The Political Theology of Betrayal: Hobbes' Uzzah, and

Schmitt's Hobbes

Feisal G. Mohamed

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 18, Number 2, Spring
2018, pp. 11-33 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2018.0020

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/717865

Access provided by Goldsmith's College, University Of London (7 Mar 2019 21:42 GMT)
 The Political Theology of Betrayal:
Hobbes’ Uzzah, and Schmitt’s Hobbes

feisal g. Mohamed

abstract

Carl Schmitt’s interest in the writings of Thomas Hobbes is widely known, and clearly visible in
Political Theology (1922). This essay explores the relationship between these two thinkers,
especially surrounding the “protection-­obedience axiom” that Schmitt strongly associated with
Hobbes. As is apparent in Hobbes’ responses to the story of Uzzah, protection and obedience
are more complex in his writings than might first appear. This essay considers these responses
alongside those of John Donne, Richard Hooker, and Lancelot Andrewes. Schmitt tends to
overlook this complexity, even as he comes to similar conclusions on the loyal subject’s exposure
to the sovereign’s arbitrary violence. We will see that Schmitt is ambivalent about Hobbes, asso-
ciating him with the advent of legal positivism, the strain of legal theory against which he contin-
ually strives. If Political Theology enlists Hobbes as an ally, then, it is on the point of
methodology propping up Schmitt’s central argument: that political theory must be grounded in
a sociology of the concept of sovereignty.

I have lived through destiny pulling on the reins,

Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations,
Inflations and deflations, bombardments,
Defamations, regime changes and burst pipes,
Hunger and cold, camp and solitary confinement.
Through all of this I have passed,
And all has passed through me.
—Carl Schmitt, “Song of the 60-­Year-­Old”1

the journal for early modern cultural studies

vol. 18, no. 2 (spring 2018) © 2018
12 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

W ritten in the wake of the Second World War, and his questioning
at Nuremburg, Schmitt’s “Song of the 60-­ Year-­
Old” vacillates
between passivity and activity. The passage above describes a violent sweep
of history—“revolutions and restorations,” “bombardments,” and “regime
changes”—in which the individual finds himself inescapably caught, and yet
in the final line Schmitt seems to claim his status as a figure through which
his age will be read; we are invited to view his interventions as snapshots of
the storms in which he has been tossed. As such, the poem rests easily, per-
haps too easily, alongside Schmitt’s claim before his Nuremburg interrogator,
Robert Kempner, that his work simply “diagnosed” conditions of the interna-
tional legal order, and thus could not be considered as seeking to achieve a
“new international legal order in accordance with Hitlerian ideas,” specifically
the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum (Bendersky 98).
In Schmitt’s telling, he was, during the war years, simply a person sitting
“quietly at a desk.” “Who else did not leave his desk?” asks Kempner. “Thomas
Hobbes,” replies Schmitt (Bendersky 103). Indeed, Schmitt’s sexagenarian
song parallels that of the nonagenarian Hobbes. In 1679, the year of his death,
appeared Hobbes’ Latin elegy, Vita authore seipso, which also offers an image
of perpetual isolation, of a man blown hither and yon by his unruly age—as
John Hale observes of the poem, it has a “busy traffic of comings and goings,
arrivals and departures, presences and absences” (Hale 99). The poem
describes Hobbes returning home in 1651 to an English Commonwealth sus-
picious of his loyalty:

In Patriam redeo tutelage non bene certus,

     Sed nullo portui tutior esse loco,
Frigus erat, nix alta, senex ego, ventus acerbus,
     Magnus, equus sternax & salebrosa via. (Hobbes, Vita 9)

Then home I came, not sure of safety there,

Though I cou’d not be safer any where.
Th’Wind, Frost, Snow sharp, with Age grown gray,
A plunging Beast, and most unpleasant way.
(Hobbes, Vita, Blackburn trans. 11)

Hobbes had also seen revolution and restoration, and he would subsequently
be read as a thinker through whom the tumults of the seventeenth century
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 13

were distilled into political theory. Hobbes, too, styled his work disinterested,
claiming to have invented a “Civil Philosophy” in line with natural philoso-
phy’s turn away from Aristotle (Elements, ix). We should not take either this
claim or Schmitt’s at face value. In moments of crisis both men strive mightily
not only to describe but to alter their political environments. This is evident
most notably in Schmitt’s arguments for the exercise of emergency powers as
the Weimar Republic was teetering on the brink of collapse, and Hobbes’
efforts to encourage his fellow royalists to take the Oath of Engagement to the
nascent English Commonwealth in order to effect the healing and settling of
his nation.2 That Schmitt compares himself to Hobbes before his Nuremburg
interrogator is not entirely surprising, given his long-­running interest in, and
admiration of, the philosopher of Malmesbury. We shall also suggest as we
proceed that the comparison is in some ways more fitting than Schmitt
knows, for the two had come to learn the hard way that political obedience is
not always compensated by the sovereign’s protection. Both men experienced
significant moments of betrayal that complicate the views with which they are
often associated.
We tend to think of political betrayal as working from the bottom up, in
the form of treason. In his recent, full-­length exploration of betrayal, Avishai
Margalit deals with treason at length, as a “gross violation of one’s allegiance
to one’s sovereign,” as “the ultimate sin, something more criminal than mur-
der” (157). Even in the modern state, where this sin has undergone reevalua-
tion, treason can be framed as a betrayal of gratitude owed to the nation, a
charge often leveled at immigrant communities deemed insufficiently loyal to
their adopted home. By this reasoning, the associations generated by social
benefits available in wealthy states, such as healthcare and public education,
become intensified as grounds of community and identity that must be
guarded against pollution, with the providing state thereby placed in the role
of giving parent or beneficent divinity. Such transformations will recall
Schmitt’s pronouncement in Political Theology that all political concepts are
secularized theological ones. Seeking to reclaim a decisive unitary sovereignty
that can command obedience, Schmitt of course turns to Hobbes, who has an
essentially secular accounting of such sovereign power. In the widely known
story, Schmitt is prompted to revise that view in response to the critiques of
Leo Strauss, who finds in Leviathan a prelude to the depersonalization of
authority and a mechanization of the state central to later liberalism. We will
14 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

return to that story and see that Strauss may force a shift in emphasis whereby
Schmitt acknowledges aspects of Hobbes’ thought with which he was already
uncomfortable.
Our especial focus, however, will be on the sort of betrayal that works
from the top down. Schmitt’s revised view of Hobbes has also been described
as arising from his own experience of being rejected by the Nazi regime that
he publicly endorsed. Despite his service to the National Socialists, Schmitt
found himself under suspicion and attack shortly after his embrace of the
party in 1933. For this reason the fuller skepticism of his 1938 book on Levia-
than may be animated in part by resentment that, as he saw it, Hobbes failed
to take into account the possibility of a sovereign’s arbitrary attack upon a
loyal subject. Though he devotes very little space to this form of betrayal,
Margalit describes the “conceptually perplexing” case of legally beheading
Charles I for the crime of treason as dramatically changing “the notion of
treason”: “Treason was conceived not as betraying the king but as betraying
the people with whom the ruler was supposed to have thick relationships”
(172). That places us, of course, in the moment of Leviathan, which resolves
this conceptual perplexity with conquest theory: it is not the power of law
that is placed above Charles, but a new power of the sword. Because the king
is no longer capable of offering protection, subjects are absolved of their obli-
gation of obedience, though also compelled to recognize the new sovereign
power offering the benefits of peace. Thus Leviathan accounts for England’s
change of regime while Hobbes’ central “protection-­obedience axiom,” as
Schmitt calls it in The Concept of the Political (1932), remains intact (52).
It was clear to Schmitt by 1938 that a subject strenuously defending an
existing political settlement might be excluded from the protection of a sover-
eign who still retained the power of the sword. In the personal model of polit-
ical authority that Schmitt and Hobbes espouse, such a subject would have no
grounds on which to mount an objection to such treatment. This perceived
absence in Hobbes’ thought is at play in Schmitt’s later reading. I say perceived
absence because Hobbes did in fact recognize this possibility. Or, to put it
more precisely, the Hobbes of Behemoth subtly injects this awareness into his
typical anti-­clericalism and, by implication, into his earlier analysis of
England’s political troubles in Leviathan. The awareness surfaces fleetingly,
but perceptibly, in his reading of the story of Uzzah, the Levite who reaches
out to sustain the Ark of the Covenant when it shakes on an oxcart, and is
then promptly struck dead by an incensed God. Before coming to Hobbes’
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 15

reading, we will explore the exegeses of several early modern predecessors,

especially Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Donne. Here we
will find some justification for Schmitt’s view of Hobbes as offering secular
and political translation of theological concepts, even as we become aware of
other dynamics of political theology. After a look at Hobbes’ account of
Uzzah in the Restoration context of Behemoth, we will return to Schmitt’s
reading of Leviathan in the context of his fallen fortunes within the National
Socialist Party. We will see that the two thinkers are skeptical of an overly
idealistic approach to political philosophy that refuses to acknowledge the
dynamics of power. We will also see that in a way seldom noted, both acknowl-
edge in their thought the anti-­absolutist fact that a subject can endure the fear
of exposure when obedient to a sovereign whose authority is stable. Both of
these insights adjust significantly our view of Hobbes, of Schmitt, and of the
intellectual history of political theology.

* * *

Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it, for the
Oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah: and
God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.
(2 Sam 6.6–7)

Uzzah’s appearance in 2 Samuel is brief but memorable. As the Ark of the

Covenant is being transported from Balaah by oxcart, he notices the oxen
stumble and intuitively puts forth his hand to steady the Holy of Holies. There
is some ambiguity in the Hebrew, but English versions describing the oxen as
merely stumbling take some liberty. The Anchor Bible favors “the oxen had let
it slip” as a translation of semato, a verb that is never intransitive in the Hebrew
Bible, lending greater emphasis to the Ark’s peril.3 As a reward for this reflex
born of a natural, even pious impulse to protect the vessel of the Law, the cen-
tral object of Israelite worship and national identity, the Lord strikes him dead.
An angry David feels that “Yahweh had made a breach in Uzzah,” and so the
site is named, ambiguously, Perez-­Uzzah, or Uzzah’s Breach.
In a straightforward reading of the story, the Lord is angered by a viola-
tion of the proscription in Numbers 4 against touching the Ark. And the
episode adds literary complexity to the David narrative, providing a moment
of confusion and trial between the battle victories in 2 Samuel 5 and Nathan’s
16 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

oracle regarding the Davidic dynasty in 2 Samuel 7.4 In this light, Uzzah’s
death is a minor distraction that can be easily explained away. The Levites are
tasked only with carrying the Ark, and as Jerome, Pseudo-­Dionysius, and
Josephus Flavius all point out, Uzzah isn’t even a priest.5 Richard Hooker
shares this emphasis in book 5 of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, his extended
defense of the rites of the English church against Thomas Cartwright’s
charges of popish ceremonialism. Arguing that separatists are wrong to re-­
baptize those who received the sacrament as infants, Hooker points to Uzzah
as showing that “it behoveth generally all sortes of men to keepe them selves
within the limites of theire owne vocation.” In the same citation he points to
Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron who took their father’s censer and
offered “strange fire before the Lord” (Lev 10.1), and Uzziah, the king chided
by Azariah and fourscore priests also for burning incense upon the altar (2
Chron 26.16). These examples place Uzzah in the company of those who
encroach upon the prerogatives of the priesthood specifically, showing that
God is unlikely to accept the “voluntarie services” of individuals “who thrust
them selves into functions either above theire capacity or besides theire place”
(Hooker 278).
But the story holds many more riches than this, and enables subtle medi-
tation on the complexities of duty. We cannot describe Uzzah as undutiful:
charged with transporting the Ark, he also acts to protect it. Still, his dutiful-
ness spills over just bounds, becoming a violation of duty. So says Salvian:
Uzzah “did not do anything in an impudent fashion or with an undutiful
intention, but his very service was undutiful because he exceeded his orders”
(Bk. 6, ch. 10). These, according to the Geneva Bible’s gloss, are the perils of
good intentions.6 In Uzzah’s excess lies impious doubt of God’s care for the
Ark, or of its status as earthly manifestation of divine presence. If the Ark can
carry the Israelites across the Jordan, Rashi remarks, then it can fend for itself
on an oxcart (n. ad 2 Sam 6.7). Uzzah not only forgets the letter of the Law,
but also implies through his actions that the Israelites are protectors of the
Ark, rather than the other way around.
Thus he reminds us that a touch of hubris motivates the excessively duti-
ful. Which is why in the first prebend sermon, Donne likens Uzzah to
Actaeon. The text on which he is speaking is Psalm 62.9: “Surely men of low
degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie; To bee laid in the balance,
they are altogether lighter than vanity” (72). Donne is eager to show that this
is not implicit praise of the middle path. Though “the lazy man gets not up to
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 17

it” and “the stirring man stayes not at it” and it “seemes (and justly) the safest
condition,” mediocrity also has its dangers. One can make an idol of medioc-
rity and transform it into a doctrine of self-­sufficiency, so that, Donne teaches
us with a characteristic paradox, we “quickly exceed a mediocrity, even in the
praise of Mediocrity.” Uzzah, Donne continues, “was over-­zealous in an office
that appertained not to him . . . and suffered for that” (87). To the audience at
St. Paul’s, potentially in thrall to classical learning, the message is clear: the
Psalmist is no Aristotelian and no Stoic. Donne’s larger lesson in the sermon
resembles Saint Gregory’s reading in the Moralia: Uzzah overtrusts his own
godliness, in a way Gregory likens to the friends of Job pridefully counselling
the holy man in his hour of distress (259–60 [Bk. 5, par. 24]).
Gregory was not the only Christian theologian to read the Ark as symbol-
izing a holy person. Jerome adapts the story to his pet concerns by likening
the Ark to a virgin’s body protected by God from profane touch (Epistles
22.23). In a 1610 sermon before James, Lancelot Andrewes runs David and the
Ark together in reading this story as admonishing us not to lay hands on a
godly king: “No more touch David than the holy Arke. It is not good touching
of holy things . . . Uzza so found it” (189). This oddly seamless association of
David and the Ark may betray an anxiety on Andrewes’ part. The story can
certainly be read as critical of David. In fact, Rashi’s harshest words in his
commentary on 2 Samuel 6 are reserved for the king: Uzzah dies because
David orders the Ark to be transported on an oxcart, instead of having it
borne on the shoulders of Levites as he is supposed to do (n. ad 2 Sam 6.3).
Andrewes erases this subtext of monarchical carelessness, and the particular
occasion of this sermon makes one wonder about the closeted sentiments he
betrays in doing so: he was preaching on the tenth anniversary of the Earl of
Gowrie’s supposed attempt on the life of James, who had imported from Scot-
land a tradition of annually celebrating his miraculous escape. But the cele-
bration was tainted by the stubborn fact that nobody really believed Gowrie
ever posed any danger to the king. In a famous, if also likely apocryphal, story
that comes down to us from Thomas Plume’s life of John Hacket, Andrewes
begged to be released from his obligation to preach on this day of thanksgiv-
ing: “the most Religious Bishop Andrews once fell down upon his knees
before King James, and besought his Majesty to spare his customary pains
upon that day, that he might not mock God unless the thing were true: the
King did assure him in the Faith of a Christian, and upon the Word of a King,
their Treasonable attempt against him was too true” (Plume viii). By running
18 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

together David and the Ark in his reference to Uzzah, Andrewes glides past
the biblical king’s infelicitous decision-­making in a way that also glides past
his anxiety about compromising his role as minister to satisfy worldly powers,
of being torn between two masters, God and king.
This quality sublimated in Andrewes’ sermon is, not surprisingly, churned
to the surface by Hobbes. Also not surprising is the atheist inflection of his
reading: for Hobbes, God seems rather more blameworthy than does Uzzah.
The story from 2 Samuel 6 appears twice in his writings. The first time is in
chapter 33 of Leviathan, where Hobbes shows that the books of Samuel were
written much later than the reign of David: “when David (displeased, that the
Lord had slain Uzzah, for putting out his hand to sustain the Ark,) called the
place Perez-­Uzzah.” Comparison to the 1668 Latin edition of Leviathan high-
lights the editorializing packed into this brief mention: “ubi David propter
Mortem Vzzae contristatus est, dicit Scriptor, Vocatum est nomen loci illius
Percussio Vzzae usque in diem hanc” (Leviathan 594–95 [ch.33]).7 Rather than
being saddened by the death of Uzzah, as he is in the Latin edition, David is
displeased that the Lord had slain Uzzah in the English edition; and while
the Latin offers no reason for Uzzah’s death, the English edition justifies
David’s displeasure with its sympathetic remark on Uzzah putting out his
hand to sustain the Ark.
The editorializing is extraneous to the point that Hobbes is making on
the composition date of the Samuel books, which may be one reason why he
eliminates it in the later Latin text. But he has already revealed that the story
does not rest easily with him, as is reinforced by the second reference to Uzzah
in his writings, which occurs in Behemoth as Hobbes criticizes monarchs who
accept the pope’s jurisdiction over matters spiritual and thus corrupt sover-
eign authority. The manuscript version declares that “most bishops” pretend
to hold the same jurisdiction in their “several Dioceses,” making the problem
span the Roman and English churches, but deletes that remark—somewhat
gratuitously, for the remainder of the first dialogue makes his assessment of
the English bishops clear enough (Behemoth 113). A separate spiritual jurisdic-
tion granted to the pope or bishops quickly metastasizes and then enlists civil
authorities to enforce its decisions. Though not mentioned by Hobbes, the
Restoration debate on adiaphora is a case in point. Revanchist bishops, eager
to impose religious conformity, press the view that refusal to participate in
the ceremonies of the national church is a violation of the law, urging the sov-
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 19

ereign to impose civil punishments and thus corrupting the principle of royal
supremacy.8
Under such conditions, Hobbes argues, the loyal subject is like Uzzah:
“He were in an ill case then, that adventured to write or speake in defence of
the Civill Power, that must be punisht by him whose Rights he defended, like
Uzza that was slaine, because he would needs unbidden put forth his hand to
keep the Arke from falling” (114). Striking here, of course, is the blithe criti-
cism of God, who in Hobbes’ simile is like a weak or mistaken king punishing
one who has the fundamental qualities of an upright subject: Uzzah’s impulses
are rightly directed toward preservation of the Commonwealth. For that he
ought to receive the sovereign’s protection. At the time that Hobbes was writ-
ing Behemoth, likely the late 1660s, the point had become personal. Aubrey
tells us in his life of Hobbes that shortly after the Restoration “some of the
bishops made a motion to have the good old gentleman burnt for a heretic.
Which he hearing, feared that his papers might be searched by their order,
and told me he had burnt part of them” (160). In 1666–67, the bishops’ parlia-
mentary allies took aim at Leviathan, which was specifically mentioned in
discussion of the bill against “Atheism and Profanity,” and Hobbes was sum-
moned to appear before the Lords.9 More than for any other commentator we
have considered, Hobbes’ reference to Uzzah is autobiographical.
Also striking are the limits on absolutism apparent in this reference. In its
most familiar arguments, Hobbes’ political theory denies subjects a position
from which they may legitimately challenge sovereign authority once they
agree to form a commonwealth by common consent. The exception to this
principle, most visible in the “Review and Conclusion” to Leviathan evidently
written after the execution of Charles I, is when a monarch is unable to wield
the power of the sword in a way that offers protection to the obedient subject.
The moment in Behemoth we have been examining suggests that such failures
of protection may not be confined to the collapse of a regime after a period of
civil war. Certain relationships with the church, be it the Roman Catholic or
English, can corrupt the sovereign’s ability to protect the subject. How this
impacts the subject’s obligation of obedience is an unanswered question.
This is a typically anti-­clerical position for Hobbes, who is stridently
Erastian throughout his writings. “Experience teaches thus much,” Hobbes
declares in a 1641 letter to the third Earl of Devonshire, “that the dispute for
precedence betwene the spirituall and civill power, has of late more then any
20 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

other thing in the world, bene the cause of civill warres, in all places of Christen-
dome” (Correspondence, 120–21).10 But, it is less familiar to the extent that it
makes us wonder how deeply it cuts into his absolutist theory. Just as there
can be no excess in the sovereign’s exercise of authority, so too there can be no
excess in the subject’s defenses of the commonwealth. The monarch punishing
the dutiful subject reveals the imperfection, and thus the tenuousness, of his
own command of sovereign power.
In Leo Strauss’ suggestive analysis, the moral foundation of Hobbes’ polit-
ical theory rests upon providing individuals this avenue for celebrating civil
authority; thus the acquisitiveness and vanity given free rein in the state of
nature is transformed in the commonwealth into the furthering of one’s inter-
ests through the promotion of civil power. The contract founding the com-
monwealth creates not only the artificial person of the sovereign, but also the
artificial person of the citizen, whose natural impulses toward personal gain
are transformed into cultivation of the arts of peace made possible by, and
tending toward, political stability.11
If the sovereign behaves as God does toward Uzzah, then the subject’s
defenses of civil authority no longer coincide with the primary impulse of self-­
preservation. And the standards implied by Hobbes in Behemoth indicate that
it is common for this to happen: actual sovereigns will rarely measure up to
the theoretical categories set forth in Leviathan, and tend to rule in conditions
of divided authority, whether they have sacrificed some authority to the
church, or to foreign powers, or to a class of oligarchs.
As a remark on political theology, then, Hobbes’ Uzzah shows how the
modern subject experiences politics in a way that makes energetic fidelity to
the sovereign seem like a profoundly unwise, even self-­defeating, course of
action. And we can sense a historical development in the examples we have
traced here: from Hooker’s deployment of this story to defend clerical privi-
lege, to Andrewes’ nervously exuberant defense of royal holiness, to Hobbes’
self-­identification with the loyal servant struck down for his efforts. Uzzah
can be straightforwardly deployed in an early modern political culture of
moderation, the kind for which Hooker and Donne provide eloquent apol-
ogy—of knowing and respecting appropriate bounds on individual activity
imposed by station, by church, by monarchy. As much recent scholarship has
suggested, “political theology” in this context invokes the complex thicket of
legal and religious texts, church ceremonies and social practices on which
prevailing authority seeks to impart a sense of divine mystery tending to sup-
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 21

port the status quo in the face of various challenges, confessional, social, and
constitutional.12 Hobbes, by contrast, points forward to later political thought
in highlighting the trials of the subject who essays civic engagement in a world
where one cannot depend with certainty on traditional mainstays of social
and political order. In a world of divided, opaque and untrustworthy sover-
eign power, putting forth one’s hand in a good-­faith effort to sustain the com-
monwealth comes with no small share of peril.

* * *

   cum desertis Aganippes

vallibus esuriens migraret in atria Clio.
[“in her hunger Clio has deserted the vales of Aganippe and moved into
the salesrooms”]
(Juvenal, Satires 7.6–7)

With this passage from Juvenal’s Satires, Schmitt concludes his remarks
preliminary to the 1921 edition of Dictatorship (xlv), apologizing that the
immediate needs of the Weimar Republic prevent him from developing a full
philosophical demonstration of his subject, and one free of polemical intent.
It is an astonishing prolepsis of the craven depths to which Schmitt would
later stoop, if also a reminder of the sense of precarity, actual and perceived,
urging him forward on his disastrous path.
That sense in itelf reveals common ground with the Hobbes of Behemoth,
and so invites reconsideration of the role that Hobbes plays in Schmitt’s
thought. In Political Theology (1922), Hobbes is a theorist of sovereign deci-
sionism, offering a translation of theological concepts into a “modern theory
of the state” (36). Strauss critiques this view, emphasizing that Hobbes
describes a de-­personalization of sovereignty: by placing the moment of the
commonwealth’s founding in the distant past, Hobbes leaves us with a lived
experience of political order as abstract, contractual relationship between
subject and sovereign. He also establishes an inalienable right to life that
“takes precedence over the state and determines its purpose and limits,” thus
setting “the path to the whole system of human rights in the sense of liberal-
ism” (Strauss, Notes 107). In these respects, Strauss argues, Hobbes is much
more of a founder of liberal political theory than Schmitt allows. For Strauss,
Hobbes occupies a central role in a different origin myth of modern political
22 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

theory as he “was the first who felt the necessity of seeking, and succeeded in
finding, a nuova scienza of man and State,” one employing the methodology of
Galileo and reflecting a rising faith in technology (Political Philosophy 1). The
argument receives its full expression in his 1936 book The Political Philosophy of
Hobbes, but some of its major claims had earlier appeared in notes on Concept
of the Political that he sent to Schmitt in 1932. There Strauss pointedly argues
that Schmitt’s critiques of liberalism fail to take into account Hobbes’ role in
establishing its core ideas.13
Schmitt’s revised reading of Hobbes in the late 1930s is typically, and not
inaccurately, described partly as a response to Strauss.14 It sounds very much
like Schmitt is incorporating Strauss’ insights when his 1938 book on Levia-
than describes Hobbes’ “concept of the state” as “an essential factor in the
four-­hundred-­year-­long process of mechanization, a process that, with the aid
of technical developments, brought about the general ‘neutralization’ and
especially the transformation of the state into a technically neutral instru-
ment” (42). However, well before these remarks, and as Victoria Kahn notes
(31), Schmitt is ambivalent about Hobbes. He clearly wishes to distance him-
self from Hobbes in Dictatorship (1921). The point that Schmitt aims to make
in the work is that, properly conceived, a dictator is not necessarily above the
constitution: a sharp distinction can be made between commissarial dictator-
ship and sovereign dictatorship. In the former, a dictator can be entrusted
with broad powers at a moment of emergency when a political constitution
is under threat. Those powers, importantly, do not extend to legislative
authority, and, even more importantly, they are limited to a specific political
situation, which, once resolved, brings the dictator’s powers to an end. The
commissarial dictator is empowered to defend a constitution, but has no con-
stituting power, or pouvoir constituant. Sovereign dictatorship, by contrast,
exists when a constitution has been suspended and an individual, or body of
individuals, claims to hold the pouvoir constituant, either directly or on behalf
of the people.
The polemical aim of the work is to advance Schmitt’s interpretation of
Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which grants emergency powers to
the president of the Reich. Indeed, he appends to Dictatorship an extended
commentary on Article 48 (180–226). In the face of objections that emergency
powers would amount to an abrogation of the constitution, Schmitt wishes to
argue that such powers are within the terms of the constitution itself—it is
the argument he makes most consistently in the Weimar years.15 For this rea-
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 23

son, he distances himself from Hobbes in Dictatorship. Here Hobbes holds

debts to a sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century absolutist tradition of sovereign
authority based on divine right, which “did not find its legitimation in any
consensus of the people” (2). For Hobbes “sovereignty emerges from a consti-
tutive act of absolute power, made through the people,” but once the state is
constituted, “private conscience” no longer exists (17–18). This places Hobbes
at odds with a natural law thinker like Grotius, for whom there is a law prior
to the state. Where Grotian natural law “takes its start from interest in cer-
tain understandings of justice, and therefore a certain content of the decision,”
for Hobbes “the interest only consists in the fact that a decision as such has
been made at all” (17). Already in Dictatorship, then, Hobbes is being associ-
ated with a decisionism that does not take the concrete political situation into
account, a sort of decisionism reduced to pure procedure, that participates in
Schmitt’s running attacks on legal positivism. Even without the intervention
of Strauss, we already detect that Hobbes is placed in the march toward
replacing legitimacy with pure legality, to adapt Schmitt’s 1932 title: rather
than a true political sovereignty, he is advancing the obfuscation of the politi-
cal by the state.
That point on positivism is more visible in the 1928 book Constitutional
Theory, the work with strongest claim to being Schmitt’s magnum opus. There
Schmitt argues that a pure legal positivism is a form of nihilism that has no
recourse to values beyond mere proceduralism and rule of law. Rather than
core constitutional values that the state is designed to protect, the persistence
of legislative bodies and procedures is taken to be the primary end of the con-
stitution.16 As is often the case in Schmitt’s writings, the influential work of
Hans Kelsen is given as a synecdoche of positivism, which, Schmitt claims,
offers an ultimately baseless normativity:

the political being or becoming of the state unity and order is transformed
into that which merely functions, the opposition of being and the norma-
tive is constantly mixed up with that of substantial being and legal func-
tioning. . . . With Kelsen . . . only positive norms are valid, in other words,
those which are actually valid. Norms are not valid because they should
properly be valid. They are valid, rather, without regard to qualities like
reasonableness, justice, etc., only, therefore because they are positive norms.
The imperative abruptly ends here, and the normative element breaks
down. In its place appears the tautology of a raw factualness: something is
24 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

valid when it is valid and because it is valid. That is “positivism.” (Schmitt,

Constitutional Theory 64)

For his part, Kelsen objected to a sociological approach to law as not, properly
speaking, a legal theory at all because “the law comes into question in enqui-
ries of this sort only as a material datum, . . . the object of [its] cognition” is
not “actually the law itself, but certain parallel phenomena in nature” (Kelsen
14). Schmitt argues, by contrast, that bourgeois rule of law was a “logically
consistent normative order” in the “seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,”
when the “bourgeoisie mustered the strength to establish an effective system,
in particular the individualistic law of reason and of nature, and formed
norms valid in themselves out of concepts such as private property and personal
freedom” (Constitutional Theory 64). Those last two qualities could contain a
“genuine command without regard to the actual existing, that is, positive-­legal,
reality” (64). The point places us in Hobbes’ moment, but sounds much more
like a defense of Locke, who elsewhere in Constitutional Theory is described as
providing “the classic Rechtsstaat [legal state] formulations and speaks of
previously established positive laws (antecedent, standing, positive laws),
while all ex post facto laws are contrary to law” (182). Hobbes, by contrast, is
associated with the absolutist principle, drawn from Leviathan, that “auctori-
tas, non veritas facit legem” (182).
Schmitt quotes the same Latin dictum in Political Theology (52) and in Dic-
tatorship (16), though each time with slightly different inflection. It is a very
short step from Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes in Dictatorship and Constitutional
Theory to his 1938 association of Hobbes with the advent of a “technically neu-
tral” machine that “realizes ‘right’ and ‘truth’ only in itself ” and “guarantees me
the security of my physical existence; in return it demands unconditional obe-
dience to the laws by which it functions” (Schmitt, The Leviathan 45).
With these readings in view, we can re-­approach the praise of Hobbes
offered in Political Theology (1922). We should first notice that Schmitt’s praise
of Hobbes in the book is narrowly circumscribed. Schmitt describes him as
primarily “natural-­scientific” in his turn of mind. Thus, as was visible in Dicta-
torship, Hobbes is distanced from a political theory with substantive core
concerns, such as the advancement of justice. Kelsen’s positivism is likewise
described as scientific in its orientation, though also associated with literary
criticism in its attempt to solve legal aporiae and impasses with an infinite
regression of readings of legal texts. Despite this core impulse, Hobbes none-
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 25

theless generates the political myth of the Leviathan. The reason he does so is
as a “postulate” by which he might explain the idea of sovereignty predomi-
nant in his moment:

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were dominated by this idea of

the sole sovereign, which is one of the reasons why, in addition to the deci-
sionist cast of his thinking, Hobbes remained personalistic and postulated
an ultimate concrete deciding instance, and why he also heightened his
state, the Leviathan, into an immense person and thus point-­blank straight
into mythology. This he did despite his nominalism and natural-­scientific
approach and his reduction of the individual to the atom. For him this was
no anthropomorphism—from which he was truly free—but a methodical
and systematic postulate of his juristic thinking. (47)

The strength of Hobbes is not that he effects a translation of theological con-

cepts into political ones, but that he recognizes the theological charge of sov-
ereignty in his moment and does not shy away from naming it, even as doing
so conflicts with many of his intellectual habits. The point is to show Hobbes
as retreating from mathematical analysis in approaching the question of sov-
ereignty and positing the necessity of an “ultimate concrete deciding instance”:
if there is magical thinking at work in the fiat by which the Leviathan is
formed, then it is the magical thinking that Hobbes observes as operative in
the world around him, rather than his own. As McCormick observes, dis-
tancing Hobbes from a natural-­scientific approach is important to Schmitt’s
argument that “natural science and technology have helped foster the liberal
conception of man that undermined Hobbes’s greatest accomplishment, the
sovereign state. Natural-­scientific and technical thinking have enhanced the
view that, with wealth and abundance, humanity’s dangerousness can be ame-
liorated and hence blinds humanity to the eternal reality of the political”
(McCormick, “Teaching” 276).
Throughout Political Theology, Schmitt is driving home a point on method-
ology, and Hobbes is enlisted as a precursor to the “sociology of the concept”
that he seeks to advance against a positivist impulse wishing to rationalize sov-
ereignty out of existence and to dismiss anything with the slightest whiff
of “theology or metaphysics” (39). In this sociology, legal positivism, too,
is historically contingent, a “relativistic and impersonal scientism” reflecting
nineteenth-­century attitudes. The period is not only the high-­water mark of
26 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

German legal science, but also one of bourgeois ascendancy, with legal posi-
tivism becoming for Schmitt, as Dyzenhaus notes, “the ideology developed by
liberals both to justify their struggle against the king and to sustain their
political domination thereafter” (Dyzenhaus 65). For Schmitt, a sociology of
concepts “aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to
compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social
structure of a certain epoch” (Political Theology 45). This describes the kind of
historical inquiry Schmitt essays in his reading of Hobbes; it can also describe,
as Schmitt sees it, the impulse driving Hobbes’ reading of his own moment
when he atrributes a mythic quality to the Leviathan.
The shift that takes place in Schmitt’s book on Leviathan, then, is the
accusation that Hobbes does not provide an effective “sociology of a concept,”
but instead that “his concepts contradicted England’s concrete political real-
ity” (85). Hobbes attempts to form a myth that will reunite the separation of
secular and religious authority that Christianity inherits from Judaism, but
rather mythologizes the state as machine in a way exploited by liberal Jewish
thinkers—this book belongs to the period of Schmitt’s most hysterical anti-­
Semitism.17 The specific point those thinkers can exploit is Hobbes’ handling
of the miraculous. In Leviathan, the sovereign can determine what the subject
publicly professes as belief: “if, by means of certain spoken words an individ-
ual asserted that bread had been transformed into something entirely differ-
ent, namely, the human body, then, says Hobbes, nobody would have a
sensible reason to believe it; but if the power of a state decrees this to be so,
then it is a miracle, and everyone has to obey this command to profess the
belief because it was proclaimed by the sovereign state” (Schmitt, The Levia-
than 55). In this power to decide the miraculous, “sovereign power has reached
its zenith” (55), but the subject retains the capacity to join, or not join, private
belief to this public confession of faith. In articulating that capacity Hobbes
creates an opportunity for “the liberal Jew” Spinoza to exploit the distinction
between public ritual and private confession, ceding that the state has power
over the former while emphasizing the importance of the latter in his political
philosophy, so that “the leviathan’s vitality was sapped from within and life
began to drain out of him” (57). Spinoza thus launches a process that contin-
ues in eighteenth and nineteenth-­century Continental thought and culmi-
nates in legal positivism, whereby “all the mythical forces embodied in the
image of leviathan now strike back at the state that Hobbes had symbolized”
(62). In his odd reading of the leviathan image, Schmitt describes it as caught
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 27

between a biblical association with Satan, as is familiar from the Book of Job,
and various natural mythologies where the leviathan, like the dragon, can be a
source of protection. Hobbes strives for the latter, but the mythical charge of
the former proves to be too strong, so that “all his clear intellectual construc-
tions and arguments were overcome in the vortex created by the symbol he
conjured up” (81).
Schmitt’s book on Leviathan, it is important to note, was published after
an embarrassing and precipitous fall from the favor of the National Socialists.
He became involved with the party in 1933, and played a part in having his
Jewish senior colleague Hans Kelsen removed from the law faculty at
Cologne, even though Schmitt had sought and obtained Kelsen’s support for
his own hire earlier the same year. Despite his best efforts publicly to signal
support of Hitler’s rise, most visible in his 1934 essay “Der Führer schützt das
Recht” (“The Führer protects the law”) and in his 1935 celebration of the
Nuremberg Laws as “the Constitution of Freedom,” Schmitt had seen his
ideological support of the Third Reich questioned in several quarters. As early
as 1934 he came under the SD’s scrutiny, and especially that of Reinhard
Höhn. It did not help that the émigré Waldemar Gurian was publishing arti-
cles in Switzerland under the pseudonym Paul Müller that pointed out sev-
eral of Schmitt’s close associations with Jews before the war—associations
that included Gurian himself. After attacks on him were published in
December 1936 issues of the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, it became
clear to him that his reputation in Nazi circles was irreparable and he
resigned his party positions, saved from further disgrace only by the interven-
tion of his friend Hermann Göring, who demanded that the SS newspaper
leave Schmitt alone.18
We might bear that experience in mind as we approach Schmitt’s 1938
book on Leviathan. Schmitt’s account of the “failure” of Leviathan registers
some personal disappointment in Hobbes, whom he identifies as the theorist
of the protection-­obedience axiom par excellence. The Leviathan book arrives
in the wake of Schmitt’s organization of a 1936 conference on eliminating
Jewish influence from German jurisprudence. His keynote address there
described such influence as both “anarchist nihilism” and “positivist norma-
tivism,” ostensible polarities that in fact resemble one another when each is
taken to an extreme (qtd. in Balakrishnan 206). Just as Hobbes’ version of
Uzzah is autobiographical in describing an obedience not repaid with protec-
tion, so too is Schmitt’s 1938 version of Hobbes. The closing statements of the
28 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

book read very much like an account of the way in which Schmitt hoped pos-
terity might read him:

His concepts informed the law state of the nineteenth century, but his
image of the leviathan remained a myth of horror, and his most vivid
characterizations deteriorated into slogans. Today we grasp the undimin-
ished force of his polemics, understand the intrinsic honesty of his think-
ing, and admire the imperturbable spirit who fearlessly thought through
man’s existential anguish. . . . To us he is thus the true teacher of a great
political experience; lonely as every pioneer . . . and yet in the immortal
community of the great scholars of the ages, “a sole retriever of an ancient
prudence.” (86)

Schmitt’s prose very rarely reaches for this emotive register, and we sense a
strong personal stake in celebrating a philosopher who has just been associ-
ated with a failed idea. Hobbes here resembles Schmitt’s self-­portrait at
Nuremburg: “I am an intellectual adventurer. . . . I have never tried to avoid
paying my bills” (Bendersky 103–04). If Schmitt’s paean to Hobbes is in part a
remark on his own imagined legacy, it is prescient in some respects. Some of
Schmitt’s ideas have deteriorated into slogans: “sovereign is he who decides on
the state of exception”; “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the
state are secularized theological concepts”; “the specific political distinction to
which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and
enemy.”19 More substantive engagements of his work have made effective use
of the force of his polemics against the liberal state. But we certainly have not
reached the point where Schmitt is celebrated with the warmth he displays
here, and likely never will do.

* * *

The greatest commonality between Hobbes and Schmitt is the way in which
each seeks to anchor political theory in a given material situation. This is cer-
tainly obvious in Schmitt’s writings, which everywhere tell us that an effective
legal theory must take stock of the concrete situation in which the law is to be
applied. It is the role of the sovereign to sustain the “situation” in which the
law can operate: “There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal
order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 29

definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists. . . . The sover-
eign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monop-
oly over this last decision” (Political Theology 13). Those who would place legal
norms above this power of the sovereign, a charge Schmitt levels against neo-­
Kantian legal theorists, will contribute to the dissolution of constitutional
order as political factions use the space liberal parliamentarianism provides to
advance their own agendas.
Hobbes is sometimes figured as bringing a geometrician’s abstraction into
the realm of political theory, but that view is misguided. By exploring the
brief references to Uzzah in his writings we have gained a glimpse into the
friction in his thought between absolutist theory and raison d’état analysis of
the actual workings of a given political settlement. And we have come to rec-
ognize the latter as a very significant influence during the years when Hobbes
was forming his political philosophy. This has been made clear through Noel
Malcolm’s recent discovery of Hobbes’ translation in the late 1620s of a pro-­
Habsburg reason of state tract, and through Richard Tuck’s careful account-
ing of Hobbes’ political thought. Both the pro-­Habsburg tract and the
Elements of Law, where Hobbes first formulates his political philosophy, were
dedicated to William Cavendish, Viscount Mansfield.20
Our exploration of Uzzah offers something of a different view of Hobbes’
place in the advent of modern political consciousness. In addressing the actual
workings of politics, Hobbes quite consistently recognizes that sovereignty in
its historical appearance is fraught and divided—or perceived to be so, which
can amount to the same thing. His utopian impulse in Leviathan was largely
directed toward imagining political order without such divisions, and so
obviating such conflagrations as the Thirty Years’ War or the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms. Apart from such conditions of civil calamity, however, the
subject must determine if his relationship with the sovereign offers the pro-
tection that it should. Hobbes’ rendering of the Uzzah story shows us that
even when living in a stable commonwealth, one can be in a condition of
exposure.21
This casts Leviathan not as a nuova scienza of the state, but as an effort to
inject political ideas into a tumultuous climate in the hope of effecting stabil-
ity. That is most clear in the “Review and Conclusion.” Here we see that
Hobbes and Schmitt not only root political theory in a concrete situation, but
also strive through their writings to alter the complexion of that situation.
Each attempts to harness the potential of myth to promote order in a moment
30 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  18:2

of flux. Like Schmitt’s polemical works in the late Weimar years, urging time
and again that the presidential powers of Article 48 be exercised, Leviathan
aspires to change the political scene that it enters by introducing a logic
whereby wartime enemies might become fellow citizens. “Political theology”
thus names, for both Hobbes and Schmitt, the recognition of politics as a
sociological phenomenon structured not only by laws, institutions, and inter-
ests, but also by narratives, perceptions, and beliefs.

notes
1. Schmitt’s “Gesang des Sechzigjärigen” appears in Ex Captivitate Salus; an alternate
translation, prepared by G.L. Ulmen, is available in the special issue of Telos edited by
Piccone and Ulmen (130).
2. On Schmitt and the Weimar Republic, see Kennedy, ch. 6, and Balakrishnan, ch.
10; on Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy, see Skinner.
3. See Anchor Bible textual n. at 2 Sam 6.6.
4. See 2 Sam 5.19–25 and 2 Sam 7.12–13.
5. See Jerome, Epistles, 22.23; Pseudo-­Dionysius, epistle 8; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities,
47 [7.4.2].
6. See Geneva Bible notes at 2 Sam 6.7, and 1 Chron 13.10.
7. Malcolm’s edition of Leviathan includes facing-­page English and Latin texts.
8. For recent discussion of this aspect of the Restoration settlement, see Rose, esp.
46–7.
9. See the account of parliamentary diarist John Milward: “I was informed that it was
moved in the House that certain atheistical books should be burned, among which Mr.
Hobbes’ Leviathan was one” (qtd. in Tuck, Philosophy, 339). This was not Hobbes’ first such
encounter, of course. For a book-­length examination of his feud with Bishop Bramhall, see
Jackson.
10. Hobbes’ letter to Cavendish is dated July 23/August 2, 1641.
11. See Strauss, Political Philosophy, esp. 8–18.
12. On sixteenth-­century and Jacobean political theology, see, for example, Kneidel
and Shuger.
13. See Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 114–15.
14. On the extent to which Strauss influenced Schmitt, see Balakrishnan (215), Kahn
(31–3); McCormick, “Fear”; and Meier.
15. Dyzenhaus persuasively argues that Schmitt wishes to show in Dictatorship that
Article 48 extends to the president the role of commissarial dictator, but is vague enough
also posit in him “at least a residuum” of the power of sovereign dictator (75). For Schmitt’s
views on Article 48 in brief, see Constitutional Theory, 157–58.
16. On this aspect of Schmitt’s thought, see Scheurman 65.
17. On the anti-­Semitism of Schmitt’s Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes,
including its implicit blaming of Jews for Nazism, see McCormick, “Teaching,” esp. 270
and 283–4. McCormick’s excellent chapter explores much of the same terrain as the pres-
ent essay, though of course with differences in emphasis.
 Mohamed  •  The Political Theology of Betrayal 31

18. Biographical information in this paragraph derived from Balakrishnan (201–07),

Dyzenhaus (4), and Schwab’s introduction to Schmitt’s Leviathan in the State Theory
(ix–xiii).
19. These arise from Political Theology (1, 36) and The Concept of the Political (26). I have
departed from the Schwab translation in the first of them; commentators on Schmitt’s
thought generally prefer “decides on the state of exception” to “decides on the exception.”
20. See Malcolm, ed., Reason of State; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 308–9; and
Tuck, Introduction to Leviathan, xxv. Tuck further describes the Elements as directly
importing continental raison d’état. Karstadt places less emphass on raison d’état in his
detailed account of the development of Hobbes’ thought on “interest,” but see 109–10.
21. On the relationship between exposure and protection in Hobbes’ theorization of
sovereignty, see Nyquist’s suggestive analysis of the mother-­infant relationship in Levia-
than (312–14).

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