Stirner Contra Schmitt

This chapter compares the analyses of political theology from Stirner and Schmitt, highlighting their contrasting emphases, approaches, and methodologies. Schmitt’s ‘sociology of concepts’ leads him to understand secular political structures as afterimages of dominant metaphysical and theological views of a particular era, whereas Stirner offers a different perspective based on a perpetuation of faith out of a psychological desire to understand the world in a metaphysical way. The chapter will delve into the philosophical debates that arise from their divergent approaches. Their relation to the truth places both thinkers on opposite sides of the Euthyphro dilemma. Despite his criticism of Enlightenment thinking, Stirner still generally represents the idealist search for truth. From this position, he brands political theology as a vain pursuit of a non-existent moral realism that governs politics. Schmitt sees in political theology the necessary but arbitrary establishment of a political system by a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, independent of truth. For Schmitt, then, political theology revolves around voluntary submission to the system, whereas to Stirner, once one sees the folly of political theology, it seems self-evident that one would always pursue personal freedom.