasts the discontinuity created by the great modern separation between religion and politics, sacred and secular, private and public carried out through the rational mediation of the state. Modern politics and its institutions, according to him, have been self-constituted in an imitation of religious concepts that is an emptying but not an exceeding of the theological categories. Thus, the claim of the modern state of being self-founded, to completely neutralise religious issues, and to rationalise social life, is jeopardised by the same rational forces (economy and technology) that the state, as machina machinarum, has unleashed. If the state, in its European expansion, had as telos a principle of order, this principle is the result of historical contingency (the civil wars of religion) and of a genealogical necessity (the Hellenistic and Christian's legacies). Yet once the state has emancipated itself (only formally) from the theological, ‘the ethical question of fidelity and loyalty must get a different answer from the one it gets in the case of a univocal, transcendent and comprehensive unity’.Footnote ⁵⁵

In order to maintain its unity within new secular borders the state must solve the question of the link between legitimacy and legality, political unity and plurality of the social body.Footnote ⁵⁶ Given the substantial decline of transcendence as a unifying principle, the new ethics of state, to keep the unity alive, must have recourse to a process of homogenisation of social differences. As Schmitt puts it: ‘Political unity is the highest unity – not because it is an omnipotent dictator, or because it levels out all others unities, but because it decides, and has the potential to prevent all other opposing groups from dissociating into a state of extreme enmity’;Footnote ⁵⁷ which is, in fact, a return to the violent origins of the state. The plurality, according to Schmitt, is conceptually possible only between states and not within them because there is the danger that different sources of legitimacy may break the political unity. The only plurality possible is a world of states. As he writes in his famous Concept of the Political: ‘The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe. In this sense every theory of the State is pluralistic even though in a different way from the domestic theory of pluralism’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The state is the decisive political unity because it is able to dominate the political, deciding the enemy and enclosing the plurality within its borders. The internal pluralism is possible because it is the state that guarantees and preserves it. Schmitt's pluralism is based on the superiority of the state over other human groups, because it ensures their survival. However, the priority assigned to the state is not against the concrete internal pluralism. Schmitt's political monism wants to contrast the dangers of multiple fidelities:

For him ‘the world of objective spirit’ is always made up of a diversity of peoples, religions, cultures, languages, and legal systems. The problem is that this plurality has to find a place to express itself which can be guaranteed, it must find its own Order (Ortung) and Orientation (Ordnung) and during modernity this was the task of the state. Externally, therefore, the international system is a plural universe made of monads which, to remain enclosed, needs to be open to the possibility of conflict. This is the sense of the political: order is only possible if it maintains openness to the disorder. Internally, however, Schmitt conceives plurality as a pluriverse of associations which, in order to be strong, must to be homogenised and be loyal, just as people are to a higher political unity. This is the conceptual node that makes Schmitt's thought truly dangerous. Given the lack of a common ethos and transcendental substance, order and the internal homogeneity of a state are not maintained ‘automatically’ but they must be politically constituted. Politics is not a ‘juridical artifice’ based on natural law but a political scapegoat created by the ever-present menace of an enemy. The state is a unity composed of movement and foundation, exception and people, friend and foe.Footnote ⁶⁰

According to Schmitt, who follows Weber, the State must be the only holder of the legitimate use of violence. As primus inter pares it has rooted its legitimacy in a system of law. In this relationship of power, the State, within its own borders, does not tolerate any violence. For, ‘the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence.’Footnote ⁶¹ But to be recognised as the ‘holder of the most amazing of all monopolies’,Footnote ⁶² the state requires that its own social body, by which it dominates, recognises its legitimate authority and, consequently, may be accepted in its enclosed borders. In order not to transform the social amalgam into a mere fictio juris, it is necessary that such political subjectivity possesses the attributes of wholeness, unity and homogeneity; that is, it needs to be transformed into people. Accordingly, the people also understood as united and homogeneous, must mirror themselves, so to speak, in the state legitimate power and identify themselves in its enclosed legality system. But it is precisely here that we meet the nodus letalis. Since the nineteenth century, the unity and homogeneity of the people and, above all, the identity between the people and the state begin to fracture, to break up. The ‘broken homogeneity’ finds, in the tensions that run through its fractures, new forms of legitimacy that are considered ‘higher’ than the state. According to Schmitt, new universalist ideologies, Marxism, capitalism and anarchism on the one hand, and the productive and uncontrollable forces of technology and the economy on the other, challenged the system of balances that the state and the state system had established. Historically, states found their nomos, to use Schmitt's term, through the capacity to neutralise their political space (Europe), substituting the arbitrary principle with the domain of law. But the European space not only represented a geographical location but instead an ethos that contained, paradoxically, its own nemesis. Rooted in a ratio through which political form was established (the state) and preserved (via inter-state system), thanks to a limitation (internal/external to the State as to Europe), the jus publicum Europaeum was eventually challenged by the same rationality that had formed it.

The process of rationalisation, in fact, could not accept the political and geographic limits that it had established. The scientific, technological, and industrial forces transcended the boundaries of the world they came from, igniting the planetary spatial revolution of which Schmitt speaks bitterly.Footnote ⁶³ The age of globalisation, then, is (not only) a quantitative but also qualitative mutation of politics. All the classical distinctions, checks and balances developed in modernity in order to guarantee order and unity, become increasingly indistinguishable. The plurality becomes, according to Schmitt, only chaotic contingency. The divisions created by the abstract modern statehood – inside and outside, public and private, religious and secular – all lose value; thus the universalist energies of the private subjectivities are re-mixed in the international arena. In the late preface to The Concept of the Political, Schmitt writes: ‘the classicity lies in the possibility of clear and unambiguous distinctions. Inside and outside, war and peace; and during the war, civil and military, neutrality and non-neutrality; all this is clearly separated and cannot be intentionally confused.’Footnote ⁶⁴ In the global age these distinctions have lost their form and strength. All the abstract categories of modernity are mixed again. Technology and economy have transformed the world by launching what Schmitt has called a legal world revolution.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘This transformation is no less profound than that which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that time man believed that the world found itself in an empty space. Nowadays … space has become the field of man's energy, activity and creativity.’Footnote ⁶⁶ For Schmitt, this revolution is not capable of generating a new political form, or transforming the chaotic plurality into a new ordered pluriverse.

It is from this new fracture that once again the problem of pluralism and political form emerges. A broader problem, given the scale of the phenomenon, which certainly cannot be solved with a forced closure of borders and territories (as Schmitt proposes). The new nomos must be able to contain the uncontainable, that is, the constant mobility that represents the essence of the processes of globalisation. The pluralism of religions and cultures, or the integration and mobilisation of the differences across the international system, proposes in a new way the question of unity and of the common good on which to ground it. The question that Schmitt bequeaths to us is to find a new unity-in-plurality in an international system now crossed by the formless and destabilising dynamics of globalisation.

Plurality, universality, and identity

The genealogy of modern politics illustrated by Schmitt, although conditioned by a Christian conception of history,Footnote ⁶⁷ has the undoubted merit of highlighting some crucial aporias of statehood and weakness of liberal democracy. By contrast, it helps us to better identify the problems of contemporary pluralism (in both its religious and cultural forms) and the underlying weaknesses of the solutions proposed by Habermas's post-secular discourse. Obviously, Schmitt's reflections are useful only if we recognise their dangerousness and anachronism; that is, only if, through them, we try to find a different solution to the problems they raise. This is the purpose undertaken here. Schmitt's deconstruction needs to be opposed to the post-secular argument to show how, between his and Habermas's theses, there is a ‘specular polarity’. In my view, Habermas – facing the new contemporary crisis of space and politics as well as the resurgence of a religious and cultural pluralism – offers a theoretical approach (the post-secular) that does not exceed the categories of modernity but instead is deeply rooted in their logic of inclusion-exclusion. To begin with, Habermas's proposal to reorder the religious and cultural diversity within ‘firmly entrenched states’ is highly contradictory. If it is true that the new plurality emerged as a consequence of the ‘border-crossing’ processes triggered by the dynamics of globalisation (which Habermas acknowledges), it is unclear why the ‘nations’ should and could be considered ‘firmly entrenched’. The plurality of which Habermas speaks is not only created by these dynamics but it is a modality of globalisation; if with this work we mean a phenomenon essentially ‘border-crossing’, which is configured exactly as continuous mobilisation and hybridisation of cultures and borders.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even when Habermas abandons the state as a reference point, because he has in mind a ‘constitutional patriotism’,Footnote ⁶⁹ he is not able to think concretely about the contemporary pluralism. He always set it in opposition to the ‘translation’ and ‘rationalisation’ of the various cultures and beliefs so as to be admitted into the public sphere. In this regard, he writes

Habermas accepts religious pluralism only as a sociological fact but politically it is reduced, through translations and reifications, to a flat, abstract, and rationalised homogeneity. Moreover for him the limit that decides the access to politics, the new democratic limes, can obviously be determined and modified only by secular reason. ‘The contents of religious expressions’ – he writes – ‘must be translated into a universally accessible language before it can make it onto official agendas and flow into the deliberations of decision-making bodies.’Footnote ⁷¹ As Chantal Mouffe has argued ‘the result of such an operation is to reify the identity of the people by reducing it to one of its many possible forms of identification’.Footnote ⁷² It is true that Habermas proposes a form of legitimacy based on the rule of law, but it serves as a means for obliterating differences and homogenising diversity. This argument is fallacious for at least two reasons. First, in a rather unsubtle way, the dominance of Western rationality over all other cultures and belief systems which are forced to follow the universalist-rationalist Western-centric model is established. This model is presented by Habermas as a sort of ‘end of History’. It appears as the ultimate achievement of humanity that does not change over time and cannot be improved through dialectical engagements. Habermas's logic transforms Western rationalism into authoritarian and exclusivist rationalism, that is, into an ‘abstract universalism’. This is a perennial problem of his political theory. As Gerard Delanty points out: ‘By conceiving of universal morality in terms of an evolutionary theory culminating in the discourse of Occidental rationalism, Habermas has failed to see how universal morality may be embodied in different forms in other cultures, both historically speaking as well as in contemporary society.’Footnote ⁷³ Even when Habermas attempts to circumvent this problem, adding the plural to its political formulations and discussing a delimitation of an interculturally shared ‘space of reasons’, he once again falls into the same isomorphic fallacy.

This brings us to the second fallacy and to the relationship between universalism and pluralism faced by Schmitt. A plurality is always something embodied in historical forms. Universalism attempts to frame it within the name of the highest concept of humanity. But the paradox is that the notion of ‘humanity’ is a universal-abstract idea that is embodied only within particular historical forms: the communities and groups of people who are bearers of this idea. The result is to generate discrimination in the name of humanity, that is, to think otherness (religious, cultural, political) as something inferior, unjust, less universal and rational. It is important at this juncture to quote a passage of great intensity referring to the conceptual coupling of ‘concrete-universal’ by Schmitt

It goes without saying that Habermas's post-secular proposal has no imperialistic or intentionally discriminatory purposes. But, eventually, he also falls into the forced ‘assimilationist logic’ when he theorises a strong separation between the state and the public realm in which religious beliefs, once rationalised, would be free to move. In short, Habermas to save the formal equality ends up removing the substantial identity and the concrete plurality of religions and cultures from which our democracies are now inevitably composed.Footnote ⁷⁵ In my opinion, this is not only conceptually weak but also pragmatically dangerous. If Western states are now open systems ‘pierced’ by the processes of global mobilisation, the attempt to close them (although only legally) can generate dynamics of conflict and rupture. Here I am referring to the well-known theoretical proposal of exit and voice.Footnote ⁷⁶ If one tends to formally exclude religious and cultural differences (unless they have ‘rationalised’ themselves) from the public sphere and if one categorically denies the possibility of democratic access to the decision making, the institutional channels of voice could be abandoned in favour of extra-legal actions. That is to say, if the formal equality established via a judicial process by democratic systems is perceived as a substantial discrimination of one's own identity or faith, the most likely outcome would be the failure of the dialogue and the emergence of shady areas of non-democratic and even illegal protests. In sum, we could witness the breaking up of our society into enclaves and subsystems which follow their ‘highest’ form of legitimacy. This was Schmitt's greatest fear: the return of the political in other more absolutist and exclusivist forms.

This problem has been updated and highlighted by Böckenförde through his famous ‘theorem of incompleteness’ of the liberal state: ‘to what extent can peoples united in a state live solely on the guarantee of individual freedom, without a “common bond” which precedes that very freedom?’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Habermas, in this regard, argues that democracy is only a procedure and a dialogic exchange; ‘a method whereby legitimacy is generated by legality’, and therefore ‘there is no “deficit of validity” that would need to be filled by the ethical dimension’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Democratic systems are self-justifying, that is, they find their unity through a system of law. They do not need ethical or pre-political bonds. It is the democratic process itself which frees citizens to participate in the democratic process. Unfortunately the type of participation proposed by Habermas still follows the logic of the exclusion of the ‘other’, the opposition between ‘us’ (Occidental rationalism) and ‘them’ (religious and other cultural utterances). Furthermore, Habermas's conceptualisation runs the risk of reducing the system of legality into mere rules of the game as in the proposition pacta sunt servanda; that is, ‘in a pluralistic dissolution of the unity of the political whole’.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Schmitt polemically outlines, this proposition

What Schmitt fears is, again, the breaking up of political systems at the mercy of a plurality of private selfishness incapable of loyalty to the state and of creating the ‘publicity’ into the public sphere. To counter this problem, Habermas does nothing but recover once again the Western universalism, proposing an ‘ethics of individuality’. According to the latter, ‘the individual has value only as a human being; the prescriptive concept is, correspondingly, humanity’.Footnote ⁸¹ However, this means dealing with the concept of democracy not as a process, an actual openness to exchange and contingency, but as a cultural notion: democracy becomes a Western identity and not a plurality. For Habermas's notion of democracy is, to quote Schmitt, ‘quintessential universalism and monism, and completely different from a pluralistic theory’.Footnote ⁸² Habermas's post-secular account still solves the Schmittian problem of unity-in-plurality through an idea of common good which is exclusively Occidental and which is not concretely open to the ‘other’, and that indeed leaves open the question of legality-legitimacy.

In short, even when he seems to rid himself of the ideals of the ‘rigid Enlightenment’, Habermas reproduces the same logic of exclusion and marginalisation towards religion and pluralism. The final outcome is a fictio juris based once again on the abstract (and aporic) concept of ‘multicultural humanity’. This dynamic of exclusion is not only profoundly linked to modernity but actually represents an ‘inverted modernity’. Compared to Schmitt – who based the criterion for the formation of political communities and the exclusion of others on the friend-foe logic – Habermas opens formally democratic systems emptying them of substantial differences. In the latter's case the exclusion is based on the primacy of Western rationality. Yet there is more. Following Schmitt and his genealogical reconstruction, we discover not only the ‘presence of the absence’ of a transcendental dimension, and therefore the need for the state to cultivate a common good to maintain its unity, but at the same time, he shows how, in an attempt to replace the sacred, the ideals of Enlightenment (which Habermas in part follows) have slavishly imitated the logic of exclusivity and universality. The result is a reversal which does not exceed the principle of exclusion. As Karl Jaspers, from a similar yet opposing perspective, has it:

Towards a new unity-in-plurality

Echoing the earlier criticisms, it is now necessary to rethink at least four dimensions of Western political systems: (1) to think of the state no longer as a closed system (‘entrenched’ à la Habermas), but an open space as a result of uncontrollable processes of trans-state mobilisation (à la Schmitt); (2) accordingly, it is worth rethinking the democratic public sphere, which is being transformed through the processes described above, as a space of dialogue open to all expressions of the actual plurality and not as an arena managed only by a mono-cultural universalism; (3) rethinking the issue of the ‘common good’, which encompasses the problem of legitimacy and, therefore, fundamentally, of loyalty to the political community; and (4) finally, one must understand which is the ‘plural subject’ that is entitled to decide its own political destiny. This means, in short, ‘to think of democratic politics as a form which is essential, but not universal, in which no one may be compelled even though everyone must be respectful as long as they share the democratic space’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Of course, it would be impossible to treat these issues exhaustively, so I offer just some lines of reflections on how to accommodate cultural and religious pluralism.

As regards the first two points, it appears obvious that the state can no longer be understood as an all-encompassing Leviathan. Technology and the ‘mobile complexity’ of the processes of globalisation are continuously opening its borders. Public spheres should open up to new concrete pluralities and no longer treat them as mere differences (as Schmitt and Habermas do in a different way). We should try to understand the public sphere as a space completely open to dialogue, as a type of enlarged communication that only in this way becomes reflexive. Communication understood not as a rational translation and reification of our Western identity but as an expression of multiple pathways and historical traditions that jointly contribute to real democratic development. The learning process, of which Habermas speaks, cannot in fact be founded on a rational-abstract ideal but rather on the plurality of historical paths that are combined together within the democratic space. This was Karl Jaspers's proposal, according to whom it was necessary to be completely open to the different plurality that characterises the human journey in history:

It is clear that such a programme inevitably leads to conflict between the parties. But even in this case, it is necessary to rethink the conflict as a creative moment of democracy and not merely as a crisis of its communicative space. The public sphere must be transformed into a space ‘of contestation forever open, instead of trying to fill it through the establishment of a supposedly “rational” consensus’,Footnote ⁸⁶ for conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Indeed, it represents the vitality and the essence of democracy, since it highlights the limits and moments of crisis in the democratic process. To take part, then, in the ‘democratic game’ the only prohibition imposed from above, the lowest common denominator, would be the renunciation of the use of violence, guaranteed by the state. In this way, the democratic identity would not be a single and stable identity already decided, based on a particular culture, but a plurality intended as constantly changing totality; a plurality within which the various projects of life can flourish ‘through multiple and competing forms of identifications’.Footnote ⁸⁷

It can be seen therefore, upon approaching the third and fourth points, that such a plurality, in addition to the renunciation of violence, must be able at least to depend on an idea of common good to be together. According to Schmitt, it must not be based solely on pure and simple legality but, beyond this, must be capable of contemplating an ‘idea’ of good. For, ‘every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This was clear to Aristotle, according to whom, not only is the idea of common good necessary but to be truly inclusive ‘the elements out of which a unity is to be formed’ must ‘differ in kind’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Even the idea of common good, therefore, is formed through the plurality and the creative interchange of opinions. As he reminds us, along with the language of logic (which he calls ‘apophantic’) there is the language of the passions, poetry and rhetoric, including religion. For, ‘a prayer is a sentence’, even if it ‘is neither true nor false’.Footnote ⁹⁰ It communicates to us one of the many possibilities of being in the world. Aristotle also suggests that the common good cannot be created out of nothing or out of contingency as such, or out of the arithmetic sum of the plurality of opinions, but on a plural concept of good.

As Chantal Mouffe has correctly argued on this point ‘without a plurality of competing forces which attempt to define a common good, and aim at fixing the identity of the community, the political articulation of the demos could not take place.’Footnote ⁹¹ In this democracy which is plural, which is a movement in search of a new and broader foundation and not a foundation that stops the movement, religions as well as cultures have, in my view, a fundamental role. They cannot be treated merely as bearers of exclusivist and potentially violent values but instead more properly as ethical systems of belief. Taken in their plurality of forms, they represent what has been called a philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy), at the heart of which there is an ‘ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.Footnote ⁹² They are fundamental in order to foster a new and plural notion of common good, overcoming the logic of exclusion and balancing the depersonalisation produced by the economy on a global scale. I believe this is the crucial way for the re-establishment of a new democratic space that rests again on the dialectical breath which is the fundamental condition for the affirmation of the democratic rule of law.Footnote ⁹³ Against the ‘sacralisation’ of the law and the advent of the ‘one-dimensional-right’, self-founded and unable to create a substantial political unity, it is necessary to recover the dualistic relation between law and conscience, rules and ethics, pluralistic ethos, and democratic nomos. Accordingly, the space of relation between ‘the sacred’ and the ‘political’ remains open, and rightly so, in an era in which the ‘universal’ human need to come to terms with the ‘meaningless infinity’ of the world has not yet been filled, because of its intrinsic problems, by sheer rationality.