Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (Gifford Lectures) | 
| Author: Jean B. Elshtain
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $17.49
You Save: $17.51 (50%)
New (27) Used (8) from $13.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 270922
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0465037593
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.15
EAN: 9780465037599
ASIN: 0465037593
Publication Date: June 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Excellent condition.
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, sovereignty has cut across the diverse realms of theology, political thought, and psychology. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, the debates about sovereignty?complete independence and self-government?have dominated our history. In this seminal work of political history and political theory, leading scholar and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of “sovereignty” as it relates to all the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self. Examining the early modern ideas of God which formed the basis for the modern sovereign state, Elshtain carries her research from theology and philosophy into psychology, showing that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self. As the basis of sovereign power shifts from God, to the state, to the self, Elshtain uncovers startling realities often hidden from view. Her thesis consists in nothing less than a thorough-going rethinking of our intellectual history through its keystone concept. The culmination of over thirty years of critically applauded work in feminism, international relations, political thought, and religion, Sovereignty opens new ground for our understanding of our own culture, its past, present, and future.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Worth the Effort July 10, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This work will be valuable if you have any desire to understand (if I may paraphrase a Jamesian title) the varieties of sovereign experience. Tracing the origins of sovereignty back to the "birth", if you will, of the nation-state in the late Middle Ages, Professor Elshtain aptly demonstrates how misguided it is to lable this period "The Dark Ages". In as much as this time was (as she puts it) "God drenched", with its unquestioned interweaving of the religious and the political on a much broader framework than prevails today in the form of the decaying Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Papacy at the head of a "world-wide" Christian community, all such tracing must begin with theological notions of Divine Sovereignty.
Interestingly, one finds here diversity of opinion and approach, not the staid uniformity that is often the harbinger of current views on this Age generally and Catholic theology specifically. Initially there arose an image of God as a "bound" (the author's word) sovereign. Mighty? Yes, but operating only within the "bounds" of His own Creation, thus avoiding arbitrariness and allowing access by our limited human intelligence and understanding. This is a view of Divine Sovereignty that the author ascribes to the works and thoughts of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. [As a personal aside, I am not sure how our educational system can claim "educated" graduates while avoiding (as I believe it does) virtually all confrontation of these two towering intellects.] As I understand it, this is a sovereign concept based on authority, legitimized and in fact delimited by Creation itself. It is a sovereignty of mutuality and reason and of "natural" law decernible by and accessable to all- believers and unbelievers alike. Thus, even if one denies a Creator and ascribes the universe to some great accident precipitating the big bang, one could still appreciate the balance and mutuality of a sovereignty of this sort as applied to the "state".
This, of course, is a far cry from where we are (mostly) today. This book traces from theorist and thinker to theorist and thinker the shift from this "bound" version of sovereignty to one of will, arbitrary and unfettered; a sovereignty of power writ absolute, able to undo all or any part of creation at any time- to run time backwards, remake lost virginity, anything at all by simply willing it so. Such power is likely accessible only by "revelation", not by reason. As the vision of God's sovereignty morphed, so too that of the state until we arrived at the absolute monarch and his collectivist successors: the French Revolution's Committee of Public Safety, Communism, and National Socialism. It is a fascinating ride- rather like watching a (very) slow motion train wreck.
One of the things I think could have been done better (or perhaps just more completely) was to explain the necessity of the conclusion that God's sovereignty was "unbound" will that is ascribed to nominalism generally and Thomas Ockham specifically. I don't think it's entirely clear why the fragmenting, abstract denying nominalist ideas necessarilly lead to absolute Divine Will as that seems, in some ways anyway, more abstract than the "bound" authority version. I see the revelatory argument, but am not (probably due to my own ignorance) sure that it's a necessary part of the nominalist credo.
As she moves into more modern times, Professor Elshtain has, in my view, more difficulty in assessing the limited and/or shared soverignty concepts of the English system or American Constitutionalism. Again, I'm not so sure she's adequately assessed the theoretical foundation of current democratic sovereignty as it relates to legitimacy, authority, and interlocking webs of rights AND duties held jointly and severally at the individual and local levels. Still, she asks (rightfully) some tough questions about the source of those "rights and duties", suggesting that issues of morality, will, power, and "natural" law must still arise and that failure to deal satisfactorilly with them by acknowledging the interlocking, mutually dependant and arising moral claims can lead down frightening roads indeed.
As she progresses into a discussion of "self sovereignty", I must confess a certain reservation and even antipathy toward Professor Elshtain's less than even-handed accounts of folks like Descarte, Emerson, and Neitzche. I confess that the last of these is versus my own idiosyncratic reading of the mercurial, probably lunatic level genius of Herr Neitzche who's refusal to be clear when he could, instead, be dramatic or literarily entertaining as well as his dogmatic insistence on inconsistency allows considerable variation in assessments. Still, her's is one of the most sensationalized and essentially propagandistic readings I've seen put forward by an otherwise seemingly sensible observer. I don't know if this can be explained as her reaction to Neitzche's vitrolic (he's seldom anything else) condemnation of Christianity and the Christian God, but it seems so unbalanced as to warrant skepticism about any conclusions she draws concerning his views on the self as sovereign, a position to which, as a dyed in the wool determinist, I'm not sure he would actually admit.
Concerning such theories of self sovereignty as Professor Elshtain discusses, one can only say, that regardless of whether you accept the Augustinian view of the "Fall" from grace and Eden as their origin, still, humans are limited creatures. We are very finite beings with finite life-spans, finite brains (which evolved in finite survival modes), finite imaginations, and finite capacities to understand ourselves and each other. The abrogation of the moral obligation to recognize this and account for it in our actions, our organizations, and our lives generally is unsupportable. Actions based on that abrogation represent a tendency toward usurpations of authority that can never be ligitimized and attempts to do so need, by all who recognize in the universe something greater than ourselves, a whole greater than the mere sum of its parts, to be resisited.
You may not enjoy all of this book, but the account it renders of its main topic and the questions raised thereby should be carefully considered by all with a claim to a humanist bone in their body, whether religiously mediated or not. It's worth the effort.
|
|
|
