The Sovereign’s Beatitude

• Author: Zoltan Balazs
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211042047
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211042047

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(3) 428 –448

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211042047

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Article

The Sovereign’s

Beatitude

Zoltan Balazs1

Abstract

Though it may sound awkward to ask whether the political sovereign is

happy or unhappy, the question is relevant to political theory, especially

within a political theological perspective. Because man was created in

the image of God, human happiness needs to be a reflection of divine

beatitude, and as divine sovereignty is, at least analogically, related to

political sovereignty, the conceptual coherence is secured. The main

argument is, however, that the analogy does not hold. I shall show how

St Thomas Aquinas’s short treatment of God’s beatitude may mislead

us about power, fame, riches, and dignity being essential to happiness,

based on an analysis of Franz Kafka’s major novel, The Castle, and a few

other writings by him. I shall argue that our tradition of political thinking

and behavior remains ambivalent on this issue. The political sovereign

is born out of our unhappy condition, yet its power, fame, riches, and

glory suggests to us that it has appropriated our happiness. But for this

very reason it cannot be happy, and it therefore suggests a false analogy

between the divine and the political sovereign. It is fundamentally at

variance with our happiness, which incites us to abandon, reject, and

eventually, kill it.

Keywords

Kafka, Aquinas, Hobbes, political sovereignty

1Institute of Political Science (Centre of Social Science), L. Eotvos Research Network,

Corvinus University, Budapest, Hungary

Corresponding Author:

Zoltan Balazs, Institute of Political Science (Centre of Social Science), L. Eotvos Research

Network, Corvinus University, 2-4 Kozraktar u, Budapest, 1098, Hungary.

Email: balazszoltan1@t-online.hu

1042047PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211042047Political TheoryBalazs

research-article2021

Balazs 429

Introduction

Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle, the usual K., in search of admission,

erroneously enters the room of “liaison secretary” Bürgel in the Gentlemen’s

Inn during the night. K. is now desperate and tired, having exhausted all con-

ceivable possibilities to meet Klamm, the mysterious top bureaucrat. All his

“liaisons” have proved to be useless. At his entering, Bürgel awakens and,

perhaps surprisingly (not in Kafka’s novels, of course), begins a conversation

with K., which quickly becomes a monologue. At the end of his monologue,

with K. half-consciously sitting/laying at his feet on the bed, Bürgel makes a

point, an observation that reads as a typical Kafkaesque containment:

Like a robber in the forest, a member of the public surprising us by night forces

us to make sacrifices of which we would never otherwise be capable—well,

that’s how it is if the member of the public is still there, encouraging us and

forcing us to do so and spurring us on, and we set it all in train half unconsciously.

But how will it be later, when that’s all over, when the member of the public

goes away, satisfied and free of care, and we are left alone, defenceless in the

face of our abuse of office? It doesn’t bear thinking of. Yet all the same we are

happy. How suicidal happiness can be! (Kafka 2009, 235)

Bürgel is talking about the very situation they are in, ostensibly giving the

clue to K., who is unable to grasp this and misses the opportunity—the usual

way Kafka frustrates his readers. What is extraordinary and exceptional here,

though, is that Bürgel reveals something about the castle that has so far been

a place and institution beyond comprehension. And when it comes to revela-

tions, our theological sense is rightly alerted. The explicit reference to happi-

ness and death, strongly connected, in the quotation, satisfies our expectations.

What can be a weightier political theological issue than the happiness and

life—or death—of the secular sovereign, to whom, as Hobbes says, we “owe

our peace and defense!”

It is somewhat weird to talk about the happiness or unhappiness of the

secular sovereign. Kafka never uses this term,1 but he does not use the term

“bureaucracy,” either, which does not make him any less of a great analyst of

modern bureaucracy. Of course, Kafka was not a scholar, and in that sense,

1. For a survey of Kafka’s writings from a “political theoretical” point of view,

see Dodd (2002). Whereas some of them are more straightforward (alienation,

power, social hierarchy), others, especially those of his later works, are more con-

troversial. Dodd does not consider a political theological possibility, however.

Nonetheless, his general assessment of Kafka’s importance for political theory

is sound: “[his] fictions are composed as intellectual and moral challenges to the

reader, offering us the potential if analytical insight and radical perspective which

it is for us to activate. Seen in this way, his works are constructed as provocations,

invitations to see in the mechanisms of power (. . .)” (146, original italics).