Book chapter
Joseph de Maistre entre « révolution contraire » et « contraire de la révolution
This is a contribution to the French-Russian Conference on Joseph de Maistre. Joseph de Maistre was a famous theorist and proponent of counter-revolution. He criticized the theory of the popular sovereignty of Rousseau and elaborated his own theory of the royal sovereignty. However, he was no advocate of the so-called decisionism, as Carl Schmitt depicted him in his writings on political theology.
In book
In 1957 Ernst Kantorowicz published a book that would be the guide for generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. In The King's Two Bodies, Kantorowicz traces the historical problem posed by the "King's two bodies"--the body politic and the body natural--back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates, by placing the concept in its proper setting of medieval thought and political theory, how the early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a "political theology."
The king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans; but the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. The notion of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation "The king is dead. Long live the king."
Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, The King's Two Bodies explores the long Christian past behind this "political theology." It provides a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.
The article analyses the specific trends of the relations between social groups within Brazilian society. It applies C. Schmitts concept of the state of emergency to assess the political [cultural, social] significance of Brazilian Carnival. The music of Samba as one of the key symbols of Brazil is also discussed in this context.
The article deals with the ideology of Stefan George circle which is considered as one of the most influential intellectual movements of the beginning of the 20th century in Gernany.
The preface to the translation of "Politics" by C. Schmitt. Schmitt in 1933-36 aspired (though rather unsuccessfully) to become an ideological guru of the Nazi regime, that was only in the process of formation then. It allows to formulate the question about the guilt of the thinker, but doesn't prevent to find the theoretical contents in his works of this period. Criticism of parliamentary democracy and understanding the political as an opposition of enemies lead Schmitt to the concept of a tripartite political unity of people, state and movement. He sees the Nazi regime as a new kind of politics based not on struggle, but on mobilization of the people conducted by the Führer. This design turned out to be not only politically vicious, but also theoretically defective, however its studying is an instructive experience.
In the article, the author analyses the conception of people as a political body (corpus politicum) described in the text of the “Siete Partidas” of Alphonse X the Wise, king of Castile and Leon (1252–1284). In the frame of this theory, the people are considered as a whole body and the king as its soul, heart and head. The multitude can become the people only being united by the love to the king. The author criticizes the hypothesis according to which the principal sources of Alphonse's political theory were the works of St.Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury and proposed the other version. According to his version, such sources were, first of all, the texts of the tradition of political Augustinism, i.e., the “De civitate Dei” of St.Augustine and the “Sententiarum Libri tres” of Isidor of Seville.
This is an afterword to the Russian translation of Carl Schmitt's "Political Romanticism". Special attention is paid to the prehistory of this work, especially to the biographical details of his life before WWI and during the war and to the small but very important book on Theodor Däubler Schmitt published just before he started to study romanticism. Many contemporary authors criticize Schmitt as a predecessor of the German nazism, however, his book on romaticism was not so clear politically biased as it can seem today. What is really wrong in Schmitts position is his underestimation of the roile of conversation in politics. He did not understand the ideological perspectives of parlamentarism falcely identified with endless and fruitless conversations.
The paper focuses on the paradox embedded in conceptual logics of the Left and Right thought, that is the semantic amalgam of the concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy. Through the conceptual deconstruction of Carl Schmitt and Michelle Foucault theories we demonstrate the actual identification of sovereignty and legitimacy in political discourse. Since this identification forms the international legal framework, we perceive the power as legitimate one by recognizing the sovereignty. We reveal the similarities in power’s perception and conceptualization of the most radical representatives of the Right and Left political thought and explain it through the merge of legal and sacral in concept of sovereignty and perception of the power’s technic as independent political value.