Table Of Content

SOVEREIGNTY BOOKS BY JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Public Man, Private Wonian: Women in Social and Political Thought Editor, The Family in Political Thought Meditations on Modern Political Thought Women and War Co-Editor, Women, Militarism, and War Editor, Just War Theory Power Trips and Other Journeys Coauthor, But Was It Just?: Reflections on the Persian Gulj War Democracy on Trial Coeditor, Politics and the Human Body Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life Augustine and the Limits of Politics Who Are We?: Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities New Wine and Old Bottles: International Politics and Ethical Discourse Coauthor, Religion and American Public Life Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy Editor, The Jane Addams Reader Just War Against Terror SOVEREIGNTY GOD, STATE, AND SELF The Gifford Lectures Jean Bethke Elshtain BASIC B BOOKS A MEMBER OE THE PERSEES BOOKS GROTP NEW YORK Copyright © 2008 byJean Bethke Elshtain Puhlishecl by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. 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ISBN-13; 978-0-465-03759-9 1098 765 43 2 1 TO THE MEMORY OF MY PARENTS Paul George Bethke and Helen Lind Bethke and for Dr. Harry Rosenberg, who taught me to love the Middle Ages We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them oii the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and others. —ALBERT CAMUS I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, as are all men and women living at the same time, whether they are aware of it or not. —CZESLAW MILOSZ CONTENTS Preface ix CHAPTER ONE Sovereign God: From Logos to Will 1 ciEAPTERTwo Sovereign Godi Bouiid or Unbouiid 29 ciEAPTER THREE Will, Power, Hiid Earthly Dominion 57 CHAPTER EocR The Sovereigii State Uncliained 77 CHAPTER EivE The Binding and Loosing of Sovereign States 91 CHAPTER SEX Binding, Loosing, and Revolution 119 CHAPTER SEVEN Unbinding Revolution, Binding Gonstitution 137 CHAPTER EKTiT The Greation of the Sovereign Self 159 CHAPTER NENE Self-Sovereigiity: Moralism, Nihilism, and Existential Isolation 181 vii Contents VI11 The Sovereign Self: Dreams of (111AFTER TKN Radical Transcendence 203 • ^ The Less-Than-Sovereign Self CHAPTER ELEVEN and die Human Future 227 Afterword 247 A cknowledgtnen ts 249 Notes 251 Index 321 4 PREFACE The bulky envelope, forwarded to my Nashville, Tennessee, home from Chicago, bore the return address: University of Edinburgh. ‘Tunny,” I mused, “I don’t think I know anyone at Edinburgh.” I opened the letter and entered into that condition of happy shock known to every person invited to be a Gifford lecturer. Being a lecturer in this most distinguished series is an unstated yearning for laborers in the vineyards of moral philosophy, theology, and, though something of a stretch, political theory. As I am not officially a philosopher, nor can I claim a theology degree, a Gifford appointment seemed a bit out of reach. But. . . then . . . there was Gifford lecturer, Hannah Arendt, she who insisted she was a political theorist^ not a political philosopher, and that a good bit hung on the difference. This was cold comfort, of course, as who among us—certainly not I—would put ourselves in the same camp as the learned and erudite Arendt. Thus I had resigned myself—as a hedge against disappointment, no doubt—that a Gifford appointment would likely pass me by. My delight at being included in the table of worthies is felt keenly. To be sure, the emotion that follows close upon delight is fear and intimidation. So many years ... so many great books. At one point these considerations must be put aside. One does what one does, for better or worse. What I do is political theory with ethics as the heart of the matter. I decided long ago that one could no more separate the study of IX Preface X politics from ethics than one could hold back the tides. Important, then, to bring the ethics embedded in one’s political analysis to the fore as a constituent feature of what one has to say. I am enormously grateful to the Gifford selection committee for giving me the opportunity to explore in depth an issue that I have probed for over a decade now: sovereignty. How does one begin to take the measure of this protean topic? I begin here by reviewing my past work and noting the relevance of previous books to this study. In my scholarly work and my life, I have learned that one cannot erect a bright line separating what we call public from what we call private. This was the subject of my first book. The issue of public in rela- tion to private haunts me yet.* No matter what the topic at hand, one can refract it in such a way that the public and private, the political and the personal, come into play. This involves no identity between public and private; indeed, that particular claim intimated noxious outcomes that I assay in yet another book.^ Public and private attaches itself to a third distinction—some insist a bright line—between what we call religion and what we call politics. It is this particular distinction, and its interweaving with public and private, that figures impor- tantly in Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. A bit of personal history will help the reader to appreciate the importance of this latter distinction to the book in hand. Let me take the reader back to a particular time, namely, the late 1960s. This was not a calm time culturally and politically speaking, as all Americans of a certain age well remember. The civil rights movement was in full swing. President Kennedy had been assassinated. Protest surrounding the war in Vietnam was heating up. The counterculture was preaching a ‘‘make love, not war” gospel. Some of us were struggling to understand what was going on and to sort out just where we “fit” in the overall scheme of things. Who were we anyway—as a people, as singular persons? I was at the time a graduate student in politics and, with a few rare excep- tions, none of my graduate courses in political science touched on any of these matters. We were more or less obliged to leave such burning concerns off to one side when we entered the classroom. The reigning epistemology was a variant on positivism called behaviorism. Its devotees proclaimed from the rooftops that the study