Michael Allen Gillespie

Montaigne's Humanistic Liberalism

Many have noted the tendency of liberalism to degenerate into egoism or collectivism. This article examines Montaignes attempt to preserve liberalism from such degeneration by establishing a basis for the liberal self in friendship and especially friendship for oneself rather than mere self-interest. In Montaignes view this promotes self-sufficient human beings who are content with private life and unmoved by political ambition and religious fanaticism. Such individuals then can also serve as disinterested political advisors who will help preserve the justice and stability necessary for a humanistic liberalism that eschews both pure egoism and unlimited collectivism.

The Inevitable Entanglement of Religion and Politics

Since the Emperor Constantine knelt in prayer with his army prior to the Battle of Milvian Bridge in October, 312 A.D. and saw a cross above the sun accompanied by the inscription “CONQUER BY THIS,” the question of the relation of religion and politics has been unavoidable for the Western world. Christianity, which had hitherto sought to give God what was God’s and Caesar what was Caesar’s, thereby came into an uneasy alliance with Caesar. This relationship was broadened and complicated in many ways by the subsequent conversion of Roman officials who brought their politics into religion and used their new religion to pursue their political agenda. Constantine himself had clearly been looking for a new religion to reinvigorate the empire and Christianity helped to sustain the empire for another 150 years in the West and for almost 1150 years in the East. In various ways since that time, popes and emperors, kings and cardinals, reformers and princes, confessional groups and parliaments have struggled to find ways to co-exist. They have often been deeply divided and in tension with one another, but this was not always a bad thing. In fact the two have often checked one another in ways that have generally been positive for the majority of the population. Occasionally they have been united, working to great, although at times horrible, effect. In the late eighteenth century, new regimes in both America and France made an effort to provide for some separation of religion and politics. Their efforts were an outgrowth of earlier attempts by political theorists to find ways to mitigate the religious conflict that had shattered European civilization during the Wars of Religion that were spawned by the Reformation. In their view there were basically three possibilities: first, religion could be subordinated to a sovereign who could command a uniform religious practice; second, religious groups could tolerate one another; or finally third, religion could be completely privatized and removed from political life. The first course was institutionalized by the Treaty of Westphalia. It led to the sectarian state with the Church as a subordinate power. The second alternative grew out of disagreements between Protestant confessions and the growing belief that if humans are saved by faith alone, coercion cannot serve the cause of religion. This view was accepted by Catholicism only in the later twentieth century. The third possibility was exemplified by Voltaire’s proclamation that religion should be “crushed” as a political force, and confined entirely to a private sphere. Most European states (and early American colonies) established sectarian states with state religions, sometimes tolerating dissenting religious practices in private but allowing them no public role. However, the supremacy of the state over religion along with a growing privatization or religion, led to a gradual reduction in the importance of religious differences and a growing willingness to tolerate if not affirm dissenting religious practices. With the growth of competing sects and democratization, disestablishment was more or less inevitable although it was not until the twentieth century that it became widespread.

The Dangerous Divide: Between Weak Thought and Practical Politics

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx presents itself as a book offering political guidance to the world’s downtrodden and as an antidote to the forms of thought and power that repress and exclude the weak. We take hermeneutic communism to be the more overtly political program corresponding to Vattimo’s so-called weak thought, and argue (a) that weak thought is a potentially powerful form of thinking, whose contributions should be seen as primarily ethical, and (b) that the jump from the ethical (weak thought) to the political (hermeneutic communism) within the book is an awkward one at best. If we adopt a proper conception of the political as a tragic sphere perpetually demanding decisions from us on the ground, then we must hold serious doubts as to the potential contribution to politics as a form of thinking operating at such a high level of generality. Furthermore, the existing political movements and institutions praised by Vattimo and Zabala (including e.g. the regime of Hugo Chavez) seem to have little discernible connection with the basic thrust of the books’ more philosophical claims. In general, we seek to cast doubt upon the potential political contributions not only of weak thought but also of all similarly-rooted forms of epochal thinking, but also to argue that those forms of thinking might be of great value to our understanding of ethics in a post-modern age.

Sherlock Holmes, crime, and the anxieties of globalization

Abstract Before the establishment in the early 1800s of Frances Sûreté Nationale and Englands Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions.

POLITICAL ANTI-THEOLOGY

Abstract In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla argues that political theology invariably leads to apocalyptic politics, and that we can avoid this fate only by maintaining a “Great Separation” between politics and religion, such as the one that Hobbes initiated, but which was overturned by Rousseau and German liberal theology—leading to Nazism. We argue that Hobbes never established such a divide; political theology is far more diverse than Lilla suggests; and liberal German political theology was not a significant source of Nazism. Moreover, liberalism is itself a political theology, suggesting that religion and politics should not, and perhaps cannot, be divided—although they may be reconciled.

Nietzsche and the premodernist critique of postmodernity

Abstract The crisis of modern reason culminates in Nietzsches proclamation of nihilism. Drawing upon Nietzsche, postmodernists suggest that reason itself is defective, while “premodernists” argue we can regain our balance by returning to premodern rationalism. Peter Berkowitz suggests, however, that Nietzsche is a contradictory thinker who fails in his attempt to combine ancient rationalism with modern voluntarism. Postmodernism thus rests upon a defective foundation. Berkowitzs critique of postmodernism is telling, but he does not recognize dangerous millenarian elements in Nietzsches thought. Moreover, the concept of ancient reason he holds up as an alternative is underdeveloped and undifferentiated.