SOURCE: "Political Theology and Reason of State in Samson Agonistes," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 95, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 1065-97.

In the following excerpt, Kahn discusses Milton's Samson Agonistes in the context of Renaissance ideas of state authority, focusing on the tragic nature of the choices individuals had to make when ethical and political demands were at odds.

In his treatise on Political Theology of 1922, Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign as "he who decides on the exception."¹ Schmitt, a conservative scholar of constitutional law during the Weimar Republic and later a supporter of the Third Reich, was interested in the paradox that the sovereign both "stands outside the normally valid legal system, [and] nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety…. The essence of the state's sovereignty [is] not … the monopoly to coerce or to...