Sovereignty: God, State, and Self - Softcover

Elshtain, Jean Bethke

Softcover

ISBN 10: 046502856X ISBN 13: 9780465028566

Publisher: Basic Books, 2012

Synopsis

In this seminal work in the fields of political history and political theory, Jean Bethke Elshtain shows how the powerful notion of sovereignty—complete independence and self-government—has irrevocably sculpted contemporary notions of God, state and self. Elshtain examines the conceptual underpinnings of sovereignty, considering the early modern ideas of God that formed the basis for the modern paradigm of the sovereign state, and making the unprecedented claim that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self—arguing, in other words, that when we understand why we have the politics we have, we will understand what makes humans themselves tick. The implications of Elshtain's monumental thesis go as far as to suggest that self-sovereignty, which understands the self to be an independent, self-sufficient entity, undermines the bedrock on which human communities are fundamentally sustained. In thoughtful, provocative prose, Elshtain explores the connections between our political and ethical convictions, changing forever the way we understand the notion of sovereignty.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at The University of Chicago. She is the author of over four hundred essays in scholarly journals and journals of civic opinion, and some one hundred and seventy five book reviews, and was a contributing editor at The New Republic. Among her books are Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (Basic, 2001), Just War Against Terror (Basic, 2003) and Democracy on Trial (Basic, 1995). She lives in Nashville, Tennessee and Chicago, Illinois.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Dismissed by most political theorists as a mere encumbrance, theology serves Elshtain well in this historical analysis of the two incarnations of sovereignty that have forged the modern world: the nation-state and the individual self. Originally delivered as the Gifford Lectures of 2005–06, Elshtain’s insightful investigation explains how political thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes first endowed the nation-state with absolute sovereignty over society by politicizing the innovative theology of nominalist philosophers such as William of Ockham, who elevated God’s sovereign will above His discernible reason. Readers thus confront the perilous political dynamics in a nation-state as powerful and as capricious as Ockham’s God. Elshtain traces the lethal consequences of this modern theopolitics in the bloody atrocities of the French Revolutionaries, the Nazis, and the Soviet Communists. Inevitably, the deified modern state fractured into millions of divinized modern selves, each intent on establishing and defending its own godlike sovereignty. Champions of modern selfhood celebrate the unprecedented autonomy of the liberated individual; Elshtain, however, warns that a self that claims its godhood by severing restraints imposed by ancestors, religious orthodoxy, and community will ultimately destroy the cultural ecology necessary to a meaningful life. An illuminating though sobering new perspective on the conjunction between religion and politics. --Bryce Christensen

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 046502856X
• ISBN 13: 9780465028566
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368