Politics, Economics, and Religion in the Global Age: Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence and Capitalism as Religion

Abstract

Walter Benjamin derives his primary conceptual strength from divergent commentaries on canonical texts rather than from a systematic historical standpoint. Illustrating an understanding of and a high esteem for existing texts, the dialogue with the past in the literary medium provides the German-Jewish intellectual with the categories needed to evaluate the social and political events of his own lifetime. This sets him apart from Carl Schmitt, a staunch Catholic whose notion of the sovereign arises from the vision of God's omnipotence and who transposes the political sphere into a theological context. A close reading of Benjamin's Critique of Violence and Capitalism as Religion provides valuable insights into the anthropological foundations for the political, religious and economic issues facing global economies today.