From Roman Catholicism to Leviathan: on political-theological disjunctures in Schmitt’s Weimar thought

Abstract

This essay uses Carl Schmitt’s often overlooked Roman Catholicism and political form to highlight generally neglected changes in Schmitt’s thinking as it develops from the early to the late 1920s and then to the mid‐1930s. In particular, the essay notes significant alterations in Schmitt’s attitudes to the Roman Catholic Church, the concept of ‘humanity’, liberalism, the Jews and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan state.