Schmitt, Hobbes and the Politics of Emergency

Abstract

Carl Schmitt reads Hobbes as a philosopher who thinks that politics is a response to emergency, and Schmitt adapts what he takes to be Hobbesian ideas to give a politics of emergency of his own, one that was supposed to have particular relevance to the upheavals of the Weimar Republic. I shall consider how Schmitt's theory might apply to at least one recent emergency. I shall claim that when applied it has considerable shortcomings, but that these are not always inherited from Hobbes.