In 1922, Carl Schmitt published a small and controversial work that has since entered the canon of Western political thought. Schmitt's Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, when taken with his last major book, Political Theology II, can be seen as a bookend to a lifelong interrogation of the concept and meaning of sovereignty — an interrogation that was jurisprudential and theological in method and controversial and influential in result. Schmitt drafted his important initial engagement with the concept of sovereignty at a moment in German history beset by the horror and brutality of the Great War and the dashing, if occasionally grotesque, onslaught of a terrific modernity. Confronted by horror and flux, Schmitt developed an account of sovereignty in which the locus and nature of the political agency that constitutes the modern nation-state is explicated by attention to the boundary concept of the exception.

Ninety years on, and confronted by the issue of sovereignty and questions of political meaning, Paul W. Kahn's Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty revives Schmitt's political-theological inquiry for an American state in an age of terror. Much like Schmitt's little book, Kahn's chapter-by-chapter excursus is constructed as a response to the perceived weaknesses of liberal political theory brought to light by the persistence of the modern democratic state's violent confrontations with threats to its citizenry and its very existence. These weaknesses take the form of a supposed inattentiveness to the existential centrality of violence at the foundation of the modern American and liberal state. It is in response to this lack of attention that Kahn engages Schmittian political theology, interrogating sovereignty and American political experience beyond liberal discourses of law and right, and contending that “If we are to understand state violence as no less an expression of political identity than law, then we must take a perspective upon ourselves other than that offered by liberal political theory. We must take up the perspective of political theology for political violence has been and remains a form of sacrifice” (7).

In this short work, Kahn embarks on an ambitious engagement with Schmitt in an effort to recover the concept of sovereignty and place it at the forefront of contemporary political theory. Neither a scholarly analysis of Schmitt, nor an elaboration of the meaning of Schmitt's work in the history of political thought, Kahn's work is an attempt to engage Schmitt as “a point from which to illuminate our own political experience” (8).

Schmittian political theology differs from liberal political theory due to its phenomenological character, which explicitly raises experiential questions regarding the political rather than emphasizing a practice of normative speculation and its practical application. What makes it theological, although secular — and what makes Kahn a theoretician practicing political theology rather than a political theologian — is the use of concepts such as faith, sacrifice, and the sacred as analogical, genealogical, and ultimately phenomenological tools to understand the relationship between constitutional law and political sovereignty. Within the contemporary American context, this translates to an examination of the problematic relationship between the rule of law and popular sovereignty, a formula which substitutes the American “We the People” for Schmitt's Hobbesian notion of the sovereign.

In Kahn's account, political theology is both theory and methodology. As both, it is a form of inquiry that differs from other forms of jurisprudence and political theory. Political-theological inquiry proceeds genealogically and analogically; the sovereign decision as an act of free will is understood as a secularized theological concept. Here, the act of the state is legitimated as expressing the free will of the popular sovereign. This legitimacy hinges on the faith of the constituent body of the popular sovereign in itself as sovereign and the state as the expression of its will. Political theology thus reveals this secular faith to be the core of American popular sovereignty. Kahn's political theology as method employs genealogy to understand American popular sovereignty and politics as a domain of freedom and will, but one in which the free will of sovereign decision is neither causally determined nor arbitrary. Rather, it can be understood genealogically, with the will conceived as a product of beliefs bound up in a web of meanings. Political theology's emphasis on immanent understanding articulates the free act within the context of the narrative belief that makes the act possible in the sense of providing it with meaning while maintaining its origin in freedom. Moving beyond genealogy, political theology proceeds analogically, dissecting the structure of the meaning of political experience by analogically reasoning between two domains of experience; the secular political and the theological. Here, political theology articulates experience by analogy; the sovereign for the divine, revolution for creation, the exception for the miracle. Through genealogy and analogy political theology reveals the meaning of political experience phenomenologically, immanently understanding and relating the meaning of political life.

Taken alongside its namesake, Kahn's work offers the reader an insightful and clear excursus of Schmitt's canonical text in such a way that Schmitt's little book is shown to possess significant relevance and powerful insight as a tool of contemporary political theory and analysis. Beyond mere excursus, Kahn provides one of the most succinct and direct elaborations of Schmittian political theology to come out of the recent revival of interest in the all-to-often ambiguous area of political theology. Kahn's work also provides one of the most well-written and clear-sighted accounts of political theology as a methodology of political inquiry while presenting a critical response to the perceived failings of liberal political theory when confronted by the violent reality of 21st-century political experience. However, it is in its explicit application of political theology directly to the case of the modern American context where the reader of Kahn's work is left wanting. The full application of political theology to a case study analysis of American sovereignty appears to be the task set for another work.

The reader of Kahn may be struck at times by an inability to situate the book in terms of liberalism and its critics, finding support both for and against the political commitments of liberal theory. Although maintaining a commitment to the methodology of political theology throughout, Kahn upholds — contrary to Schmitt's own anti-liberal position — that “one can be liberal in one's personal political values and practices and still think that we need a theological account of political experience” (25). Yet ultimately, when looking to position Kahn's work between liberalism and its critics and when seeking to encapsulate its meaning, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is an ostensibly scurrilous love letter to the perceived failings of liberal political theory, and a defense of a secularized political theology for a modern age of the Schmittian exception.