Product Description

One of America's foremost political theorists explores the connections between our political and ethical convictions, changing forever the way we understand the notion of "sovereignty."

Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, one concept has cut across arenas as diverse as theology, political thought, and psychology: sovereignty. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, from the feminist movement of the 1970s to the dramas that unfold on the Oprah Winfrey Show today, debates about sovereignty--complete independence and self-government-- have dominated our history.

In this seminal work of political history and political theory, Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of "sovereignty" as it relates to all the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self. Examining the early modern ideas of God which formed the basis for the modern paradigm of the sovereign state, Elshtain carries her research one step further, making the unprecedented claim that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self--in other words, when we understand why we have the politics we have, we will understand what makes humans tick. The implications of Elshtain's monumental thesis suggest that self-sovereignty underpins the bedrock on which human communities are sustained.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164991 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780465037599
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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 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 Just War Against Terror and Democracy on Trial, among other books. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee and Chicago, Illinois.