Political Theology as a Vocation

Max Weber and Carl Schmitt

Abstract

The article attempts to explore and reveal the political-theological elements in the teachings of Max Weber. This line of work is based on Carl Schmitt's direct testimony that the classic of Social Science is indeed the true founder of political theology. Starting from the thesis, which establishes a relationship of correspondence between metaphysical-theological and state-legal thinking as the central principle of political theology as the sociology of legal concepts, the author expands the relevant field on the issue of non-correspondence or desynchronization of these two contexts. It is noted that this issue is dispersed throughout one of Weber's most complex texts, “Intermediate Reflection”, which is open to consideration as Max Weber's most essential work. It is established that Weber perceives the disappearance of belief in the transcendent as destroying the meaningful as such, which is directly connected to both the genesis and maintenance of social order. Weber's thesis is reconstructed to assert that political rhetoric appealing to brotherly love merely “pharisaically” conceals the fundamental impossibility of fraternity in the conditions of Modern statehood, organized on the principle of a large enterprise. Weber's solution, favoring the parallel consideration of the state as a systematically functioning apparatus of arbitrary violence and as a focal point of genuine brotherhood during the periods of external wars, is problematized in the paper. Several provisions in “Intermediate Reflection” are recognized by the author as forming a political-theological challenge, to which Carl Schmitt responds, thinking “together with Weber against Weber”. Schmitt's concept of the exalted political unity is examined in the work as an alternative to Weber's absence of the transcendent in a secularized and rationalized world. The conclusion is drawn that Schmitt provides the most substantial response to the challenges of Weber's teachings in his lecture “The Age of Neutralizations and Politicizations” arguing that the theological-metaphysical sphere of spiritual life does not turn into a vacuum, remaining the refuge of the “religion of technicality”, in the struggle against which a new political-theological beginning can reveal itself.