Of the 20 leading journals in political science (as measured by “impact factors”), only 1.34 percent of the articles published could be said to have religion as a primary topic, the analysis found.

Nicht, dass ich viel von Ernst Bloch halten würde, doch Blochs Ansicht über die politische Seite der Religion schliesse ich mich gerne an. In den Worten von Mark Lilla: “Religion (…) represents a political journey to discover what might exist, what lies dormant, in the human mind and society.”¹ Wenn das nicht für die Politikwissenschaften Grund genug sein sollte, sich mit Religion zu befassen.

1. Mark A. Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, New York 2007, 288. [back]

A new book by Eric Nelson (”The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought”) explores the phenomenon of political Hebraism:

When John Milton sought in 1649 to justify the creation of an English Republic, he used the opinions in the Midrash to formulate what Nelson calls republican exclusivism, the notion that only kingless government is legitimate. Taken up and developed by other writers, including Algernon Sidney and James Harrington, republican exclusivism based on Jewish sources became a cornerstone of anti-monarchic polemic in the seventeenth century and enjoyed a brief but important revival in the era of the American Revolution.

This is a book that you absolutely have to read, says Shalem Center’s Yoram Hazony:

The retrieval of the story of the “Biblical Century” is a project that has been the work of dozens of scholars in recent years. One of the reasons my previous letters have alluded to a new opening to Judaism and to the Jewish sources at the universities is precisely the rapidly increasing excitement surrounding this project of reconstructing the story of the 17th century in light of the Jewish sources, which can now be felt among historians, philosophers, political theorists and Bible scholars around the world. It’s still a relatively small movement. But there’s no doubt that the study of early modern Hebraism is also gaining ground quickly in academia, and has the potential to transform the story of the West as we’ve known it.

John Selden’s monumental book De Iure Naturali Et Gentium: Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum (1640), an outstanding work of political hebraism, can be downloaded here.

Further readings:

• Lloyd Jones, Gareth (1983): The Discovery of Hebrew under Tudor England. Manchester.
• Nelson, Eric (2010). The Hebrew Republic: Jewish sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.
• Schochet, Gordon/ Fania Oz-Salzberger/ Meirav Jones, eds. (2008): Political Hebraism. Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought. Jerusalem, New York.
• Sutcliffe, Adam (2004): Judaism and Enlightenment. Cambridge.

Focusing on religious studies, philosophy of religions, ethics, political philosophy and political science, anthropology, sociology, interreligious dialogue and communications theory the journal explores the religious dimension throughout; interdisciplnary approaches are encouraged.

The current volume deals with topics as different as:

• Hermeneutics in Hasidism
• Mircea Eliade and the Quest for Religious Meaning
• Westernization as Cultural Trauma: Egyptian Radical Islamist Discourse on Religious Education or
• Tribalism, Islamism, Leadership and the Assabiyyas.

Link: http://jsri.ro/

Today, efforts to locate the source of the social order in some original contract are out of fashion among political theorists. Yet the attitude behind such efforts–a deep-rooted abhorrence of extra-legal, or pre-legal, violence–continues to be a central feature of liberal political philosophy. (…)

The idea that all authority must obey a code of justice and right behavior was not a modern invention; it appears in the earliest civilizations of the ancient world. Yet, only in the last two centuries did there emerge a fully developed ideological paradigm that attempts to subject every mechanism of the state to legal regulation. The aim of this new paradigm is to prevent governments from wielding their power arbitrarily, and in so doing sacrifice the basic rights and liberties of man. In the words of the nineteenth-century jurist Benjamin Constant, the objective was “the union of men under the empire of the laws.” Constant, who offered the first liberal critique of the French Revolution, also correctly understood the danger posed to political freedom by the suspension of the law in times of crisis. In an article he wrote in 1814, he warned against the temptation to declare a state of emergency and extend it on various pretexts: “Presented initially as a last resort, to be used only in infinitely rare circumstances, arbitrary power becomes the solution to all problems and an everyday expedient.”

So how did George Washington persevere? As he acknowledged many times, he trusted “Providence.” George Washington had a silent ally to whom he regularly gave thanks, publicly and privately.

(…) For Washington, both the Bible and the writings of the ancients (especially military heroes) were storehouses of wisdom, and he studied each. When he ordered busts and portraits for the ornamentation of his parlors at Mount Vernon, he chose exemplars of the use of power from across the centuries: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia. He also hung prominently on the wall of his large dining room, the most public room at Mount Vernon, two key portraits: the Virgin Mary and St. John. He kept clearly in mind—and exemplified in his own speech and behavior—the dual message of the Bible: that men are capable of both brutishness and nobility.

Das ist beste aufklärerische Tradition. Aufklärung ist zwar immer insofern gegen die Religion gerichtet, als sie ihre unbedingte Autorität in allen Fragen des Seins nicht anzuerkennen bereit ist. Sie ist aber ebensowenig die Kehrseite des Atheismus. Nicht ohne Grund war der Deismus die vorherrschende Geisteshaltung in Bezug auf die Gottesfrage gerade vieler kontinentaleuropäischer Aufklärer. Auch der Rückgriff auf die Antike ist typisch für den Humanismus dieser Zeit. Numa steht Pate.

(…) There is some dispute concerning how religious most of America was during the years of the War of Independence. The shortage of clergymen and even churches was always severe along the paths of the westward migration. On the other hand, recent studies suggest that religious practice was more intense than previously thought. The “First Great Awakening,” a broad renewal of religious conviction, was slowly spreading through the colonies, even in the Anglican South, threatening the laws of religious establishment, for example, in Virginia.

Thus, it can be no surprise that at the first meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, in September 1774, when news was received of the sudden outbreak of war in Boston, the very first motion on the floor was for a prayer to seek the guidance of Almighty God. Resistance immediately erupted—not because prayer was thought inappropriate, but because John Jay and others protested that they could not pray in the same terms as other people present (Anabaptists with Quakers, Congregationalists with Episcopalians, Unitarians with Presbyterians). Sam Adams settled the dispute by announcing loudly that he was no bigot and could pray along with any minister so long as he was a patriot.

(…) In Pennsylvania and New York, the primary meaning of liberty seemed to be freedom from central government—liberty meant, at the very least, minimal government. In part, this flowed from the Whig tradition of Britain, and its strong emphasis on commercial and market liberty. It was also fed by Adam Smith and other Scottish commonsense philosophers who, along with John Locke, saw in human nature a “system of natural liberty.”

Der amerikanische Weg der Aufklärung verläuft anders als in Kontinentaleuropa. »Virtue was a presupposition of the Constitution, but it did not appear in the document itself. Nor did religion.« schreibt Gertrude Himmelfarb über die amerikanische Verfassung. »Both were omitted for the same reason: because they were presumed to be rooted in the very nature of man and as such were reflected in the moeurs of the people and in the traditions and informal institutions of society.«

Benjamin Rush, einer der Unterzeichner der amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitserklärung, befand »The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.« Alexis de Tocqueville notierte in seinen Betrachtungen über die amerikanische Gesellschaft, dass in Frankreich der Geist der Religion und der Geist der Freiheit in direktem Gegensatz stünden, wohingegen in Amerika beide auf demselben Boden wüchsen. Die USA, das Land, in dem das Christentum am stärksten ist, ist daher zugleich »das aufgeklärteste und freieste«.

Deisten und Unitarier, britische Protestanten, Römisch-Katholiken, Evangelikale und Juden fochten für dieselbe republikanische Idee. Himmelfarb: »In seeking respite from the religious passions of the Old World, the Americans did not, like the French, turn against religion itself.« In der Vision einer »city upon a hill« trafen sich das christliche und das republikanische Amerika. Wichtig war, wie Tocqueville schrieb, nicht etwa, dass alle Bürger der einen wahren Religion angehörten, sondern überhaupt einer Religion. Das schliesst ein säkulares Staatsmodel keineswegs aus: »The separation of church and state, however interpreted, did not signify the separation of church and society. On the contrary, religion was all the more rooted in society because it was not prescribed or established by the government.«