When Will We Be Prophets?
The phrase “political theology” is most closely associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a thoroughgoing critic of liberal constitutionalism who insisted on defining sovereignty as the ability to decide on “the suspension of the entire existing order.” Schmitt’s thought tends to become newly fashionable in times of creeping right-wing authoritarianism in the United States. Heath is not bringing up Schmitt to engage in the kind of authoritarian cosplay that so thoroughly mars our legal and political discourse. Nor is Heath particularly interested in what many lawyers take to be the central challenge posed in Schmitt’s Political Theology— whether liberal constitutionalism can be expected to constrain a sovereign in times of emergency. This is either an empirical or theoretical challenge, which Heath thinks is readily answerable and ultimately uninteresting.
Recommended Citation: J. Benton Heath, When Will We Be Prophets?, 48 Fordham Int'l L.J. 1063 (2025).