Political sentiments, sovereignty, religion and human rights

In this text, we focus the debate on rights (including human rights) at the turn of the 20th century and within the process of fascism development. We examine the relationship between legal-political culture and religious culture. We draw on scholarly sources arising from the debate on the concept of sovereignty at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century within the field of legal-political philosophy, examining texts by the Portuguese legal historian Paulo Merea and his critique of the political-legal thought of Carl Schmitt, a theorist of Nazism. We combine content analysis of the texts examined with the methodology of intellectual history, broadening our examination of the research findings to the historical context, which has enabled us to analyze the extent of cultural and religious resistance to the state of exception in John Keynes’s England.