Schmittian Fascist Moments 6

Here is a brief sketch of Carl Schmitt's theological approach to politics, law and culture and his focus on order. It's basically an assault on liberal modernity and captures much of what I suggest is the current fascist authoritarianism we find across the globe. 

The concept of order (Ordnung) lies at the heart of Carl Schmitt’s political and philosophical thought. For him, it is the essential ground upon which law, politics, and culture rest. Without order, none of these domains can function coherently or meaningfully. But order is never abstract or neutral—it is always concrete, historically situated, and spatially rooted. It emerges from and binds together a particular people, their territory, and their way of life.

Schmitt rejects the idea that law can be autonomous or self-sustaining. Legal systems presuppose an underlying political and cultural order that gives them meaning. This is a direct challenge to the tradition of legal positivism, which attempts to separate law from its cultural and existential roots. For Schmitt, there is “no norm without a concrete order.” Laws are expressions of a deeper order, one that is ultimately maintained by authority—the capacity to make decisions, define enemies, impose structure, and hold chaos at bay.

In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt develops this idea further through the concept of nomos. This refers to the original act of land-taking (Landnahme), where a group lays claim to a territory, institutes a community, and enacts a way of life. This foundational act fuses land appropriation, law creation, and the institution of order. The nomos is not just a matter of geographical boundaries—it embodies a worldview, a legal and political cosmos. Each historical epoch has its own nomos, and Schmitt saw the decline of the European ius publicum Europaeum as a symptom of the erosion of a coherent order under global liberalism.

Order, for Schmitt, always stands in contrast to chaos. Politics is ultimately about preserving order in the face of existential threat. The sovereign is the one who decides when normal legal processes no longer suffice—who suspends the norm in order to preserve the order. In moments of crisis, when routine governance fails, the foundational structures of order become visible. It is not norms that hold society together, but the ability to decide, to draw lines between friend and enemy, and to assert meaning.Schmitt also sees order as culturally and mythically embedded. A true political order must be anchored in spiritual or theological foundations. He is skeptical of modern liberal attempts to construct political orders that claim neutrality or universality. Such orders, he argues, conceal their ideological commitments and lack the cultural depth to endure. He found in Catholic baroque political theology an example of a richly rooted, symbolically dense order that could sustain itself over time—something liberalism, in his view, cannot replicate.

Because order determines who belongs to a community, it necessarily entails exclusion. It defines insiders and outsiders, the sacred and the profane, what is permitted and what is not. Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is central to this process. Every political order entails a boundary, and thus the possibility of conflict. Any claim to universal order that denies this exclusionary dimension is either naïve or a mask for imperial domination.Finally, Schmitt sees crisis as the moment when the true nature of order is revealed. In times of stability, norms and procedures conceal the existential core of political life. But when those norms break down, the power to decide becomes visible. The sovereign emerges as the one who secures the order, not by following rules, but by making the decision that re-establishes coherence in the face of chaos.For Schmitt, then, order is not a passive background condition. It is the enabling ground of all political, legal, and cultural life. It is historically and spatially shaped, constituted by acts of decision and exclusion, rooted in myth and culture, and laid bare in times of crisis. His project is to defend this thick, concrete conception of order against what he sees as the flattening effects of liberalism, technocracy, and legal positivism, which seek to eliminate the political by dissolving it into neutral norms and procedures.

Schmitt's thought is deeply theological, even in his most legal or political writings. He does not treat theology merely as a matter of private belief, but as a structuring discourse that underpins political authority, sovereignty, and legitimacy. For Schmitt, theology is not left behind in modernity—it survives in disguised form, shaping the very concepts that structure modern political life. His key theological concepts function to reveal the hidden foundations of political order and to critique liberal secularism.

Central to Schmitt’s theory is the notion of sovereignty, which he famously defines as the power to decide on the exception. This is more than a legal technicality—it is a political theology. Just as God stands above and outside the natural order and can suspend it through miracles, the sovereign stands outside the legal order and can suspend it in times of crisis. This suspension is not arbitrary but discloses the foundational role of decision rather than norm in political life. Schmitt argues that modern legal and political concepts are secularized theological ones—sovereignty mirrors divine omnipotence, the exception mirrors the miracle, and political decision mirrors divine will. Even in their most secular guise, modern institutions operate through structures inherited from theological thought.

The concept of the exception functions as the political analogue to the miracle. Just as a miracle is a suspension of natural law that reveals divine power, an exception is the suspension of legal norms that discloses sovereign power. Liberal legalism tries to deny this, presenting law as a self-regulating system of rules. But for Schmitt, every legal order ultimately rests on a moment of decision—an act that cannot be derived from the system itself. Thus, the exception becomes the site where the foundational act of political creation is revealed. It is the moment when the state shows itself not as an administrative machine, but as an existential authority.

Closely related is Schmitt’s esoteric but crucial concept of the katechon—the restrainer of chaos from 2 Thessalonians. The katechon is the force that delays the apocalypse, holding back disorder and nihilism. Historically, Schmitt identifies the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, and the modern sovereign state as katechontic powers. These are not merely administrative entities—they are metaphysical brakes on chaos. The state’s authority is not merely procedural but providential; it holds the world together. Without such a restrainer, history would collapse into pure anarchy. Schmitt’s own political sympathies leaned toward a conservative longing for such restraining powers—he sees the erosion of sovereignty and order as inviting catastrophe.Political theology, for Schmitt, is not a topic but a method. It shows how secular political concepts inherit their form and meaning from theological origins. Sovereignty corresponds to God’s omnipotence, law to divine command, exception to miracle, and political decision to divine will. Even liberal neutrality, which claims to reject theological grounding, is—according to Schmitt—a covert theological stance. He identifies it with Gnosticism, a heretical worldview that sees the world as fundamentally flawed and seeks salvation through abstract knowledge. 

Liberalism, in Schmitt’s view, inherits this Gnostic dualism. It dreams of escaping the tragic, conflictual reality of political life through consensus, reason, and depoliticized institutions. But this amounts to a denial of the world as it is.Against this liberal escapism, Schmitt posits decision as the core of the political. A true political order requires a founding decision—an act of will that cannot be deduced from reason or procedure. Like divine command, it originates from a position of authority outside the system it founds. This is why he rejects liberal proceduralism and legal positivism, which treat legitimacy as something that emerges from norms or rules. For Schmitt, legitimacy arises from existential commitment—from an act that binds a community to a shared form of life. The sovereign decides not because he is above the law, but because he constitutes the law in the moment of crisis.

At the heart of Schmitt’s framework is an anti-liberal theodicy. Where liberalism seeks to deny or dissolve conflict, Schmitt insists that enmity, struggle, and violence are permanent features of human existence. Politics cannot eliminate these tragic dimensions; it must organize and contain them. This gives his thought a dark, eschatological tone: he does not seek utopia, but order in a fallen world. Political theology thus becomes the effort to construct meaningful political life in the shadow of apocalypse. The question is not how to transcend enmity, but how to decide upon and contain it.