Guardian
December 3, 2011
As Carl Schmitt has shown, forms of political organisation correspond to metaphysical images of the world. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the current political and economic malaise of Greece.
The history of occidental democracies is the story of educated and affluent Protestants gradually diverting popular reverence from landed nobility and the divine right of western kings to the right to own and utilise property for profit. In secular polities, belief in salvation through obedience to the omnipotent God's will on Earth is not eliminated but transformed; "God", originally a mysterious maker (as he still is in Judaism, eastern Christianity and Islam), became something terrestrial if equally abstract: the nation, the market or the revolutionary mass.
The old God sanctioned the king to act as Christ, and suffer for the benefit of his people before bouncing back; the market-god and its plebeian rival expected the same from government with bourgeois liberty and social justice vying for the role of the holy spirit. Today, worshippers of the omnipotent market and of the masses seem ready to dispense with the services of any government-as-Christ. Salvation will come through the will "of the market" or of the "people" directly materialising itself.
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