Customer Reviews

Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (Gifford Lectures)

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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.

Applause to Jean Belthke Elshtain for taking on such a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary topic and in the midst of it rewriting the story of political thought. One can see all the threads from her previous works coming together in this book, from war to feminism, theology to the private/public dichotomy. This was a book that needed to be written.

Her arguments are largely cogent, and offhand I cannot think of a one with which I can terribly disagree. For a work of nonfiction, the imagery is well-constructed- not surprisingly so, for her love of literature shows frequently in these pages. Consider these lines on the French Revolution: "One might say that the sovereigntism of Rousseau, with its sacralization of politics, demands human sacrifice. If ancient peoples sacrificed goats, the French Revoution sacrificed humans to propitiate the revolutionary gods" (137). Her appeal to the Augustinian tradition of personalism is, in my estimate, the best course for countering the autonomous individualism rampant in even the best of modern thinkers.

What the book lacks, unfortunately, is sufficient length. Another reviewer commented that Elshtain does not sufficiently explain the connection between late medieval nominalism and the supremacy of will within the Godhead. For the record, the connections comes about because as nominalism rejected metaphysical realism and essentialism as the twin bases for grounding the common reality of imminent realities, ideas of absolute (inherent) justice tended to collapse. At the same time, the Trinity- a single essence or being or substance existing as three persons- shifted away from that traditional definition, wherein the persons of the Trinity were less hypostatic identities manifesting a single substance (the nominalist: what substance?) than three manifestations of one entity. The inherent nature of justice vanished from the late medieval mind precisely when the plurality and personhood of the Godhead lost its former vigor- thus the monistic, willing sovereign God of Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and eventually Luther and Calvin.

Alas, this connection is assumed on the part of the reader. Indeed, the whole debate surrounding the problem of universals that lies at the root of the realist-nominalist split goes without naray a mention; and conceptionalism, a third solution to the problem pioneered by Peter Abelard and back in force (in a way) with Immanuel Kant (hardly an insignificant aspect of his transcendent self Elshtain derides) isn't referenced at all. This is but one example. Personally, I found the whole section on divine sovereignty poorly explained and all-too-brief. And while I have no complaints on the factuality or clarity of the chapters on political sovereignty, I found these too brief as well and severely lacking in the non-intellectual history surrounding the rise of political sovereignty. The Peace of Westphalia is mentioned on but two pages.

As a typographical note, the author should fire her editor. The book is riddled with typos- hardly a page went buy without finding one. Moreover, sentences are poorly constructed with alarming frequency- dangling modifier here, split infinitives there, run-on sentences on the one hand and sentence-fragments on the other. I had to read several passages three times over, so much so that it took me a full week to read it cover to cover- something that should not have taken so long in a book concerning which I have complained of insufferable briefness.

That said, these negatives are warnings for the reader, not discouragements. The absence of medieval political thought in the modern teaching of the field is a great loss, and Jean Elshtain has done us all a great service with its publication. Thread of sovereignty as a holistic concept running from William of Ockham to Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant- a thread, more amazingly, that runs the same course from theology through politics through anthropology- can no longer be ignored with the publication of this important book.

The idea of sovereignty, like almost any other politically or culturally meaningful term, was not born in a vacuum, remaining unchanged through the centuries. In many ways, Elshtain's "Sovereignty" is a history of this complicated idea from its deeply religious and theological associations in Augustine and Aquinas to what she refers to as a "monist," psychologized sovereignty of the self that holds the most sway in our fractured modernity. As the title of the book indicates, Elshtain discusses sovereignty at what she perceives to be the three critical junctures of its development, with the sovereignty of the self being a product, or so she seems to think, of Enlightenment's secular humanism.

In the first part of the book, Elshtain sees an important shift from Thomistic conceptions of sovereignty, which emphasize God's love and rationality and especially the ability of the human being to use her intellect to deduce these things about God, toward the nominalism of William of Ockham. She associates Ockham's nominalism with a prevailing trend toward voluntarism, which shifts the focus away from God's love and rationality toward the omnipotent, volitional will. While theology was the locus classicus of this paradigmatic shift, it eventually spills over into the political realm wherein there is a consolidation of power into a single body (either the Pope or the prince), as opposed to the idea of the Gelasian Two Swords doctrine (as articulated by Pope Gelasius in a 494 letter titled "Deo sunt" to Emperor Anastasius I). Elshtain's intellectual genealogy is right to see in this historical moment both the origins of the all-powerful secular prince and those of the archetypical medieval Pope, one of whose missions was to purposively blur the lines between the political and spiritual realms.

The second part of the book gives several adumbrations of thinkers Elshtain associates with the view that the rightful place of sovereignty is in the state, including Hobbes, Hegel, Schmitt, and Machiavelli. Elshtain explains how these thinkers, along with Martin Luther whose fear of civil disorder and unruliness lead him to give increasing numbers of powers to the king, built the theoretical absolutism which James I and Louis XIV used as justification for their reigns. While the author limns the origins of shifts in the idea of sovereignty, she never locates a "cause" or a rationale; she points to Hegel and shows (convincingly) that he places ultimate sovereignty in the state, and later says that movements such as radical feminism have even further atomized sovereignty, locating it at the site of the individual's body. But as a reader, I would have appreciated an investigation of the shifts themselves - of how one conception, over time, turned into the other.

While the first two-thirds of the book honed in tightly on the examination of carefully made arguments about ideas, the last part completely falls into politically conservative homiletic. Instead of following arguments, this part of the book blames everything from radical feminism to eugenics to cloning as being part of the irresponsible shift of sovereignty to the level of the human body. Elshtain sees these as breach of deeply Christian humanism which she seems to espouse in her admiration of Augustine and Aquinas. While one can easily agree or disagree with her opinion, it was ultimately the lack of a well-presented defense of God-centered sovereignty that made me think less of the book. Throughout the book, she also seemed to downplay or ignore the atrocities of our ventures in God-centered sovereignty (like the burning of heretics), doing the same for all of the progress made during post-Enlightenment modernity (like representative democracy and women's suffrage).

For those interested in more on the topic: Elshtain openly admits to not having a deep background in theology in the introduction to the book. Anyone looking for a correction in this should look to Quentin Skinner's much more theologically grounded and scholarly two-volume "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought," especially the second volume which focuses on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political theory.

In comparison with much more serious scholars who have traversed the same terrain - Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock, for example - this book is superficial, careless, ill-organized, and implausible. And lurking in the background, believe it or not, is an argument for the authority of the Pope. That disqualifies the whole structure for me; I think any argument in favor of the authority of the Pope is ipso facto fallacious. However, I realize you might not agree!