The Hidden Dialogue between Strauss and Schmitt
Professor John McCormick (University of Chicago) spoke on “Political Theology and Biblical Atheism” in an Institute of Philosophy and Religion lecture that will revisit the late Weimar (1932) “hidden dialogue” between Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), then a dissident Catholic political theorist, and the young Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a former fellow of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, a political Zionist, and member of a group of Marburg philosophers around Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger. Strauss’s review of Schmitt’s work on the “concept of the political,” which first appeared in Max Weber’s Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (1932), was a turning point for Strauss.
Strauss’s piece on Schmitt had two immediate effects. It sharpened Schmitt’s own understanding of the genealogy and conception of the political, and it moved Schmitt to support Strauss’s application for a Rockefeller Foundation stipend that brought him to Paris first and later to England, where he researched the political philosophy of Hobbes. In 1933, Schmitt, who thought of Strauss privately as a “fine Jew,” joined the Nazi party (much like Heidegger) and began a steep career that made him, for a while at least, the “chief jurist” of the Third Reich. Strauss in turn led the difficult life of a Jewish emigré intellectual, first in England and later in the United States until, in 1949, he began to teach at the University of Chicago where eventually he held the position of Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science.
John McCormick is Professor of Political Science. His research and teaching interests include political thought in Renaissance Florence (specifically, Guicciardini and Machiavelli), 19th and 20th century continental political and social theory (with a focus on Weimar Germany and Central European emigres to the US), the philosophy and sociology of law, the normative dimensions of European integration, and contemporary democratic theory. He is the author of Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge, 1997), and Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge, 2006). His latest work is Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, 2011).
The lecture was held Thursday, March 29 (5pm) at the Photonics Center.