Myth and Rationality in Politics

Discussions of Carl Schmitt's 1938 Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes have focused on the question of whether Schmitt defends a mythic conception of politics based on the idea of political theology or a rationalist approach that focuses on state power to the exclusion of theological justifications for power.1 The difficulty in assessing this text is that Schmitt provides in it both types of explanation for the stability of the state. On the one hand, Schmitt argues that the absolutist state originated out of fear. Once the religious civil wars began, the resulting destruction and chaos led to

Biopower · Epistemology · LEVIATHAN (cipher · Liberalism · Materialism · Mythology · Political philosophy · Political science · Political theology · Politics · Power (physics · Rationality · State (computer science · State of exception · Theology · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Religious studies · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Religious Studies

• Toward the Question of the Possibility of Political Theology

  Open Access•Aleksey Yarkeev•Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie /…•2022

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