Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

III. The Leviathan Lurking Behind Liberalism 
To put the argument advanced in this section bluntly: it is not only that liberalism 
assumes the Leviathan and tries to limit it, but that the task of limiting the Leviathan is an 
impossible one. To defend (or assume) a state, is to defend (or assume) an absolute state.
[Liberal thinkers] want sovereignty to be both a foundation for liberalism and not 
one; they seek an absolute that is not quite absolute…To argue that there is a 
“Law of the Peoples” or “absolute rights” that trump and ameliorate sovereign 
power must mean either than sovereign power does not exist (since it must be 
ultimate to exist at all) or that such rights are merely wishes in the face of 
sovereign power…Indeed, this is exactly what any reading of Hobbes tells us; if 
we are going to choose sovereignty, we are choosing something that is absolute” 
(
ibid
. 231). 
So, when Pettit (2001, 145) writes that “the attempt to defend [the absolute] state” is “anathema 
to contemporary republicans,” his claim rings both true and false. On the one hand, he seems 
clearly correct that no contemporary republican (or liberal) thinkers wish to defend an absolute 
state. On the other hand, a state cannot, fundamentally, be anything other than absolute, and thus 
arguments that seek to defend a non-absolutist state gloss over what they actually do: justify an 
entity that centralizes and monopolizes the legitimate use of violence in society.
Let me propose a thought experiment. Imagine that in coming decades a major and 
militant movement emerged in this country against the escalating repression of civil liberties.
Imagine that this movement grew in size and that significant portions of this movement sought to 
overthrow the government (since neither political party was willing or able to halt the 
surveillance state). Facing such a threat, how do you think the U.S. government would respond?
Would they engage in pervasive surveillance of political dissidents? Would they infiltrate and 
disrupt oppositional organizations? Would they ban protests that do not receive prior 
authorization from the state? Would they imprison people without trials? Would they engage in 

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mass arrests whenever dissidents gather publically? Would they assassinate leaders? Would they 
fire into crowds? 
I would suggest the following principle: 
Any
state faced with an existential threat – a 
challenger seeking to dismantle or overthrow it – will do whatever it can to maintain its power 
for as long as possible, most certainly including the suspension of basic rights and the 
mobilization of violence against its citizens. This suggests that, at its core, 
the state is absolute
.
If a state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence – and, perhaps even more importantly, 
has such an extremely unequal capacity for violence in comparison to citizens’ capacity to do 
violence – it is not possible to put 
actual limits
on the state’s power. In other words, no amount 
of legal rights, or divided powers, or checks and balances actually undercuts sovereignty. The 
liberal state is still a sovereign state. As Carl Schmitt (2005, 5) has famously put it: “Sovereign 
is he who decides on the exception,” where the exception is any major political, economic or 
social disturbance that requires the state – in its efforts to maintain control and normalize the 
situation – to use extraordinary measures. The sovereign “decides whether there is an extreme 
emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it…[I]t is he who must decide whether the 
constitution must be suspended in its entirety” (
ibid
. 7). In focusing on the extreme case, the 
exception, Schmitt pulls back the veneer of rights and rule of law that characterize liberal and 
constitutional states, to uncover sovereignty. “What characterizes an exception is principally 
unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation 
it is clear that the state remains where law recedes” (