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In this article I argue that Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt, despite the century separating their major works, draw on a shared Catholic tradition that can be viewed as a common intellectual context, allowing the two thinkers to be brought into conversation in heretofore overlooked ways. This shared context, and even at times a shared language, does not mean Schmitt and Tocqueville take the same lessons from this Catholic tradition: Schmitt draws from the Ultramontane and absolutist tradition of Maistre and Cortés while Tocqueville favours the Jansenist and republican tradition of Pascal and the othermen of letters at Port-Royal. In this article, I show how Tocqueville’s use of Jansenist republicanism allowed him to articulate a sophisticated legal critique of decisionism from within the boundaries of political theology. This criticism can admit Schmitt’s existential idea of the state connected to the site of the decision while also prioritizing democratic practices of participation. I conclude that Tocqueville’s political theology opens up space for amity--not against but alongside enmity--and is the necessary complement to Schmitt’s conception of the existential state.
