Chapter 3 - Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt, and the University of California Regents

Summary

In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernest Kantorowicz explores the fusion of corporate office with the private person occupying this office, considering the historical and legal issues within this topic. Kantorowicz, however, was also to fuse his ongoing study of the past with his own office as professor in his refusal to sign the oath of loyalty requested by the University of California regents, 1949. Kantorowicz’s intellectual life as a medieval historian informed his decision not to sign the oath – in contrast to his Berkeley colleague, the Renaissance scholar, Leonardo Olschki. This example shows not only how one fashions one’s scholarly work, but how one is, perhaps on the deepest level, fashioned by the working out of one’s mental life. This chapter also considers how Kantorowicz incorporated pivotal concepts from his past, in this case, the notion of sovereignty from Carl Schmitt.