Vatter, Miguel E. “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation Between Political Theology and Liberalism.” CR: The New Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 161–214. doi:10.1353/ncr.2005.0025.

Excerpt:

“Among those thinkers who experienced the emergence of totalitarian regimes and lived to offer a theoretical analysis of them, it is not infrequent to notice the absence of what in our times is presented as unquestionable evidence: the conviction that liberalism constitutes a political system antithetical to totalitarianism. Arendt and the early Frankfurt School, for instance, did not share this conviction. For them liberalism does not effectively counteract totalitarianism, and may even favor conditions that make it possible. The various phenomena that attest to this inversion of liberalism come under the name of “dialectic of Enlightenment.” The recent work of Giorgio Agamben offers a provocative and increasingly influential recasting of this dialectic, a hypothesis as to how liberalism, understood as a system of rights based on the absolute respect of human dignity, may be internally connected to totalitarian phenomena. Agamben locates the connection in the very idea of the rule of law. Modern liberalism demands that individuals give to their conduct the form of law so as to allow for the mutual coexistence of their freedoms. Behind this demand, Agamben identifies a biopolitical finality that seeks to bring human life under the control of the law in order to exercise unlimited mastery over it.”

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