America’s Leviathan: From Hobbes to Trump on Crisis Constitutionalism and Emergency Powers

• In Event: Reckoning with Liberalism

Brief Overview

This paper examines Thomas Hobbes’s sovereign, Carl Schmitt’s state of exception, Clinton Rossiter’s constitutional dictator, and Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to argue that constitutional dictatorship is a vehicle for neo-fascist politics.

Author

• Robert T. F. Downes, University of Connecticut