The Eclipse of Natural Right in Walter Benjamin’s Natural History of Baroque Sovereignty

In Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin offers a “natural history” of Baroque sovereignty. This paper examines how the Baroque allegory of nature, implied in the natural history approach, informs Benjamin’s legal critique and analysis of Fascism. I begin by discussing Benjamin’s historico-philosophical approach to law and justice in “Critique of Violence,” where the evocation of natural history occurs against the backdrop of Benjamin’s rejection of any affirmative concept of natural right. This negative criticism is shown to have originated in Trauerspiel, where natural history as a method contains the discoveries Benjamin made about the 17th-century Baroque allegory of nature in philosophical, theological, and aesthetic terms. The portrayal of nature as fallen, transient, and positivized informs Benjamin’s theory of Baroque sovereignty and his understanding of the fate of legal positivism. At the crux of this paper, I show that this conservative-revolutionary hermeneutics enables a profound understanding of reactionary political phenomena from the 19th-century Romantic counter-revolution and restoration to the 20th-century Fascist triumph of legal positivism. In particular, Benjamin’s natural history reveals the origins of Schmitt’s total state in these persisting tendencies with origins in the political theory of the 17th-century absolute monarchy. However, regardless of the metaphysical depth of Benjamin’s natural history of Baroque sovereignty, his dismissal of the natural right tradition leads him to pit fallen positive law against redemptive utopianism in a way that fails to expound any realizable just ends. I conclude that the limitation of this approach, which is reflected in antinomian interpretations of Benjamin, can be remedied with an expanded program of natural history that calls forth the materialist dialectical critique of historical contradictions of rational natural right without rejecting it.