Carl Schmitt's Enemies: Context for a Critique of Political Theology

Carl Schmitt famously charged that "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts…" We contend that this argument has not been taken seriously enough in its historical, systematic, or tendentious intent. Using his 1956 essay "Hamlet oder Hecuba," we offer a contextualization of Schmitt's late political theology. Tracing the sectarian elements revealed here against their alternatives, we demonstrate the overriding interpretive importance of Schmitt's radical Roman Catholic political theology: the character of Schmitt's thinking was always already religiously sectarian.