The State.

Throughout his Weimar writings, Schmitt often asserts the existence of a dissociation between what is natural-scientific and what is “personalistic,” “human,” “specifically real,” “alive” within the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. For example, It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of the abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century [Thomas Hobbes] became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and a natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature. … [J]uristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life. In this chapter, I discuss why Schmitt felt the need to emphasize this supposed distinction or opposition in the work of the great seventeenth-century English political theorist, particularly in his famous Concept of the Political. As Hobbes remarked, “The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear” (I, 14), and Schmitt recognizes something vital, substantive, and fundamentally human in Hobbes's grounding of the state in the fear of death. On the eve of Weimar's collapse, Schmitt, with the intellectual aid of a young admirer named Leo Strauss, sought to retrieve this primal source of political order and free it from the elements that Hobbes himself had found necessary to employ to construct a state on this foundation: natural science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]