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History of European Ideas 29 (2003) 459473

Myth, law and order: Schmitt and Benjamin read

reflections on violence
.
Jan-Werner Muller
All Souls College, Oxford OX1 4AL, UK
Received 2 August 2003; accepted 7 August 2003

The Kingdome of God is gotten by violence: but what if it could be gotten by

unjust violence? (Hobbes, Leviathan).

Heidegger and next to him Carl Schmitt, author of public lawypublications and
to a certain degree pupil of Georges Sorel, turn out to be the two intellectual
catastrophes of the new Germany. Schmitt appears to me as the even more
dangerous one. (Karl Vossler, in a letter to Croce, 25th August 1933).

Our task is not one of deciding for all time, but rather one of deciding in every
moment. But we must make our decision. (Walter Benjamin, 26th May, 1926).

1. Introduction

To talk about Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin in one breath still seems to have
an air of the sacrilegious, maybe even an air of violencedoing violence to
Benjamin, that is of course.1 Is one not reinforcing what, at least at the time of
Benjamins suicide, seemed to be the work of the historical victor, making, as
Benjamin put it, death unsafe from the enemy?2 Escaping this suspicion by
employing Benjamins own concept of constellation seems merely an ultimately
blocked intellectual escape-route: how can one associate Schmitt, the Crown jurist
of the Third Reich, unrepentant until the end, with Benjamin, its tragic and
terrorized victim?.
The answer is of course that they associated themselves, through Benjamins
famous (or infamous) letter in which he expressed his appreciation for Schmitts
1
Thanks to Michael Jennings, Andreas Kalyvas and John P. McCormick.
2
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, In: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 245255; here p. 247.

0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.08.002
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work on sovereignty and dictatorship. The necessity of dissociating them moved

Adorno to eliminate references to Schmitt from Benjamins Origins of German
Tragedy and leave out this correspondence from the selection of Benjamins letters
thereby eventually giving substance to a vicious debate, typical of the German
intellectual scene, and making the letter into an ideological weapon par excellence.3
Just as followers of Benjamin had to prove over and over again that there was no
elective intellectual afnity by pointing out the obvious differences between Schmitt
and Benjamin, Schmitts apologists took the mere existence of the letter as proof that
Schmitt was not only an intellectually respectable gure, but also a major inspiration
for the Weimar Left.4
The myth of Schmitts domination, however, seems to be borne out even during
their overlapping lifetimes: Schmitt, the e! tatist who actually managed to position
himself at the centre of the state, as Prussian state secretary, and Benjamin, the
institutional outsider, both wrote articles on Georges Sorels Reflections on
Violence.5 Schmitt claimed to have been the rst to have introduced Sorelian
thought into Germany.6 While Schmitt did in fact briey mention Sorel in a footnote
in his 1921 book on dictatorship, Benjamin in the same year published his Critique
of Violence, in which he took Sorels general strike as a starting point for a rich, but
elusive theory of overcoming violence. Still, Schmitt tends to get credited with having
initiated a Sorel reception in the German-speaking countries.7

3
Walter Benjamin, Briefe, Eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, 2 Vols. (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1966). On the discovery of Benjamins letter, see Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige
.
Fugung (Berlin: Merve, 1987). Somewhat bizarrely, Derrida has gone to the other extreme and invented a
letter by Schmitt congratulating Benjamin on the publication of Critique of Violence, alongside a whole
correspondence between Schmitt and Benjamin as well as between Schmitt and Heidegger. See Jacques
Derrida, Der mystische Grund der Autoritat . (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 67 and 97.
4
Paul Noack, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993), pp. 110114.
5
I should stress that this essay is not concerned with the adequacy of Schmitts and Benjamins
interpretations of Sorel. Apart from being methodologically both dubious and fruitless, such an exercise in
assessing the correctness of their views on Sorel would have to face the problematic fact of what Jeremy
Jennings has referred to as Sorels methodological, scientic, epistemological and ethical pluralism and
the diversity of intention, style and subject-matter that Sorels work reveals. See J. R. Jennings, Georges
Sorel: The Character and Development of his Thought (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 15.
6
Carl Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles 19231939 (1940; Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1988), p. 313. According to Piet Tommissen, Schmitt rst read Sorel during the First
World War, when his task in the Munich Ministry of War was to screen foreign propaganda, newspapers
and books. It was then that Schmitt became thoroughly acquainted with the works of Ernest Seilli"ere and
was led on to the study of Sorel. See Piet Tommissen, Bausteine zu einer wissenschaftlichen Biographie
(Periode 18881933), in: Helmut Quaritsch (Ed.), Complexio Oppositorum: Uber . Carl Schmitt (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1988), pp. 71100; here pp. 7677. Schmitt was widely recognized as having treated
Sorel for the rst time in political and historical context and in his true signicance. See Ernst Posse, Der
antidemokratische Denker und der moderne Sozialismus, preface to the German edition of Georges
Sorels La decomposition du marxisme, Die Auflosung . des Marxismus, (Jena, 1930), pp. 119; here p. 19,
quoted by Helmut Berding, Rationalismus und Mythos: Geschichtsauffassung und politische Theorie bei
Georges Sorel (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969), p. 47.
7
See Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt: Sein Aufstieg zum Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), p. 183. The major work on Sorel was Michael
Freunds Georges Sorel: Der revolutionare . Konservativismus (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
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Having said this, one has of course to face the possibility that Schmitt and
Benjamin might be theoretically too close for comfort, or that they at least
entertained what Susanne Heil has called dangerous liaisons.8 After all, it is now
widely recognized that Benjamin felt certain theoretical afnities with extreme right-
wing Weimar intellectuals such as Ludwig Klages, and that he freely appropriated
fragments of their thought for his own projects.9 I shall argue, however, that rather
than being too close for comfort, the two political theologians Schmitt and Benjamin
were on a collision course. This argument is of course in danger of leading to what
one already knows: that Schmitt was an authoritarian Catholic, with occasional
forays into totalitarianism, whoat least at certain points in his lifeput his faith in
the Biblical gure of the Katechon who holds off the Anti-Christ;10 whereas
Benjamin subscribed to a Jewish messianism which Anson Rabinbach has aptly
described as radical, uncompromising, and comprised of an esoteric intellectualism
that is uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamoured of apocalyptic
visionswhether revolutionary or purely redemptive in the spiritual sense.11
Schmitt was consistently anti-materialist, always denying any legitimacy to
modernity, which he tended to see as the homogeneous disaster of secularization and
the loss of an old European civilization with its clearly demarcated state system and
legal order, the ius publicum Europaeum. Benjamin, on the other hand, for all his
ideological twists and turns between Marxism and radical conservatism, eventually
sought to uncover modernitys redemptive potential. But given these obvious
antinomies, how did they ever get theoretically so close? Was it simply because they
both thought from extremes, radically pushing concepts to their limits, and because
both subscribed to a form of decisionism? A common vocabulary centred on states
of exceptions would suggest as muchbut not much more. Or is it perhaps that a
radicalism, rooted in eschatology, and decisionism ow from any political theology,
irrespective of content?.
What I want to argue is that, at least during the early 1920swhen Schmitt was
still clearly in the Catholic camp and Benjamin had yet to discover Marxism as well
as the perhaps redemptive potential of modern mythologyit was precisely their
different conceptualization of the relationship between mythology and morality
which set them apart.12 These conceptualizations were close enough to make them

(footnote continued)
1932). In the preface, Freund acknowledges Schmitt, along with the likes of Edouard Berth, H.D.G. Cole
[sic!], Croce, A. P. dEntr"eves, Waldemar Gurian and Hermann Heller. See pp. 1011.
8
.
Susanne Heil, Gefahrliche Beziehungen: Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler,
1996).
9
See for instance Richard Wolin, Introduction to the Revised Edition, In: Walter Benjamin: An
Aesthetics of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. xixlviii.
10
For the most careful and comprehensive, but ultimately inconclusive study of Schmitts view of the
Katechon, see Felix Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
1996).
11
Anson Rabinbach, Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German
Jewish Messianism, In: New German Critique, No. 34 (1985), pp. 78124.
12
It seems to me undeniable that Schmitt was a peculiar kind of Catholic in the late teens and early
1920sbut I do not wish to suggest that he subscribed to a homogeneous Catholic political theology
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take an intense interest in each others workin Schmitts case, in fact until the
1960s and 1970s, when he almost obsessively followed the Benjamin renaissance on
the West German New Left.13 But the differences are crucial and illuminate larger
aspects of Schmitts and Benjamins ouevres.
To stake out this argument, I shall focus on Schmitts major article on Sorel,
entitled The Political Theory of Myth, which was later incorporated into his Crisis
of Parliamentary Democracy, and on Benjamins essay Critique of Violence, which
. Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. On the other
appeared in 1921 in the Archiv fur
hand, Benjamins book on German tragedy and its relation to Schmitts work on
dictatorship will remain beyond the scope of this article, as will the recent
deconstructive readings of Benjamins Critique undertaken by Jacques Derrida and
Werner Hamacher.14

2. Schmitt reads Sorel: the power of myth

Carl Schmitt rst mentioned Sorel in his 1921 book The Dictatorship, but only
engaged extensively with Sorels thought in his 1923 piece on The Political Theory of
Myth.15 In this review of Reflections on Violence Schmitt argued that Sorel
presented an anti-rationalist, anti-materialist theory of direct action and unmediated
concrete life. This theory constituted a major improvement on intellectualist
Marxism. What Sorel taught was that the unmediated active decision, and the
sheer psychological power required for such a decision, were both generated by
myths. Schmitt spoke admiringly of Sorels idea that out of true life-instincts come
the great enthusiasm, the great moral decision and the great myth.16 Myths created
courage and a new morality, a morality which was to bring about a great cataclysm,
the moment when in turn the great moral decision was required. Mythical images,
through their aesthetic immediacy, induced action and heroism. In short, myth and
morality would feed on each other. Far from vitalism and voluntarism leading to
disorder, irrational myths actually contributed to a new grounding of authority,
discipline and hierarchy. Schmitt endorsed this contribution of myths, conceding

(footnote continued)
throughout his life, as Heinrich Meier has done in The lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the
Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. Marcus Brainard (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
13
On Schmitts interest in New Left publications on Benjamin, see Helmut Lethen, Unheimliche N.ahe:
Carl Schmitt liest Walter Benjamin, In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16th September 1999.
14
Derrida, Der mystische Grund der Autoritat; . Werner Hamacher, Afformative, Strike: Benjamins
Critique of Violence, in: Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Eds.), Walter Benjamins Philosophy:
Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 110138. For an excellent discussion of
Benjamins use of Schmitts theory of sovereignty in The Origin of German Tragedy, see Lutz Koepnick,
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 3552.
15
.
Carl Schmitt-Dorotic, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfangen . atsgedankens
des modernen Souveranit . bis zum
proletarischen Klassenkampf (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1921), p. 149.
16
Carl Schmitt, Die politische Theorie des Mythus, In: Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 918, here
p. 11.
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that the great psychological and historical signicance of the theory of myths could
not be denied.17
While supporting Sorels assessment of the sheer power of myths, Schmitt
disagreed, however, on what actually constituted the most powerful myth. He
acknowledged the impact of the Marxist myth of the bourgeois, but argued that the
Russian Revolution had been successful only because Lenin had managed to
transform the myth of the bourgeois into a nationalistic Russian myth. In this
refashioned Russian or Slavophile myth, the bourgeois became rst and foremost a
Westerner oppressing the Russian peasants. Only a fusion of socialism and
Slavophilism into a powerful myth had brought the Bolsheviks to power. For
Schmitt, this demonstrated that the energy of the national was greater than that of
the myth of the class struggle.18
Was this merely a historical argument, based on the experience of the Russian
Revolution? More likely, Schmitt saw the myth of class struggle as an unstable
mixture of two contradictory impulses: the political will to self-sacrice, and the
impulse to struggle for economic improvement, which he denigrated as a form of
materialism, even hedonism.19 True, his concept of the political as a friendenemy
distinction seemed a neutral criterion of intensity, rather than of a particular
domain of human life. The economic, the moral or the aesthetic could all become
political, as long as polarizing conicts would emerge in any of these elds that were
intense enough to effectively group people into friends and enemies and pose an
existential threat.20 What was needed was what Schmitt called a sensitivity for
difference as such. But Schmitt added that all that is moving today in the direction
of national antagonisms, rather than class antagonisms.21 In that sense, Schmitt did
privilege the national over the economic, but rather as a matter of historically
contingent factors.22 What remained constant was that powerful myths were myths
of an existentially threatening other, which could be cast as constitutive enemy. For
now, this sense of heterogeneity, of otherness, which needed to be mobilized
through myths, was most powerful in the case of national difference. The polarizing
power in the service of effectively distinguishing friend and enemy, is therefore what
Schmitt valorized above all in myths.

17
Carl Schmitt, Die politische Theorie des Mythus, In: Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 918, here
p. 15.
18
Carl Schmitt, Die politische Theorie des Mythus, In: Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 918, here
p. 16.
19
.
Gunter Meuter, Der Katechon: Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: Duncker
& Humblot, 1994), pp. 312313.
20
See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996) and for an account of the evolution of Schmitts concept of the political, see Heinrich Meiers
brilliant study Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
21
Carl Schmitt, Die politische Theorie des Mythus, p. 17.
22
For a more detailed consideration of Schmitts nationalism, see my Carl Schmittan Occasional
Nationalist?, In: History of European Ideas, 23 (1997), pp. 1934.
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3. Schmitts repudiation of Sorel: the perils of myth

One could argue, then, that Schmitt incorporated Sorels teachings into his
developing authoritarianism and decisionism, simply substituting nationalism for
socialism. Such a view would make for an excellent theoretical t with Zeev
Sternhells interpretation of the birth of fascist ideology in a fusion of Sorels anti-
materialist revisionism of Marxism and the integral nationalism of Charles
Maurrass Action Fran@aise and Maurice Barre" ss neo-Lamarckian philosophy of la
terre et les morts.23
Such a reading of Schmitt as uncritically endorsing Sorels doctrine of myths,
however, overlooks two aspects of his interpretation: rst, Schmitt made a merely
sociological claim about the homogenizing and antagonistic power of nationalism,
rather than a normative one. Nationalism was one particularthough a particularly
powerfulideology which could provide a content for myths. But it was also a
historically contingent, rather than a theoretically essential one. More importantly,
and contrary to what most commentators have argued, Schmitt did not
automatically endorse the activist and irrationalist aspects of myths per se.24
Towards the end of The Theory of Myth, Schmitt discussed the anarcho-
syndicalists discovery of the power of irrational myths in more general terms,
arguing that the ideational danger of these irrationalities is great. The last, at least in
some pieces still remaining forms of cohesion are dissolved in an unlimited number
of myths. For political theology, this is polytheistic, as any myth is polytheistic.21 In
other words, a multiplication of myths was yet another instance of pluralism in an
age that was already losing coherence and cohesion, the cohesion and coherence that
is, of the era of a Christian Europe centred on the Westphalian system of ius
publicum Europaeum. Unlike Sorel, for whom probably any myth ensuring moral
regeneration would have been attractive, Schmitt would not have just accepted any
arbitrary mythmaking, or an uncontrolled proliferation of action-inducing images.
Schmitts endorsement of myths was limited to endorsing the right kind of myth: in
Schmitts idiosyncratic political theology, this myth had to be connected to his kind
of Roman Catholicismat least in the early 1920s.
Not surprisingly, then, soon after his The Political Theory of Myth, Schmitt
argued in his slim volume Roman Catholicism and Political Form that Sorels
teachings stood in an essential opposition to the political idea of Catholicism.25 He
opposed an economic and materialist mode of thought, based on technology, natural
science and instrumental rationality, to the humane rationality of Catholicism.
Catholicism embodied a rationality not aimed at the domination of nature but one
that gave normative direction to life. It understood psychological and social aspects

23
See Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barr"es et le nationalisme francais (Paris: A. Colin, 1972), Zeev Sternhell,
The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, with Mario Sznajder and
Maia Asheri (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) and David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism,
Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), pp. 7196.
24
See for instance Volker Neumann, Der Staat im Burgerkrieg:. . und Wandlung des
Kontinuitat
Staatsbegriffs in der politischen Theorie Carl Schmitts (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1980), pp. 6970.
25
.
Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1925; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), p. 22.
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of human nature which could never be captured by views informed only by

instrumental rationality.26 Most importantly, the Church constituted what Schmitt
called a complexio oppositorum, capable of containing the supposed opposites of
nature and reason, the rational and irrational aspects of human nature and even
antithetical political principles such as monarchy and democracy. Thus, the Church,
with its humanity and juridical power to nd forms for the genuine expression
of lifethereby combining substantial concreteness with the superiority of
formoffered what one might call a quasi-Hegelian rationalism of reconcilia-
tion.27 This rationalism was alien to, and spiritually above, the economic mode of
thought aimed at the manipulation of matter and the satisfaction of endlessly
proliferating, arbitrary desires. In short, it was a substantive rationality capable of
containingrather than just replacinginstrumental rationalityyHowever, it was
the latter mode of thought which had become all-pervasive in the twentieth century,
as it was penetrating into its last atoms the imagination of the modern inhabitant of
the city which was lled with technological and industrial imagesy.28
In fact, however, the instrumental and, more specically, technological view of the
world also had its own metaphysics and mythology, which envisaged the world as a
great dynamo. In that sense, a mechanistic-mathematical ideology was also capable
of producing a myth, even a theology, in which God became a giant motor powering
the universe.29 But it was nevertheless a soulless, deeply anti-human Weltanschauung.
Even the struggle between the proletariat and capitalists was supercial, or, given
Schmitts tendency towards metaphysical reductionism, one might even say
superstructural, in comparison to the underlying mode of thought which both
political opponents shared. Schmitt argued, pace Sorel, that the great entrepreneur
does not have a different ideal than Lenin, namely an electried Earth. Both are
only ghting about the correct method of electrication. American nanciers are
coming together in the struggle for the economic mode of thought, that is in the
struggle against politicians and jurists. In this alliance one also nds Georges Sorel,
and here, in the economic mode of thought, lies a decisive current opposition against
the political idea of Catholicism.30
Schmitt, then, might well have been attracted to Sorels notorious pessimism, to
his stringent moralist vision, his gesture of apocalyptical resoluteness, and nally to
some of the anti-mechanistic ruminations of the engineer Sorel against the little
science. Ultimately, however, he viewed Sorel as also subscribing to a vision of
human beings empowering themselves and undermining the rationality of institu-
tions like the Church. Sorels association of producers was rooted in the same
productivist, progressivist and technological world-view which informed Marxism

26
.
Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1925; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), p. 20
and p. 23.
27
.
Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1925; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), p. 14.
28
.
Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1925; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984),
pp. 2122.
29
.
Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1925; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), p. 20.
30
.
Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1925; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), p. 22.
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and liberalism.31 Sorels idea of permanent struggle, of a constant mobilization of the

masses for the sake of keeping morality intact, was antithetical to Schmitts ideal of a
state capable of containing a homogeneous population and of keeping the peace
internally. Moreover, Schmitt saw Sorel as inuenced by the theorist whom Schmitt
considered the ultimate enemy who purely embodied an activist metaphysics and an
anarchism resistant to any form whatsoever.32 This was of course Bakunin, and
placing Sorel next to Bakunin meant placing him not just in the camp of the
anarchists, but in that of the anti-Western barbarians and, ultimately, the Anti-
Christ.33 In short, despite Sorels stringent moralism, Schmitt ultimately read him as
simply a subversive.
Unlike what some commentators have claimed, Schmitt did not celebrate violence
for its own sake, but only endorsed it for the establishment or re-establishment of
political orderthe very task of the sovereign. Myth could support this process
of stabilizationif necessary through the representation of past violence and acts of
sovereignty. Law remained parasitic on these mythical, exceptional moments of
imposing orderbut order was always Schmitts ultimate concern, and a certain
amount of mobilization through myth a necessary sacrice to preserve an ultimately
static picture.
Thus, the crucial ideological fault line did not run between systems of thought
capable of myths and those that were not, but between those which imposed a
substantial rationality on human life, and those which insisted on relentless
Sachlichkeit, or an instrumental rationality which treated human beings as things.
However, such an ideology not only subverted the more comprehensive rationality
of established institutions, but was also ultimately itself irrational. Hugo Ball, in
what still remains the most perceptive reading of Schmitts political theology,
pointed out that according toySchmitt, one might as well suggest to the Church a
pact with the devil, than endorse Sorelianism and an alliance between the Church
.
and the irrational masses.34 Gunter Meuter is right in his assessment that Schmitt
thought a Christian or nationalist monomyth necessary, rather than the Dionysian
31
There was of course ample justication for this interpretation of Sorel. See for instance Georges Sorel,
Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme (1915; New York: Peter Smith, 1941), pp. 3536 and Sorels
chapter on the Ethics of the Producers.
32
In Schmitts view, one could respect the true political enemy in a way one could not respect the half-
hearted, indecisive liberalism between the extremes. This is the reason why Donoso Cort!es could respect
Proudhon, and why Schmitt held a secret fascination for Bakunin. In Roman Catholicism, he even
acknowledged that perhaps Russian formlessness could have the potential power to create a form for the
.
economic-technical age. See Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus, p. 64.
33
Michael Freund attempted to refute the idea that Sorel had been inuenced by Bakunin. In a footnote
he referred to Schmitts thesis, arguing that in fact Sorel was rmly in the Western, civilized camp, whereas
Bakunin represented asiatic barbarism. He also commended Schmitt for having toned down his argument
about Bakunins inuence on Sorel in the second edition of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. See
Freund, pp. 4142 and 286287.
34
Hugo Ball, Carl Schmitts Politische Theologie, In: Jacob Taubes (Ed.), Der Furst . dieser Welt: Carl
Schmitt und die Folgen (Munich, 1983), pp. 100117; here p. 107. Ball suggested that Schmitt should not
have just defended the vital eschatology of some contemporary Catholics against Sorel, but also
marshalled recent canonizations and beatications as evidence which disproved Sorels contention that the
Church had lost its mythological vitality. See Ball, p. 114.
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polymythology of arbitrarily exchangeable demiurges, which Schmitt saw pregured

in Sorels theories.35
Moreover, where Sorelaccording to Schmittsaw myths as driving the masses
forward toward some cataclysmic moment, Schmitt feared what he called the
acceleration of history, eventually putting his faith precisely in the restraining and
delaying powers of the Katechon and the regimes in which he found this gure
embodied.36 Rather than endorsing the Sorelian violence which destroys the present
order and gives rise to the sublime alongside a new morality, Schmitt supported the
force of the state (and, subsequently, the Reich) as sustaining political unity within
and against political enemies outside. Ultimately, however, since for Sorel the actual
revolution was neither possible nor desirable, there was an afnity between Sorels
wish for a permanent struggle holding off moral degeneration and Schmitts faith in
political institutions restraining both individuals and the forces of evil. Both hoped
for the creation of a Frist, or interregnum, the creation of stability, morality and time
out of the spirit of enmity before an ultimate moral collapse.37 This Frist, however,
was not only ctional, since both ultimately believed in the inevitability of such a
collapseit was also to be based on ctions, namely myths.
Schmitt never questioned the power of myths.38 In his 1938 study of Hobbess
Leviathan, Schmitt still spoke of the unproblematic immediacy of myth as always
being superior to even the clearest train of thought.39 But he also hinted that myths
were as uncontrollable as they were powerful: Hobbes, by conjuring up the image of
the Leviathan, had activated the invisible powers of an ancient, polyvalent myth,
which eventually came to overshadow his rationalist system of thought. The realm
of myths and powerful images was one in which the value and purchasing power of
words and language could not easily be calculated: rather, this was the realm of
demonology, in which ideology could be subverted by the sheer emotional appeal of
images.39 The theorist who had miscalculated in conjuring up a myth was like a
magician who had hit upon a heartless demon instead of an ally, and was
accordingly delivered up to his enemies.40 The question, then, had to be whether in
the great course of political fate myths turned out to serve good or evil.
In the twentieth century, an increasing number of sorcerers apprentices came to
marshal a multiplicity of pseudo-theological myths of enemies, a secularizing process
which Schmitt described as a sign of decadence.41 In his 1950 study of the Spanish

35
Meuter, Der Katechon, p. 318.
36
See for instance, Schmitts 1942 essay Beschleuniger wider Willen oder: Problematik der westlichen
.
Hemisph.are, reprinted in: Carl Schmitt, Staat-GroX raum-Nomos, Ed. Gunter Maschke (Berlin: Duncker
& Humblot, 1995), pp. 431440.
37
See also Horst Bredekamp, From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes, trans.
Melissa Thorson Hause and Jackson Bond, In: Critical Inquiry, 25 (1999), pp. 247266.
38
See also my Carl Schmitts Method: Between Ideology, Demonology and Myth, In: Journal of
Political Ideologies, 4 (1999), pp. 6185.
39
Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines
.
politischen Symbols, Ed. Gunter Maschke (1938; Cologne: Hohenheim, 1982), p. 123.
40
Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines
.
politischen Symbols, Ed. Gunter Maschke (1938; Cologne: Hohenheim, 1982), p. 124.
41
Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Cologne: Greven 1950), p. 89.
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political theologian Donoso Corte! s, Schmitt argued that the multiple myths
which moved the masses were not properly theological in origin, but resulted
from the self-dissolution of the philosophy of German idealism.42 These myths were
secular and materialist philosophies of history, which emerged from the 1830s and
1840s. This period remained a eld of philosophical ruins, but also an uranium
mine which caused or at least contaminated the great political conictsand
cataclysmsof the 20th century. Thus, according to Schmitt, mythmaking with the
radioactive raw material of German idealism, the spiritual loss through seculariza-
tion and the social process of massication combined to produce the catastrophes of
the 20th century. Needless to say, this view was itself part of post-war mythmaking
by Schmitt who simply blamed the moral and material disasters in which he himself
had played a signicant role on previous philosophers.
For Schmitt mythology was an effective grounding for ethics, for hierarchy, order
and disciplinebut it was only justied in the context of a particular ethic, which at
various times for him took Catholic, nationalist and totalitarian shapes. His Roman
Catholicism of the early 1920s was comparable to the Catholicism minus
Christianity of Charles Maurras: it was more Roman (or Latin) than Catholic,
and consequently could accommodate the use of pagan elements such as myths and
demons. The writer and literary critic Franz Blei might have been exaggerating when
he wrote to Schmitt in 1921 that I am a godless clerical. And so are you, dear
friend.43 But the point remains that in Schmitts political universe myths were as
admissible as proper religious belief, as long as they had a concrete, order-
maintaining content and served a higher purpose. Not myth made for a
reinvigorating morality, as in Sorel, but the true myth as immediate image made
for a stabilizing, supra-individual morality, rendering myth an effective ideological
instrument. It is neither an accident nor slander that Schmitt has so often been
compared to the Grand Inquisitor.

4. Benjamin reads Sorel: shattering myth, law and order

Issues of instrumentality and immediacy were also at the heart of Benjamins

treatment of Sorel. Benjamin wrote his piece Critique of Violence in 1920, when he
was under the strong impression of his encounters with Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball.44
He had read Sorel the previous year in Switzerland, probably at the suggestion of
Bloch, and, according to Gershom Scholem, occupied himself with Sorels teachings
for a long time to come.45
42
.
Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cort!es in gesamteuropaischer .
Interpretation: Vier Aufsatze (Cologne: Greven,
1950), p. 11.
43
Franz Blei, letter to Carl Schmitt of 7th December 1921, In: Franz Blei, Briefe an Carl Schmitt, Ed.
Angela Reinthal (Heidelberg: Manutius, 1995), pp. 3133; here p. 32.
44
Chryssoula Kambas, Walter Benjamin liest Georges Sorel: R!eexions sur la violence, In: Michael
Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Eds.), Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her: Texte zu Walter Benjamin
(Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), pp. 250269.
45
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1975), pp. 109110.
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In his critique of violence, Benjamin made highly idiosyncratic use of the anarcho-
syndicalist theory which Sorel offered. He drew a number of sharp distinctions in
order to provide a metaphysical foundation for a new ethics of revolutionary
violence. The most signicant of these was the distinction between law and justice,
since the task of the critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its
relation to law and justice.46 Already in his 1920 fragment The Right to Use Force
Benjamin asserted that ythe laws concern with justice is only apparent, whereas in
truth the law is concerned with self-preservation. In particular, with defending its
existence against its own guilt.47 Benjamin placed law in opposition to justice and
morality, but grouped it with guilt, fate, and myth.
Law, rather than securing justice, as natural law theories and certain positivist
doctrines held, reafrmed itself in acts of violence. In fact, violence, violence
crowned by fate, is the origin of law.48 Instead of providing a response to violence,
law perpetuated it more or less openly. Within the eld of law, Benjamin drew a
further distinction, arguing that all violence is either lawmaking or lawpreserving.49
According to Benjamin, mythic violence, or, put differently, violence as a
manifestation of the gods, lay at the origin of the fateful cycle of lawmaking and
lawpreserving. Law, he claimed, was merely a residue of the demonic stage of
human existence, when legal statutes determined not only mens relationships but
also their relation to the godsyet, law had preserved itself long past the time of
the victory over the demons.50 Law was parasitic on the violence which myth had
initially appropriated and stabilized in an eternal return of performances of violence.
On the other hand, the lawmaking violence embodied in institutions always came to
be weakened and ultimately subverted by law-preserving violence. For law to persist
effectively, it would have to be reafrmed through recurring acts and representations
of violence.
Benjamin sought to delineate an escape from this mythical cycle of lawmaking and
lawpreserving: an extrahistorical, redemptive realm of non-violence was, for
instance, foreshadowed in the weak messianic power of language. An analogy to
language as a pure means in politics was the proletarian general strike, as
conceptualized by Sorel. The general strike was a pure means, a puried, immediate
form of violence which deposed the whole legal order founded upon violence, but
itself diminished the incidence of actual violence.51
The general strike was neither instrumental nor immanent. In accordance with the
Jewish Bilderverbot, it followed Sorels prohibition on envisioning utopias; more
importantly, it could not be brought about in this world alone: it required an act of
pure divine violence, which was both law-destroying and expiating. Justice, in this
case, was not a matter of mediation, but of absolutely decisive, striking and

46
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, In: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Eds. Marcus Bullock
and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996), pp. 236252; here p. 236.
47
Walter Benjamin, The Right to Use Force, In: Selected Writings, pp. 231234; here p. 232.
48
Benjamin, Critique of Violence, p. 242.
49
Benjamin, Critique of Violence, p. 243.
50
Walter Benjamin, Fate and Character, In: Selected Writings, pp. 201206; here p. 203.
51
Benjamin, Critique of Violence, p. 246.
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terminating intervention. This would be the very world politics whose method is
nihilism which Benjamin called for in his Political-Theological Fragment, but also
the equivalent of the non-instrumental, pure language which he had rst outlined in
On Language as Such and the Language of Man.52 In that sense, Benjamins ethics
of violence could be called a radically pessimistic, revolutionary nihilism, beyond
intentions and instrumentality, but also beyond any intersubjective understanding.53
This also meant that the strike could neither be imagined nor willed by human beings
through myths. Far from valorizing myths a" la Sorel as propelling the workers
towards the moment of pure violence, Benjamin, primarily under the inuence of
Hermann Cohen, saw myth as the corrupting inuence of nature upon man.54 Any
secular morality ultimately sustained by myth necessarily had to be corrupted. And
any law that embodied or enforced such a morality also had to be contaminated.
Much as in Schmitt, then, mythology was associated with worldliness and
polytheism, as well as an eternal recurrence of violence. But unlike Schmitt,
Benjamin radicalized the idea of non-instrumentality, whichat rst sightcould be
found in Sorel, further and lifted it into the realm of theology. There was to be no
permanent violence for the sake of secular moral regeneration. In that sense,
Benjamins blending of Messianism and anarcho-syndicalism constituted Sorelianism
minus myths and minus the instrumental consideration of a moral rebirth through
struggle. Violence would cease to be instrumental altogether.
Benjamins sovereign divine violence was a form of decisionism, and in its
outward structure not unlike Schmitts conceptualization of the sovereign both
deciding on and ending the state of exception. Ultimately, however, it was almost the
opposite of the decisionism which Schmitts challenge of the exception required.
Where Schmitts ruler made a momentous decision to restore order, reinstate law
and a world split into discrete, homogeneous political units, Benjamins pure,
striking violence left nothing to be imagined beyond the apocalyptical moment. In
short, Schmitts violence was instrumental, Benjamins was not. While the messianic
age was likely to have a restorative quality, neither a sovereign ruler a" la Schmitt nor
a revolutionary vanguard could adopt any lawmaking programme. Any programme
would contradict the strike, both divine and revolutionary, in its singular, non-
repeatable, non-representational character.55 Much like the anti-bourgeois destructive
character, Benjamins revolutionaries must have no image in front of them. For
Schmitt, however, the decisive moment of establishing concrete order gave rise to a
myth and precisely needed to be re-presented as the supposed real presence of a
singular moment of immediate divine presenceat least in the sense of an as-if

52
Walter Benjamin, Political Theological Fragment, In: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiogra-
phical Writings, (Ed.), Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 312313;
here p. 313; Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, In: Selected Writings,
pp. 6274.
53
.
Heil, Gefahrliche Beziehungen, p. 155.
54
Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamins Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1987), p. 69.
55
See Tom McCall, Momentary Violence, in: David S. Ferris (Ed.), Walter Benjamin: Theoretical
Questions (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), pp. 185206.
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presence.56 This continuous immanent historical presence then lent a moral

seriousness to history. Clearly, what Schmitt had in mind at this time as the model
for this concrete, substantive justice was the continuous representation of Christ
through the Catholic Church.
Thus, Benjamins anarcho-Messianism, his dictum that theocracy has no
political, but only a religious meaning, were directly opposed to Schmitts.57 Where
Benjamin talked about the Messianic destruction of law as a residue from a demonic
age, Schmitt was not at all averse to a judicious appeal to myths and demons in the
interest of a concrete order based on a lawpreserving power.58 Ultimately, Schmitt
was inclined to put order above justice and a particular religionhis was a
theological politics, not an anti-political theology, as for Benjamin.

6. Conclusion

Schmitt and Benjamin both sought to expose the supposedly repressed, illiberal
presuppositions of liberal political thought and liberal legal orders, both thought
from extremes, both were decionists.59 And yet, they read Sorel in radically divergent
ways. It would be simplistic to describe Schmitt as a mythmaker for the sake of law
and order, versus an anarchic Benjamin beyond any immanence and instrumentality,
who blasts myths apart. Both had a much more differentiated view of the
relationship between myth and morality in modern times.
Schmitt drew a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the pseudo-theological
modern myths which seduced the masses, i.e. the philosophies of history which were
a by-product of the degeneration of German idealism, and on the other hand, a truly
mythical moment which acquired a transcendental quality and which could be made
present and visible again over time. For Schmitt, such myths enabled the great moral
decision, i.e. the founding of a concrete order and an enduring morality, which
would unfold their supra-individual qualities and serve to restrain the Anti-Christ. In
that sense, Schmitt represented the very position that Benjamin attacked: myth and
law were at root identical, both were founded on acts of violence, and both had an
inner-worldly stabilizing effect. The kingdome of order could be gotten by unjust
violence, as long as it could be gotten.
For Benjamin, law was a residue of the demonic age, and identical with
manifestations of myth aimed at the preservation of a quasi-natural order of
56
Meuter, Der Katechon, p. 473. Cf. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As if: A System of the
Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1949).
57
And the fact that Benjamin managed to keep the jurists proto-fascist program at bay was not just
due to the fact that Schmitt and Benjamin did not share a political anthropology, as Beatrice Hanssen
claims in the otherwise excellent On the Politics of Pure Means: Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault, in: Hent de
Vries and Samuel Weber (eds.), Violence, Identity and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997),
pp. 236252.
58
Rabinbach, Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse, p. 117.
59
.
Heil, Gefahrliche Beziehungen, pp. 150151.
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domination over human beings. Only pure, divine violence could destroy this
mythical entanglement, and Sorels proletarian general strike was potentially one
such moment of overcoming myth. Thus, both resorted to decisionism, but in one
case to overcome law, in the other to re-establish the authority of law in response to
the challenge of the exception.
Both Schmitt and Benjamin were, needless to say, deeply illiberal and hostile to
any conception of law as establishing procedures with a view to nding consensus,
and, more interestingly, to law as in any sense enabling, as opposed to making or
preserving.60 Conict could only be suppressed, as in Schmitts authoritarian
solution based on the mythical moment of the exception, or abolished altogether, as
in Benjamins messianic moment of justiceany mediating role of law was roundly
rejected. In Benjamins case, law could not even approach justice, but was
diametrically opposed to it; in Schmitts, law was always a matter of concrete,
substantive justice, rather than of abstract norms and procedures. The idea that
mediation and indirectnessas opposed to direct actionare hallmarks of
modernity itself, the notion that a permanent postponement of nal decisions is a
requirement for partially resolving disagreements in the here and now, the
conception of a Frist that extends endlesslyall these were alien to two thinkers
who hankered after a nal moment of decision. In fact, both felt that one had to
decide for all time.
In a sense, the thought of both Benjamin and Schmitt could be described as
ultimately anti-political: in Benjamins case, because of his anti-political stance of
rejecting politics as being merely the choice of the lesser evil; in Schmitts case,
because of his total, theocratic politicization, the result of which was the complete
submission of the individual to a homogeneous political unit.61 As Sandor Radnoti
has pointed out, for Benjamin politicsyis important not as politics, but as the
adequate form of morally and philosophically decisive action.62 This also resolves
the question of the somewhat uneasy co-presence of messianism and anarcho-
syndicalism in the Critique of Violence. One could say with John McCole that it
constituted an instance of Benjamins tendency to posit the identity of opposed
positions, which would result in and be revealed by the paradoxical reversals of

60
What is obvious at rst about Benjamins relationship to democracy and deliberation, is nevertheless
interestingly illuminated by Otto Karl Werckmeister in Ein Demokrat war er nie, In: Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 17th August 2000.
61
Schmitt did not always totalize the political, and there exists within his oeuvre a rival theory of the
autonomy of politics, of coursebut he certainly did so during the Nazi period. In his November 1933
preface to the second edition of Political Theology Schmitt wrote that we have come to recognize that the
political is the total.y See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: 1985), p. 2. On Schmitts totalization of the political, see also
.
Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt. Ulrich Brockling suggests that it was precisely because the totality of
faith had been lost that one of its parts became totalized in the thought of interwar Catholic intellectuals,
.
in order to nd possible resistance points to modernity. See Ulrich Brockling, Katholische Intellektuelle in
der Weimarer Republik: Zeitkritik und Gesellschaftstheorie bei Walter Dirks, Romano Guardini, Carl
Schmitt, Ernst Michel und Heinrich Mertens (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), pp. 2122.
62
Sandor Radnoti, Benjamins Politics, In: Telos, No. 37 (1978), pp. 6381; here p. 66.
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theology into politics.63 One might also say, however, that in many ways the latter is
the expression of the former.64 In that sense, Ellen Kennedy is mistaken in asserting
that Benjamin used an emergency situation (here a revolutionary general strike) to
reveal the essence of politics.65 If anything, the general strike would end politics (at
least as we know it), and, theoretically, reveal the essence of Benjamins anti-politics.
Curiously, both Schmitt and Benjamin, in their own way, denied the autonomy of
the political realm.
Schmitts and Benjamins conceptions of law and myth received an eschatological
meaning and tension from the perspective of their respective political theologies: for
Schmitt, the Catholic imperative of restraining the Anti-Christ pointed in the
direction of present-day, worldly political stabilization. It also pointed to slowing
down the movement towards a unied, technocratic and materialist world society
from which the political, as the God-given antagonism between human beings, had
been annihilated. Finally, on the plane of political action, it translated into
unconditional support for the present Katechon, which, in effect, amounted to
supporting any regime capable of establishing concrete order. Moreover, its
theological roots led to a totalization of the political, at least at times. Benjamins
anarcho-Messianism resulted in an endorsement of revolutionary violence from the
perspective of a total transformation of a fallen world into a literally lawless, utopian
state. But because of its extrahistorical, Messianic dimension, because the Messiah
would enter through a strait gate, rather than be represented through the state,
Benjamins pessimism lent itself less to the theologization of politics than Schmitts
search for a Katechon, which, after all, ended in a demonic entanglement with the
Third Reich.

63
John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), p. 12 and
p. 21.
64
Expression should be read here in a Benjaminian sense of correspondence. When discussing Marxs
view of the relationship between base and superstructure, Benjamin used the analogy of a dreaming person
with an overfull stomach. While the stomach-ache might cause bad dreams, the dreams do not reect it,
but rather express it. See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, In: Gesammelte Schriften, Ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 495496.
65
Ellen Kennedy, Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School, In: Telos, No. 71 (1987), pp. 3766; here
p. 43.