Carl Schmitt and the Challenge of Spinoza's Pantheism between the World Wars

Abstract

Focusing on Carl Schmitt's early work, this article argues that Schmitt's relatively unfamiliar mystical interpretation of Spinoza's pantheism, in combination with his use of the abbé Sieyès's notion of pouvoir constituant, deeply informed his particular conception of anti-liberal, dictatorial democracy. Although it is often argued that, in Carl Schmitt's view, Spinoza heralded the end of political theology, this essay suggests that, even though it may be correct to say that Schmitt by 1938 deemed Spinoza “the corrupting spirit of modern liberalism”, there is a prior crucial, yet relatively unexplored, story to tell about Schmitt's reading of Spinoza—a story that leads to the heart of Schmitt's reconceptualization of democracy. While in Schmitt's view Spinoza's pantheism was detrimental to divine and kingly transcendentalism, it also served as a bold mystical foundation of Schmitt's notion of democratic homogeneity that would be capable of competing with contemporary “political theories of myth”.