Throughout his Weimar writings, Schmitt often asserts the existence of a dissociation between what is natural-scientific and what is “personalistic,” “human,” “specifically real,” “alive” within the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. For example,

In this chapter, I discuss why Schmitt felt the need to emphasize this supposed distinction or opposition in the work of the great seventeenth-century English political theorist, particularly in his famous Concept of the Political. As Hobbes remarked, “The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear” (I, 14), and Schmitt recognizes something vital, substantive, and fundamentally human in Hobbes's grounding of the state in the fear of death. On the eve of Weimar's collapse, Schmitt, with the intellectual aid of a young admirer named Leo Strauss, sought to retrieve this primal source of political order and free it from the elements that Hobbes himself had found necessary to employ to construct a state on this foundation: natural science and technology.