A new book by Paul W. Kahn
Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
Paul W. Kahn, Political
Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
Columbia University Press, 2011, 207pp., $32.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780231153409.
Reviewed by Lars Vinx, Bilkent University
Notre Dame Philosophical
Reviews
Paul W. Kahn's
Political Theology is best
described as a philosophical commentary on Carl Schmitt's famous work of the
same title.[1]
Like Schmitt's Political Theology,
the book is divided into four chapters (plus an introduction and a short
conclusion). These chapters bear the same titles as the chapters of Schmitt's Political Theology and attempt to reconstruct
the arguments in the original Political
Theology.
The aims of
Kahn's Political Theology,
however, are not primarily exegetical. Though he offers some very illuminating
perspectives on Schmitt's text, Kahn is primarily interested in using Schmitt's
arguments as a foil to develop a conception of political theology that is
applicable to contemporary debates in political and legal theory. This attempt
to update the idea of political theology is consistently interesting and
intriguing but ultimately fails to convince.
The project of
political theology might appear irrelevant to contemporary politics for the
simple reason that we are living in a secular state which refuses to give
official recognition to any particular religious doctrine. In response to this
challenge, Kahn argues that the point of political theology is not to subject
politics to the beliefs or demands of some religious tradition or other, but
rather to acknowledge that "the state is not the secular arrangement that
it purports to be." (p. 18)
Even a state that, like the US, sharply separates politics and
religion "maintains its own sacred space and history," (p. 19) and
political life in the modern state is therefore "not a life stripped of
faith and of the experience of the sacred." (p. 18)
Political theology, consequently, remains relevant even where there is a clear
distinction between church and state.
Like Schmitt,
Kahn believes that the existence of a political community depends on a
willingness on the part of its members to sacrifice their lives in the defence
of the existence of the community against internal or external enemies. The
idea of sacrifice, Kahn claims, is implicit in the American understanding of
democracy, which grounds the legitimacy of the constitution in a revolutionary
exercise of popular sovereignty.
A democratic revolution cannot take place
without a willingness to sacrifice on the part of a people rising up against
its oppressors. Sacrifice, therefore, stands at the beginning of modern
political experience and the idea of popular sovereignty is inseparable from
it.
The view that
one ought to be willing to sacrifice oneself for the state, Kahn argues, is
incommensurable to a liberal political theory that bases the state on a social
contract designed to further the satisfaction of individual interest. In
political sacrifice, the individual willingly subordinates its personal
interest to the life of the community, on the basis of the belief that the
sacrifice for the state "holds forth an ultimate meaning." (p. 155)
A
completely de-theologized liberal political theory has no access to that
ultimate meaning, and it must consequently fail to offer a complete and
adequate understanding of political experience in the modern democratic nation
state committed to the principle of popular sovereignty. (p. 17)
Kahn's charge
that liberalism must fail to understand the modern experience of the political
remains ambiguous. The charge is based on the fact, presumably, that a liberal who
denies that 'the state maintains its own sacred space' is likely to see only
regrettable slaughter where the political theologian sees a noble sacrifice
imbued with transcendent meaning.
But to justify a dismissal of liberal
political theory one must do more than to point out that a liberal's political
experience will differ from that of a committed political theologian. One must
show that the liberal perception of the sacrifice as regrettable slaughter is a
misperception.
The liberal,
the political theologian might argue, wrongly denies that the act of sacrifice
for the state is objectively valuable from a moral point of view. But Kahn does
not want to make an argument of this sort. He claims that his political
theology is "a project of descriptive political analysis." (p. 25) He
goes on to point out that one can be engaged in this project without endorsing
the "values that are revealed in this account." (p. 26)
The goal of
political theology, Kahn suggests here, is merely to describe the forms of
political experience prevalent in American society. The question is not whether
the beliefs and attitudes described by political theology are true or false,
but rather how they "figure in the construction of a broader political
imagination."
(p. 10)
The charge against
liberalism, it would seem, must then be a charge against liberalism's
capability to offer an accurate descriptive account of political experience,
not a charge against the liberal denial of the perceptions of value embedded in
that experience. Kahn claims, in this vein, that "we will never find an
adequate explanation of the politics of sacrifice in liberal theory or positive
political science." (p. 17) So understood, however, the charge against
liberalism is either irrelevant or false.
If the task of explanation is not to
be understood as the task of giving justification or endorsement, but rather as
the task of theoretical description, the criticism does not apply to normative
liberal political theory, since such theory does not aim to offer explanations.
And it is hard to see, on the other hand, why a descriptive social scientist
should be unable to offer explanations, be they historical, cultural,
social-psychological, etc., for why people are attached to a political-theology
of sacrifice, or why he should be unable to understand what it is that those
people believe or what their acts of sacrifice mean to them.
Of course, the
acts in question will not mean to the social scientist what they mean to those
who perform them, unless the scientist is himself attached to the political
theology that motivates those acts. But if we were to say that the
understanding of the non-attached scientist is therefore deficient, we would
fall back, it seems, into the view that the scientist's mistake consists in a
failure to perceive the sacrificial acts he observes as objectively valuable.
In response to
this dilemma, Kahn admits that a popular sovereign acting outside of the law
"is no more imaginable from without than is a god to those outside of the
faith." (p. 12) But Kahn claims that this is no reason to worry for the
political theologian: "Just as no one will be convinced by argument to
believe in God, no faith was ever defeated by argument alone." (p. 26) The
failure of the liberal political theorist, then, is neither a moral failure nor
a failure of description or explanation. The failure, rather, is the liberal
theorist's lack of faith in the civil religion that Kahn's political theology
is about.
The liberal theorist simply does not believe that the sacrifice for
the state 'holds forth an ultimate meaning.' One cannot prove by argument, Kahn
concedes, that the liberal theorist is wrong not to have faith, since faith is
inaccessible to reason. But if a political community is constituted by a shared
political faith in the state as a source of ultimate meaning then one can
conclude, it would seem, that the liberal cannot be a true member of that
political community. Kahn's criticism thus appears to come down to the
troubling claim that the liberal is a political heretic, an unbeliever in the
American civil religion, and thus an internal enemy.[2]
Understandably,
Kahn does not dwell on this implication of his attack on liberal political theory.
His rhetorical strategy, rather, is to issue an invitation to join in the
faith. Kahn attempts to show that some key features of American constitutional
practice, like the institution of judicial review, the veneration of the
constitution, or the strong executive power of the president make better sense
if they are seen in the light of a political theology.
Two key claims emerge in
the course of these discussions--claims that are supposed to make attachment to
the faith appear attractive, even in the absence of any possibility of reasoned
proof of its superiority over a liberal-individualist perspective. Kahn argues
that a political religion is needed to avoid inauthenticity and to achieve
collective autonomy.
The deepest symptom
of liberal inauthenticity, according to Kahn, is the belief that political
opponents can always be brought to agreement through reasonable deliberation.
Liberals consequently deny that there are states of exception or political
crises that are essentially beyond legal regulation and that require a
sovereign decision beyond the law. Such a view, Kahn argues, overlooks the
possibility of existential crisis: "The mistake is to think that law
without sovereignty -- in particular, international law -- has solved the
problem of perpetuating its own existence." (p. 56)
A state without
sovereignty will, in a moment of crisis, fail "to defend its own
self-ordering as an existential value." (p. 57) The Schmittian state, by
contrast, is mindful of the possible need to defend itself and thus achieves a
more authentic form of political existence: "Like Heidegger's authentic
individual, Schmitt's state always confronts the possibility of its own
death." (p. 60)
It seems to
make little sense, however, to argue that liberal states or liberal systems of
legal ordering are inauthentic because they fail to solve 'the problem of
perpetuating their own existence.' Clearly, a Schmittian state doesn't solve
that problem either. Even if citizens share a political religion that motivates
them to sacrifice their lives for the state, they may still fail in their
struggle to defend their state if faced with a stronger external enemy.
What is
more, the liberal state is explicitly based on the goal of mutual protection of
individual rights and interests. If a state fails to realize this goal, or if
it excludes significant proportions of the citizenry from its realization, a
liberal would likely argue that the state in question is illegitimate and that
its preservation may not be desirable. It is hard to see why such a stance
should signal inauthenticity or a failure to confront the possibility of the
death of the state. It would be inauthentic, rather, for liberals to attribute
unconditional value to the existence of a state that fails to realize liberal
aims or even thwarts the realization of those aims.
According to
Kahn, however, liberalism is not just guilty of inauthenticity, it also
precludes the realization of a form of collective freedom that could not exist
without a political faith (see pp. 91-122). Kahn models the free act on the
paradigms of aesthetic creation and philosophical dialogue. A genuinely
creative act, or a genuine contribution to an ongoing philosophical debate,
must be related to the conventions, the language, and the content of previous
creative acts or philosophical interventions in order to be understandable to
its audience.
But it must also distance itself from the earlier conventions,
languages, and contents to which it refers and on which it is based in order to
create something new. Moreover, the creative act must be surprising in order to
be an exercise of freedom. If the act were predictable on sociological,
psychological, or ideological grounds, it would fail to qualify as an authentic
exercise of freedom. Schmitt's sovereign decision on the exception, in Kahn's
view, is the paradigm example of an act that is free in this sense.
As Kahn
acknowledges (p. 101), his conception of free decision is in danger of
collapsing into mere arbitrariness. To solve this problem Kahn argues, in a
rather freewheeling interpretation of the third chapter of Schmitt's Political Theology, that the free act must
be based on analogical rasoning (see pp. 101-114).
Analogical reasoning
bridges the gap between a norm and its application, suspension, or change in a
way that goes beyond mere deduction and thus introduces an element of
creativity. Since it is impossible to predict what analogies will be drawn and
be found convincing in the future, the results of analogical reasoning cannot
be predicted by causal analysis.
But analogical reasoning nevertheless forges a
meaningful relation between antecedent normativity and the free act. It
involves seeing a new situation as relevantly similar to past political
experience. To participate in a community's political life, one must therefore
participate in the practices of analogical reasoning that maintain and develop
a community's political self-understanding through history. In doing so, Kahn
claims, the members of a political community collectively realize a form of
freedom that is akin to the freedom experienced by the aesthetic genius or the
great philosopher.
This
conception of collective freedom, it would appear, is no more intimately
related to a political theology of sacrifice than it is to a liberal narrative
focusing on the extension of liberal freedom and equality. Using the method of
analogy, one might, following Kahn, interpret contested judicial decisions or
uses of extra-legal force on the part of the executive as re-enactments of acts
of revolutionary popular sovereignty that transcend legality (see pp. 31-90).
But one might just as well use the method of analogical reasoning to show that
situations of crisis are relevantly analogous to conditions that have
previously been considered amenable to legal control. Hence, the method of
analogy as such does not support the idea that every legal order must be based
on a sovereign power capable of taking a decision on the exception. Analogical
reasoning may, with equal justification, be used to extend the range of
legality instead of curtailing it.
Moreover, if
the method of Kahn's political theology is simply the method of analogy, it is
hard to see what is supposed to be specifically theological about it. Kahn
claims that a political-theological inquiry into American political culture
will show that "our political life remains deeply embedded in a web of
conceptions that are theological in their origin or structure." (p. 120)
Even if this were an uncontroversial observation, it would fail to support
Kahn's claim that liberal political theory "lacks a conception of the
political." (p. 121)
If political thought is simply a hermeneutics of
social meaning based on analogical reasoning, we will find that the content of
'the political' is culturally variable because different communities understand
their politics in different ways. Kahn's general claim that any community which
does not subscribe to a political theology of sacrifice doesn't have a true
political life is therefore ungrounded.
Kahn complains
that liberal theory considers much of American political practice to be
pathological, "as if the aim of a political practice is to satisfy some
normative theory." (p. 121) But to say that liberal theory ought to be
rejected because it considers political practice to be pathological evidently
begs the question against a normative theory.
Since Kahn fails to establish
that political theology is necessary to secure political authenticity or
collective freedom, he is in no position to assume that the practices
criticized by liberals deserve to be preserved. That he makes that assumption,
nevertheless, gives the lie to his initial claim that his project is merely
descriptive. At the end of the day, Kahn has little of substance to add to the
intolerant and sectarian idea that liberals are un-American since they do not
adhere to what he takes to be America's
civil religion.
Perhaps this
should not occasion surprise. Kahn attempts to distance himself from Schmitt's
own views by claiming that his Political
Theology differs from Schmitt's in that it "substitutes the
popular sovereign for his idea of sovereignty." (p. 9, see also p. 39) But
it should be evident to even a casual reader of Schmitt's major works that
Schmitt thought his conception of sovereignty was perfectly applicable to the
democratic state. Schmitt's project throughout the Weimar-period centers on the
attempt to transpose the decisionist idea of sovereignty into a democratic key.[3]
It is an unavoidable
condition of this transposition, for Schmitt, that we conceive of the principle
of democracy as being completely distinct from and as taking priority over the
principles of liberal-democratic constitutionalism. Democracy, as a result,
comes to be fused with authoritarianism in the call for a plebiscitarian
dictatorship that is empowered to act beyond the law.
Those who want to employ
Schmitt's conception of sovereignty to interpret a constitution which is
clearly committed to a separation of powers and to the rule of law must explain
why we should accept the authoritarian consequences of Schmitt's conception of
sovereignty, or else they must tell us how it is possible to disavow those
consequences while using a Schmittian conception of sovereignty. Kahn skirts
this issue.[4] One suspects that the
political implications of his political theology may not be as different from
those of Schmitt's own as Kahn seems to believe.
The problems
and gaps in the argument of Political
Theology indicate a failure of Kahn's declared project of separating
political theology from intolerant sectarian conviction, of making it safe for
a society committed to a separation of church and state and to the principles
of tolerance and equal concern that underpin it. Kahn's Political Theology may, despite its
argumentative failings, have an important lesson to teach, namely that
political theology is not a viable paradigm for contemporary political thought.
[1] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty, trans. by George Schwab, with a foreword by Tracy B. Strong
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006).
[2] Of course, a similar
assessment will presumably have to apply to those inclined to reject Kahn's
sacralization of the state on religious grounds.
[3] See Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. and ed. by
Jeffrey Seitzer, with a foreword by Ellen Kennedy (Durham
and London:
Duke University Press, 2008).
[4] This criticism equally
applies to Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and
the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
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