Religion and Empire Carl Schmitt’s Katechon between International Relations and the Philosophy of History

Abstract

Carl Schmitt’s thought on international relations appears from the outset to be profoundly informed by his reflections on the philosophy of history. In this the German jurist seems to be fully consonant with the climate of his time, of that generation which saw the 19th century ‘concert of Europe’ crumble beneath their feet into the great tragedy of European civil war which began with the First World War. The collapse of the world order thus almost inevitably leads him to question the meaning of history and to be influenced by the ideas of the end of the world and of history, and by the symbols and metaphors connected to this theme, which have been part of Western culture for centuries.

From the Commissary Dictator to the Katechon: Continuity in Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Intermediate Authority

“…The bibliographical details of Schmitt's doctrine of the katechon are discussed extensively already by Grossheutschi, Nicoletti and de Wilde, so I will only touch on this briefly. 83 As Grossheutschi and de Wilde show, Schmitt's early comments on the katechon in the Nachlass fragments and various publications in the early 1940s are mostly concerned with identifying "who" (the USA, Rudolf II, Tomáš Masaryk, etc) is the katechon in each period of history. 84 On this point Schmitt echoes precisely the Talmudic line of thought identified by Cullmann: "Who is delaying?"…”

Spirit, Katechon and Civilization. The Structure of Orientalist Time

“…By becoming part of the Hegelian fabric of time, Schmitt inserts into it a device, the katéchon, which will suspend the movement of dialectics in order to configure a homogeneous time, an aeon of order and stability that finds its incarnation in the Grand Inquisitor [19]. Not for nothing did Schmitt himself consider Hegel, in himself, a katéchon, who tried to keep world history within the Christian aeon by retarding the progress of nihilism and atheism [20].…”

“…Copyright© Amar Díaz M. part of the Moslem world, like Northern Africa, and all of the Ancient and Christian civilization would have been destroyed" [20]. Although this last passage is marginal with respect to the possible uses of the concept of katéchon (an ambiguous and polysemic concept in Schmitt's own texts), it reveals that in the German jurist's analysis, Western civilisation appears as a fact given by Christianity, which was threatened at a singular moment in history by Islam.…”