Racial absolutism enacts Schmittian sovereignty while liberal constraint represents a rival bounded sovereignty

Evidence

Racial absolutization exemplifies and embodies Schmittian sovereignty: racial purification and anti-pollution controls, separation, ghettoization, the declaration of emergency law to stave off increasingly successful resistance, a death order for anyone considered a threat to social order and power. Racial secularization, by contrast, seeks to bring sovereignty back under constitutional constraint, “hampering” it in principle by “checks and balances” designed also to ameliorate the paranoia or at least to undercut its likelihood. But this hampering, far from being simply to chain the omnipotent sovereign, constitutes a different conception of sovereignty, one less omnipotent than bounded in conception by guiding principles and generalized delimitations. The latter is the sovereignty of the autonomous, self-determining individual, supposedly guaranteed to reach a common conclusion or outcome by drawing on the universalizing dictates of reasons in the comparable circumstances. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1627

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the state-of-exception / emergency-law logic in recent politics and the racial-state literature; also echoes the sovereign-decision theme from the reader’s corpus on vigilante and racialized sovereignty. — connects to: Neoliberal spontaneous-order rhetoric masks theorists’ Schmittian power to define state sovereignty — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2196; Racial secularization displaces sovereign control from state to privatized economic forces — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1628; Liberalism historically promoted racial reasoning and racist exclusions as central to state formation. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1654
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘death order for anyone considered a threat’ as the defining gesture of racial sovereignty — apartheid’s emergency-era death squads as pure Schmittian sovereign acting.