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The Political Theology of Prerogative: The Jurisprudential Miracle in Liberal Constitutional Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2008

Clement Fatovic
Clement Fatovic
Affiliation:
Florida International University. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Liberalism ordinarily requires authorities to provide a full public account of their actions so that citizens can critically evaluate those actions for themselves, but in times of life-threatening emergency, liberalism sometimes evinces a willingness to place unquestioning faith in executives who promise to deliver it from such evil. In doing so, liberalism violates its moral and epistemological commitment to “make public use of one's reason in all matters.” This article uses the framework provided by Carl Schmitt's concept of political theology to analyze the reluctance of liberals to ask questions of the executive in times of danger and uncertainty. That framework helps explain how both the content and the structure of liberal thought can shift in a theological (and specifically theistic) direction when faced with an emergency. This article demonstrates that the quasi-religious rhetoric sometimes used to justify expansions of executive power in practice has precedents in the theories of John Locke, William Blackstone, and Alexander Hamilton. Analysis of their writings suggests that the use of quasi-theistic language in discussions of emergency powers can have the effect of insulating “godlike” executives from the kind of scrutiny and criticism that liberalism usually promotes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 487 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2008

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