The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol

by Carl Schmitt, Tracy B. Strong (Foreword), George Schwab (Introduction)

One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science.
 
“Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”—Perspectives on Political Science
 
“[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”—Telos




 

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science, German Literature, Theory

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Carl Schmitt's early career as an academic lawyer falls into the last years of the Wilhelmine Empire. (See for Schmitt's life and career: Bendersky 1983; Balakrishnan 2000; Mehring 2009.) But Schmitt wrote his most influential works, as a young professor of constitutional law in Bonn and later in Berlin, during the Weimar-period: Political Theology, presenting Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, appeared in 1922, to be followed in 1923 by The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, which attacked the legitimacy of parliamentary government. In 1927, Schmitt published the first version of his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, defending the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy. The culmination of Schmitt's work in the Weimar period, and arguably his greatest achievement, is the 1928 Constitutional Theory which systematically applied Schmitt's political theory to the interpretation of the Weimar constitution. During the political and constitutional crisis of the later Weimar Republic Schmitt published Legality and Legitimacy, a clear-sighted analysis of the breakdown of parliamentary government Germany, as well as The Guardian of the Constitution, which argued that the president as the head of the executive, and not a constitutional court, ought to be recognized as the guardian of the constitution. In these works from the later Weimar period, Schmitt's declared aim to defend the Weimar constitution is at times barely distinguishable from a call for constitutional revision towards a more authoritarian political framework (Dyzenhaus 1997, 70–85; Kennedy 2004, 154–78).

Though Schmitt had not been a supporter of National Socialism before Hitler came to power, he sided with the Nazis after 1933. Schmitt quickly obtained an influential position in the legal profession and came to be perceived as the ‘Crown Jurist’ of National Socialism. (Rüthers 1990; Mehring 2009, 304–436) He devoted himself, with undue enthusiasm, to such tasks as the defence of Hitler's extra-judicial killings of political opponents (PB 227–32) and the purging of German jurisprudence of Jewish influence (Gross 2007; Mehring 2009, 358–80). But Schmitt was ousted from his position of power within legal academia in 1936, after infighting with academic competitors who viewed Schmitt as a turncoat who had converted to Nazism only to advance his career. There is considerable debate about the causes of Schmitt's willingness to associate himself with the Nazis. Some authors point to Schmitt's strong ambition and his opportunistic character but deny ideological affinity (Bendersky 1983, 195–242; Schwab 1989). But a strong case has been made that Schmitt's anti-liberal jurisprudence, as well as his fervent anti-semitism, disposed him to support the Nazi regime (Dyzenhaus 1997, 85–101; Scheuerman 1999). Throughout the later Nazi period, Schmitt's work focused on questions of international law. The immediate motivation for this turn seems to have been the aim to justify Nazi-expansionism. But Schmitt was interested in the wider question of the foundations of international law, and he was convinced that the turn towards liberal cosmopolitanism in 20th century international law would undermine the conditions of stable and legitimate international legal order. Schmitt's theoretical work on the foundations of international law culminated in The Nomos of the Earth, written in the early 1940's, but not published before 1950. Due to his support for and involvement with the Nazi dictatorship, the obstinately unrepentant Schmitt was not allowed to return to an academic job after 1945 (Mehring 2009, 438–63). But he nevertheless remained an important figure in West Germany's conservative intellectual scene to his death in 1985 (van Laak 2002) and enjoyed a considerable degree of clandestine influence elsewhere (Scheuerman 1999, 183–251; Müller 2003).

Unsurprisingly, the significance and value of Schmitt's works

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schmitt here gives a twofold picture of Hobbes as a theorist of the modern state both in its absolutist counter-revolutionary and liberal-constitutional forms. Schmitt is not favorable to the liberal state but correctly identifies Hobbes not simply as some kind of authoritarian but also a progenitor of small-l liberalism. Ultimately the leviathan sea beast paradoxically had more of an impact in continental Europe than Hobbes’ native Britain for the development of a centralized state with hostilities among neighbors and internal dissension—although things could have gone differently.

In fact, they nearly did under the Stuarts. Hobbes’ Leviathan was not merely symbolic—it carried the latent potential for a maritime sovereign order. A thalassocratic Leviathan could have steered England toward a sea-based commercial empire, legitimizing itself not as Behemoth-by landward extraction and territorial bureaucracy-but by naval protection, trade dominance, and cosmopolitan urban autonomy. In this speculative light, Hobbes anticipated a sovereign less invested in ruling the soul and more in safeguarding the ship. England’s failure to embrace this trajectory after his lifetime, instead absorbing Leviathan into parliamentary forms, marks not the weakness of Hobbes’ vision but the missed opportunity of a maritime synthesis—an imperial protector of routes and liberties.

Hobbes’ conception of the Leviathan was meant to free political thought from Romanism by uniting temporal and religious authority, but what undermines the Leviathan for Schmitt is the mechanical or positivist nature of the state operating according to its own prescribed laws as an artificial person, and the distinction of private conscience from public worship which become inverted as the private predominates over the public until eventually enemies of Leviathan—first in the form of Spinoza—subvert the law, from Schmitt’s perspective at least. The sovereign becomes trapped in its own system since its authority is of a contrived nature relating only to people’s outer lives.

Nevertheless, sovereignty for Hobbes, according to Schmitt, is based on an existential fear of the other and a duty of obedience for protection, in accordance with Schmitt’s own views. Hobbes’ insistence on the inalienability of sovereignty and the right of self-preservation was more absolute than other thinkers—a voluntarist stance echoed in his distinction between counsel and command. His definition of liberty as negative—the absence of legal restraint—does not involve participation in the lawmaking process or social entitlements outside of law, avoiding the excesses of the liberal state.

But this rigid architecture still contains fluid possibilities. A Leviathan ruling from the sea suggests that protection can be existential without being invasive; sovereignty can preserve without totalizing. Hobbes’ dual legacy—landlocked by history, but ocean-bound in imagination—makes him an essential thinker not only for political philosophy but for speculative geopolitics. After all both leviathan and behemoth in Job served as sort of God’s viceroys to keep men in awe whether in their thallasic or telluric forms even if Hobbes behemoth as symbol of pride and rebellion.

[Edoardo Giungi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mai letto un libro in cui il disgusto e l’orrore si alternano rapidamente all’ammirazione per una mente geniale, per il ragionamento limpido, per la capacità straordinaria di rendere chiare teorie filosofiche tutt’altro che semplici ed intuitive. Perché Carl Schmitt non era solamente un filosofo, era un genio, e non era solamente un genio, era un “genio compreso”, un intellettuale in grado di semplificare, di chiarire, di avvolgere il lettore nel dolce vortice del suo ragionamento. Ma purtroppo Schmitt non era soltanto un gigante della filosofia, era anche un nazista, era un antisemita e in questo libro, scritto nel 1938, esce fuori tutta la mostruosità dell’ambiente culturale tedesco dell’epoca. La splendente prosa, quasi divina, che con precisione abbatte ogni ostacolo logico, delucida ogni possibile intoppo, si alterna alla peggiore propaganda antiebraica, certo arricchita dalle solite, dotte citazioni, ma non per questo meno ripugnante, anzi. Anzi perché è soprendente la contrapposizione, è sorprendente scoprire, in un uomo così intelligente, così colto, così superiore, in un uomo simbolo delle inarrivabili altezze della nostra cultura, è scioccante scoprire in un essere umano del genere le peggiori pulsioni animalesche, seppur abilmente adornate di sapienza. La bestialità che si palesa a sprazzi rende ancora più importante la lettura, ci insegna a quali vette possono arrivare la miseria e la nobilità, e Schmitt ci mostra che ci può essere continuità tra le due cose, tutto si può mischiare, l’alto ed il basso possono confondersi, in un ballo malato e tragico dove i ballerini sono talmente avvinghiati nella terribile presa da rendere impossibile l’individuazione dei contorni ad uno spettatore terzo.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

A 'neat' little addendum to the Leviathan that is of limited commentarial value. You don't have to read between the lines to grasp Schmitt's overarching thesis that Jewish philosophy (specifically Spinozist freedom of conscience and the demarcation of the private and the public) is partially responsible for the internal collapse (at both at transcendental and empirical levels) of the colossal god man machine animal, which unable to tolerate politics and policticking, eventually bleeds to death under a thousand cuts.

[Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes offers significant academic value to those interested in Schmitt's political writings historically, and even biographically. George Schwabb suggests in the introduction, and perhaps I am taking too much freedom in my interpretation of this, that the work is a kind of apology for Schmitt's support of the Nazi regime.

That being said, the work is majorly an examination of the concept of the Leviathan in Hobbes' work. This begins with the Leviathan as a mythological image, and the import of such an image for the historical, perhaps political, on the digestion of Hobbes' political theory. Then, the evaluation Schmitt's interpretation of the image is set forth, which invites evaluation of the Leviathan's message, its structure, and it's role in the political theory of Hobbes, and the history of the political theory of liberal democracy. This allows for examination of its objections, its ultimate weakening, most explicitly, the attack of Spinoza's Tractatus.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this challenging book, Carl Schmitt analyzes the modern state through the life and death of the Leviathan state of Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, the “mortal god,” dominated the early modern era, but contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, the shattering of the unified all-powerful state into the dual spheres of private and public posited by liberalism. This work is not primarily a critique of liberalism, however; Schmitt covers that in many of his other works. Rather, it is a criticism that in the modern state, the degenerate successor of Leviathan, men are drawn to deny the primacy of the political. Instead, they exalt government as administrative machine, deliverer of soulless technique. And this is destructive, because the state becomes alienated from the life of a nation, which undermines the unity of a people.

As always with Schmitt, to understand his thought in any given writing, you must place him very precisely in his time. The 1920s and 1930s, when Schmitt produced the majority of his work, were the hinge of fate for Germany. He published The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, with its revealing subtitle, Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, in 1938. In 1936, Schmitt had barely survived his opportunistic embrace of National Socialism, and had been exiled from his brief (since 1933) elevation to an important legal role in the German state. Perhaps as a result, this book can be read (and Schmitt unsurprisingly insisted, after the war, that it should be so read) as criticism of the direction in which Adolf Hitler had taken Germany.

What got Schmitt in trouble was his conception of the state. In the previous decade, in several crucial books, notably Political Theology and The Concept of the Political, as well as a crucial article (“State, Movement, People,” of which there is no good English translation), Schmitt tried to generate a coherent theory of the desired unity of a people and state (although as always with Schmitt, a distinct protean quality in his thought prevents a total coherence). The problem for Schmitt was that his focus on the people and the state did not leave any real place for, much less primacy of place for, the specific leader of that state. This was anathema to a political movement that saw itself as being wholly subservient to one leader, the Führer (which, for those keeping score at home, means “leader”).

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt had said, “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the State.” That is, by parallel to René Descartes in his analysis of mind and body dualism, the core claim of legitimacy, even of existence, for the modern state is that it obliges obedience because it protects. “If protection ceases the state too ceases and every obligation to obey ceases.” Such a claim is obviously derived, at least in part, from Hobbes’s Leviathan. But this claim is incompatible with a state that focuses not exclusively on obedience as the touchstone of protection, but rather also on race, just as it is incompatible with any state that focuses on other characteristics, notably class, instead of actions. In retrospect, it is obvious that Schmitt was always going to run afoul of National Socialism.

Schmitt tried to deflect criticism, starting in 1934, by adopting a strident anti-Semitic stance. But this fooled few, given his longstanding philo-Semitic (though anti-Judaic) tendencies and many Jewish friends and students. He was soon attacked in the official publication of the SS, for being an opportunist, a Catholic, and a fake anti-Semite—all easy cases to make, especially given that he had earlier written extensively about how the Weimar state could and should keep the National Socialists from power, and that their racial theories were ludicrous. As a result, in 1936 Schmitt was expelled from the positions to which the National Socialists had appointed him in 1933 and 1934, and was only able to avoid more severe consequences through the personal intervention of Hermann Göring.

Schmitt does not explicitly acknowledge, although it was pretty clearly in his mind, the life-situation parallels between himself and Hobbes. The Englishman wrote, as did Schmitt, in a very specific time and place, also potentially dangerous for politically-oriented writers—during the English civil wars, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Leviathan was published in 1651, shortly before Oliver Cromwell ascended to Lord Protector, at a point where it was unclear who would hold supreme power in England, which in any case shifted several times over the following decades. Schmitt does acknowledge that Hobbes wrote in an esoteric manner, which suggests that the reader should also understand Schmitt’s writing here as esoteric, more so than in his other writings. Usually I am skeptical of esoteric readings, because they tend to encourage prideful Gnosticism in the one doing the analyzing, but in this case it is probably warranted, at least to some degree.

Schmitt’s admiration for Hobbes, which shows up in many places in his work, was not due to anything as simple as mere preference for authoritarianism, although certainly Leviathan is compatible with authoritarianism. Rather, Schmitt saw that Hobbes recognized the political was crucial for every people (which is not the same as saying the people should be political). Depoliticization, the attempt to remove politics, not in favor of libertarianism or anarchy, but in favor of putatively neutral “technique,” what we today call the managerial state, was for Schmitt opposed to the life of a people. Along similar lines, Schmitt abhorred (and wrote a whole book about) what he called political romanticism, the “endless conversation” that never resulted in actual political action, which reinforced modern tendencies toward administrative, rather than political, government. Politics is necessary. Politics are not separate from the rest of life, but, ultimately, the way in which a political community determines its destiny, in opposition to those who hold incompatible beliefs, through violent conflict if necessary. And the essence of this line of thought is Schmitt’s famous distinction between friend and enemy.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The core of this book is the intersection of religion and politics, arguably also the main underlying theme of Leviathan. Tracy B. Strong, sometime Schmitt translator who wrote one of the Forewords to this edition, notes that “When Schmitt says [in Roman Catholicism and Political Form] that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is the most important sentence in Hobbes, he is attributing to Christianity a political quality. It is to claim that the integrity or unity of political society is of central importance.” This unity is the thread that binds all of Schmitt’s major political works together, and here it is unity of religion, and what that says of state power and capability, which receives the focus.

Schmitt begins, however, with pure symbology, which he derives himself, then applies to Hobbes. Leviathan, as conceptualized by Hobbes, is a maximally “provocative” symbol. Concepts of the “unity of a political entity” as a “huge man” date back to Plato; they are not original to Hobbes. But only with Hobbes was the symbology of the most powerful of sea creatures, Leviathan, brought forward from sources such as the Book of Job to characterize something created by men, and combined with the symbols of both man and machine to create a new type of Leviathan.

Among ancient pagans, the image of the all-powerful sea creature was seen as containing within itself numerous variant symbols, many positive, notably that of a powerful dragon. Both Jews and Christians, however, were hostile toward the symbol of Leviathan. The Jews saw Leviathan as symbolizing their enemies, to be defeated at the end of history. The Christians saw Leviathan as the symbol of Satan attempting (and failing) to devour Christ, the Man-God, as shown by icons of Christ’s cross being the fishhook on which Leviathan was caught. This symbolic conflict between Christians and Leviathan is crucial; it is not coincidence that Julian the Apostate, during his brief reign, on his battle banners replaced the Chi Rho, one of the quintessential Christian symbols and the one adopted by Constantine as the symbol in hoc signo vinces, with a purple dragon. Rather, the conflict is emblematic of Judaism and Christianity, or rather certain forms of Christianity, notably Roman Catholicism, destroying the “original and natural heathen unity of politics and religion.”

Hobbes was the first to map this ancient symbol onto political theory. Here Schmitt turns to Leo Strauss, his former student, at that point already in exile, citing Strauss’s then-recent work on Hobbes approvingly (although most of the book, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, was actually an attack on Hobbes, and effectively a rebuke of some of Schmitt’s thought). In Strauss’s reading, Hobbes “regarded Jews as the originators of the revolutionary state-destroying distinction between religion and politics,” because the Jews first wholly subsumed politics to religion. The Christians, or more precisely the Roman Catholics, throve “on the state-destroying separation of the spiritual and the secular power.” The “actual meaning of Hobbes’ political theory” is to “overcome the Roman papal church’s division between a ‘Kingdom of Light’ and a ‘Kingdom of Darkness.’ ” Hobbes’ symbol of Leviathan is, properly viewed, “a struggle against political theology in all its forms.” That is, it is an argument that religion should be subsumed to politics. It is an attempt to make “a faithful restoration of the original unity of life.” (Schmitt, it seems, approves of Caesaropapism.)

But is Leviathan, as conceived by Hobbes, actually “a faithful restoration of the original unity of life”? Did Leviathan, in fact, withstand “the test of being the politico-mythical image battling the Judeo-Christian destruction of the natural unity?” No, is Schmitt’s answer, and the rest of this short book, originally a series of lectures, explains why Schmitt believed not.

Everyone remembers the famous cover of Leviathan, with the gigantic sovereign’s body composed of many individuals, standing guard over a peaceful city. What few note is that in one hand the figure carries a sword, and in the other a crozier, a bishop’s staff. What almost nobody notes (I certainly never did) is that below each are five symbols, representing under the sword secular power, and under the crozier religious power. “These illustrations represent the characteristic means of using authority and power to wage secular-spiritual disputes. The political battle, with its inevitable and incessant friend-enemy disputes that embrace every sphere of human activity, brings to the fore on both sides specific weapons. . . . The important realization that ideas and distinctions are political weapons, in fact, specific weapons of wielding ‘indirect’ power, was thus made evident on the first page of the book.”

After quite a bit of such musing about the symbology of Leviathan, both in the abstract and as conceived of in the mind of Hobbes, citing everything from Jean Bodin’s Of the Demon-mania of the Sorcerers to the Talmud, Schmitt asks the crucial question, “But what is the significance of the image of the leviathan in the intellectual context and in the conceptual and systematic construction of Hobbes’ theory of the state?” He lays out the well-known state of nature as perceived by Hobbes, the war of all against all. “The terror of the state of nature drives anguished individuals to come together; their fear rises to an extreme; a spark of reason flashes, and suddenly there stands in front of them a new god.” He is a god because he performs the miracle of bringing peace and security where there was none—though he is a mortal god, deus mortalis, in the words of Hobbes, which recur throughout this book, suggesting this is the central concept around which Schmitt revolves his analysis of Hobbes.

While the phrase is resonant, Hobbes never makes exactly clear what he means by it. Schmitt sees its use primarily as polemical, rather than philosophical, a way for the proponents of a sovereign state, supreme in all areas of human life, to resist the religious claims of “papists and Presbyterians,” who would separate religion and state power. In an inversion of divine right, Hobbes claims that the supreme power of the state is itself a type of divine power, but derived wholly from men themselves, not granted by the actual God. The new god “is much more than the sum total of all the participating particular wills”; it “is transcendent vis-à-vis all contractual partners of the covenant and vis-à-vis the sum total, obviously only in a juristic and not in a metaphysical sense.” But because the mortal god is “nothing but a product of human art and human intelligence,” “the leviathan thus becomes none other than a huge machine, a gigantic mechanism of ensuring the physical protection of those governed.”

Schmitt analogizes this to Descartes (who wrote shortly before Hobbes) and his dualist conception of the human body as machine animated by a soul. If Leviathan is but a “huge man,” it is no long logical leap to view him as pure machine. And the mechanization of the state, a characteristic of modernity, “with the aid of technical developments, brought about the general ‘neutralization’ and especially the transformation of the state into a technically neutral instrument.” “By extension, therefore, the machine, as all of technology, is independent of every political goal and conviction and assumes a value-and-truth neutrality of a technical instrument.” Such neutrality made some sense in the early modern period, fraught with religious conflict. “Despair about the religious wars led the well-known originator of the modern concept of sovereignty, Jean Bodin, to become a decisionist in the sense of sovereign state power.” But today, it is opposed to politics, and thus to the lifeblood of the people.

Here we have the connection to Schmitt’s core principle of the state, to which he returned again and again—decisionism. A neutral state “separates the religious and metaphysical standards of truth from standards of command and function and renders them autonomous.” State neutrality, however, is not tolerance. “A technically neutral state can be tolerant as well as intolerant.” What matters is its legal commands, its decisions, made without reference to outside standards. “Right” and “truth” are merely the “performance and function of the state”—whose only obligation is that it “guarantees me the security of my physical existence.”

Schmitt also here touches on another preoccupation of his, the “right of resistance.” The medieval state recognized the “right to resistance” towards an unlawful ruler. In the Hobbesian state, however, “resistance as a ‘right’ . . . is factually and legally nonsensical and absurd.” True, the “state can stop functioning and the big machine can break down because of rebellion and civil war. This development, however, has nothing to do with a ‘right to resist.’ ” We will return to the importance of this line of thought.

Continuing with the focus on the intersection of religion and politics, as part of the all-powerful nature of the state, Hobbes ascribed to the state the right and power to decide whether a miracle exists. Miracles, wonders defying nature’s laws performed through religious power, were a preoccupation of early modern thinkers, but not exactly in the sense that we think of them. When moderns today think of miracles, they think primarily of healings. The miracle par excellence in the seventeenth century, however, was transubstantiation—the changing of bread and wine through liturgy into the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Whether this miracle, or any miracle, in fact occurred was a matter, in Hobbes’s view, for the state to command—in other words, the state should decide which religious belief was to prevail. If the state said transubstantiation existed and was therefore a miracle, so it was, and all citizens must so confess, because that is the nature of the Leviathan state. Nonetheless, “in a barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the sovereign state,” Hobbes allowed that an individual might exercise his private reason whether to believe or not to believe, in this or any other miracle. He could “preserve his own judgment in his heart,” so long as he complied with the external dictates of the state.

This admission, in Schmitt’s view, destroyed Leviathan and its majestic internal coherence, by making it more machine and less mortal god, which necessarily creates a tendency towards neutral technique, the administrative/managerial state. Baruch Spinoza, already in 1670, realized this, and expanded this crack “into a universal principle of freedom of thought, perception, and expression, with the proviso that public peace and the rights of the sovereign power would be respected.” Spinoza, that is, made the private primary, and the public a proviso. This devolves the state to a mere police force, “which is restricted to maintaining ‘public’ calm, security, and order.” The inner man is no longer subject to the state. “Public power and force may be ever so completely and emphatically recognized and ever so loyally respected, but only as a public and only an external power, it is hollow and already dead from within.” Leviathan is no longer a god, but a monster, and so Hobbes’s symbol became viewed during the eighteenth century by all major political thinkers.

Thus, the state passed from absolute power to become “the nineteenth-century bourgeois constitutional state.” State power became justified . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Jelena · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Schmitt's analysis you realize that there's actually something really uncanny about this Leviathan..creature...thing. "Who is this god who brings peace and security to people tormented by anguish, who transforms wolves into citizens and through this miracle proves himself to be a god ...?" (p.92)

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reading of Hobbes’ Leviathan; just have to stomach a LOT of antisemitism.

[Zelai Xu · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's great reading of Hobbes

[Forest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just incredible. Schmitt does it again. Really amazing book for understanding Hobbes and his impact on political philosophy.

[Samuel Weiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject of the book is the changing meaning of the symbol of the Leviathan and how this relates to the way the political philosophy of Hobbes has been understood over time. It is interesting for a number for reasons. First, Hobbes is one of the biggest influences of Schmitt so an understanding of Schmitt's political thought requires understanding Schmitt's interpretation of Hobbes. Second, the discussion of the symbol fo Leviathan relates to Schmitt's broad thinking on the nature of political myths (which I am not familiar enough with to comment upon further). Third, the book is essential for determining how we should view Schmit. It confirms that we cannot seperate Schmitt's political thought from his association due its obvious anti-semitism and that it is proper to judge his thought in light of his colloboration with the Nazis. Some writers go too far the other way and condemn Schmitt completely. This approach is wrong too- although he was a philosopher who was a Nazi, he was not a Nazi philosopher- his philosophy is categorically different from the philosophical views endorsed by the Nazis. Moreover, his thought is useful for understanding the nature of power, sovreignity, and the political.

Leviathan appears in the Book of Job and is alluded to in several other parts of the Bible. In the medieval period, there were two dominant interpretations, Christian and Jewish. Christians viewed Leviathan as the devil. During the Harrowing of Hell, which occured during the time when Christ was crucified and yet to be resurrected, he tried to eat Christ, but choked on the cross, like a fish-hook. Jews set Leviathan within a view of world history as a battle among gentiles. He represents sea powers and is enternal conflict with the behemoth, representing land powers. The Jews stand by and watch contempously as the people of the world kill each other. (Schmitt's anti-semitism here is apparant in his exposition of this interpretation and much of the rest of the book.)

By the early modern period, a decline in demonology and a belief in the occult meant that Christians viewed Leviathan as a great power, neither good nor bad. His history of the Presbytarian and Puritan Revolution of 1640 to 1660 is entitled Behemoth. This monster is represented in the book as a symbol brought about by religious fantacism. Behemoth is Leviathan's nemesis who he must fight forever. Hobbes is influenced by the cabbalastic interpretation insofar as he emphases the eternal conflict between the two monsters. Although Hobbes tries to use the symbol of Leviathan free of its past demonological associations, he cannot free it completely from its occult past. Schmitt suggests that the Jewish misuse of the philosophy of Hobbes is the result of these associations. The labelling of the state as Leviathan meant that, despite Hobbes' intention, they viewed the power of the state as negatitive and as something to be resisted. Interestingly, Schmitt argues that Hobbes (a Christian) tries to use the Jewish interpretation of Leviathan and that his philosophy is twisted by Jews who use the Christian interpretation.

The meaning of the symbol of Leviathan continued to develop after the publication of the eponymous book. In Chapter 37 of Leviathan, Hobbes declares that the question of whether miracles exist should be a matter for individual belief to maintain universal freedom of thought. However, as soon as it comes to public confession of faith, private judgement ceases and the sovreign decides what is true and false. The (notably Jewish) philosophers Mendelsson and Spinoza used the distinction between private and public faith with respect to miracles to justify a distinction between private and public belief with respect to all belief. Other (also Jewish) writers took the distinction introduced by Spinoza to argue that the state cannot claim total obedience, since it cannot command the private sphere. This eliminated total sovreignity, which Schmitt thinks is a problem and risks letting Behemoth win.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Consisting, initially, of an explication of the twin mythological figures of the Leviathan and the Behemoth, which were so important to Hobbes, and continuing into a detailed overview of the Leviathan in the texts of Hobbes, amidst further research into Hobbes' complex ideas, "The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes" is work of considerable acuity and genius that founders on the shoals of its misguided affinity for authoritarian tendencies in political thought. With a brevity and accuracy familiar to readers of his other works, Schmitt delves deeply into the nature of Hobbes images, ideas, and influence, the better to raise up in the esteem of his reader's Hobbes (and Schmitt's) misplaced valuation of the state as the unquestioned authority of life which, in exchange for obedience, guarantees security for its adherents. Particularly problematic for this reader was the phrasing, using anti-Semitic emotional tones, of his criticism of the few "Jewish" philosophers (Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn) for breaking open the "fissure" hinted at in Hobbes thought, between the public and the private, between the "inner" and the "outer." Contrary to what Schmitt implies, that these thinkers destroyed the perfection of the "Leviathan," in fact these thinkers advanced the cause and justification of freedom from arbitrary authority that made Democracy, in the modern sense, possible in the Western world. So, both the disturbing overtones of blaming the "Jewish" nature of these thinkers for their expansion of individual rights and the accompanying glorification of authoritarian modes of governance have the effect of undermining any truth content in this work. According to the introduction found at the start of work, Schmitt evidently ran afoul of National Socialist authorities for deviating from the "party line" of the Nazi party which he had joined. Perhaps he learned a lesson that authority, when blindly followed, often substitutes persecution for protection when complete obedience is given. However, in actuality, Schmitt, evidently, continued to espouse a disturbing authoritarian streak to the end of his days. We readers, on the other hand, still have time to mend the errors of our ways. And espousing the tenets of this disturbing book is not a step in the right direction.

[Uri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molt encertat en qüestions de legitimitats, per fer 5 cèntims. El Leviatà actual no ha mort, sinó s'ha refundat en els cossos administratius del estats actuals, però perquè el leviatà clàssic no ha sàpigut perviure en l'època moderna ni comtemporània. Crítica al liberalisme: El liberalisme d'època parlant de Locke, Montesquieu o Voltaire donen peu a la diferenciació entre vida privada i vida pública, marcant així una llibertat individual sense precendents a l'època, en el moment en que el sobirà no pot controlar la consciència del poble, la política com diria Schmitt es neutralitza o despolititza i dona peu a la fragmentació social en àmbits com la religió i impedeix la consolidació del Leviatà com a actor sobirà. Conclusió: no crec que haguem d'entendre el Leviatà com el sobirà, sinó com l'aparell administratiu.

[Fnaught · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The state can stop functioning and the big machine can break down because of rebellion and civil war. This development, however, has nothing to do with a "right to resist." Viewed from the perspective of Hobbes' state, this would constitute a politically recognized right to civil war –that is, the right to destroy the state, a paradox. The state, after all, has been formed to end the kind of war that exists in a state of nature. A state is not a state unless it can put an end to that kind of war. The state of leviathan excludes the state of nature."

This pairs extremely well with Ernst Jünger's presentation of rural Utopia versus State of Nature in his novel 'On the Marble Cliffs' -a friend of Schmitt's.

[Minäpäminä · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting in regards to both Hobbes and Schmitt himself. It is difficult to position oneself to Schmitt's interpretation since he outright says he believes Hobbes was an esoteric writer but later shrugs the symbol of the Leviathan off as just English humor. Schwab wonderfully contextualizes this piece in both Schmitt's ouvre and the political situation of his time.

[Eitan]

The Nazi stopped being subtle! Not very interesting as actual political philosophy, no crazy new perspectives or ideas.

Also- Intro by Schwab is sickeningly forgiving of Schmitt’s Nazism. Helpful historical context to the publication but nonetheless disgusting.

[Luis Agustín Txanpongile Münasteriotar · Rating 4 out of 5]

El bueno de Carlos se pone un poco antisemita esta vez (1938) y la paga con Spinoza, "el primer judio liberal". En cualquier caso, me parece que lo voy a regalar en el dia de la madre (y a mi madre, claro).

[Anna Puig · Rating 1 out of 5]

Una edición terrible. Mala traducción del griego, lleno de faltas tal que fetal en vez de fatal o directamente sin puntos cuando debía haberlos, las páginas mal impresas (diferencia de color o letras desaparecidas). En definitiva, no comprar...

[Count Gravlax · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great and clear explanation on the basic concepts of Tomas Hobbes' Leviathan, probably the clearest of Schmitt's books till now, antisemitic clap-trap notwithstanding.

[Lobo¡! · Rating 4 out of 5]

muy interesante. me lo he acabado de leer en Molinos de Duero, tiene un bañadero y mesas de picnic excelentes.

[Jacob Neplokh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antisemitic mythological political theory, with a bit of esoteric international relations added in

[Igarcias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeeeeens.

[Henrique Valle]

o cara voltou no século 17 para fazer uma teoria da contrarrevolução anti-nazista,
século 20 é um dos séculos que existem mesmo

[Luke Echo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schmitt's break with Hobbes. the Failure of the Leviathan as a Myth, with a fair bit of anti-semitism.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting clarification of Hobbes, especially as regards his religiosity.