Stirner and the Critique of Political Theology

In his Politische Theologie (1922), Carl Schmitt declared that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”; “not only,” he goes on to add, “because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.”1 The key example Schmitt gives is that of the exception in jurisprudence, which he says bears the same structure as the miracle in theology.