This article problematizes the recent comeback of the exceptionalist jargon as it is conjured by both critics and sympathizers. While in the last decades governments across the globe had recourse to emergency measures to cope with far-reaching emergencies, from terrorism to the COVID-19 pandemic, the received view has it that political power takes advantage of states of emergency as they put themselves in the position to circumvent constitutional limitations. Carl Schmitt is claimed to be the major advocate of this conception (...) of emergency politics in that he elaborated on the concept of the state of exception as the heart of the state political power. This article contends that the received view is doubly wrong. First, soon after his espousal of exceptionalism, Schmitt realized that emergency legislation is an ineffective and costly governmental device that should be transitory and is as unstable as the crisis it is meant to overcome. Second, the received view neglects how Schmitt came to his model of ultraconservative substantive constitutionalism as he maintained that the main task of politics is to protect the normative life of a limited set of state-sponsored institutions as well as the substantive contents they produce. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Carl Schmitt is generally considered as the father of exceptionalism – the theory that the heart of politics lies in the sovereign power to issue emergency measures that suspend everyday normality. This is why his name comes up anytime state governments, whether liberal or not, impose limits on constitutional rights and freedoms to cope with emergencies. This article problematises such a received understanding. It argues that Schmitt held an exceptionalist view for a limited period of time and that even (...) in that period his thinking cannot be regarded as unshakably exceptionalist. This interpretation offers a new entry point to Schmitt’s overall theory. While it can hardly be defended from allegations of reactionary conservatism, it remains a juristic theory of the legal order that tries to answer the question of what ensures the stability of social life. The backdrop of this view is an institutional theory of law and politics that is hardly reconcilable with any form of exceptionalism. In this light, the core of Schmitt’s thinking turns out to be the exaltation of legal science as a jurisgenerative practice that shelters a community’s institutional practices and the traditional identity. (shrink)

This article offers an in-depth analysis of Carl Schmitt's social ontology to explain how and why he came to reject exceptionalist decisionism. To this end, the authors unearth the considerable shifts in terms of social ontology that paved the way for this conceptual turn. The gist of their argument is that Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) espoused a Hobbesian conception of the political as the possibility condition for stable patters of social interaction. Though the first three chapters of Political Theology were (...) originally designed for and published in a posthumous Festschrift for Max Weber, his understanding of the social was indebted to a Hobbesian legacy. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter, he began to revise his conception of the social and to put stress on the organisational dynamics of social institutions as independent of there being a political authority. From 1927 through to 1950, Schmitt never got back to his 1922 exceptionalist view of politics and rather sought to make sense of how the state could and should draw the contents of the legal order from the normative life of social institutions. (shrink)

The Winter 2010 issue of Telos has clearly highlighted the relevance of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba to both the interpretation of Schmitt's political theory and Shakespearean criticism. The main thesis concerning Schmitt's intrusion into the literary field deals with the structural relationships between historical context and tragic dimension, between politics and aesthetics; the tragic drama can be properly understood only in relation to the historical context to which it refers and the concrete situation that it aims to re-present. The (...) historical reality that can be glimpsed by focusing on the tragic masks against the light of their contexts represents…. (shrink)

Emergency and exception are central concepts in Schmitt’s theory of decisionism. The present article explores the distinction between the two by focusing on their emergence, i.e. the process by which in times of crisis a potentially alternative or-der comes into existence and becomes visible. The primary aim of the comparison is to provide a more detailed and less conventional account of Schmitt’s excep-tionalist decisionism. In order to achieve this aim, three relevant questions must be raised: How does the sovereign succeed (...) in gaining acceptance, by exploiting what situation, and by convincing whom? Based on the different answers provid-ed by Schmitt over the years, it is possible to distinguish three different phases of his thought: the sovereign decisionism of the early 1920s, the concrete-order thinking of the 1930s, and the jurisprudential institutionalism advanced from 1950s onwards. (shrink)

The politicization of Islam from a European viewpoint is apparent in how the Islamic ‘veil’ has become an icon of Islam’s alleged deficits with regard to fitting into European modernity. This article unpacks the iconic symbolism of ‘political Islam’ and shifts the focus to Muslim voices articulating struggles for justice and solidarity through the attempt to reformulate secular republicanism and critique its authority basis. This is the emerging trend of ‘critical Islam’, which targets both the hegemonic discourse on secularity and (...) republicanism, and its antithesis, that is, ‘communitarianism’, understood, in European-continental parlance, as the ideology that perpetuates traditional forms of authority. In this context, the article examines the work of the French commission on laïcité and the debates it initiated within the emerging Euro-Islamic public sphere. The analysis puts in evidence the critical potential of this public sphere to enrich the categories of the European sociology of religion. The critique of the normative limits of secularity is thus linked to the valorization of the transnational positioning of critical Islamic voices in Europe. Their capacity to penetrate the political process, related to the erosion of the nation-state and to the conflicted reconstruction of a pan-European republicanism, is a precious asset. (shrink)

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative (...) ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia. The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context. (shrink)

This article takes issue with the practical and the cognitive roles of normality within political life and its relevance to the constitution of the groups that comprise a political community. From a practical viewpoint, normality fosters standards of correctness; from a cognitive viewpoint, these standards are what allows individuals to perceive themselves, and to be recognized, as group members. To achieve this aim, the article delves into Carl Schmitt’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of how politics is a field where semantic (...) struggles take place that are meant to impose alternative visions of the social world. Different types of connections and relationships among individuals and groups (which rule out alternative connections and relationships) shore up a specific vision of the social world (which rules out alternative visions). The article concludes by saying that awareness of the normalizing effects of politics is key to producing a counter-politics meant to defy the naturalization and de-historicization that every political representation furthers. (shrink)

This study articulates the leitmotif of civilizational analysis (the interaction of power and culture) with regard to the relation between religion and the state within the Islamic civilization or ‘Islamdom’. In a first step, it clarifies, by reference to Marshall Hodgson, the extent to which his view of Islamdom as a transcivilizational ecumene can fit into a comparative type of civilizational analysis. The comparative approach to civilizational analysis can be enriched by reevaluating the specific Islamic pattern of mild legitimization of (...) power through culture, and by integrating into the analysis the resulting field of tension vis-à-vis Western power and its supporting normative paradigms. In a second step, in order to better grasp the forms of power governing this field of tension, the article critically reconsiders Rémi Brague’s characterization of Western European civilization as the outcome of an expansive ‘Roman road’ that matched culture with power by investing into the charisma of corporate entities: first, the church, then the state. Against this double background, the study shows that the culture—power syndrome that is proper to Islamdom as a transcivilizational ecumene does not consecrate a separation of ‘religion’ from the body politic, but promotes the building of expansive patterns of connectedness. (shrink)