Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Government

Reader 1

Ioannis Evrigenis

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

This paper offers an internal critique of Carl Schmitt's Nazi-era state theory from the perspective of the counterrevolutionary political-theological tradition to which Schmitt belongs. Using Schmitt's political-theological method which holds that all political theories have a systematic theological structure, the paper argues that Schmitt's 1933 turn to National Socialism contradicts this tradition. The paper proceeds in five sections. The first establishes the political-theological framework that will be utilized throughout the paper. The second develops Schmitt's concept of the katechon—the restrainer of lawlessness drawn from Christian eschatology— which he uses as a model for his theory of the state. The third section builds an overview of the counterrevolutionary tradition through Augustine, Hobbes, and de Maistre, arguing that each thinker builds what Schmitt calls a representative state — a state that stands above the people and derives its legitimacy not from the people's immediate will but from its capacity to repress man's natural dangerousness and maintain peace. The fourth section compares and contrasts Schmitt’s Weimar-era and Nazi-era theories. The fifth section delivers the critique: the Nazi state's logic dissolves the representative state, produces perverse incentives that misalign the state from its katechonic task of ensuring order, and ultimately generates the chaos it claims to restrain. The paper concludes that Schmitt’s Nazi-era state theory is not a refinement of the counterrevolutionary tradition but its antithesis — a political theology that, like the liberal and anarchist theologies Schmitt attacks, undermines the conditions of stable political order.

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