Summary

Carl Schmitt’s theorizing has been dominated by attempts to secure the state as a bulwark against looming socio-political disintegrations. This paper arti-culates some important insights as well as limitations of Schmitt’s arguments. The basic assumption of this paper is that political stability requires not just bare peace but peace with a transcendent quality. I take two opposing solu-tions that Schmitt has offered in regard to achieving ultimate political stabi-lity – one neglected in comparison with the other. First, Schmitt proposed the political idea of Catholicism imagined as a transcendent anchor against so-cial fragmentation along with its entailed critique of economic rationalism. Later on, during the 1930s, he abandoned this transcendent grounding for the concept of the political together with the protection-obedience axiom. In this paper I seek to explore the fallacy and limitations of this turn, supplementing my analysis by using the case of Antigone as a paradigm of the fragility of a political order that disregarded the problem of the transcendent, and by draw-ing on Hobbes as Schmitt’s alleged theoretical model. I suggest that Schmitt failed both in providing a blueprint for political stability, by not taking, un-like Hobbes, transcendent passions seriously enough, as well as in replicating the Hobbesian model for political order, and thus ending up in the totalitarian theoretical framework