Carl Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes began as two lectures delivered in 1938, one before the Philosophical Society of Leipzig and one before the Hobbes Society of Kiel. It carries the marks of that origin: a compact, dense study rather than a treatise, moving through seven short chapters and an appendix on “The State as a Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes.” Schmitt, a German constitutional lawyer and political theorist, wrote it in the shadow of the Nazi seizure of power, and the book’s central question—why Hobbes’s image of the leviathan failed as a political symbol—is inseparable from that setting. The English translation by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, with an introduction by Schwab and a later foreword by Tracy B. Strong, presents the work to readers who come to it knowing something of its author’s compromised career.
“The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state.”
The Wager Behind the Book
Schmitt’s premise is that Hobbes did not choose the leviathan casually. The image comes from the Book of Job, where the sea monster stands beside the land beast behemoth as the strongest of God’s creatures, and it passed through centuries of interpretation—Christian and Jewish, theological and cabbalistic—before Hobbes restored it as the name for his sovereign state. Schmitt reads the frontispiece of the 1651 Leviathan closely: a gigantic man composed of countless small figures, sword in one hand and crosier in the other, guarding a peaceful city, with the instruments of secular and spiritual power arrayed beneath each arm. The wager of the book is that this symbol, and the state it names, can be understood only by asking what happened to it—how a mortal god meant to guarantee peace and protection came to be seen as a monstrosity, and why the symbol failed.
The 1938 Book and Its Editorial Frame
The volume in hand is Carl Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, translated by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, with an introduction by Schwab and a new foreword by Tracy B. Strong. It first appeared in 1938 as Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes; the English translation came from Greenwood Press in 1996, and the University of Chicago Press edition in 2008. The copyright page credits the 2008 foreword to the University of Chicago and the 1996 translation, introduction, and index to Schwab. A biographical note identifies Schmitt (1888–1985) as a legal and political theorist and constitutional lawyer, listing among his works Legality and Legitimacy, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, Political Romanticism, Nomos of the Earth, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Political Theology, and The Concept of the Political. The contents run from Strong’s foreword through Schwab’s 1996 foreword and introduction, a translators’ note, Schmitt’s introduction, an overview of chapters one through seven, the seven chapters themselves, an appendix on the state as a mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes, and an index.
Strong’s Foreword: Three Epigraphs and a Life
Strong opens with three epigraphs: Schmitt’s line that protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state; Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan (chapter 30) that the good of the sovereign and the people cannot be separated; and Max Weber on political actors’ ignorance of the “satanic powers” working inexorably against them. He then supplies the biography. Schmitt was a leading German jurist after the First World War, born in 1888, habilitated in 1916, and taught at several universities. Responding to the disorder following Germany’s defeat and parliament’s apparent inability to govern, he advocated from his first work a strong executive, including dictatorship under certain circumstances, and his work mattered to thinkers across the political spectrum. In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party and took a chair at the University of Berlin, becoming president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists. In 1936 an official SS publication attacked him severely; protected by Goering, he kept his academic post but resigned or let lapse most other public positions. The Allies detained him fourteen months after the war though he was never officially charged. He did not return to teaching but became important to postwar right-wing thought in Germany, maintaining ties with Alexandre Kojève, Jacob Taubes, and Ernst Jünger. He died in 1985, aged ninety-six, in Plettenberg, Westphalia, his birthplace.
Strong stages an imagined exchange voicing the objections—Schmitt was a Nazi, sought to align German law with Nazism, never apologized, and some post-1945 writing remained anti-Semitic—answers that one knows this, and holds that anyone writing on Schmitt must give a substantive account of what in his work is worth the effort, which is neither a matter of “freedom of thought” nor merely “knowing your enemy.” Schmitt, he says, helps us purchase questions: why executive power has gradually and apparently continually dominated legislative power in Western democracies over the last century; how those democracies’ adherence to rights, liberty, and social welfare coexists with repressive, disciplinary qualities at home and, given power, abroad—imperialism, colonialism, support for authoritarian regimes; and whether fascism is a possible development of tendencies in modernity or an aberration. The present work raises several questions: Hobbes’s place in Schmitt’s thought; Schmitt’s relation to anti-Semitism; and how far this book, written in 1938 and reissued in 1965, can be read, as Schmitt claimed it should be, as an act of resistance to Nazism.
Schmitt and His Several Hobbeses
Strong argues the book marks an evolution in Schmitt’s thought. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt called Hobbes “truly a powerful and systematic political thinker” who drew the simple consequences of political thought more clearly than anyone—already a toned-down version of the original 1927 Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft publication, where Hobbes appeared as perhaps the only truly systematic political thinker. Hobbes was for Schmitt the thinker who best established the primacy of the political and led the struggle against depoliticization. In 1932 appeared Leo Strauss’s “Notes on The Concept of the Political“; Strauss had worked on Hobbes at least since the previous year, and in those remarks argued what became the central point of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (written in German in 1935, published only in English in 1936): Hobbes founded not autonomous politics but liberal politics. The Hobbes Schmitt admired thus remained, Strauss argued, within the liberal bourgeois world Schmitt sought to critique. Shortly thereafter, through Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Schmitt sought in texts—most notably Staat, Bewegung, Volk—to theorize the “legal German Revolution” in terms of a “total state,” understood as a unity, indeed fusion, of state and civil society.
Anti-Judaism, Homogeneity, and the Marx Parallel
Strong argues Schmitt’s anti-Judaism stems from his claim, held from at least 1923, that sovereignty presupposes homogeneity (Gleichartigkeit) of the political body rather than pluralism; anti-Judaism is thus part of Schmitt’s construction of national identity. In the first chapter Schmitt had favorably cited “the Jewish scholar Leo Strauss” for recognizing Hobbes’s struggle to restore “the original unity” of spiritual and secular powers. But Schmitt argues Strauss is misleading on Hobbes on Jews: Strauss seems to hold Jews responsible for the distinction between spiritual and secular realms, which would let one maintain the incompatibility—yet reality and necessity—of reason (Athens) and revelation (Jerusalem, God’s Law, necessarily in tension with political sovereignty). In chapter five, referring to “the Jew Moses Mendelssohn,”
Editorial Framing and Schmitt’s Preface
The volume opens with editorial apparatus that sets the tone for everything after. Schmitt’s postwar hostility to things Jewish, the editor insists, had nothing to do with race—he dismissed race as a “swindle,” remarking that people talk most about what they lack. Raphael Gross concedes Schmitt kept Jewish friends before 1933 but hunts for continuity in his anti-Jewish attitudes, building a case on indirect evidence; his thesis, the editor says, must be weighed accordingly. Gross reads Schmitt as seeing Jewish emancipation as the destruction of the Christian-theological state, with Jewish attachment to abstract universal norms serving the preservation of tradition—hence Schmitt’s attacks on the normative jurisprudence of Laband, Jellinek, Kelsen, and others, which spilled over into hostility toward Jews generally. Schmitt later told the editor that Israel’s founding changed the Jewish situation: at last, he said, Jews again have contact with a soil they can call their own. Against Stephen Holmes’s charge that the 1938 Hobbes book was packaged to look harmlessly liberal, the editor finds continuity between the Weimar and late-1930s Schmitt, with only 1933 and 1936 as the years he sank to rock bottom. The translators note that Schmitt avoided professorial German, though his long paragraphs were divided for readability.
Schmitt’s own preface traces the book to two 1938 lectures—one in January before the Philosophical Society of Leipzig under Arnold Gehlen, one in April before the Kiel Hobbes Society under Baron Cay von Brockdorff. He quotes Diderot: it is a book to read and comment on one’s whole life. But he warns of the danger in the name itself: stat nominis umbra, the name leviathan casts a long shadow. The book is signed Berlin, 11 July 1938.
The Career of a Symbol
The opening chapter follows the leviathan from scripture to political myth. Hobbes became notorious as the “prophet of the leviathan”; Hegel called the book a very disreputable work. The image of the huge man, the magnum corpus, runs back to Plato’s many-colored mob, and Nietzsche’s “most callous monster” belongs to the same lineage. The leviathan itself comes from Job 40–41, the strongest sea monster, paired with the land animal behemoth and linked to Tiamat of Babylonian flood myth; the Vulgate and Luther apply the name to the serpents of Isaiah 27:1, and dragon-slayer legends from Siegfried to Saint Michael descend from it. Ephraim the Syrian has leviathan eject the dead at the Last Judgment; Mandaean tradition has it swallow the universe at the end of time; the fourteenth-century Opicinius de Canistris ties it to the Mediterranean, the diabolic sea. Two interpretive streams emerge: Christian symbolization by the church fathers and Jewish mythologization by cabbalistic rabbis. In the Christian reading, the devil is the leviathan—a huge fish lured and caught by God, who hid in the servile flesh of the crucified Man-God so that the devil, trying to devour him, was hooked on the cross. The line runs from Gregory the Great through Leo the Great and Gregory of Nyssa to Walafrid Strabo.
The Frontispiece and the Machine
The second chapter begins with the famous copperplate of the 1651 Leviathan: a gigantic man assembled from countless tiny figures, sword in the right hand, crosier in the left, guarding a quiet city, the motto from Job declaring there is none like him on earth. Under each arm hang the means of secular and spiritual warfare—castle, crown, cannon, weapons, battle beneath the sword; church, mitre, thunderbolts, syllogisms, dilemmas, council beneath the crosier. The notes that follow range widely: Schelsky’s reading of “to speak more reverently,” which Schmitt calls absolutely correct while still holding the leviathan image inadequate to Hobbes’s conception of the state—better explained as a half-ironical literary idea born of good English humor, a judgment the Berlin philologist Walter Schirmer confirmed. Tönnies calls the state one monster and the revolution another; Laird notes Hobbes’s “Behemoth against Leviathan” title; the Oxford English Dictionary records leviathan as a man of vast power or wealth, and Partridge’s slang dictionary as a heavy backer of horses. Schmitt admits his survey is no exhaustive philology, and thanks Schelsky for criticism he deems more significant than further controversy.
Mechanism, Neutrality, and the State as Machine
The argument then turns on mechanism and machine, which for Hobbes carried mythical meanings unlike later distinctions. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did the sharp split between mechanism and organism prevail—Kant’s Critique of Judgment separating inner from outer, living being from dead matter, draining mechanism of its living character, while Schelling and the Romantics added the contrast of dead mechanism with the animate work of art. For Hobbes, mechanism, organism, and work of art all remain parts of the machine, products of the highest human creativity. Ernst Mach’s observation about a mechanistic mythology confronting animistic religion holds for the worldview that let Hobbes fold the leviathan image into the huge machine, making his concept of the state a factor in the four-hundred-year process of mechanization. Cosmopolitans read the state as a technical apparatus because the metropolis breeds fantasies about technique; with modern communications and weaponry the command mechanism has grown astonishingly, and its exact functioning seems independent of religious, metaphysical, juristic, or political aims. The state’s value comes to reside in being a well-functioning big machine, the machina machinarum, and the machine assumes the value-and-truth neutrality of a technical instrument—the neutralization process underway since the seventeenth century.
That first decisive step came in a century sickened by religious strife, when each party defamed the other and none convinced. The search for a neutral territory of security and order began in “natural”
The Sovereign as Mortal God and the Question of Miracles
Hobbes’s leviathan fuses god and man, animal and machine—a mortal god who secures peace and demands unconditional obedience. Not because of any divine right of kings, but because the sovereign alone punishes and rewards, defines justice by law, and settles what counts as truth or error in religion. The sovereign even decides what subjects must believe to be a miracle. This was no idle question: royal healing by touch belonged to the king’s sacred person, an official rite in the Book of Common Prayer, and the Stuarts—above all Charles II, to whom Hobbes was personally obliged—practiced it, with Charles touching some 23,000 persons between 1660 and 1664.
Hobbes’s own position was agnostic to the core: no one can know for certain whether an occurrence is a miracle. His critique ranged over error, delusion, and the tricks of forgers, actors, ventriloquists, and swindlers with a style almost Voltairean, so that every claim to credence seems senseless. A critical reader of Chapter 37 must conclude that belief in miracles is invariably superstition. Yet the great decisionist accomplished his decisive turn: Auctoritas, non Veritas. Nothing is true; everything is command. A miracle is what the sovereign commands subjects to believe—and, ironically, miracles cease when the state forbids them. His explicit example is transubstantiation: if an individual claimed that certain words turned bread into Christ’s flesh, no one would have sensible reason to believe it; but if state power decrees it, it is a miracle and all must obey. Sovereign power thus reaches its zenith—God’s lieutenant on earth, with power over miracles as well as confession.
The Crack in the Leviathan
At that zenith comes the rupture. Hobbes evades the decisive point, declaring miracle a matter of public versus private reason, but on the basis of universal freedom of thought (quia cogitatio omnis libera est) he leaves it to the individual’s private reason whether to believe, preserving his judicium in his heart, intra pectus suum. Once public confession is at issue, private judgment ceases and the sovereign decides true and false. The distinction between private and public, faith and confession, fides and confessio, was introduced so that everything else could be logically derived from it through the ensuing century until the liberal constitutional state. The modern neutral state, born of agnosticism rather than sectarian religiosity, originated here: a juristically constructed individual freedom of thought and conscience on one side, and on the other the evolution of the state into a justifiable external power—the stato neutrale e agnostico of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Chapter 42 Hobbes reinforced the state’s right to demand lip-service confession while protecting inner faith, invoking Kings II and stressing the inner/outer distinction; his answer to Bishop Bramhall confirms he absorbed private freedom of thought into the political system. This contained the seed of death that destroyed the leviathan from within.
Only a few years after the Leviathan appeared, a liberal Jew noticed the barely visible crack. Spinoza, in the famous Chapter 19 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), whose subtitle speaks of libertas philosophandi, holds that for external peace the sovereign can regulate public religious cult, and everything referring to religion receives legal validity, vim juris, only through the state’s command—but state power determines only the external cult. Hobbes had laid the groundwork for separating internal from external; the Jewish philosopher pushed it to its limit until the opposite was reached and the leviathan’s vitality was sapped from within. Spinoza speaks explicitly only of the external cult, not of piety itself or internal worship of God: Internus enim cultus et ipsa pietas uniuscujusque juris. In Chapter 20 he expanded this into a universal principle of freedom of thought, perception, and expression.
Legality as the Modern Mode of Command
On the European continent the eighteenth-century princely state gave way to the nineteenth-century bourgeois constitutional state, which is really a lawgiving state whose justification lies in the general legality of all expressions of state authority. A closed legal system establishes the claim to obedience and justifies eliminating every right of resistance; law becomes the specific manifestation of right, legality the specific justification of coercion. Max Weber observed that in the rationalized enterprise of the modern state, legality can pass for legitimacy. The future belongs to the trained bureaucracy, the actual carrier of the technologized state operating by inner rational logic; legality is its positivistic mode of operation. Otto von Schweinichen put it chemically: the state reacts to the element “right” only when it appears in the aggregate of a state’s legality. The problem of legality is therefore no merely formal question—the perfected armature of the modern state requires a specific rationality, a form of command, an expertly executed plan, signifying the transformation of legitimacy into legality and of prestate right into positive state law.
Long before this legalistic machina machinarum, Hobbes conceptualized that transformation so thoroughly that his formulation undermined all medieval notions of divine right and every substantive concept of constitution; he became in a twofold manner a spiritual forefather of the bourgeois law-and-constitutional state. Here the author credits Ferdinand Tönnies, who in 1926 noted that Hobbes’s contractual justification differs essentially from medieval covenants: Hobbes, objectively neutral, considered every state a human product based on a covenant of all with all, yet in Chapter 18 differentiated a particular “established” state—commonwealth by institution—that could be characterized constitutionally as a law-and-constitutional state, one brought about by the resolution of a multitude, a constituent national assembly. Through Rousseau’s mediation this theory influenced the beginnings of the French Revolution, though Rousseau refused to consider any constitution definitive, allowing the periodic revival of the national convention, while Hobbes insisted on negating the state of nature in the true status civilis.
The Index as a Map of the Argument
The volume closes not with argument but with apparatus: an index running from “Conviction” to “Termitenwahn,” and it is worth pausing over what it records, because the entries trace the book’s whole course in miniature. Concepts carry their page citations like small footprints. “Conviction versus attitude” points to page 62; “Corporation” to 19; “Cosmopolitanism” to 42; “Counterreformation” to 22. The entry for “Covenant” fans out into a cluster of cross-references—covenant and the individual, covenant and law, covenant and liberalism, covenant and the mortal god, covenant and resistance, covenant and the state, and “types of” covenant—each with its own page numbers. “Creator Pacis” appears as a heading of its own. Criminal law is cited across several stretches of the text, Kant’s Critique of Judgment at page 41, the crocodile at 18–19, Oliver Cromwell at 79 and in the notes, and the formula cujus regio, ejus religio at 58 and 59–60.
Authors, Works, and the Demonological Thread
The index also catalogues the book’s reading. Bodin’s Daemonomania and Demonomanie appear, Dante’s Inferno and Thomas Dekker and De Quincey cluster around page 25, and Descartes recurs across a wide spread of pages. Passerin d’Entrèves, Figgis’s The Divine Right of Kings, Durkheim, Eisler, Emge, Hennings’s study of nulla poena sine lege, Ephraim the Syrian, Erastus, Escherich’s Termitenwahn, and Condorcet’s Esquisse all find their places. A second thread runs through the same list: “Demon, demonology,” “Devil,” “Dragon,” “Egyptian mythology,” “Elephant,” “Emblem,” “Deification of state,” “Deus mortalis” cross-referenced to “Mortal god,” “Earthly god.” The mythological and the juristic sit side by side, exactly as they do in the text.
The Remaining Entries
The rest of the range fills in the conceptual furniture: democracy, despotism, divine right of kings, divinity, the duel, education, the eighteenth-century state, the Enabling Act, “Enemy” (with its cross-reference to friend versus enemy), England and the English Civil War, the English constitution and English humor, English literature, error versus truth, the esoteric versus the ordinary, estate, ethics, the Evangelical Church, evil, excommunication, executive power, physical existence, freedom of expression, external versus internal, fable, factional war, faith, fame, fanaticism, fascism, fear, freedom of feeling, feudalism, and Feuerbach’s Anti-Hobbes. The list ends mid-entry, at Feuerbach, with the page references trailing off—the book’s argument having already been made, the index simply registering where each piece of it can be found.
The Mortal God and the Machine
The leviathan, for Schmitt, is a compound: god and man, animal and machine. It is a “mortal god” who brings peace and security, and for that reason—not because of any divine right of kings—it demands unconditional obedience. The sovereign alone punishes and rewards, decides what is just, and determines what counts as truth in religious belief. Schmitt stresses how far Hobbes was willing to push this: the sovereign decides even what is a miracle. Hobbes’s treatment of miracle belief is radically agnostic, almost Voltairean in its cataloguing of fraud and delusion, yet it ends in the decisionist formula auctoritas, non veritas—nothing is true, everything is command. A miracle is what the state commands its subjects to believe, and miracles cease when the state forbids them.
At the same time the leviathan is a machine, and Schmitt insists that for Hobbes and his age “mechanism” and “machine” still carried mythical meanings. The sharp split between mechanism and organism, between dead matter and living being, came later, with Kant and the Romantics. Hobbes’s state is a machina machinarum, a work of the highest human creativity, and its exact functioning appears independent of every religious, metaphysical, or political aim. This is why the state could become the neutral territory that a century of religious civil war made desperately desirable—a neutralization that Schmitt traces from Erastus through Bodin to Frederick the Great’s “I am neutral between Rome and Geneva.” The machine, in this reading, is not a metaphor for soullessness but the culmination of a process of neutralization that Hobbes grasped before anyone else.
The Crack That Killed the Leviathan
The book’s most striking argument concerns the seed of death within the leviathan. At the very zenith of sovereign power, Hobbes makes an individualistic proviso: he distinguishes inner faith from outer confession, private reason from public reason. The individual may keep his true judgment in his heart; only the public confession is the sovereign’s to command. Hobbes introduced this distinction to secure peace, and Schmitt does not condemn the distinction itself—public peace and sovereign right were foremost for Hobbes, and individual freedom of thought was only a background proviso. But over the centuries the crack widened until individual freedom of thought became the form-giving principle and public peace a mere proviso. Schmitt names Spinoza, in the nineteenth chapter of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as the first to notice the barely visible crack and push it to its limit, and he names Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Julius Stahl-Jolson as later inheritors of that tactic. This is where Schmitt’s anti-Judaism enters the book, and Tracy Strong’s foreword treats it as of a piece with Schmitt’s opposition to pluralism and indirect powers: what makes Strauss wrong about Hobbes, in Schmitt’s eyes, makes Hobbes wrong and all of liberalism wrong.
The other force that breaks the machine is pluralism. The constitutional state machine, Schmitt argues, founders on the indirect powers—churches, sects, parties, associations—that Hobbes’s sovereign was meant to subordinate. And the symbol itself fails. In the final chapter Schmitt turns to England, where Hobbes’s theory did not materialize: the English people decided against the centralized state, Cromwell’s dictatorship did not forge the commonwealth, and since 1660 the leviathan image attached to monarchical absolutism and the Stuarts, defeated by the might of the sea and commerce. England became a world power without state absolutism; the English leviathan did not become a state. Hobbes conjured invisible forces of an old, ambiguous myth, and whoever uses such images risks meeting a heartless demon—the indirect powers, usually hostile to one another, agreed to catch the huge whale. The symbol’s tragedy, Schmitt writes, matches the tragedy of the lonely philosopher of Malmesbury, who destroyed the traditional foundations of divine right even as he tried to rescue monarchical belief.
What the Book Is Doing
Read in its context, the study is doing several things at once. It is a work of intellectual history, tracing the leviathan from Job through the church fathers, the cabbalists, Luther, Bodin, and Shakespeare. It is a work of state theory, arguing that Hobbes was the spiritual forefather of the bourgeois law-and-constitutional state—the thinker who transformed right into positive legal command and legitimacy into legality, so that Max Weber’s “legality can pass for legitimacy” is already latent in his construction. And it is, on Strong’s reading, a coded act of resistance: written after the SS organ Das schwarze Korps attacked Schmitt in 1936, the book is remarkably free of Nazi jargon, and its insistence that protection and obedience are reciprocal—that if protection ceases the state ceases and every obligation to obey ceases—can be read as a warning to a regime that demanded obedience without providing security. Schmitt speaks of passive resistance, of a people’s soul taking the secret road inward and growing the counterforce of silence and stillness; a public power alienating its people becomes hollow and already dead from within. Whether that reading holds is contested. Some condemned the book for bearing Schmitt’s signature at all; others placed it closer to authoritarian bourgeois liberalism than to Hitlerian Nazism. Strong’s foreword stages the objections and refuses to let them go, arguing that anyone writing on Schmitt must give a substantive account of what in his work is worth the effort.
The Afterlife of a Failed Symbol
The book’s final pages widen into a meditation on technology and myth. Schmitt doubts the leviathan could symbolize a new technical age; technology would place it in a preserve as a museum curiosity. The image that Hobbes conjured belongs to an older world of force and power, throne and master, and Hamann’s remark that the distance “from transcendental ideas to demonology is not great” hangs over the whole study. What survives is the diagnosis: the modern neutral state, derived from agnosticism rather than sectarian religiosity, originated in Hobbes’s distinction between inner faith and outer confession, and the liberal constitutional state grew from that crack. Schmitt’s book remains a strange and uncomfortable classic—a conservative Catholic’s account of how the sovereign state was born, how it was hollowed out from within, and why its most famous symbol ran aground. Strong’s foreword adds a further turn, noting that Schmitt’s doctrine of the exception parallels justifications of emergency power in the present, and that modernity increasingly makes all situations exceptional. The leviathan, caught on God’s fishing line with Christ as bait, becomes in Schmitt’s hands a warning about what happens when the state’s protection is withdrawn and only obedience remains.
