70 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Reformation and Counter-Reformation revealed themselves as related in di-
rection. Name me your enemy, and I will tell you who you are. Hobbes and the
Roman church: the enemy is our own question as form.^37The claim here is that despite its ostensible reference to the Catholic Church in
Dostoevsky’s text, the Grand Inquisitor more closely resembles the modern state
itself, as represented by Hobbes’s Leviathan. Schmitt does Machiavelli one better
here: lip service to the minimalist formula “Jesus is the Christ” is sufficient to
claim absolute divine authority for human sovereignty and to short-cut apoca-
lyptic attempts to delegitimize the state by means of theology. Furthermore, as
Tracy Strong has pointed out, “The leviathan (as mortal God, hence as Christ/
Messiah) holds back the kingdom of God on this earth or at least makes no move
to bring it about. This is why this is political theology and not theological poli-
t ics.”^38 In one of his overtly antisemitic moods, Schmitt claims that it was Spi-
noza, the first “liberal Jew,” who undid the great serpent and “mortal god” Le-
viathan by denying it the right to the formula “Jesus is the Christ” in the name of
religious freedom.^39
Such a concern with legitimation reveals a preoccupation with the potential
failure of representation to be accepted by the represented. Unlike the aristo-
cratic reactionaries with whom he associated during the Weimar era, Schmitt
presented himself as highly preoccupied with political legitimacy per se and not
merely with the legitimacy of the new liberal-democratic Republic. For political
theorists concerned with legitimacy, anarchism often plays a role analogous to
that of skepticism for philosophers concerned with the ultimate grounding of
truth claims: it is like a boogeyman, lying in wait, suggesting by its very existence
the possibility of the necessary failure of all projects of legitimation. Schmitt’s
student turned critic Waldemar Gurian sees Schmitt as always seeking a “high-
est instance of decision” that would bring an end to his “despair at an anarchy
identified behind all its facades.”^40 Indeed, Schmitt respects the anarchists’ clear-
cut opposition to his thinking, unlike liberals who dismiss anarchism as unseri-
ous. He mentions anarchism in nearly all his works of the Weimar period and
describes the conflict between the optimistic anthropology he ascribes to anar-
chism and the pessimistic anthropology of the Counter-Revolution as “the clear-
est antithesis in the entire history of political ideas.”^41
There is a strange duality to Schmitt’s view of anarchism. On the one hand,
he sees anarchism as atheistic and dependent upon a radically optimistic view
of human nature. He links it intimately to the progressive secularization of mo-
dernity and to the corresponding increase of technicity. In this sense, anarchism
aligns with liberalism and Marxism, the other secularizing and depoliticizing
forces descended from the American and French Revolutions. On the other
hand, Schmitt’s rhetorical presentation of anarchism emphasizes its radicalism;
the bloodlessness of the technical society is balanced out by the “Scythian fury”