Political theology in crisis: Orestes Brownson between Hobbes and Schmitt

Abstract

This chapter situates antebellum literature within a larger political theological tradition by reading of Orestes Brownson’s political and theological writings. In response to three distinct crises in three different settings—seventeenth-century England, nineteenth-century America, and twentieth-century Germany—a diverse array of political theorists share a remarkably similar response. Crises of the market, political authority, the law, and representation are in the hands of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Orestes Brownson, and Carl Schmitt opportunities to posit a new foundation for the political. Across these accounts, we find a common denominator of representation: under liberalism’s prevailing semiotic ideology nothing has a definite meaning anymore. Though the particularities of each response are different, each thinker posits a theological and representational supplement to the state that each contends will rectify the critical conjuncture in which they write. Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s miracle, Brownson’s incarnation, and Schmitt’s representation offer each thinker a way to transcend possessive individualism, link divine and civil authority, and incorporate definite meaning into political life. Accordingly, each of this chapter’s sections outlines a contemporary crisis and political theory’s response to it, a corpus which includes 1850s American literature.