Carl Schmitt delivered his famous lectures on Thomas Hobbes ’ Leviathan in 1938, and they were later published as Die Leviathan in der Staatslehre Thomas Hobbes ( The Leviathan in Thomas Hobbe’s Political Theory ). In fact, Schmitt was responding to one of his disciples, Helmuth Schelsky , who claimed that Schmitt did not capture the Hobbesian statement about political action. Schmitt's argument follows a line of conservative historicism to read the course of early-modern philosophy: Hobbes’ theoretical revolution consisted in opposing the image of an artificial body to political theology , understood as unity of the state with the totality of the European spiritual being. Therefore, Hobbes incarnates the break between the High Middle Ages and modern political thought. For Schmitt, this picture is beyond any theoretical articulation that Hobbes constructed— he omits the De Cive in his study, and his commentary on the text itself is rather poor . Hobbes would then be the author who...