“BEYOND THE LEGAL NORM”. THE CONCEPT OF SOVEREIGN ACCORDING TO CARL SCHMITT’S POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND LEGAL DECISIONISM
Authors:   Russian State University for the Humanities, Antonov Boris A. 
Published: September 2024

The author of the article attempts to analyze the concept of sovereign according to Carl Schmitt’s legal decisionism and political theology. – the doctrines developed by the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Decisionism is rightfully considered as one of the basic concepts of Schmitt’s political and legal discourse. In his voluminous treatise “Dictatorship” (1910), Schmitt initiates a detailed doctrine of decizionism, which is based on the adoption of a political decision justified by the relevant authority (and not the law). Later (in 1922), Schmitt publishes his “Political Theology”, which again takes into its optics decisionalism and those of its state-legal concepts that can be correlated with theological ones. Sovereign, sovereignty and state of emergency are the first to belong to them. And finally, in his work “On Three Types of Legal Thinking” (1934), he works out classification of legal thinking (in which it is permissible to assume the simultaneous existence of all three of its types), rejecting normativism and justifying his own inclination towards decisionism and thinking in terms of the specific order. Some researchers of Schmitt’s works – and in particular his “Political Theology” – believe that by correlating sovereign with God, state of emergency with a miracle, and political action with Way of the Cross, Schmitt tried to protect his doctrine of decisionism from any criticism, since being “passed” through the prism of the theological, not the critical politics, it became an object of faith, taking the form and expression of an indisputable dogma. In fact, such an “exploratory” vision of Schmitt’s analogies did not explain either the interpretatively complex theory of the sovereign or his political theology, but only simplified and sometimes vulgarized it. While researching the genealogy of political power, Schmitt attempted to establish a type of sovereign being characteristic for a particular era (the Pope – during the Early and Classical Middle Ages (V–XIV centuries); the Protestant reformer (represented by J. Calvin) – during the late Middle Ages (XVI century), the absolute monarch – during the period of European absolutism (XVI–XVIII centuries), the German people – during the existence of the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–1933), the Reich president – during the birth of national socialism (the 30s of the XX century). The essential nature of each of them is revealed in the process of taking only those political decisions that the German Schmitt defines as decisions on introducing a state of emergency. At the same time, each epoch “sets” its own sovereign, what implies the obligatory subordination of its political decision to the spirit of the time in a particular historical period. Thus, with the progressive development of political theology, (legal) decisionism is also developing, resulted in the concepts of sovereign, sovereignty and emergency decision “acquiring” new semantic meanings