ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of freedom as it appears in Schmitt's texts, specifically his analyses of freedom of expression and freedom of religion, both of which he regards as being originary in nature. The originary nature of religious rights comes to the fore in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, where Schmitt explores the Leviathan myth as a force of self-destruction incorporated within the concept of the state itself by Hobbes. The telos of the modern liberal constitution according to Schmitt is the protection of the sphere of freedom of the individual, which is believed to precede the state and to be in principle unlimited. Such freedom finds expression in the form of fundamental rights or liberal rights. A structure similar to that of freedom appears when Schmitt carefully distinguishes his own 'substantial' conception of equality from the equality of everything that bears a human face, which he associates with meaninglessness, folly, evil and self-destruction.
