Hermann Cohen and Socialist Democracy

Abstract

This chapter is dedicated to Hermann Cohen’s renewal of Jewish theologico-political thought. Cohen is the first to establish an internal, systematic connection between the Jewish messianic idea and a universalistic conception of democracy. He articulates a political theology of socialist democracy, not based on the analogy between One God and One King, but on that between One God and One Humanity. Cohen rejected Zionism as a solution to the political problem caused by the condition of minority nationality in which the Jewish people lived in European states. But he did not believe in assimilation either. He maintained that its messianic religion assigned the Jewish people the task of pointing the way to an international order based not on state sovereignty but on the supremacy of international law founded on human rights that recognized the plurality and right to self-determination of nationalities.