The liberal injunction to think for oneself has always constituted a direct challenge to the idea that it is dangerous for individuals to question or criticize the actions or pronouncements of authorities. In its pursuit of what Kant called the “freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters,” liberalism has sought to banish from politics virtually all forms of assent based on faith, even when its conception of reason is rooted in or confirmed by religion.Footnote 1 The secular character of liberalism lies less in the ontological content of its thought than in the epistemological structure of its thinking. In normal circumstances, the liberal ideal translates into a refusal to accept the claims of authorities on faith and a concomitant demand that those in positions of authority provide a full public account of their actions grounded in reasoned arguments and supported by empirical evidence subject to critical examination. But during times of war or other life-threatening emergencies the standards of proof are often lowered if not suspended altogether. As demonstrated since the terrorist attacks of September 11, the executive, who usually has primary responsibility for dealing with emergencies, sometimes receives a benefit of the doubt that would be unthinkable in ordinary circumstances. The reluctance to ask questions in the moments of greatest danger and uncertainty is reinforced by the ascription of extraordinary personal qualities to the executive that can reach the point of deification and make scrutiny of the executive's words and deeds seem downright impious. In fact, the religious rhetoric used in connection with the Bush administration's use of extraordinary powers in its handling of the “war on terrorism” echoes the language employed by John Locke and other early liberal theorists exercised by the problem of emergencies. Despite its ordinary commitment to the moral and epistemological ideal of rational scrutiny, the imputation of certain “godlike” qualities to the executive in these circumstances—both in theory and in practice—is best understood as an effort to secure popular assent to the exercise of extraordinary powers on the basis of faith in the executive.
The impulse to place faith in a seemingly messianic executive who promises to deliver the people from evil lends credence to Carl Schmitt's intriguing suggestion that theology continues to structure modern jurisprudenceFootnote 2—but not necessarily in the way that Schmitt believed. In his view, liberal constitutionalism corresponds to a deistic worldview so committed to the idea of a harmonious system operating according to regular and inviolable laws that it denies the need for an authoritative personal decision to set things right. Just as deism “banished the miracle from the world” when it supplanted theism as the dominant metaphysical paradigm, liberalism banished the sovereign decision from jurisprudence when it replaced the natural law doctrine that prevailed during the seventeenth century.Footnote 3 The metaphysics of liberalism does not allow it to acknowledge even the possibility of the “exception,” which Schmitt defined “as a case of extreme peril” that creates an existential crisis for the state.Footnote 4 However, the liberal conception of executive prerogative, which its progenitor John Locke defined as the “Power to act according to discretion, for the publick good, without the prescription of Law, and sometimes even against it,”Footnote 5 suggests that liberalism may adopt a theistic mindset when confronted with the kinds of emergencies that seem to exceed the capacities of ordinary law. Even though Schmitt believed that liberal constitutionalism repudiates those “personalistic” and “decisionistic” elements of juristic thinking associated with the idea of a transcendent God who intervenes to restore order in an otherwise chaotic world, the appeal to executive prerogative is sometimes accompanied by theistic modalities of thought that compromise liberalism's ordinary commitment to the critical use of public reason.
If, as Schmitt suggested, particular juristic concepts are associated with distinct patterns of theological thinking, then prerogative may be fundamentally at odds with liberalism's normal secularist and rationalist orientation. That may be because prerogative is, to borrow a phrase from Schmitt, “analogous to the miracle in theology.”Footnote 6 Indeed, the parallels are striking. Just as the miracle transgresses the laws of the natural world, prerogative exceeds the bounds of the legal system. Both occur in moments of crisis that are apt to test the people's beliefs (in a benevolent world); both are beyond the explanation of normal laws (of science or of jurisprudence); and both are extraordinary forms of intervention exercised by a single powerful figure.
If prerogative is analogous to the miracle, then the executive who invokes prerogative is analogous to God, if only for a moment. Compared to other juridical means of dealing with exceptional circumstances (e.g., the legislative enactment of emergency measures, the invocation of special emergency powers specified in a constitution, the temporary appointment of a commissarial dictator chosen by the legislature, etc.), prerogative is initiated unilaterally by a single executive acting beyond the bounds of ordinary (human) laws. Exercises of prerogative are often attended by a degree of secrecy and opacity that make an executive's genuine motives as inscrutable as God's purpose, which makes it difficult—morally and epistemologically—to critique the actions of an executive cast in the role of savior. The exercise of such extraordinary unilateral power that lies beyond the full and immediate comprehension of ordinary citizens effectively relieves individuals of their ordinary responsibilities, especially the burdens of judgment entailed in the Lockean prescription to make “use rather of our own Thoughts, than other Mens.”Footnote 7 To the extent that it does so, the effect is to depoliticize the actions of the executive by placing them beyond the scrutiny and contestation of mere mortals. Yet liberal jurisprudence is based on the proposition that the powers of the state—and the powers of those who act in its name, including the executive—are determined by what Alexander Hamilton described as the deliberate “reflection and choice” of the people rather than “accident and force.”Footnote 8
When confronted with a dire emergency that requires measures that have not been authorized by law, the basis of legitimacy within liberalism thus seems to shift, if only momentarily, from the presumed rationality and functionality of legal rules to the supposed wisdom and benevolence of a charismatic executive charged with a divine mission.Footnote 9 The theological rhetoric that has been used to portray President George W. Bush as a messianic figure acting under a “divine mandate” is just the latest in a long, if not always direct, line of attempts to imbue the executive with an aura of infallibility.Footnote 10 The use of such rhetoric to legitimize expansions of executive power in times of emergency is present in the writings of John Locke, William Blackstone, and Alexander Hamilton, the three liberals whose ideas arguably had the greatest impact on the formation of the American presidency. Although none of these thinkers ever claimed that executives who come to power during moments of crisis are personally chosen by God (as President Bush is reported to have said of himself in a 2003 meeting with former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas), their uncharacteristic use of theological rhetoric in defending the emergency powers of the executive has the effect, if not the intention, of insulating the executive from public scrutiny and criticism, at least in the short run. In each case, the fallibility of the executive's judgment compared to that of the people is downplayed if not denied. The subtle (and sometimes overt) deification of the executive by these three thinkers is by no means representative of liberalism as a whole, but it is indicative of how difficult it is for some varieties of liberalism to come to grips with the extraordinary without resorting to those theistic categories and modes of thought they otherwise seek to banish from politics.
It is instructive to consider Schmitt's account of political theology in some detail because his analytical framework helps uncover enduring tensions within certain varieties of liberal jurisprudence. Examining prerogative through the prism of political theology suggests that the exercise of such extraordinary discretionary power by a single individual may be even more threatening to liberalism's critical orientation than it is to its institutional configurations. Prerogative seems to demand the adoption of a personalistic or decisionistic mode of juristic thinking that is structured along theistic lines incompatible with the moral and epistemological commitments of liberalism. The opposition that Schmitt draws between the authoritative decision of an absolute sovereign and the critical judgment of individual citizens indicates that the affirmation of one often implies the negation of the other. The dichotomy between executive decisionism and individual rationalism suggests that liberalism must be on guard against the possibility of deifying the executive—and demonizing critics—whenever it permits the executive to exercise prerogative.Footnote 11
The Political Theology of Liberalism According to Carl Schmitt
Schmitt's claim that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” is based on an ideal-typical analysis that aims to explain modern (mainly liberal) understandings of the relation between the individual subject and political authority central to the concept of sovereignty.Footnote 12 Jurisprudential concepts are “secularized theological concepts” not only in the sense that they are the contingent products of a process of “historical development” that has left various “aftereffects” or “reminiscences of theology,” but also, and much more importantly, in the sense that they exhibit a “systematic structure” or conceptual pattern that is analogous to a particular theological worldview. The clearest examples of this correspondence between theological and jurisprudential ideas can be found in “the structural relationships of ideas between monarchy and monotheism, constitutionalism and deism.”Footnote 13 Theological presuppositions continue to shape our understandings of and expectations regarding legitimacy, obedience, and other ideas connected to the concept of sovereignty even when the content of those ideas has been drained of any obvious or overt religious meaning.
According to Schmitt, the secularization of these concepts has proceeded along rationalistic lines characterized by the kind of calculating and prosaic instrumentalism Weber had identified with the “disenchantment of the world.”Footnote 14 The process of secularization did not banish the theological from the world altogether, though. Rather, it eliminated “all theistic and transcendental conceptions” of God and replaced them with deistic and immanentist conceptions more amenable to the mechanistic and rationalistic metaphysics of modernity.Footnote 15 What defines the metaphysics of modernity, in general, and liberalism, in particular, is the replacement of an active interventionist God with profane authorities such as “humanity, the nation, the individual, historical development, or even life as life for its own sake, in its complete spiritual emptiness and mere dynamic.”Footnote 16
As a result of this transformation, Schmitt argued liberal jurisprudence is now structured along the lines of deism, a theology which “maintains that God is an otherworldly authority” largely absent from and inactive in the world.Footnote 17 Unlike theism, in which ontological priority belongs to a transcendent God whose arbitrary, absolute, and groundless will is the ultimate basis of law, the deistic universe is governed by impersonal and regular laws of nature that obviate the need for direct intervention by God. In short, deism is “a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world.” Citing a variety of Enlightenment thinkers who exemplify the deistic mindset of modernity, Schmitt argued that the miracle becomes completely unnecessary when the universe is conceived as a “machine [that] now runs by itself.”Footnote 18 Rationalist strains of Enlightenment thought assume the knowability, calculability, predictability, and ultimately the manageability of both the natural and the political worlds. Rationalism thus seeks “to produce a politics of mathematical and physical exactness” that denies the inescapable irrationality and irregularity of human existence.Footnote 19 According to this view of the world, there is never any need for miracles in either the natural or the political realms because the world operates according to ineluctable general laws that should be “intelligible and plain to a rational Creature,” as Locke claimed of the laws of nature.Footnote 20
It is these background metaphysical assumptions that explain why, Schmitt believed, liberalism is hopelessly incapable of dealing with—let alone acknowledging—the challenge of the exception. By substituting a deistic metaphysics for a theistic one, liberalism replaced a decisionistic mode of juristic thinking with a normativistic one centered around the notion of an impersonal and rigorously standardized “rule of law” explicitly and emphatically opposed to the highly discretionary and personalistic “rule of men.” Despite the fact that few varieties of liberalism actually adopt the sort of legalistic formalism that Schmitt denounced,Footnote 21 he sought to discredit liberalism as a whole by claiming that it adopts a normativistic mode of juristic thinking that “absolutizes the norm or rule” and denies the need for a personal decision.Footnote 22 Its penchant for resolving all political questions into legalistic ones means that it attempts to fit the particularities of a concrete situation into an abstract Procrustean bed of general rules designed in and for a very different set of conditions. Even though the foundation of liberal constitutionalism (like any other juridical order) ultimately rests on a decision that is itself ungrounded in any pre-existing legal norms,Footnote 23 Schmitt claimed that liberalism seeks to eliminate this type of juristic thinking and subordinate the juridical order to a form of pure normativism that makes no allowance for the exception.
Due to its rigid adherence to normativistic ideals, Schmitt contended, liberalism cannot consistently or coherently permit the performance of a jurisprudential miracle—the sovereign decision—to deal with extraordinary events.Footnote 24 What makes the sovereign decision miraculous for Schmitt is that, like the exception, there is no way to anticipate it or provide for it in advance. There is no way to define in general, rule-like terms what constitutes a miracle because a miracle is an utterly singular and unique event. The rules and procedures prescribed by normativism are simply too general and too restrictive to provide any meaningful guidance on a question that can be settled only by reference to the particularities of concrete facts. It is for that reason that the sovereign—famously defined as the one “who decides on the exception”—must have “the authority to suspend valid law.”Footnote 25 According to Schmitt's reformulation of Weber's classic definition of the state as the entity “that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force,”Footnote 26 the sovereignty of the state rests on the fact that it possess “the monopoly to decide.”Footnote 27 But it is not the impersonal state in the abstract that decides whether an exception exists and what to do about it; rather, it is the personal decision of a charismatic executive exercising extraordinary unilateral powers who makes those critical determinations. It is thus no surprise that Schmitt would come to equate sovereignty with the emergency powers of a unitary executiveFootnote 28—a monotheistic conception of authority that conflicts with the pluralistic (or perhaps polytheistic) predispositions of liberal normativism.
One of the things that makes the decision of the executive appear like a miracle is that it, too, seems to come of out nowhere. It is an act of pure creation, an “absolute beginning” that establishes a new order.Footnote 29 Like the decision on the enemy, which is constitutive of the political,Footnote 30 the decision on the exception is a freestanding and self-validating exercise of authority that makes no appeal or reference to existing norms, rules, or procedures: “The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute.”Footnote 31 For this reason, Schmitt's concept of the decision is not analogous to either Aristotelian or Grotian notions of equity, which place loose normative constraints on magistrates by insisting that the spirit of the existing law must still be upheld even when it becomes unjust or irrational to enforce the strict letter of the law in particular circumstances. Schmittian decisionism is essentially normless, contentless, and nihilistic in its insistence that the “decision emanates from nothingness.”Footnote 32 The juridical “content” that the decision creates is, “from the perspective of the content of the underlying norm, new and alien,”Footnote 33 which means that the validity of the decision cannot be challenged or questioned because there are no external standards or criteria according to which it can be judged.
Exactly what is at stake in Schmitt's decisionistic treatment of miracles is revealed most clearly in his discussion of Hobbes, the thinker who exemplified “the classic case of decisionistic thinking.”Footnote 34 By directing readers of his esoteric study on The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes to read Hobbes in order to understand the “problems associated with a belief in miracles,”Footnote 35 Schmitt was indicating that the miracle holds the key to the political relationship between the sovereign state and individual subjects. The relevance of Schmitt's reading of Hobbes on miracles to the liberal theory of prerogative is that it highlights the fundamental incompatibility between liberal solicitude for the individual right to think for oneself, on the one hand, and the state's invocation of divine power, on the other. According to Schmitt, there is no better demonstration of the “unconditional obedience” that the sovereign state demands than the fact that it possesses the exclusive power to decide “what subjects of the state have to believe to be a miracle.”Footnote 36 The power to decide on the miracle (or the exception) is critical to the state's ability to circumscribe the role of private conscience as a rival source of authority, at least as long as an emergency is believed to exist.
Based on his interpretation of Hobbes, Schmitt concluded that sovereign power is at “its zenith” when “the state in its capacity as the exemplar of the public reason in contrast to the private reason of subjects” decides “whether something is to be considered a miracle.”Footnote 37 From his very first mention of miracles, and particularly in his pervasive references to Moses as the model of a sovereign who decides on both civil and ecclesiastical matters, Hobbes made it clear that the miracle is integral to the maintenance of unquestioned human authority. By directing readers interested in Hobbes' analysis of miracles to Chapter 42 of Leviathan, “Of Ecclesiasticall Power” (which actually contains no explicit reference to miracles),Footnote 38 Schmitt was drawing attention to the fact that there will always be a “praetext of Sedition, and Civill Warre”Footnote 39 when the state is unable to make final, authoritative decisions that cannot be questioned by the private judgment of individual subjects. This was the conclusion that Hobbes had already reached in his vitally important diagnosis “Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the DISSOLUTION of a Common-wealth.” In that chapter he singled out the “the poyson of seditious doctrines,” especially the notions “That every private man is Judge of Good and Evill actions” and “that whatsoever a man does against his Conscience, is Sinne,” as the greatest threats to the survival of the commonwealth.Footnote 40 When there is any question whether any “strange” or irregular occurrence qualifies as a miracle, Hobbes proclaimed that “we are not every one, to make our own private Reason, or Conscience, but the Publique Reason” the final arbiter in such matters.Footnote 41
Although Schmitt came to realize that Hobbes' methodological individualism helped lay the foundations for the liberalism that he despised,Footnote 42 his understanding of the political dangers of private individual judgment was thoroughly Hobbesian. Unless the sovereign became the supreme terrestrial substitute for the divine—a “Mortall God”Footnote 43 in the Hobbesian phrase that Schmitt preferredFootnote 44—there would be nothing to prevent a chaotic war of all against all whenever private conscience is given free rein. According to Schmitt, the divinity of the Hobbesian sovereign has nothing to do with its origins, which are admittedly artificial. It owes its “divine character” to the supremacy of its power.Footnote 45
Liberalism was abhorrent to Schmitt because it reserved to individuals the right to make and remake subjective (and therefore conflicting) choices without any regard to transcendental absolutes. Whereas Schmitt wondered whether it is even proper to speak of a sovereign other than God,Footnote 46 liberalism adopts an agnostic attitude that allows individuals to decide for themselves what is right and wrong.Footnote 47 In Schmitt's estimation, the inability of individuals to come to a final resolution produces destabilizing antagonisms likely to engender widespread disorder. Liberalism's individualistic rationalism is not, as some liberal thinkers have implied, a precondition of agreement or consensus, but a virtual guarantee of disagreement and conflict with the potential to escalate into outright war. James Madison had admitted as much in Federalist No. 10, the cannonical statement of liberal pluralism, when he explained that “diversity in the faculties of men … is … an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.”Footnote 48
The dreadful yet predictable consequence of liberalism's solicitude for deliberation and openness is that it is incapable of deciding on the exception. Since liberalism recognizes no sovereignty other than the sovereignty of individual reason, it has no coherent way to make a final authoritative decision on the exception (or on the enemy, for that matter). The liberal belief in a spontaneous natural order actually undermines the conditions that would make order as such possible in the long run. Moreover, its commitment to “individual freedom and private property” is so stubbornly rigid that it becomes impossible for the liberal state (a contradiction in terms from Schmitt's point of view)Footnote 49 to “demand the sacrifice of life” that may be necessary for the preservation of the state.Footnote 50
Schmitt singled out Locke more than once as the primary culprit in this jurisprudential crime, claiming that “the exception was something incommensurable to John Locke's doctrine of the constitutional state and the rationalist eighteenth century.”Footnote 51 The point Schmitt was making was not simply that any liberal attempt to deal with the exception would necessarily violate its normativistic commitments, but that it would invariably fall short owing to an inability to think beyond the predictable regularities of normativistic jurisprudence. To the extent that liberal constitutionalists like Locke have even acknowledged the existence of the exception, they have attempted to deal with the exception by regulating it “as precisely as possible.”
However, the problem is not that Lockean liberalism renders its executives inactive and “powerless,”Footnote 52 but that it imbues them with “God-like” attributes that justify breathtaking expansions of their power that would not be permitted in ordinary circumstances. Far from adhering dogmatically to some kind of debilitating deistic normativism that would impair the ability to recognize the exception, liberalism sometimes lapses into a treacherous form of theistic decisionism that threatens its core moral and epistemological commitments.
Liberal Responses to the Exception
As a number of recent studies have demonstrated, liberalism—or at least some varieties of it—has proven itself more than capable of dealing with the exception.Footnote 53 Even though there is no evidence that any liberal thinker looks to the exception as a positive “occasion for revivification,”Footnote 54 or explicitly endorses sovereign (as opposed to commissarial) dictatorship to establish a new jurisprudential order, there is an unmistakable appreciation for the occasional contingency, unpredictability, incalculability, and irrationality of the world evident in the political and constitutional writings of liberal thinkers as different as David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, William Blackstone and John Stuart Mill. Such skepticism towards the utility of strict rules is exemplified by Locke, whose theory of prerogative sets his liberalism jurisprudential worlds apart from more rationalistic and formalistic liberals like Kant and Bentham, who do tend to display some of the rigidly formulaic normativistic tendencies decried by Schmitt.
However, the version of prerogative endorsed by Locke, Blackstone, and Hamilton differs significantly from the approaches adopted by liberals like Mill and Jefferson. Unlike the first group, the second explicitly subordinates the executive to various forms of popular control that make unilateral and unaccountable exercises of power impossible. Jefferson does so by requiring the executive to justify the use of extraordinary powers and seek an indemnity from the people or their representatives for acts that exceed the express mandate of the Constitution.Footnote 55 Mill does so by making the executive a creature of the legislature in the form of a temporary dictator commissioned by a popular assembly that has already determined the existence of an emergency.Footnote 56 In both cases, the scrutiny of others is a necessary condition for the valid exercise of extraordinary executive power. But in the case of Locke, Blackstone, and Hamilton, such scrutiny is discouraged by a near-deification of executives that makes an appeal to faith, which directs attention to the quality of their character, rather than to reason, which directs attention to the quality of their arguments.
The Prudence of the God-Like Prince in Locke's Theory of Prerogative
At first glance, Locke's political theory would seem to confirm Schmitt's contention that liberalism preserves the sanctity of individual judgment at the expense of sovereignty—even to the point of rebellion. That, after all, seems to be the point of Locke's Second Treatise. Even Locke's chapter on prerogative concludes with a reminder that the people reserve the right to make the ultimate judgment in political controversies.Footnote 57 However, Locke's discussion of prerogative is far less normativistic and rationalistic than the rest of his Second Treatise. The executive is always subject to the laws of nature, but whether the executive has actually acted in accordance with the laws of nature in a particular instance is not necessarily a matter that Locke opens up to wide debate. In fact, the tenor of his discussion suggests that executives who possess the right personal qualities deserve the benefit of the doubt whenever the uncertainties of life outstrip the capacity of ordinary individuals to make rational judgments of their own. The notion that certain aspects of the political world become inaccessible to ordinary human knowledge—and therefore unsuitable objects of ordinary human judgment—in times of emergency is indicative of the extent to which epistemological considerations inform political considerations in Lockean liberalism.Footnote 58
Contrary to Schmitt's unsubstantiated assertion that the Lockean norm “only designates how decisions should be made, not who should decide,”Footnote 59 Locke clearly and consistently explained why prerogative, the “Power to act according to discretion, for the publick good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes even against it” properly belongs to the executive.Footnote 60 His chapter on the “Subordination of Powers” contains a revealing comparison of the relative merits and defects of the legislature and the executive that ends up making the latter seem like a providential benefactor responsible (in more than one sense) for the very existence of the community. Unlike the legislature, which is not and should not always be “in being” since it is not essential that “new Laws” be made, Locke contended that it is “absolutely necessary that the Executive Power should” be “always in being,” because the enforcement of existing laws is essential to the preservation of life.Footnote 61 This means that the executive is often the sole institutional manifestation of the state. Locke stressed that the executive's power to assemble and dismiss the legislative assembly “gives not the Executive a superiority over it,”Footnote 62 but the discussion that follows has theological overtones more reminiscent of divine right absolutists James I and Robert Filmer than his fellow Whigs. Locke accentuated “the uncertainty, and the variableness of humane affairs” to explain why “a steady fixed rule” cannot and should not be improvised by the legislature to “answer all the Exigencies of the Commonwealth” in advance. Instead, it is better to trust the “prudence of one, who was always to be present, and whose business it was to watch over the publick good.”Footnote 63 Like an omnipresent being, the Lockean executive keeps a watchful and benevolent eye over the turbulent affairs of men in case his intervention is required. Even though the executive does not actually make the laws that would restore order in the community, the executive is cast in the role of a creator who calls the law-making body into being. For without the executive, there would be no lawmaker, and hence no law. And without law, existence itself is uncertain.
Although the executive ordinarily just exercises the power that belongs to everyone equally in the state of nature, Locke's use of the word “prudence” here and elsewhere suggests that the executive enjoys a superior epistemological point-of-view based on long experience. The ability to make the right decision has always been an essential feature of prudence, but Locke's usage evokes qualities that exceed those of ordinary mortals. The word “prudence,” which Locke did not define in The Second Treatise, Footnote 64 is etymologically derived from the Latin word providens, meaning “foreseeing.” It is also the origin of the word “Providence,”Footnote 65 an idea that Locke explicitly attributes to God in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Footnote 66 This is the meaning that Hobbes accentuated in Leviathan, where he defined prudence as a kind of foresight or wisdom based on long experience: “by how much one man has experience of things past, than another; by so much also he is more Prudent, and his expectations seldomer faile him.” This is highly suggestive of long, even extraordinary experience that calls to mind God's timelessness.Footnote 67 Indeed, Hobbes indicated that other words for “Prudence” include not just “Foresight” and “Wisdome,” but “Providence.”Footnote 68 The religious connotations associated with these related terms are made more explicit in Locke's chapter on “Political or Civil Society,” where “foresight” is described as a God-given ability.Footnote 69
In light of this connection between “prudence” and the divine, it is significant that the words “prudence” and “prudent” are never used in the Second Treatise to characterize anyone other than an executive who has been entrusted with discretionary power.Footnote 70 Locke had even emphasized the probable lack of foresight among “the first Framers of the Government” to justify the discretion that would be exercised by a prudent executive.Footnote 71 His justification for the most discretionary power of all, the “Federative,” which “contains the Power of War and Peace” and other matters pertaining to foreign affairs, was that it was better to leave such matters “to the Prudence and Wisdom of” the executive than to restrain it “by antecedent, standing, positive Laws.”Footnote 72
Locke's only specific reference to a “prudent” ruler in the entire Second Treatise is the mythical Ulysses. What is remarkable about this passage is that Locke used the story of “Polyphemus's Den” from The Odyssey to make the point that the people must sometimes suspend their own judgment and trust that a prudent executive will lead them to salvation. Locke concluded that it was better for Ulysses' men to suppress their urge to battle the man-eating Cyclops that held them captive than to attempt a futile act of resistance before the opportune moment (determined by Ulysses) arrived. Using a telling choice of words, Locke defended the actions of Ulysses, who “preach'd up Passive Obedience, and exhorted them to a quiet Submission, by representing to them of what concernment Peace was to Mankind; and by shewing the inconveniences might happen, if they should offer to resist Polyphemus, who had now the power over them.”Footnote 73 It may very well have been rational for the other captives to follow Ulysses' instructions and bide their time, but the notion that Ulysses “preach'd” rather than “advised” or “counseled” his men gives the impression that he was asking them to put aside their personal misgivings and place their faith in him. As Locke explained in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Faith … is the Assent to any Proposition, not thus made out by the Deduction of Reason; but upon the Credit of the Proposer, as coming from GOD, in some extraordinary way of Communication.”Footnote 74
Ulysses' actions in “Polyphemus' Den” exemplify the proper use of executive prerogative described by Locke earlier in the Second Treatise. In cases of emergency, the executive assumes direct responsibility for enforcing “this Fundamental Law of Nature and Government, viz. That as much as may be, all the Members of the Society are to be preserved.”Footnote 75 This responsibility authorizes the executive to circumvent laws created by the legislature and to enforce the laws of nature instead. Contrary to Schmitt's understanding of miracles, this normative criterion means that exercises of prerogative are morally constrained, even if they are not legally or institutionally constrained. But because the laws of nature are God's eternal laws for rational creatures, this responsibility makes the executive a direct agent of—or even a substitute for—God on earth, what Schmitt described as in Roman Catholicism and Political Form as “a concrete personal representation of a concrete personality.”Footnote 76 Even though individuals interpret the laws of nature for themselves in the state of nature, and the legislature reformulates them into municipal laws where political society has been established, it is now the executive who authoritatively determines how to enforce the laws of nature. And as long as prerogative seems to be exercised “for the benefit of the Community,” Locke suggested that it “never is questioned.” This is because
the People are very seldom, or never scrupulous, or nice in the point: they are far from examining Prerogative, whilst it is in any tolerable degree imploy'd for the use it was meant; that is, for the good of the People, and not manifestly against it.Footnote 77
But this begs the question: how can the people make the determination that the executive is exercising prerogative for the common good unless they have actually inspected the motives of the executive and the circumstances surrounding any particular exercise? To say that the people will be roused only when prerogative is used “manifestly” against their interests, i.e., in a manner so obvious or conspicuous that the people “cannot but feel” it,Footnote 78 is to confess that popular scrutiny and criticism occur only after unmistakable facts have presented themselves.
The people's faith in the benevolence and wisdom of the executive explains why this lack of forensic initiative could even be contemplated in a political theory that otherwise defines legitimacy in highly functionalist-rationalist terms. In a brief essay written just before the publication of the Two Treatises, Locke provided a general definition of virtue that helps explain why he believed deference to a virtuous executive would be reasonable: “those actions are esteemed virtuous which are thought absolutely necessary to the preservation of society.”Footnote 79 Far from believing that all individuals are motivated by the same passions and interests, Locke believed that a few individuals possess a “nobler constitution” than most, which disposes them selflessly to seek the welfare and happiness of others.Footnote 80 Pervasive references to the moral attributes of “princes” in Locke's account of prerogative indicate that some executives possess special qualities that set them apart from the ordinary mass of humanity, not to mention those vicious princes who prey on the people. Locke surmised that it is neither “necessary, [n]or useful to set precise Bounds to [the] Power” of a ruler who is believed to be “good and wise.” Looking back on the history of England, he stated that there was nothing wrong with the people allowing the “wisest and best Princes” to “inlarge their Prerogative as they pleased” because such princes have pursued the common good even when they were not restrained by law.Footnote 81 The impression that Locke gives is that such princes can only do good, in much the same way that a rationalistic God can do only good.Footnote 82 But whether Locke's conception of the divine is rationalistic or voluntaristic, the effect in either case is the same: to place beyond reproach the executive who resembles God in “his Power, Wisdom, and Goodness.”Footnote 83
By the time Locke neared the conclusion of his chapter on prerogative, the deification of the executive became explicit:
Such God-like Princes indeed had some Title to Arbitrary Power, by that Argument, that would prove Absolute Monarchy the best Government, as that which God himself governs the universe by: because such Kings partake of his Wisdom and Goodness. Footnote 84
Locke explained that it would be terribly foolish to design laws or institutions on the assumption that all executives would possess these extraordinary qualities, but he never entertained the idea that it would be foolish to trust anyone at all with such unquestioned discretionary power. He saw no contradiction in entrusting certain kinds of individuals with the very same discretionary powers that his constitutionalism was designed to curtail. And when a dispute over the exercise of prerogative arises between the executive and the people when the legislature is out of session (which is one of the reasons why the executive would have to take unilateral action in the first place), “there can be no Judge on Earth,” but only an “appeal to Heaven.”Footnote 85
To allow the executive to assume extraordinary, even God-like powers, may not be entirely unreasonable, but it is not wholly irreligious, either. Lockean individuals ultimately reserve the right to judge for themselves whether or not the executive possesses the requisite qualities and whether or not an exercise of prerogative tends toward the public good. But in the meantime they may adopt such a reverential attitude toward the executive that attempts by others to criticize or question the executive's motives or competence may come to seem blasphemous. Locke no longer expressed the suspicion of untrammeled popular judgment evident in some of his earlier writings,Footnote 86 but he did express serious reservations about their ability to make political judgments in moments of crisis. The deference they are expected to show to the executive in desperate moments (such as the episode in “Polyphemus' Den”) requires them to put aside their accustomed doubts, reservations, suspicions, and criticisms of consolidated discretionary power. The so-called “appeal to Heaven,” a euphemism for violent resistance, might give the impression that the people had never suspended their judgment. However, Locke emphasized that “such Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in publick affairs,” but only when “the Inconvenience is so great, that the Majority feel it, and are weary of it.”Footnote 87 Almost every assertion of the people's right to resist tyranny is accompanied by similar disclaimers based on the people's reluctance to act unless abuses of power become palpable, i.e., “manifest.”Footnote 88 And in suggesting that it was not unreasonable to give the executive the benefit of the doubt during the early stages of an emergency, it becomes that much more difficult to hold the executive accountable after the emergency has passed. By then, irreparable damage may already have been done to the constitution and, perhaps even more gravely, to the habits of vigilance required to safeguard it.
The “Transcendent Nature” of Blackstone's Executive
At first glance, William Blackstone's Commentaries of the Laws of England, which helped shape the political and constitutional ideas of multiple generations of American lawyers and politicians, from Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln, would appear to confirm many of Schmitt's criticisms of liberal metaphysics. To an even greater degree than his liberal forebear, Blackstone's cosmology presented a perfect picture of rationalistic harmony and precision typical of the deistic worldview excoriated by Schmitt. Indeed, the “fixed and invariable” laws of the universe, which operate according to regular principles that leave nothing “to chance,” are expected to serve as models for the permanence, uniformity, and universality of rules to be codified in municipal law.Footnote 89 Blackstone's rationalistic image of God as an all-powerful yet self-constrained “workman” who is bound to conform to “the eternal, immutable laws of good and evil”Footnote 90 seems to support Schmitt's contention that liberal metaphysics leave little or no room for the possibility of a normatively unconstrained decision. However, this champion of parliamentary supremacy, natural rights, and the ancient constitution accepted an expansive and highly discretionary role for the executive that rivals the powers contemplated for “the supreme being [who] formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing.”Footnote 91
Perhaps because the legislature includes individuals who are inevitably fallible, Blackstone acknowledged that there will always be a need for the executive to exercise extraordinary powers to compensate for their lack of foresight. But his defense of royal prerogative went well beyond traditional arguments for equity. Since the political universe does not exhibit the same kind of regularity and harmony that is observed in the natural universe (if only because individuals in society are apt to be ignorant, if not downright truculent, when it comes to their duties under the laws of nature),Footnote 92 Blackstone's executive is authorized to take extraordinary action to deal with the ever-present possibility of instability in a political world that is continuously in flux.Footnote 93 Explicitly following Locke's account of prerogative, he explained that the unforeseeability of “sudden emergence of national distress” justifies the need for “those extraordinary recourses to first principles, which are necessary when the contracts of society are in danger of dissolution.”Footnote 94 Far from regarding emergency powers that exceed the law as fateful steps on the road to tyranny, Blackstone considered them important roadblocks to the introduction of absolutism on a permanent basis. An important reason for this is that the royal executive is supposed to possess “certain qualities … distinct from and superior to those of any other individual in the nation.”Footnote 95
The “sacredness” of the royal person is a point that Blackstone reiterated throughout his discussion of executive power, but his deification of the executive reached unprecedented heights when he turned to the subject of prerogative. Even though Montesquieu and other eighteenth-century commentators on the English Constitution described the king as “sacred” under the law,Footnote 96 they did not use that fact to justify popular deference to the king in his exercises of prerogative. Blackstone's emphasis on the unimpeachable personal qualities of the English king are all the more remarkable when one considers that other Enlightenment thinkers were arguing that a good monarch was even more dangerous than a bad one because the former accustoms the people to absolutist principlesFootnote 97—principles which Blackstone rejected. His defense of Lockean prerogative builds on a discussion of sovereignty that casually equates “the three grand requisites” to be found in the sovereign (i.e., the executive) with those same qualities that Locke had identified with “the creator” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Footnote 98: “infinite power,” “wisdom,” and “infinite goodness.”Footnote 99 Some of Blackstone's overblown rhetoric can be attributed to the fact that he was explicating established constitutional principles rather developing his own theory of government, but the persistence and consistency with which he stressed the “perfection” of the king in his discussions of emergency royal prerogatives is indicative of the critical political importance he attached to belief in the infallible and unquestionable judgment of the executive.Footnote 100 Even though his chapter on the king's prerogative begins almost immediately with the claim that “the power of discussing and examining, with decency and respect, the limits of the king's prerogative” offers proof of England's unmatched liberty, his defense of the king's emergency executive powers is designed to forestall and make impious the exercise of this right.Footnote 101
Blackstone epitomizes that contradiction within some varieties of liberalism that asserts the existence of an absolute right to question the executive or any other political authority yet works to prevent the exercise of that same right. Much like Locke's displacement of the right of resistance, Blackstone's displacement of the right to question is based on the supposed epistemological differences between the people and the executive. By stressing the superiority of the executive's judgment to that of subjects, individual or collective, Blackstone made it unnecessary for the people even to question whether a state of emergency actually exists.Footnote 102 And by describing the executive as a “superior being,” Blackstone made it virtually blasphemous to question the executive. His high-toned defense of “royal dignity” is worth quoting at length:
Under every monarchical establishment, it is necessary to distinguish the prince from his subjects, not only in the outward pomp and decorations of majesty, but also by ascribing to him certain qualities, as inherent in his royal capacity, distinct from and superior to those of any other individual in the nation. For, though a philosophical mind will consider the royal person merely as one man appointed by mutual consent to preside over many others, and will pay him that reverence and duty which the principles of society demand, yet the mass of mankind will be apt to grow insolent and refractory, if taught to consider their prince as a man of no greater perfection than themselves. The law therefore ascribes to the king, in his high political character, not only large powers and emoluments which form his prerogative and revenue, but likewise certain attributes of a great and transcendent nature; by which the people are led to consider him in the light of a superior being, and to pay him that awful respect, which may enable him with greater ease to carry on the business of government. Footnote 103
The extraordinary elevation of the executive evident in this and similar passages would be enough to place the king beyond the reach of mortal judgment, but the distance between the people and the executive is expanded from the other direction, as well. Even though Blackstone's stated purpose in writing the Commentaries was to educate “gentlemen” on those laws that preserve their liberties, he was wont to remind readers of the fallible reason of “weak” and “simpleminded” individuals. This meant that the extraordinary “interposition” of a superior being (God or the king) will always be necessary.Footnote 104
The American President as Messianic Figure
Compared to his views on Locke's political and constitutional thought, Schmitt had a much more favorable and accurate view of Alexander Hamilton's contributions to the Federalist, which he considered “moderate” (i.e., less hostile to state power) compared to other theories of parliamentarism. In particular, Schmitt credited the Federalist with recognizing that “decision making and protection of state secrets belong to the executive.”Footnote 105 Schmitt would no doubt have approved of Hamilton's assertion “that the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law … has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.”Footnote 106 However, he failed to appreciate the theological elements of Hamilton's theory of executive power. The theological—indeed, theistic—resonances in Hamilton's writings on executive power are all the more remarkable for being so crucial to a thinker who was not otherwise given to religious ways of thinking. Hamilton's attitude toward religion and God throughout much of his adult life can be characterized as one of “indifference,” at least when he was not making sarcastic denials of the need for “foreign aid” at the Constitutional Convention.Footnote 107
The starting point in any assessment of Hamilton's theory of executive power must begin with the extraordinary independence and latitude that he granted the president. In contrast to then-prevailing republican conceptions of executive power, which strictly subordinated the executive to legislative assemblies, the Hamiltonian executive was the quintessential trustee, largely free to form and act on judgments independent of the stated preferences of constituents. If the representative in the delegate model is literally “bound” to adhere to the instructions and wishes of constituents,Footnote 108 then the representative in Hamilton's trustee model is “un-bound.” This idea is evident in his discussion of large-scale presidential undertakings that may take years to come to fruition.Footnote 109 Hamilton's less-than-reassuring response to Americans alarmed at the prospect that a single executive elected to four full years in office would have ample time and opportunity to undermine “public liberty” was that the representative has a duty to make independent judgments that might conflict with the express wishes and apparent interests of the people:
The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD … it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.Footnote 110
Even though Hamilton consistently argued that office-holders are ultimately dependent on the people in a free government, he shared Locke's and Blackstone's epistemological doubts concerning the people's ability to make sound judgments about uncertain political matters. At the Constitutional Convention, he spoke even more bluntly about the fallibility of the people, whose “imprudence,” turbulence, and fickleness he opposed to the wisdom, steadiness, and efficiency of more august individuals. Although his denial of the maxim that the “voice of the people” is the “voice of God” does not mean that another body necessarily represents the voice of God,Footnote 111 the qualities that Hamilton attributed to the executive leave little doubt that the president would at the very least bear a striking resemblance to God, thereby accentuating the epistemological distance between the executive and the people.
Of all the qualities that Hamilton sought in his ideal executive, it was foresight that he deemed indispensable, both in the ordinary course of politics and in moments of crisis. To an even greater degree than Locke or Blackstone, he defended his expansive view of prerogative in terms of the foresight that the president was likely to exemplify. The president's preternatural ability to prognosticate the long-term effects of policies adopted under conditions of enormous uncertainty and risk set that officer apart from other representatives, who tend to get fixated on what is near in space and time. In fact, it was the legislature's persistent “want of foresight” that made Hamilton look to a strong executive as a remedy for many of the young republic's ills well before most of his contemporaries were prepared to contemplate the establishment of such a monarchical institution.Footnote 112 In Hamilton's view, foresight entitles the president to the benefit of the doubt in undertaking ambitious or unconventional projects. The people would ultimately be able to hold the president accountable for any mischief or abuses of power connected with any long-term projects, but only after sufficient time has elapsed to give “the community time and leisure to observe the tendency of his measures, and thence to form an experimental estimate of their merits.”Footnote 113 As in Locke's account, the people here take no direct initiative in examining the executive's project, but wait until the facts begin to present themselves on their own because they are simply unable to see as far ahead as the experienced executive, who is capable of making sound predictions about long-term impact of policies that may have been formulated with urgency. It seems that Hamilton aimed to quash potential concerns about the fallibility of the president by postponing the moment of judgment to an indeterminate time in the future—a strategy employed by the Bush administration whenever it dismisses negative opinion polls by suggesting its actions will ultimately be vindicated by a priesthood of historians in the future.
Such postponement of judgment would be integral to the effectiveness of any exercise of presidential prerogative. Hamilton's argument that prerogative is an inherent presidential power implied in the Constitution and contained in the very idea of good governmentFootnote 114 was designed to insulate the executive from the sorts of criticisms that might undermine presidential authority. In Federalist No. 23, Hamilton discussed the urgent need for a government imbued with so much energy—the chief virtue of executive power—that it would have virtually unlimited powers to deal with the exception. Such “powers ought to exist without limitation, because it is impossible to foresee or to define the extent and variety of national exigencies, and the corresponding extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them.”Footnote 115 The impossibility of developing laws that would provide for every possible contingency meant that it would be necessary to rely on the energy supplied by the executive to protect members of the community from “irregular and high handed combinations” and “the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction and of anarchy.” There is an unmistakable providential quality to energy that makes it “a leading character in the definition of good government.”Footnote 116
One of his chief arguments for the superiority of the proposed Constitution and its elaborate system of indirect and federalized elections is that such a system would be most conducive to the selection of what Madison had called “fit characters.” Hamilton pledged that the presidency would be “filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue” since only an individual who exhibits “a different kind of merit” than what is required to win merely local or state office could win “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union.”Footnote 117 Such virtues would reinforce the dignity that Hamilton considered indispensable to the “public good.”Footnote 118 It was the government's lack of such dignity under the Articles of Confederation that convinced Hamilton of the need for a unitary and energetic executive who could inspire the people with confidence in his virtue. Hamilton's sincerest expectation was that the president, especially in times of emergency, would exhibit that “energy, dignity and extensiveness of views” so sorely lacking in the legislature.Footnote 119 As William Scheuerman has argued, the Hamiltonian presidency is based on a monarchical model of power that once relied on divine sanction for support,Footnote 120 but kingship itself is modeled on a monotheistic conception of divinity that juxtaposes the stability enforced by a single authoritative will to the chaos that arises from uninhibited political disagreement. As Schmitt noted, the monarch's resemblance to God in the performance of miracles and possession of “a supernatural character” is indicative of the extent to which “monarchy is religiously grounded.”Footnote 121
Hamilton's essays on the presidency are filled with references to the existence of exceptional “men” of incorruptible virtue who could be expected to fill the office of chief executive. This is most evident is his encomiums to George Washington, who was idolized by Hamilton and others for his outstanding virtue and whose “transcendent popularity” was of “indispensable importance” to the salvation of the country during its darkest hours.Footnote 122 There are obvious republican overtones throughout Hamilton's discussions of those virtues associated with the office of the president (e.g., patriotism, disinterestedness, etc.). But what makes Hamilton's appropriation of these republican virtues innovative is that he attributes them to the executive in order to free the president from those fetters that constrain other political actors. And unlike many disciples of classical republicanism, including numerous anti-Federalists, Hamilton believed that the virtue of the president was largely, if not entirely, independent of the virtue of the people, effectively severing a crucial link between ordinary citizens and their representatives that suggested a certain degree of equality between them. Even as he defended the institutional and legal checks against presidential abuses of authority, Hamilton repeatedly suggested that the exceptional virtue that the president was likely to possess would render these constraints nearly superfluous, which may be one reason why his definition of a “limited Constitution” contains no explicit mention of limitations on the executive.Footnote 123 When there are presidents who “could not be distressed nor won into a sacrifice of their duty” it becomes unnecessary to subordinate them to the will of the legislature.Footnote 124 Unlike the vast majority of the people and their constituents, who are often preoccupied with immediate and mundane concerns, such individuals would also be motivated to serve the public interest to the best of their abilities by the hopes of receiving a reward that might be enjoyed only in the afterlife: immortal “fame.”Footnote 125
Because times of emergency call for individuals who can act with “dispatch” and “energy,” it is necessary for the country to have the kind of president that makes it unnecessary for the people and their representatives to engage in the kind of critical public debate that makes popular government so prone “to dissolution and disorder.”Footnote 126 The “danger of difference of opinion” was also a major argument against proposals for a plural executive offered at the Constitutional Convention and the state ratifying conventions. Such “dissensions,” explained Hamilton, would “lessen the respectability, weaken the authority, and distract the plans and operations of those whom they divide.”Footnote 127 Although Hamilton himself was always diligent in offering carefully-constructed arguments that appealed to the reason of his readers, especially when defending the policies and programs undertaken by the Washington administration,Footnote 128 his argument in Federalist No. 71 on giving the executive the benefit of the doubt requires an element of faith that cannot be reconciled with the core principles of liberalism. Even though the people pass judgment on their presidents when they elect them to office, the call to give presidents the benefit of the doubt in times of crisis makes it difficult to hold presidents accountable for abuses of those extraordinary powers that the people are willing to grant the executive at such moments.
Conclusion
Emergencies tend to shake the public's commitments to its moral and institutional ideals in any regime, but they pose special challenges to liberal regimes. Liberal constitutionalism is based on the proposition that adherence to the separation of powers and the rule of law is essential to the preservation of individual liberties, but grave emergencies raise doubts about the utility of certain juridical arrangements and even the sanctity of individual rights. As a result, liberal regimes often enact legislative and constitutional changes during times of emergency that would be unthinkable in normal circumstances. But the invocation of prerogative by the executive in a liberal regime also seems to encourage a change in the way that its citizens think about the world in a metaphysical sense. Repeated suggestions that the terrorist attacks of “September 11 changed everything” imply that the world can no longer be comprehended using old assumptions and categories. Not coincidentally, the idea that the United States now find itself in a “new world” has also become a mantra intoned in nearly every public defense of the powers asserted by the president and supporters of the administration.
Schmitt's account of political theology is illuminating here because it clarifies the systematic structural relations that obtain among particular jurisprudential concepts. An unobstructed exercise of prerogative does not necessarily mean that a wholesale or irreversible transformation of the juridical order has occurred, but it does imply at least a momentary change in thinking about questions of political authority. Declarations of emergency do not just call on individuals to rethink their positions on the war powers of the executive or the proper balance between civil liberties and national security; they also compel them to adopt a way of thinking that conflicts with the critical orientation liberalism ordinarily encourages. The exercise of a power that emerges out of a jurisprudential void like a deus ex machina coming to the rescue in the darkest hours demands at least a temporary suspension of disbelief in the fallibility of the executive. Prerogative asks the public to waive ordinary requirements for verifiable proof and defer reverentially to the judgment of the executive in matters of life and death.
If prerogative is “analogous to the miracle in theology,” this does not bode well for the health of a liberal society that is too quick to acknowledge it. A miracle is first and foremost proof of the existence—and therefore of the might—of God. It is a call to have faith in the divine being or suffer the lethal consequences. A miracle is not a reason, a justification, or an explanation; it is an extraordinary exercise of unfathomable and irresistible power. As Locke explained, the performance of a miracle is a testimony to the unquestionable power and superiority of the one who performs it.Footnote 129 Behind every miracle lies a threat: have faith or you will be punished, either by the righteous condemnation of God or by the iniquitous destruction of malevolent forces. The jurisprudential miracle appeals to fear rather than reason. It asks for passivity not engagement, acquiescence not scrutiny, obedience not dissent, credulity not critique. When the executive claims that attacks have been thwarted but adduces no evidence; when the executive claims that checks against potential abuses of prerogative are unnecessary (or worse); or when the executive claims that the blessings of his policies will be evident only at some undefined point in the distant future, the public is effectively being asked to suspend its judgment and take a leap of faith in the executive's personal wisdom and benevolence. Although the effectiveness of both a miracle and prerogative is ultimately measured by the belief and subsequent submission inspired in those who witness these extraordinary acts of intervention, they are not dependent on faith in the same way. While the actual performance of a miracle is independent of any faith that the people already possess, the actual exercise of prerogative is always dependent, to at least some degree, on the amount of faith that the people place in their executive.
Liberal society must constantly be on guard against the temptation to lapse into the kind of juristic religiosity that Schmitt believed had been repudiated by liberalism. Liberal society must also be on guard against the excesses, injustices, and irrationalities that a dogmatic rationalism can produce with lethal and inhumane consequences, but that is no reason for individuals in a liberal society to quit their senses in the face of an irrational, incalculable, and uncertain threat. If anything, the moment of existential crisis, especially when the possible enemy comes into view, requires a recommitment to calm and rational deliberation, not as an end in itself, but as the only assurance a liberal society can have that it is doing the right thing.
Like many other anti-liberals, Schmitt denounced liberalism for a lack of courage because it could not—or would not—align itself with the divine in the battle against evil in the world. But liberalism's usual reluctance to rely on the divine for guidance and protection is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of its greatest strength and a testament to its courage. After all, what could be more courageous than taking direct responsibility for the problem of evil? It is not the liberal society that constantly questions those in authority but the one that prays for a savior to deliver it from evil that is guilty of political blasphemy.
