Complex Space or Broken Middle? Milbank,Rose, and the Sharia Controversy

Abstract

Remarks by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggesting that British law recognize Islamic law in some cases provoked a public outcry. I reflect on what may have caused the strong reaction to Williams's remarks by situating them between the work of John Milbank and the work of Gillian Rose. What Williams, Milbank, and Rose are struggling to articulate is a "politics of the middle," a political theory that does not privilege the sovereignty of individual or state, and which puts intermediary associations at center stage. A politics of the middle offers the only alternative to political theology, I argue. However, attempts to articulate a politics of the middle have remained cloaked in residual political theology. Critics of secular liberalism, who often content themselves with offering genealogies instead of presenting a constructive alternative, should explore the possibilities held by a politics of the middle, possibilities (and challenges) exposed by the sharia controversy.     

Armitage on Locke on International Theory: The Two Treatises of Government and the Right of Intervention

Summary

The paper examines David Armitage's claim that Locke makes an important contribution to international theory by exploring the place of international relations within the Two Treatises of Government. Armitage's suggestion is that the place of international theory in Locke's canonical works is under-explored. In particular, the paper examines the implication of Locke's account of the executive power of the law of nature which allows third parties to punish breaches of the law of nature wherever they occur. The corollary is a general right of intervention under the law of nature. Such a right could create a chaotic individualistic cosmopolitanism and has led scholars such as John Rawls to claim that Locke has no international theory. In response to this problem the paper explores the way in which Locke's discussion of conquest, revolution and the right of peoples to determine the conditions of good government in chapters xvi to xix of the second Treatise contributes to a view of international relations that embodies a law of peoples.     

Non-domination and the libera res publica in Cicero's Republicanism

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses to what extent the neo-Republican accounts of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit adequately capture the nature of political liberty at Rome by focusing on Cicero's analysis of the libera res publica. Cicero's analysis in De Republica suggests that the rule of law and a modest menu of individual citizens’ rights guard against citizens being controlled by a master's arbitrary will, thereby ensuring the status of non-domination that constitutes freedom according to the neo-Republican view. He also shows the difficulty of anchoring an argument for citizens’ full political participation in the value of non-domination. While Cicero believed such full participation (by elite citizens) was essential for a libera res publica, he, like other elite Romans, argued for participation on the basis of liberty conceived as the space to contend for and enhance one's social status. The sufficiency of the rule of law and citizens’ rights for securing a status of non-domination taken together with their insufficiency for ensuring a libera res publica suggests that neo-Republican accounts of liberty do not fully capture the idea as articulated in Cicero's Republicanism.     

A European Enlightenment in the Promised Land? The Jewish Kulturkampf at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the European Kulturkampf in the nineteenth century from the points of view of the Russian Hebrew writer Judah Leib Gordon and the founding father of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl. Gordon’s literary outlook emphasizes the tension between the traditional Jewish religious leadership and the maskilim as an instance of the sweeping all-European Kulturkampf phenomenon, in which the problem of the rabbis was the last issue that had not yet been solved. He believed that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel, without the elimination of the rabbis’ authority, carried serious dangers. In his dystopian feuilleton published in 1885 depicting the future Jewish state, he argued that the victory of liberalism was a historical necessity in order to avoid a radical orthodox and nationalistic hegemony. Like Gordon before him, Herzl feared that losing the basic humanistic principles of the Enlightenment the Jews had acquired in Europe would be one of the outcomes of their settling in the Land of Israel. In his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland he declared: “Stand by the principles that have made us great: Liberalism, Tolerance, Love of Mankind. Only then will Zion be truly Zion.” Gordon and Herzl both expressed their concerns in their fictional works, probably wishing that these would serve only as warning signs.     

Writers and politics in West Germany

This article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland.     

When one heart can speak to another: the role of tenderness in Rousseau’s theory of passions

The aim of this paper is to show how tenderness (attendrissement) plays a key role in Rousseau’s theory of emotion. A deeper analysis of tenderness will shed light on the complex dynamics of Rousseau’s conception of the passions, which appears to be one of the principal means of understanding both the transition from the homme de la nature to the homme de l’homme and the development of human morality in the latter. Furthermore, the concept of attendrissement allows us to view from an unfamiliar, original standpoint a central problem of Rousseauian ethics, which has been debated, particularly in recent literature, namely that of recognition. Tenderness, thanks to its authentic and spontaneous nature, is able to retain the principles of the law of nature – pity and love of the self – while elevating them to an ethically superior height. For this reason, it might be considered a positive fulfillment of amour-propre capable of eliminating the pathological and competitive aspects that connote, from a historical but not constitutive point of view, the reciprocal interdependence of consciences.     

Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty.     

Lucretius on Religion

Abstract

A number of Enlightenment thinkers of questionable piety drew inspiration from Lucretius's philosophic poem On the Nature of Things. Contemporary atheists, in their renewed vigor, have continued the Enlightenment attack on faith. Our atheists have sought to create a tradition for themselves by claiming Lucretius as an ancient exemplar of their own impious forthrightness. This study argues that Lucretius was more fully appreciative of the necessary and salutary relationship between religion and politics and would not appreciate being co-opted by either group. A return to Lucretius may be useful in understanding the foundation of the early modern project and revealing the imprudence of modern atheism.     

Thomas Carlyle's Calvinist dialogue with the nineteenth-century periodical press

This article signals at a dearth of critical engagement with Thomas Carlyle's Presbyterian heritage resulting from the received whiggish narrative of his Calvinism as unenlightened, anachronistic, and backward-looking. It proceeds to challenge this view by examining closely Carlyle's creative use of key Calvinist concepts in his cosmopolitan and enlightened dialogue with the contemporary periodical press over British and European cultures. Carlyle is shown to be an adept purveyor both of the Edinburgh Magazine's enlightened idiom and of Blackwood's morally conservative and artistically cosmopolitan agendas, while also making creative capital of the Anti-Jacobin's powerful Gothic imagery and of the critical verve of the Westminster Review. The main addressees of Carlyle's reading of the signs of the times, I argue, are contemporary Whigs. Carlyle's depiction of Macaulay as a ‘spiritual hippopotamus’ spells Carlyle's broader critique of the modern lack of imagination of the spiritual which sponsors deterministic religious and secular readings of reality. Carlyle displays his enlightened Calvinist perspective in discussing the French Revolution through such key Scottish Enlightenment concepts as free will, conscience, civilisational and moral progress, and divine providence. Insightful and creative use of his inherited Scottish Calvinist heritage characterises Carlyle's open, cosmopolitan reading of the signs of the times.     

The Art of Contested Histories: In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] and the Pacific Legacy

ABSTRACT

European artists of the eighteenth century framed an exotic textual and visual narrative of the Pacific, drawing largely on knowledge gained from exploratory journeys of the 1760s and 1770s. Visual representations of the Pacific became socially fashionable and commercially successful. The French wallpaper manufacturer, Dufour, captured this commercial potential in a dramatic, panoramic wallpaper that told stories of European encounters with Pacific peoples: Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804). Yet it was selective, defining the Pacific by moments of contact with Cook and other explorers. Lisa Reihana's In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] (2015–17) dramatically interrogates the eighteenth-century narrative of the Pacific, responding to Dufour's wallpaper in a complex, panoramic work. By attending to ways in which the factual and speculative are brought together in Enlightenment artefacts and Reihana's restaging of them, we explore how art might be put to use in the service of historical interpretation.     

Restorationist Counter‐Enlightenment: Thomas M'Crie on the Concept of Civil Liberty

Enlightenment notions for Counter‐Enlightenment purposes have not to date been used to provide a comprehensive context for Scottish religious history‐writing in the age of Counter‐Revolution and Restoration. The Evangelical historian and divine Thomas M'Crie's studies on Scottish Reformation history, Life of John Knox and Life of Andrew Melville, published in 1811 and 1819 respectively, exhibit an abundance of historiographical material for research. M'Crie was among the most renowned writers of his own time, but his historical works have been briefly passed over in recent secondary sources. The main purpose of this study is to rescue M'Crie's historical works on the Scottish Reformation past from near oblivion. This article argues that M'Crie produced an apology for the Scottish Reformation, adopting an aggressive style that attacked Scottish Enlightenment historians and thinkers such as William Robertson and David Hume, especially in the matter of their treatment of John Knox and Andrew Melville. M'Crie tried to restore his chosen past in order to influence the religious and political affairs of Scotland. In M'Crie's Counter‐Enlightenment historiography, the concept of civil liberty and Presbyterianism become interchangeable in a Restorationist religio‐political discourse. That is why M'Crie's enthusiasm for the Scottish Reformation constitutes the most representative example of the Presbyterian interpretation, which held its own against Enlightenment influence.     

Enlightenment,Haskalah, and the State of Israel

ABSTRACT

This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel’s government, judiciary, and political discourse. It traces this complex legacy using a semantic distinction between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne’orut, that illustrates their importance in the political and discursive legacies of the State of Israel. The article then explores the recent populist and nationalist assaults against some of these legacies.     

Jeremy Bentham on Utility and Truth

SUMMARY

Jeremy Bentham has two very strong commitments in his thought: one is to the principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as the fundamental principle of morality; the other is to truth, as indicated, for instance, in his opposition to falsehood and fiction in the law. How, then, did Bentham view the relationship between utility and truth? Did he think that utility and truth simply coincided, and hence that falsehood necessarily led to a diminution in happiness, and conversely truth led to an increase in happiness? This article addresses this issue through two bodies of material: the first consists of Bentham's writings on religion under the heading of ‘Juggernaut’ and dating from 1811 to 1821; the second consists of the writings on judicial evidence dating from 1803 to 1812 and which appeared in Rationale of Judicial Evidence.     

‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law’: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s

This paper analyses two critiques of the jurisprudential basis of settler colonialism in Australia published in the early Victorian periodical press. Review articles in the North British Review and Fraser's Magazine in the 1840s deployed claims of legal sophistry to dispute the fiction that Australian colonies were settled, rather than conquered, and that the country was a terra nullius. By examining the politics and rhetoric of each article, the significance of legal ideology for both literature promoting colonization and humanitarian critiques of colonial policy is assessed. Through a combination of discourse analysis and intellectual history, the North British Review article is read as fusing Scottish Enlightenment concepts of social evolution with the rhetoric of sensibility to defend the existence of Indigenous rights to land and to argue for the degenerative implications of colonial social practices. Similarly, the Fraser's Magazine article offers an epitome of the place of law in colonial policy-making by invoking utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to law to rationalize doctrines of sovereignty and jurisdiction, minimizing legal protections for Aborigines while maximizing the legal powers of colonists. By tracing the use of jurisprudential rhetoric in reviews published in two leading metropolitan journals, the paper offers evidence that the literary sphere contributed to the emergent culture of colonial legality.     

Gerhard Schøning,Gothicism and the Re‐evaluation of Northern Landscapes

In this article we shall survey some central views of the north and the people living there, as it was presented by different scholars from the 16th to the 18th century. In particular, we will focus on Gerhard Schøning (1722–1780). Many historians have stressed the big influence that French Enlightenment philosophy had on Schøning. This article, however, will also point to other ideas and traditions that inspired him. One is the old Swedish cultural and patriotic movement called Gothicism. Schøning did, no doubt, share many ideas with Swedish Gothicism. Even so, important factors like aesthetics, scholarly orientation and religious ideas changed greatly during this period, and this effected both Gothicism and Schøning's relation to it. It is also fundamental for us to clarify these changes when trying to explain the re‐evaluation of northern landscapes in the 18th century.     

Introduction: Religious toleration in the Age of Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment’. It begins by characterizing the Enlightenment's attitude towards religion as an opposition to bigotry and ecclesiastic authority based on a particular interpretation of the European Wars of Religion. Then it acknowledges the problematic nature of the phrase ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which seems to push some of the most relevant eighteenth-century realities to the margins of history. Next, it challenges some common scholarly assumptions regarding Enlightenment ideas on tolerance. In particular, it disputes that these ideas were essentially principled, secular, pluralist and liberal. By way of conclusion, this introductory article suggests that the Enlightenment's main contribution to the history of toleration is found not in the originality or subtlety of its ideas, but rather in the promotion of a new mentality according to which toleration came to be regarded as an essential feature of modern civilization.     

Historian or Philosopher? Ian Hunter on Kant and Vattel

Summary

Ian Hunter's essay pursues several lines of argument, one explicit and the others not. The first is that of an historian correcting the mistaken view among Kantian commentators that Kant's conception of international justice had displaced Vattel's as the dominant one in nineteenth- and twentieth-century international thought. The second, which is not acknowledged, is that of a philosopher entering a debate over the relative cogency of the two conceptions. To accomplish this unacknowledged philosophical task, Hunter exaggerates the importance of Kant's metaphysics in his treatment of international justice and understates the element of raison d'état in Vattel's casuistical ethics. The subtext in both lines of argument is criticism, political rather than either historical or philosophical, of Kant's effort to articulate principles of international justice, together with implicit advocacy of Vattelian ethics as a corrective to Kantian ideology.     

Mankind and its Histories: William Robertson,Georg Forster,and a Late Eighteenth-Century German Debate

The Scottish historian William Robertson's works on European encounter with non-European civilizations (History of America, 1777; Historical Disquisition […] of India, 1791) received a great deal of attention in contemporary Germany. Through correspondence with Robertson, as well as by reviewing and translating his texts, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg took an active part in this process. The younger Forster also became simultaneously involved in a debate which was unfolding on the German intellectual scene concerning the different or equal “value” (Wert) of the various “races of mankind” (Menschenrassen), engaging especially the relevant views advanced by the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant. The debate was firmly embedded in the context of an emerging ‘science of man’ in the German Enlightenment, to which Forster contributed an almost incomparable richness of empirical knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication. Forster's direct engagement with Robertson's work during the same period (mid-1780s to the early 1790s) creates a context through which the Wissenschaft vom Menschen in the Aufklärung and the Scottish version of the science of man – built on the neighbour disciplines to which Robertson's historiography was crucially indebted – is set in an interesting comparative light. This paper, part of a comprehensive project tracing the German reception of Robertson as an instance of inter-cultural exchange in the Enlightenment, will exploit the opportunities presented by one particular and documented case for a general comparison of enlightened ‘sciences of man’.     

Confucianism,Secularism, and Atheism in Bayle and Montesquieu

It should be hardly surprising to discover that eighteenth-century European perspectives of other cultures were shaped to a large extent by concerns internal to European political life. Objective or unprejudiced accounts of non-European cultures are rarely found among travellers, missionaries, and philosophers of the time. While the insights of Enlightenment political thinkers on the non-European world may shed little light on the cultures being commented upon, they are useful for assessing the nature of the Enlightenment's engagement with cultural traditions external to Europe. In particular, Enlightenment conceptions of China were extremely varied and reflective of the debates between Enlightenment thinkers, especially on the proper relation between religion and politics. I shall argue that Montesquieu's account of Confucianism in The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, first published in 1748) was in part influenced by his critique of Bayle's position on the role of religion in society as expounded in his Various Thoughts on the Comet (Pensées diverses sur la comète, published in 1682). While Montesquieu's account and assessment of Chinese thought and culture are “Eurocentric,” his evaluation of Confucianism nevertheless arises from a considered philosophical position on religion and politics.     

A heavenly poise: radical religion and the making of the Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Scholarship continues to identify the Enlightenment with secularization, despite the theological tenor of much of the movement's canonical literature. This article proposes an explanation for such a dissonance, before addressing the matter more directly through the work of Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle. The claim is that scholars have been unduly dependent upon theological commentary in reaching the fixed verdict of secularization, inferring ‘atheism’ and disenchantment from the polemical utterances of a privileged orthodoxy rather than the primary sources themselves. Seen apart from such controlling anathemas, icons of the radical Enlightenment such as Spinoza and Bayle emerge as deeply spiritual thinkers, challenging the theocratic assumptions of their age with theological certainties of their own, interrogating orthodoxy with a resolutely biblical rationality. The final section suggests the continuity of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft with the spiritual rationalism of the seventeenth century. If so many of the Enlightenment's landmark thinkers were inspired by religious ideas, the concept of a secular modernity must be open to revision.