Tenemos aquí una nueva serie de reflexiones sobre el Leviatán. Cortesía del colega Oscar Delgado, topo ilustrado de las novedades intelectuales. N de la R.

Re-Imagining Leviathan:

Schmitt and Oakeshott on Hobbes and Political Order1

Jan-Werner Müller

Princeton University

ROUGH FIRST DRAFT

(Comments and Criticisms are welcome;

unauthorized quotation or circulation are not)

Forthcoming in:

CRISPP, Special Issue on Hobbes and Schmitt, ed. Johan Tralau

¹ This paper was initially prepared for a colloquium on ‘Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt: Thinking Political Order Past and Present’ at Uppsala University in January 2007; I thank fellow participants in the colloquium and also the audience at NYU, where the paper was read in February 2007, for comments and suggestions.

² Perry Anderson, ‘The Intransigent Right: Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von Hayek’, in: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso, 2005), 3-28.

³ As Oakeshott once put it, ‘it is as if we had never quite got used to living in a modern European state; never quite understood it, or resigned ourselves to it. It is still capable of puzzling us; and arguments to

At first sight, Michael Oakeshott and Carl Schmitt could perhaps not appear more different: Schmitt, a leading Nazi lawyer, often described as the ‘Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’ -- whose best case for relativizing his role from 1933 to 1945 is that he in fact all his life subscribed to a bizarre private crypto-Catholic ‘political theology’, of which his engagement for the Nazis was an unfortunate by-product; Oakeshott, on the other hand, the quintessentially English gentleman scholar, fond of cooking and cricket metaphors, and a self-declared conservative, who famously turned down the honor that Margaret Thatcher had offered him.

One a man for whom the political had existential import, the other an aesthete or even a dandy for whom politics appeared variously as ‘vulgar’ or as a ‘necessary evil’; one the jurist of decision, the other the political theorist of conversation. Obviously, the list of such more or less interesting differences could go on and on.

And yet: both thinkers have been classified by Perry Anderson as members of what he has called ‘the intransigent right’ (an honor they share with Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek)2 – an inclusion that is at first sight supported by the fact that there are a few similarities, after all: both Oakeshott and Schmitt were deeply preoccupied with what Oakeshott time and again called ‘the experience of living in a modern European state’; both felt that the state’s proper origins and trajectory had not been grasped, that proper statehood had profoundly been put into doubt in the twentieth century, and that state authority and legitimacy needed to be shored up in an age of ‘mass’ (read: democratic) politics.3

It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that both time and again returned to the study of Hobbes: Schmitt went so far as
to call Hobbes a ‘friend’, a ‘brother’, and even spoke of love; whereas Oakeshott, while less prone to emotional
confessions of elective affinity, clearly felt most inspired by Hobbes in articulating his vision as ‘civil association’.4

More importantly, both developed their conception of political association with and sometimes against Hobbes – their
political theories are, on one level, part of the long and complex chronicle of productive modern appropriations and
mis-appropriations of Leviathan and, less so, other Hobbesian writings.

Now, looking at Schmitt and Oakeshott through the lens of their Hobbes interpretations could easily turn into a kind of fruitless compare-and-contrast where we will simply see what we think we already know: Schmitt and Oakeshott were quite different, and so were their views of Hobbes. What is important to find out, it seems to me, is where and why they appeared to make strategic choices in interpreting – or, for the most part, mis-interpreting Hobbes – in light of what both construed as a kind of story of decline, a Verfallsgeschichte, of the type of state that supposedly had been conceived by Hobbes initially. The task of the intellectual historian, after all, is not to be a kind of schoolmaster and to hand out good or bad marks for right or wrong interpretations of classical texts – rather, he or she must ask what choices underlay certain interpretations (even those demonstrably false), and what purposes they might have served.

Accordingly, in this essay I wish to develop an argument along the following lines: both Schmitt and Oakeshott attempted to save what they considered a proper notion of statehood under conditions of twentieth-century mass democracy. In line with this overall purpose, both returned time and time again to Hobbes and especially Leviathan and offered highly unorthodox views on Hobbes. Above all, both consistently interpreted Hobbes as a particular kind of moralist, not as a materialist and a mechanistic thinker or as the ‘first proper political scientist’. While it can’t be demonstrated conclusively, it is highly plausible that such a reading was inspired by Leo Strauss’s interpretation of Hobbes from the 1930s, with which both Schmitt and Oakeshott were familiar.

Now, both – and this is the philosophically crucial move – in a certain sense tried to ‘de-liberalize’ Hobbes by disabling the contractualist logic at the centre of Leviathan. Sidelining Hobbesian contractualism (and Hobbes’ claims about authorization and resistance in particular), both Schmitt and Oakeshott instead focused on what one might call the cultural preconditioof proper political order; and both were highly sensitive to the importance of symbolically representing political association as a whole. Consequently, there was an at first sight surprising preoccupation with questions of symbolism, imagination and even myth – a side of Hobbes to which Hobbes scholars have only recently become more alert.

For all the idiosyncrasies in their interpretations of Hobbes, both Schmitt and Oakeshott ended up with what actually are not such unusual views of ‘the experience of living in a modern European state’, after all. In fact, I take their interpretations to come down to paradigmatic positions on modern European statehood – positions that are arguably still with us – but positions also that are arguably distinguished by their curious inability to deal with conflict other than in a deeply illiberal manner: for shorthand, the one position, because it ‘culturalizes’ statehood, the other, because it ‘moralizes’4

⁵ Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und “Der Begriff des Politischen”: Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, )

Before that, the argument will proceed by examining Schmitt’s and Oakeshott’s successive engagements with Hobbes from the mid-1930s to the late 1970s: I begin by saying a few words about Schmitt’s well known Leviathan interpretation from 1938, leaving aside the deeply anti-Semitic narrative which Schmitt told about the decline of the Hobbesian state, and instead focus on what precisely Schmitt’s considerations about the necessity of symbolically representing political association entailed. In the second step, I chart Oakeshott’s views on Hobbes from the 1940s to the 1960s, and, in particular, his surprising re-interpretation of what kind of human being is really capable of creating a state.

The third and final part which compares Schmitt and Oakeshott, before drawing more general lessons from this exercise, also contains what is perhaps a mild surprise – Schmitt’s previously unknown direct comment on Oakeshott, a comment which at first sight might suggest a curious convergence of Schmitt and Oakeshott on the necessity of political myth – and it will turn out that Oakeshott might in fact have been a more successful, or at any rate a more subtle, myth-maker than Schmitt. More on whether there was in fact such a convergence or not shall be said in the conclusion.

One more side remark: Examining the Hobbes interpretations of Oakeshott next to Schmitt is in no way to imply that either thinker took the other to be important for the development of his thought. Put differently: I am in no way suggesting that we are facing a substantive Dialog unter Abwesenden here.5 Heinrich Meier’s brilliant reconstruction of the Strauss-Schmitt relationship has, in my view, prompted too many attempts --