Schmitt’s Method
The third chapter of Schmitt’s Political Theology argues that changing ideas of political sovereignty in Western Europe are connecting to changing theological commitments. Following Max Weber, he sees an elective affinity connecting religious and political sensibilities—the claim is not necessarily that one of these is prior to the other, but that they both derive from certain master conceptual characteristics of particular epochs. He summarizes this methodological “sociology of legal concepts,” as follows:
It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of a certain epoch. There is no question here of whether the idealities produced by radical conceptualizations are a reflex of sociological reality, or whether social reality is conceived of as the result of a particular kind of thinking and therefore also of acting. Rather this sociology of concepts is concerned with establishing proof of two spiritual but at the same time substantial identities. It is thus not a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when, for example, the monarchy of the seventeenth century is characterized as the real that is “mirrored” in the Cartesian concept of God. But it is a sociology of the concept of sovereignty when the historical-political status of the monarchy of that epoch is shown to correspond to the general state of consciousness that was characteristic of western Europeans at that time, and when the juristic construction of the historical-political reality can find a concept whose structure is in accord with the structure of metaphysical concepts. Monarchy thus becomes as self-evident in the consciousness of that period as democracy does in a later epoch (Political Theology 45-6).I am sympathetic to this broad approach because of its blobbish character. We need not determine the precise causal connections between material facts, economic attitudes, theological convictions, and political theories. There are more subtle if imprecise unifying themes that run through them all. But regardless, my point is not to think through the method here, just to lay it out. Schmitt goes on to outline the theologico-political similarities in distinct periods of modern European history.
Schmitt on Early Modernity
The theology and political theory of the seventeenth century feature a sovereign authority who stands at the head of a rational order. The rationalism of a Descartes, for example, insists on the perfect rational structure of the universe produced by the perfect work of an omnipotent creator. Schmitt summarizes the Cartesian position (quoting from the Discourse on Method) as follows:
the works created by several masters are not as perfect as those created by one. “One sole architect” must construct a house and a town; the best constitutions are those that are the work of a sole wise legislator, they are “devised by only one”; and finally, a sole God governs the world. As Descrates once wrote to Mersenne, “It is God who established these laws in nature just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom (PT 47).Cartesian rationalism thus points to a single, omnipotent divine creator and likewise a single, omnipotent political sovereign. Crucially, however, both God and the Prince remain palpably present. The theological and political sovereign remain personal authorities, capable of intervening in the world. Hobbes, Schmitt argues, further develops the Cartesian picture, emphasizing the centrality of the personal sovereignty of the Leviathan.
Schmitt on the Eighteenth Century
Despite his rationalism, Descartes still understood God to intervene in the world through miracles. That possibility of special providence disappears in the eighteenth century. Descartes’ divine architect becomes the deists’ watchmaker God, a perfect engineer whose personal presence disappears from his creation. This theological revolution is tied to the new political commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law not man:
The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order” (PT 36).The disappearance of the miracle goes with the disappearance of the exception, what Schmitt takes to be the essence of political sovereignty. The Enlightenment takes the order of early-modern theology/politics, but evacuates it of personal authority. The universe and the state are machines that operate without subsequent intervention. Deism forgets the deity just as constitutionalism forgets the founder:
The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself … The decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was thus lost (PT 48).Some further features of the Enlightenment should be noted. The first is the intensification of a scientific ethic that insists on regularity. Theologically, that ethic explains the rejection of miracles and God’s special providence. Politically, it explains the hostility to any form of personal discretion or authority. As Schmitt puts it, quoting a book by Hugo Krabbe:
The modern idea of the state, according to Krabbe, replaces personal force (of the king, of the authorities) with spiritual power. “We no longer live under the authority of persons, be they natural or artificial (legal) persons, but under the rule of laws, (spiritual) forces. This is the essence of the modern idea of the state (PT 22).We are left with law and legal form, but we have abandoned the authoritative, personal sources of that law. This, Schmitt suggests, is the crucial difference between Hobbes and Locke. The Hobbesian personal sovereign gives way to Lockean constitutionalism.
A second important theme is the connection between the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the new emphasis on education. Both the constitutional separation of powers and omnipotent, tutelary despotism are products of the deist-rationalist ethic:
For the rationalism of the Enlightenment, man was by nature ignorant and rough, but educable. It was thus on pedagogic grounds that the ideal of a “legal despotism” was justified: Uneducated humanity is educated by a legislator (who, according to Rousseau’s Social Contract, was able “to change the nature of man”); or unruly nature could be conquered by Fichte’s “tyrant,” and the state became, as Fichte said with naïve brutality, an “educational factory” (PT 56).(For what it’s worth, the alleged connection here between Rousseau’s legislator and Quesnay’s legal despotism strikes me as implausible given Rousseau’s contempt for the physiocrats. But that’s a separate point).
Schmitt says more on this theme in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. He argues there that the principles of eighteenth-century rationalism are just as connected to Publius’ program of constitutional balance as they are to Condorcet’s demand for rational despotism (maintained through education):
Condorcet’s absolute rationalism negates the division of powers and destroys both its inherent negotiation and moderation of state powers and the independence of the parties. To his radicalism, the complicated balancing of the American constitution appeared subtle and difficult, a concession to the peculiarities of that land, one of those systems “where one must enforce the laws an in consequence truth, reason and justice,” and where one must sacrifice “rational legislation” to the prejudices and stupidity of individual people. Such rationalism led to the elimination of balance and to a rational dictatorship. Both the American constitution and Condorcet identify law with truth; but the relative rationalism of the balance theory was limited to the legislative and logically limited again within parliament to a merely relative truth” (Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy 46).There’s something a slippery here, as Condorcet’s rationalist dictatorship sounds a bit more like the Cartesian sovereign. The contrast with Hobbes is more clear, though likewise the connection between Descartes and Hobbes weakens. For Hobbes the personal authority is prior to the “truth” or rationality of the laws, whereas Condorcet’s dictator is a servant of truth. But more should be said about that.
Schmitt on the Nineteenth Century
This relatively clean taxonomy gets a good deal more complicated when we come to the nineteenth century. We see, for example, an abortive attempt of certain democratic peoples to invoke a new standard of democratic authority not unlike that of the old seventeenth picture of sovereignty. Schmitt quotes Tocqueville, for example, to observe that early America invoked a standard of democratic legitimacy in some ways reminiscent of Hobbesian personal sovereignty:
for some time the aftereffects of the [absolutist] idea of God remained recognizable. In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God—a belief that is at the foundation of Jefferson’s victory of 1801. Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns (PT 48).Reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries similarly attempt to reconstruct a vision of political absolutism tied to an account of divine voluntarism. De Maistre, on Schmitt’s view, cares less about what the government does than he does about whether an absolute authority exists. Donoso Cortes goes so far as to adopt a Calvinist vision of human depravity and an existentialist contempt for human reason: “What Donoso Cortes had to say about the natural depravity and vileness of man was indeed more horrible than anything that had ever been alleged by an absolutist philosophy of the state in justifying authoritarian rule” (PT 58).
More prominently, Schmitt notes the continued persistence of deist constitutionalism in the legal theories of Kelsen and the like. Such thinkers continue the eighteenth century’s assault on sovereignty and authority by identifying the legal order itself with the state. This neo-Kantian constitutionalism features a redoubled commitment to scientific order, rejecting the category of personal command as precisely the kind of arbitrariness a system of laws cannot tolerate: “at the foundation of this identification of state and legal order rests a metaphysics that identifies the lawfulness of nature and normative lawfulness” (PT 41). And again: “Democracy is the expression of a political relativism and a scientific orientation that are liberated from miracles and dogmas and based on human understanding and critical doubt” (PT 42).
Schmitt also sees the rise of immanent theology and politics as the other major development of the nineteenth century. Where the sovereign God of the seventeenth century and the deist God of the eighteenth were both transcendent divinities, standing above or outside the created order, the God of the nineteenth century is found in the world itself, perhaps even made identical with it:
Conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people, who will settle for either a more or less clear immanence-pantheism or a positivist indifference toward any metaphysics. Insofar as it retains the concept of God, the immanence philosophy, which found its greatest systematic architect in Hegel, draws God into the world and permits law and the state to emanate from the immanence of the objective (PT 50).The radical left-Hegelians and their offspring are the clearest representatives of this immanentizing tendency. Schmitt sees in their demand that man become God and kill any remnants of transcendent theology a ruthless yet serious challenge to the prevailing liberal order. Indeed, in some stirring (if somewhat confusing) passages toward the end of the book, Schmitt casts the conflict between these radicals and the reactionaries to be the key antithesis of modern times. Liberal constitutionalism with its endless discussion and parliamentarism is outmatched by these two extremes.
Schmitt’s own positive view at the end of PT is not entirely clear. His master polemic against liberal constitutionalism remains powerful, and he clearly wishes to restore sovereignty and politics. Consider this famous passage, which connects well with his essay on “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations:”
Today nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant (PT 65).But the form of this restored sense of the political should take is not obvious. He sympathizes with the counterrevolutionaries and their demand for a restoration of sovereignty. And he sympathizes too with their observation that the age of monarchy is over and that the only choices left are democracy or dictatorship. But he concludes on a slightly critical note concerning the illegitimate character of brute, decisionist dictatorship. Does that suggest a tepid defense of democracy—or a commissarial dictatorship within democracy? I think so, but I’m not sure.
Foucault’s Method
Enough of Schmitt. Let’s turn to Foucault. The text I’m interested in here is Security, Territory, Population, which because of its lecture-format is remarkably clear and easy to follow. There is a lot going on in these lectures, including a very interesting distinction between law, discipline, and security as distinct techniques of power. The connection and disjunction between security and discipline is of particular interest, and I’m not sure I follow it entirely. There is also a wonderful account of how "counter-conduct" practices rebuke of settled forms of governmentality and regimented control before being themselves coopted and routinized. But again, my focus will be more narrow—Foucault’s political theology. It is difficult to draw out a clean set of categories even here. As a friend of mine put it, the trouble with interpreting Foucault is that nothing is ever stable, the categories are always moving under your feet. But I’ll do my best to artificially make them stand still.
First on method. Foucault’s method in these lectures—which I will not attempt to say anything about—is an extension of his more general project of institutional and disciplinary analysis. This method begins as follows:
This kind of method entails going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power. In the same way, this analysis allows us to replace a genetic analysis through filiation with a genealogical analysis—genealogy should not be confused with genesis and filiation—which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communications, and points of support. So, the first methodological principle is to move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of the technology of power (STP 117).Applied more specifically to the state, he summarizes his project in these lectures as follows:
Is it possible to place the modern state in a general technology of power that assured its mutations, development, and functioning? Can we talk of something like a “governmentality” that would be to the state what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions? (STP 120).I don’t aim to comment on this methodological program, for I’m not sure I understand it. But in the interest of symmetry I’ve included it.
Foucault on Christian Pastoral Political-Theology
Unlike Schmitt, Foucault begins his political theology with Christianity and the political-theological image of the pastor. He argues that the image of the ruler as a shepherd is properly a contribution of Christianity, and spends more than a few pages explaining why the apparent invocation of the shepherd in Plato’s Statesman does not represent Plato’s real image of political rule. For Plato—and for the Greeks more generally, Foucault suggests—“the politician is a weaver,” a metaphor that emphasizes the political vocation’s focus on knitting together society:
What then is political action in the strict sense, the essence of the political, the politician, or rather the politician’s action? It will be to join together, as the weaver joins the warp and the weft. The politician will bind the elements together, the good elements formed by education; he will bind together the virtues in their different forms, which are distinct from and sometimes opposed to each other; he will weave and bind together different contrasting temperaments, such as, for example, spirited and moderate men; and he will weave them together thanks to the shuttle of a shared common opinion. So the royal art is not at all that of the shepherd, but the art of the weaver, which is an art that consists in bringing together these lives “in a community that rests on concord and friendship” (STP 146, quoting Statesman 311b).The Christian image of the pastorate is radically different, for it emphasizes not primarily the communitarian good of the whole, but each individual soul: “pastoral power is an individualizing power. That is to say, it is true that the shepherd directs the whole flock, but he can only really direct it insofar as not a single sheep escapes him” (STP 128).
The shepherd image, Foucault provocatively argues, is the origin of what he calls “governmentality,” which when rationalized becomes the foundation of the modern state (STP 165). He discusses here patristic sources and monastic rules, which together point to the Christian celebration of obedience as a means of acquiring apatheia and self mastery. As he puts it: “The perfection of obedience consists in obeying an order, not because it is reasonable or because it entrusts you with an important task, but because it is absurd” (STP 176). Proceeding through a discussion of spiritual direction, he concludes that the pastorate is an “absolutely new form of power” that relies on a comprehensive network of mutual servitude and individuation, the combination that he takes to yield the technique of the modern state (STP 183-4).
St. Thomas Aquinas’ De Regno is offered here as representative of the medieval Christian attitude toward political rule and sovereignty. Though importantly different from the animating spirit of the modern state, Thomas articulates an kind of political governmentality. As Foucault puts it, the crucial point here is that Thomas rejects any hard line between sovereignty and government. In outlining the governmental character of political rule, Thomas offers a series of analogies. The first is that the king must imitate God, for just as God governs nature, the king must govern the state. The second is an analogy to nature: the king must be the “vital force,” the animating principle of the political community. The third is our familiar pastoral and paternal image; the king must “procure the common good of the multitude in accordance with a method that can obtain for it heavenly blessedness” (STP 232-3). These three analogies point to the sweeping role of political rule in organizing a huge array of social institutions and relationships.
Foucault on the “De-Governmentalization of the Cosmos” (STP 236)
In imitating God, the vital force, and the pastor, Thomas’ monarch governs with a conscious eye to the salvation of each. The pastoral prince is not bound by abstract rules or principles, he must deal with the particular demands of each individual. For Foucault (in a clearly Schmittian line of reasoning), the Thomistic model of politics requires signs and decisions that can be analogized to God’s miracles. As he puts it: “A pastoral government of nature was therefore a nature peopled by prodigies, marvels, and signs” (STP 235).
This political-theological vision is brought to an end with the scientific revolution. In an analysis that closely follows Schmitt’s, Foucault argues that the scientific revolution proved:
that ultimately God only rules the world through general, immutable, and universal laws, through simple and intelligible laws … What does it mean to say that God only rules through general, immutable, universal, simple, and intelligible laws? It means that God does not “govern” the world; he does not govern it in the pastoral sense. He reigns over the world in a sovereign manner through principles (STP 235).Like Schmitt, the new vision of the ruler-God is not a sovereign who intervenes (through miracles/decision) to touch individual lives, but who reigns over his creation through the immutable regularities he builds into it. The pastoral God of “prodigies, miracles, and signs” disappears “precisely between 1580 and 1650” (STP 236).
With the fall of the old pastoral vision, we get the new pure theory of government. Machiavelli and the new tradition of reason of state insist on a merely political mode of rule, one that has been severed from the analogy to nature or the divine. Foucault goes so far as to term the new vision of politics “statolatry,” the good of the state becomes the sole criterion for proper rule (STP 242). For that reason, the state becomes an object of “reflected practice,” a preeminent form of governmentality (STP 247-8).
From Reason-of-State back to Nature
Foucault goes on at great length about the consequences of the new purely political understanding of the state. He says much of interest here—including an aside on how the demystification of nature requires the dramatization of politics (STP 266-7) and a discussion of the origins of balance-of-power thinking (STP 296ff). But most important for our purposes is the discovery of the economy as the essential site of governmentality and regulation as the essential mechanism. The modern state brings with it an obsession with statistics, a need to know about the whole of society: population, economic facts, public health, etc. The fundamental aim of the new category of “police,” Foucault explains, is as follows:
what police thus embraces is basically an immense domain that we could say goes from living to more than just living. I mean by this that police must ensure that men live, and live in large numbers; it must ensure that they have the wherewithal to live and so do not die in excessive numbers. But at the same time it must also ensure that everything in their activity that may go beyond this pure and simple subsistence will in fact be produced, distributed, divided up, and put in circulation in such a way that the state really can draw its strength from it (STP 326).Something odd is happening. The modern state rejected the pastoral model and gave up on the commitment to tend to the salvation of each soul. Yet it has produced an intensified mode of governmentality that demands totalizing knowledge of every feature of social life. In a sense, Foucault suggests, we see some continuity with the medieval Christian ethos. The point gets even stranger when it comes to nature. The original reason-of-state turn rejected the analogy to nature and the natural order. But the eighteenth century sees the rise of the physiocrats, who rely on a new fetishization of nature and naturalness.
The “politiques,” the champions of reason of state, had rejected natural balance. The physiocrats restore that vision with a vengeance, and thereby inaugurate modern economics. Nevertheless, Foucault continues, there is a crucial difference between physiocratic and medieval understandings of nature:
naturalness re-appears with the economistes, but it is a different naturalness. It is the naturalness of those mechanisms that ensure that, when prices rise, if one allows this to happen, then they will stop rising by themselves. It is the naturalness that ensures that the population is attracted by high wages, until a certain point at which wages stabilize and as a result the population no longer increases. As you can see, this is not at all the same type of naturalness as that of the cosmos that framed and supported governmental reason of the Middle Ages or of the sixteenth century. It is a naturalness that is opposed precisely to the artificiality of politics, of raison d'état and police. It is opposed to it, but in quite specific and particular ways. It is not the naturalness of processes of nature itself, as the nature of the world, but processes of naturalness specific to relations between men, to what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work, and produce (STP 349).If I understand this correctly, Foucault is arguing that the naturalness of the physiocrats is limited to a vision of the “naturalness” of the economic sphere and civil society, of the realm of human “spontaneous” exchange. The role of the state is merely to manage these social interactions so that the natural mechanisms of balance can take root. But the state can in no way understand itself as “natural” in the old medieval sense, which touched a far more comprehensive vision of human life. There is none of the old Thomistic analogy between the king and the “vital principle” of the state.
Instead, we are left, as with Schmitt’s vision of liberal constitutionalism, with a state that aims at perfect self-regulation and equilibrium:
the new governmentality, which in the seventeenth century thought it could be entirely invested in an exhaustive and unitary project of police [cf. Schmitt’s Cartesian sovereign] now finds itself in a situation in which it has to refer to the economy as a domain of naturalness: it has to manage populations; it also has to organize a legal system of respect for freedoms; and finally it has to provide itself with an instrument of direct, but negative intervention, which is the police (STP 354).So, in short, we have gone from the natural pastoral monarchy of the medievals to the artificial, anti-natural reason-of-state of Machiavelli to the naturalist balance of the market/civil society constrained by the artificial state. The new “natural” economic governmentality limits nature to the commerce of social life, which though self-correcting still requires artificial government support. While initially disavowing the pastoral demand to touch all aspects of social life, the modern state has reconstructed an equally if not more totalizing omnipotence over every significant feature of the modern world—population, health, and the economy. All this is maintained through a regime of regulation with an eye to balance.
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