Back to Palaver.
The heart of Palaver's argument is that Thomas Hobbes' vision of the secular state in Leviathan is that of a Girardian ketechton.
Recall how, according to Girard, the demise of archaic religion threatens to unloose social violence. Satan has been thrown out of heaven and now prowls the earth. The archaic religious scapegoating mechanism, where all (the community) were against one (the scapegoat), has returned to the primordial all against all. As a result, social dissolution threatens. There is no cathartic outlet for rising mimetic violence
Thomas Hobbes saw the looming catastrophe that was emerging in modernity. Witnessing the wars of religion that had resulted from the fracturing of the sacred order due to the Protestant Reformation, Hobbes argued that the secular state had to step into repress the escalating mimetic violence that was emerging between religions and individuals. As Palaver observes:
Hobbes's solution to the religious and political crisis of his time was the proposal to establish an absolute power that could prevent the outbreak of civil war. According to Hobbes, the civil sovereign should be the ruler of both politics and religion; he should be civil sovereign as well as head of the Church and sole interpreter of Scripture. If we study Hobbes's political philosophy carefully, we will realize that his state functions like a katéchon: it provides for the permanent prevention of chaos and violence...The aim of Hobbes's state is the restraining of the apocalyptic state of war.
Simply put, the secular nation state functions as the katechon to prevent the contagious outbreak of widespread mimetic violence. The key difference here is the secularization of the katechon. Where ancient societies relied upon sacred violence, the secular state is a demythologized power and can perform its katechontic function only if stands over and above religion. As Palaver writes:
Hobbes's political concept, the powerful state, resembles his image of God in many ways. Just as the [Biblical] God of the final speeches of Job or the [Egyptian] God Horus have to restrain the chaotic monsters, Hobbes's state has to prevent the outbreak of chaos or civil war. As Carl Schmitt notes, the purpose of Hobbes's state—which originates in the war of all against all—is the permanent prevention of that war. The analogy between Hobbes's image of God and his concept of the state and of sovereignty is an example of secularization...Basically, the state becomes the new God of modernity, the national God who stands above the fractious gods of the Christian denominations. But notice what has happened here. A bait and switch has just occurred. By stepping in to prevent the Apocalypse, the state takes over the role of justifying violence. The scapegoating once hidden by archaic religion is now masked by a new sacred order, the violence of the secular state. Palaver makes the observation:
Hobbes’s transfer of the theological concept of the katéchon to the secular realm of politics, for instance, is not a secularization of the true spirit of the Gospel. It is the secularization of a sacrificial theology.
Here’s the question: How will the world be saved? We face, again, the choice between conversion and the katechon, a choice between “the true spirit of the Gospel” and the modern state’s katechonic “secularization of a sacrificial theology.” Modernity has chosen the state. And Christians have chosen the state! We apprehend threats all around us and run to the state as savior, the katechonic Restrainer who will hold back the chaos. And as our new God, the state preserves the social order just as the old archaic religions once did: through scapegoating violence. And that’s the Devil’s greatest trick. Through the state, as our katechonic savior, we use Satan to cast out “Satan,” the innocent scapegoat. Mimetic violence is directed toward the scapegoats identified by the state which secures national solidarity and peace.
The tragedy of Carl Schmitt is repeated. The katechonic savior is, once again, revealed to be the Antichrist.
