ABSTRACT
The term “legal theology” stresses the tendency towards the moralisation of legal normativity, which came to the fore in particular following the caesura of 1989 in concomitance with a highly optimistic vision of globalisation and the so-called humanitarian wars. The secular recovery of ethically charged and often theologically rooted concepts marks a clear inversion of the primacy of political law. The persistent presence of religions in the public sphere as a sociological phenomenon can be understood functionalistically as a cohesive force of the social and ethical bond. The paradigm of political theology developed in the twentieth century with the essential contribution of Carl Schmitt is crucial to understanding the rationale of modern politics, underpinning political rationalism.
