On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition

The 'Theologico-Political Problem' in Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3970568
AutoresFacundo Vega (0000-0002-1387-5944, Cornell University, autor correspondente)
Ano2017
Volume22
Fascículo6
Páginas697-728
Data de publicação2017-08-18
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe European Legacy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10848770.2017.1334987
OpenAlexW2626510497
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas126

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic

Environmental ethics · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty