The Serpent | 69mer acts under authorization and in the name of a previously constituted order
to protect what exists; the latter appeals directly to “the people,” that “constituent
power” responsible for the authorization of any order whatsoever, in the name
of an order still to come. While Dictatorship maintains a diagnostic tone, one
can detect a clear normative preference in Schmitt for the commissary dictator-
ship; the sovereign dictatorship appears as a dangerous metastasizing of modern
secularization, wherein the previous “constituent power,” God, is replaced by an
unchecked nation.
Arguably, Schmitt at one point understood Roman Catholicism to commend
a middle way between romantic indecision and sovereign dictatorship. In Roman
Catholicism and Political Form (1923), he argued that the church was not roman-
tic, as commonly alleged, but rather was poised to become the last remaining
home of true political “form” on Earth. Marxist socialism, anarchist syndical-
ism, and American capitalism all line up on the side of the increasing depolitici-
zation of the world that comes with the rationalization of industry: “There must
no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-
sociological tasks.”^35 If these ideologies spread further, only the Roman church
would preserve Weberian Herrschaft against the onslaught of modern bureaucra-
cy. True representation empowers one person to act in the name of another—to
act freely, without needing to check with the represented to reconfirm authority,
in the manner of the workers’ and peasants’ councils of the revolution. The pope,
as Vicar of Christ, is infallible and sovereign; his decisions carry weight because
of his representative function and therefore do not depend on the personal cha-
risma of the holder of the office.
Schmitt’s interest in the ability of true representation to maintain the per-
sonality of decision, even beyond the charismatic stage of authority, is found
again in the famous claim in Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides the
state of exception.”^36 Schmitt was keenly aware of the potential of religious faith
to undermine such personal human sovereignty, however, and in his later years
he wrote of the need to “de-anarchize Christianity” in order to render it useful
for legitimation:
The most important sentence of Hobbes remains: Jesus is the Christ. The pow-
er of such a sentence also works even if it is pushed to the margins of a concep-
tual system of an intellectual structure, even if it is apparently pushed outside
the conceptual circle. This deportation is analogous to the domestication of
Christ undertaken by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Hobbes expresses and
grounds scientifically what Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor does: to render
harmless Christ’s impact on the social-political realm; to de-anarchize Chris-
tianity while still leaving it with a certain legitimizing effect and in any case
not to renounce it. A clever tactician renounces nothing unless it is totally use-
less. Christianity was not yet spent. We can thus ask ourselves: to whom is the
Grand Inquisitor closer, the Roman church or Thomas Hobbes’s sovereign?