In his masterwork Leviathan and other major political works, Thomas Hobbes advocates that the state suppress men's private moral judgments in order to maintain civil peace. However, in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt argues that Hobbes's theorized sovereign state, which limits its subjects' speech but not their beliefs, doesn't go far enough in the way of bypassing opinions of good and bad. Schmitt claims that, contrary to Hobbes's theory, only a state that places restrictions upon men's outward expressions of their beliefs and those inner beliefs themselves could ensure that subjective judgments of the political do not engender an eventual reemergence of civil conflict. This paper seeks to demonstrate that Schmitt's critique of Hobbes exposes flaws not only in the means by which the latter suggests that men's private judgments of good and bad may be suppressed, but also in the pursuit of a politics that bypasses opinion itself. After drawing primarily from the Leviathan to reconstruct Hobbes's case for preventing men's opinions from having political implications, the paper proceeds to explain how Schmitt reappropriates Hobbes's thought in The Concept of the Political to advocate for suppressing men's private judgments in the context of his own civil conflict-ridden Weimar Republic. The paper then examines Schmitt's reconsideration of Hobbes in light of the Nazi regime's ascendance, and, upon considering both its tragic dimension and historical accuracy, concludes that Schmitt's critique of his predecessor does not reveal the need for state control over both speech and belief but instead lays bare the futility of attempting to secure civil peace by quieting political controversy.
Surya Gowda (Thu,) studied this question.