From the Commissary Dictator to the Katechon: Continuity in Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Intermediate Authority

Abstract

What relation is there between the commissary dictator and the katechon in Schmitt's writings? In this paper I argue that both the dictator of Dictatorship and the katechon of Nomos of the Earth are characterized by a specific conception of authority. This intermediate and limited form of authority, distinct from sovereignty and the regular office, was key Schmitt's attempts, in the 1920s, to save the administrative apparatus of the state from its subsumption to the "machine of government" typical of the theory of the Rechtsstaat.Oriented by a task arising from a concrete problem and supported by a hierarchical conception of dignity, Schmitt claims this limited personalist authority can preserve the 2 creative humanity of the civil service. Reconstructing this form of authority, informed by eschatological fragments from his Tagebücher, I argue that Schmitt's 1920s works are haunted by a kind of shadow of the katechon, which is only given body thirty years later in Nomos of the Earth. Although there shifts in the weighting of elements, parallelling his turn from "decisionism" to "concrete-order thinking", I argue that, at least in its dominant specificities, this form of authority returns in the doctrine of the katechon.

The modern Epimetheus: Carl Schmitt's katechontism as reactionary chronopolitics

“…This aligns my paper with a series of other commentaries on Schmitt which of late have come to emphasize the importance of concrete order thinking for Schmitt's work throughout his career and life (Brännström, 2016;Croce and Salvatore, 2021). A related route of analysis is pursued by Luke Collison, who traces the structural likeness between Schmitt's conception of the katechon and his earlier theory of the commissarial dictator (Collison, 2021).…”