The Limits of Bonhoefferian Responsibility: On Jean Bethke Elshtain's (Mis)Use of Bonhoeffer

ABSTRACT

Jean Elshtain claims that her defense of torture draws from the Christian tradition. To defend this claim, she makes direct appeal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her defense of torture has taken on greater political significance today. This article will refute Elshtain's claim to Bonhoeffer. To do so, this article will first point to Bonhoeffer's explicit rejection of torture in Ethics, then argue that Bonhoeffer's rejection of torture draws from themes initiated in Creation and Fall. Placing Bonhoeffer in conversation with David Decosimo will show that Bonhoeffer holds a distinction between relation-ending and relation-perverting acts. Responsible actors may be called to perform the former class of actions, like tyrannicide, in extraordinary situations. However, the latter class of actions, like torture or rape, constitutes a limit to responsible action that we find no evidence Bonhoeffer is willing to cross. Elshtain, and others who wish to provide “Christian” defenses of torture, must look elsewhere.     

Francis Hutcheson on Luxury and Intemperance: The Mandeville Threat

This paper looks at two figures in the modern, European, eighteenth-century debate on luxury. It claims to better understand the differences between Francis Hutcheson and Bernard Mandeville by exploring how Hutcheson treated the topic of luxury as a distinction between two desires, thus differing from Mandeville's concept of luxury, and a concept of temperance based on moral sense. It explores why Hutcheson believed that luxury was a moral, social and political issue and particularly why he considered Mandeville the embodiment of a threat that went beyond simple considerations of the content of The Fable of the Bees to touch on reflections on the equilibrium of a social and political system. It aims to show how the psychological and the moral dimension were connected to Hutcheson's political theory and how luxury was one of the key points of this connection.     

The good and the bad of the same: On the political value of historical repetition in Angola

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ historical repetitions.     

God,not Caesar: Revisiting National Socialism as ‘political religion’

This article argues that use of the concept of ‘political religion’ to describe the radicalized political movements of the twentieth century has again gained currency in recent years as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the global upsurge of religiously inspired violence and that research with respect to religion proper – what religion is, its role in public life, its evolving reception by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – can advance the discussion. The article subsequently offers the author's own research as evidence of the concept's applicability to the case of National Socialism. Analysis focuses, specifically, on a movement in nineteenth century Germany to develop a secular system of ethics, a project that eventually led, ironically and tragically, to the emergence of a new faith in a absolutized ‘collective will’ as the transcendent source of all moral values. The National Socialist movement subsequently co-opted this article of faith, the article argues, by transforming Hitler into a holy medium for the salvific dictates of what became, by the early 1930s, an unimpeachable ‘Volkswille.’     

Capitalism and the Fall of Market Morality: How Piketty,Sandel, and the Skidelskys Vindicate R. H. Tawney's Economic Ethic

This article reappraises the thought of the British economic historian, writer on political economy, Christian socialist, and great intellectual of the Labour Party, R. H. Tawney on market morality. It extracts and synthesizes moral insights from Tawney's two most influential books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Equality in order to present his economic ethic, its political implications, and Christian theological roots. Tawney's ethic, which holds that market morality, social ethics, and politics are inseparably linked, is then evaluated in the light of contemporary economists and philosophers, including Thomas Piketty, Michael Sandel, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, and Harry Frankfurt. Tawney's ideas are found to be insightful and useful, particularly in linking unrestrained capitalism with inequality, exploring capitalism's opposition to market morality, finding synergies between theological and secular humanist critiques of capitalism, and in addressing criticisms of the moral significance of equality itself.     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.     

Expressing Islamic feminism in Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter

This article examines the presence of a strictly Qur'anic base shaping the Islamic feminism of Ramatoulaye, the narrator and main protagonist of Mariama Bâ's francophone classic So Long a Letter (1979). I argue that the widely circulated insistence by critics and readers of Bâ's epistolary style novel on the practice of Islam in West Africa, particularly in Senegal, as a syncretic presence eagerly adapting to indigenous non-Islamic beliefs and practice, has led to an overly generalized and somewhat inaccurate perception of Islam in Africa. Through my reading of some key Islamic concepts described in Bâ's novel, such as the mirath, polygamy, prayer and sunna, I situate my reading of Ramatoulaye's expression of Islamic feminism within an African and Islamic feminist reading and further position these within the cultural context of the practice of Islam in Senegal. By her ‘strategic self-positioning’, as defined by Islamic feminist Miriam Cooke, among others, within a small group of Senegalese Muslims – locally known as ibadu Muslims – Ramatoulaye succeeds in enacting Islamic feminism in her spiritual persistence for a strict adherence to the Qur'an and in her resistance to the temptation to expand the Islamic precepts of her faith.     

The Indexification of Poverty: The Covert Politics of Small-Area Indices

In recent decades statistical indices have become a dominant method for measuring many features of the social world. While the resulting enumerations are regularly cited by critical human geographers, the wider political stakes of indexing the world remain unaddressed. In this article, we theorise indexification as the process through which composite statistics transform theoretical constructs into epistemic objects, and then geographically bounded rankings. Rather than a neutral process, we argue that these epistemological manoeuvres can mask various forms of violence. Through a detailed analysis of the UK's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), we highlight the clandestine politics of indexification and their tendency to conceal harms meted out by the state. Seeking a more critical reckoning with indices, we conclude by calling for and outlining a project of radical indexification—a participatory, democratic, and transparent endeavour that takes spatial justice as its organising principle.     

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Symbol as Experience

Dreams and Discourses (1627) by Francisco de Quevedo is a Baroque satirical work composed by five dreamlike narrations that criticize the moral decadence of seventeenth-century Spanish society. Traditionally, it has been read as a conservative Catholic text that conveys an official view of truth and morality. This article attempts to question that reading by addressing the use of subversive strategies, such as wordplay and ambiguity. Through an analysis of the paratext, the narrative voices, and the satire of popular trades—e.g., bankers—the article sheds light on the text's self-erosion of established moral and epistemological values. It concludes that behind its apparent religious correctness, the work reflects on the fundamental opacity of language. Theoretically, Quevedo's satire is understood as a disseminatory artifact following Derrida in Dissemination.     

Elite Analysis of Democracies' International Policy Introduction

This essay offers a critical appreciation of Mark Lilla's Stillborn God. To his credit, Lilla understands the primacy and enduring appeal of political theology, as well as the danger of intellectual complacency about the underlying principles of modern politics. Lilla maintains that modern politics is a relatively recent and radically novel experiment that aims at nothing less than displacing a primordial and perennial way of constituting politics with reference to the divine. My essay compares Lilla's analysis of the fundamental antagonism between political theology and modern liberal politics to Strauss's analysis of the theological-political problem. In doing so, I bring to light both the strengths and limits of Lilla's attempt to clarify the relationship between politics, biblical religion, and philosophic rationalism.     

Decadent Conservatism: Politics and Aesthetics in The Senate

Abstract: The relationship between late-Victorian Decadence and Aestheticism and politics has long been vexed. This article explores the hitherto under-explored confluence of conservatism and avant-garde literature in the period by introducing The Senate, a Tory-Decadent journal that ran from 1894-7. While Decadent authors occupied various political positions, this article argues that The Senate offers a crucial link between conservatism and Decadence The article presents the journal in its political and publishing context, outlining its editorial position on such issues as the Liberal Unionist-Conservative coalition governments, Britain's relationship with Europe and the threat of ‘State Socialism’, as well as its valorisation of Bollingbroke and eighteenth-century Toryism, and its relationship to, and difference from, key Decadent journals the Yellow Book and The Savoy. It then goes on to articulate its relationship to Decadence by focussing on the presence of Paul Verlaine in its pages and its vitriolic response to the press coverage of Oscar Wilde's trials. The article concludes by exploring the surprising wake of The Senate, briefly tracing the editors' influence in the development of Modernism and links with the journal BLAST.     

Two AHA Sessions: The Revolutionary Mr. Kuhn and the Evolutionary Mr. Bertalanffy

Abstract

Quantitative methods of content analysis have become established in most subfields of political science, but remain relatively unutilized in studies of political theory, despite the exclusive focus of that subfield on textual sources. This article develops a variation of content analysis—termed usage analysis—and employs it to resolve a standing debate in scholarship on Cicero's political theory regarding the synonymy of the major Latin terms for the state (civitas and res publica). The resulting distinction between these concepts then informs an exposition of Cicero's ideal state not as the Roman Republic itself or the mixed constitution alone, but as a universal, everlasting political society supported by justice, a mixed constitution, and active citizenship.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.     

Introduction: Between Morality and Anthropology—Sociability in Enlightenment Thought

Summary

This introductory article sketches out the evolution of the concept of sociability in moral and political debates from Grotius to the German Romantics, so as to elucidate the range and scope of the contributions to this special issue. The article argues that the concept of sociability serves as a bridge between moral theory, domestic politics and international relations, just as it also connects the jurisprudential mode of enquiry to subsequent Enlightenment enquiries into political economy, aesthetics, individual and collective moral psychology, forms of government and philosophical history. Particular attention is paid to sociability's relationship to moral scepticism, and to its position between morality and anthropology. The article highlights the central role of Rousseau in radically reformulating the debate and in sparking new controversies up to the nineteenth century.     

On Political Theology: The Hidden Dialogue between C. Schmitt and Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies

In recent years, Ernst H. Kantorowicz's work The King's Two Bodies (1957) has been the object of both historical and philosophical research. Kantorowicz decided to subtitle his book ‘A Study in Medieval Political Theology’, but few scholars have actually recognised his work as research in ‘political theology’. The aim of this article, then, is to uncover the sense(s) in which his book might be considered a work of ‘political theology’, especially in the sense coined by Carl Schmitt in 1922. Such a discussion ultimately aims to contribute to the foundation of political-theology research, a subject that has been widespread among European intellectuals in the twentieth century and which continues to be a focus of interest. This article argues that Kantorowicz's book can be interpreted as a practice of—and also an enriching addition to—Schmitt's thesis on political theology, even if it does not mention Schmitt's name. Such a conclusion is only possible by accepting that there was a heated dialogue between Kantorowicz and Schmitt through Erik Peterson's work. The article further discusses its approach with other scholars that, even though they are based on similar hypotheses, make different conclusions.     

The work of Norbert Elias

This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius assumed an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. The idea of terra nullius has a central place in the political thought of thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. Although terra nullius, consolidated in European colonial thought in the early modern period, differed conceptually from the doctrine of trusteeship as the colonial legitimation for Africa, both instituted a moral justification for the appropriation of native land, and of empire itself.

The contention is that the trajectory from the one doctrine to the other was aligned with the change in the underlying moral framework of the rights and duties of Europeans and non-Europeans. In the early days of colonisation, there was a certain permissiveness on the part of the colonisers to appropriate the land of American Indians. By the late nineteenth century this seemed to change into a moral requirement for civilising the native Africans. Edmund Burke's conceptualisation of trusteeship illustrates the way in which traditionally conceived natural rights were transformed into fundamental social rights, and central to this idea was the expansion of European ‘civilised’ moral communities on which rights now depended.     

French Intellectuals and the Iraq War

Because of its representation of marginal and often violent milieux, the status of noir fiction has long been that of an ‘inferior’, less ‘literary’ genre. It could be argued that its frequent references to popular culture, and especially television and film, explain its appeal to a wide audience, one that does not necessarily read other genres. The intrigue and setting of the noir novel enables it to be perceived primarily as a ludic activity while often dealing with issues which are both political and ideological. Brigitte Aubert's work makes frequent references to film, TV and popular literature, and this article aims to examine the way these are used, how they play with notions of reality and fiction, how they can create an ironic distance which allows the writer both to create a sense of complicity with the reader and to criticise the society she presents.     

The editor and the CIA: Herbert Tingsten and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: a symbiotic relationship

This article deals with the relations between perhaps Sweden's most influential publicist during the Cold War, the professor of political science and editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter 1946–1959, Herbert Tingsten, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA-sponsored organisation gathering the elite of the world's non-communist leftist intellectuals, Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Swedish sub-branch called ‘Svenska kommittén för kulturens frihet’ (SKfKF). Tingsten was a professor of political science at University of Stockholm from 1935 to 1946 and then editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter from 1946 to 1959. It argues that parts of Tingsten's work both as an opinion maker and as a scholar was part of a symbiotic relationship with the CCF and the SKfKF. Tingsten was the foremost propagator for the ‘end of ideology’ thesis in Sweden and the article argues that this campaign was inspired by the CCF's advancement of this idea in the 1950s and 1960s. Tingsten was personally acquainted with several CCF intellectuals and he visited several of the CCF's conferences. The article also makes the case that Tingsten helped the CCF and the SKfKF's causes and furthered their agendas in a number of ways during his time as editor-in-chief of DN. For example, Tingsten allowed the SKfKF to use DN as a platform for presenting its ideas and programmes to a broader public. The article thus shows how the CCF network of intellectuals influenced opinion making in non-aligned Sweden.     

The rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters

This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.     

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: THOMAS JACKSON AND THE CONTROVERSY OVER PRODIGIES IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES I

Abstract

This article focuses on Hobbes's use of metaphor, particularly the larger structural metaphor of the artificial man in Leviathan. Hobbes claims to draw his political animal according to the figurative outlines of the natural one, despite the significant differences between these two bodies. In Part I we see the scientifically-minded Hobbes reject the old dualistic imagery of body and soul, act and will; but in Part II the politically-minded Hobbes appeals to exactly these dualistic distinctions in order to lend his radical vision of the state the numinous appeal of the medieval and Tudor formulations. An understanding of Hobbes's rhetorical strategy, and what I call his strategic use of dualism, can show how the recent linguistic turn in Hobbes studies can in fact re-open the much older debate on the overall unity of his philosophical system.