“Law, Sovereignty, and Political Theology: Jewish Thought in Conversation with Carl Schmitt” a talk by Miguel Vatter

Professor Miguel Vatter’s lecture examines the confrontation between Carl Schmitt’s conception of law as nomos (concrete order) and the alternative political-theological horizon that emerges from Leo Strauss’s engagement with Jewish thought. The talk discusses Schmitt’s critique of his own decisionist concept of sovereignty and his recovery in the 1930s of a Platonic-Aristotelian idea of law as nomos. In the same years, Strauss wrote that “the idea of [divine] law [nomos] is what unifies Jews and Greeks: the idea of the concrete, binding order of life.” Building on themes developed in Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt, the lecture compares their politico-theological conceptions of concrete order – what they may have in common and where they diverge and indeed oppose each other. By tracing Strauss’s encounter with Schmitt’s jurisprudence, the lecture shows how a non-sovereign understanding of law reframes contemporary debates on constitutional order, emergency powers, and the relation between theology and politics.
Professor Miguel Vatter is Professor of Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, and is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of several books, including Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (2021).