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Review Essay* The Jewish Roots of the Modern Republic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2012
Extract
A concise study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant Hebraica does not immediately suggest a provocative contribution to contemporary debates about secularization, religion, and politics. But that is what Eric Nelson’s learned yet accessible book about the Jewish sources of early modern republicanism provides.1 According to Nelson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, the distinctive authority of the Hebrew Republic made possible the Protestant development of three central ideas: republican liberty, care for equality, and religious toleration. Nelson’s rehabilitation of the neglected Christian Hebraism of the late Renaissance and Reformation seeks to challenge historiographies which characterize modern political thought in terms of a rationalist independence from theology. These dominant narratives roughly describe a transition from political theology to political science that excludes religious conviction from political argument.2 Nelson invokes (but does not engage) Mark Lilla’s description of “the Great Separation” of religion and politics as one expression of this threshold of disenchantment.3 He also associates this narrative with figures as diverse as Hans Blumenberg, Leo Strauss, C. B. Macpherson, Michael Oakeshott, John Rawls, and Jonathan Israel. The book, therefore, contributes to scholarship that complicates the primacy of the “Enlightenment” origins and character of Western politics. It also raises complex questions about our relation to these origins. Much like Nelson’s own argument about the way Jewish sources helped reorganize accepted categories, his book opens new spaces for scholarly conversation across multiple fields of study. This review briefly raises normative implications of Nelson’s book for scholars of theology, ethics, and religious studies. I examine stronger and weaker versions of Nelson’s historical narrative as well as his gestures at their implications.
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References
2 Nelson, The Hebrew Republic.
2 Nelson recognizes the difficulty of the term “secularization.” For his purposes, he takes it to mean “the banishment of religious argument from the sphere of acceptable political or public discourse” (141 n. 2). I take up the limits of this approach below.
3 Lilla, Mark, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007)Google Scholar. Lilla’s story describes an “intellectual rebellion against political theology in the West” (6).
4 In addition to several helpful citations for specialist studies on Christian Hebraism, Nelson identifies many of the most important contributors to political Hebraism, including J. G. A. Pocock, Lea Campos Boralevi, Frank Manuel, Kalman Neuman, Michael Walzer, Gordon Schochet, and Fania Oz-Salzberger.
5 The phrase belongs to English Hebraist and separatist minister Henry Ainsworth (cited in Nelson, 74).
6 Nelson notes several studies in the ongoing debate about Hobbes’s religiosity, offering a mediating position between strong materialism and Christian orthodoxy: Hobbes was a “deeply heterodox thinker who nonetheless retained some sort of belief in revealed religion” (195 n. 198).. Here Nelson contrasts Hobbes’s account of biblical and divine authority to Machiavelli and Spinoza. Machiavelli’s own religious and political views have become a matter of new scholarly dispute: see, for example, Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli’s God (trans. Shugaar, Antony; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and McCormick, John P., Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Nelson does not discuss the important role of late medieval nominalism and voluntarism in many contemporary secularization narratives. In addition to Charles Taylor and John Milbank, see now Gregory, Brad, The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It seems Nelson takes Protestant notions of divine sovereignty to adopt a “decisionist picture of God.” See Margalit, Avishai, “Political Theology: The Authority of God,” Theoria (April 2005) 37–50Google Scholar, at 38.
8 Nelson carefully traces various efforts in Jewish and Christian exegesis to coordinate the so-called “pro-monarchical” passages in Deuteronomy 17 and the “anti-monarchical” 1 Samuel 8 where God tells Samuel that Israel has rejected God in asking for a king. While his focus is the influence of certain rabbinic readings of 1 Samuel 8, it would be interesting to learn how early modern theorists read other passages influential in these ongoing interpretive debates (i.e., 1 Samuel 9, 2 Samuel 23, Judges 8 and 9, 2 Kings 9, and Hosea 13). Oliver O’Donovan surveys various biblical passages in his account of political authority and likens the debate to discussions of sovereignty in modern political thought. See O’Donovan, Oliver, The Desire of the Nations Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar esp. 30–81.
9 Nelson, Eric, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See, for example, Witte, John Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Unlike Nelson, Witte emphasizes anti-Erastian Calvinist constitutional forms. One virtue of Nelson’s book is his account of how Erastian arguments sponsored their own distinctive kind of religious toleration.
11 Most scholars of religion are familiar with the liberal–communitarian debates of the latter half of the twentieth century. In fact, some played a prominent role in them. Contemporary political theory, however, is increasingly animated by republican alternatives to both liberalism and communitarianism. Nelson cites Philip Pettit’s influential contrast between a republican notion of freedom as “non-domination” and liberal notions of freedom as absence of interference. See Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Perhaps the most significant scholar of religion to employ a version of Pettit’s argument is Stout, Jeffrey (Democracy and Tradition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004]Google Scholar and (Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010]).
12 For a non-specialist guide to these developments, see From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (ed. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999).
13 Kahn, Paul W., Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) 3Google Scholar. Kahn’s strategy of unmasking this “theological dimension” is similar to the many Christian critiques of democratic nationalism. Most recently, see Cavanaugh, William T., Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011)Google Scholar.
14 Ibid., 124.
15 See, for example, Smith, Jonathan Z., Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar, Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar, Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, Markus, Robert A., Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2006)Google Scholar, Batnitzky, Leora, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, and Lewis, Thomas A., Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Interestingly, two of the most significant Protestant political thinkers who offer sustained engagement with the Hebrew Bible provide such accounts: Anglican theologian Oliver O’Donovan and Calvinist philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. For the latter, see Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
17 Nelson admits that “Spinoza’s path” that deflates the authority of the Hebrew Republic is “a real and important dimension to the story of political Hebraism” (134). But, he argues, “it was the Israel of Grotius, Cunaeus, Selden, and Harrington that more profoundly shaped the development of what would emerge as liberal political thought in the modern West” (134). I suspect Nelson would need to extend his story beyond 1700 to make good on this claim. Skeptics will argue that he only pushes our dating of a secular modernity later than others.
18 Taylor, Charles, “Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo,” in Varieties of Secularism in A Secular Age (ed. Warner, Michael et al.; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010) 300–21Google Scholar, at 300.