The European Legacy

Toward New Paradigms

ISSN: 1084-8770 (Print) 1470-1316 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20

On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition: The

‘Theologico-Political Problem’ in Carl Schmitt, Leo
Strauss, and Hannah Arendt

Facundo Vega

To cite this article: Facundo Vega (2017): On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition: The
‘Theologico-Political Problem’ in Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt, The European
Legacy, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2017.1334987

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1334987

Published online: 14 Jun 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 9

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cele20

Download by: [The UC San Diego Library] Date: 16 June 2017, At: 01:42
The European Legacy, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1334987

On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition:

The ‘Theologico-Political Problem’ in Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss,
and Hannah Arendt
Facundo Vega
College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more Carl Schmitt; Leo Strauss;
political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” Hannah Arendt; Claude
by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three Lefort; the theologico-
prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo political problem;
disenchantment of the
Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a world; secularization;
preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and political beginnings
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.

“There is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought,”
writes Eric L. Santner in The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of
Sovereignty.1 This perception of the surreptitious presence of the theologico-political has a
long tradition: the term theologia politike appears in Marcus Terentius Varro’s Antiquitates
rerum divinarum and in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei contra Paganos. Although the inexhaust-
ibility of political theology is clearly evident in contemporary theory,2 the milieu in which
it emerged as a “predicament” points to the work of three prominent twentieth-century
representatives: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt.
These three thinkers share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism
and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses
to the theologico-political differ dramatically, their individual accounts center on what
has been termed the abyssal character of modernity, that is, the absence of incontestable

CONTACT Facundo Vega [email protected]

© 2017 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
2  F. VEGA

principles that justify life-in-common and the persistence of political orders.3 Admittedly,
several theorists have examined the contestable core of modern political legitimacy as well
as the role of political theology in contemporary politics. A primary reason, however, for
grouping Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt together is that their reflections on modern political
legitimacy and the repercussions of the theologico-political are closely intertwined. Put
differently, their analyses of the problem of grounding modern politics are part and parcel of
their confrontation with the theologico-political predicament. The interdependence of these
two issues can hardly be grasped if one does not take into account the historical context in
which Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt lived and worked. The intellectual debates during the
interwar years and mid-twentieth century enlivened their thematizations of the crisis of
modern liberalism and the vision of ineluctable progress. Kronjurist Schmitt and émigrés
Strauss and Arendt, respectively, supporter and victims of German totalitarianism, offered
a distinctive reply to it: their assessments of the modern debacle centered on the political
sphere. Unlike other critics of modernity, for Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt, politics—rather
than technology, ethics, culture, or religion—constituted the main vantage point from which
to illuminate contemporary quandaries. According to them, liberalism prevented the world
from confronting the depth of the cataclysm brought about by the advent of modernity.
Vis-à-vis the celebration of liberal progressivism, controversies surrounding the persistence
of past heritages, the concept of tradition, and the fate of the divine at work in the theo-
logico-political problem inflected their approaches to modern political failures. Thus their
“hidden dialogue”4 was not only an important episode in the European intellectual history
of the twentieth century but also offers a theoretical prism through which to understand
the promises and risks inherent in the unstable grounding of modern political life, caught
between what Arendt called the breaking of the “thread of tradition” and the impression
that, even under democratic veils, the “royal remains.”5
This essay proceeds in four parts to elucidate Schmitt’s, Strauss’s, and Arendt’s engage-
ment with the contestable nature of modern politics and in particular with one of the main
responses to this contentious character of life-in-common: political theology. In the first
section, I thematize the origin of the theologico-political problem in each of their oeuvres,
focusing on the way in which each deals with the Weberian “disenchantment of the world”
and with the notion of “secularization.” Secularized political modernity represents a situation
in which transcendental values have been withdrawn from the arena of life-in-common.
However, Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt approach secularization with different aims, which
are, respectively, to denounce the collapse of the sacred in contemporary politics, to spurn
modern political imprudence, and to advocate the opportunity to constitute political free-
dom. To fully apprehend their diagnoses of the modern disenchantment of the world, in the
second section I argue that their competing responses to the theologico-political problem
constitute a singular treatment of tradition and the place of “the absolute” in the political
realm. Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political predicament, specially, proves
crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties
can no longer be re-established. In the third section, I further examine their responses
to the “tragic character of the modern condition.” The recognition of the tragic strain of
modernity—as analyzed by Claude Lefort—is intrinsic to the hidden dialogue between
Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt. The modern challenge to the theologico-political promi-
nently manifests itself through a persistent form of intertwining the politically ordinary and
extraordinary, the old and the new, continuity and interruption, founding and preservation.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  3

In the fourth section, finally, I discuss the pervasive impact of the hidden dialogue between
Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt on current theoretical efforts to deal with the abyssal character
of politics. My account suggests that, beyond the specter of the theologico-political, political
beginnings cannot be merely described as foundational moments enacted by exceptional
founders, which, as such, are fueled by the dignity of “the extraordinary.” It suggests, rather,
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.

The Problem of the Origin: Omens of Political Theology

Among other important works in social and political thought, Max Weber’s famous speeches
“Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” may be said to foreshadow the current
debate on political theology. By taking into account political organizations and scientific
specialization, Weber makes clear that “the growing process of intellectualization and ration-
alization… means that… there are no mysterious, unpredictable forces... but that we rather
can… control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of
the world.”6 In this disenchanted world, science appears to challenge the status of religious
beliefs. This, however, is not Weber’s blind defense of an omnipotent modern science and
faith in progress. Controversial as it may sound, Weber implies that the tension between the
two spheres, between the values of science and the values of religion, cannot be overcome.
The most prominent feature of Weber’s description of a disenchanted world, with its
scientific rationalization and intellectualization, is the withdrawal of ultimate, transcen-
dental values as grounds of public discourse. Paradoxically, the “disenchantment of the
world” entails that political life is exposed to a conflict between gods and the absence of
ultimate possible attitudes. “The genius or the demon of politics,” Weber claims, “lives in
an inner tension with the God of love as well as with the Christian God as institutionalized
in the Christian churches, and it is a tension that can erupt at any time into an insoluble
conflict.”7 The political inflections of this problem include the aforementioned absence of
incontestable principles to justify life-in-common.
The world Weber described, marked by secularization and the “polytheism of values,”
formed the crucial intellectual background of Schmitt’s, Strauss’s, and Arendt’s individual
approaches to the theologico-political problem. For Schmitt, the origin of the predicament
lies precisely in the pervasiveness of secularization.8 In contrast to the secularized reality,
Schmitt detects the analogous relationship between transcendence and immanence and the
ontological co-substantiality of theology and politics, and he re-inscribes it in his theory of
the twofold development of political theology. Whereas in Political Theology Schmitt traces
the shift from theological to political conceptions, from the sacred to the secular, his work
on Hobbes describes modernity no longer in terms of the transformation of the sacred into
the profane but as the elimination of the former.9 Schmitt’s sociology of juridical concepts
attempts to define the fundamental structures of a particular age by claiming that politics
is neither the cause nor the effect of theology, and yet the modern theory of the state, as he
famously put it, consists of “secularized theological concepts.” The particular relationship
set out by Schmitt between the modern theory of the state and the theological is exempli-
fied in the structural analogy he draws between “the exception” in jurisprudence and “the
miracle” in theology.10
4  F. VEGA

Schmitt’s statements on what he calls contemporary “neutralizations” and “depolitici-

zations” also address the process of secularization and the rise and eclipse of the theolog-
ico-political realm. He sees the various stages of neutralization and depoliticization—the
shifts from the theological to the metaphysical domain, from the metaphysical to the human-
itarian-moral, and then to the economic domain—as producing a profound transformation
in spiritual life and, consequently, its secularization.11 The corollary of this transformation
was the emergence of a “religion” of technical progress, of the triumph of technology and
liberalism. In contrast to the idiom of political liberalism and its stato neutrale ed agnostico,
Schmitt’s theoretical and historical analyses of the advent of political theology rely on essen-
tial and non-normative concepts. His praise of political theology is, in fact, an attempt to call
into question the tendencies toward neutralization and technologization that characterize
secularized politics. In contesting these tendencies, he deplores the situation in which “God
himself… is removed from the world and becomes a neutral instance vis-à-vis the struggles
and antagonisms of real life.”12 For Schmitt, Christian political philosophy acutely grasped
how modern revolutions imply the eruption of atheistic thought that subjectifies God. In
contrast to liberal and bourgeois security, Schmitt’s political theology postulates the evil
nature of human beings. Beyond the banal talk of the bourgeoisie, the “‘discussing class’,”13
as he calls it, Schmitt’s political theology seeks to defend the persistence of “the political”
now threatened by the economic-technical spirit. His fierce anti-liberalism is a rejection of
the notion of “cultural decline” so ubiquitous in Weber’s work.14
The key to Schmitt’s dispute with Weber and to his vehement defense of political theol-
ogy is offered by one of his prime adversaries: Leo Strauss. As John McCormick explains,
the young Leo Strauss recognizes Schmitt’s project… and its relationship to that of Hobbes; he
confirms the necessity of such a project based on “the present situation” of Weimar; he criticizes
the project on the basis of Schmitt’s own assumptions and aims; and finally, he refashions,
redirects, and radicalizes the project itself.15
To understand how the radicalization of the theologico-political issue occurred, we should
note that Strauss’s interest in political theology and in the origin of its predicament goes
beyond Christian political philosophy and the Schmittian horizon,16 though as the author
of Political Theology he was also motivated by the crisis of political liberalism in pre- and
post-Weimar politics. Their mésentente comes to light in Strauss’s review of Schmitt’s Concept
of the Political and persists throughout his later work.17 By way of illustration, Strauss’s
reflections on Hobbes’s philosophy also problematize the notion of secularization, which, he
argues, cannot retain any theological content.18 His critique of modernity does not consist
of an exposition of the metaphysical chain leading from Hobbes to nihilism; neither does
it constitute a political theology, an ontology, or a “sociology of juridical concepts.” Rather,
Strauss’s critique emerges in tandem with a theologico-political predicament that traverses
the history of political philosophy and its confrontation with ancient thought to meditate
on the notions of political beginnings, the good, and order. That is to say, Strauss’s theologi-
co-political problem—defined by him as “the theme of [his] investigations”19—sheds light on
political irresponsibility, which he sees as inherent in modernity. Thus for him the passage
from classical prudence and caution to the modern rupture with tradition is a radical change
of the conditions of life-in-common. In challenging modern imprudence, Weber’s positions
on secularization, the disenchantment of the world, the insolubility of the conflict between
ethics and politics, and the “polytheism of values,” no longer entail, according to Strauss, the
need to reflect on the persistence of theological structures.20 For Strauss, instead, Weber’s
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  5

assumptions simply overlook the legacy of classical philosophy.21 Strauss’s renewed attention
to and interest in the ancients—as his philosophy shows—must be based on a meditation
on the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem, or reason and revelation.22 This alternative
exemplifies a different approach to the question of the good life and provides a basis for
Strauss’s subsequent elaborations on the origins of the theologico-political predicament.
By referring to the quarrel between Athens and Jerusalem, he also calls into question the
modern ideal of progress, which assumes the superiority of the present over the past. For
Strauss, “modern man is a blind giant” who can only distinguish between the progressive
and the reactionary, but cannot distinguish between good and evil.23
Hence, according to Strauss, to understand modern political failures we need to return
to the past, and more specifically, as he states: “Obviously… to the principles of Western
civilization.” But, Strauss adds, “there is a difficulty here, because Western civilization con-
sists of two elements, it has two roots, which are in radical dis-agreement with each other.
We may call these elements… Jerusalem and Athens or, to speak in non-metaphorical lan-
guage, the Bible and Greek philosophy.” It is from this theoretical maneuver that Strauss’s
attempt to define the theologico-political predicament arises. For him, both the Bible and
Greek philosophy coincide in their praise of justice and of obedience to the law. And yet,
he emphasizes, what they disagree about is how one is to obey: Greek philosophy relies
on understanding or contemplation; biblical revelation relies on humility, a sense of guilt,
repentance, and faith in divine mercy. Whereas in all Greek thought, “we find in one form
or the other an impersonal necessity higher than any personal being,” Strauss remarks, “in
the Bible the first cause is, as people say now, a person.” Athens and Jerusalem, then, stage
different answers to the fundamental question of how one should live one’s life. Philosophy,
as a quest for knowledge of the whole, necessarily entails a particular way of life. Its antag-
onist, biblical faith, based on revelation, miracles, and a supra-rational law, also entails a
particular way of life. For Strauss, these two ways of life are clearly irreconcilable, but it
is the tension and conflict between them that accounts for the secret vitality of Western
civilization: “No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian nor, for that matter, some
possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to
be a synthesis of both.”24 For Strauss the theologico-political predicament thus lies in the
insoluble tension between reason and revelation, which he subsequently adds cannot be
refuted: “The genuine refutation of orthodoxy would require the proof that the world and
human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.”25
In view of this insoluble tension between Athens and Jerusalem, Arendt’s approach to
political tradition proves helpful in clarifying both Schmitt’s and Strauss’s positions on
political theology. Although she never refers to the theologico-political problem as such,26
it is implicit in her discussions of secularization and the broken thread of tradition. Both
her analysis of secularization and her view of the abyssal character of modern politics, in
fact, define the scope and limits of the theologico-political problem. In Arendt’s terms,
secularization simply means the ascent of the secular and the concomitant decline of a
transcendent world. By implicitly referring to Schmitt, she specifies that secularization
cannot be equated with the conversion of religious and transcendent categories into imma-
nent standards. Rather, “secularization means first of all simply the separation of religion
and politics, and this affected both sides so fundamentally that nothing is less likely to have
taken place than the gradual transformation of religious categories into secular concepts
which the defenders of unbroken continuity try to establish.”27 That is to say, secularization
6  F. VEGA

should not be understood via the persistence of theological concepts, as Schmitt maintained.
More specifically, Arendt does not read modernity through the prism of neutralization
and depoliticization, but simply as the separation between political thinking and theology,
and the discovery of the secular realm—the space where human beings become mortals.28
From her understanding of the consequences of secularization, nevertheless, we detect a
resonance of the theologico-political problem in Arendt’s thought. Between Past and Future
is clear in this respect. By discussing the modern loss of ultimates or absolutes, Arendt
asserts that “the most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may
well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in
traditional religion, the fear of hell.”29 Political troubles arise, however, because the disregard
of the fear of hell configures one of the key conditions for the advent of totalitarianism. This
particular understanding of the consequences of secularization is constitutive of Arendt’s
comprehension of modernity and its pathos of novelty. Her singular stance towards the
theologico-political problem suggests that “even if we admitted that the modern age began
with a sudden, inexplicable eclipse of transcendence, of belief in a hereafter, it would by
no means follow that this loss threw [men] back upon the world… but upon themselves.”
Arendt then refers to Weber, in particular to his “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism,” to scrutinize the lack of enjoyment of the world and its replacement by the
care of the self within modernity.30
Although Arendt considers Weber the only author who “raised the question of the
modern age with… depth and relevance” and was aware of the extent of the loss of faith,
modernity, she argues, implies more profound losses.31 In On Revolution Arendt thema-
tizes one of those losses, namely, the breaking of the thread of tradition. This Destruktion,
to be sure, can entail both the promise of freedom and depoliticization. The breaking of
the thread of tradition, nonetheless, is not merely a repercussion of secularization: “the
enormous significance for the political realm of the lost sanction of religion is commonly
neglected in the discussion of modern secularization.” Arendt’s reluctant approach to the
theologico-political problem—one that, paradoxically, rejects the rubric of political theol-
ogy—lies in her perception of the abyssal nature of modern politics. The key issue for her is
that, after secularization, “politics and the state needed the sanction of religion even more
urgently than religion and the churches had ever needed the support of princes.”32 These
claims emphasize neither how the sacred persists in profane conditions à la Schmitt, nor
how the recognition of the theologico-political predicament is constitutive of a philosophical
challenge à la Strauss. What Arendt’s work stages, rather, is a reflection on the conditions
that are necessary to maintain political freedom.

The Theologico-Political as a Problem: A Return of Tradition?

The current interest in political theology calls, as noted earlier, for a closer look at the hidden
dialogue between Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt. And yet, while critics have analyzed the
quarrel between Schmitt and Strauss on the political and political theology,33 Arendt does
not seem to be engaged, at least at first glance, with their dispute. There are only incidental
mentions of Schmitt in her work and, though controversial, they remain both isolated and
secondary.34 Regarding Strauss, Arendt’s reluctance is perhaps more radical. They knew
each other personally, both experienced the strong impact of Heidegger’s thought, and
both were engaged in the study of ancient political philosophy and its significance for
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  7

contemporary politics. As German Jews, both of them fled Nazi Germany and settled in
the United States. Arendt and Strauss were affiliated with the same institutions, and in the
1960s they both taught at the University of Chicago.35 Strikingly, however, Arendt never
explicitly refers to Strauss in her work,36 her only mention of him being a response to Karl
Jaspers’s question: “[D]­o you know anything about Leo Strauss…?” To which she replies:
“Leo Strauss is [a] professor of political philosophy in Chicago, highly respected. Wrote a
good book about Hobbes (as well as the one about Spinoza). Now another about natural
law. He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don’t like him.
He must be in his middle or late fifties.”37
Beyond narratives based on personal intrigue, the mésentente between Schmitt, Strauss,
and Arendt on the theologico-political problem comes to the fore by looking at their posi-
tions on the contestable grounds of modern politics. But first we must consider what is
at stake in the theologico-political problem and, more broadly, in political theology. The
problem, as originally formulated by Strauss, names a specific theoretical conjuncture. To
be sure, Strauss enigmatically alludes to the theologico-political predicament or problem
in his prefaces to his books on Spinoza and on Hobbes, respectively, which were repub-
lished in the 1960s.38 Understanding the theologico-political as a problem, Strauss sets out
to ­diagnose the modern attempt to overcome traditional revelation. At this first level, as
Steven B. Smith notes, Strauss seems to be referring to the “unavoidable theological matrix
in which political life takes place,”39 which might reinforce the idea that modern political
philosophy is indebted to tradition.40 Yet by noting the limits of the modern “refutation”
of tradition, Strauss clearly does not propose a return to political theology as Schmitt does.
Instead, his reconstruction of the theologico-political problem shows that he primarily
seeks to recover classical political philosophy in which the tensions and even contradictions
that define society are not resolved but recognized.41 As Heinrich Meier, Daniel Tanguay,
Thomas L. Pangle, and Smith himself, among many others, argue, this second level brings
to the fore the conflict between political theology—according to which the political order
is founded on revelation—and political philosophy—according to which it is founded on
reason.42 “No alternative,” Strauss affirms, “is more fundamental than the alternative: human
guidance or divine guidance. Tertium non datur.”43
In the juxtaposition of politics and theology, political theology, accordingly, is under-
stood in at least three different ways: as a politics of theology that pursues a hierocracy; as
a reflection on the theological core of politics and the philosophico-political meaning of
theology; and as a “theology of politics” or “civil theology.”44 These meanings, however, are
unlikely to capture the theologico-political problem as presented by Schmitt,45 whose view
of the predicament needs to be understood in the context of his critique of liberal politics
and the disenchantment of the world.46 In one of his earliest works, Political Romanticism,
Schmitt lays the basis for his later conception of political theology as the primordial way
of dealing with a concrete historical reality.47 In a polemical gesture, he emphasizes that
political liberalism, the epitome of the bourgeois world outlook, implies that the individ-
ual subject “takes the place of God as the ultimate authority and the decisive factor.” What
Schmitt strongly criticizes is the imposition of secularization as a new “metaphysical” reality:
“what human beings regard as the ultimate, absolute authority… certainly can change, and
God can be replaced by mundane and worldly factors.”48
Although Schmitt criticizes the modern obliteration of theism, his theory expresses the
need to analyze the secularized political world that is no longer imbued with traditional
8  F. VEGA

values. Thus, while he condemns modern politics for its lack of substance, Schmitt also
makes clear that the “metaphysical development from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century led to entirely new ideas of God and the absolute.” Once traditional metaphysics
and its notion of a transcendent God were eliminated, humanity and history became fertile
grounds for the appearance of a new demiurge. Once the idea of God as an absolute and
objective entity was displaced, the individual subject began treating the world as a mere
occasio for his productivity. “By means of a simple reversal,” Schmitt states, “the subject has
become the creator of the world.”49 The political consequence of this metaphysical turn was
that the emancipated individual had become a new kind of absolute.
Vis-à-vis this new imperium of the subject, Schmitt’s Political Theology offers not only a
diagnosis of the crisis of modern liberalism but also a detailed deployment of the theolog-
ico-political problem. In this book Schmitt develops a new conception of sovereignty that
is attentive to the existential nature of both decision and exception, in contradistinction
to liberalism’s notion of the normalcy of everyday life and of politics as a set of norms.50
Against normativism, Schmitt argues that the legal order rests on the sovereign decision
regarding the exceptional case. It is from this premise that political theology draws its
strength as a measure of political legitimacy that is open to the creative and unstable nature
of decision-making. Schmitt’s conceptualization also applies to political normalcy: “for a
legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely
decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”51 It is thus only the sovereign who
decides what is politically acceptable and what is unacceptable, what is ordinary and what
is extraordinary.
Schmitt’s theologico-political problem hence stands at the conjuncture between “the
normal” and “the exceptional.” His Political Theology is a philosophy of concrete existence
based on the emergence of the exception, where “the power of real life breaks through the
crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition,”52 thus emphasizing the fight
against superficiality and monotony. Schmitt’s notion of the exceptional appears to be a
political substitute for the belief in God as the absolute, proposing a politics informed by
a metaphysics that acknowledges the “miraculous” nature of exception and decision. But
is Schmitt’s depiction of politics an apt expression of political prudence? This is one of the
questions Strauss seems to have had in mind in addressing the theologico-political problem.
Strauss, a former admirer of Schmitt’s theologically inflected political theory, subse-
quently developed one of the most forceful critiques of the primacy of political theology in
understanding political life.53 And yet his view of modernity and of the failure of political
liberalism does not differ radically from Schmitt’s.54 Strauss too sees the rupture with tradi-
tional certainties as the imposition of a world in which political responsibility has become
impossible. However, he considers Schmitt’s political theology, based on sovereign decision,
as part and parcel of this problem. In the conference on “German Nihilism,” Strauss identifies
Schmitt as one of the teachers of the young nihilists who called for the totalitarian destruc-
tion of the world order. In arguing against modern civilization and the establishment of an
open society, the German nihilists, Strauss writes, pondered the ideal of a closed society
“oriented toward the Ernstfall, the serious moment, M-day, war.”55 Inspired by Schmitt, the
young nihilists claimed that “the sublime is unknown to the open society,”56 the recovery of
which would thus require the destruction of the liberal status quo. What German nihilism
in general and Schmitt in particular rejected was a world centered on hedonistic pleasure
and therefore lacking in seriousness and a sense of sacrifice. This rejection of modernity
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  9

also entailed, according to Strauss, a disregard for political prudence. His subtle response
to “Schmittian nihilism” and the need to regain political responsibility is implicit in his
definition of philosophy as the quest for truth which compels us “to distinguish political
philosophy from political theology.” According to Strauss, “Political theology consists of
the political teachings based on divine revelation. Political philosophy is limited to what
is accessible to the unassisted human mind.”57 Strauss’s distinction between reason and
revelation is hence a first step toward a proper understanding of political prudence.58
In tandem with Strauss’s distinction between reason and revelation there emerges a
debate on the crisis of modernity, which in turn constitutes in itself a crisis of modern polit-
ical philosophy. Strauss criticizes the view that modernity is a secularized form of biblical
faith, marked by a shift from other-worldly to this-worldly concerns. To him “secularization
means, then, the preservation of thoughts, feelings, or habits of biblical origin after the loss
or atrophy of biblical faith. … Yet modern man was originally guided by a positive project.
Perhaps this positive project could not have been conceived without the help of surviving
ingredients of biblical faith.”59 One could read this as a rejection of contemporary egotism
and immanentism, which Schmitt also repudiated. And yet it does not mean that Strauss is
hereby declaring the victory of revelation, but rather that revelation motivates his return to
classical philosophy.60 As “a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the
grip of the theologico-political predicament,”61 Strauss was aware, first, that “infinite, absolute
problems cannot be solved,” and, second, that “human beings will never create a society
[that] is free of contradictions.”62 These judgments enliven Strauss’s virulent critique of both
positivism and radical historicism. In particular, he condemns the unexamined impositions
of relativism by considering its political repercussions: the rejection of the absolute and of
fundamental questions lower the aspirations and purposes of human action. Relativism
thus renders it impossible to distinguish what is just from what is unjust in political terms
and, as Arendt also argues, exposes the failure of modern politics. What is remarkable is
that, while Strauss holds that political philosophy has to address this failure, the particular
inflection of his theologico-political predicament—conceived as a precondition of political
philosophy—places his project at odds with Arendt’s. For Strauss, “philosophy teaches the
eternity of the world” and exhibits clear principles on the right way of living life.63 Informed
by politics, political philosophy cultivates prudence and responsibility in the social domain
of life-in-common. Arendt, in contrast, is suspicious of a philosophy that sets out to deter-
mine what is politically beneficial. A personal statement is eloquent in this respect: “I do
not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all,
is political theory.”64 Arendt then grudgingly approaches the theologico-political problem
through the prism of political theory to prove that a mere return to tradition is unworka-
ble.65 And although—unlike Schmitt and Strauss—she does not advance her ideas under
the rubric of political theology,66 her work indirectly addresses the stakes involved in the
theologico-political problem inherent to modern politics.
Arendt’s first indirect response to the theologico-political problem comes through in
her view of the contestable grounding of modern political thought. For her, the modern
rupture with tradition instantiates both the danger of totalitarianism and the opportunity for
freedom.67 Thus her confrontation with the theologico-political problem also addresses the
abyssal kernel of modern politics. As she stated at a conference held in her honor in 1972:
“I am perfectly sure that [the] whole totalitarian catastrophe would not have happened if
people still had believed in God, or in hell rather—that is, if there still were ultimates.” But,
10  F. VEGA

she added, “there were no ultimates.”68 In other words, the absence of fundamental principles
that govern life-in-common can give rise to radical uncertainty and may have dangerous
political consequences.
Arendt’s second indirect response to the theologico-political problem is conveyed by her
statements on the contemporary lack of religious absolutes within public life. Her insistence
on the damaging political consequences of this absence should not, however, be confused
with Schmitt’s position. Whereas Schmitt associates political theology with the question of
sovereignty, Arendt deplores this latter term as mere “quicksand” rather than a solid founda-
tion for politics. It is in this context that Arendt explicitly refers to Schmitt as the defender
of sovereignty, a concept which, according to her, erodes human freedom.69 But does her
rejection of the concept of sovereignty entail an anti-theologico-political claim? To answer
this question, it is necessary to look at Arendt’s view of tradition, from which the theolog-
ico-political problem emerges. Modern revolutionary politics, she says, tells the tale of the
sudden appearance and disappearance of the treasures of tradition. The price of this lack of
continuity is the absence of a yardstick to determine political legitimacy. These statements
on the rupture of tradition and absence of religious absolutes reveal Arendt’s attitude to the
theologico-political problem. More specifically, her response to this predicament becomes
clear through her analysis of three essential aspects of life-in-common: political foundations,
political action as a form of miracle, and revolutions as new beginnings.
The third indirect response to the theologico-political problem is found in Arendt’s
analysis of political foundations, starting with the Greek and Roman notions of greatness
and immortality.70 Political foundations, she argues, are guarantees against human futil-
ity and finitude. However, this classical ideal of greatness ended in the Christian era: “in
Christianity neither the world nor the ever-recurring cycle of life is immortal, only the
single living individual. It is the world that will pass away; men will live forever.”71 Against
this view, Arendt calls for a secularized inflection of immortality—that is distinct from the
eternal—via political foundations, the authority of which confers permanence and durability
to human life.72 Without this form of earthly immortality, or particular transcendence, “no
politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible.”73 Arendt
thus sees the classical Roman experience of political foundation as a unique, unrepeata-
ble beginning imbued with the extraordinary capability of immortalizing life-in-common
that, though lost to the modern world, is nevertheless crucial for understanding modern
revolutions.
Furthermore, Arendt recognizes the theological permanence within politics by defining
political action as miracle, which may be seen as her fourth implicit response to the theolog-
ico-political problem. While elaborating on human action and political beginnings, Arendt
affirms that humans have the capacity to perform miracles. In what is clearly a non-Schmit-
tian maneuver, she states: “the experience which tells us that events are miracles is neither
arbitrary nor sophisticated; it is, on the contrary, most natural and, indeed, in ordinary life
almost commonplace.”74 The human actor as initium, as a beginning and as a beginner, is
the source of the unforeseeable and unpredictable. But this leads to a paradox—the need
to defend the world against the mortality of its creators.75
Arendt approaches this paradox inherent to political action in order to overcome repeti-
tion and monotony. By doing so, she appears to express a search for the politically extraordi-
nary. Thus “the new” comes in the guise of a miracle, and action implies that human beings
expect the unexpected as a manifestation of their uniqueness: “Action can be judged only by
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  11

the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted
and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no
longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.”76 Nevertheless, this
is not Arendt’s last word on action, since it seeks to make the extraordinary an ordinary
occurrence of everyday life. Her understanding of miraculous action, again, neither echoes
traditional views nor is it equivalent to Schmitt’s position in connection to sovereign deci-
sion.77 For Arendt, miracles are not necessarily supernatural events but rather interruptions
by human beings who “prove themselves to be of a ‘divine’ nature.”78
Finally, Arendt indirectly approaches the theologico-political problem in her study of
revolutions as new beginnings, which also sheds light on the implications of the absence of
fundamental principles to justify modern politics. In a key passage in On Revolution, she
asserts that the “‘recourse to God’… was necessary only in the case of ‘extraordinary laws,’
namely of laws by which a new community is founded.” “[W]­e shall see,” she continues,
that “the task of revolution, to find a new absolute to replace the absolute of divine power,
is insoluble because power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to
omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute.”79
Arendt’s view of the political world is full of perplexities, for even modern revolutions
cannot avoid the problem of the absolute, which is why the issue of authority has to remain
inextricably tied to some sort of religious sanction. Hence, the absolute appears as both
impossible and ineluctable in modern politics. Could it be that the nature of this problem
entails a theoretical deadlock? If so, Arendt seeks to navigate these complications by arguing
that the revolutionary foundational moment is based on political principles and mutual
promises: “The very fact that the men of the American Revolution thought of themselves
as ‘founders’,” she writes, “indicates the extent to which they must have known that it would
be the act of foundation itself, rather than an Immortal Legislator or self-evident truth or
any other transcendent, transmundane source, which eventually would became the fountain
of authority in the new body politic.”80
Obstacles and impasses emerge once again. Whereas the American revolutionary expe-
rience seemed to be truly virtuous at first, it necessarily succumbed to the problem of the
political absolute. Arendt’s initial praise of American exemplarity soon turns into a bitter
dictum: the revolutionary spirit was lost. The capacity of the Americans to initiate a new
beginning did not result in the stability and durability of political institutions. Arendt con-
cludes her incursion into the theologico-political predicament by dwelling on the problems
of political foundation that are intrinsic to modern politics—a politics configured as both
lacking and in need of a grounding of life-in-common. And yet she never explores the locus
of political theology, perhaps because for Arendt this locus remains an illusion.

Beyond the Abyss? Political Promises in Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt

The elusive status of political theology as perceived by Arendt has contemporary reper-
cussions. In his work, Claude Lefort, in fact, offers a compelling analysis of the theologi-
co-political problem by decoding what is at stake in the hidden dialogue between Schmitt,
Strauss, and Arendt. In the conclusion of his essay on political theology, Lefort poses the
question of whether we should see modern democracy as an episode in the displacement
of the religious to the political. He asks:
12  F. VEGA

[S]­hould we not conclude that the old transfers from one register to the other were intended
to ensure the preservation of a form which has since been abolished, that the theological and
the political became divorced, that a new experience of the institution of the social began to
take shape, that the reactivation of the religious occurs at the social’s points of failure [?].81
Lefort identifies a unique problem of democracy: the “unavoidable—and no doubt onto-
logical—difficulty democracy faces to render itself self-legible, as well as… the difficulty of
political or philosophical thought to assume, without making it a travesty, the tragic of the
modern condition.”82 His observations condense several points in the debate on the theolog-
ico-political problem. First, Lefort makes clear that there is an essential gap within modern
politics: democracy cannot be understood as a mere reverberation of the theological in the
political. Second, his position manifests a theoretical quandary: although the theological
and the political are distinguishable from each other, as the social domain gradually assumes
a new shape, the religious element persists in it by preserving a form that is devoid of its
earlier transcendent meaning. It is this remaining form that intertwines the domains of the
ordinary and the extraordinary in modern politics. It does so by enacting the encounter
of the old and the new, persistence and interruption, preservation and founding, and thus
conveys the absence of an indisputable self-legibility in democracy. The inherent paradox
of democratic life—the “difficulty democracy faces to render itself self-legible”—seems to
be unresolvable. This difficulty, as I have shown, was detected earlier by Schmitt, Strauss,
and Arendt in their diverse ways of dealing with the theologico-political problem and with
what Lefort calls the “tragic of the modern condition,” its abyssal, or essentially contestable,
principles.
This brings me back to Schmitt’s rejection of what he defines as anti-political nor-
mativism. From his writings on political theology to his reflections on political space,
Schmitt focuses on the persistence of the political once transcendence has been super-
seded.83 Challenging the ubiquity of the immanent closure and the presumption that, at
least potentially, everything is under the control of human reason, Schmitt’s discloses his
virulent antagonism to liberalism.84 A politics informed by the theologico-political problem
then calls into question the identification of democracy with liberal parliamentarism. As we
have seen, Schmitt criticizes liberal discourse and advocates a non-liberal democracy that
recognizes sovereignty as that entity that has the authority to decide on the exceptional.85
Since, for him, liberalism imposes a reverence for negotiation and rational discussion in
politics, Schmitt develops his rejection of the liberal world view by establishing a criterion
on the political that has a concrete and existential aspect, one that cannot be normativized
or moralized through a set of norms.
Schmitt’s theologico-political refusal of normativity presupposes an entrenchment of
the extraordinary. Against ordinariness and repetition, he famously proclaims that “the
exception is more interesting than the normal case. The normal proves nothing; the excep-
tion proves everything: It not only confirms the rule; the rule actually exists only due to
the exception.”86 This praise of the extraordinary impacts the constitution of life-in-com-
mon: “Political antagonism is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete
dichotomy becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme
point of the friend-enemy grouping.”87 Even terms such as combat or war do not “have to
be ordinary, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But [they] must nevertheless remain a
real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.”88 Schmitt’s hyperbolic
rhetoric suggests that freed from the exceptional the world would become depoliticized.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  13

His appraisal of the excessive and the extreme situation, furthermore, could be seen as
an attempt to “re-enchant” politics. In contempt of a de-transcendentalized world, the
Schmittian concept of exception thus re-inscribes the unexpected in politics.
Schmitt’s fervent attack on normativism and a de-transcendentalized world animates his
defense of political constitutions. Constitutions originate from a decision, which precedes
any norm. Whereas political liberalism conceives constitutions in tandem with the “sov-
ereignty of law,” individual rights, and the division of powers, Schmitt sees constitutions
as the expression of a concrete sovereignty based on the political unity of the people. This
conception involves a particular elaboration of the theologico-political problem. Here again,
when it comes to a decision in times of an existential conflict, Schmitt argues that “under
democratic logic, only the will of the people must come into consideration, because God
cannot appear in the political realm other than as the god of a particular people.”89 What
worries Schmitt in this, however, is that the people come to occupy the place of God. For
him the theologico-political problem is clearly more than the transposition of theological
concepts to the theory of the state. What Schmitt thus sets out to explore is the nature and
the limits of a people defined as the demiurge of the world. It is striking that what Strauss,
his young admirer, identified in Schmitt’s work was precisely the egotistic and immanent
closure that the jurist deplored.
Strauss in fact positions himself beyond the contours of political theology by showing
the limits of Schmitt’s theory. His review of The Concept of the Political, as suggested earlier,
shows his attitude to a political thought that celebrates the exceptional. First, Strauss sees
Schmitt’s thesis as part of his polemic against liberalism, a world view that is characterized
by the negation of the political. Schmitt, Strauss argues, seeks to position the political by
emphasizing the role of enmity, which amounts to affirming the political: “if the political
is ultimately threatened, the position of the political must ultimately be more than the
recognition of the reality of the political, namely, an advocacy of the threatened political,
an affirmation of the political. It is therefore necessary to ask: why does Schmitt affirm the
political?”90 Strauss’s answer to this is emphatic: Schmitt “affirms the political because he
sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life. The
affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral.”
Since this affirmation reinvigorates liberalism and moralism, Strauss calls for a more radical
critique: “The critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed
only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.”91
What then is Strauss’s alternative vision beyond both Schmitt’s critique of liberalism and
the influence of the theologico-political in contemporary thought? According to Strauss,
modernity stages a radical transformation that is related to its lack of prudence. As noted
earlier, by disregarding the importance of political prudence, modern philosophy under-
mines one of the most important requirements for the stability of the political order: the
belief in the indisputable superiority of the principles and values upon which the city is
built. Modern philosophy, additionally, lowers the standards of social action to the level of
mere self-preservation.92 This failure exposes the absence of a criterion to distinguish good
from evil. Strauss concludes that the impossibility of defining the transcendental grounds
of politics places life-in-common at risk, and, in turn, he condemns a relativist historicism
that lacks a “clear view of the highest political possibility with regard to which all actual
political orders can be judged in a responsible manner.”93 Strauss’s aim is to provide these
missing criteria for a philosophico-political understanding of regimes and ways of life. This
14  F. VEGA

endeavor requires the rebirth of political philosophy as “that part of philosophy in which
the whole of philosophy is in question.”94
The point at issue is which political regime can bring about the rebirth of philosophy
from the ruins of relativism. Although there is no definitive answer to this interrogation,
Strauss insists that “the critique of modern rationalism or of the modern belief in reason…
cannot be dismissed or forgotten. This is the deepest reason for the crisis of liberal democ-
racy.”95 While Strauss is mainly concerned with philosophy, other thinkers reject “the view
that the contemplative life is categorically superior to the life of political involvement, and
that the latter has to be judged ultimately by the standards of the former.” Among them,
as Ronald Beiner notes, is Arendt, who firmly believes that “what shapes our world is
not intangible ideas, but tangible ‘events’.”96 Arendt, to be sure, is deeply concerned with
the crisis of contemporary democracy. Like Strauss, she draws attention to the problems
inherent to political liberalism, but she strongly disagrees with Strauss’s epistemological
approach. Arendt’s theoretical position—which is intertwined with her indirect response to
the theologico-political problem—centers on the loss of absolutes in the very age that sees
the rise of totalitarianism and thus demands the recovery of political founding moments
through free action.97
Arendt tends to identify both political foundation and free action with the miraculous
human capacity to perform “new beginnings.” “Since action is the political activity par excel-
lence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished
from metaphysical, thought.”98 Imbued with the vitality of natality, at times Arendt associ-
ates politics with the uniqueness of the extraordinary.99 In fact, she develops her theory of
human experience as the phenomenology of labor, work, and action not only to explain how
monotonous repetition is overcome in everyday life, but, inspired by Heidegger, to scrutinize
the notion of process.100 Hence, rather than being instantiations of mere repetition, speech
and action express the unusual energy of political beginnings: “With the creation of man,”
Arendt claims, “the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is
only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created,
but not before.”101 According to Arendt, though, political action also implies plurality and
the search for the “good life.”102 For that reason, Arendtian action is defined, paradoxically,
as both powerful and fragile. It is in the way Arendt deals with this ambivalent character of
action—evident, particularly, in ancient Greece—that she reveals her attempt to question
the pervasiveness of the theologico-political problem and its exceptionalism: “The original,
prephilosophic Greek remedy for [the frailty of action’s meaning] ha[s] been the foundation
of the polis.”103 Arendt’s rendition of political experience within the Greek polis—a “site”
where humans could attain “immortal fame”—illustrates her position on how the ordinary
and the extraordinary might converge in life-in-common: “One, if not the chief, reason for
the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less sur-
prising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost
aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.”104
Importantly, in elaborating on the ambivalence of political action and “new beginnings,”
Arendt in fact resituates and reformulates the contours of the theologico-political problem:
how might we remember the miraculous character of the political foundation without
exhausting its potentiality by imposing a mere quotidian repetition? By approaching this
question, Arendt seeks to avoid instrumental solutions: ordinary means cannot result in
extraordinary ends, nor can extraordinary ends be the means to overcome ordinariness.105
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  15

Political action, in fact, cannot be conceived as an instrument, and yet its miraculous poten-
tial enables us to combat the inexorable ordinariness of daily life: “The miracle that saves the
world… from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty
of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new
beginning.”106 The significance of Arendt’s notion of miracle is that it surpasses its religious
meanings and thus elusively evokes the theologico-political predicament, while showing, at
the same time, her attentiveness to the extraordinary as the raison d’être of political begin-
nings. In other words, even if the theologico-political problem has to be superseded, the
act of founding seems to be invested with a “sacred” dignity, which is apparent in Arendt’s
approach to revolutionary politics.
In effect, Arendt sees revolutions as the only events that confront us with the question of
beginnings and the legitimacy of political founding. For Arendt, modern revolutions might
be based on a notion of power related to action-in-concert and plurality. Nonetheless, she
also analyzes the causes of revolutionary failures: where the liberation from necessity and
bodily needs, where the search for prosperity and comfort, displaces the foundation of
freedom, the plural understanding of power is, concomitantly, eclipsed. In sum, the failure
of modern revolutions manifests the oblivion of the foundational act of political institution.
In scrutinizing this oblivion, the risk is that Arendt’s phenomenology of political action
and freedom may re-actualize a means-ends relationship related to the entrenchment of the
extraordinary beginning and entrapped in the theologico-political problem. What would
the role of revolutions be if not a means to remember extraordinary acts of political foun-
dation? One of the main tasks of contemporary political thought, I argue, is to examine
these revolutionary events not as the expressions of extraordinary moments that we need
to remember, but as common occurrences and democratized afterlives of the foundation,
beyond its theologico-political embodiment.

What Remains after the Theologico-Political Problem? Politics beyond the

Fascination with the Extraordinary
The works of Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt testify to the widespread preoccupation with
the theologico-political problem throughout the twentieth century.107 Their elaborations
on the subject offered them an opportunity to discuss the political implications of the
contestable, or abyssal, status of contemporary politics. This brings me to the question
of the influence of their work on current reflections on political beginnings that seek to
supersede the reverberations of the theologico-political problem and therefore attempt to
unravel the assumption according to which political institution is necessarily invested with
an extraordinary dignity. Two motifs characterize the fascination with the exceptionality
of political beginnings.108 The first is the belief that beginnings are exclusively foundational
moments, and the second is the conviction that they are only enacted by extraordinary
founders. But grounding political beginnings merely in their extraordinariness may conceal
the paradoxical status of politics.109 On the contrary, a post-exceptionalist characterization
of political beginnings is not unrelated to what Lefort defines as the “tragic of the modern
condition”—the tragic, I would add, inherent in a politics based precisely on the absence
of a foundational moment or an exceptional founder. My account of the tragic aspect of
modernity, as emphasized by Lefort, requires a clarification: the tragic, in this respect,
does not solely amount to the conflict of ultimates in founding life-in-common. Rather, it
16  F. VEGA

mainly refers to “a way of asking about ends, destiny, and history,” or more precisely, to “a
long meditation on the aporias of a world convulsed by history.”110 Lefort’s approach to this
question includes a careful consideration of the kind of discussions developed by Schmitt,
Strauss, and Arendt.111 On the one hand, in order to account for the abyssal core of modern
politics, Lefort notes that our era has displaced the phenomenon of death from the realm
of theologico-political “immortality” to the banality of the quotidian and, hence, theologi-
co-political “immortality” appears to die too.112 On the other hand, he directly engages with
the theologico-political problem in discussing the religious influences on politics, such as
when Lefort analyzes the relationship between transcendental sovereignty and worldly life,
or the conception of the human being as fallen or as an incarnation of the divine. In “The
Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” Lefort claims that modern political philosophy
“discovers in religion… a mode of portraying or dramatizing the relations that human beings
establish with something that goes beyond empirical time and… space.” And yet, he adds,
“the change in religion does not simply present the signs of a human invention of the divine
to be read, but instead those of a deciphering of the divine, or, beneath the appearance of
the divine, of the excess of being over appearance.” This excess underlies Lefort’s warning
against the dangers intrinsic to the pure self-immanence of totalitarianism. More impor-
tantly, perhaps, the influence of Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt on Lefort comes to the fore
in his conceptualization of democracy as a regime where the place of power is empty. In
this conception society has neither a positive determination nor can it be represented by an
instantiation of community, since it is constituted by its own internal divisions. This leads
to a disjunction between the spheres of power, law, and knowledge, whereas in traditional
political theology the unity of such spheres is the ground of political certainties.113
The decomposition of these certainties is primarily illustrated in Lefort’s reading of
The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz’s magnum opus, which is also echoed in current
reflections on political beginnings. The royal body as juridical fiction configured the king
as two persons in one: the natural, vulnerable, mortal being, subject to time and common
laws, and the supernatural, immortal, infallible, omnipotent being, freed from temporal
and legal constraints. Our incursion into the theologico-political labyrinth through the
notion of the king’s two bodies indicates that the political mechanisms of incarnation broke
down after the nineteenth century, and the fragmentation of power was accompanied by
the disincorporation of thought and of the social.114 Lefort’s examination of the doctrine
of the king’s two bodies can also be seen as an implicit argument against Schmitt’s politi-
cal theology. The mystic fiction of the king emphasizes that the political body is superior
to the natural body, thus reducing the imperfections of human nature. The royal body as
juridical fiction, in turn, is based on a notion of time that exceeds the natural span of life. In
sum, the liturgical significance of the king as gemina persona, human by nature and divine
by grace, was that he constituted both a representation and an imitation of Christ. Put
differently, the king was the hypostasis of the idea of the immortal. Then, the paradoxical
status of the king—both under and above the law, subject to but unaffected by time, mor-
tal and immortal—should be understood, according to Kantorowicz, in terms of political
theology: “the KING’S TWO BODIES is an offshoot of Christian theological thought and
consequently stands as a landmark of Christian political theology.”115 Now the importance
of Lefort and Kantorowicz in the present context is that they have inspired a novel approach
to analyzing political beginnings that centers on the notion of the “people’s two bodies,”116
so as to overcome the horizon of political theology and traditional legitimacy. Beyond
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  17

classic representations of the body politic, the presence of the people’s two bodies implies
“the migration of the royal flesh… that supplants the merely mortal body of the king into
the bodies and lives of the citizens of modern nation-states.”117 Addressing the constitutive
role that those “subjected” to authority play in political life necessitates an examination of
how the ordinary and the extraordinary are intertwined in the dispersion and democrati-
zation of the exceptional event of foundation. Viewed as such, political beginnings are not
simply the outcome of a political founder’s ontological act, but also involve an imaginative
configuration of the potentialities of the common and the ordinary that cannot be captured
and incorporated by a single and exceptional figure.
Lefort is concerned with the precise blind spots in accounts of political beginnings based
on the fascination with the extraordinary, which is why he insists that the amalgam of the
theological and the political implies an excess. Religion provided society with a “figurative
mode” of dramatizing the relationship between humans and that which transcends empirical
time. This theologico-political matrix persisted until the nineteenth century and became
the basis of the imperial impulse of the nation-states and their univocal conception of “the
good.” Contrary to this account, Lefort sees the good as the object of an interminable quest
in modern democracy. While democracy in the modern world is a political structure that
grants ordinary human beings the prerogative to exercise power, it does not thereby deny
the mystery surrounding the good but sees the good as the subject of a perpetual contesta-
tion. The recognition of this ineradicable dispute on the meaning of the good as intrinsic
to democratic life-in-common leads to questioning the exceptionalist premises of political
theology. What remains to be clarified is thus whether we should accept the theologico-po-
litical predicament as inevitable.
In attempting to answer this question I have focused on Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt’s
hidden dialogue and in particular on Arendt’s approach to the impasse posed by the theolog-
ico-political problem. Her reflections on the paradoxical nature of politics and her account
of political action as contingent and plural are, I suggest, a way to address the problematic
implications of the theologico-political predicament.118 Several critics have emphasized that,
for Arendt, “the problem of politics in modernity is, how do we establish lasting foundations
without appealing to gods, a foundationalist ground, or an absolute?”119 In more positive
terms, Arendt’s non-foundational politics remains open to the abyssal character of political
freedom and makes manifest the current stalemates of political theology. Scrutinizing these
theoretical deadlocks, Bonnie Honig finds that Arendt “sees less of an opposition between
ordinary life and extraordinary politics.”120 Even Arendt’s view of the conditions “under
which people are open to the miraculous, to receive, perceive, and perform it”121—which
she associates with the disruptive political action of ordinary people—goes beyond the
specter of the theologico-political problem. A miracle for Arendt is thus a this-worldly
metaphorization of action in concert and a form of promising. As Honig explains, when
Arendt conceptualizes promising “as an extraordinary act, she… shows an awareness of how
ordinary practices might take on a heroic cast when performed in the context of exceptional
circumstances.”122 This merging of the ordinary and the extraordinary in political action
implies that exceptionalist political theology can be superseded.123 And this, perhaps, is the
lesson the theologico-political problem can offer us. By shifting the focus from the theologi-
co-political king’s two bodies to the democratic people’s two bodies, we must accept that the
“contemporary insistence on the theme of the ‘theologico-political’ dissolves the question
of politics into that of… an originary sacrifice. But the dividing of the arkhe that founds
18  F. VEGA

politics, and thus democracy, is not a founding sacrifice. It is the neutralization of every
sacrificial body.”124 Put differently, only if we admit that the exceptionalist repercussions of
the theologico-political problem can be displaced, can we finally do justice to the “tragic
character of the modern condition” and to the paradoxical status of democratic politics. The
tragic form of democracy, then, remains an enigma that requires to be addressed:
Democracy is the institution of politics as such, of politics as a paradox. Why a paradox?
Because the institution of politics seems to provide an answer to the key question as to what
it is that grounds the power of rule in a community. And democracy provides an answer, but
it is an astonishing one: namely, that the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is
no ground at all.125
By superseding the specters of the theologico-political problem and its inherent exception-
alism, modern politics, I argue, cannot depend on, or re-establish, the certainties embedded
in the transcendental grounding of life-in-common. In other words, modern politics must
endure in the paradoxes of its origins, and, more precisely, in their common occurrences
and afterlives.

Notes
1.  Santner, The Royal Remains, 46. See also Kahn, “Political Theology and Liberal Culture,” 23.
2.  See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 91–103; and Kingdom and the Glory; De Vries and Sullivan, eds.,
Political Theologies; Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor; Meier, Was ist politische
Theologie?; Scattola, Teologia politica; Scott and Cavanaugh, eds., Companion to Political
Theology; Manemann and Wacker, eds., Politische Theologie; Cheng, Radical Love; Crockett,
Radical Political Theology; Kahn, Political Theology; Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political
Theology; Santner, The Royal Remains; and Weight of All Flesh; Hammill, Mosaic Constitution,
2012; Hammill and Lupton, eds., Theology and Early Modernity; Papanikolaou, The Mystical
as Political; Kessler, ed., Political Theology for a Plural Age; Kahn, Future of Illusion; Rust,
The Body in Mystery; Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology; Raschke, Force of
God; Gourgouris, “Political Theology as Monarchical Thought,” 145–59; and Kajewski and
Manemann, eds., Politische Theologie.
3.  Strong asks: “What then is the problem of political theology? Put simply it is that in the
contemporary world the transcendental criteria for justifying the social order are rejected
by more and more people.” Strong, “Exile and the Demos,” 718. On the abyssal character of
modernity, see Arendt, “The Abyss of Freedom,” 195–217. See also Panis, “La Question,”
59–78 ; Keenan, “Promises, Promises,” 76–101; and Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss, 125–64.
4.  On this concept, see Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss.
5.  Santner, The Royal Remains.
6.  Weber, The Vocation Lectures, 12–13, original emphasis; translation modified.
7.  Weber, The Vocation Lectures, 90.
8.  On Schmitt and political theology, see Schmitt, Political Theology; and Politische Theologie
II. See also Hirt, “Monotheismus als politisches Problem?” 319–24; Maier, “Politische
Theologie?” 73–91; Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 3–20; Koslowski, “Politischer Monotheismus oder
Trinitätslehre?” 26–44, Nicoletti, Trascendenza e Potere; Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts; Galli,
Genealogia della politica, 331–459; McCormick, “Political Theory and Political Theology,”
830–54; Balakrishnan, The Enemy, 53–65; Hollerisch, “Carl Schmitt,” 107–22; Duso,“Teologia
politica,” 189–218; and Arato, “Political Theology and Populism,” 143–72. For a critique of
Schmitt’s juxtaposition of theologico-political analogies and secularization, see Blumenberg,
Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. See also Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation.
9.  Schmitt, Der Leviathan.
10. For a contemporary critique of this formulation, see Gourgouris, “Political Theology as
Monarchical Thought,” 146.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  19

11. Schmitt, “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” 80–96.

12. Ibid., 90, translation modified.
13. Schmitt, Political Theology, 59. See also Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 69–70.
14. Schmitt, “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” 93. Weber also plays the role of
interlocutor in Schmitt, Political Theology, 27–28, 42, 65. See Engelbrekt, “What Carl Schmitt
Picked Up,” 667–84.
15. McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 627.
16. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form; and Political Theology. See Smith, “Leo
Strauss’s Discovery,” 388–408. See also Dotti, “Jahvé, Sion, Schmitt,” 147–238. Interestingly,
Keedus states in Crisis of German Historicism that Strauss wrote his dissertation on a Christian
religious thinker, Friedrich Jacobi, yet his “interest in Christianity was above all driven by its
relation to the contemporary predicament of the Jewish community” (13). See Strauss, “Das
Erkentnisproblem,” 237–98. According to Batnitzky, in “Leo Strauss and the ‘Theologico-
Political Predicament’,” “Strauss strongly criticizes what he regards as a particularly Christian
view of revelation not to banish revelation from intellectual conversation once and for all but
to suggest that modernity’s intellectual ills stem in large part from the legacy of Christian
theology” (54–55).
17. Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss. See also Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously,” 175–94.
18. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes.
19. Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft,” 453; original emphasis.
20. Rather, what is a stake in Weber’s positions requires political scrutiny. In his letter to
Jacob Klein, of June 23, 1934, Strauss wrote: “National Socialism is just the last word of
‘secularization’.” Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 516.
21. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 35–80.
22. Tanguay notes that Strauss introduces the conflict between revealed religion and philosophy
under the rubric of “Jerusalem and Athens” in his letter to Löwith of August 15, 1946
(Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 660–64). Between 1946 and 1948, he
planned to publish an essay under this title, as “an elementary discussion of the most important
points of agreement and divergence between Judaism and classical Greek philosophy.”
Strauss, “Plan of a Book,” 468. In Leo Strauss, Tanguay claims that “Strauss did not consider
the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens in order to propose a solution to overcome
it. On the contrary, he stressed the opposition and rejected all attempts at conciliation or
harmonization of the two spiritual powers” (145).
23. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 239.
24. Ibid., 245, 252, 270.
25. Strauss, “Preface,” 28–29. In “Leo Strauss and the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament’,” Batnitzky
claims that “revelation for Strauss does have a particular content and form. Its content is not
blind belief in the grace of God but the prophetic call to care not just for one’s neighbor but
also for the stranger, and its form is law.” She adds: “Strauss’s conception of revelation must
be understood in Jewish as opposed to Protestant terms, which means that religion should
be understood as public practice rather than private faith” (59, 61).
26. Still, the presumption that “what Leo Strauss termed ‘the theological-political predicament’…
left virtually no imprint upon Arendt’s thinking” seems to be inexact. See Gordon, “Concept of
the Apolitical,” 857. See also Gordon, “Hannah Arendt’s Political Theology,” 325–39; Chacón,
“Hannah Arendt in Weimar,” 73–107; Chacón, “Arendt’s Denktagebuch,” 581. In “Natality and
Biopolitics in Arendt,” Vatter argues that Arendt’s thought can be understood as a negative
political theology (137–59). See also Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” 71–96; and
Camp, “Hannah Arendt and Political Theology,” 19–35.
27. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 69. Arendt develops a similar theorization in The Human
Condition, 253.
28. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 70, 74–75.
29. Ibid., 133.
30. Arendt, The Human Condition, 253–54, 251–55.
31. Ibid., 277–78. See also Heins, “Reasons of the Heart,” 715–28.
20  F. VEGA

32. Arendt, On Revolution, 160, emphasis added, 161.

33. See, in particular, Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts; Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss; Carl
Schmitt, Leo Strauss; and Das theologisch-politische Problem. For a critique of Meier’s accounts
of Schmitt and Strauss, see McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 619–52; “Post-
Enlightenment Sources,” 175–80; “Educable or Sinful Evil?” 179–98; and “Authority beyond
the Bounds,” 171–83. See also Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship,” 56–90; and Vatter,
“Strauss and Schmitt,” 161–214.
34. On the relationship between Arendt and Schmitt, see Jay, “Political Existentialism of Hannah
Arendt,” 237–56; Kateb, “Death and Politics,” 612–13; D’Entrèves, Political Philosophy of
Hannah Arendt, 86–87; Arato, “Forms of Constitution Making,” 191–231; Villa, Arendt and
Heidegger, 115–17; Scheuerman, “Revolutions and Constitutions,” 252–80; Kalyvas, “From
the Act to the Decision,” 320–46; Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 194–253;
Emden, “Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt,” 110–34; Sluga, “The Pluralism of the Political,” 91–
109; Honig, Emergency Politics, 89–93; and Jurkevics, “Hannah Arendt,” 1–22.
35. See Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss,” 238. See also Kielmansegg, Mewes, and Glaser-
Schmidt, eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, 911–33; Villa, “Hannah Arendt and Leo
Strauss,” 246–98; Havers, “Between Athens and Jerusalem,” 19–29; Young-Bruehl, Hannah
Arendt, 98; Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical,” 856–57; Owens, “Beyond Strauss,” 265–
83; Chacón, “Reading Strauss from the Start,” 288, 298; Zuckert and Zuckert, “Strauss and
His Contemporaries,” 254–88; and Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism.
36. In a footnote to “Truth and Politics,” however, Arendt invokes Strauss’s “noble lies” in a
derogatory way: “I hope no one will tell me any more that Plato was the inventor of the ‘noble
lie.’ This belief rested on a misreading of a crucial passage (414C) in The Republic, where Plato
speaks of one his myths—a ‘Phoenician tale’—as a ψεῦδος. Since the same Greek word signifies
‘fiction,’ ‘error,’ and ‘lie’ according to context—when Plato wants to distinguish between error
and lie, the Greek language forces him to speak of ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ ψεῦδος—the
text can be rendered with Cornford as ‘bold flight of invention’ or be read with Eric Voegelin…
as satirical in intention; under no circumstances can it be understood as a recommendation
of lying as we understand it. Plato, of course, was permissive about occasional lies to deceive
the enemy or insane people. … But, contrary to the cave allegory, no principle is involved in
these passages.” See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 291.
37. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, 244, emphasis added. Interestingly enough,
Strauss evaded responding to Karl Löwith’s question whether Arendt was “worth reading”:
“I have not seen H. Arendt’s articles of Political Philosophy.” Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften,
Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 689.
38. Strauss, “Preface,” 1; and “Preface to Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft,” 453.
39. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 51; and “Leo Strauss’s Discovery,” 389. See also Jaffa, “Crisis of the
Strauss Divided,” 593–97; Green, “‘In the Grip of the Theological-Political Predicament’,” 41–
74; and “In the Grip of the Theological-Political Predicament,” in Jew and Philosopher, 5–27;
Batnitzky, “Revelation and Commandment,” 181–203; and “Leo Strauss,” 43; and Janssens,
Between Athens and Jerusalem, 7–30.
40. Strauss’s letter to Karl Löwith of August 15, 1946, is revelatory. In Das theologisch-politische
Problem, Meier reads this letter, particularly its reference to a “shipwreck,” as Strauss’s
confrontation with faith in revelation (49). Strauss refers to the querelle des anciens et des
modernes and suggests: “I do not deny, but claim, that modern philosophy has many essential
things in common with Christian medieval philosophy; but that means that the attack of the
moderns is directed resolutely against ancient philosophy.” The letter emphasizes what Strauss
will later analyze under the rubric of the theologico-political predicament. The continuities
between modern and Christian medieval philosophy show that “modern philosophy emerged
by way of transformation of… Latin or Christian scholasticism” and is an invitation to recover
ancient philosophy. Strauss, “Preface to Isaac Husik,” 252. Although Strauss sees Christianity
as the counterpart of the ancients, he defines ancient philosophy as the proper and genuine
philosophy. In sum, he writes that we should “attempt to learn from the ancients.” Strauss,
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  21

Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 662, original emphasis. See also Pangle
and Tarcov, “Epilogue,” 911.
41. On the “diagnostic” and “reconstructive” senses of the theologico-political predicament, see
Batnitzky, “Leo Strauss,” 41–62. On the predicament as either a naïve or a critical attitude to
a set of fixed assumptions, see Zank, “Beyond the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament’.” See
also Jaffa, “Leo Strauss Remembered,” 41.
42. Meier, Das theologisch-politische Problem; Pangle, Leo Strauss, 27; Smith, Reading Leo Strauss,
75–76; “Leo Strauss’s Discovery,” 389; and Tanguay, Leo Strauss. See also Gordon, “The
Concept of the Apolitical,” 856–59.
43. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” fol. 4 recto/4 verso, in Leo Strauss Papers, Box 11, Folder
13. See also Strauss, Natural Right and History, 74–75; and Meier, Das theologisch-politische
Problem, 17.
44. See Scattola, Teologia politica. In “On Political Theology,” Espejo detects five different meanings
of the term (477–78). See also Lezra, “The Instance of the Sovereign,” 183–211; and Thiem,
“Political Theology.” DOI: 10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0794.
45. In Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, Schmitt states: “The term ‘political theology’ really is one that I
coined” (25). Spinoza, to be sure, refers to this notion, albeit as an adjective, in his Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (1670). The term is also introduced in other treatises such as Morhof,
Theologiae gentium politicae (1662), and Van Heenvliedt, Theologico-Politica Dissertatio (1662).
46. See Koselleck, Kritik und Krise; and Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde.
47. See Mehring, Carl Schmitt, 101–11.
48. Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 17.
49. Ibid., 58, 97.
50. For a critical exploration of the relationship between political theology and decisionism, see
Espejo, “Does Political Theology Entail Decisionism?” 725–43.
51. Schmitt, Political Theology, 13, emphasis added.
52. Ibid., 15, emphasis added.
53. See Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss; and Das theologisch-politische Problem.
54. In a letter of May 19, 1933, Strauss responded to the Nazis’ triumph by saying he would
rather live in a ghetto than bow to “the cross of liberalism” [Kreuz des Liberalismus]. Strauss,
Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 625.
55. Strauss, “German Nihilism, Leo Strauss,” 358. See also Altman, “Leo Strauss on ‘German
Nihilism’,” 587–612.
56. Strauss “German Nihilism, Leo Strauss,” 358.
57. Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?” 13.
58. Batnitzky asserts: “The theologico-political problem that Strauss wishes to reinstate is not a
return to medievalism of any kind but a return to the wisdom of doubt, or put another way,
a return to a philosophy, theology, and especially a politics of moderation.” Batnitzky, “Leo
Strauss,” 60.
59. Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” 83.
60. See Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics I,” 58–84; and “Philosophy and Politics II,” 281–
328; Lampert, “The Argument of Leo Strauss,” 39–46; Tarcov, “Philosophy & History,” 5–29;
“On a Certain Critique of ‘Straussianism’,” 3–18; and “Leo Strauss’s ‘On Classical Political
Philosophy’,” 72–76.
61. Strauss, “Preface,” 1, emphasis added. On the equivalent status of reason and revelation, see
ibid., 28–29. See also Sorenson, “Strauss and the Defense of Western Civilization,” 193–221.
62. Strauss, “Preface,” 6.
63. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 252.
64. Arendt, “‘What Remains?” 1. See also Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 28–29.
65. In “Karl Marx,” Arendt argues that totalitarianism in fact prevents a return to tradition:
the thread of our tradition, in the sense of a continuous history, broke only with
the emergence of totalitarian institutions and policies that no longer could be
comprehended through the categories of traditional thought. … I propose to accept
the rise of totalitarianism as a demonstrably new form of government, as an event that,
22  F. VEGA

at least politically, palpably concerns the lives of all of us, not only the thoughts of a
relatively few individuals or the destinies of certain specific national or social groups.
Only this event, with its concomitant change of all political conditions and relationships
that previously existed on the earth, rendered irreparable and unhealable the various
“breaks” that have been seen retrospectively in its wake. Totalitarianism as an event has
made the break in our tradition an accomplished fact, and as an event it could never
have been foreseen or forethought, much less predicted or “caused,” by any single man.
So far are we from being able to deduce what actually happened from past spiritual or
material ‘causes’ that all such factors appear to be causes only in the light cast by the
event, illuminating both itself and its past. (280–81).
See also Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 10.
66. Arendt, nonetheless, is not intellectually indifferent to theology. She enrolled at the Philipps-
Universität Marburg as a theology student and wrote her dissertation on the Christian political
thinker Augustine of Hippo. Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. In her interview with
Günter Gaus, Arendt regards philosophy and theology as “belong[ing] together.” “‘What
Remains?” 9.
67. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 94, 140, 201; and Arendt, “Karl Marx,” 273–319.
68. Arendt, in Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt, 313–14.
69. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163–64.
70. Ibid., 48, 71.
71. Ibid., 52. See also Arendt, The Human Condition, 314.
72. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 71–72; and The Human Condition, 20.
73. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55.
74. Ibid., 170, emphasis added.
75. See Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 35–69. See also Kattago, “Why the
World Matters,” 170–184.
76. Arendt, The Human Condition, 205, emphasis added.
77. See Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 146–47; Honig, Emergency Politics, 89–93; and Kalyvas,
Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 202–10.
78. Arendt, The Human Condition, 19. See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, 168.
79. Arendt, On Revolution, 29, emphasis added.
80. Ibid., 196, emphasis added.
81. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 255, original emphasis; translation
modified.
82. Ibid., 255, emphasis added; translation modified.
83. See, e.g, Marramao, Passaggio a Occidente.
84. See Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics; Mouffe, ed., Challenge of Carl Schmitt; and Kalyvas and
Jan-Werner Müller, eds., “Carl Schmitt Legacy and Prospects,” 1469–895.
85. Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 43; and Constitutional Theory, 342.
86. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15, emphasis added; translation modified.
87. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 29, emphasis added; translation modified.
88. Ibid., 48–49, translation modified.
89. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 267.
90. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” 112, original emphasis; translation modified.
91. Ibid., 117, 122.
92. Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?” 41.
93. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 191.
94. Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss, 30.
95. Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” 98.
96. Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss,” 239, 243.
97. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 155.
98. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. See also Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights,
4–34; and Kottman, “Novus Ordo Saeclorum,” 145.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  23

99. For an attempt to emphasize the role of the ordinary within Arendt’s rendition of politics,
see Honig, Emergency Politics, xviii. In Honig’s earlier account in Political Theory, however,
Arendt is defined as “a theorist devoted above all to the extraordinary” (89).
100. See Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 69; and Arendt, The Human Condition,
43, 98, 141–42.
101. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176–77. See also Arendt, On Revolution, 203.
102. Arendt, The Human Condition, 4, 37.
103. Arendt, The Human Condition, 196.
104. Ibid., 197, emphasis added.
105. Ibid., 229. See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, 139.
106. Arendt, The Human Condition, 247, emphasis added.
107. Of course, this list is not exhaustive. For the authors who would have to be taken into account,
see Scattola, Teologia politica; esp. Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem;
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; Löwith, Meaning
in History; Schmitt, Politische Theologie II; Kelsen, “God and State,” 61–82; Barion, Kirche und
Kirchenrecht; Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit; Baptist Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen
politischen Theologie; Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul; Barth, The Word of God and
Theology; and Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment,” 312–13; and “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” 253–64.
108. These motifs are based on a kind of “exceptionalism” that conceives of unusual political
moments as the primary lens through which to comprehend everyday—but not only
everyday—political life. Political exceptionalism actualizes a specific binary defined by the
opposition between the normal and the exceptional, and the ontological primacy of the latter.
See Schmitt, Political Theology and Concept of the Political. On the radical difference between
“the exceptional” and “the extraordinary,” and between “emergencies” and “foundings,” see
Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 3, 15, 92–97, 116, 119, 129, 135,
161–62. See also Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, 46; and Frank and McNulty, “Taking
Exception to the Exception,” 3–10.
109. On the “political paradox,” see Ricoeur, “Le Paradoxe Politique,” 260–84; Honig, “Declarations
of Independence,” 97–113; Political Theory, 76–125; “Between Decision and Deliberation,”
1–17; and Emergency Politics, xv–xviii, 87–111; Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; Keenan,
“Promises, Promises,” 76–101; Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” 624–58; and Frank,
Constituent Moments, 41–66.
110. See Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, 6; and Loraux, The Mourning Voice, 13. See
also Honig, Antigone, Interrupted.
111. For the influence on him of Strauss, Arendt, and less explicitly, Schmitt, see Lefort, Travail
de l'œuvre Machiavel; “Une interprétation politique de l’antisémitisme. Hannah Arendt.
I,” 654–60; “Une interprétation politique de l’antisémitisme. Hannah Arendt. II,” 21–28;
Democracy and Political Theory; The Political Forms of Modern Society; Écrits. À l’épreuve
du politique; “Loi de mouvement et idéologie,” 193–210; and “Thinking with and Against
Hannah Arendt,” 447–59. See also Labelle, “Can the Problem?” 63–81; Schaap, “The Proto-
politics of Reconciliation,” 615–30; Goldman, “Beyond the Markers of Certainty,” 27–34;
Weymans, “Defending Democracy’s Symbolic Dimension,” 6380; and Hilb, “Claude Lefort
as Reader of Leo Strauss,” 71–86.
112. Lefort, “The Death of Immortality?” 261–63.
113. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 223, translation modified, 225, 227–28.
114. Ibid., 255.
115. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 506.
116. See Wolin, “The People’s Two Bodies,” 9–16; and Santner, The Royal Remains.
117. Santner, The Royal Remains, 10, original emphasis.
118. Honig, Political Theory, 76–125; and “Between Decision and Deliberation,” 9, 14. See also
Lefort, “Hannah Arendt,” 45; and “Loi de mouvement et idéologie,” 208; Keenan, Democracy
in Question, 99; Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics, 230; Frank, Constituent Moments, 51;
and Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 5.
24  F. VEGA

119. Honig, “Declarations of Independence,” 98.

120. Honig, Emergency Politics, 136. See also Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the
Extraordinary, 194–253.
121. Honig, Emergency Politics, 92.
122. Ibid., 93, emphasis added.
123. See Espejo, “On Political Theology,” 475–94.
124. Rancière, Dissensus, 34, translation modified.
125. Ibid., 50.

Acknowledgment
This essay owes a great deal to conversations with Étienne Balibar, Peg Birmingham, Bruno Bosteels,
Wendy Brown, Jorge Dotti, Grant Farred, Jason Frank, Carlos Forment, Werner Hamacher, Wolfgang
Heuer, Claudia Hilb, Andreas Kalyvas, Fabián Ludueña Romandini, Jean-Luc Nancy, Julio Pinto,
Diego Rossello, Luis Rossi, Eric Santner, and Geoff Waite. I am also deeply indebted to Andrew
Amstutz, Ophélie Chavaroche, Janet Hendrickson, Miriam Minak, Adam Schoene, Bécquer Seguín,
Matías Sirczuk, the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of The European Legacy for their invalua-
ble comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst
(DAAD) and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung for financial support.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

Notes on contributor
Facundo Vega is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, USA, and a visiting scholar at the Institut
für Philosophie at the Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität
Frankfurt am Main. He is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “Extraordinary Matters:
The Political after Martin Heidegger.” Two of his essays are due to be published in Diacritics and
Philosophy Today (forthcoming).

References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Altman, William H. F. “Leo Strauss on ‘German Nihilism’: Learning the Art of Writing.” Journal of
the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (Oct. 2007): 587–612.
Arato, Andrew. “Forms of Constitution Making and Theories of Democracy.” Cardozo Law Review
17, no. 2 (1995): 191–231.
Arato, Andrew. “Political Theology and Populism.” Social Research 80, no. 1 (2013): 143–72.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Abyss of Freedom and the Novus Ordo Seclorum.” In The Life of the Mind,
195–217. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin
Books, 2006.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  25

Arendt, Hannah. Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation. Berlin:
Verlag von Julius Springer, 1929.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Arendt, Hannah. “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought.” Social Research 69,
no. 2 (Summer 2002): 273–319.
Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Arendt, Hannah. “Lying in Politics. Reflections on the Pentagon Papers.” In Crises of the Republic,
1–47. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1969.
Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
Arendt, Hannah. “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus.” In
Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, edited by Jerome Kohn,
1–23. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994.
Arendt, Hannah, and Melvyn A. Hill. Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1979.
Arendt, Hannah, and Karl Jaspers. Correspondence 1926–1969, edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans
Saner. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
Balakrishnan, Gopal. The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso, 2000.
Barion, Hans. Kirche und Kirchenrecht. Gesammelte Aufsätze, edited by Werner Böckenförde.
Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984.
Barth, Karl. The Word of God and Theology. New York: T&T International, 2011.
Batnitzky, Leora. “Leo Strauss and the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament’.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Leo Strauss, edited by Steven B. Smith, 41–62. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
Batnitzky, Leora. “Revelation and Commandment: Strauss, Levinas, and the Theologico-Political
Predicament.” In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation,
181–203. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Beiner, Ronald. “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue.” Political Theory
18, no. 2 (May 1990): 238–54.
Bendersky, Joseph J. Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1983.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theological-Political Fragment.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings, 312–13. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Essays and Reflections,
253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.
Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Bluhm, Harald. “Variationen des Höhlengleichnisses. Kritik und Restitution politischer Philosophie
bei Hannah Arendt und Leo Strauss.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 47 (1999): 911–33.
Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966.
Canovan, Margaret. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Chacón, Rodrigo. “Arendt’s Denktagebuch, 1950–1973: An Unwritten Ethics for the Human
Condition?” History of European Ideas 39, no. 4 (2013): 561–82.
Chacón, Rodrigo. “Hannah Arendt in Weimar: Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament?” In
The Weimar Moment. Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law, edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and
Rudy Koshar, 73–107. New York: Lexington Books, 2012.
Chacón, Rodrigo. “Reading Strauss from the Start on the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political
Philosophy’.” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 3 (2010): 287–307.
Cheng, Patrick S. Radical Love. An Introduction to Queer Theology. New York: Seabury Books, 2011.
Crockett, Clayton. Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after Liberalism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011.
26  F. VEGA

De Vries, Hent, and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds. Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular
World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.
Dotti, Jorge. “Jahvé, Sion, Schmitt. Las tribulaciones del joven Strauss.” Deus Mortalis. Cuaderno de
filosofía política, no. 8 (2009): 147–238.
Duso, Giuseppe. “Teologia politica e logica dei concetti politici moderni in Carl Schmitt.” In La logica
del potere. Storia concettuale come filosofia politica, 189–218. Monza: Polimetrica International
Scientific Publisher, 2007.
Dyzenhaus, David. Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller in
Weimar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Dyzenhaus, David, ed. Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998.
Emden, Christian J. “Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and the Limits of Liberalism.” Telos 142 (Spring
2008): 110–34.
Engelbrekt, Kjell. “What Carl Schmitt Picked Up in Weber’s Seminar: A Historical Controversy
Revisited.” The European Legacy 14, no. 6 (2009): 667–84.
Esposito, Roberto. Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2015.
Frank, Jason. Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010.
Frank, Jason, and Tracy McNulty. “Taking Exception to the Exception.” Diacritics 37, nos. 2–3
(Summer-Fall 2007): 3–10.
Galli, Carlo. Genealogia della politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno. Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1996.
Gauchet, Marcel. Le désenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.
Goldman, Samuel. “Beyond the Markers of Certainty: Thoughts on Claude Lefort and Leo Strauss.”
Perspectives on Political Science 40 (2011): 27–34.
Gordon, Jane. “Hannah Arendt’s Political Theology of Democratic Life.” Political Theology 10, no. 2
(2009): 325–39.
Gordon, Peter Eli. “The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political
Theology.” Social Research 74, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 855–78.
Gourevitch, Victor. “Philosophy and Politics I.” The Review of Metaphysics 22, no. 1 (Sept. 1968):
58–84.
Gourevitch, Victor. “Philosophy and Politics II.” The Review of Metaphysics 22, no. 2 (Dec. 1968):
281–328.
Gourgouris, Stathis. “Political Theology as Monarchical Thought.” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016):
145–59.
Graf Kielmansegg, Peter, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, eds., Hannah Arendt and
Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and Political Thought after World War II. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Green, Kenneth Hart. “‘In the Grip of the Theological-Political Predicament’: The Crisis of Reason
and Revelation in Modern Jewish Philosophy.” In Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides
in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, 5–27. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Green, Kenneth Hart. “‘In the Grip of the Theological-Political Predicament’: The Turn to Maimonides
in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss.” In Leo Strauss’s Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement,
edited by Alan Udoff, 41–74. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991.
Hammill, Graham. The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to
Milton. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Hammill, Graham, and Julia Lupton, eds. Political Theology and Early Modernity. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Havers, Grant. “Between Athens and Jerusalem: Western Otherness in the Thought of Leo Strauss
and Hannah Arendt.” The European Legacy 9, no. 1 (2004): 19–29.
Heidegger, Martin. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987.
Heins, Volker. “Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotion in Politics.” The European Legacy
12, no. 6 (2007): 715–28.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  27

Hilb, Claudia. “Claude Lefort as Reader of Leo Strauss.” In Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political,
edited by Martín Plot, 71–86. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Hirt, Hans. “Monotheismus als politisches Problem?” Hochland 35 (1937–38): 319–24.
Hollerisch, Michael. “Carl Schmitt.” In The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, edited by Peter
Scott and William T. Cavanagh, 107–22. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Honig, Bonnie. Antigone, Interrupted. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Honig, Bonnie. “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory.” The
American Political Science Review 101, no. 1 (Feb. 2007): 1–17.
Honig, Bonnie. “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a
Republic.” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (Mar. 1991): 97–113.
Honig, Bonnie. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009.
Honig, Bonnie. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1993.
Howse, Robert. “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship—and Back Again: Leo Strauss’s Critique of the
Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt.” In Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, edited
by David Dyzenhaus, 56–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Jaffa, Harry V. “Crisis of the Strauss Divided: The Legacy Reconsidered.” Social Research 54, no. 3
(Fall 1987): 579–603.
Jaffa, Harry V. “Leo Strauss Remembered.” In Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Strauss and Straussianism,
East and West, edited by Harry V. Jaffa, 39–44. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
Janssens, David. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s
Early Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.
Jay, Martin. “The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt.” In Permanent Exiles: Essays on the
Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, 237–56. New York: Columbia University Press,
1985.
Jurkevics, Anna. “Hannah Arendt Reads Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth: A Dialogue on Law
and Geopolitics from the Margins.” European Journal of Political Theory (2015): 1–22.
Kahn, Paul. Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011.
Kahn, Victoria. The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Kahn, Victoria. “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza, and Arendt.”
In Political Theology and Early Modernity, edited by Graham Hammill and Julia Lupton, 23–47.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Kajewski, Marie-Christine, and Jürgen Manemann, eds. Politische Theologie und Politische Philosophie.
Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016.
Kalyvas, Andreas. Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and
Hannah Arendt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Kalyvas, Andreas. “From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism.”
Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004): 320–46.
Kalyvas, Andreas, and Jan-Werner Müller, eds. “Symposium: Carl Schmitt: Legacy and Prospects.”
Cardozo Law Review 21, no. 6 (2000): 1469–895.
Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1957.
Kateb, Georges. “Death and Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on the American Constitution.”
Social Research 54, no. 3 (1987): 605–16.
Kattago, Siobhan. “Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings.” The
European Legacy 18, no. 2 (2013): 170–84.
Keedus, Liisi. The Crisis of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and
Leo Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Keenan, Allan. Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
28  F. VEGA

Kelsen, Hans. “God and State.” In Hans Kelsen: Essays in Legal and Moral Philosophy, edited by O.
Weinberger, 61–82. Dodrecht: Reidel, 1973.
Kessler, Michael Jon, ed. Political Theology for a Plural Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973.
Koslowski, Peter. “Politischer Monotheismus oder Trinitätslehre? Zur Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit
einer christlichen Politischen Theologie.” In Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen,
edited by Jacob Taubes, 26–44. München: Ferdinand Schöningh – Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983.
Kottman, Paul A. “Novus Ordo Saeclorum: Hannah Arendt on Revolutionary Spirit.” In Political
Theology and Early Modernity, edited by Graham Hammill and Julia Lupton, 143–58. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Labelle, Gilles. “Can the Problem of the Theologico-Political be Resolved? Leo Strauss and Claude
Lefort.” Thesis Eleven 87 (Nov. 2006): 63–81.
Lampert, Laurence. “The Argument of Leo Strauss in ‘What is Political Philosophy?’” Modern Age
22 (Winter 1978): 39–46.
Lefort, Claude. “The Death of Immortality?” In Democracy and Political Theory, 256–82. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1988.
Lefort, Claude. Écrits. À l’épreuve du politique. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1992.
Lefort, Claude. “Hannah Arendt and the Question of the Political.” In Democracy and Political Theory,
45–55. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Lefort, Claude. Le Travail de l’œuvre Machiavel. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
Lefort, Claude. “Loi de mouvement et idéologie selon Hannah Arendt.” In La Complication. Retour
sur le Communisme, 193–210. Paris: Fayard, 1999.
Lefort, Claude. “Permanence du théologico-politique?” In Essais sur le politique, XIXe–XXe siècles,
251–300. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986.
Lefort, Claude. “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” In Democracy and Political Theory,
213–55. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Lefort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.
Lefort, Claude. “Thinking with and against Hannah Arendt.” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer
2002): 447–59.
Lefort, Claude. “Une interprétation politique de l’antisémitisme. Hannah Arendt. I. Les juifs dans
l’histoire politique occidentale.” Commentaire 4, no. 20 (1982): 654–60.
Lefort, Claude. “Une interprétation politique de l’antisémitisme. Hannah Arendt. II. L’antisémitisme
et les ambiguïtés de la démocratie.” Commentaire 1, no. 21 (1983): 21–8.
Lezra, Jacques. “The Instance of the Sovereign in the Unconscious: The Primal Scenes of Political
Theology.” In Political Theology and Early Modernity, edited by Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard
Lupton, 183–211. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Loraux, Nicole. The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2002.
Maier, Hans. “Politische Theologie? Einwände eines Laien.” Stimmen der Zeit 94, no. 2 (Feb. 1969):
73–91.
Manemann, Jürgen, and Bernd Wacker, eds. Politische Theologie – gegenlesen. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008.
Marramao, Giacomo. Passaggio a Occidente. Filosofia e globalizzazione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri,
2003.
McCormick, John. “Authority Beyond the Bounds of Mere Reason: A Political-Theological Sketch
of the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange.” In The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and
Law, edited by Leonard V. Kaplan, and Rudy Koshar, 171–83. New York: Lexington Books, 2012.
McCormick, John. “Educable or Sinful Evil? Revisiting the Moral Status of the Political in the Schmitt-
Strauss Exchange.” In The Problem of Political Theology, edited by Paweł Armada, Arkadiusz
Górnisiewicz, and Krzysztof C Matuszek, 179–98. Kraków: Akademia Ignatianum, 2012.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  29

McCormick, John. “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of
Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany.” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (Nov. 1994): 619–52.
McCormick, John. “Political Theory and Political Theology: The Second Wave of Carl Schmitt in
English.” Political Theory 26, no. 6 (1998): 830–54.
McCormick, John. “Post-Enlightenment Sources of Political Authority: Biblical Atheism, Political
Theology and the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange.” History of European Ideas 37, no. 2 (June 2011):
175–80.
Mehring, Reinhard. Carl Schmitt. Aufstieg und Fall. München: C. H. Beck, 2009.
Meier, Heinrich. Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und “Der Begriff des Politischen.” Zu einem Dialog unter
Abwesenden. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1998.
Meier, Heinrich. Das theologisch-politische Problem. Zum Thema von Leo Strauss. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler
Verlag, 2003.
Meier, Heinrich. Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss. Die Geschichte der Philosophie und die Intention
des Philosophen. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 1996.
Meier, Heinrich. Die Lehre Carl Schmitts. Vier Kapitel zur Unterscheidung Politischer Theologie und
Politischer Philosophie. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 1994.
Meier, Heinrich. Was ist politische Theologie? München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2006.
Metz, Johann Baptist. Zum Begriff der neuen politischen Theologie: 1967–1997. Mainz: Matthias
Grünewald Verlag, 1997.
Monod, Jean Claude. La querelle de la sécularisation. Théologie politique et philosophies de l’histoire
de Hegel à Blumenberg. Paris: Vrin, 2002.
Morhof, Daniel Georg. Theologiae gentium politicae dissertatio prima de Divinitate Principium.
Rostock, 1662.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000.
Mouffe, Chantal, ed. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso, 1999.
Moyn, Samuel. “Hannah Arendt on the Secular.” New German Critique 35, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 71–96.
Näsström, Sofia. “The Legitimacy of the People.” Political Theory 35, no. 5 (2007): 624–58.
Nicoletti, Michele. Trascendenza e Potere. La teologia politica di Carl Schmitt. Brescia: Morcelliana
Edizioni, 1990.
Ochoa Espejo, Paulina. “Does Political Theology Entail Decisionism?” Philosophy and Social Criticism
38, no. 7 (2012): 725–43.
Ochoa Espejo, Paulina. “On Political Theology and the Possibility of Superseding It.” Critical Review
of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2010): 475–94.
Owens, Patricia. “Beyond Strauss, Lies, and the War in Iraq: Hannah Arendt’s Critique of
Neoconservatism.” Review of International Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 265–83.
Pangle, Thomas L. Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Pangle, Thomas L., and Nathan Tarcov. “Epilogue: Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy.”
In History of Political Philosophy, edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 907–38. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Panis, Daniel. “La Question de l’Être Comme Fond Abyssal d’après Heidegger.” Les Études philosophiques
1 (1986): 59–78.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
Passerin d’ Entrèves, Maurizio. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London: Routledge, 1994.
Peterson, Eric. Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen
Theologie im Imperium Romanum. Leipzig: Hegner, 1935.
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2010.
Rancière, Jacques. “Dix thèses sur la politique.” In Aux bords du politique, 164–86. Paris: La Fabrique
éditions, 1998.
Raschke, Carl. Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Le Paradoxe Politique.” In Histoire et Vérité, 260–84. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964.
30  F. VEGA

Robbins, Jeffrey. Radical Democracy and Political Theology. New York: Columbia University Press,
2011.
Rust, Jennifer. The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature
of Reformation England. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014.
Santner, Eric L. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Santner, Eric L. The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy. Edited by Kevis
Goodman. The Berkeley Tanner Lectures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Scattola, Merio. Teologia politica. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007.
Schaap, Andrew. “The Proto-politics of Reconciliation: Lefort and the Aporia of Forgiveness in Arendt
and Derrida.” Australian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 615–30.
Scheuerman, William E. “Revolutions and Constitutions: Hannah Arendt’s Challenge to Carl Schmitt.”
In Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, edited by David Dyzenhaus, 252–80.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Schmidt, Dennis J. On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001.
Schmitt, Carl. “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.” In The Concept of the Political,
80–96. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2007.
Schmitt, Carl. Constitutional Theory. Translated by Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008.
Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Translated by Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Schmitt, Carl. “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen (1929)”. In Der Begriff
des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien, 79–95. Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1963.
Schmitt, Carl. Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien.
Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963.
Schmitt, Carl. Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen
Symbols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Romanticism. Translated by Guy Oakes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George
Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1979.
Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie.
Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970.
Schmitt, Carl. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Scott, Peter, and William Cavanaugh, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007.
Shell, Susan. “Taking Evil Seriously: Schmitt’s ‘Concept of the Political’ and Strauss’s ‘True Politics’.”
In Leo Strauss. Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, edited by Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter
Nicgorski, 175–94. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.
Sluga, Hans. “The Pluralism of the Political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt.” Telos 142 (Spring
2008): 91–109.
Smith, Steven B. “Leo Strauss’s Discovery of the Theologico-Political Problem.” European Journal of
Political Theory 12, no. 4 (2013): 388–408.
Smith, Steven B. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2006.
Sorenson, Leonard R. “Leo Strauss and the Defense of Western Civilization.” The European Legacy
13, no. 2 (2008): 193–221.
Spinoza, Benedict. Theological-Political Treatise. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY  31

Strauss, Leo. “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen.” In Gesammelte Schriften,
Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe. vol. 3, edited by Heinrich Meier,
217–42. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2001.
Strauss, Leo. “Das Erkentnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis.” In Gesammelte
Schriften. Philosophie und Gesetz – Frühe Schriften, Band 2, edited by Heinrich Meier, 237–98.
Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2013.
Strauss, Leo. “German Nihilism.” Interpretation 26, no. 3 (1999): 353–78, and Interpretation 28, no.
1 (2000): 33–34.
Strauss, Leo. Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften –
Briefe, Band 3, edited by Heinrich Meier. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2001.
Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
Strauss, Leo. “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political.” In Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the
Political, 97–122. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Strauss, Leo. “Plan of a Book Tentatively Entitled Philosophy and the Law: Historical Essays.” In
Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, edited by Kenneth Hart Green, 467–70. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1997.
Strauss, Leo. “Preface.” In Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 1–31. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1997.
Strauss, Leo. “Preface to Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft.” In Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of
Modernity, edited by Kenneth Hart Green, 453–56. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997.
Strauss, Leo. “Preface to Isaac Husik, Philosophical Essays.” In Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of
Modernity, edited by Kenneth Hart Green, 235–66. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997.
Strauss, Leo. “Progress or Return?” In The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction
to the Thought of Leo Strauss, edited by Thomas L Pangle, 227–70. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1989.
Strauss, Leo. “Reason and Revelation.” In Leo Strauss Papers, Box 11, Folder 13, fol. 4 recto/4 verso.
Strauss, Leo. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis. Translated by Elsa M. Sinclair.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
Strauss, Leo. “The Three Waves of Modernity.” In An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays,
edited by Hilail Gildin, 81–98. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989.
Strauss, Leo. “What is Political Philosophy?” In What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 9–55.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Strong, Tracy B. “Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America.” The European Legacy 18, no. 6
(2013): 715–26.
Tanguay, Daniel. Leo Strauss. An Intellectual Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Tarcov, Nathan. “Leo Strauss’s ‘On Classical Political Philosophy’.” Perspectives on Political Science
39, no. 2 (April-June 2010): 72–76.
Tarcov, Nathan. “On a Certain Critique of ‘Straussianism’.” The Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (Winter
1991): 3–18.
Tarcov, Nathan. “Philosophy & History: Tradition and Interpretation in the Work of Leo Strauss.”
Polity 16, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 5–29.
Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Taubes, Jacob. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Thiem, Annika. “Political Theology.” In The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael
Gibbons. Oxford Blackwell, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0794.
Van Camp, Nathan. “Hannah Arendt and Political Theology: A Displaced Encounter.” Revista Pléyade
8 (julio-diciembre 2011): 19–35.
Van Heenvliedt, Simon. Theologico-Politica Dissertatio, ofte Discours over dese Vrage: Of den
Pausgesinden in dese vereenighde Nederlanden, niet en behoorde toe-gestaen te worden, d’openbare
exercitien van hare Religie, in enighe openbare Kercken, of Capellen van enige Ste. Utrecht: Jacob
Waterman, 1662.
32  F. VEGA

Vatter, Miguel. “Natality and Biopolitics in Arendt.” Revista de Ciencia Política 26, no. 2 (2006): 137–59.
Vatter, Miguel. “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation between
Political Theology and Liberalism.” New Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 161–214.
Villa, Dana. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996.
Villa, Dana. “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: Citizenship versus Philosophy.” In Socratic Citizenship,
246–98. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
Weber, Max. The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004.
Weber, Max. Wissenschaft als Beruf, 1917/1919; Politik als Beruf, 1919. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck), 1994.
Weymans, Wim. “Defending Democracy’s Symbolic Dimension: A Lefortian Critique of Arendt’s
Marxist Assumptions.” Constellations 19, no. 1 (2012): 63–80.
Wolin, Sheldon. “The People’s Two Bodies.” Democracy 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1981): 9–16.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2004.
Zank, Michael. Beyond the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament:’ Toward a Contextualization of the Early
Strauss. Paper presented at the APA Eastern Divison Meeting, New York, December 2005.
Zerilli, Linda M. G. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005.
Žižek, Slavoj, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political
Theology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Zuckert, Michael P., and Catherine H. Zuckert. “Strauss and His Contemporaries.” In Leo Strauss
and the Problem of Political Philosophy, 254–88. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.