I

In an acrimonious note written in 1947 the German political thinker and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) stated, “The most audacious insult ever to be inflicted upon God and man, and which justifies all the synagogue's curses, lies in the ‘sive’ of the formula: Deus sive natura”.Footnote ¹ With this famous phrase Schmitt, of course, referred to the philosophy of Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77).Footnote ² Schmitt's estimation of Spinoza's “system”, however, had not always been so condemnatory. In the late 1910s and early 1920s Schmitt had discerned in Spinoza's metaphysics, as expounded in the Ethica, a mystical trait that in his view represented a philosophical reaction—a Gegenbewegung—against the mechanistic rationalism of Hobbes and Descartes.Footnote ³ In Die Diktatur, published in 1921, Spinoza was even depicted by Schmitt as a thinker who provided a “perfect” metaphysical analogy for the “mystical” foundation of popular sovereignty. According to Schmitt, Spinoza's concept of natura naturans (“naturing nature”), a concept employed by Spinoza to render God as an immanent, active, and infinite divine power—potentia dei—that is self-determining and not limited by any constraints whatsoever, paralleled the French revolutionary Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès's concept of pouvoir constituant; that is, the fundamental political capacity of a people to establish and institute a constitution. Schmitt's interpretation of Spinoza's mystical, unbound God thus corresponded to what he would come to see as the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the absolute political capacity to act (or decide) without being constrained by any (legal) order whatsoever.Footnote ⁴

Schmitt's harsh comment of 1947 stands, therefore, in stark contrast to his earlier appreciative views on Spinoza's “mystical pantheism”, ascribing even at some point to the Dutch Jewish philosopher a “serene and calm exaltedness” (heitere und ruhige Erhabenheit).Footnote ⁵

His ambivalence toward Spinoza raises a number of questions. What, in the first place, might explain Schmitt's particular mystical pantheist reading of Spinoza? What exactly was Schmitt's point in invoking Spinozist concepts in his investigations into the nature of constituent power? And what might Schmitt's shifting interpretation and estimation of Spinoza tell us about the underlying assumptions of his political thought? Recently a number of scholars have drawn attention to chapter 5 of Schmitt's Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes (1938), which contains his most extensive discussion of Spinoza.Footnote ⁶ In it Schmitt depicted Spinoza as the founder of “modern liberalism”.Footnote ⁷ By bringing Hobbes's distinction between public religion and private beliefs to its liberal conclusion, Schmitt argued, Spinoza in his Theological–Political Treatise dealt a decisive blow to the concept of unlimited and undivided sovereignty. Thus it is claimed that Schmitt “utterly detested” Spinoza; that Schmitt's discussion of Spinoza can be seen as an illustration of his “antiliberal and totalitarian discourse”, and that “by setting Spinoza against Hobbes” Schmitt took aim at “the entire German Jewish tradition of Enlightenment.”Footnote ⁸ In what follows, I demonstrate that these renderings of Schmitt's relation to Spinoza are partial and overlook the relevance of Spinoza's metaphysics for Schmitt's early politico-theological analysis of the popular constituent sovereign. Even though it might be correct to say that Schmitt by 1938 deemed Spinoza “the corrupting spirit of modern liberalism”, there is a prior crucial, yet relatively unexplored, story to tell about Schmitt's reading of Spinoza—a story that leads to the heart of Schmitt's reconceptualization of democracy.

Although Schmitt's references to Spinoza are only scattered throughout his oeuvre and he never engaged in a systematic interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy, this essay contends that important insight is to be gained by understanding why Schmitt at crucial junctures in his writings, perhaps opportunistically, turned to Spinoza. I argue that, for Schmitt, Spinoza's mystical pantheism turned out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it helped to shape and elucidate his “irrationalist” absolutist conception of an infinite pouvoir constituant.Footnote ⁹ On the other hand, as Spinoza was one of the key figures in the historical turn from transcendental theism towards “immanence-pantheism”, he was in Schmitt's eyes co-responsible for the destruction of the “person” of the worldly sovereign. It will be shown that Schmitt found in Spinoza an important, though ambiguous, interlocutor in developing his politico-theological analysis of one of the central concepts of “the modern theory of the state”; that is, of democracy.Footnote ¹⁰ In contrast to the thesis—similarly defended by Renato Christi; Miguel Vatter; Manfred Walther; and, most recently, Jeffrey Robbins—that, for Schmitt, Spinoza heralded the “end of political theology”, I argue that Schmitt's mystical reading of Spinoza's metaphysics in fact deeply informed his analysis of (anti-liberal) democracy within the “special field” that Schmitt calls “political theology”.Footnote ¹¹ This aspect of Schmitt's political theology has hardly been noticed in the existing secondary literature.Footnote ¹² Yet, while for Schmitt Spinoza's “liberalism” might have torn down the pillars of political theology, his metaphysics offered building blocks for the only political theology left that Schmitt considered being appropriate for the modern era.

The story of Schmitt's Spinozist conceptualization of constituent power did not end in the 1920s. In Italy it has been picked up by the radical left-wing philosopher Antonio Negri, who appropriated it—in amended form, to be sure—into his influential work (together with Michael Hardt) on the radical democratic potential of “the multitude”. In Il potere constituente (1992; English translation 1999), the theoretical precursor of Hardt and Negri's influential trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), Negri tells us that, with regard to the question how the “originary [sic] radicalness of constituent power” can be conceived, it was Schmitt who led the way, as he “posed this question with extraordinary intensity”.Footnote ¹³ Tracing the origins of the concept of constituent power, Negri claims that “it was Schmitt who refers us to Spinoza”.Footnote ¹⁴ Even though Jan-Werner Müller in his fine study on the legacy of Schmitt in post-war European thought is right to note that Schmitt's influence on the New Left in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s was overall only “short lived”, this is not the case for Negri, arguably the most sophisticated and best-known exponent of Italian left-wing radicalism (at least in the last two decades).Footnote ¹⁵ Although he rejected the factuality and cynicism of Schmitt's theory of political decision, as well as his vision of democratic dictatorship, Negri found in Schmitt's early writings an uncompromising articulation of a disconnection of democracy from liberal parliamentarism. Negri is, moreover, sympathetic to Schmitt's interpretation of democracy as a “theory of absolute government”, as well as his Spinozist–Sieyesian account of “constituent power” as an all-powerful principle that resists “being constitutionalized”. Like Schmitt, Negri tells us, he too “is convinced that Spinoza's philosophy allows us to construct a first schema of the concept of constituent power”.Footnote ¹⁶ Lastly, there is a strong methodological affinity between Schmitt's general understanding of the entanglement of the history of metaphysics and the history of political concepts, and Negri's viewpoint that “the real political science of modernity lies in metaphysics”.Footnote ¹⁷ Given this (largely unfamiliar) aftermath of Schmitt's Spinozist–Sieyesian conception of constituent power in late twentieth-century intellectual history, as it informed Negri's left-wing rethinking of radical democracy, a close examination of Schmitt's ambiguous engagement with Spinoza might improve our understanding of how, in the twentieth century, Spinoza's “political metaphysics” could be appropriated by both the left and the right.Footnote ¹⁸

As Benjamin Lazier has recently shown, there was an explosion of interest in Spinoza in Jewish circles and amongst Catholics in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ¹⁹ To the extent that Schmitt's discussion of Spinoza has been examined, this has mainly been done against this background, and especially in relation to Leo Strauss (1899–1973).Footnote ²⁰ Schmitt's drawing on Spinoza was indeed part of this broader revival. But Lazier's brief discussion of Schmitt shows how difficult it is to pin down why Schmitt in the 1920s should have an interest in Spinoza. His own suggestion, that Spinoza's pantheism was attractive to Schmitt in rebutting the dualisms of Protestant crisis theology and (pantheism's “twin” heresy) gnosticism, fails to bring out the political import that Schmitt distilled from Spinoza's metaphysics. I suggest there is a pertinent and more specific context from which Schmitt's engagement with Spinoza in the late 1910s and early 1920s originated—namely the interpretative trend, rooted in the late eighteenth-century Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy), and rapidly gaining ground in the early twentieth century, to understand Spinoza as the prime exponent of a mystical pantheism.Footnote ²¹ It was in this context that the staunch Catholic Schmitt could discover something worthwhile in Spinoza. This was all the more remarkable, as Schmitt ascribed a serene and calm exaltedness to a philosopher who had formerly been despised as a dangerous atheist. To this context we shall turn next.Footnote ²²

II

In 1932, at the celebration of the tercentenary of Spinoza's birth, the secretary of the Dutch Vereniging het Spinozahuis (Spinoza House Society) and writer of several books and articles on Spinoza, W. G. van der Tak (1885–1958), noticed that

Van der Tak's remark about Spinoza's contemporary reputation is revealing. Whereas Spinoza for centuries had been despised as an “atheistic materialist”, his philosophy was now presented as a religious alternative, albeit a non-traditional mystical religious alternative, for those spiritually minded who did not feel at home any more in more traditional creeds. No longer was Spinoza's philosophy being flatly dismissed as a pernicious form of atheism.Footnote ²⁴ In German philosophical and theological circles the rehabilitation of Spinoza as a religious thinker (instead of being an outright atheist) goes back to the Pantheismusstreit and the widespread interest in Spinozism this controversy engendered among German Idealists (such as Hegel, Fichte and Schelling) and poets and writers (such as Lessing, Novalis and Goethe) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ²⁵

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Spinoza had also become, as it were, increasingly acceptable theologically as a result of Schleiermacher's incorporation of (amended) Spinozistic ideas into his theology that would become immensely influential in the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ The link between Schleiermacher and Spinoza was by then already well established.Footnote ²⁷ Wilhelm Dilthey, for example, in his massive Leben Schleiermachers (1870, 2nd edn 1922) situated Spinoza in a tradition of mystical pantheism, yet raising it to a higher level, as his pantheism was grounded “in the mechanistic explanation of nature of Hobbes and Descartes.”Footnote ²⁸ Schleiermacher, Dilthey pointed out, had a much clearer understanding of Spinoza—who in the late eighteenth century had “suddenly risen out of his grave” and taken a central position “next to Kant's transcendental idealism”—than had the instigator of the Pantheismusstreit, F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819), who had merely condemned Spinoza's materialism and fatalism. What Schleiermacher took from “the heir of mystical pantheism” was that the “infinite absolute” (unendlich Unbedingte) was the ground for all finite entities, not separated (as in the traditional Christian notion of creation), but included (in dem ganzen Inbegriffen) in the unity of (one) substance.Footnote ²⁹ During the 1920s Schleiermacher's defence of Spinoza against Jacobi was a topic that was still deemed highly relevant, as can be inferred from the fact that in the 1923 issue of Chronicon Spinozanum the full text of Schleiermacher's essay Spinozismus was for the first time published and accompanied by the comments of theologian Hermann Mulert (1879–1950). Citing a passage that displayed Schleiermacher's adoration for Spinoza's understanding of der hohe Weltgeist (“the sublime world spirit”), Mulert emphasized that “one has to realize what these words from the mouth of a theologian mean. For more than a hundred years a great many who enjoyed a good reputation had spoken of atheus or even improbus ille Spinoza, and now a Christian minister declares him holy!”Footnote ³⁰

The religious attractiveness of Spinoza thus rested on the allegedly mystical (religious) character of his metaphysics. Someone who in the 1920s had been stressing Spinoza's mysticism for many years and who, like Van der Tak, delivered a speech at the tercentenary of Spinoza's birth in 1932 was the Dutch jurist and Spinoza expert J. H. Carp (1893–1979).Footnote ³¹ The relevance of Carp in this context is twofold. First, echoing Schmitt, Carp observed in his 1927 speech “Belgium: Wezen en Waarde van het Spinozisme” (Belgium: Essence and Value of Spinozism), at the international commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Spinoza's death in The Hague, that the direction taken by “the metaphysical conscience” which can be seen in our current “spirit of the age” is “a transition from transcendental to immanent images”.Footnote ³² God in Spinoza's metaphysical “whole-unity doctrine” (Al-eenheidsleer) is the “amorphous infinite”. In this notion of immanence, Carp concluded, “the democratic idea has taken root”: “out of this monistic way of thinking, arose an equally monistic state doctrine, in which the identity of government and subjects is accepted.”Footnote ³³ For Carp, in short, Spinoza's metaphysics was the foundation of “the democratic idea”.

Second, Carp directs our attention to an additional number of works on Spinoza which help us to get a fuller picture of the context in which Schmitt's mystical interpretation should be understood. After Carp obtained his PhD with a thesis on Soviet communism and Bolshevism at Leiden University in 1921, he became a member of the editorial board of Chronicon Spinozanum. This was the yearbook of the international Spinoza society, the Societas Spinozana, which had just been founded in 1920 by, among others Carl Gebhardt (1881–1934), probably the greatest Spinoza scholar at that time. Carp was a prominent figure in the (scholarly) Spinoza scene in the 1920s and 1930s. In the Chronicon Spinozanum, of which five issues came out between 1921 and 1927, he published several articles on different aspects of Spinoza.Footnote ³⁴ From his earliest publications on, Carp had drawn attention to the “mystical mood” of Spinozism and referred twice to Gebhardt's article “Spinoza und der Platonismus” that had appeared in the first number of Chronicon Spinozanum as another chief mystical interpretation of Spinoza.Footnote ³⁵ Carp had found an important ally for his views on Spinoza, he remarked in a book review for Chronicon Spinozanum, in the neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), of whom Gebhardt had been a student at the University of Heidelberg. In his multi-volume Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, published between 1878 and 1880 and reprinted in 1904, Windelband, like Dilthey, loosely situated Spinoza within mystical traditions of Neoplatonism. He identified the “desire” (Sehnsucht) to know God as the “essential feature” (Grundzug) of Spinoza's mystical pantheism. The mystical interpretation of Spinoza's thinking thus consisted of Spinoza's notion of the “intellectual love of God”, his substance-monism and the concomitant idea that men were taking part in this divine substance, and that thus a mystical relationship between the finite and infinite was established, in combination with the sense of a deep interconnectedness of all individual things. Windelband concluded his chapter, however, by pointing out an irresolvable tension between Spinoza's mysticism and rationalism. That Spinoza's system suffered from such a tension was denied by the professor of modern German literature Christian Janentzky (1886–1968) in Mystik und Rationalismus, a work that is particularly relevant here. This short book, published in 1922, had grown out of a paper Janentzky had presented to the Kantgesellschaft in Munich in February that same year. The defining element of mysticism, according to Janentzky, is that reason goes “beyond” itself. Mysticism is what Janentzky called “transrational” in that it requires a rational base, but ultimately dissolves itself in “the experience of a direct and absolute transcendence”, and thus arrives at a “visio sine comprehensione”.Footnote ³⁶Mystik und Rationalismus was reviewed by Carp and—for our purposes very interestingly—cited by Schmitt in the second edition of Politische Romantik and again in Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus.Footnote ³⁷

Against this background we can now see that Schmitt's appreciation for Spinoza's pantheism in Politische Romantik was actually part of a broader tendency to reinterpret and read into Spinoza's rationalism a deeper mystical meaning.Footnote ³⁸ Schmitt's main aim in Politische Romantik was to criticize and set himself apart from what he called “political romanticism”, to which he imputed a “poeticization” of political conflicts. He blamed the Romantics for making two major mistakes. First, Romanticism displaced God as the “final authority” (absolute Instanz). In the Romantic mind das geniale “Ich” takes the place of God as basic metaphysical principle. This Romantic (transcendental) subject “treats the world as an occasion and an opportunity for his romantic productivity”, a view that Schmitt called “subjectified occasionalism”.Footnote ³⁹ With the subject at the centre, the highest and most certain reality of the “old” metaphysics—a transcendental God—was eliminated. Second, the Romantic is defined by Schmitt, as Heinrich Meier put it, “as the virtual embodiment of the incapacity to make the demanding moral decision”.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Romantic creativity and productivity, Schmitt held, can “can tie on to any historical–political reality without losing its essence and structure.” It is essentially an ironic attitude that lies at the basis of the Romantic's “suspension of every decision”. And the Romantic outlook was not compatible with any “moral, legal or political norm [Maßstab]”. Therefore “politics is as alien to it [the Romantic outlook] as morality and logic”.Footnote ⁴¹ “Mysticism”, on the other hand, Schmitt concurred with Janentzky, does not suffer from this indecisiveness, because it “is a manifestation of the appearance of religious consciousness”.Footnote ⁴²

Despite his profound criticisms of political Romanticism, Schmitt did share the need to overcome a rigid mechanistic and abstract rationalistic Weltanschauung. Spinoza's pantheism, which comprised “enough mystical elements” to be in accord with a mystical–religious (second) countermovement also (Spinozism itself was the first), offered one way out. Of Spinoza's “theory of state” (Staatsphilosophie), however, Schmitt did not think much. It was “too much influenced by the rationalistic natural right of his time and by Machiavelli, than that it could be a typical and logical expression of his ‘emanatist’ philosophy.”Footnote ⁴³ The bearing of Spinoza for Schmitt's political thinking would manifest itself in a different, more indirect, yet arguably more fundamental, way.

III

It was in Die Diktatur, two years after the publication of Politische Romantik, that Spinoza's mystical pantheism—or, more precisely, Schmitt's mystical pantheist interpretation of Spinoza—became a politically relevant set of ideas for Schmitt. The Weimar Republic, which had just been founded in August 1919, was under attack from communist, anarcho-syndicalist and right-wing sides. It was in this context and more specifically as an intervention into the debate about the extent and the justification for the use of emergency powers by the then Reichspräsident Friedrich Ebert during a time of intense crisis and political chaos that Die Diktatur appeared.Footnote ⁴⁴ In contrast to much of his later work, Schmitt in Die Diktatur basically argued within the parameters of constitutional democracy, or, more precisely, the democratische Rechtsstaat. The reason for Schmitt to write this book was that he believed that among his contemporaries dictatorship was largely misunderstood. In “bourgeois political literature” the then widespread concept of Diktatur des Proletariats appeared to him to be completely ignored, whereas personal dictatorship was usually associated with military dictatorship (such as that of Napoleon) and the abolition of democracy. But this attitude of “distrust”, Schmitt worried, obscured a more positive way to think about a type of temporary dictatorship, one that could actually be very useful for a constitutional democracy. More specifically, Schmitt's message was that such a form of dictatorship might prove to be crucial, if the Weimar Republic under which he lived did not want to leave itself tremendously vulnerable to emergency situations.Footnote ⁴⁵ But Schmitt had another, more theoretical issue on his agenda as well. He wanted to give an account of the historical rise of a different conception of dictatorship, one that was grounded in the “mystical” power of a people and could serve as an alternative to the Marxist class-based view of proletarian dictatorship.

The classical conception of dictatorship that Schmitt recounted in his historical–theoretical interpretation was derived from the Roman institution of dictatorship. The fundamental characteristic of this conception was that a dictator was appointed or “commissioned”, in the case of the Roman Republic by the Senate. It is therefore best rendered as “commissarial dictatorship”. The commissarial dictator, like the ancient Roman dictators, was appointed to counter direct emergency situations. Although the legal order might be suspended during these concrete situations, this could only be done for a limited period of time. The ultimate aim of appointing a dictator is to restore the state of law.

Schmitt made a distinction between this kind of “technical” commissarial dictatorship that is instituted to protect or preserve the constitution and what he called “sovereign dictatorship”. The sovereign dictator is different in kind, and has a complex conceptual history. The rise of this conception of dictatorship came into being, Schmitt held, as a result of a conceptual transformation in which the institution of dictatorship came to be seen as a “model of political practice”.Footnote ⁴⁶ Schmitt interpreted the sovereign in Hobbes's political philosophy as constituted “by the people” so as to put an end to the “exceptional situation” of a war of all against all. By solving this emergency Hobbes's sovereign was “in that sense a dictator”. Yet Hobbes's sovereign was not entirely what Schmitt had in mind with the concept of sovereign dictatorship. Hobbes's “contract of subjection” (Unterwerfungsvertrag), as he put it, brought about “sovereign unity” by the creation of a “representative body”, rather than it being strictly a process of “delegating sovereign dictatorship”.Footnote ⁴⁷

Sovereign dictatorship, as Schmitt understood it, only fully developed during the eighteenth century and culminated in the writings of the French revolutionary Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836). But Sieyès's theory of sovereign dictatorship—that is, of the idea that sovereignty is instituted by a pre-constitutional power of the people—was in Schmitt's view itself an innovation and modification of Rousseau's view on dictatorship. According to Schmitt, in Rousseau's Contrat social rationalism had reached a critical point. In Rousseau's account the general will, which comes into being by a social contract agreed upon by people in a state of nature, is transparent, united, “reason itself”, and is posited as something that is just “right” by virtue of its bare existence. Neither the people nor the will of the people can be represented. Any kind of executive power or form of dictatorship in Rousseau's theory is therefore not part of the social contract but remains commissarial, Schmitt claimed—except for the often overlooked (and in Rousseau's theory highly problematic) figure of the “legislator”, who for Rousseau was neither a commissioner nor a sovereign.Footnote ⁴⁸ The “odd confusion”, Schmitt pointed out, is that the people are not deemed capable by Rousseau of making suitable laws for themselves. Therefore an external legislator would be needed. But since this legislator stands outside the state, a peculiar “antithesis” is created. Thus Schmitt stated cryptically, “The content of the work [Tätigkeit] of the legislator is law [Recht] but without lawful power, powerless law; the dictator is omnipotence without law, lawless power”.Footnote ⁴⁹

It was Sieyès's introduction of the notion of the pouvoir constituant that offered a way out of this predicament, according to Schmitt:

Thus a sovereign dictatorship does not appeal to any existing constitution. Instead it seeks to create a condition “whereby a constitution which it considers as a true constitution will become possible”.Footnote ⁵¹ In a revolutionary situation the “total negation” of the existing order still lacks a “lawful justification” (rechtliche Begründung), because the future constitution does not yet exist. It appears, then, that the abolition of the existing legal order would just be “purely a question of power” (eine bloße Machtfrage)Footnote ⁵²—unless, Schmitt claimed, and this is the crucial point, a “power” (Gewalt), not “constitutionally constituted” (Verfassungsmäßig konstituiert), is accepted as standing in relation to the constitution as “foundational power”. That, according to Schmitt, is “the meaning of pouvoir constituant”.Footnote ⁵³ This concept, coined by Sieyès, stands in opposition to any sort of constituted power (pouvoir constitué) and is “principally unlimited” and “capable of simply doing everything”.

It is at this point that Schmitt invoked Spinoza so as to convey what he had in mind. The systematic thought that Schmitt took from Spinoza's metaphysics is that the monistic substance, or God, has sovereign right over everything and becomes “the Leviathan”. In Schmitt's words, “the individual is nothing, the universe the whole—the whole, the Leviathan, becomes the substantial holder of all right”.Footnote ⁵⁴

On the basis of this reasoning, Schmitt held,

Just like Spinoza's God, “the people, the nation, the elemental force [Urkraft] of the essence of the state” creates new forms out of the “boundless, incomprehensible, abyss of its power”.Footnote ⁵⁶

Schmitt was highly sympathetic to the “mystical” trait of this conception of the will of the people—as long, that is to say, as the will of the people is conceived in the way Sieyès meant it, namely as das unorganisierbar Organisierende. Any unity of the will of a people, Schmitt learned from Sieyès, can only be brought about by representation. The “raw”, amorphous power of the people is prior to such a unity:

Schmitt then suggested that the National Convention that came together during the French Revolution in September 1792 can be seen as an example of a “sovereign dictator” grounded in the pouvoir constituant.Footnote ⁵⁸ Crudely put, whereas commissarial dictatorship is instituted by a pouvoir constitué (e.g. the Roman Senate or the German Reichstag), sovereign dictatorship is grounded in the power of the people, the pouvoir constituant.Footnote ⁵⁹ The question for Schmitt now became how and by whom this formless power should be shaped into a united political will and how it should be represented (and it is at this point that Negri and Schmitt part company). As Ellen Kennedy rightly observed, “the essentially democratic idea that the people themselves were the constitution-giving power in Germany did not resolve the question of how Germany should be governed and what form the concept of democracy in the state and German politics should take.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Schmitt's answer to this question, as will be pointed out in the following section, is bound up with the theologico-political implications of the historical rise of “immanence-pantheism” and how this development impaired the “personalist” and “decisionist” elements in the concept of sovereignty that Schmitt regarded as essential for a genuinely political form of representation.

IV

For Schmitt, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, Spinoza's mystical pantheism turned out to be a double-edged sword. To understand why this is so, we need to examine more closely what Schmitt understood by “political theology” and how it had developed since the early modern era. Schmitt saw the historical succession of metaphysical images of the world as intimately intertwined with the development of modern political concepts. “The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world”, Schmitt wrote in his Politische Theologie (published one year after Die Diktatur) “has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization”.Footnote ⁶¹ This outlook had both methodological and substantive implications. Methodologically, Schmitt sought to work out a “sociology of the concept of sovereignty” by determining the identity of the dominant metaphysical image and political organization of a certain epoch. In Schmitt's words, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”.Footnote ⁶² Substantively, this also meant that all politics have a “metaphysical kernel”.Footnote ⁶³ Renato Cristi is therefore wrong to suggest that Schmitt held that the “political metaphysics of democracy cannot claim political theological status” and that “political theology has become unthinkable within a democratic context”.Footnote ⁶⁴ This is in fact precisely what Schmitt tried to do—that is, to give a politico-theological analysis of democracy:

Schmitt's remark in this passage that the belief that all power derives from the people can result in “various forms of government” is a key to what his particular understanding of democracy would amount to. For Schmitt in a way complied with the democratic spirit of his epoch. Following the Spanish counterrevolutionary thinker Donoso Cortés (1809–53), it was perfectly clear to him that since 1848 “the age of royalism was over”. Elaborating on his historical–theoretical narrative of dictatorship, Schmitt determined that “all power resides in the pouvoir constituant of the people, which means that the democratic notion of legitimacy has replaced the monarchical”.Footnote ⁶⁶

Schmitt identified the gradual substitution of conceptions of transcendence by what he called “immanence-pantheism” as the main historical trend in the history of metaphysics since the sixteenth century. Whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Schmitt made clear, the idea of a sole sovereign was still dominant—mythically reflected in Hobbes's depiction of the Leviathan and paralleled by a corresponding theological conception of a transcendent God vis-à-vis the world—the nineteenth century saw the rise of conceptions of “immanence”.Footnote ⁶⁷ God, in these views, is immanent in the laws of nature, or, put more simply, is nature. While “for Hobbes God is above all power (potestas)”, this model of God as sovereign ruler was superseded by God as being immanent in “the people”: the transcendental potestas dei was succeeded by the pantheistic potentia dei.Footnote ⁶⁸ On this reading, Spinoza's metaphysics presented a democratic ontology detrimental to any transcendental Leviathan.

Thus Spinoza's immanence-pantheism left Schmitt a double-sided legacy. On the one hand it offered him a way to think about, and provided a parallel for, a pre-constitutional mystical “democratic” power of the people that he thought in his epoch was the only conceivable modern legitimacy of sovereignty. On the other hand, the turn towards immanence immensely complicated the possibility to form and represent this democratic Urkraft. For Schmitt a democratically conceived pouvoir constituant did not necessarily entail a democratic type of government.

V

So far I have argued that Schmitt's confrontation with the challenge presented by Spinoza's pantheism took place in an intellectual climate in Germany in which a renewed interest in Spinoza was dominated by mystical religious interpretations. Moreover, I have pointed out that Schmitt found in Spinoza a mystical metaphysics that was governed by principles of immanence and active (constituting) power, and that these notions helped to shape his thinking about the “political metaphysics” of democracy. Schmittian democracy had a politico-theological foundation. This foundation, however, in itself did not suffice to confront the crisis that Schmitt felt was permeating the political system of the Weimar Republic. Although Schmitt thought that the irrational trait of the pouvoir constituant did not suffer from the indecisive character of either political romanticism or liberalism, he claimed in Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus that a modern mass democracy was doomed to fail if the people were not represented by a strong “sovereign-representative”. For the contemporary “crisis of the modern state”, Schmitt observed, was due to the incapacity of “the mass and mankind democracy [Massen- und Menschheitsdemokratie] to realize either a form of government or a democratic state.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Schmitt feared that this fundamental weakness of mass democracy left an ideological vacuum that could be filled by radical political movements which increasingly relied on political myths and “irrational” theories of direct action. In his essay “Die politische Theorie des Mythos” Schmitt noted that, whereas the Marxist concept of the proletarian dictatorship still contained the possibility of a “rationalistic dictatorship”, Bolshevist and anarcho-syndicalist thinkers like Georges Sorel (1847–1922) increasingly appealed to myth or Irrationalitätsphilosophie in order to legitimate the use of force.Footnote ⁷⁰ Only through a theory of myth could the vital power and energy of a class or nation be mobilized. What matters, then, Schmitt urged, is where this “ability” to utilize mythical images was to be found and where “this vital power really thrives”. It comes as no surprise that Schmitt maintained that this ability and vital power were certainly not to be found amongst the modern bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁷¹

Schmitt therefore feared that the discourse of myth (which like the mystical is characterized by its irrational base) was prone to be monopolised by anarcho-syndicalist and Bolshevist movements. As can be inferred from his quotation of Donoso Cortés, who recognized in “radical socialism” something “more magnificent” (großartigeres) than in liberalism, Schmitt seemed to appreciate the radical socialists’ “decisive answers to radical questions”. His own conceptualization of a mystical (or mythical) image underlying his version of democracy as primarily elaborated in Die Diktatur was intended to confront the anarcho-syndicalist and Bolshevist challenge by using the same decisionist “political theory of myth”. Against this background of Schmitt's assessment of the political expediency of myth (or the mystical) we are now in a better position to understand his attack on liberal and parliamentarian forms of democracy, and why Schmitt's own conception of democracy took a decisively undemocratic direction.Footnote ⁷²

In Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus Schmitt sought to strip democracy of its parliamentarian and liberal aspects so as to reinvest in the demos of democracy the mystical, absolute character that he had developed in Die Diktatur. The issue at stake for Schmitt was, given that political legitimacy in his age could only rest on some sort of democratic foundation, how one could realize and bring to fruition “a democratic sentiment governed by essentially political ideals” (eines von wesentlich politischen Idealen beherrschten demokratischen Staatsgefühls).Footnote ⁷³ To achieve this, Schmitt bestowed upon his own particular ideal of democracy a fundamental politico-theological boldness that he believed had been distorted by the contingent contemporary connection between democracy on the one hand and liberalism-cum-parliamentarism on the other. Distinguishing sharply between liberalism and democracy, and between parliamentarism and democracy, Schmitt tried to extract what he deemed to be the vital political core of democracy: “The belief in parliamentarism, in government by discussion, belongs to the world of thought [Gedankenwelt] of liberalism. It does not belong to democracy. Both, liberalism and democracy, must be distinguished from each other”.Footnote ⁷⁴ Likewise, Schmitt held that “there can be democracy without what is called modern parliamentarism and parliamentarism without democracy; equally, neither is dictatorship the distinctive opposite of democracy, nor democracy of dictatorship.”Footnote ⁷⁵

In making these distinctions Schmitt in fact only elaborated a view he had laid out in Politische Romantik. There Schmitt had condemned liberal bourgeois democracy as “intrinsically and radically self-contradictory”. For what liberal democracy really amounted to was the “domination of the liberal middle class”. It had nothing to do with the “mass democracies of the large modern, industrialized states”.Footnote ⁷⁶ Since for Schmitt the defining element of a democracy was the “identity of governed and governing”, parliament itself had become “an inconceivable and outmoded institution” for a modern mass democracy.Footnote ⁷⁷ Whereas originally “openness” and “discussion” were the guiding principles in a parliamentarian democracy, in actual fact “argumentative public discussion” had become “an empty formality”. Parliament, in short, failed to be a truly “sovereign-representative” for the kind of democracy Schmitt wanted to realize.

What a genuine democracy, in Schmitt's eyes, requires is “homogeneity” and the “elimination or eradication [Ausscheidung oder Vernichtung] of heterogeneity”.Footnote ⁷⁸ For the democratic concept of equality is a political concept that distinguishes the demos from das Fremde. This distinction gives the concept of equality its “substance” and provides a people a sense of unity. To Schmitt, this homogeneous substance of a people, understood in a Spinozist–Sieyesian fashion as the “ultimate, absolute authority”, represented the vital political core of democracy. But as Schmitt had already noted in Politische Theologie, “the unity represented by a people does not possess a decisionist character”.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Schmitt's eyes the people were, after all, only an amorphous source of undirected power. Hence, as it seemed evident to Schmitt that the “relative rationalism of parliamentarian thought” had lost its “validity” (Evidenz) and only the mystical absolutism of an infinite pouvoir constituant could restore a truly political Staatsgefühl, the crucial issue remained what type of government was required. Dismissing both direct and parliamentary democracy, Schmitt's own suggestions proved to be ominous: “In the history of democracy there are many dictatorships, Caesarisms, and other examples of conspicuous methods that are uncommon for the liberal traditions of the last century, to form the will of the people and bring about homogeneity.” And further on,

Schmitt thus travelled a long way—from Spinozist pantheism, through Sieyès, ending up with a vision of dictatorial or plebiscitary democracy based on a rigorous disconnection of “democratic substance” from liberal parliamentarism. While recognizing that in his age political legitimacy rested on some notion or form of democracy, Schmitt came to realize in his Verfassungslehre that his Spinozist (pantheistic) rendering of democratic sovereignty ultimately belonged to ‘the field of political theology’.Footnote ⁸¹ Whereas in the early 1920s Schmitt deemed mystical pantheism a viable candidate to ground a post-Enlightenment conception of democratic sovereignty in order to establish a “nonrational commitment” to political authority, in a later work Schmitt surmised that such a Spinozist–Sieyesian political theology might be too “esoteric” for “today's humanity”.Footnote ⁸² At the very end of Geistesgeschichtliche Lage Schmitt observed, “Until now the democracy of mankind and parliamentarism has only once been contemptuously pushed aside through the conscious appeal to myth, and that was an example of the irrational power of the national myth.” He accordingly quoted from Mussolini's speech of October 1922 in Naples before the March on Rome, saying, “Our myth is the nation.”Footnote ⁸³ Apparently, and indeed not surprisingly, for a wider (mass) audience Schmitt deemed the mythical appeal of the nation greater than that of a pantheistically conceived democratic substance. The concept of the nation, Schmitt would explain in his later synthesizing Verfassungslehre of 1928, “describes the Volk as a unity that is capable of political action [politisch-aktionsfähige Einheit]”.Footnote ⁸⁴ The democratic “substance of equality”, moreover, is vested in the nation and requires national “homogeneity”. The doctrine of constitutional power still figured prominently as unorganized Urgrund prior to the constitution, “endlessly expressing itself into new forms”. Indeed, the language of Spinozist pantheism had not disappeared entirely. Yet with Die Hüter der Verfassung (The Custodian of the Constitution, 1929), and especially with Staat, Bewegung, Volk (1933), Schmitt decisively moved to a more authoritarian and nationalist vision of dictatorial democracy. Schmitt's theologico-political or Spinozist–Sieyesian analysis of democracy lost its relevance as his understanding of political authority evolved under the Nazi regime.

If my analysis of Schmitt's reconceptualization of democracy has been correct so far, it might also shed fresh light on his assessment of the place of the representative in Hobbes's theory of the state. In the 1920s Schmitt's concerns with representation had drawn heavily on his reflections on the character of representation within Roman Catholicism. In the same year that Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage and “Die politische Theorie des Mythos” were published, his Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form appeared. It is beyond the scope of this essay to expand on the Catholic background of Schmitt's views on representation, but the personalist aspect of genuine representation that was underscored by Schmitt in this work provides a clear indication of what “democratic dictatorship” would look like, as he stated that

We already established that for Schmitt the implications of immanence-pantheism for the politico-theological structure of this kind of personal representation were catastrophic. In a speech in 1929 Schmitt, in characteristic language, stressed this point again: “When the ‘worldly God’ falls from his throne and the empire of objective reason and morality becomes a ‘magnum latrocinium’, parties will slaughter the mighty Leviathan and cut themselves a piece of flesh out of its body.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It is this ultimate failure of the symbol of the leviathan, in Schmitt's words, “that the leviathan as magnus homo, as the godlike sovereign person of the state, was destroyed from within”, that is the central thesis of Schmitt's notorious 1938 book-length interpretation of Hobbes.Footnote ⁸⁷ Initially, Schmitt maintained, the sovereign-representative person in Hobbes's theory “animated” the otherwise purely mechanic state and could be seen as its “soul”; it is moreover, “much more than the sum total of all the participating wills” and the “‘new god’ . . . transcendent vis-à-vis all contractual partners and vis-à-vis the sum total”. What ultimately was left of the Hobbesian state was a man-made, artificial product, indeed, a “huge machine”.Footnote ⁸⁸ Accordingly, in light of his earlier claim that “the age of royalism was over” and that the only modern form of legitimacy of the state would have to be democratic in nature, it is not surprising that Schmitt by 1938 thought that the “mythical image created by Hobbes” had come to an end and could not become a symbol of the modern “technological age” that Schmitt claimed to be living in.Footnote ⁸⁹ As we have seen, the modern, neutralized machine-like state could in Schmitt's earlier view only be animated by the myth and symbol of a democratic mystical, and later nationalist homogeneous, Urkraft that would serve as the basis for a dictatorial democracy. In that respect Schmitt's condemnation of the mechanistic rationalism of Hobbes (and Descartes) in Politische Romantik and his deep appreciation of the mystical Gegenbewegung that he had discerned in Spinoza had not fundamentally altered.Footnote ⁹⁰

What had altered, of course, was Schmitt's overall appreciation of what Spinoza stood for. His initial confidence in the symbolic and political power of a mystically conceived constituent power, deeply informed by the image of democratic homogeneity, had been substituted by a dictatorial democracy based on the notions of nation and Volk. Not only was Spinoza's immanence-pantheism detrimental to the (parallel) transcendental structure of both divine and kingly authority, by 1938 he was also considered by Schmitt as having completed Hobbes's incipient liberalism. While in Hobbes's theory sovereign power achieved “its zenith” by bringing about “the unity of religion and politics”, Schmitt spotted a “barely visible crack” in the “political system of the Leviathan”. This crack was caused by Hobbes's “differentiation between inner faith and outer confession” and manifested itself most clearly, Schmitt argued, in his view on how states should deal with the truth (or falsehood) of miracles.Footnote ⁹¹ According to Schmitt, Hobbes held that the state could decree whether something should be publicly considered a miracle, but has no business coercing the individual's private judgement about the truth of miracles, or indeed any beliefs. Schmitt maintained that “this contained the seed of death that destroyed the mighty Leviathan from within and brought about the end of the mortal God.” Only a few years later this seed was picked up by the “liberal Jew” Spinoza, who developed a “universal principle of freedom of thought” on the basis of the distinction between “external cult” on the one hand and “inner conviction” or “piety itself” on the other. Individual freedom thus became “the form-giving principle” (formgebende Grundsatz) that trumped “the necessities of public peace” and “the right of the sovereign power”.Footnote ⁹²

Whereas the pantheist political theologian Spinoza provided a rigorous Urgrund for the people's power, the liberal Jew Spinoza destroyed the state that was founded on this very same unity. Thus Schmitt ended up with an anti-liberal form of dictatorial democracy that he deliberately put in opposition to liberal (or parliamentarian) democracy. Spinoza, as we have seen, played a role at both ends of the line.Footnote ⁹³ For Schmitt it had become evident that in the modern epoch “the whole” had become “the substantial holder of all right”. It is in this sense that the nation as pouvoir constituant paralleled Spinoza's pantheistic God. Drawing this parallel had not only theological conceptual significance. Ellen Kennedy and Jan-Werner Müller have recently objected to “too” theological readings of Schmitt, thereby “missing his political intentions”, and perhaps even displaying “apologetic tendencies”.Footnote ⁹⁴ This article has demonstrated that during the 1920s Schmitt's democratic political theology was an instrument, an intellectual weapon, in a concrete struggle for political power. The mystical character of Spinoza's pantheism was attractive and useful to Schmitt because it enabled him to bestow upon his conception of (dictatorial) democracy a certain theological vitality and boldness so that it might be able to compete with other “political theories of myth” that did not suffer from the indecisiveness of either political romanticism or parliamentarism.Footnote ⁹⁵ In doing so, Schmitt impudently mobilized Spinoza's mystical pantheism for constructing a mythical nationalism that resembled anarcho-syndicalism and Bolshevism in their critique of liberalism and parliamentary democracy. Spinoza's metaphysics was thereby turned into a political metaphysics that mythically underpinned the substance of democratic homogeneity.

It is only by grasping these deeper politico-theological dimensions of Schmitt's conceptual and historical understanding of (the rise of) democratic legitimacy that we can make sense of Schmitt's theory of constituent power, in both its authoritarian and its radical democratic potentialities.