Excerpt fromIntroduction: Why Political Theology Again

The Problem of Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is one of the most famous, as well as one of the most obscure, books in twentieth-century political theory. It is much cited by contemporary political and legal theorists, but those citations often seem to refer to just two canonical sentences: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" and "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." These are indeed critical claims, but standing alone they are as puzzling as they are shocking.

The claim of a theological origin for political concepts stands against the widely accepted belief that the turn away from religion by figures such as Locke, Hume, and Smith -- not to speak of Machiavelli and Hobbes -- laid the groundwork for the modern theory of the state. The social contract, not the divine covenant, is at the center of modern political theory. The localization of sovereignty in a single subject who decides is similarly inconsistent with modern beliefs about the rule of law, separation of powers, and judicial review. Today, we are more likely to ask "what exception?" rather than who decides on it. How, after all, can we reconcile Schmitt's definition of sovereignty with that classic line of American jurisprudence, "extraordinary conditions neither create nor enlarge constitutional power"? In a system of popular sovereignty, we do not know a "he" who can claim to be the sovereign; in our system of constitutional law, we do not know a state of exception.

Puzzling as these two famous sentences appear on first impression, most American readers have an intuition that Schmitt is pointing to at least some aspects of our political situation that are difficult to understand within the terms of contemporary political theory. We know, for example, that the American president is trailed by a military officer carrying a box with the nuclear attack codes. The President maintains a world-destroying power. Is this an example of the sovereign power to decide on the exception? Surely, such a decision would itself be exceptional not just in a political sense, but in a legal one as well. There would be no judicial review of the decision, no opportunity to challenge it by those affected, no due process, and no norm of law that the president could claim to be executing. Imagining such a moment of decision, we might find ourselves using religious concepts: Armageddon, for example. More generally, we are familiar with the idea that Americans practice a "civil religion." Consider the Pledge of Allegiance, the iconography of the flag, or the memorialization of citizen sacrifice. These are only the most obvious elements of this practice. How important are these aspects of our political life? And, what exactly is the relationship of faith to reason in our political practices? These too are political-theological questions.

Schmitt was, of course, not thinking of the practice of an American civil religion. Can his suggestions about political theology, nevertheless, help us to understand the way in which the modern nation-state -- particularly our nation-state -- has occupied the place of the sacred for its citizens? Does the idea of the constitution, for example, carry forward the religious concept of the covenant? Is revolution a secularized form of revelation? Are these examples of "secularized theological concepts"? Just to the degree that these questions remain plausible, we need a political theology to explore the sources and nature of our political life.

Schmitt links exception to sovereignty in his first sentence. Not just this text, but political theology as a form of inquiry begins where law ends. If today we are generally inclined to believe that we live in a world of law that is, or should be, without exception, is it the case that we live in a world without sovereignty? Much of the contemporary political theory of globalization claims exactly that: sovereignty, on this view, is an anachronistic concept that has become dysfunctional at best, and misleading at worst, in our world of human rights and global markets. Neither the discourse of human rights nor that of economic markets has any room for the exceptional, sovereign decision. For both, political order means law without exception. But is this like saying that under modern conceptions of science there is no longer a cognizable place for religion? In both cases, our theory of the universal claim of law -- natural or political -- may not match our experience of faith or our actual, institutional practices.

Even those who object to contemporary claims for a global order of law are more likely than not to share with liberal political theorists a skepticism toward claims for a theological approach to political analysis -- unless of course, they are fundamentalists attacking the secular character of modern politics both locally and globally. The "antiglobalization" or "global justice" movements, for example, show little interest in the theological. The leftist critique of liberalism may rest on a deep philosophical difference concerning the nature of justice and the forms of oppression, but that debate avoids any claims for or about the sacred. That political concepts have their origin in theological concepts is, to most contemporary theorists, about as interesting and important as learning that English words have their origin in old Norse. Consequently, a contemporary political theology must be more than a genealogical inquiry if it is to be more than a passing curiosity. It becomes interesting just to the degree that these concepts continue to support an actual theological dimension in our political practices. Political theology as a form of inquiry is compelling only to the degree that it helps us recognize that our political practices remain embedded in forms of belief and practice that touch upon the sacred.

Since 1922, when Schmitt wrote Political Theology, there has been a change in the background beliefs against which we understand the possibility of political theory. Theology is no longer an important element of philosophical inquiry in general and, at least in the United States, no longer a major aspect of the institutional life of the university. If political theology is about empowering theologians politically or theoretically, it has no future in the West. The very possibility of a political theology has been displaced from the academy by the rise of positive political science. Indeed, arguably this shift from theology to science, in the study of both nature and social practices, is what makes us modern. For us, the most pressing questions are likely to concern the relationship between liberal political practices and market structures. We think of ourselves as living in an increasingly multicultural world in which any effort to link politics to religion is likely to prove counterproductive, if not actually dangerous. Religion belongs to civil society, where it is simultaneously protected and excluded from politics. In our discourse about politics, we speak a language of institutional structure and procedure, on the one hand, and of rights and welfare, on the other.

While questions of the relationship of law to religious practices and beliefs remain matters of controversy, academics have, for the most part, lost touch with the subject matter of Schmitt's book: political theology. If political theology means anything at all to us, it is associated with religious fundamentalists who oppose liberalism at home and are the enemies of the modern secular state abroad. Domestically, we are likely to associate political theology with those who insist that America return to its origins as a "Christian nation." Our political practices, on this view, should be measured by their religious beliefs. Externally, we are likely to associate political theology with Muslim theocracies: the Saudis have a political theology; Osama bin Laden attacks us in the name of a political theology.

When we try to put the two well-known Schmittian sentences back in their larger textual context, we are frustrated by the obscurity of the book. Our failure of understanding can be attributed, in part, to the form in which Schmitt presented his ideas. To the contemporary reader -- especially the American reader -- the book appears as a virtually impenetrable consideration of lost German theoreticians. Their work, in turn, was responding to a political crisis of which we are only dimly aware. With a few exceptions -- notably Max Weber and Hans Kelsen -- there is little point in elaborating the views of those long-gone European theorists who occupied Schmitt's attention. Often, Schmitt is situating himself in the contemporary debate. These, however, are matters for the intellectual historian, not for the political philosopher.

Adding to the obscurity of his text and the association of the entire endeavor with the domestic and foreign opponents of the modern, liberal state, we come to Schmitt with a skepticism and even animosity because of his personal politics. Schmitt associated actively with the National Socialists. How long he did so remains a subject of some dispute: he never formally left the party, nor did he disavow his earlier, active support. Schmitt scholars have argued endlessly about the depth and character of this association. However one explains the connection, it is impossible to deny that he believed there to be a relationship between his theoretical work and his politics. We cannot but see a reflection of Schmitt's definition of the sovereign as "he who decides on the exception" in Schmitt's support for Hitler, who emerged so forcefully a decade after he wrote this sentence. Schmitt's understanding of his own work put him on the wrong side of history. He personally illustrates the danger of his ideas; his own biography supports the association of political theology with fascism.

Of course, we should not overestimate the role of Schmitt in German politics, nor the influence of political theory on politics in general. Theory is rarely an effective form of political praxis; it does not translate easily into either effective rhetoric or a specific plan for action. One of the subjects of Political Theology is a consideration of just why this is so: between norm and application there must be a decision. Philosophers have no particular skills when it comes to decision; they are not trained to have good judgment. Philosophers have rarely been effective in politics: a fact already evident to Plato after his Syracuse experiment. Nevertheless, we are right to worry that the road from Weimar to National Socialism, at least in the domain of political theory, moved through Schmitt's political theology.

If an engagement with Schmitt is to be useful in the domain of theory today, we must put aside both the local context of his work -- the Weimar crisis -- and his personal political beliefs and practices. Lasting theoretical contributions will have their origins in local circumstances, but they do not depend upon those circumstances. Indeed, it misses the philosophical point and disrespects the political thinker if we emphasize context over content. Of course Schmitt wrote against a background of pressing, local concerns. So do we, but then so did Plato, Aristotle, and every other philosopher. Their achievement was to gain a freedom of thought within those circumstances. This is the attitude with which we must approach Schmitt's work. It is the same attitude with which we should approach any other creative work, whether of art, literature, or science. This is not an excuse for Schmitt's politics, which were inexcusable. Rather, the point is that no excuse is needed to engage the work. Taking up that work, we need not give any special weight to what Schmitt may personally have believed about his text.

This work will inevitably be seen as part of the post--Cold War resurgence of interest in Schmitt. That turn toward Schmitt was puzzling. Just as a global regime of law -- a regime that seriously threatened the traditional idea of sovereignty -- was growing, so was interest in Schmitt, who was the century's leading theorist of sovereignty. For those who harbored some skepticism about the claims of a new world order, Schmitt became a useful resource. Skepticism toward a developing orthodoxy with respect to a global order of law was linked to a renewed interest in the place of violence in political culture. Schmitt put the state's power of life and death at the center of his inquiry into the political. Along with Schmitt, Walter Benjamin became popular, and he too was often reduced to a few canonical sentences, including most famously, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Post-1989, Schmitt became a reference point for those who sought to develop a broadly antiliberal theory, free of the decades-old dispute between the communitarians and the liberals. Schmitt symbolized this new freedom from old categories, for while he was personally associated with the far right, those most interested in his theory traced the development of their own political views to the left.

The fact that much of the enthusiasm for Schmitt followed the collapse of the Soviet Union should give us pause, for Schmitt may be our best guide to understanding the Cold War as an era in which political conflict threatened to break out into world-destroying violence. At stake was always more than the political theory of either the liberal or the Marxist variety could explain: mutual assured destruction could not be understood from the perspective of either a doctrine of rights or a clash over ownership of the means of production. To understand the political imagination of complete annihilation, we need a political theology. Had liberal theory, like socialist theory, served as an exercise in political apologetics? Did it require the end of the Cold War to free a space for a new form of critique of liberal theory in the West?

In truth, there was never much distance between liberal political theory, typified by John Rawls's Theory of Justice, and the American constitutional order. America was a good enough political order when compared with its Cold War adversaries. Yet Rawls and his followers never took seriously the violence of the state. Mutual assured destruction never appears within liberal political theory. It is as if the violence of the United States is simply an accidental characteristic of an essentially liberal political order: a posture forced upon the liberal state by threats from abroad. The defense policies of the United States are always seen as somehow exceptional -- more transitional arrangements than expressions of national identity. We constantly expect the defense budget to go down, not up; we are slightly embarrassed by the maintenance of a standing army. Whatever happened to the state militias which were to be called out in the rare case -- the exception -- of national emergency?

If we are to understand state violence as no less an expression of political identity than law, then we must take a perspective upon ourselves other than that offered by liberal political theory. We must take up the perspective of political theology, for political violence has been and remains a form of sacrifice. This is not hidden but celebrated in our ordinary political rhetoric: to serve and die for the nation is commonly referred to as "the ultimate sacrifice." We can find no more obvious nor more important an instance of Schmitt's "secularized theological concepts." Moreover, the moment at which such sacrifice is performed is always that of the exception. Law can impose risks, but it cannot demand a sacrifice. Not even in the military is there a legal regime of the "suicide mission." One way to express this is to say that sacrifice is always a free act. Liberal theory puts contract at the origins of the political community; political theology puts sacrifice at the point of origin. Both contract and sacrifice are ideas of freedom. The former gives us our idea of the rule of law, the latter our idea of popular sovereignty. On this difference turns not only the distinction of political theory from political theology, but also our understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to the political community.

The project I propose here is to reflect on our political beliefs, institutional structures, and patterns of behavior by engaging with Schmitt's Political Theology. The text was subtitled Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Sovereignty remains critical to understanding the American political experience. It is, however, a concept that has dropped from sight in most contemporary political and legal theory. Schmitt's text can help us to recover that concept, but only if we keep in mind that the conversation with him is about us; it is not about him. My aim here is not to elaborate the meaning of Political Theology as he understood it. Rather, it is to engage his work as a point from which to illuminate our own political experience. Schmitt, the person, does not appear in my text at all. All references to him should be understood in the very narrow sense of the author of the text, and that is all.

American Exceptionalism and Political Theology

To take up the perspective of political theology requires us not just to reconsider the character our political theory, but to consider how well contemporary theory maps our political imagination. A political theology -- one that breaks free of religious fundamentalism -- must straddle both philosophy and anthropology. It raises fundamental questions about the nature of contemporary experience and of the place of the political in that experience. It brings to that inquiry a set of concepts -- faith, sacrifice, the sacred -- that are ordinarily excluded from political theory.

These are not small issues. Before we turn to Political Theology, we must have reason to think that the work promises something more than a few quotable sentences that can be deployed to express contemporary frustrations with liberal theory and recent American political developments. In response, we might begin by noting that Political Theology speaks directly to the relationship between constitutional law and political sovereignty. For Americans, this is the problem of the relationship between the rule of law and popular sovereignty, that is, between law and self-government. Indeed, I can summarize the inquiry of this book in a single question: what do we learn if we engage Schmitt's argument from a perspective that substitutes the popular sovereign for his idea of the sovereign?

This relationship of law to popular sovereignty is the central problem of American constitutional theory, where it goes by the name of "the counter-majoritarian difficulty." When the Supreme Court declares a law unconstitutional, what exactly is the source of legitimacy for that judgment? The ruling is not a judgment as to the justice of the legislation. A theory of justice will not get us very far in understanding this aspect of American political practice. If we say the Constitution itself is the source of the Court's legitimacy, then how is it that a two-hundred-year-old text can deny a contemporary popular majority the right to rule itself? When the Court declares a law unconstitutional, it is invoking some sort of exception: its decision marks the endpoint of the ordinary course of legislative majorities responding to shifting political interests. Does our Court live within the matrix of the Schmittian exception?

That our Court occupies a role that has a theological dimension is an old point. At the center of our civil religion is the "priesthood" of the Court, guarding that most sacred of texts: the Constitution. While the Court likes to appeal to the rule of law to legitimate its exceptional role, political theology suggests that we look in a different direction: to the Court's capacity to speak in the voice of the popular sovereign.

Not coincidentally, our belief that the Constitution is the product of popular sovereignty supports what is commonly called "American exceptionalism." American exceptionalism appears in our nation's reluctance to join international human rights conventions, to agree to submit itself to the jurisdiction of transnational courts, and to recognize claims of universal jurisdiction by foreign courts. This resistance is puzzling for two reasons. First, it is often the case that these conventions and institutions are, in substantial part, products of American foreign policy efforts. Second, we resist even though we do not disagree with the substantive content of most of contemporary international human rights law. Nevertheless, we are reluctant to displace national law by international law. No doubt, there are sometimes narrow, self-interested reasons for avoiding international law, but resistance to the displacement of our own constitutional order is broad and deep. Americans have a problem imagining international law: if law is an expression of popular sovereignty, how can a system of norms that has no source in that sovereign constitute law?

The concept of popular sovereignty links the Constitution -- and thus the rule of law -- to the Revolution; it links law to exception. The Constitution continues to express the revolutionary self-formation of the popular sovereign. The counter-majoritarian difficulty is resolved by an appeal to the presence of the popular sovereign. The judicial decision, accordingly, becomes the space for the exceptional reappearance of the sovereign. From this perspective, American exceptionalism may be best understood as a variation of the Schmittian exception. This is surely not what he had in mind, but we are playing the notes of political theology -- including the idea of the exception -- in a new key, that of popular sovereignty.

Political theology may not only help us to understand ourselves but also to understand how and why our political imagination makes our relationship to the rest of the world so exceptional. Americans resist international law not just because they do not see it as grounded in a legitimate act of popular self-determination, but also because it is law beyond sovereignty in the sense that it is law without exception. Many intuitively believe this is not a political arrangement within which America can survive as a nation. In our contemporary political debate, this is just the argument we have been having over the international law prohibition on torture under any and all circumstances. The American resistance to a rule without exception is expressed in the regular invocation of the ticking time bomb hypothetical. Implicit in the hypothetical is the idea that the bomb might be nuclear. Without an exception to the torture prohibition, we face the possibility of a nuclear detonation, that is, we imagine the death of the state. The issue here is not whether this belief is true, but how it figures in the construction of a broader political imagination. That imagination is the object of political theological inquiry.

Americans continue to imagine a world in which there are potential enemies and thus one in which politics can turn to life-threatening violence. Ironically, the world's most powerful nation lives with a belief in the insecurity of its own existence. This is ironic, but hardly odd. Political beliefs are not a matter of reason alone, and there can be no assertion of power that does not harbor a reflexive fear of failure. Schmitt believed that a world in which potential enemies are feared is not one that can be fully ordered by law. Thus, the European project of creating a transnational order of law without exception required that no national community view any other within the European Union as a potential enemy. Out of this comes the idea of European citizenship, as well as the limits on the potential extension of that idea.

The identification of the enemy is not grounded in a difference in policy but rather in the perception of an existential threat. In the face of such an imagined threat, one decides to act. One does not adjudicate national survival. The exceptional turn to violence against the enemy will always be understood as the defense of sovereign existence. This includes, but is not exhausted by, the defense of the order of law that the sovereign put in place: to defend the state is not just to defend the border, but to defend a way of life. For Americans, the rule of law is not that which eliminates the need for the violent defense of the nation, but that for the sake of which violence is deployed. Paradigmatic of this synthesis for Americans was the Civil War, in which defense of sovereignty was inseparable from defense of the Constitution. The current war on terror shows us the continued vitality of these themes of law, exception, sovereignty, and the imagined existential crisis of the state.

Schmitt writes that the exception is more interesting than the norm because "it confirms not only the rule but also its existence" (15). An abstract rule is not defended; it has no existence. There is a sense in which the entire American political experience is lived within the exception -- or at least within the shadow of the exception. The order of law begins in the exception of the Revolution and continues always under the possible need to turn to violence to defend the revolutionary accomplishment of a constitution. The translation of this imaginative construction into material reality today is found in the world-destroying power of the American nuclear arsenal. How is it that a political order that understands itself as characterized by the rule of law can hold forth the possibility of such destruction? A political theory that will not take the step to political theology is simply not equipped to answer this question.

Any theory of law that ignores the exception will fail to grasp the reality of American power and the nature of the American political imaginary. There is a direct line from the revolutionary consciousness of 1776 to the weapons of mass destruction today. That line passes through the popular sovereign and the Constitution, to arrive at our current debates over law and exception. The ticking time bomb example, as an argument for torture, is simply another imaginative construction of the Schmittian exception. When we imagine the time bomb as a nuclear weapon, we have replicated under current circumstances exactly the character of American exceptionalism throughout the Cold War.

The concept of the popular sovereign as an intergenerational, collective subject capable of action that is simultaneously creative and destructive is not accessible to someone who views the political culture from outside the terms of its own self-imagination. The sovereign is no more imaginable from without than is a god to those outside of the faith. A foreign faith's belief in the miraculous appearance of the divine is always reduced to a false or mistaken belief by those who are not prepared to see the sacred in those circumstances. We don't imagine that there were Aztec gods that have now withdrawn or that gods once lived on Mount Olympus. If the popular sovereign is a political theological concept, then it will no more appear to the contemporary political scientist than those earlier gods appear to the social scientist. In place of the popular sovereign, the political scientist today speaks of popular majorities and of the forces that effect electoral politics -- all measurable entities. There is no need for a separate concept of popular sovereignty, which will only obscure what needs analysis: voting trends, coalition building, and the competition for power among institutions and factions. The political scientist explores how judges participate in the formation of public policy: judges appear as only another locus of political power to be analyzed in the same way as other political institutions.

From the perspective of the political scientist, the American practice of judicial review will not appear exceptional: judicial institutions in many countries review legislation for its constitutionality. European constitutional courts, for example, have no trouble declaring legislation unconstitutional. They do so, however, in the name of individual rights, not in the name of the popular sovereign. The American Supreme Court founds its claim for legitimacy on its capacity to speak in the voice of a transhistorical popular sovereign. The method of legal reasoning for European courts, on the other hand, is "proportionality" review, which is just another name for balancing the various interests -- including rights -- that are at stake in a situation. This is an all-things-considered judgment of the best way of moving forward given the conflicting claims and interests -- exactly what a legislature should consider. Because they operate on the same conceptual horizon as the legislature, judicial review has effectively been incorporated into the law-making process of European states: the best analysis of the law-making situation speaks of "governing with judges."

One does not "govern with judges" in the United States: the imaginative horizon of constitutional decision making by the Court is entirely different from that of the legislature. Here, the Court speaks in the name of the popular sovereign. It is not a participant in ordinary politics but a presence outside of politics. Such a court relies on charisma -- mystery and awe -- as much as on argument. When seen as only another instance of ordinary politics, the Court's legitimacy is undermined. The best contemporary example of this may be the fear expressed by the dissenting justices as to how the Court's decision in Bush v. Gore would be perceived.

The American legislature governs under the provenance of the Court, not with the Court. Judicial review works as a reappearance of the political rupture: we are to hear once again the voice of the popular sovereign. For this reason, the Court resists descriptions of its deliberative process as proportionality review -- even though that is often what it appears to be doing. Instead, it imagines itself to speak the constitutional truth. Only by taking seriously this idea of a national "truth" can we begin to make sense of the abiding appeal of originalism as an interpretative strategy.

The divide here is not a matter of competence or knowledge. American and European justices are, for the most part, doing the same thing. More than anything else, the different approaches reflect a difference between the secular and the sacred. No theory that avoids the theological can be adequate to the American practice of judicial review, which has its roots in the sacred character of the popular sovereign. Postwar American constitutional theory often tried to describe the difference between Court and legislature as one between decisions based on principles or enduring values, on the one hand, and those based on interests or short-term preferences, on the other. This was never convincing outside of the academy, for the Court hardly has a monopoly on the consideration of principles. Our deepest divisions -- for example, over abortion, religion, or federalism -- are all differences over principles. An academy that is no longer open to consideration of the theological will always confuse the sacred with the "principled" -- perhaps because what is sacred to the academic is principle.

While the sovereign rupture has been successfully institutionalized in the practice of judicial review, this is not the only site at which the popular sovereign appears in tension with our ordinary legal practices. As others have pointed out, this tension was arguably behind the extraordinary claims that President Bush made to conduct the war on terror beyond the reach of the courts and the ordinary norms of law. The most controversial of the Justice Department memos placed presidential war powers beyond the control of law.

In the United States, we generally find a deep skepticism of executive claims to act in the name of the people outside of law. There are routine citations made to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and to Roosevelt's extraordinary wartime efforts, but such instances are few. The revolutionary heritage has its roots in executive abuse; the Constitution was, in large part, an attempt to limit executive power. When we step back just slightly, however, we do see effective presidential power to decide upon the use of force -- an area in which the courts have been most reluctant to intervene. No president has accepted the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. When we try to bring the reality of a president's world-destroying power under a theory of the constitutional allocation of power, we are falling exactly within a puzzle that Schmitt raises: Is the exception a concept within or without the order of law? Can a norm define the exception, or is it the other way around? How exactly is a decision that places itself outside of law nevertheless bound to law? The idea of the exception captures this conundrum, for we can only understand an exception by reference to the norm. If, however, we make the exception an instance of the norm, we lose the concept completely.

We are likely to have conflicting views, depending on the context, of whether the president or the Supreme Court has the power to decide on the exception. For that matter, the legislature also makes such a claim, for it has the formal, constitutional authority to declare war. Historically it has contested the president's claim to speak for the people. All three branches claim some sort of ultimate power to act in the name of "we the people." Interestingly, while the Constitution specifies a single exceptional power, the suspension of habeas corpus, it neglects to specify who is to decide on that exception. We face the puzzling situation of action in the name of the Constitution, but outside of the ordinary structures of law, which always allocate jurisdiction when specifying power. We can work Schmitt's equation backward to understand why, if the sovereign is he who decides, a system in which no political actor can make an uncontested claim to be sovereign is one that cannot localize the power to decide. The competition for the sovereign voice in American political life can take just this form of a competition to decide upon the exception. Is this not just what we have been seeing in the complex competition between president, courts, congress, and voters in determining the appropriate response to the threat of terrorism?

The defining conceptual struggle of our political age is whether the response to terrorism should be thought of as a matter of law enforcement ("a police action") or as a matter of war (an assertion of "sovereign power"). Are we within law or are we within the exception? That we can ask the question at all suggests that Americans have not accepted for themselves the postwar vision of Western politics as a matter of law alone. Our political culture is one in which both law and sacrifice figure, and in which the believer finds the truth of the self in and through participation in the popular sovereign. It is a faith that can support sacrificial violence as easily as it can support adjudication under law. Indeed, in the concept of the popular sovereign, we find the imaginative link between law and violence: at stake in both is the creation and maintenance of "we the people." America, we might say, finds itself equally when it looks to the court and the bomb.

Unsurprisingly, Americans and Europeans have given fundamentally different answers to this question of law or war. The juridification of politics is the leading idea of the Western European political order today. To the question of whether there can be sovereign action beyond the rule of law, European institutions have answered with a resounding no. All political violence is limited to law enforcement: no exceptions. Correspondingly, there has been a seamless movement from the order of constitutional law, with its protection of fundamental rights and limited delegations of power, to international law, with its prohibition on the use of force and its articulation of a doctrine of human rights.

There is no political theology appropriate for the institutions of the European Union: it is politics as a fully secularized practice of reason. Reason denaturalizes borders, just as it displaces the existential question from political life. The European Union is to pursue politics without sovereignty: law without exception. The United States, however, never underwent any sort of postwar reconfiguration of either our political institutions or our political imaginations. We remained an "exceptional" nation because we never gave up our belief in our own sovereignty. Not surprisingly, the American triumph in the Cold War has been read -- at home and abroad -- through both the lens of law and that of violence, sometimes described as "soft" and "hard" power.

Americans live comfortably with their long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars. American history begins with the Revolution and continues today in the war on terror. Popular history is shaped by a narrative of the successful use of violent force against enemies, within and without the nation. Much of this past remains vivid in our political imaginations, endlessly reinforced by both popular media and scholarly work. Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even to Omaha Beach. They do not think of past political violence through the prism of the concentration camp or the destruction of urban centers. They visit Mount Vernon and the Lincoln Memorial, not palaces like Versailles or camps like Auschwitz. They may visit the reconstructed slave operations at Monticello, but they do so believing in a myth of progress.

***

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Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Why Political Theology Again	p. 1
Definition of Sovereignty	p. 31
The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision	p. 62
Political Theology	p. 91
On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State	p. 123
Conclusion: Political Theology and the End of Discourse	p. 153
Notes	p. 159
Index	p. 191
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Political Theology

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