The Divine Right of Founders

Review: The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Part 2/2

This is part 2 of a review of “The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes” by Carl Schmitt. Find Part 1 here.

In the eighteenth century the leviathan as magnus homo, as the godlike sovereign person of the state, was destroyed from within. The distinction of inner and outer became for the mortal god a sickness unto death. But his work, the state, survived him in the form of a well-organized executive, army, and police as well as administrative and judicial apparatuses and a well-working, professionally trained bureaucracy.

The Silicon Valley founder has a divine right. Some Silicon Valley founders are atheists. They have as much divine right to their startup as the believers do. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless others cultivate a reputation akin to local gods. Legitimacy in the company derives from them. They have a special revelatory insight to the nature of their company that cannot be matched by anyone, based on the legitimacy of ruling over the startup from its origins. Per Thiel: "A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket." Thiel derives part of his philosophy from Rene Girard, who ascribes to the idea that nations contain a founding crime. There is much more to elaborate on Girard’s philosophy and the founding crime, but that is out of scope for this essay.

Schmitt’s most famous work, Political Theology, beings chapter three with a stunning quote: “The central concepts of modern state theory are all secularized theological concepts.” It is difficult to understate the significance of this statement not just to states but to large software companies, which are larger, more generative, and more powerful than many nations. Due to the influence of Thiel and Jobs, among others, most of Silicon Valley believes that companies inevitably stray when they lose their founders and the legitimacy that comes with them. In the modern day, few have extended the same concept to nations.