Radical Democracy and Political Theology 9780231527132

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radical democracy and political theology

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, editors The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion. After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis

radical democrac

Jeffrey W. Robbins

and political theology

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robbins, Jeffrey W., 1972–   Radical democracy and political theology / Jeffrey W. Robbins.    p.  cm. — (Insurrections)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-231-15637-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-52713-2 (ebook)   1.  Democracy—Religious aspects—Christianity.  2.  Death of God theology—Political aspects.  3.  Political theology.  4.  Schmitt, Carl, 1888–1985.  I.  Title.    BR115.P7R69  2011    261.7—dc22 2010031360 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acidfree paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Charlie and Rose-Marie (and their Baba)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

part one  Radical Democracy 

17

chapter one  Democracy, More or Less

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interlude  Managing Democracy Abroad

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chapter two  Democracy, Radically Conceived

57

part two  Political Theology

75

chapter three  Political Theology and the Postsecular

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interlude  The Iranian Revolution Redux

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chapter four  Political Theology, Beyond Despair

106

chapter five  Political Theologies, or Finding

128

chapter six  The Theopolitics of Democracy

155

an Alternative to Schmitt

contents

interlude  The Messianic as a Democratic

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conclusion  From the One to the Many

180

Notes

193

Index

207

Political Theology

viii

Acknowledgments

A book is a life unto itself. At least so it seems to me as I near the end of this particular book’s own life process. It has seemed to take a lifetime to produce. But as I now have the time to reflect on when it actually began and how it eventually took shape, it has really only been a few short years, five at the most. But while I was writing it, Charlie and Rose-Marie were born, and everything that came before seems to be absolutely from another life and another time. And so it is that this book is for them, for without them it would have been a different book by a different author altogether. Their lives have been this project’s primary distraction but also, as any parent will understand, its greatest urgency. With babies in the house, time is always of the essence. Because of Charlie and Rose-Marie, I’ve become conscious of time like never before: time to eat, time to play, time to wash, change diapers, eat some more, and play some more. But never enough time to sleep. And no time to think. No time to read (unless one counts Clifford, Froggie, Curious George, et al.). And no time to write. Which is why in addition to Charlie and Rose-Marie, this book is also dedicated to Barbara, their grandmother and my mother-in-law, without whom this book could have never been completed. It would have lived its life instead as merely an idea in my head. So thank you

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Barbara for making Charlie and Rose-Marie’s life your own, so that I could have enough life of my own to complete this work. In my mind it is a book for them, although I realize that they may never themselves read it. But it is for them nonetheless, because it is about our world, which will all too soon become theirs. Despite the largely optimistic tone that this book strikes with regard to democracy as the immanent political power proper to humanity as such, that my children will inherit our world remains for me a foreboding thought. And just as they have radically disrupted the natural flow of my own life process, my hope for this book is that it will do the same. While it pertains to political philosophy and democratic theory, it is not being offered up as a comprehensive theory of governance but instead as a critical intervention. It is meant as an interruption, a singling out of an alternative way of conceiving political power and practice, a coming to terms with the power and possibilities that we have. It is theological because it is a grappling with supreme power. And it is radical because it locates that power not in some transcendent, other-worldly realm but in us, with us, and for us. When in the midst of escalating violence and national mourning Abraham Lincoln spoke of democracy as a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” this was a radical confession of faith, and its theopolitical implications are yet to be told. This book is therefore an attempt at getting that story started. Telling this new story, instead of the same old story, requires new concepts and new theoretical arrangements. It was my teacher, the late Charles Winquist, who first taught me that. And it is with Clayton Crockett, another of Winquist’s students, with whom I have had the benefit of pursuing this task together. Clayton has been a constant conversation partner with me as this project has unfolded. And indeed, it was upon his invitation to contribute to his edited volume, Religion and Violence in the Secular World: Towards a New Political Theology, that the original idea for this book was born. Soon after I completed my chapter for that book, Professor Gerritt Neven invited me to speak at the Netherlands School of Advanced Studies in Religion and Theology at the Kampen Theological University. I presented a sketch of this book’s outline there and received excellent feedback, especially from Renée van Riessen, with whom I have not spoken since but for which I remain grateful. In addition to this formative moment, I was able to present portions of this book at various international conferences and public fo-

acknow ledgment s

rums. These include the following: a conference on “Secularity and Globalization: What Comes After Modernity?” sponsored by the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, held at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in November 2005; the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in November 2005; an international workshop in the hermeneutics of religion, co-hosted by Mount Allison University and the International Institute for Hermeneutics, held in Sackville, New Brunswick, in August 2006; a conference on “The Messianic Now,” held at Lancaster University in Lancaster, England, in July 2007; the annual meeting of the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, held at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 2008; an international conference on religion, law, and power, sponsored by the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law, held in Tunis, Tunisia, in March 2009; and the conference “A Secular Age: Tracing the Contours of Religion and Belief,” held at the Mater Dei Institute of Education of the Dublin City University, in Dublin, Ireland, in June 2009. In addition to this, several papers that have been significantly reworked and revised into chapters of this monograph have been published or commissioned for publication in the following: “Beyond the Politics of Theological Despair,” Journal of Religion and Society 8 (2006); “Theses on Secular Theology,” CSSR Bulletin 27, no. 2 (April 2008); “Left Behind: The Messianic Without Sovereignty,” Journal of Cultural Research 13, nos. 3–4 (July/October 2009); “From the Secular to the Political: The Enduring Power of Religion in Contemporary American Politics,” in Droit, Pouvoir et Religion, ed. Chawki Gaddes; “Thinking Transcendence with Levinas: From the Ethico-Religious to the Political and Beyond,” Analecta Hermeneutica 2 (2010); and “The Death of God and the Politics of Democracy,” in Resurrecting the Death of God: The Past, Present, and Future of Radical Theology, ed. Daniel Peterson and Michael Zbaraschuk. While a long time in the making, the real work of this book was completed during my sabbatical in spring 2009. I am grateful to Lebanon Valley College for giving me that much needed time to do this work. Special thanks are owed to Gary Grieve-Carlson, my colleague at LVC, for his reading of this manuscript. Gary is a great reader, and his visceral distaste for jargon and ideological sloganeering helped catch me in my own rhetorical excesses. My friend and colleague Michael Pittari provided the cover art with his image “The Beast in

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acknow ledgments

xii

the Garden.” By his splicing together of scenes from the history of American landscape painting, it is as if he has unveiled the monstrous dimension hidden in the roots of the nation’s founding. As such, his work provides the perfect image for this book’s focus on the social, cultural, and religious torment that is the modern democratic revolution. Conversations with several other colleagues at LVC helped me form and clarify my thoughts on these and related matters, to say nothing of their friendship and professional solidarity: Mike Day, Chris Dolan, Noel Hubler, Chris Rodkey, Cathy Romagnolo, Matthew Sayers, Kerrie Smedley, Grant Taylor, and Robert Valgenti. Tiffany Hubble completed the index for this book. I would also like to thank Wendy Lochner, Christine Mortlock, and Robert Fellman at Columbia University Press. And of course, Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis, who along with Clayton Crockett, are my co-editors for this book series, “Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture,” which has quickly become the most exciting and relevant of any in the field of contemporary religious thought. It is a pleasure and honor for me to work with them all. But most of all, I would like to thank once again Noëlle Vahanian, my wife, colleague, and inspiration. As only she can attest, there were times when this book had become such a burden to me that I was ready to quit. It was her belief in me that gave me the strength to see it through to completion. So even as we endeavor together as parents to Charlie and Rose-Marie, this book stands as a testament to her faith in me and our hope for their future.

radical democracy and political theology

Introduction The failure of [contemporary] theology is its unwillingness, or inability, to ground a politically engaged ethos. Ultimately, most antiontotheology amounts to an eloquent mystical escapism . . . leaving the violent, unjust, idolatrous world to its own devices. —Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Theology and the Political

This book arises out of two mutually reinforcing observations. First, the tradition of radical theology has heretofore been insufficiently political. Second, the predominant contemporary reading and employment of political theology has been antidemocratic in its thrust. Reading radical democratic theory into political theology redresses both issues. Radical theology joins together with radical democratic theory to provide an alternative political theology. In the process, the theopolitics of democratic theory and practice is laid bare and political theology is made more democratic. This is the problematic and constructive thesis that the pages that follow will pursue. It is largely a theoretical work that operates on two fronts. First, the question asked throughout is a rather straightforward one—namely, what is political theology? Though straightforward, this proves to be no simple question, for it is intimately connected with the legacy of modern political philosophy, specifically modern liberalism and its predication on the division between the religious and the secular and the private and the public. This division of powers, which has constituted the modern governing philosophy, if not the philosophy of governance, has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. The so-called postmodern return of religion has brought into question the secularization hypothesis that was long

introduction

assumed within sociological theories of modernity. Within political philosophy and cultural and religious theory, this has meant a shift from the secular to the postsecular, which renders modern liberal philosophy antiquated at best. Regarding my use of the designation “postsecular,” it is to be understood in two different registers. Philosophically, it draws on the contemporary theological critique of the reign of secular reason and is concerned with how the supposed neutral public sphere contains its own ideological bias with regard to the rightful place and practice of religion. Specifically, the shift from the secular to the postsecular comes by way of the awareness that the expectation that religion be kept as an exclusively private matter of individual conscience is in fact a modern Protestant norm. Further, the postsecular is a way of talking about the so-called theological turn within contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. If, as John Caputo has argued, modern philosophy can be at least partially distinguished by the Enlightenment critique of religion, the postmodern is postsecular in the sense of it becoming critical of this Enlightenment critique. In Caputo’s words, contemporary philosophy has become postsecular as it has grown “disenchanted with the disenchanters,” “enlightened about the (old) Enlightenment,” and “suspicious of the Enlightenment suspicion of religion.”1 But shifting registers, the postsecular is also to be understood politically as a fundamental change with regard to the secularist selfunderstanding of the state. This meaning of the postsecular is given expression in a recent lecture given by Jürgen Habermas, when he states in reference to the work of John Rawls and Charles Taylor: Although the secularization of state authority makes it necessary to justify the political constitution in ways that are neutral toward competing worldviews, the constitution itself must not ignore the political contributions made by religious groups within civil society to the democratic process. It follows that even the collective self-understanding of a democratic community cannot remain unaffected by the religious element within the pluralism of worldviews. The political that has migrated into civil society retains a reference to religion, however indirect, as long as religious and nonreligious citizens respect one another as such and trust one another as post-secular contemporaries.2

2

It is precisely this postsecular political transformation that opens up the possibility pursued in this book, which is, namely, the develop-

introduction

ment of a democratic political theology. And while this notion of the postsecular has been seized upon by many conservative or neotraditional elements within contemporary thought and politics, my employment of it throughout this work is for a different purpose. By radicalizing the democratic potential of this postsecular moment, this serves to continue, if never to complete, the unfinished work of radical theology. One more clarification of terminology is in order before proceeding further. By modern liberalism what I specifically have in mind is the strand of modern political philosophy that has become an all-embracing global system predicated on the logic of individual freedoms, and that, in the words of Eric Hobsbawn, “is perfectly compatible with the free market.”3 While there are of course a wide range of approaches and schools of thought within the general tradition of modern liberalism, my concern throughout in developing the critique of liberalism is how easily its political philosophy of governance has been joined to a free-market neoliberal economic policy such that the political itself has been effectively precluded or, in the terminology of Carl Schmitt, neutralized. This will be developed in chapters 1 and 2 in terms of the “postpolitical” and the process of “depoliticization” that has been the long-term effect of the market-based economy that has long since become the global norm. Put briefly, as will be explained in more detail later on in reference to the work of the American political philosopher Benjamin Barber, while democracy is good for free markets, free markets have not proven to be good for democracy. I should be clear that I do not intend this critique of modern liberalism so much in ideological terms—that is to say, as a blanket condemnation of liberalism writ large—but more as a way of situating the present political predicament. Indeed, I find much value and even inspiration in the work of contemporary liberals such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty. Additionally, Habermas’ recent claim that it is Rawls who “is the first political philosopher who systematically takes into account the relevance of religious doctrine and religious communities for both the founding of a secular constitution and the democratic processes within such a frame”4 must be noted. By persuasively demonstrating how “Rawls retains an important role for religion in legitimating a secular state authority,” Habermas makes clear the important contribution that the modern liberal tradition can and must make to this burgeoning field of study regarding the nature and parameters of contemporary political theology and, more specifically, the connection between political theology and democratic ­theory.

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introduction

4

But in examining the long shadow cast over the field by the legacy of Schmitt and his explicitly antidemocratic casting of political theology, I believe that the best and most helpful resources and theoretical orientation for the development of a fully democratic political theology lie elsewhere than in the recuperation of modern liberalism. Specifically, as I will detail in the chapters that follow, contemporary political theology first emerged and continues to thrive directly as a consequence of the despair over the perceived failure of modern liberalism. As such, political theology is originally conceived as the first and greatest rival to the dominant but increasingly weakened and ineffectual political order. While the modern liberal democratic state languishes in the technocratic grasp of economic bureaucrats, rendering contemporary politics nothing more than a means of money management, political theology clarifies the true nature of the political. Whether this is by the conceptual politics of enmity or more directly still, by political theology’s focus on the nature of sovereign power, the field of battle is set, matching modern liberal philosophy against its ancient and enduring foe, political theology. At stake is not only the proper relationship between religion and politics but, even more fundamentally, the very meaning of power and the conditions of possibility for political practice. Therefore, if modern democratic theory and practice are predicated on modern liberalism, then what becomes of democracy in the postliberal, postsecular moment that political theology hearkens? Does the postliberal and postsecular require us also to be postdemocratic as well? Or might there be another way to conceive of democracy, one that is not predicated on the liberal separation of powers nor in cahoots with neoliberalism’s free-market ideology and thus able to survive liberalism’s apparent demise? It is with regard to this latter question that radical democratic theory emerges as the necessary alternative to liberal democracy and political theology as currently understood and practiced. The selfappointed task of radical democratic theory is, accordingly, to show how and why this alternative conception of democracy is not only a desirable but a necessary alternative. The global economic cycles of boom and bust, culminating in the September 2008 world financial collapse, should prove that the present collusion between liberalism and corporate power is untenable: mounting debt, imperial hegemony, a permanent state of war, to say nothing of irreversible environmental degradation, the looming energy crisis, and so on. As the radical democratic theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write on this point in the preface to Multitude: “Never has democracy been

introduction

more necessary. No other path will provide a way out of the fear, insecurity, and domination that permeates our world at war; no other path will lead us to a peaceful life in common.”5 In many ways, Hardt and Negri’s collaborative works provide the inspiration for this present book. By their radical conception of democracy they refuse to allow the politics of democracy to be usurped by the economics of free-market capitalism. Nevertheless, they acknowledge that global capital functions as an empire, only it is an empire without a controlling center, one that eclipses even the sovereign power of the modern state form. As such they renew the central task of democratic theory as first begun by Alexis de Tocqueville by grappling with the particular nature of democratic power as a diffuse force. But, as this book will explore most directly in chapter 6, whereas Tocqueville’s concern was primarily in showing democracy’s palpability for the postrevolutionary world (and, as such, his Democracy in America was a quintessentially modern work in political philosophy that still took for granted the sovereignty of the nation-state), Hardt and Negri belong to the age of globalization and thus give articulation not only to a postliberal conception of democracy but also a postmodern and even a postnational one. In this way, radical democracy takes the sting out of political theology’s original critique by severing the ties between modern liberalism and democratic theory and practice. In other words, political theology and democracy need not be opposed as mutually exclusive options, but instead, by conceiving of democracy otherwise, this paves the way for an alternative form of political theology as well. In short, while getting its impetus from the despair over the perceived failures of modern liberalism, political theology need not, and must not be allowed to, translate into a rejection of democracy as such. Which brings us to the other theoretical front opened by this book—namely, to demonstrate the necessity for a robust political theology as a critical supplement to contemporary radical democratic theory’s efforts at rethinking the conceptual bases of democracy itself. If the fault line between modern liberalism and political theology comes down to the meaning of power, we are still left burdened with another significant question: what is the true nature and source of political power? By its conception of and appeal to popular sovereignty, modern democracy was truly revolutionary. But as has been shown by a slate of recent radical democratic theorists, by conflating popular sovereignty with a representative system of government, modern liberal philosophy effectively restores or maintains the theopolitical rule of the one. In this way, the revolutionary impact of

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introduction

modern democracy is contained and curtailed. Rather than following the logic of democracy to its true ideal of self-governance by the rule of all by all, which would mean the dispersal and diffusion of power, the sovereignty of the people kept the logic of sovereign power inherited from the theology of the indivisible divine intact. While radical democratic theory accomplishes the conceptual shift from the people as one to the multitude as many, a democratic political theology might serve as its critical and necessary supplement by drawing on alternative theological sources, specifically theologies of the weakness of God as opposed to those traditionally oriented around divine power. Or, as the present work will claim, a democratic political theology reveals democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. This argument is meant in a constructive fashion by detailing the nature of a viable form of political resistance for today. In other words, when radical democracy is wed to political theology, exodus—defined as a flight from sovereignty and a taking leave of domination—rather than transcendence is shown to be the only means for a meaningful form of resistance and rebellion. Rejecting both the theopolitical fatalism of the late Heidegger, who tells us in an interview from 1966 that only a God can save us now,6 and what Mark Lilla terms Carl Schmitt’s “politics of theological despair,”7 which rests on a nostalgic vision of a unified Christian world and breeds a virulent form of political cynicism, this book instead theologically affirms democracy as the rightful coming-to-power particular to humanity. As a democratic political theology informed by, and intended as a critical supplement to, radical democratic theory, this coming-to-power is necessarily understood as an immanent force. If, as Hardt and Negri suggest, democracy is the necessary means by which we get beyond the present state of war, domination, and environmental degradation, then this path can only come from within. As an inside-out force, the exodus to the beyond is not imagined in terms of some other world but an unveiling and affirmation of our own present possibilities.

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While this is the book’s main argument, I must first step back to provide some context for the opening observations. Concerning the first, where I assert that the tradition of radical theology has been insufficiently political, another way to put that point is to say that there is no truly radical political theology. On the contrary, radical theology, ei-

introduction

ther wittingly or unwittingly, often serves to buttress an inherent political conservatism, whereas radical political theory and left-leaning political movements and organizations have consistently failed to appreciate the truly revolutionary potential of religion as a mobilizing and motivating force. When speaking of radical theology, I have in mind a specific trajectory of late twentieth-century Anglo-American Protestant theological thought that takes its lead from the methodological reconfiguration of theology that was accomplished by the earlier “crisis” theologians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. As the Anglican Bishop John Robinson so eloquently summarized the challenge that these Protestant thinkers posed to traditional Christian theology in his best-selling book from 1963, Honest to God, in order for Christianity to be relevant and credible in the modern, scientific age, it must strip itself of religion (Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity”), mythology (Bultmann’s method of “demythologizing”), and supernaturalism (Tillich’s notion of God as the “ground of being”).8 In its American variant, this trajectory came to expression in the radical death-of-God movement, whose leading voices included Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, and Gabriel Vahanian. One effect of these radical death-of-God theologies was the creation of the seemingly oxymoronic movement within American philosophical theology called “secular theology,” in which a certain strand of philosophical theology sought to sever its ties from its traditional bearings in the church and generate an alternative language of faith as desire.9 This marks the onset of postmodern theology, as various figures such as Carl Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, and Charles Winquist incorporated a deconstructive analysis into their respective theological projects, thereby radicalizing the earlier theology of crisis by questioning the very conditions of possibility for theological thinking and extending the radical death-of-God theologies by announcing the impossibility of classical theology.10 Finally, this genealogy comes to its contemporary expression in the theology of the weakness of God, a theology unlike the radical death-of-God movement or its postmodern a/theological successors by its explicit affirmation of the religious desire for God. Only now, this is a religious affirmation for a God who has passed through the crucible of the death of God and the critique of ontotheology and is thus a God whose power is a power of weakness and in solidarity with the poor and outcast instead of being imagined in terms of the divine sovereign. While the interests of the radical and postmodern theologians were characteristically broad and far ranging, moving seamlessly from

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philosophy and theology to literature, psychoanalytic theory, art, and architecture, the political was notably absent. This lack of interest in and disengagement from political theory and analysis by the radical and postmodern theologians is perhaps most emblematic when it concerns its treatment and understanding of Marx. Almost without exception, Marx is conflated with Nietzsche and Freud as an “evangelist of suspicion” and commended for his contribution to the hermeneutics of suspicion, whereas Marx’s more programmatic political efforts are given little to no attention at all.11 My point here is not that radical theology must somehow become more Marxist in order to engage the political but rather that even an overtly political thinker such as Marx is treated in a characteristically apolitical fashion. The apolitical nature of radical theology is one thing, but its essential conservatism is something else. The argument concerning the conservatism of radical theology has been made by Nick Brown in his observation of the British theological scene. Brown argues that there is an underlying commitment to inherently conservative political principles that animates much of the radical theological project. Indeed, there is a curious connection in “how a number of radical Christian thinkers, despite [their] commitment to a socialist reading of the Christian faith, nevertheless demonstrate an interest and indeed faith in concepts which are valued and promoted within Conservative traditions as much as they are in any other political philosophy.”12 Most significant is the shared emphasis that both radical theology and conservative political philosophy place on individualism, and correlatively, anti-institutionalism, by pitting individual freedom against overbearing institutions (whether the church or the state). Also, as Brown observes, “the love of freedom and the opposition to overbearing institutions brings with it a call for individual responsibility” (87). For Brown, this exemplifies a central tension that he finds expressed by the radical Christian theologian Don Cupitt: [there is] a permanent tension within Christianity itself between order and freedom—between, that is, the need in any historical society for standard symbols, rituals, and disciplinary structures, and the clamour of those who will always try to argue that we have now outgrown the need from such structures and can escape into pure spiritual freedom. The excitement and dynamism of Conservatism this century has been generated by a creative tension between these two principles: our belief on the one hand in individual freedom . . . and on the other hand a commitment to maintaining the institutions which hold our nation together.13

introduction

A truly radical political theology would be one that put both the political and the theological order in question, whereas what passes as so-called radical theology uses its theological critique in the service of a prevailing, even if unseen or unquestioned, political order. A similar observation was made years ago by the sociologist of religion Richard Fenn, when he commented on the death-of-God theologies of the 1960s. For Fenn, radical theology is a misnomer “because of its unwitting tendency to sanctify the dominant, if not ruling, values in American society.”14 This assertion might seem counterintuitive at first glance, especially when considering on the one hand the personal political leanings of most radical theologians and, on the other, the personal piety of most Americans. It is safe to say that the triumphant proclamation of the death of God was a scandal to, rather than the sanctification of, the dominant religious values of most within American society. But what Fenn was identifying was a much deeper form of political ambivalence within the death-of-God movement, one expressing itself either in the form of a religious and political moratorium wherein faith, ritual, and organization are all suspended indefinitely or, even more problematic, by its unqualified “Yes” to the world as a balance to its “No” to God. By evacuating God from its religious, moral, political, and cultural analyses, the death-ofGod movement found itself bereft of a critical lever by which to judge and direct the energies of society. In the words of the historian of religion Charles Long, who writes in reference to the death-of-God movement, they have no particular touchstone, no specific understanding of any reality as ultimate from which to launch a truly radical attack on these issues [of racial injustice, civil rights, etc.]. They suffer from a linguistic confusion—an inability to assign the proper words to reality. They are like that religious figure, the trickster, who has the power to create but no sense of what or how to create. And thus their works burst above and around us as the ephemeral balloons that they are.15

This is not to discount or diminish the landmark achievements of the radical death-of-God movement in theology nor its postmodern deconstructive successor. Rather it is to say that it was important but incomplete precisely because it was insufficiently political. Its limitations are apparent especially when surveying the desperate need for a meaningful, viable, and potent alternative ideology to counter the unrestrained and increasingly unregulated spread of global capital and

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to direct the energies of opposition toward a future beyond either dehumanization or terror. Further, not only has radical theology failed to contribute to contemporary political theory, but also and perhaps more telling, it has thus far been unable to generate an alternative piety. As Phillip Goodchild states, there is no higher task, yet the truth of the matter is that radical theology has yet to break through into the mind of religion as practiced. It remains, in the most limited sense, an expression of academic theology. As such, the long-term change it hoped to effect in the very institution of religion never materialized. Meanwhile, conservative religiosity, increasingly wedded to a conservative political and cultural agenda, now reigns supreme. Another way to put this concern, as suggested by the moral philosopher Jeffrey Stout, would be to critique contemporary theology for its self-marginalization or isolation, with the result being that in the midst of the “return of religion,” the public is utterly lacking in a meaningful theological understanding. Stout writes, Academic theology seems to have lost its voice, its ability to command attention as a distinctive contributor to public discourse in our culture. Can theology speak persuasively to an educated public without sacrificing its own integrity as a recognizable mode of utterance? . . . Theologians with something distinctive to say are apt to be talking to themselves—or, at best, to a few other theologians of similar breeding. Can a theologian speak faithfully for a religious tradition, articulating its ethical and political implications, without withdrawing to the margins of public discourse, essentially unheard?

He continues: The worry that this question imposes an exclusive choice between two foci of loyalty, that one must turn one’s back on tradition in order to be heard by the educated public at large (and vice versa), has turned many theologians into methodologists. But preoccupation with method is like clearing your throat: it can go on for only so long before you lose your audience. Theologians who dwell too long on matters of method can easily suffer both kinds of alienation they fear. They become increasingly isolated from the churches as well as from cultural forums such as the academy and the leading nonsectarian journals of opinion. This isolation helps explain why the much-heralded religious resurgence in American culture lacks a theological (as opposed to a prophetic or evangelical) voice

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The lone possible exception to this problem of the disconnect if not irrelevance of contemporary theology to public life would be the liberation theologies that swept through the worlds of Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam in the latter half of the twentieth century.17 But even liberation theology, which was perhaps the most effective and wide-ranging recent theopolitical intervention, does not escape the problem and does not entirely mesh both a radical politics with a radical theology. For while effectively integrating a Marxist critique and programmatic into an already established theological framework, whether it be Catholic, Protestant, or Islamic, it successfully fueled protest and targeted discontent but never went so far as to put the established theology in question. This is the argument made by Alistair Kee when he critiques liberation theology for its failure to subject its theology to its own Marxist criticism. In his words, “I myself have accused Liberation Theology of not being Marxist enough.”18 The result is that liberation theology has never achieved its promise of becoming a theology of revolution. Instead, it has been content to provide a theological interpretation of the world of the poor, but the point, at least from a proper Marxist perspective, should be to change it. Kee concludes: “Unfortunately Liberation Theology is an essentially conservative force.”19 Kee’s critique would seem confirmed by the rebound of both political and theological conservatism, if not fundamentalism, that is sweeping across the Southern Hemisphere as the beliefs, practices, and even the very institutions itself of Christianity are being transformed by the forces of globalization and inculturation. This is the argument made by Philip Jenkins in his widely discussed book The Next Christendom. For Jenkins, the future of Christianity lies in the Southern Hemisphere, and this future is quite different from the one predicted by Western European and American observers. These observers saw in the various liberation theologies an opportunity as a site of protest, revolution, and renewal. But the problem was that these movements were seen through a Euro-American (read: secular) cultural lens, with the result that the influence of the liberation theologians was perhaps exaggerated while the actual religious and

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and also why theology has benefited little from the resurgence. The resurgent piety tends not to be disciplined by serious thought, just as academic theology tends not to be nourished by piety—at least not the kind of piety now enjoying resurgence.16

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cultural transformation that was taking place was entirely overlooked. As Jenkins writes: Some Western Christians have since the 1960s expected that the religion of their Third World brethren would be fervently liberal, activist, and even revolutionary, the model represented by liberation theology. In this view, the new Christianity would chiefly be concerned with pulling down the mighty from their seats, through political action and armed struggle. All too often, though, these hopes have proved illusory. Frequently, the liberationist voices emanating from the Third World proved to derive from clerics trained in Europe and North America, and their ideas won only limited local appeal. Southern Hemisphere Christians would not avoid political activism, but they would become involved strictly on their own terms.20

As for the actual religious and cultural transformation that is taking place, Jenkins insists that “we are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide”—namely, the fact that “the era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning” (1, 3). Furthermore, “a Southernized Christian future should be distinctly conservative” in the sense that it is “traditionalist, orthodox, and supernatural.” And as Jenkins remarks time and again: “This would be an ironic reversal of most Western perceptions about the future of religion” (8). Once again, therefore, there is no radical political theology. What we have instead is either a radical theology that effectively deconstructs the theological tradition while remaining ambivalent or essentially conservative in its basic political philosophy or a radical political theory of liberation that remains essentially conservative in its basic theological commitments.

II

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This introduction began with two mutually reinforcing observations, one about radical theology being insufficiently political and the other about political theology being largely antidemocratic in its thrust. Regarding this second observation, consider, for instance, the modern history of political theology: while it begins with Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise from 1670, which inaugurates an im-

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manent political theology that corresponds to a burgeoning democratic age, it is Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, first published in 1922 and later revised and republished in 1934, that defines its current parameters and preoccupations. Schmitt’s work arrives at that crisis point when many are unmistakably perceiving the breakdown of the modern, liberal, democratic order. What Schmitt accomplishes is almost a complete repudiation and reversal of Spinoza’s political theology. Whereas Spinoza heralds the beginning of the modern, liberal, democratic order, Schmitt chronicles, or exposes, or perhaps even hastens its end. Whereas Spinoza’s theology functions as a political propaedeutic by using his critique of religious authority to create an open and free space for democratic reasoning, Schmitt begins with modern political philosophy and lays bare its theological root: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”21 And finally, whereas Spinoza was almost the prototypical iconoclast, leaving him an “outcast twice removed”—to the Jewish community he was a heretic who was excommunicated at age twenty-four but to the Christians still an “atheist Jew” regarded by his contemporaries as “the most impious and most dangerous man of the century”—Schmitt followed his powerful critiques of the foundations of the Weimar Republic by becoming a supporter of Adolf Hitler and a member of the Nazi party (at the invitation of Martin Heidegger).22 Of course, this is not a book about Spinoza but about Schmitt—or more precisely, about the large shadow cast by Schmitt over the entire field of contemporary political theology. For Schmitt, political theology is primarily concerned with the concept of sovereignty not as democratically conceived by Spinoza but rather as delineated in the state of exception. As Habermas shows, by sovereignty, Schmitt understood “the highest . . . underived authority” that, though it is itself the source of all legally binding norms, neither depends nor answers to those self-same norms.23 In short, the sovereign is necessary to, but stands outside, the rule of law. Put bluntly, political theology is a response to the perceived crisis of political neutralization and is fundamentally undemocratic in the sense that its analysis sees modern democracy naturally and inevitably giving way to the purely administrative economic state. Indeed, its antidemocratic thrust is indicated in the famous opening line of Political Theology: “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”24 By defining sovereignty in relation to the state of exception and by his equation of theology with politics, Schmitt shows his penchant for a traditional theology and an authoritarian

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form of politics wherein just as a transcendent and omnipotent God operates outside the bounds of natural law, the sovereign is authorized to disregard every social norm and rule. The state of exception is an order without law wherein the state has “the monopoly to decide.” Schmitt writes: “What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.”25 This rendering of sovereignty as the state’s monopoly to decide is a far cry from the democratic ambitions of Spinoza. It also reveals a different employment of theology. Whereas Spinoza is the prototypical secular theologian whose immanent critique of religion, like Marx’s centuries later, was the beginning of a much broader political program and democratic revolution, Schmitt draws on a classical theological image of a transcendent God as an analogue to, and rationale for, his critique of the contradictions and emptiness of the liberal democratic order. While Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty in relation to the state of exception has been criticized by many—most prominently Giorgio Agamben, who demonstrates the endemic dangers when the state of exception becomes the contemporary norm or working paradigm in so-called liberal democracies—he still casts a considerable shadow that in many ways molds the field of political theology in opposition to democracy. As the British democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe shows, Schmitt’s political theology boils down to his opposition to liberal democracy as a nonviable regime. While Mouffe goes on to show how this is a “false problem” concocted by Schmitt to serve his own ideological agenda and political interests, it is precisely this critique of modern liberalism that has been seized on by those on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Regarding the left’s continued preoccupation with Schmitt, the American political philosopher Alan Wolfe writes: “It is not that they admire Schmitt’s political views. But they recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.”26 To be clear, while at least the specter of Schmitt haunts this entire work, this should not be read as a sign of my admiration or even at-

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traction to either his politics or his conception of political theology. On the contrary, it is my argument that Schmitt—and more specifically, his employment of political theology in opposition to democratic theory and practice—is the chief obstacle to political theology realizing its own radically democratic potential. Key to making this argument is first unraveling the presumed natural connection between modern liberalism and democracy, which is precisely the effort undertaken in part 1 of this book. In so doing, we might accept aspects of Schmitt’s critique of the modern liberal political order while not simultaneously despairing over the future prospects of democracy as a viable political regime. In short, my argument will be that by his conflation of democracy with modern liberalism, Schmitt effectively throws the baby out with the bathwater. Or, to repeat an earlier line, while political theology might get its impetus from the despair over the perceived failures of modern liberalism, it need not, and must not be allowed to, become a rejection of democracy as such. This is Schmitt’s great mistake, which is one that gets reduplicated each time the assumption is made that democracy and political theology are fundamentally and necessarily incompatible. The alternative I am proposing is a democratic political theology, one that is informed both by radical theology’s courageous willingness to engage the currents of contemporary culture, acknowledging the wounds inflicted on traditional religious belief by the torment of modern democracy, and radical democracy’s faith in the ideals of selfgovernance not only as a hope but as an urgent necessity for our times. It is a democratic political theology that is both postliberal and postsecular but that is not to be confused with the reactionary conservatism with which these terms are typically associated. And finally, as a democratic political theology, it is to be understood as the necessary supplement to radical democratic theory’s own efforts at rethinking the conceptual bases of democracy itself. Both theoretically and politically speaking, this book is a taking leave, both employing the image of exodus as the appropriately immanent form of political resistance and rebellion and departing from the assumed categories that prevail in both democratic theory and political theology. It is my hope that by bringing these two disparate fields of discourse together, the radical potential of each will be more fully revealed.

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part one

Radical Democracy

The cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. —John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less. —Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom

chapter one

Democracy, More or Less

While the principal concern of this book is the (possible) connection between political theology and radical democracy and, as such, it is not principally a work in political philosophy, it is necessary to draw on existing theories of democracy in order to develop the radically democratic potential of political theology. For even by asserting a connection between political theology and radical democracy we find ourselves pressed up against certain objections. After all, the still normative understanding of political theology as defined by Carl Schmitt is largely antidemocratic in its thrust. This is an argument that will be made explicit in later chapters, but for now, suffice it to say that in Schmitt’s scathing critique of the modern technocratic state, he conjoins the problems associated with modern liberalism with those of so-called liberal democracies. By his rejection of liberalism, therefore, he also rejects democracy, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a line of argumentation that has become favored by many political theorists, social commentators, and even theologians on both the left and the right, irrespective of their own ideological persuasion. Not only would the normative understanding of political theology preclude any meaningful connection with the theory and practice of radical democracy, but so too do discussions of democracy oftentimes

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preclude any mention of the theological or religious. Here, the socalled wall of separation between church and state establishes a normative secular idiom. Whether following the lead of John Rawls, Richard Rorty, or at least the early Jürgen Habermas, religion is treated as a “conversation stopper” and thus ill suited to the open public discourse a plurivocal democracy requires.1 Because religion is seen as (or is it confined to?) a merely private matter of individual conscience, defenders of this position can rightfully say that a degree of religious freedom—and most certainly, religious diversity—is still allowed. But the point here (and again, this is a point that will be elaborated on in later chapters) is that so long as democracy is seen to require what the critic Richard John Neuhaus calls the “naked public square,” then the religious voice is effectively silenced, to say nothing of the theopolitical consideration of the meaning and practice of democracy.2 This brings me back to the warning with which I began this chapter: it should be understood from the start that the very premise of this book, which seeks to connect political theology with the theory and practice of radical democracy, is very much in dispute. We might say that by even posing the possibility we are venturing into the terrain of the heretical. That is because on the one hand, it is still widely assumed that political theology by its very nature is antidemocratic, either because most simply it harbors theocratic ambitions or (à la Schmitt) because it rejects the groundlessness of the modern liberal democratic state and the accompanying decadence such a state produces within its society. On the other hand, because the modern world and the modern democratic state are culturally diverse and selfidentified as pluralistic, both modern democratic theory and the normative legal culture in the West is thought to be necessarily secular, meaning in this case—and quite problematically so—irreligious. In short, by the dominant rendering, there is, and there can be, no political theology that is also radically democratic: political theology arises out of the despair over the failures of the modern liberal democratic state, and to champion democracy, conversely, means to keep a watchful eye on the inordinate influence of religion. To be sure, there are the political strategists who have successfully co-opted and employed a winning formula for political success and influence and thereby upset the apple cart. For instance, to take an example from recent electoral politics in the United States, as Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” morphed into the more sophisticated

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“Christian Coalition” envisioned by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, the identity politics used to such great effect by those who had long been suppressed and whose basic civil rights had long been denied was successfully translated by a religious identitarian movement that when fully mobilized could claim for itself a national majority yet nevertheless exploit the rhetoric of victimhood to rally the conservative base to its cause. Only after a generation of increasing success, whose apotheosis was the election of George W. Bush to two successive terms as president, did progressives on the left begin to claim the language of moral values for themselves. Perhaps this recent history is itself a sign of the self-correcting nature of democracy. But recall as well how this very public display of religiosity by the Democratic Party also almost threatened to derail its chosen candidate in Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. First, there was the public controversy over Obama’s longtime association with his Black Liberationist pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In addition, there were the persistent rumors that Obama was secretly a Muslim in spite of his forceful and consistent protestations to the contrary. There was also his own embarrassing sound bite from a private fundraiser in San Francisco, where Obama seemed to adopt a dismissive, materialist, Marxist attitude toward religion, lumping religious belief together with fear of immigrants and rural America’s attachment to guns, describing it as something that angry, dispossessed, and parochial small-towners cling to when times get tough. And finally, the one and only occasion during the long presidential campaign where the Republican candidate John McCain’s numbers spiked and Obama’s fell was after the televised forum on faith and public policy sponsored by the Saddleback Church and moderated by the Reverend Rick Warren. Here, McCain’s moral certitude played as a strength, recalling Bush and Karl Rove’s winning formula from election cycles prior by invoking a Manichean struggle between good and evil, whereas Obama’s deliberative nature was perceived as weak and indecisive. In each case, Obama had to tread carefully for fear of his religious credentials being questioned. Beware of the hand that feeds you. There is no doubt, at least in the United States, that religion is back in the public square. Following the advice of the progressive evangelicals, the left (or, at least, Democratic politicians) now “gets it” and understands that it must speak the language of moral values in a way that the American believer can understand and to which they can relate.3 But confusion

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still abounds, and dangers lie around every corner. It is one thing to recognize how religion might be employed as a strategy for political success and as a means to wield political power; it is quite another to consider and evaluate the theopolitical ramifications of our understanding and practice of democracy. The challenge, therefore, is twofold: both political theology and democracy must be radically redefined. By radical, I mean we must get at the roots of these terms’ respective meanings, to effect a “short circuit” within the dominant discourse. For as we all readily understand, there is no shortage of talk of both democracy and political theology, at least in a manner of speaking whereby pundits and social commentators consider the rightful role of religious beliefs within our public discourse, or in a more theoretical vein, philosophers and theologians consider the postmodern return of the religious and suggest a postsecular paradigm of understanding. While talk abounds, the actual connections between political theology and democratic theory and practice remain wanting. We are striving toward that end here. Therefore, before proceeding any further, this chapter will offer a range of theories concerning the meaning and practice of democracy today. What we will discover is that while there is a broad consensus that some version of democracy is key to us moving forward and responding to the present challenges we face, there is a widespread difference as to what exactly that means. We are all, evidently, democratic, more or less, but it is in deciphering where on that scale of more or less we reside that makes all the difference.

I Conventionally defined, democracy is the rule of or by the people. Its familiar elements include popular elections, a free press, competing political parties, the rule of law, the constitutional guarantee of basic civil rights, and at least some semblance of social and political equality. The first major theorist of democracy was Aristotle, who in his Politics laid out a taxonomy of political systems. While Aristotle actually preferred a royal or aristocratic form of government to democracy, he recognized that any form of government might be exercised properly or improperly judged according to how well its rule served the common good as opposed to advancing private interests. So considered, democracy, which Aristotle classified as the deviant form of 22

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polity, is deemed the most tolerable form of improper rule, to be preferred to either tyranny (the deviation of royalty) or oligarchy (the deviation of aristocracy), because at least with a democratic form of government a greater number of people benefit from its self-serving rule. This is hardly a ringing endorsement of democracy, to be sure, but even here we can appreciate what many have seen as democracy’s essential strength—namely, given the selfish nature of human beings, the corrupting influence of power, and the tendency of institutions to consolidate and congeal over time, in the words of Winston Churchill, political democracy suddenly seems “the least bad regime.” Tocqueville would eventually expand upon Aristotle’s theory of democracy, most significantly by his reappraisal of self-interest. In one of the most cited chapters from his two-volume study Democracy in America, Tocqueville discusses “self-interest rightly understood,” by which Americans’ “enlightened self-love continually leads them to help one another and inclines them to devote freely a part of their time and wealth to the welfare of the state.”4 The significance of this in relation to Aristotle is that instead of self-interest being seen in conflict with, or working against, the well-being of all, Tocqueville believes it establishes the cultural conditions by which political democracy might thrive. He bases this on his observation of the early Americans’ high degree of civic participation, which then he sees leading to an engaged citizenry. As he writes in his chapter on the “Real Advantages of Democratic Government”: How is it that in the United States, where the inhabitants arrived but yesterday on the land they occupy, where they have brought with them neither customs nor memories, where they have met each other for the first time without prior acquaintance or where, to sum up, the feeling for one’s country can hardly exist, each person gets as involved in the affairs of his township, canton, and the whole state as he does in his own business? It is because each person in his own sphere takes an active part in the government of society. (276)

Individuals do not have to sacrifice or disregard their self-interests. On the contrary, with the fuller civic and political participation that democracy affords, interests compete in an open marketplace of ideas, individuals and groups learn the art and benefit of cooperation and compromise, and thus political citizens are made. Democracy, in this 23

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sense, is not merely the least bad system absent an enlightened philosopher-king or oligarchy but the “irresistible revolution” that is the unavoidable outcome of the history of expanding equality in the modern world. That being said, Tocqueville was no unbridled apologist for democracy. From his unique vantage point he was able not only to observe the workings of democratic political institutions in the early days of the American Republic—a constitutional system that at least in theory could be easily duplicated in Europe and around the world—but even more, the cultural revolution and social leveling that accompanied democracy in America and that stood in such stark contrast to the old aristocratic regime with which he and his fellow Europeans were more familiar. For Tocqueville there was no denying the transformative power of even the very notion of popular sovereignty, which he saw as the essence of democracy in America and about which he famously wrote, “The people reign over the American political world like God over the universe” (71). For instance, because the people were invested in the drafting of laws, they were on the whole a more law-abiding people: “People obey the law not merely because they made it but also because they can alter it, if it ever happens to harm them. They obey what they see firstly as a self-imposed evil and secondly as an evil which is always temporary” (282). Precisely because religion was disestablished, the level of religious participation and belief remained high, with the American public able to find an outlet for their every spiritual want. Less economical but always more innovative, “an aimless restlessness permeates democratic societies where a kind of everlasting excitement stimulates all sorts of innovations which almost always involve expense” (246). And, most significantly, the great privilege of democracy according to Tocqueville is that the people always have the capacity to repair their mistakes—democracy as a self-correcting system.5 Nevertheless, because the power of rule came from below rather than from above—or, more precisely, was exercised horizontally rather than vertically—Tocqueville noted the oppressive power of social conformity and the stifling of genuine debate and difference of opinion— for example: “I know of no country where there is generally less independence of thought and real freedom of debate than in America” (297). In addition, the social leveling of democratic culture, along with the petty jealousies associated with the cult of equality, easily translate into a generalized lack of any grand ambition, high culture, or great works of art. In this sense, in a passage that remains as timely now as

If it seems useful to you to divert man’s intellectual and moral activity upon the necessities of physical life and use it to foster prosperity; if you think that reason is more use to men than genius; if you aim to create not heroic virtues but peaceful habits; if you prefer to witness vice rather than crime and to find fewer splendid deeds provided you have fewer transgressions; if, instead of moving through a brilliant society, you are satisfied to live in a prosperous one; if, finally, in your view, the main objective for a government is not to give the whole nation as much strength or glory as possible but to obtain for each of the individuals who make it up as much wellbeing as possible, while avoiding as much suffering as one can, then make social conditions equal and set up a democratic government. (286–287)

And finally, though civic and political participation were high in America’s budding democracy, politicians became little more than managers of public perception forced to pander to the people’s whims, making statesmanship all but impossible. In Tocqueville’s words, “I discovered with amazement to what extent merit was common among the governed but rare among the rulers” (229). Inevitable and irresistible perhaps, but as Tocqueville’s observations about democracy in America resound to us today, we are reminded that we must be careful what we wish for. Democracy works in both seen and unseen ways, as a political project and a cultural revolution. No doubt Tocqueville requires us to expand the meaning of democracy so that it is not merely a matter of politics but is seen to apply to all facets of society, culture, and the economy. In so doing, we realize how easily and imperceptibly democracy hides within it certain antidemocratic elements. Beyond Tocqueville’s well-known warning about the tyranny of the majority, what I am talking about here is how the very idea and ideal of democracy can cloak itself, obscure the actual practices within a society, and be turned against its own values of freedom, equality, and self-governance. As Tocqueville famously writes: “My main complaint against a democratic government as organized in the United States is not its weakness, as many Europeans claim, but rather its irresistible strength. And what I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom that prevails there but the shortage of any guarantee against tyranny” (294).

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when it was written almost two hundred years ago, the choice of democracy, while full of tangible benefit, also exacts a great cost:

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This argument is picked up and expanded upon in relation to the contemporary state of affairs in the United States by the noted scholar of Tocqueville Sheldon Wolin, in his book Democracy Incorporated, where he describes the features of today’s “managed democracy” as a form of “inverted totalitarianism.” As opposed to the classic totalitarian regimes of Fascist Germany and the Soviet Union, today’s managed democracy banks on the compliance of the people as the state is twisted and distorted to almost exclusively serve the private interests of the transnational corporations, who are asked to give no account of themselves. In Wolin’s terms, inverted totalitarianism “represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.”6 Wolin’s argument regarding managed democracy in the United States resembles the broader description of what Colin Crouch terms “post-democracy”: Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professional experts in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind the spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests.7

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As the game of politics obscures the actual work of government, the systematic dismantling, or at least distorting, of democracy continues unabated, underneath the people’s noses to be sure, but masked as a continually updated stream of information; news and opinion flows such that everyone is seen to have a voice, but meanwhile the power lies elsewhere. For instance, returning to Wolin, whereas classic totalitarian regimes sought to take over, suppress, or neutralize competing bases of power such as churches, universities, and businesses, an inverted totalitarianism merely combines its forces with other forms of power in a symbiotic relationship. Whereas classic totalitarianism typically involves “the attempt to realize an ideological, idealized conception of a society as a systematically ordered whole, where the ‘parts’ (family, churches, education, intellectual and cultural life, economy, recreation, politics, state bureaucracy) are premeditatedly, even forcibly if necessary, coordinated to support and further the purposes of the regime,” inverted totalitarianism merely manages these overlapping spheres of sovereignty such that electoral

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politics is contained. “Managed democracy,” Wolin writes, “is democracy systematized” and demonstrates how “democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.” This level of control is achieved not by the imposition of authority, but by a cost-effective economy that relies on integration, rationalization, and predictability wherein even “voters are made as predictable as consumers” and universities are “nearly as rationalized in [their] structure as a corporation.”8 And finally, while the harshness of classic totalitarian regimes is to be repudiated, the benignity of inverted totalitarianism is to be questioned. In contrast to neoconservative ideology, there is no benign empire, especially when predicated on the omnipresence of military force. Thus, concerning the United States’ own recent exalted claims to spread democracy around the world, Wolin writes: That our system actually is democratic is more of an unquestioned assumption than a matter of public discussion, and so we ignore the extent to which antidemocratic elements have become systemic, integral, not aberrant. The evidence is there: in widening income disparities and class distinctions, polarized educational systems . . . health care that is denied to millions, national political institutions controlled by wealth and corporate power. While these contrasts are frequently bemoaned, they are rarely considered as cumulative and, rarer still, evidence of an antidemocratic regime.9

Tocqueville’s great advantage was to observe democracy in America during its nascent stage, when it was still regarded by the world at large as the radical social and political experiment it was. We now stand at a point where democracy has become an “unquestioned assumption.” But democracy has always been as a wager on an uncertain future, known and experienced more by its promise than its actualization—or, borrowing from Tocqueville yet again: “Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion of equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely.”10 When a self-styled democracy becomes characterized more and more as a managed state, we are required along with Wolin to question how truly democratic it in fact is. Whether we adopt the term “inverted totalitarianism” or “postdemocracy” matters little. But like Tocqueville before us, we stand on the cusp of something new being born economically, culturally, and politically. And whether our future will be more or less democratic remains to be seen.

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II Shifting registers from the historical to the more philosophical, as Jacques Derrida has written, democracy is a promise. It works according the messianic structure of the “to come.” Its eye is always set toward the future, its standard of law the impossible call for justice and equality. As such, there is a permanent breach between democracy as it is practiced and as it is imagined. After all, there are no actually existing democracies. Nevertheless, there are actually existing states and societies who define themselves democratically. Indeed, a more fully realized democracy remains the aspiration that binds many of us together, a political bond that is as potent as it is tenuous—in the words of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. . . . ” Here in its codified form is the notion of democracy as a work in progress, a union to be sure, but still to be perfected, always awaiting its fuller realization. Here is the notion that democracy is a revolution within a revolution, a further call beyond mere political independence, beyond—or perhaps better, prior to, and the precondition on—the right to vote. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., in his speech called “The American Dream” delivered at Lincoln University in 1961, “in a real sense, America is essentially a dream—a dream yet unfulfilled.” Democracy stands and falls in accordance with the scope of its promise, a promise already, but not yet, fulfilled, an imagined condition on the not-too-distant horizon, a persistent hope for more equality, more justice, more participation. Democracy always and forever calling for more, building upon itself, and in the process reinventing its very meaning and practice. It is the imaginary condition of democracy that I am interested in presently, the quintessentially democratic demand for always more democracy. More precisely, when we imagine democracy, what exactly do we imagine, and how exactly does this imagination inform our practice of politics? If democracy remains our collective unfulfilled promise, then to what extent does our understanding of democracy either further or thwart our own democratic ambitions? In short, what is the measure of democracy? When we take its measure, are we more or less democratic? Further still, what is the measure of the measure—that is to say, for those interested in the meaning and practice of democracy for today, to what extent do they imagine democracy democratically? In what follows, I will first expound upon this notion of democracy as an imagined condition and then evaluate rep-

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resentative images of democracy. What we will see is that there is a historical tension that has only been exacerbated in the era of globalization between democracy defined strictly in terms of liberty or independence versus democracy defined more in terms of equality. It will be my argument that while the freedoms traditionally associated with a democratic society are integral—chiefly because of how those freedoms have been exploited, if not twisted and distorted, by the global economy’s greater concern with a free market—it is primarily equality in terms of political potency that is the more accurate gauge of democracy today. By establishing this standard of equality as the measure of democracy, we will later be able to examine its possible connection to a reenvisioned political theology.

III When writing of the principle of the sovereignty of the people in America, Tocqueville describes this notion of popular sovereignty as the “law of laws,” or the “principle that predominates over the whole of society in America.” Of course, popular sovereignty did not begin with the United States. On the contrary, as Tocqueville notes, it “is to be found, more or less, at the bottom of almost all human institutions.” The difference is that while the will of the people is generally concealed in nondemocratic states and institutions, within a democracy, it is its very raison d’être. The people are to have their say, as unruly and disconcerting as it may be. As such, the principle of the sovereignty of the people has an inertia or a logic all its own. Once it is claimed as the proper means by which a state is governed, not only do the people become their own lord and master, with the theopolitical implications here apparent, but the very concept of “the people” functions according to its own expansive logic, to the point where only universal suffrage will suffice. Our axiom of democracy always demanding more democracy can be found in Tocqueville’s observation: “There is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength.” But what if even this most basic principle to democracy was itself a fiction? Who, after all, are the “people”? There is no need to recount here the many, at times tortured, restraints placed on who exactly qualifies as a member of the people. What matters is the fact

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that the very notion of the people is a historical construct and, as such, is easily pliable toward either democratic or antidemocratic ends. The historian Edmund Morgan has shown this brilliantly in his book Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. Beginning with an argument made by David Hume in his essay “Of the First Principles of Government,” wherein Hume writes, “Nothing is more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers,” Morgan’s operating thesis is that “government requires make-believe.” Human beings willingly subject themselves to political and legal authority not simply or even primarily, according to Morgan’s analysis, because of fear of reprisals but, more fundamentally, because of an acceptance of a necessary fiction, a willing suspension of disbelief that lies at the heart of any and all governments, whether democratic and popular in nature or not. “Make believe that the king is divine, make believe that he can do no wrong or make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God,” Morgan writes. “Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.”11 Though we rely on these undeniably fictional aspects to our political concepts, we prefer them unacknowledged, calling them instead, for one case in point, “self-evident truths.” Again, in the words of Morgan: “Among the fictions we accept today as self-evident are those that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and that they owe obedience to government only if it is their own agent, deriving its authority from their consent” (14). However difficult or impossible it is to demonstrate these supposedly self-evident truths, their power lies elsewhere, in the degree to which they invite credulity. So long as the people believe they are equal and that their government guarantees their equal status before the law, they will not rest until their demands for equality are satisfied. In this way, we see, as Morgan intends, “that the fictional qualities of popular sovereignty sustain rather than threaten the human values associated with it” (15). This emphasis on political credulity is not to claim a theopolitical origin to democracy—not at this point in the book’s analysis, in any case. Instead, it is to say that it matters greatly which fictions we live by. And further, whether we imagine the need for more or less democracy goes a great deal toward determining how democratic we will in fact be.

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Combining Morgan’s historical insight into the development of the notion of popular sovereignty with Wolin’s concern with the contemporary state of the United States as a “managed democracy” that effectively hides its actual condition as an inverted form of totalitarianism, what the two scholars share in common is a belief in how the political imagination prefigures the political state of affairs: democracy as make-believe. When asking whether an American version of totalitarianism is plausible or even conceivable, Wolin bypasses the standard route by which the signs of totalitarianism might be detected, opting instead for an examination of two contrasting types of ideals or imaginaries, which he calls the “constitutional imaginary” and the “power imaginary.” Of the constitutional imaginary, he writes that it “prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable, and constrained (e.g., popular elections, legal authorization). It emphasizes stability and limits” and depends on what “citizens conceive it to be, such that there is a reasonable continuity between the original formulations and the present interpretations.” On the contrary, the power imaginary “seeks constantly to expand present capabilities.”12 While Thomas Hobbes among others sought to combine the two contrasting imaginaries, Wolin’s concern is that the “pursuit of the power imaginary may undermine or override the boundaries mandated in the constitutional imaginary.” Indeed, once accompanied by a justifying mission (such as the overarching and vaguely defined “war on terror”), the power imaginary not only undermines or overrides its constitutional limits but also blurs the line between truth and reality. “One consequence of the pursuit of an expansive power imaginary is the blurring of the lines separating reality from fancy and truth telling from self-deception and lying. In its imaginary, power is not so much justified as sanctified, excused by the lofty ends it proclaims, ends that commonly are antithetical to the power legitimated by the constitutional imaginary.”13 The important thing to note here is that the political imaginary properly conceived is not adverse or antithetical to the truth. On the contrary, as Morgan makes plain, as a necessary fiction, it sustains the very values it envisions even as it recognizes the inevitable gap that exists between the ideal and the real, the imagined and the actual. Thus, when power threatens to suspend its constitutional limits via, for instance, a declared wartime state of exception however contrived it might be, the proper democratic response is also a work of the imagination. And, not to be missed, a work of truth. Wolin calls this

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the work of a “fugitive democracy” and admits that it is a work against the grain given the powerful forces allied against it. Nevertheless, history has shown that fugitive democracy works in at least calling to question the legitimacy of the claim to power by “challenging the democratic credentials of a system that legitimates the economic oppression and culturally stunted lives of millions of citizens while, for all practical purposes, excluding them from political power.”14 Likewise, when pressed to identify his main hope for the future of an egalitarian and maximal democracy, Crouch calls for the mobilizing of “new disruptive creativity within the demos” by which the “world of official politics is taken by surprise, finds the movement unmanageable and attacks it as undemocratic.”15 Consider what follows, therefore, as an effort toward the end of a fugitive democracy, a measure of our own political imagination at this present moment according to an absolute standard, albeit along a sliding scale, of democracy, more or less. Indeed, along with the axiom of democracy always demanding more democracy comes the pledge that when talking about democracy here in this present work, it will be a democracy democratically conceived. By this I mean an unapologetic demand for democracy without compromise, an egalitarian form of social democracy that is maximally defined. Not the sort that exists merely as an “unquestioned assumption,” neither America’s birthright nor its gift to the world. For as the history of the United States shows, a democracy that harbors a fear of the people as an unruly multitude is a democracy in name only. And a democracy that begins with a fear of its own is easily and tragically turned—or better, borrowing Wolin’s analysis, inverted—by its fear of the other. In this sense, the managed democracy that America has become is effectively the world’s greatest superpower in squelching a more democratic democracy the world over. It is to that tragic irony that we now turn.

IV

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To be clear, when repeating the axiom that democracy always demands more democracy, this should not be confused with either Wilsonian idealism (making the world safe for democracy) or Bush’s neoconservative “freedom agenda” (freedom and liberty are God’s gift to humankind). Both, though in different ways, would be examples of Wolin’s power imaginary, because they sanction the United States’

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expansive powers by giving it an almost mythological status: America as the world’s benefactor and protector, sacrificing its own men and treasure for the preservation and spread of democracy. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the United States’ pursuit of global power in successive administrations made use of wartime emergency to enlarge the power of the executive, which eventuated into the promotion of democracy by way of shock and awe. Meanwhile, a truly global market was established, making the world safe not for freedom and democracy per se but at least for the free market. As many have observed, it is not democracy but capital that governs U.S. foreign policy. Yet the common mistake made by democratic theorists, and even more by politicians and policymakers, is to conflate the one with the other, to claim that democracy and the market are twins, allowing the free-market ideology to effectively define the meaning and practice of democratic politics. For a case in point, consider Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama was once considered one of the loyal insiders of the neoconservative fold, together with the likes of high-ranking Pentagon officials and conservative opinion makers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer. However, whereas the great bulk of the neoconservative ideologues share a common intellectual heritage and journey, Fukuyama’s ideological bearings have oscillated quite dramatically.16 As the author most famous for The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama’s argument that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the triumph of global capital and liberal democracy was a favorite of neoliberals throughout the 1990s, when globalization promised an end to ideological conflict and adumbrated a prolonged period of peace and prosperity. At the same time, beginning in 1997 he was a prominent member of People for the New American Century (PNAC) and a signatory to two of that organization’s most hawkish and influential letters: one a public letter to then President Clinton recommending the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq as official U.S. policy, the other an open letter to President Bush on September 20, 2001, that linked the demand to “capture or kill Osama bin Laden” with the continued need to oust Saddam Hussein “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack.”17 Though a vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Fukuyama began to express misgivings as early as August 2004 not only about the direction of the war and the much publicized series of blunders that had occurred in the eighteen months since the start of the American

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invasion but also, more controversially, about the very mindset that justified America’s preemptive attack in the first place—a prerogative that was a cornerstone of the neoconservative philosophy of American power. By publicly casting doubt on the neoconservative strategy that establishing an Iraqi democracy in the heart of the Middle East would serve as a bulwark against Islamic radicalism, Fukuyama was the first chink in the armor of the tightly knit group of neoconservative intellectuals. Their feud was public and perhaps foreshadowed the decline in their influence within the White House during President Bush’s second term.18 My interest with Fukuyama is not to relitigate the second Gulf War, nor even to expose the ideological naïveté of the neoconservatives. Rather, Fukuyama presents us with an interesting case precisely because of the perceived drifts within his own political stances. While his conservative credentials are well established, dating back to his work within the Reagan administration in helping to formulate what came to be known as the “Reagan Doctrine,” a policy that used both covert and overt aid to thwart the spread of Soviet power and influence around the world, his persistent neoliberal economic leanings have at times been in conflict with his defense of a militant neoconservative agenda and, more recently, with his stated commitment to a more democratic future. In his book from 2006, America at the Crossroads, it is precisely this neoconservative legacy from which he tries to distance himself. While repudiating neoconservativism for its mistake in Iraq, Fukuyama reiterates the basic neoliberal economic principles made famous in his The End of History. The End of History is finally an argument about modernization. . . . Economic modernization, when successful, tends to drive demands for political participation by creating a middle class with property to protect, higher levels of education, and greater concern for their recognition as individuals. Liberal democracy is one of the by-products of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.19

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He goes on to delineate what distinguishes this particular reading of history from that of the Bush administration. As the scholar Ken Jowitt argues, and Fukuyama agrees with his assessment, Fukuyama’s historical timetable was too hands-off and laissez-faire, whereas Bush, under the sway of his neoconservative advisors, came to believe that

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history “needs deliberate organization, leadership, and direction.” The difference, in a nutshell, is between an “active ‘Leninist’ foreign policy” and a “passive ‘Marxist’ social teleology,” with Bush opting for the former and Fukuyama the latter. As Fukuyama puts it: “Democracy in my view is likely to expand universally in the long run. But whether the rapid and relatively peaceful transition to democracy and free markets made by the Poles, Hungarians, or even the Romanians can be quickly replicated in other parts of the world, or promoted through the application of power by outsiders at any given point in history is open to doubt” (55). The grossest assault on the meaning and practice of democracy within Bush’s freedom agenda—namely, that democracy can be spread by the barrel of a gun—is rightly condemned. However, it is still not clear what Fukuyama means when he speaks of democracy. What is clear within Fukuyama’s analysis to this point is that democracy is a likely byproduct of economic liberalization. But what of the people themselves, to say nothing of the local, national, and international institutions by which their rights are secured? As Fukuyama himself acknowledges, “a theory of democratic change emerging out of a broad process of modernization like the one laid out in The End of History suggests that democratic contagion can take a society only so far; if certain structural conditions are not met, instability and setbacks are in store” (57). And further, “although democratic elections were held in many countries by the 1990s, liberal rule of law and observance of human rights made much less progress and in many cases suffered serious setbacks” (58). As we have already seen, while Fukuyama might have once been sympathetic to the argument that the solution to this problem is the wedding of U.S. military force to morality to ensure the preservation and spread of democracy, the lessons of Iraq taught him otherwise. Nevertheless, in his estimation, the terrorist threat revealed on 9/11 is real and deadly, even if it does not rise to the level of the existential threat claimed by some. In considering the nature of this threat, Fukuyama is careful to contrast radical political Islam to the civilizational conflict argued by Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. “We are not fighting the religion Islam or its adherents,” Fukuyama writes, “but a radical ideology that appeals to a distinct minority of Muslims. That ideology owes a great deal to Western ideas in addition to Islam, and it appeals to the same alienated individual who in earlier generations would have gravitated to communism or fascism” (71). In this sense, the true source of the problem is “deterritorialized” Islam, “in

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which individual Muslims find themselves cut off from authentic local traditions, often as uprooted minorities in non-Muslim lands. This explains why so many jihadists have not come from the Middle East but have rather been bred . . . in Western Europe” (72). And further, “the most dangerous people are not pious Muslims in the Middle East but alienated and uprooted young people in Hamburg, London, or Amsterdam who, like the fascists and Marxists before them, see ideology (in this case, jihadism) as the answer to their personal search for identity” (73). Then finally the key insight which is most relevant to our specific concerns: Jihadism is a by-product of modernization and globalization, not traditionalism, and hence will be a problem in modern, globalized societies. In addition, Western democracy will not be a short-term solution to the problem of terrorism. The September 11, Madrid, Amsterdam, and London attackers lived in modern, democratic societies and were not alienated by the lack of democracy in the countries of their birth or ancestry. It was precisely the modern democratic society they lived in that they found alienating. (74)

There is much in this analysis for which Fukuyama should be commended. He urges caution in the use of military force, recognizing the limits of American power and the need for more international cooperation. He rightly identifies the range of opinion that exists within the so-called Muslim world, refusing the simplistic and selffulfilling “West versus the Rest” logic that sees the present geopolitical challenges in terms of broad civilizational strife. And he places radical Islam as an essentially modernist movement within the context of globalization, as opposed to the caricature of bin Laden and his ilk as antiquarians stuck in the barbaric Middle Ages. While his hands-off approach might be a welcome relief from the bombast of those who foolishly believed that Americans would be greeted as liberators as democracy took hold in Iraq, notice exactly what is consistently thought uncertain or certain according to Fukuyama’s view. As for the uncertain, economic modernization as practiced in accordance with Fukuyama’s neoliberal philosophy leads to historical byproducts, but whether that byproduct is liberal democracy or jihadism is unknown. Nor is there any stated preference, so long as there are no serious interruptions to the free flow of global capital. Indeed, at least 36

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so far as Fukuyama is concerned, it is liberal democratic societies themselves that are the very source of alienation and deterritorialization that breeds radical Islam in the first place. The solution, therefore, is clearly not more democracy, because as Fukuyama understands it, jihadism feeds on the global spread of liberal democracy just as assuredly as profits and opportunity grow. As for what is certain, as Fukuyama sees it, radical Islam is nothing more and nothing less than an outlet for the disaffected, just as fascism and Marxism were in generations past. There is no consideration of the inner logic or particular histories of each of these disparate ideological movements as the distinct entities they are. There is no attention paid to their differences. They are instead used as a gloss or a stand-in for those who have yet to be incorporated into the worldwide community. Even as he claims the end of history with the ideological triumph of global capital, he allows no ideological competitors to stand in the breach. It is in this sense that Fukuyama’s view of democracy is fundamentally flawed. For one, the sharp dichotomy between Marxism and democracy does not withstand historical scrutiny. After all, Marxists of all stripes and nationalities have often done the work of fugitive democracy, pressing for reforms if not revolution and, despite the odds, have won many of the great victories that best represent democracy’s advance toward greater equality, whether in terms of universal suffrage, the right for workers to organize, fair labor practices, the establishment of international institutions, and so on.20 In other words, Fukuyama’s vestigial antagonism toward Marxism leads him to a false dichotomy that taints his appreciation for how democracy actually works and how democratic gains are actually won. Moreover, Fukuyama’s dismissive attitude toward radical Islam as more of the same exposes his unwillingness to consider the cacophony of voices that, to repeat an earlier line, is democracy’s raison d’être. That there are entire groups of disaffected people within socalled liberal democracies who feel they have no stake in their government, who perceive their most cherished values and traditions as under assault, and who are uprooted by the global force and triumph of capital no doubt represents to some extent their own failure of imagination, but not entirely. The economic forces of modernization that Fukuyama consistently describes in neutral if not benign terms carry with them an unmistakable way of life and the power to transplant and replace values, irrespective of custom or tradition. Liberal democracy or jihadism may be its byproducts; it cares little so long as

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the markets remain free and open, even when we know they are paid for and protected by the vast military-industrial complex that threatens the unassimilated and unincorporated with extinction. In the end, therefore, Fukuyama is correct that liberal democracy is not the solution, but his reasoning is all wrong. Liberal democracy is insufficient not because it harbors within it the deterritorialized and thus radicalized other, the would-be terrorist who threatens to use the very freedom society allows as a weapon to destroy. Rather, it is not the solution because liberal democracy so understood is insufficiently democratic, having already sold its soul in the open market. As Crouch writes: Since we have become so accustomed to the joint idea of liberal democracy we tend today not to see that there are two separate elements at work. Democracy requires certain rough equalities in a real capacity to affect political outcomes by all citizens. Liberalism requires free, diverse and ample opportunities to affect those outcomes.  .  .  . Maximal democracy certainly cannot flourish without strong liberalism. But the two are different things, and at points even conflict.21

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What we see here is the tension between democracy being defined in terms of liberty or equality. As one whose primary faith is in economic modernization, when Fukuyama speaks of democracy he is more concerned with individual freedoms than the political capacities of the citizenry. The problem with this is that the economic modernism he unabashedly defends undeniably creates winners and losers, consolidating the power—and thus, the political capacity—of “those who benefited from the unrestricted operation of the capitalist economy rather than those who needed some protection from it.”22 Though successfully repudiating the neoconservative legacy, by his conflation of liberal democracy with economic liberalism, Fukuyama unwittingly paves the way for America’s own democratic ambitions to continue to be held hostage by an economic determinism. And so long as the tail is wagging the dog, the bite is as ferocious as it is indiscriminate. On the scale of more or less democracy, Fukuyama therefore would fall under the category of less. A similar case can be found with Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, a prominent media personality, and the author of The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Zakaria begins this book with the announcement, “We live in a democratic age,” with democracy serving as “the

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sole surviving source of political legitimacy.”23 Then, like Tocqueville before him, Zakaria explains how the principle of the “rule of the people” has the cumulative and wide-ranging effect of shifting power downward in all facets of life, from politics to economics, culture, and even violence itself: “hierarchies are breaking down, closed systems are opening up, and pressures from the masses are now the primary engine of social change. Democracy has gone from being a form of government to a way of life.”24 But therein lies the problem, because once the will of the people becomes absolute, not only are old hierarchies broken down and new opportunities created, but a regime that enjoys widespread popular support might proceed to ignore constitutional limits on its power and violate its own citizens’ basic rights. In this sense, democracy might become illiberal. “After all,” Zakaria reminds us, somewhat simplistically, “Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany via free elections.”25 And since the publication of Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom in 2003, prominent examples from the Middle East such as the election of Hamas to power in Gaza in 2006 and the electoral gains of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2005, to say nothing of Bush’s reelection in 2004, would seem to confirm Zakaria’s concern over the potential for the illiberal, if not authoritarian, turn of democracy, or at least make questionable the democratic emphasis placed on free elections. In Zakaria’s words: “Democracy is flourishing, liberty is not.”26 By distinguishing between constitutional liberalism and democracy, Zakaria shares with Crouch the plea for us to question the joint idea of liberal democracy and the treatment of democracy and the market as twins, with which we have become so accustomed. But whereas Crouch’s emphasis is on a maximal democracy—the criterion of which is the equality of political capacity—Zakaria argues that we must curtail certain democratic principles and forces in order to preserve our liberty. In addition, whereas Zakaria sees liberalism as essentially a neutral, if not benign, force, Crouch finds it inevitably tilted toward corporate interests. Thus, while “democracy is increasingly being defined as liberal democracy,” though that is “an historically contingent form, not a normative last word,” it should be understood that “this is a form that stresses electoral participation as the main type of mass participation, extensive freedom for lobbying activities, which mainly means business lobbies, and a form of polity that avoids interfering with a capitalist economy. It is a model that has little interest in widespread citizen involvement or the role of organizations outside the business sector.”27 In this way, while it would be

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premature to conclude that democracy and capitalism are mutually exclusive and not inconceivable that democracy might freely choose a capitalist free market, it should be noted how the global force of capital mitigates against the political capacity of an engaged citizenry and thus can be rightly seen as an antidemocratic force. As one author who will be discussed shortly puts this relationship between democracy and capitalism, “democracies prefer markets but markets do not prefer democracies. Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must also do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.”28 Like the contrast between Zakaria and Crouch, the contrast between Zakaria and Wolin is also an illuminating one. In some respects, Zakaria’s argument regarding the consolidation of power and the exploitation of democratic elections by illiberal forces resembles that of Wolin when he contrasts the “power imaginary” with the “constitutional imaginary.” Like Wolin, Zakaria argues that power needs to be curtailed by constitutional limits. Like Wolin, Zakaria appreciates how easily democracy can be twisted or inverted into its own form of absolutism. Yet, about Zakaria, Wolin writes that his “argument is exactly the opposite of the argument I have been advancing. Instead of a beleaguered democracy growing ever more powerless, he portrays democracy as all-powerful, total in its influence. . . . What is troubling about Zakaria’s analysis is not the particular political problems he identifies. Rather it is his account of their causes and his proposed solutions.”29 Wolin’s problem with Zakaria boils down to two primary concerns: First, though Zakaria offers an expansive definition of democracy that includes all forms of the democratization of society, throughout his analysis he nevertheless singles out elections as the essential element of democracy and thus all too easily compiles evidence from around the world of supposedly free and fair elections ushering in illiberal and authoritarian regimes. The conclusion that Zakaria draws from this, which is Wolin’s second concern, is that the people obviously need more guidance from authority. In other words, the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves, or, in the words of the French thinker Jacques Rancière, whose The Hatred of Democracy provides a scathing and rigorous philosophical critique to such antidemocratic discourse, “the fact that democracies are ‘ungovernable’ is abundant proof of the need they have to be governed, and that is all the legitimation they need for the care they put into governing them.”30

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For Wolin, Zakaria proves himself to be an unabashed elitist, one who prefers the early history of the United States before the days of universal suffrage, when political candidates were chosen by “highly controlled hierarchies.” “Once the floodgates were opened,” Wolin writes, summarizing Zakaria’s position, “ ‘minorities,’ lobbyists, celebrities, and the rich began to dominate.” Zakaria’s solution, Wolin concludes, “is antidemocratic as well as antipolitical.”31 Or as Zakaria himself writes, the solution to the problem of illiberal democracy is to “insulate some decision-makers from the intense pressures of interest groups, lobbies, and political campaigns—that is to say, from the intense pressures of democracy.” And just in case the point here is not clear, a few pages later Zakaria removes any ambiguity whatsoever: “What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.”32 By following the logic of this new antidemocratic discourse as articulated by Rancière, Zakaria’s portrait of democracy “comprises traits that until quite recently were attributed to totalitarianism.” Democracy is totalitarian, so argued, because democratic society, with its rampant individualism, consumerism, decadence, and sense of entitlement, devours the state. Once democracy is seen in these terms as the “reign of excess,” then, as Rancière shows, “this excess signifies the ruin of democratic government and must therefore be repressed by it.”33 Zakaria’s concluding argument, therefore, should be no surprise when he makes the case for a managed state in which “less is more,” by which he means Americans should look to certain institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court—the least democratic of our institutions—which function so well, in his estimation, in generating prosperity and securing rights, as our model forward. Again, like Fukuyama, and to Wolin’s dismay, Zakaria allows the political to be predetermined by the economic, collapsing the affairs of the state to the interests of a managed economy wherein the people might be the beneficiaries as a byproduct, but only so long as they are willing to forego their hard-earned political agency. What is striking for both Fukuyama and Zakaria is that neither regards global capitalism as problematic, and thus whatever defense of democracy they offer up, it is in fact a salvaging of the neoliberal order. Crouch writes: “A flourishing liberalism certainly enables all manner of causes, good and bad, to seek political influence, and makes possible a rich array of public participation in politics. But unless it is balanced by healthy democracy in the strict sense it will always proceed in a systematically

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distorted way.” After all, he continues, “the resources available to different causes vary massively and systematically,” meaning that “such a regime favours liberalism but hinders democracy, because there is nothing like a level playing field of competition as required by the equality criterion.”34 It is in this sense that Zakaria’s politics is in fact antipolitical, preserving a public sphere with equal opportunity perhaps, but with no consideration of those with diminished political capacities. What is missing is precisely the democratic citizen. What is missing is the willingness to consider not only how the project to export American-styled democracy globally has fallen short but also the self-examination of American-styled democracy itself. If Fukuyama is correct that terrorism is a byproduct of economic liberalization and that liberal democracies have been alienating for many to the point of their own radicalization, and if Zakaria is correct that our recent history has shown the tragic irony of how liberty has been threatened by the spread of democracy, then are we right to call for more, or less, democracy? Is democracy the problem or the solution? Crouch lays out the issue well: Given the difficulty of sustaining anything approaching maximal democracy, declines from democratic moments must be accepted as inevitable, barring major new moments of crisis and change which permit a new reengagement—or, more realistically in a society in which universal suffrage has been achieved, the emergence of new identities within the existing framework which change the shape of popular participation. . . . For much of the time, however, we must expect an entropy of democracy. It then becomes important to understand the forces at work within this and to adjust our approach to political participation to it. Egalitarians cannot reverse the arrival of post-democracy, but we must learn to cope with it—softening, amending, sometimes challenging it—rather than simply accepting it.35

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For the final case to consider along this scale of more or less democracy I turn to the political theorist Benjamin Barber, whose book Jihad vs. McWorld became that rare phenomenon—a serious and technical work in political philosophy that also became a bestseller in the wake of 9/11. Barber adds much to our discussion that will be drawn on and expanded in future chapters. Most significantly, when it comes to our attempt at the recasting of political theology, Barber’s understanding of the changing nature of political sovereignty raises questions about the continued resonance of the term “political theology”

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as it has been employed by Schmitt and those who continue to follow in his lineage. As Barber sees it, to put things rather crassly, the era of the sovereign nation-state has come to an end. We are now living in a postnational moment, in which the transnational corporation and the global market have long since become the dominant political and social forces in our world. One question we must ask, therefore, in the course of this study is how this changed status of sovereignty allows for—if not necessitates—an altered notion of political theology. In addition to this argument regarding postnational sovereignty, Barber also will be important in showing how the economic markets have been allowed to usurp the role of politics, adding to Wolin’s critique of both the antidemocratic and antipolitical implications of the work of those such as Zakaria. Again, while my argument is not that democracy and capitalism are mutually exclusive, it is important to underscore the real tensions that exist between the two and how the latter has undermined or weakened the political capacity of the former. As Barber writes: “Markets simply are not designed to do the things democratic politics do.”36 Put most simply, the difference is between private and public goods and between whether the will of the people is best determined by the currency of consumption by individual consumers or by the deliberative debate and political contestation over the social consequences of our private market choices. When the free-market ideology is left unchecked, we suffer from a diminished political capacity that results from our social alienation. As Barber writes: The dogmas of laissez-faire capitalism that have suffused the politics of America and Europe in the last few decades have been reinforced by the resentments of an alienated electorate that has lost confidence in its own democratic institutions; together, they have persuaded us that our democratic governments neither belong to us nor function usefully to limit markets or to help them work.37

This antipolitical sentiment was captured perfectly by the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in October 2006 on the eve of the historic midterm elections that would see the Democrats regain a majority in both houses of Congress. Herbert begins his column called “The System’s Broken” with a quote from a middle-aged woman he meets at a gas station. The woman confesses to Herbert that she does not plan to vote and adds, “Politics are for silly people.” An understandable sentiment on the heels of the election cycle, with

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its growing barrage of political commercials, direct mailings, and phone calls, but just as surely disempowering, and one that does not bode well for the future of supposed self-governance. “The politicians, special interests and the media are in a state of high excitement over next week’s midterm elections. They are addicted to the blood sport of politics, and this is a championship encounter,” Herbert notes. “But that excitement contrasts with what seems to be an increasing sense of disenchantment and unease that ordinary Americans are feeling when it comes to national politics and government. For far too many of them, the government in Washington is remote, unresponsive and ineffective.” Part and parcel of this widespread distrust of, and disgust with, government are the corporations hedging their bets by peddling their influence with both Republicans and Democrats alike. Herbert states the obvious when he concludes that “democracy needs to be energized, revitalized.” But how? After all, this sentiment captured by Herbert is only a reflection of a deeper systemic problem with the actual workings of democracy in America. From politicians and political parties, we hear sporadic calls for greater voter turnout and repeated urgings for financial contributions from ordinary citizens. But as Crouch argues, this is a “means of encouraging the maximum level of minimal participation,” by which the political class excludes the mass of citizens from its operations and deliberations while desperately wanting us to offer them our passive support: “If it is worried about voter apathy,” Crouch writes in regard to the tight control that the political class holds on our supposed democratic institutions, “it thinks about extending the opening hours of polling stations, or of enabling voting by telephone or Internet. If it worried about declining party membership, it runs marketing campaigns to encourage supporters to take out membership subscriptions, but it does little to ensure that membership is an attractive and worthwhile activity.”38 Where Herbert contrasts the game of politics with the urgent need for a revitalized democracy, the question remains whether and how democracy itself can provide its own cure. This is where Barber’s operating definition of democracy figures significantly as he marshals a truly democratic response to the challenges identified by the likes of Fukuyama and Zakaria, and in so doing he also effectively redefines the problem of our present age. Unlike Fukuyama and Zakaria, whose efforts are essentially a salvaging of the neoliberal order, Barber refuses to predicate democracy on, or conflate democracy with, the free-market economy. While Fukuyama admits that jihadism might be one of the byproducts of global-

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ization, Barber’s analysis goes further by demonstrating how what he calls “McWorld” and “Jihad” are both decentralized, borderless systems that exploit the global chaos and the intricately networked, interdependent world of the market’s making. Although McWorld and Jihad are in many ways polar opposites, they are both fundamentally antidemocratic and together engage in a shared war against sovereignty. When speaking of McWorld, Barber has in mind the global freemarket economy that insists on the deregulation of industry, that is characterized by its secular materialism, that reduces the political to a form of market-driven politics that treats individuals as consumers rather than citizens, and that when left to its own devices becomes a form of savage capitalism run wild. McWorld is omnipresent and allencompassing, and as such is beyond the reach or control of any sovereign power. It points to the fundamental problem with globalization and the neoliberal philosophy of economic modernization upon which it is predicated—namely, while the economy has been effectively globalized, our political institutions have not. As Barber writes: “Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional box that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face.” He continues: On the global plane today, the historical symmetry that paired democracy and capitalism has gone missing. We have globalized the marketplace willy-nilly, because markets can bleed through porous national boundaries and are not constrained by the logic of sovereignty. But we have not even begun to globalize democracy, which—precisely because it is political and is defined by sovereignty—is trapped inside the nation-state box. The resulting global asymmetry, in which diminished states and augmented markets serve only private, economic interests, damages not only a wellfunctioning democratic civic order but a well-functioning international economic order as well.39

Or, to return to Crouch: “Large corporations have frequently outgrown the governance capacity of individual nation states.  .  .  . Democracy has simply not kept pace with capitalism’s rush to the global.”40 The result of this is a politics of unintended consequences, which is really no politics at all, because it is entirely lacking in political agency. “I see no conspiracy here,” Barber writes, “no stealth tyrants using information to secure hegemony. This is rather a politics of inadvertence and unintended consequences in which the seemingly

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innocuous market quest for fun, creativity, and profits puts whole cultures in harm’s way and undermines autonomy in individuals and nations alike.”41 When no one is in charge, no “we the people” who have the capacity and power not only to act but to effect meaningful change, the very condition of possibility for a democratic form of politics is eradicated. Repeating the line from Wolin, therefore, we might say that the politics of McWorld is not political at all but rather antipolitical as well as antidemocratic. Again, this is not to suggest that democracy and capitalism are mutually exclusive or that a democracy might not choose a capitalist free market; it is rather a sober examination of how the current ascendance of global capital has led to a tangible deficit in democratic politics and that, if left to its own devices, capitalism has a savage streak with the potential to destroy the very cultural and political conditions that allowed it to take root in the first place. If McWorld is savage capitalism run wild, as Barber argues, then how are the forces of Jihad to be understood? Whereas McWorld is the end result of economic modernization, the forces of Jihad pose themselves as antimodern. Whereas McWorld is known for its secular materialism, the forces of Jihad are mobilized as a form of reactionary fundamentalism. Whereas McWorld is integrative, forming an all-encompassing whole from which there is no escape, Jihad makes its plea as a disintegral form of tribalism, evoking the certainties offered by a particular religiopolitical identity rooted in a local culture and an absolute belief system. To counteract the excesses of McWorld and its capitalism run wild, Jihad sanctions the violence of terrorism as an essentially defensive and thus justified holy war. In short, as Barber writes, “terrorism is a depraved version of globalization” (xx). While the differences between McWorld and Jihad are stark and apparent, the important element to Barber’s analysis is how he also demonstrates their congruity, claiming “Jihad is not only McWorld’s adversary, it is its child”: What I have called the forces of Jihad may seem then to be a throwback to premodern times: an attempt to recapture a world that existed prior to cosmopolitan capitalism and was defined by religious mysteries, hierarchical communities, spellbinding traditions, and historical torpor. As such, they may appear to be directly adversarial to the forces of McWorld. Yet Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response to modernity whose fea-

For a case in point of this perverse synergy, Barber writes that “McWorld has no choice but to service, even to package and market Jihad.” Meanwhile, “McWorld cannot . . . do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites” (155). Here one only needs to recall the endless reduplication of the horrific images of destruction from 9/11, in which the media conglomerates became willing accomplices to a strategy whose principal aim was to spread terror. And, so as not to make the mistake of reducing what Barber intends by the forces of Jihad to merely that of Islamic radicalism, consider how easily and often the televangelist decries the decadence of contemporary American society while himself acting the part of a media star with all the telltale signs of worldly success. While McWorld and Jihad clash, their influence nevertheless spreads, each feeding off the other and together fomenting what Barber terms “a new world disorder in which democracy is occluded” (219). By democracy here, Barber does not mean to suggest a return to the sovereign nation-state. By his estimation, this would be both nostalgic and ineffectual. Indeed, both McWorld and Jihad have thrived in today’s climate, in which the logic, if not the actual force, of national sovereignty still prevails. Likewise, neither do McWorld nor Jihad promise a democratic future. “On the contrary,” Barber writes, “the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggest new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbarism.” While the market promises freedom, it is an illusion of choice from which one cannot choose to withdraw. “The ideology of choice seems to liberate the body (you can choose sixteen brands of toothpaste, eleven models of pickup truck, seven brands of running shoes) but fatally constricts the possibility of real freedom for the soul” (220). This is the case in times of economic boom and bust, as was witnessed in the wake of the worldwide financial collapse in 2008, when the American consumers were on the one hand chastised for their irresponsible spending and on the other told that without a return to their profligate ways there was no hope for the economy to recover. This dilemma, known as the “paradox of thrift,” captures perfectly the illogic of McWorld, in which savage capitalism has to be saved from its own self-annihilation. “McWorld is not and cannot be

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tures both reflect and reinforce the modern world’s virtues and vices— Jihad via McWorld rather than Jihad versus McWorld. (157)

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self-regulating,” Barber concludes. “Nor is it likely to produce the kinds of democratic civic bodies it needs to stay in business. This is McWorld’s paradox. It cannot survive in the world it inevitably tends to create if not countered by civic and democratic forces it inevitably tends to undermine” (245). Therefore there is no going back to a time in which what were still largely localized business interests could be properly regulated by and accountable to a sovereign political power, a time when Henry Ford could rightly make the case that what was good for Ford was good for America. The urban decay and empty wasteland that Detroit has become exposes its obsolescence. But neither can we continue down this death spiral that we are currently on, in a state of what Barber calls a “kind of default totalitarianism without a totalistic government: everyone a subject, no one a ruler” (250). While there is no worldwide conspiracy making the logic of McWorld all-determinative, neither is there any meaningful deliberative debate or political agency. Indeed, “McWorld runs on automatic pilot: that is the whole point of the market” (250). It is precisely this notion of a self-perpetuating, allencompassing system about which the people, beyond their habits as consumers, have very little power whatsoever that flies in the face of democracy. Democracy, as Barber intends it, is “not just government by, for, and of the people, but government by, for, and of citizens. Citizenship is power’s political currency and is what gives democracy its civic solvency” (223). Further, “the sovereignty of democratic states  .  .  . is nothing other than the sovereignty of citizens who, in their civic capacity, make advertent common decisions that regulate the inadvertent consequences of their conduct as private individuals and consumers” (224). These are the same citizens who Zakaria fears get in the way of the smooth workings of the economic state, those clamoring not simply for their rights but for their interests, organizing for a common agenda, not merely subjects to a managed state but daring to believe the fiction that they have the capacity—indeed, the power—to rule. It is this basic predicate of democracy that is the basis for democracy finding its way forward, recovering its promise by reimagining itself globally. This most fundamental democratic demand for always more democracy might very well be a flight of fancy, but I will argue that it is a necessary one, for there are no alternatives. As Barber writes: “In a future world where the only available identity is that of blood brother or solitary consumer, and where these two paltry dispositions engage in a battle for the human soul, democracy does not seem well

V What if, as Derrida has implored by contrast to both McWorld and Jihad, democracy is its own promise? What if the very imagination of a more democratic future is itself a political act? What if the very belief in democracy was all that was required for democracy to again be energized and revitalized? For what it is worth, Barber himself is a believer, even as he keeps a sober eye on the challenges we face:

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placed to share in the victory, to whomsoever it is delivered. Neither the politics of commodity nor the politics of resentment promise real liberty” (224).

For all my skepticism about the dialectic of Jihad and McWorld, I do not think that democracy is impossible in an era after the eclipse of the nation-state. . . . Those who would construct some form of global democracy require patience. They also require stubbornness, however, for to preserve, let alone extend, democracy under these rapidly evolving conditions will require acts of bold political imagination and self-conscious political willing that cannot in themselves be expected to emerge from the dialectical interplay of Jihad and McWorld. (224)

It is to that act of political imagination for the purpose of the reenchantment of our democratic credulity that I now turn.

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interlude

Managing Democracy Abroad Democracy has triumphed, but one must understand the meaning of this triumph: bringing democracy to another people does not simply mean bringing it the beneficial effects of a constitutional State, elections and a free press. It also means bringing it disorder. —Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy

Recalling Wolin’s argument from Democracy Incorporated that what currently goes by the name of democracy in the United States is in fact a “managed democracy” that hides an inverted form of totalitarianism, we might be tempted to look to the 2000 U.S. presidential election as the default case in point. As the Florida recount commenced, evidence of ballot rigging, statistical anomalies, and undercounts in some precincts and overcounts in others were compiled, and eventually the election was decided in the court system. Yet, as Crouch observed: apart from some demonstrations among Black Americans, there were very few expressions of outrage at tampering with the democratic process. The prevailing mood seemed to be that achieving an outcome—any outcome—was important in order to restore confidence in the stock markets, and that was more important than ensuring that the verdict of the majority was truly discovered.1

The management of a political outcome, in this case, trumped any democratic concern, which leads Crouch, like Wolin, to see democratic elections as a veneer and means of managing a bankrupt politi-

Our generational commitment to the advance of freedom, especially in the Middle East, is now being tested and honored in Iraq. .  .  . We will succeed because the Iraqi people value their own liberty—as they showed the world last Sunday. (Applause.) Across Iraq, often at great risk, millions of citizens went to the polls and elected 275 men and women to represent them in a new Transitional National Assembly. A young woman in Baghdad told of waking to the sound of mortar fire on election day, and wondering if it might be too dangerous to vote. She said, “Hearing those explosions, it occurred to me—the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they are losing. So I got my husband, and I got my parents, and we all came out and voted together.” Americans recognize that spirit of liberty, because we share it. In any nation, casting your vote is an act of civic responsibility; for millions of Iraqis, it was also an act of personal courage, and they have earned the respect of us all.3

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cal system. Thus, whether it is called “postdemocracy” (à la Crouch) or “inverted totalitarianism” (à la Wolin), the argument is that the maintenance of power by corporate and political elites remains the “central crisis of early twenty-first-century democracy.”2 While the levels of cynicism and apathy on display throughout that ordeal would certainly warrant consideration for the meaning of managed democracy within the United States, consideration must also be given to U.S. interests around the world and the means by which the specter of managed democracy preserves the global status quo not only by projecting American power abroad but more subtly by the use of internationally sanctioned elections to buttress its claim as a benign superpower. Who can forget the powerful symbolism of the Iraqis’ purple ink–stained fingers from 2005 marking the success of the nation’s first multiparty elections in fifty years? As the New York Times correspondent John Burns reported it a day after the historic election: “Nobody among the hundreds of voters thronging one Baghdad polling station on Sunday could remember anything remotely like it, not even those old enough to have taken part in Iraq’s last partly free elections more than fifty years ago, before the assassination of King Faisal II began a spiraling descent into tyranny.” As many as eight million of Iraq’s twenty-eight million residents turned out to vote in spite of threats of violence. The event was immediately heralded by the Bush administration as a major turning point in the Iraq War. As Bush proudly proclaimed in his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress just three days after the Iraqi election:

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Making full use of the imagery of the embattled but still courageous Iraqi citizens willing to put their lives at risk for their freedom, Bush counted this election as evidence of the power and viability of his freedom agenda, an overarching foreign policy he announced to the world a few weeks prior in his second inaugural address. As Bush stated then in a speech characterized by its lofty rhetoric and high idealism, There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.4

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For many, there was something to Bush’s second inaugural address, quickly backed up by the show of political courage and some semblance of order and security in Iraq only ten days later, that renewed their shattered confidence in America’s power and democratic ideals. For instance, The Economist proudly proclaimed “Democracy Stirs in the Middle East” on its March 5, 2005, cover, with a story chronicling not only the success of the Iraqi elections but also the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut. Having won a hotly contested election to a second term, Bush and his administration were putting everything on the line. While they might have previously floundered in searching for a rationale for the nation’s invasion of Iraq, now the freedom agenda was not only its governing philosophy but also its hope for redemption and the promise of a new world order of democratic states together forging the bonds and fostering the spread of freedom. While this veneer of democracy certainly gave President Bush some (albeit short-lived) political clout, the signs of danger hiding barely beneath the surface were there for those who had eyes to see. The January 2005 election in Iraq brought to power a Shiite coalition government who shared power with the largely autonomous Kurds in the north. The Sunnis, who had long been the dominant political power in Iraq despite their minority status, boycotted the national election, casting doubts regarding its legitimacy. Soon thereafter, the violence throughout Iraq spiraled out of control, amounting to what can only be called a civil war, with casualties and deaths at a higher rate during 2006–2007 than during any other period since the onset

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of the American occupation. Neighborhoods with mixed sects were purged, leading to the displacement of over two million Iraqi refugees and a thorough remapping of Iraqi demographics. All told, the struggle has seen upward of one hundred thousand documented civilian deaths. Iraq has been a grand experiment in managing democracy abroad, the actualization of the long-held neoconservative geopolitical strategy of securing America’s interests and influence in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. Indeed, as Naomi Klein tells it, Iraq provided the United States with the perfect laissez-faire laboratory, a “prudent use of violence” for a post 9/11 world.5 If Klein is correct, then the chaos, looting, gang violence, and war profiteering that ensued in Iraq after the U.S.-led forces took Baghdad were not a case of mismanagement, as has been popularly reported and widely assumed, but were according to design. As the Iraqis were consumed by their own struggle for survival, Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who reported directly to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was auctioning off Iraq’s state assets to the highest transnational corporate bidders. As a particularly crass example, Klein reports a delegate at the “Rebuilding Iraq 2” conference in Washington, D.C., telling her that “the best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground” (326). Even still, the reality of the situation— indeed, the genius of Bremer and the CPA—did not really hit her until a conversation she had with a journalist in Argentina (the site of a previous laissez-faire laboratory) who warned her “that extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.” Thus, as Klein examines the various explanations for why the war was waged—whether it was oil, Israel, or Halliburton—she eventually concludes: “There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake” (327). This is the “shock doctrine” in a nutshell: the notion that the global spread and triumph of capitalism is predicated on disaster. Whether manufactured as in the case of Iraq, an act of God as in the case of the tsunami that devastated the coasts of Southeast Asia, or a combination of both as in the case of Hurricane Katrina, with each and every one, the disaster is greeted as an opportunity to exploit, a form of economic shock therapy pushing through a set of policies that otherwise would have been fought tooth and nail.

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While the Iraq War has received the bulk of the world’s attention and headlines, the specter of managed democracy extends beyond those places under direct U.S. military control. The Mexican general election of July 2, 2006, was noteworthy not because of its contested results but because of the massive uprising of street protests that led to widespread civil unrest. From July 2 to September 1, 2006, supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-of-center challenger to Felipe Calderón, took to the streets, forming an organized opposition that effectively delayed outgoing President Vicente Fox’s State of the Nation address, formed a parallel congressional assembly, and blocked access to foreign-owned banks and business offices—all extragovernmental actions in the name of democracy. The alleged irregularities that sparked this democratic uprising included illegal campaigning, vote buying, missing ballots, annulled votes, and striking statistical anomalies that are still being pored over by political scientists and that still lack any satisfying explanation.6 While the election results were eventually ratified in favor of Calderón, what this incident, together with the horrific violence in Iraq from 2006– 2007 represents, is the power of the people when they feel that they have nothing left to lose. That power might be destructive and antidemocratic, as in the case of the Sunni uprising in 2006, or more constructive and in the name of democracy, as in the case of Obrador and his supporters. But in each case, returning to Wolin, it shows how a managed democracy banks on the compliance of the people. So long as the people refuse their sanction, so long as they challenge the democratic credentials of a system that “represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power,” then the systematization of democracy, which is simultaneously its suppression, is made impossible. Of course, this does not excuse those clamoring for more democracy from the need for discrimination and judgment—all acts resisting the specter of managed democracy do not automatically qualify as democratic, just as any challenge against the democratic credentials of a system does not automatically rise to the level of fugitive democracy. On the contrary, as Crouch advises, “First is the decision whether to welcome the emergence of a particular new movement as compatible with democracy, contributing to civic vigour and preventing politics from disappearing into a manipulative game among elites. Second is the decision whether personally to support, oppose or remain indifferent to its objectives.”7 Finally, for another truly devastating story of the power and consequences of the exporting of managed democracy abroad, the De-

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cember 2007 Kenyan national elections continue to disturb. The Kenyan general election was held on December 27. While the opposition leader Raila Odinga claimed victory, the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner and sworn in on December 30, despite serious lingering questions about the election results. One week later, the chief U.S. envoy in Kenya, Jendayi Frazer, declared that the election was rigged. Frazer went on to say that the Kenyans had been “cheated by their political leadership and their institutions.” These controversial public statements by Frazer were made in the midst of a violent uprising that would leave more than one thousand Kenyans dead from the ethnic and political violence sparked by the contested election. Meanwhile, as Frazer tried to broker a peace to end the violence and to provide for a power-sharing agreement between the two sides, rumors of an exit poll that would have supported Odinga’s claims to victory surfaced. In a front-page story from the New York Times, Mike McIntire and Jeffrey Gettleman described the frustrations of Kenneth Flottman, East Africa director for the International Republican Institute, a prodemocracy group that administered the exit poll, which had been paid for by the U.S. government.8 Flottman possessed the results of the exit poll, which had been conducted for the purpose of checking against election fraud by either side. Yet as the nation faced a political stalemate and spiraled into ethnic bloodshed, Flottman’s pleas to release the results of the poll were rejected, leading him to suspect that the IRI had succumbed to political pressure from U.S. officials. The official explanation for withholding the poll was that it was technically flawed, a claim that has subsequently been refuted by those involved. And while none of those involved professed to know why exactly the IRI had withheld the results, in the words of the New York Times, it raised “questions about the intentions and priorities of American observers,” and the decision to withhold the results was “consistent with other American actions that seemed focused on preserving stability in Kenya, rather than determining the actual winner.” The New York Times report goes on to say that while Kibaki had been largely discredited among the world’s leaders for playing divisive tribal politics, “he had a good relationship with the Bush administration and generally supported American counterterrorism policies in East Africa.” While the temptation with this and other related stories is to pin the blame on the Bush administration and its all-consuming war on terror, the problem lies deeper and is more systemic. As Flottman

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wrote in an e-mail in the midst of the Kenyan crisis, “Supporting democracy and managing political outcomes are two different objectives for a non-partisan, foreign-based organization or country, and sometimes there is a conflict that requires a choice.” In this particular case, as in others, the U.S. influence, trained in the practice of managed democracy at home, opted for stability over democracy even while championing the global spread of democratic elections as a sure sign of freedom’s advance. Just as it is capital that determines America’s foreign policy, managed democracy is its chief political export— and both at the bequest of corporate power. This is not democracy but its inversion or its reversal. And, in the words of Odinga, this is a difference that makes a huge difference: “While I have no evidence to make me believe that I.R.I. withheld the exit poll results at the request of the U.S. government,” Odinga confessed over a year after the catastrophic events in Kenya, “my supporters believe that had I.R.I. released those polls, they would have made a huge difference and even saved lives.”

By eliminating the boundaries between the rulers and the ruled, always the constructs of entrenched elites, the people . . . could no more step away from the revolutionary agendas they had created than a mountain stream fed by melting snow can halt its rush to the valleys below. —Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution Democracy is never just a set of laws about equal and fair treatment.

chapter two

Democracy, Radically Conceived

Rather it is an ongoing interpretation of itself, an ongoing production of new practices and narratives, of new values and forms of social and personal life that constitute a democracy. —Rebecca S. Chop, “From Patriarchy Into Freedom,” in The Postmodern God

I To take the analysis from chapter 1 a step further: we might say along with Rancière that when examining how more or less democratic a few select representative democratic theorists and commentators are, what we discover is a hatred of democracy, a rationality of hatred that comes to expression in the common sense heard in the voices of the political and economic elite throughout the ages. As a hatred of democracy, it betrays an even more fundamental or baser fear of the people for their anarchic power. This is a fear as ancient as it is enduring. As Rancière writes: “Hatred of democracy is certainly nothing new. Indeed it is as old as democracy itself for a simple reason: the word itself is an expression of hatred. It was, in Ancient Greece, originally used as an insult by those who saw in the unnamable government of the multitude the ruin of any legitimate order.”1 We have seen already how Aristotle made concessions to democracy as the least bad form of corrupt governmental regimes. Before Aristotle, Plato opposed good government to democracy, wherein democracy meant the rule of abstract law. So long as a democratic government aims to enforce a rule of law applicable to all, it is a deficient

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form to the more ancient regime that pits the ruler as shepherd caring for his sheep or to the republic wherein the philosopher-king plays the role of the doctor capable of an objective diagnosis and administering the precise prescription needed. The problem with democracy, so conceived, is that so long as its rule is general to all, it is generalizable and thus immutable. Such an argument might seem counterintuitive, especially after considering Tocqueville’s claim of the selfcorrecting nature of democracy in America, but beneath it lies a dark philosophical anthropology betraying contempt for the people as a collection of selfish, ignorant, and egotistical individuals who are slaves to their appetites. “In the immutability of the law,” Rancière writes, invoking the specter of fear that animates Plato’s political philosophy, “it is not the universality of the Idea that democratic man honours, but the instrument of his own good pleasure. In modern terms, it will be said that, underneath the universal citizen of the democratic constitution, we must recognize the real man, that is to say, the egotistical individual of democratic society” (35). In this way, Plato’s estimation of democracy is much more severe than Aristotle’s. Because Plato regards democratic law as “nothing but people’s pleasure for its own sake, the expression of the liberty of individuals whose sole law is that of varying mood and pleasure, without any regard for collective order,” democracy is not only opposed to good government. On the contrary, it does not even rise to the level of government, because, in the words of Rancière, it “is a political regime that is not one” (36). It is a bazaar as opposed to a constitution, a reign of individuals as opposed to a practiced form of politics, an unruly multitude as opposed to a well-ordered regime. In short, the problem with democracy is that it is a world turned upside down: Its governors have the demeanour of the governed and the governed the demeanour of governors; women are the equals of men; fathers accustom themselves to treating their sons as equals; the foreigner and the immigrant are the equals of citizens; the schoolmaster fears and flatters the pupils who, in turn, make fun of him; the young are the equals of the old and the old imitate the young; even the beasts are free and the horses and asses, conscious of their liberty and dignity, knock over anyone who does not yield to them in the street. (36)

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The surprising thing, of course, is how Plato’s repudiation of democracy was simultaneously a repudiation of his own master and

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teacher Socrates, for whom the task of philosophy was nothing more or less than the violation of the legitimate order. In his philosophical vocation as a gadfly, Socrates’ provocations had an anarchic power that not only exposed high-ranking individuals’ ignorance but, in so doing, overturned the established hierarchy. As a philosopher, his work was also political in the sense of establishing a new, alternative, and competing base of power. And in elevating the right of the individual to question everything and anyone, his was a distinctly democratic voice erasing the gap between the old and the young, the governed and the governor, the ruled and the ruler—indeed, overturning the very idea of the rule itself. Just as Socrates had to die at the hands of the representatives of the Athenian democracy, so democracy is to be feared because it is an antigovernmental form of government, a rule of law that is fundamentally unruly, as unruly as a collection of bodies operating without a head under no authority but that of their own appetites and whims, a generalized and thus immutable rule of anarchy. As a regime, it is nevertheless unregimented, ruled not by the logic of one but the many. So it is true as Rancière summarizes of Plato’s critique that democracy is a “political regime that is not one,” but ironically Plato can only come to this point of critique by distancing himself from his own teacher, an act and capability he both learned and repudiated at one and the same time, a product and beneficiary of that which he himself would destroy. This hatred of democracy that regards it as a ruin to government and order alike can be seen in the American founding fathers as well. As John Adams said, democracy signifies nothing other than “the notion of a people that has no government at all.”2 And Alexander Hamilton famously stated, “the same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority.” In both cases, whether democracy is seen as antigovernmental or more generally as disrespectful toward all forms of authority, the people are incapable of ruling themselves. Just as the individual cannot control his or her passions or appetites, so too the social body is victim to its individual whims. Because they might lack land or property, the people have no skin in the game. Because they might be uneducated or uncultured, their minds are simple and their politics those of a horde or rabble. Therefore they must be led, and if not by a divine sovereign, then at least the theo-logic of the one can reconstitute itself in the form of a representative governing body composed, in the words

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of Rancière, of “the logics of birth and wealth [to] produce elites with ‘capabilities’ who have the time and means to enlighten themselves and impose republican standards on democratic anarchy.” So given, “the drawing up of the United States constitution,” as argued by Rancière, “is the classic example of this work of composing forces and of balancing institutional mechanisms intended to get the most possible out of the fact of democracy, all the while strictly containing it in order to protect two goods taken as synonymous: the government of the best, and the preservation of the order of property.”3 What Rancière theorizes, the American historian Gary Nash illustrates by his telling of the “unknown American Revolution,” which includes all classes and races from early American society and which depicts the making of democracy in America as a messy and still unfinished ordeal. The implications of Nash’s work are both methodological and political. As Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815: “Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”4 For Adams, the reluctant revolutionary whose fight was for independence rather than equality and who thus used his power and influence to tamp down the democratic fervor of the revolution, the answer was a simple one—no one. The passing of the generation of revolutionary leaders weighed heavily on him, for only they could tell the story, only they could understand the sacrifices made and the decisions forged. For Adams, the revolution was a history authored by a cast of great and noble men, true patriots whose learning and political wisdom set them apart. History, so conceived, is not only a tale told by the victors but a spoil claimed as a prerogative to be doled out at their discretion. Nash, by contrast, sees the task of history differently. His questions are whether it is possible to write a democratic history of the birth and struggle over democracy in the United States. If so, what would a truly democratic history look like? Who would it include? And how would it be different from what we have come to know and expect? As such, he describes his work as an “antidote for historical amnesia” and as a corrective to the “enshrined, mythic form” of history taught about the founding fathers. For Nash, to write a truly democratic history is “to expand our conception of revolutionary American society and to consider the multiple agendas . . . that sprang from its highly diverse and fragmented character” (xiv). In this way, the American Revolution was not only or simply a war for independence but a “people’s revolution,” a multifaceted struggle that hides within it a contentious fight over the very meaning and purpose of what they were

looked toward a redistribution of political, social, and religious power; the discarding of old institutions and the creation of new ones; the overthrowing of ingrained patterns of conservative, elitist thought; the leveling of society so that top and bottom were not widely separated; the end of the nightmare of slavery and the genocidal intentions of land-crazed frontiersmen; the hope of women of achieving a public voice. (xv)

In short, the radical roots of the American Revolution were “connected to a multifaceted campaign to democratize society” (xv). As for the methodological significance of this alternative rendering of history, Nash comments: “The more intensely democratic, the more radical and visionary the idea, the more likely it has been excised from the textbook accounts of the American Revolution.” And further, “the ideals and ideas that motivate those who want to complete the Revolution’s radical agenda today are the very ones that have been leached out of the nation’s history” (xxv). It is in this way that Nash’s method is put to political work, for only by telling the unknown history of radical democracy hidden within the American Revolution can the unfinished work of the revolution be completed. So there is a history within the history that portrays a revolution within the revolution. On the one side are those whose conception of the revolution was principally about independence, and thus when England laid down its arms, the revolution was thought to be complete. On the other, the revolution was a many-sided struggle to reinvent America, more about equality than liberty, a radical revolution impatient for change, a history that includes jailbreaks, barnstorming, and religious zeal, one where attention is drawn to class struggle, gender and social inequities, the ill treatment of native Americans, a history wherein ordinary people are portrayed as actual agents of history and wherein there is seen a new assertiveness in the public arena by the plebian class—all of which Adams termed derisively “absurd democratical notions” (192) and the “madness of the multitude” (201).

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fighting for, all of which highlights “the true radicalism of the American Revolution that was indispensable to the origins, conduct, and outcome of the world-shaking event” (xv). By radicalism here, Nash means those elements of society who were “advocating for wholesale change and sharp transformation,” those who:

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Put in these terms, we realize that the American Revolution was both a fight for and a fight against democracy and comprised a people who were both inspired by the idea of democracy and those whose fear easily turned to hatred. Returning to Adams yet again as our case in point, Nash writes of him that he “had nervous fits about the leveling spirit breaking out in all the colonies. It was one thing to bring the high and mighty down a rung or two, but quite another to allow those on the bottom rungs to spring upwards” (202–203). Or as Adams himself complained in a private letter to his wife, in a passage painfully reminiscent of the earlier satirical critique from Rancière: “Our struggle has loosed the bands of government everywhere. That children and apprentices were disobedient—that schools and colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their masters” (203). The world was indeed turned upside down. Or, switching to the metaphor preferred at the time, the genie was out of the bottle, and it was only by wedding the hard-won political power with economic—more specifically, propertied—interests that the democratic revolution was contained. And now it is our contemporaries’ turn to make the case for restraining democracy in the name of liberty or, more often, to sanction a de facto managed democracy that is democratic in name only. “The conclusion we are invited to draw from this,” Rancière writes, “is that democracy is a political form belonging to another age and unsuitable for ours, at least not without serious modifications and, in particular, not without considerably recanting on the utopia of the power of the people.”5 Knowing how this contemporary critique has an ancient pedigree leads Rancière to an opposite conclusion—namely, that democracy is not simply a form of politics but the very principle of politics. It is not antigovernmental but government otherwise. Though rejecting the necessity of the rule of one, it is not entirely without rule, only this rule has no foundation other than that of the shifting sands of a whimsical people of impropriety. As such, it is not that democracy creates the trouble; rather, it merely reveals it. Democracy is an unveiling, a stripping away of the pretense of the authority to govern and to rule, of the special right of the highly born and well connected. It is here, with this radical democratic claim for political agency on behalf of and by the people, with the realization of how political power is an open and ongoing contest, a disordering and inversion of the presumed natural order, that politics properly begins. Politics-asdemocracy is a severing, a breach in the continuity between the natural order of society and the order of government, between human

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nature and convention, the “disjoining of entitlements to govern” and “the dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body.” Politics-as-democracy begins “when the principle of government is separated from the law of kinship, all the while claiming to be representative of nature; when it invokes a nature that cannot be confounded with the simple relation to the father of the tribe or to the divine father.” Politics-as-democracy consists in the belief that this world could be otherwise. And therein, as well, lies the scandal: “The scandal for the well-to-do people unable to accept that their birth, their age, or their science has to bow before the law of chance; scandal too for those men of God who would have us all be democrats on the condition that we avow having had to kill a father or a shepherd for it, and hence that we are infinitely guilty, are in inexpiable debt to this father” (40–41). Always a risky chance, all democracy requires is a throw of the dice, which is precisely why it gives such trouble to those who have the most to lose. And to conclude this extended riff on Rancière, we come finally to his radical definition of democracy: Democracy is not the whim of children, slaves, or animals. It is the whim of a god, that of chance, which is of such a nature that it is ruined by a principle of legitimacy. . . . It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority. Democracy first of all means this: anarchic “government,” one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern. (41)

II Not only is this fear of democracy as ancient as it is enduring; it is also as confused as it is disingenuous. While Tocqueville highlighted the democratic pressure for conformity and both the political and religious pandering that mitigated against both statesmanship and propheticism, others go further by claiming a fatal flaw within democracy’s investment of power in the people. This is a procedural argument that sees democracy as victim to its own democratic excesses. As we have already seen with Zakaria, the argument holds that unrestrained democracy easily becomes illiberal, and when forced to

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choose, it is the constitutional liberalism rather than democracy that is worth preserving. After all, as he notes, “what is distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on electoral majorities.”6 Thus as the U.S. government has moved away from the republican elitism of its founders’ vision, it perhaps has become more responsive and democratic, but also more dysfunctional, according to Zakaria’s estimation. Recognizing the difficult position he has placed himself in by making the case for less democracy, he asks: “What if liberty comes not from chaos but from some measure of order as well—not from unfettered, direct democracy but from regulated, representative democracy? What if, as in much of life, we need guides and constraints? And what if liberty is truly secure only when these guardrails are strong?” (25–26). Zakaria is not wrong when he posits a conflict between liberty and democracy. Nor is he wrong when he questions the purely democratic credentials of the U.S. system of government. But when posing the alternatives between chaos and some measure of order and between direct democracy and a representative system, it becomes evident for whom he speaks. Like Adams before him, he recognizes the value of democracy in agitating for change and in mobilizing the masses, but for power to be secured and order maintained, the people must get back in line and play by the rules. It is only a strong constitutional state that is able to rein in the excesses of democracy. So given, the people are to be grateful for the beneficence of their rulers. Throughout his book The Hatred of Democracy, Rancière questions precisely this narrative trope. Whether it is Plato’s contempt for the body public, the American founding fathers’ simultaneous stoking and squelching of the fires of democratic fervor characteristic of their revolutionary times, or the contemporary reports on the crisis of democracy throughout the Western world, what they share in common is the notion that “a good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.”7 It is argued that the anarchic principle that affirms the power of the people runs counter to the people’s interests in the common good. Summarizing this line of argument, Rancière writes that democracy “signifies the irresistible growth of demands that put pressure on governments, lead to a decline in authority, and cause individuals and groups to become refractory to the discipline and sacrifices required for the common good” (7). One remedy to diminish this excessive political energy is for government to promote “the quest for individual happi-

Either democratic life signified a large amount of popular participation in discussing public affairs, and it was a bad thing; or it stood for a form of social life that turned energies towards individual satisfaction, and it was a bad thing. Hence, good democracy must be that form of government and social life capable of controlling the double excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent to democratic life. (8)

More recently, this narrative trope of democratic excess has turned its critique to the atomized individual of consumer culture. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which analyzes the breakdown of civil society, is perhaps the most well known.8 And while it is true that by all appearances the bonds of community have been frayed, taking this as evidence and rationale for a stronger, less democratic government to counteract the excesses of so-called democratic society is as disingenuous as it is opportunistic. Critics of democracy revel in the sociological portrait of the postmodern (read: hedonistic) self captive to the law of consumerist individuality. “Against this,” Rancière writes, “it was necessary to restore . . . a clear sense of a politics freed from the encroachments of democratic consumers. In practice, this consuming individual came quite naturally to be identified with the salaried worker, egotistically defending his or her archaic privileges.”9 Not only does the critique play on age-old fears of the unruly and ungovernable multitude, but as Rancière shows, it also has the effect of disempowering the people of their own political capacities: “State power and the power of wealth tendentially unite in a sole expert management of monetary and population flows. Together they combine their efforts to reduce the spaces of politics” (95). If democracy is the principle of politics, if politics-as-democracy begins with the rejection of the natural order of rule, then the narrative rendering of the people as the cause for mindless consumption or selfish agitation makes for a well-managed—albeit undemocratic and apolitical—society. As Rancière writes, for those who subscribe to this

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ness and social relations,” but unfortunately, even this solution proves unviable, for the promotion of “a vitality of private life and forms of social interaction” leads to “heightened expectations and escalating demands.” Democracy so understood is the reign of excess, and “this excess signifies the ruin of democratic government and must therefore be repressed by it” (8). Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, democracy is perpetually caught in its own double bind:

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story, “the fact that democracies are ‘ungovernable’ is abundant proof of the need they have to be governed, and that is all the legitimation they need for the care they put into governing them” (8). Returning to Zakaria, therefore, we must ask again for whom he speaks and whose interests he represents. He speaks for those who claim the right—indeed, the responsibility—to govern, the representatives whose political expertise and experience grease the wheels of the machine with the promise of kickbacks to those who first entrusted them to their position, the managers who draft and master policies that generate massive, unimaginable wealth that will eventually trickle down so long as the people do not dare interrupt its natural flow. In this way, the presumed natural order of the power of birth and kinship, which is finally declared for what it is—namely, the power of property owners—is restored. It is not liberty that is its aim, but order, a restoration and maintenance of the rule of one whereby the people who know what is good for them take what is given to them. A more illuminating case of how this hatred of democracy is both confused and disingenuous can be found with Carl Schmitt, specifically in what the British democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe calls his “false dilemma.” As Mouffe writes, Schmitt issues a “trenchant verdict about liberal democracy, namely, his thesis that this is a nonviable regime, given that liberalism negates democracy and democracy negates liberalism.”10 This verdict shares in the analysis of the uneasy pairing of liberalism with democracy as expounded in chapter 1 in the critique of Zakaria and Fukuyama. Indeed, this analysis is at the heart of Mouffe’s own work in democratic theory. As she writes in The Democratic Paradox, “On the one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defense of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between these two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation” (2–3). Further, in a line with which Zakaria would be most sympathetic: “What cannot be contestable in a liberal democracy is the idea that it is legitimate to establish limits to popular sovereignty in the name of liberty. Hence its paradoxical nature” (4). In short, therefore, the two traditions of liberalism and democracy are incompatible and hence cannot be perfectly reconciled. Schmitt exploits this tension in his wholesale rejection of the liberal tradition, and in so doing leaves little or no room for the possibility of democracy without liberalism (i.e., a post- or nonliberal con-

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ception of democracy, or, in short, what I am calling here “radical democracy”). As stated previously, by rejecting liberalism Schmitt also rejects democracy, at least as a viable political regime for the contemporary state. Consider, for instance, his critique of modern mass democracy from his 1926 work The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.11 It is here that he makes the case that the democratic ideal of equality is, technically speaking, a nonpolitical concept, one that actually can be traced to the individualism associated with the modern liberal tradition. It is nonpolitical because it does not contain the conceptual possibility of its opposite—namely, inequality. It functions as a moral ideal as opposed to a concrete political possibility within existing state forms. It is in this way that modern democracies are historically tied to, or conflated with, liberalism: “The equality of all persons as persons is not democracy but a certain kind of liberalism, not a state form but an individualistic-humanitarian ethic and Weltanschauung. Modern mass democracy rests on the confused combination of both.”12 It is also the way in which modern democracies hide from themselves the unsettling reality of the condition of possibility for their own political viability: “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity” (9). While Mouffe acknowledges the chilling effect that this statement has on contemporary readers given Schmitt’s later collaboration with the Nazis as Hitler’s “crown jurist,” she nevertheless maintains it is essential to come to terms with it in order to appreciate Schmitt’s argument regarding the nonviability of liberal democracy. As she explains, for Schmitt the democratic ideal is not moral but political, in that its principal aim is in establishing an identity for a people. From Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political we learn the friend-enemy distinction that is at the heart of his political philosophy. Establishing an identity among a people is essentially political, because it forces a decision regarding the drawing of boundaries between those who are to be regarded as friends and those regarded as enemies. While the liberal moral conception of equality posits universal equality, the democratic political conception of equality, in Mouffe’s words, “requires the possibility of distinguishing who belongs to the demos and who is exterior to it; for that reason, it cannot exist without the necessary correlate of inequality” (39). In short, it is political because it makes a distinction and requires a decision. Therefore, while the

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moral logic of liberalism has been allowed to contaminate democracy as a proper form of politics, the weakness of modern liberal democratic regimes has been made abundantly manifest, leading to the self-destruction of the idea and practice of democracy as well. As Mouffe writes: “Contrary to those who believe in a necessary harmony between liberalism and democracy, Schmitt makes us see how they conflict, and the dangers the dominance of liberal logic can bring to the exercise of democracy” (44). Mouffe’s own response to this scathing indictment from Schmitt is twofold. First, while she accepts the analysis of the tension inherent to liberal democracy, she rejects the conclusion that Schmitt comes to on the basis of his analysis. For her, the ultimate irreconcilability between liberalism and democracy need not be understood in terms of a nonviable contradiction but rather as a paradox. By understanding this inherent tension as a paradox, “such an articulation can be seen as the locus of a tension that installs a very important dynamic, which is constitutive of the specificity of liberal democracy as a new political form of society.” In other words, “we can accept his [Schmitt’s] insight perfectly well without agreeing with the conclusions he draws” (44). It is with this in mind that Mouffe lays out a framework for democratic theory that serves as an alternative to that of Schmitt’s on the right and to the contemporary consensual politics of the center, as reflected in the “Third Way” movement as practiced in the present generation by the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and in the theory of “deliberative democracy” as expounded by Habermas and Rawls. Her alternative framework is an agonistic form of politics that comes to terms with the conflictual nature of democracy and the irreducibility of pluralism. “Only by coming to terms with its paradoxical nature will we be in a position to envisage modern democratic politics in an adequate manner, not as the search for an inaccessible consensus . . . but as an ‘agonistic confrontation’ between conflicting interpretations of the constitutive liberal democratic values” (8–9). So given, democracy provides no final resolution or equilibrium. However, this is not its shortcoming but its strength. For there can always and only be “temporary, pragmatic, unstable and precarious negotiations of the tension” (45) between the competing logics of liberalism and democracy. Thereby, Mouffe aims at a rehabilitation of liberal democracy while avoiding the naïveté and idealism characteristic of the dominant rationalist perspective of contemporary political philosophy that is

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“bound to remain blind to ‘the political’ in its dimension of antagonism” (11). But this rehabilitation comes at what cost? Mouffe takes from Schmitt his understanding of the concept of the political whereby politics requires the drawing of distinctions and the making of decisions, and in so doing, though separating herself from Schmitt by her positive appraisal of the productive tension that exists between liberalism and democracy, she nevertheless encloses the logic of democracy within the point of decision. As she writes, “the logic of democracy does indeed imply a moment of closure which is required by the very process of constituting the ‘people.’ This cannot be avoided, even in a liberal-democratic model; it can only be negotiated differently” (43). This is an argument that we will return to in the following section, for so long as democracy requires a moment of closure, we must question the degree to which it lives up to its radical democratic potential. Second, and in a related fashion, where Schmitt asserts homogeneity as a predicate for democracy—indeed, even going so far as calling for the political eradication of heterogeneity—Mouffe maintains the political possibility of the people being constituted pluralistically. It is here that we come to what Mouffe terms “Schmitt’s false dilemma.” Schmitt’s fear is that a pluralistic state inevitably dissolves into disunity wherein the constitution is degraded into a “mere ethic of fair play.”13 The false dilemma he presents us with is as follows: “Either there is unity of the people, and this requires us expelling every division and antagonism outside the demos . . . or some forms of division inside the demos are considered legitimate, and this will lead inexorably to the kind of pluralism which negates political unity and the very existence of the people.”14 The problem with the first horn of this dilemma is that it contradicts Schmitt’s own concept of the political, in that if there is already a preexisting unity or homogeneity to the people, then there would be no need to constitute the people politically. Political unity would thereby be a given within the existing social structure. The problem with the second horn of this dilemma is that it is left wanting in its own empirical justification. Once acknowledged that the people are constituted as the result of a political decision, the integral relation between the exercise of the people’s rule and the constitution of its identity is indissociable. As Mouffe writes: “Liberal democracy is precisely the recognition of this constitutive gap between the people and its various identifications. Hence the importance of leaving this space of contestation forever open, instead of trying to fill it through the establishment of a supposedly

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‘rational’ consensus.” Mouffe continues by arguing that the Schmittian frontier between “ ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ ” is always “an internal one,” and thus the outsider is never permanently estranged. “We begin to realize, therefore,” Mouffe concludes, “why such a regime requires pluralism” (56). I agree with Mouffe that Schmitt is “an adversary from whom we can learn” (57), but at best he nevertheless is limited by his own lack of political and philosophical imagination. (At worst, if we are to take his biography into account, he was guilty of craven opportunism.) When it comes to his indictment of democracy, therefore, we must conclude that it is as confused as it is disingenuous. He saw modern liberal democracies as essentially technocratic states that had entered into a devil’s bargain with the corporatist mentality, effectively neutralizing politics, depoliticizing its people, and thereby losing both the will and capacity to act. But in the force of that critique, he failed to recognize the alternatives open to those who might conceive of democracy otherwise. While Schmitt remained certain that the tension between liberalism and democracy marked an irreparable breach, thus proving modern democracy to be a nonviable political regime, Mouffe has effectively shown how this very tension might instead be conceived as a productive paradox, opening democracy to a more pluralistic conception of the state befitting the age of globalization. But even Mouffe might not go far enough in her critical analysis. To rehabilitate liberal democracy is to neglect how easily it has been co-opted by world capitalism. Recalling the observation from Barber in the previous chapter, while democracies might prefer markets, markets do not prefer democracy and, indeed, have a tendency to diminish the very political capabilities necessary for a democratic form of politics. The political neutralization that both she and Schmitt deplore is not an historical accident nor the product of some confusion with regard to what constitutes proper political concepts. It is instead, as was argued by Rancière, the inevitable result of the presumed natural order—whether conceived in terms of the invisible hand of the free market, the divine right of the sovereign who stands above and outside the law, or the philosopher-king shepherding over an ignorant mass—taking precedence over the always radical and untimely commitment to democracy. In this way and somewhat paradoxically, as Gopal Balakrishnan makes clear in his biography of Schmitt, it is actually Schmitt who has the clearer conception of democracy than even Mouffe, which is precisely the reason for Schmitt’s own fear and repudiation. For Schmitt, democracy remained an evoc-

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ative image of explosive high energy. As he once wrote of the intrinsic power of democracy: “Out of its endless, elusive, groundless power emerge ever new forms, which it at any time can shatter, never limiting itself.”15 Here we get surprising confirmation of the axiom of democracy laid out in chapter 1: democracy always demanding more democracy. Likewise, Schmitt’s image of democracy as a groundless power returns us to Rancière’s argument regarding the source and rationality of the hatred of democracy. With the neutralization of political power by the triumph of global capital in its collusion with the modern liberal democratic states, we discover in Balakrishnan’s words “a development which has made the entire world safe from democracy” (264). While some such as Zakaria and Fukuyama and the entire cast of neoliberals they represent might see this as a positive development, in its erasure of borders and the minimizing of possible resistance to the free flow of capital, Schmitt recoiled from what it forebode. In his mind, only two powers had the capacity to resist such an overwhelming force: democracy or political theology, the former governed by the constitutive power of the people according to the logic of popular sovereignty, the latter by the concept of the sovereign who exempts himself from the endless and impotent deliberations of the state by his responsibility to decide and to act. Both contained within them a potent political capacity that is to be feared and admired. That Schmitt’s own conservative disposition and positioning precluded him from opting for the former need not lead us to neglect the lesson we might still learn from him. Thus Balakrishnan takes a different lesson from his reading of Schmitt than does Mouffe: “The Left can invoke this idea in its original, radical form, as a concentrated public power capable of reining in the powers of private property. Those who thought of democracy as a dangerous, overreaching and unstable political system, even from an enemy perspective have more to say about the meaning of radical democracy than an effete, incorporated and culturalist Left” (265). Therefore, from the rationality of the hatred of democracy we learn something essential about the radical potential of democracy conceived otherwise than in accordance with the logic of liberalism. Lest we forget the example of Socrates, democracy is rightly feared by those who have the most to lose. Its power, though inverted and diffuse—and as the technocrats would remind us, illegitimate— has the capacity to mount a challenge against the inhuman reign of global capital. The invisible hand of the market can be stayed and

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made visible by the democratic unveiling of the people once voiceless, left behind, or caught as cogs in the endlessly churning machine. Structurally anarchic, radical democracy undoes the present, known forms of corporatist governance, leaving the future uncertain, like a throw of the dice in which all our presumed entitlements are at risk. This is a far cry from Pascal’s wager, because here we stand to lose everything. The world turned upside down. The world made anew. Democracy as if for the first time.

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What I am proposing here as radical democracy is a great risk, to be sure. But it is a risk taken with its eyes wide open, for the alternatives are dire. The global economic cycles of boom and bust, culminating in the September 2008 collapse, should prove that the present collusion between liberalism and corporate power is untenable: mounting debt, imperial hegemony, a permanent state of war, to say nothing of irreversible environmental degradation, the looming energy crisis, and the structural incapacity for full or total integration by a system that requires nothing less.16 Radical democracy, by contrast, is an open system. This is not to oppose either Schmitt or Mouffe on the concept of the political as a point of decision and the making of a distinction. Rather, it is a fundamental reconsideration of who decides and the process by which the distinction is made. When both Schmitt and Mouffe speak of the event of the decision, they immediately appeal to the concept of sovereignty. Schmitt’s opening line from Political Theology is the perfect case in point: “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” While Mouffe rejects the antidemocratic conclusions that Schmitt draws from this, she nevertheless agrees that the logic of democracy, insofar as it is politically conceived, implies a moment of closure. By the political constitution of the people, in other words, the sovereign rule of one is reestablished. In this way, though she provides a compelling counterargument to Schmitt and effectively shows how the tensions inherent to liberal democracy are not necessarily debilitating but rather can be seen as a productive paradox, she falls short of a radical conception of democracy. For that, we must turn to the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, who breaks decidedly from Schmitt’s politics of enmity and what Rancière describes as the hatred of democracy with his articulation of a politics of love.

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To make the contrast plain, when it comes to the event of the decision, Negri writes, “in no case can the decision be defined as a closure of possibilities, as the power of exception; on the contrary, it will have to be acknowledged as the opening of a new horizon of common power.”17 For Negri, the political decision is “always multilateral, ‘impure’ and monstrous, because the singular is always an immeasurable determination of bodies, of languages and of machines” (248). As such, it is imperative that “we must continue to view the production of the decision from below” (249), by which Negri means the perspective of the common, which is composed of the singularities that constitute the multitude as irreducibly plural. For Negri, it is here in the constituent power of the multitude—not in the exceptional power of the sovereign—that political power lies. And, in a statement that is key to his understanding, he writes: “In becoming power, the multitude generates” (232). It is precisely by this notion of the generative power of the multitude—the notion that through the people’s cooperation new power is created—that Negri shows how politics, when democratically conceived, is not a zero-sum game. To use the image preferred by Negri himself, the point of political decision is not a moment of closure, because democracy is an opening up into the void. By the constituent power of the multitude, therefore, any order is rendered immeasurable, as it demonstrates a power that is “more than the sum of the productive singularities (taken separately) that co-operate within them” (231). Through cooperation, the multitude possesses a productive capacity that is neither imposed by the state nor governed by capital; indeed, it is not subject to any form of sovereign mediation. Rather, it is intrinsic to the social body as its very own political potential. It is for this reason that Negri can say that “the political decision is always solely the decision of the multitude” (236). It is the people who act, who comply, or who resist. As we have already seen, it is the people who invest their power in the regulative fiction of a representative body, and without the credulity of the people, not only government but also the capitalist economy it serves would be at a standstill. It is why when terror strikes, we are cajoled by our leader to not stop our spending ways, to take a trip to Disney World of all places, the land of makebelieve. It is why when the global economy suffers an entire collapse, we are given handouts in the form of free money that is in reality only borrowed time to spend our way out of the paradox of thrift. It is why Negri writes, counterintuitively perhaps, that “it is the poor who participate in the decision most, not those who command” (239).

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The concept of the political, when conceived in the fashion of radical democracy, still requires a point of decision and the making of a distinction, but to reiterate, the decision is an opening, not a closure. We are back again to Rancière’s god of chance, where democracy is shown to be not just a form of politics but the very principle of politics—a rejection of the prerogative to rule or the entitlement to govern, radical democracy as an anarchic government based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern, a realization of the anarchic power of the people. For Negri, the language is different but the argument the same: “The ontology of the biopolitical is considered as a pre-condition for the production of the political” (235). In other words, before the political configures itself in the form of sovereign power, before the natural order congeals as a state-form, before the representative elite codify their prerogative to rule, there exists a social body made possible only through cooperation. Its shared intellectual, social, and economic life gives rise to the political. Thus whether its politics eventually takes a democratic or antidemocratic shape, the democratic basis of political power cannot be denied. Which leads Negri to the following question: “How can this biopolitical (intellectual and co-operative) mass, which we call ‘multitude,’ exert ‘governance over itself’?” (225). Or we could simply ask: who will decide the destiny of humanity? The political crisis that we face today is that no one or no-thing decides. The people have been rendered the object of market forces. The market, while banking on the power of the state to establish policies in its favor, nevertheless follows its own self-annihilating logic where only the few stand to benefit but none hold the power to control. Nevertheless, there exists a history within this history, one wherein the modern world has been born by a democratic revolution still waiting to be completed. It is one that, when radically conceived, has profound theopolitical implications to which we will now turn. But given the journey we have traveled thus far, we can conclude the present discussion with what might also serve as an anticipation of the argument that will follow: no longer is Heidegger’s failed theopolitical fatalism, according to which we stand waiting for redemption believing that “only a god can still save us,” even an option. Instead we stand poised, waiting only for ourselves, opting again as if for the first time, for a democracy radically conceived.

part two

Political Theology

One could hold on to the fiction of a “purer,” “cleaner” separation between religion and politics, even in the liberalism of the nineteenth century. Religion was either an issue for the church or, simply, a private concern. But politics was an issue for the state. Both remain distinguishable, despite ceaseless disputes about their responsibilities, as long as the organizations and institutions were visibly distinctive, immanent organizations and institutions and were able to appear and act effectively in the political public sphere. For, as long as this was the case, one could define religion as being related to the church and politics as

chapter three

Political Theology and the Postsecular

being related to the state. The time of change came when the state lost its monopoly on the political and other political agents, who were literally fighting each other, claimed this monopoly for themselves. —Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II “Post-secular” . . . doesn’t express a sudden increase in religiosity, after its epochal decrease, but rather a change in mindset of those who, previously, felt justified in considering religions to be moribund. —Hans Joas, Braucht der Mensch Religion?

The recent interest in political theology arises out of the despair over the perceived failure of liberal democratic states. As such, it has been employed as an assault on liberalism, with democracy suffering as part of the collateral damage. The task we have pursued thus far is to set out a standard of democracy radically conceived, which has led to the question of whether democracy is possible without liberalism. Put otherwise, must the critique of liberalism (and in related fashion, modernism and secularism as well) necessarily imply the need to overcome or replace democracy as well? Must democracy be defined in modern liberal terms? For those who theorize the possibility of a radical democracy, the answer to this is clear: though they have been historically conjoined, there is no necessary connection between liberalism and democracy. Indeed, for democracy to live up to its radical

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potential, it must sever its historical ties to liberalism and undergo a reconsideration of its very own conceptual bases. As we have seen, this is the work that those such as Rancière and Negri have already begun, and it has profound theopolitical implications. Our task from this point forward, therefore, will shift from the conception of radical democracy to its application to political theology. Like the analysis of radical democracy we undertook in the previous chapters, this point of transition to political theology requires a conceptual reevaluation, because the prevailing view of political theology still views it in opposition, or as a threat, to democracy. Therefore our questions will be the following ones: What effect might an appreciation of radical democracy have for a new and different understanding and employment of political theology? For instance, is it the case, as Schmitt envisaged, that democracy and political theology represent two equally potent, but opposing, political options to confront the seemingly irresistible force of the modern technocratic state? Do those who employ political theology always harbor secret theocratic intentions? Further, is it true, as has long been assumed within normative political theory, that the political must safeguard itself from the religious? Or when democracy is radically conceived, does that open a pathway for a reconfiguration of the proper relationship between these two distinct, but overlapping, spheres of public life and discourse?

I Let me begin by positing an argument in schematic form: The historical transition and the cultural and political transformation from the modern to the postmodern, from the national to the postnational, and from the secular to the postsecular, while not yet complete, represents a dramatic change that consequently requires a grappling toward a new language and a new conceptual framework. With this transition, the modern separation of powers has been weakened by the generalized erasure of borders and hybridization of identities characteristic of globalization. One result of this generalized trend is the postmodern return of religion wherein religion has been repoliticized. If modern secularism requires the privatization—and thus, the depoliticization—of religion, then the postmodern postsecular is a repoliticization. Put otherwise, there is a renewed appreciation of the inherently political dimension within any and all religious formulations. To be 78

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clear, the identification of the postsecular is not a measure of a society’s or our present epoch’s level of religiosity; rather, in the words of Hans Joas, the postsecular indicates a “change in mindset” about the enduring nature of religious beliefs and practices and, consequently, a change in the “secularist self-understanding” of the state. Or, as Hent de Vries puts this point, the postsecular “stresses less a change in the societal role of religion than a different governmental or public perception of it.”1 It is important, therefore, to distinguish between what can be called the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. As pointed out by the sociologist of religion Peter Berger, the former has tied itself too exclusively to a rather simplistic reading of the sociological theory of secularization that thinks that the more modern we become, the less religious we would become. Secularization, on the other hand, is best understood as the sociopolitical consequence of a specific religious history—namely, the post-Reformation history of the Christian West. This includes not only the series of religious wars in Western Europe that ended with the diplomatic Peace of Westphalia (1648) but also the emerging political philosophy from this period that found its classic American expression in James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance.” In this text, which was written to oppose a proposed bill that would have established Christian education in the commonwealth of Virginia, Madison identifies this minimal form of religious establishment as a “dangerous abuse of power.” The obvious reason for Madison’s opposition was the conflict he saw between the establishment of religion and the freedom of religion, the latter of which he regarded as a prerequisite for a democratic society. After all, as Madison wrote, “the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same easy any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects.” Less obvious is the lesson Madison drew from history and the lesson that the subsequent history of the United States seems to have confirmed. Again, in Madison’s words: Because experience witnessesth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had the contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

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This model of religious liberty would become the basis for the strictly “voluntary” nature of American religion. The irony, as those observers of the United States from at least Tocqueville to the present have maintained, is that this peculiar form of the positive political value of secularization has apparently contributed to a certain religious vitality and dynamism and, further, has made possible a radical and unrestrained form of theological inquiry that is untethered from ecclesiastical control. Accordingly, secularization—at least in the American context—has much more to do with religious pluralism than it does with some kind of rejection or turning away from religion.2 In other words, the challenge of secularization is not with religious decline but with religious multiplicity. This is a point made years ago by Berger in his own reconsideration of the secularization theory. As he noted in A Far Glory, perhaps “pluralization theory” would be a more apt description of the status of religion in the modern world, if only because it does not confuse the processes of modernization with a lessening of religious intensity or devotion.3 To reiterate: with the disestablishment of religion and the establishment of a secular state, religion on both the individual and societal level has actually thrived in U.S. history. In other words, the separation of church and state not only has protected the state from the church but has proven beneficial to the ongoing relevance of the church within American society—or more precisely, the ongoing relevance of the churches and other denominations of religion that have become more and more part of the American landscape. Conversely, and still remaining within what is essentially the observation made by Tocqueville, while the U.S. remains the most religious nation of the Western world and continues its longstanding tradition of civil religion within the public and political sphere, by virtue of the diffuse nature of religious authority, religion has tended to reflect rather than direct dominant attitudes and cultural trends. Put in more philosophical terms, with the intrusion of modernity and the taking root of democratic sensibilities, when the people are made sovereign they come to occupy the space once reserved for God alone. As Tocqueville famously wrote: “The people reign over the American political world like God over the universe. It is the cause and aim of all things, everything comes from them and everything is absorbed in them.”4 The democratization of religion, therefore, can be seen as the political instantiation of the death of God. In this sense, religion in the United States is rightly seen as a weak force befitting a secular, if not a postsecular, world.

II To begin, consider the magisterial edited volume by Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan entitled Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. In this work not only is the dominant understanding of political theology predicated on the concept of sovereignty bequeathed by Schmitt called to question, but it is at once shown to have both a more ancient pedigree and more open future possibilities. This is a work whose strategic importance can be read in its title alone. By pluralizing political theology, de Vries and Sullivan effectively strip it free from its predication on the concept of sovereignty, and thus the notion of political theology set in opposition to democratic theory and practice is effectively relativized, paving the way for a political theology that is democratically conceived. Turning to de Vries’ introductory essay “Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political,” it is here where de Vries asks the question of whether the pluralization of political theology, as indicated in the volume’s title, is even permitted. And if so, how might this pluralization of political theology provide a future meaning for political theology beyond its traditional schematization in accordance with the modern notions of sovereignty? Notice that by beginning with the question of what is or is not permitted, de Vries is at least tacitly acknowledging a certain crisis of political legitimation, a crisis out of which Schmitt’s own writings on political theology were born almost a century prior. For de Vries, this inquiry into the possible future meanings for political theology is a particularly urgent one, given how modern notions of sovereignty “have been rendered virtually obsolete or are at least steadily undermined by the flows of capital and information, immigration and migration, bodies and ideas.”5 This notion of the obsolescence of sovereignty is a point frequently expressed by Derrida as well, most notably in Rogues. For Derrida, it

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Or, shifting idioms yet again, in this circumscribed way we can here affirm the basic axiom of political theology as laid out by Schmitt—namely, that all modern political concepts are secularized theological ones. But what becomes of this basic, modernist, secularist framework and of the rightful relation between religion and politics it assumes, when we make the shift from the modern to the postmodern or from the secular to the postsecular? It is to that question that this chapter and this book will now turn.

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is not only that the modern notion of sovereignty has been rendered obsolete by global capital, but the very notion itself contributes to the abuse of the law and is thus in contradiction to the democratic principle of the rule of law itself. As he writes, “as soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state. Abuse is the law of use, it is the law itself, the ‘logic’ of a sovereignty that can reign only by not sharing. . . . It can only tend toward imperial hegemony.” And further: “The paradox, which is always the same, is that sovereignty is incompatible with universality even though it is called for by every concept of international, and thus universal or universalizable, and thus democratic, law.”6 The theopolitical alternative that Derrida suggests is a reconceptualization of democracy in light of a plural divinity, a breaking away from the monopolar theologicopolitical tradition that conceives of sovereignty in terms of unity and indivisibility—from the theopolitical logic of the one to the many. Here the pluralization of political theology invoked by de Vries is quite literal, from the monotheistic conception of a transcendent and sovereign God to the concrete necessities of acknowledging the multiple, and thus competing, spheres of sovereign power. And with such a pluralization, the relativization, if not dissolution, of the concept of sovereignty is bound to follow. Likewise, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that in the current age of Empire we have moved from a politics predicated on national sovereignty to a postnational or at least transnational notion of sovereignty, wherein there is no power or “single center of rationality transcendent to global forces, guiding the various phases of historical development according to its conscious and all-seeing plan.”7 In other words, the modern notion of sovereignty has become an outdated concept no longer useful in understanding the global flow of capital or in mobilizing and redirecting political will. Further, rather than seeing our politics as a means by which to actualize a transcendent will, this acknowledges the immanent, and thus always contested, forces at play. While this post- or transnational situation in which the concept of sovereignty has been rendered obsolete might be interpreted as a dire form of postpolitics in which there is the complete reign of the economic over the political—for example, recall Barber’s concern from chapter 1 over the antidemocratical ramifications of an economic globalization without any meaningful political transparency or oversight—Hardt and Negri are not as pessimistic. Indeed, by severing the ties between sovereignty and democratic theory, or by at least

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reducing the dependence of the latter on the former, we are only now in a position to realize the radical promise of democracy. That is because if we consider the history of modern political thought, we find not one but two notions of sovereignty. The first, which has been the dominant and largely victorious one throughout our modern history and which is reflected in the political philosophy of Schmitt and perhaps most prominently in Thomas Hobbes, views sovereignty as absolutely fundamental to politics. In the words of Michael Hardt, it is “conceived as an autonomous substance, and thus the multitude of its subjects follow from the sovereign’s power. Hence, the common analogy in this line of thought between the sovereign and the divine: the sovereign is god on earth, in the position of the creator, whereas its subjects are creatures, created, and hence secondary.”8 While socalled modern liberal democratic states rely on this first form of sovereignty in their implementation of representational government, it is hardly democratic at all, considering the subservient, paltry role played by the people. The second notion of sovereignty, however, which is reflected in the work of Machiavelli and Spinoza, “posits the autonomy of the multitude and its social relations against any preestablished or divine conceptions of social order or hierarchy. According to this conception, sovereignty is secondary; it arises only from a relationship between the rulers and the ruled, and in this relationship the multitude is always primary over the sovereign” (59). The importance of this distinction is revealed when bearing in mind the right to resistance or rebellion. If sovereignty is deemed primary, then resistance has “a strictly negative role” that is legitimate only “as a check or limit on government.” Correlatively, the sovereign is authorized to resort to whatever measure so long as it can be justified in terms of the preservation of the state. On the other hand, if sovereignty is secondary to the constituent power of the multitude, “resistance and rebellion actually have a positive, foundational role” (60). That is because it returns power to where it properly resides. In this sense, the preservation of the state form is not the first order of business for politics; on the contrary, because there are no “preestablished or divine conceptions of social order,” the multitude is free to find its own coherence and structure. This is a fluid conception of the state that, as recommended by Thomas Jefferson, is served well by periodic upheavals. Again, in the words of Hardt, “resistance (and the threat of it) is the constantly present constituent foundation of sovereignty. Against the primacy of sovereignty, then, stands the primacy of resistance” (60).

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The concern, of course, is whether the multitude can be trusted do what is best or even to know what is in its own self-interest. And it is with this concern that the very hope for democracy stands or falls. But for my purposes here, what Hardt and Negri provide is a way to conceive a political theology apart from the priority it gives to the concept of sovereignty and consistent with democratic theory. In the place of Schmitt’s political theology, which follows from the idea of a sovereign and transcendent God, what I am proposing here is an immanent political theology predicated on the constituent power of the multitude. Returning to de Vries, when considering the alternative conceptual possibilities for political theology, he writes the following: To articulate all this . . . means rewriting a certain idea of transcendence (the notions, dimensions, or experiences with which “religion” and the “theologico-political” are most often identified) in the language of immanence, associated with the history of atomism, materialism, naturalism, and pantheism. The latter traverses the history of thought as a heretical countercurrent, of sorts. Yet this rewriting also implies interrogating the historical and systematic pertinence of the very distinction and opposition between transcendence and immanence as well.9

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So in connection with the first conceptual pairing and the prevailing logic of sovereignty that the pluralization of political theology redirects and calls into question, here de Vries questions the distinction and opposition between transcendence and immanence. In so doing, he raises the issue of the emphasis typically given to the idea of transcendence within traditional religious and/or theologicopolitical discourse and indirectly poses the possibility of an immanent political theology. Theorizing the possibility of an immanent political theology that has its sole basis and legitimacy in the constituent power of the multitude proves that Schmitt’s opposition of political theology to democracy is an arbitrary one, just as his predication of political theology on the concept of sovereignty is. It should be no surprise, therefore, that de Vries and Sullivan’s volume contains essays from leading democratic theorists such as Chantal Mouffe wherein her theory of democracy as a form of agonistic politics is applied to the meaning and task of political theology for today. Specifically, Mouffe is interested in the formative role played by religion in shaping personal identities and political commitments. Religious differences con-

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tribute to a pluralist democracy by highlighting the differences between the logic of identity and the logic of difference, and they thereby “guarantee against the dangers of final closure or total dissemination that would be the consequence of the exclusive dominance of one of the two logics.”10 In addition, because religious communities and individuals often speak in different languages, inhabit different sacred spaces, make reference to different revelatory texts, and so on, this calls to question the liberal notion of the neutrality of the public sphere. The agonistic model of politics she advocates for “denies that the liberal state is or should be neutral” (324). Nevertheless, she does defend the ongoing political commitment to the separation of church and state. However, this separation “does not require that religion should be relegated to the private sphere and that religious symbols should be excluded from the public sphere” (325). On the contrary, by her understanding of democracy, religious believers must be given room as religious believers within the political realm. It is in this way that religious groups can effectively intervene and redirect the political will of a society. After all, as she reminds us: “Many democratic struggles have been informed by religious motives. And the fight for social justice has often been enhanced by the participation of religious groups” (325). Further, in the attempt to curtail the excesses of religion—indeed, even by some efforts at liberal tolerance—“many democratic theorists end up eliminating the very forces that move people to political participation” (326). Therefore, in a series of distinctions that is essential to understand the shift from the secular to the postsecular, Mouffe writes: To speak of the separation between church and state, therefore, is one thing; another is to speak of the separation between religion and politics; and still another is to speak of the separation between the public and the private. The problem lies in the fact that those three types of separation are sometimes presented as in some way equivalent and requiring each other. In consequence, the separation of church and state is seen as implying the exclusion of all forms of religious expression from the public sphere. (325)

Returning to my argument in its schematic form, recognizing the inherently political dimension within any an all religious formulations should not be misconstrued as a denial either of the process of secularization or of the continued political commitment to the separation of church and state. Instead, what we have with the postsecular

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is a rejection of a rigid, modernist, secular ideology that would extend a particular political commitment—namely, the separation of church and state, which only emerged and makes sense within a particular historical, cultural, and religious matrix—into a generalized rule regarding the separation of powers. Such an extension is unwarranted and an overreach, and it rests on a mistaken or distorted view of our history. It has contributed to the very conceptual confusion over the nature of religion and politics to this day and thus exacerbates the very problem it means to address.

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For an elaboration of Mouffe’s argument, we can turn to two wellknown examples: the first from the American legal scholar Stephen Carter and the second from the moral philosopher Jeffrey Stout. Carter’s best-selling book from 1993, The Culture of Disbelief, chides the American political culture and legal theory for what he calls its “trivialization of religion.” He argues that religious-establishment cases before the Supreme Court have been wrongly decided and that this both reflects the public’s confusion with regard to religion and sets dangerous precedents that will prove detrimental to American democracy. Like Mouffe, he agrees that many democratic movements working for social justice have been enhanced by religious groups and individuals being politically mobilized, citing the classic case in point of the civil-rights movement as led by Martin Luther King Jr. So by the common sentiment that “refuses to accept the notion that rational, public-spirited people can take religion seriously,”11 Carter fears that the American political and legal culture is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Further, like Mouffe, Carter argues that the religiously faithful should not have to bracket out the logic of their religious belief for the sake of public consumption. Asking “citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action” (8) breeds a kind of cultural schizophrenia that, on the one hand, diminishes the positive and productive role that religion might play in shaping discussions on public policy and, on the other, boosts the ideology of victimization that is present within certain segments of the religiously faithful. Carter writes: “In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our

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politics . . . we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them” (3). As it currently stands, the only form of religious expression that is acceptable within the public sphere is that which is worn lightly on the sleeve, a process that Carter terms the “secular leveling” of our culture, which he seeks to capture with the following sentiment: “Pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously” (15). Basically as Carter sees it, religion is treated like a hobby, something akin to building model airplanes, “and not really a fit activity for intelligent, publicspirited adults” (22). In this way, the trivialization of religion that Carter chronicles within the American legal and political culture is not only an act of condescension but, even more, betrays a certain hostility. It is a prejudice against religion masquerading as neutrality. In Carter’s words: We live in a secular culture, devoted to sweet reason. We separate Church and State. We believe in tolerance. We aren’t suspicious. . . . There is a message in this miasma, and the message is that people who take their religion seriously, who rely on their understanding of God for motive force in their public and political personalities—well, they’re scary people. Not only scary, but maybe irrational too. (23–24, emphasis in original)

Carter’s solution (which incidentally anticipates the statement by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, fifteen years later with regard to the incorporation of Sharia law within English law through what he termed “supplementary jurisdictions”)12 is twofold. First, he argues that when reconsidering the proper relationship between religion and politics within the context of the United States, specifically when it concerns furthering the interests of democracy, what is most significant is not religious freedom or liberty but religious autonomy. In other words, it is not a matter of individuals being free to choose their religious identity, a multicultural phenomenon characterized by today’s new-age spirituality, which threatens to turn or reduce religion into yet another commodity. Rather, it is again a question of political power and capacity. When the autonomy of religion is protected, religious groups and individuals are then enabled to “play a vital role as free critics of the institutions of secular society.”

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“Democracy is best served,” Carter goes on to argue, “when the religions are able to act as independent moral voices interposed between the citizen and the state.”13 In this way, it is autonomy, not liberty or freedom, that is “the missing element in America’s confused relationship with its religions.” When autonomous, religions function as “independent centers of power,” with a “voice different from that of the state” and acting as a “counterweight to the authority of the state” (35). In essence, religions should be seen and valued as “autonomous intermediary institutions” (101). What this means practically is that religions “live by resisting” (37) and pose the “radical possibility of refusing to accept the will of the state” (41). “No wonder,” Carter concludes, “that our political culture seems to be afraid of it” (43). By this recalibration of the proper relationship between religion and politics, one that refuses to subsume religion to the authority of the state but instead views religions as autonomous intermediaries, the reign of secular reason is combated as the secularist self-understanding of the state is called to question. In Carter’s words: “To try to make religions, in their internal organization, conform to the state’s vision of a properly ordered society is not simply a corruption of the constitutional tradition of religious freedom; it is an assault on the autonomy of religion as bulwarks against state authority” (38–39). In conjunction with this argument, which calls on religion to assert its autonomy more clearly, the second part of Carter’s proposed solution is that American legal culture should strive to be more inclusive to the various types of arguments and rationales that our diverse public employs when coming to decisions and expressing values and deep-seated convictions. As he writes: “What is needed is not a requirement that the religiously devout choose a form of dialogue that liberalism accepts, but that liberalism develop a politics that accepts whatever form of dialogue a member of the public offers. Epistemic diversity, like diversity of other kinds, should be cherished, not ignored, and certainly not abolished” (230). In arguing for more epistemic diversity within American legal culture, Carter is modeling the agonistic form of politics advocated by Mouffe. Likewise, the Princeton moral philosopher and scholar of religion Jeffrey Stout also argues for the positive—even necessary— value that this epistemic diversity holds for a well-functioning democracy. The difference between Carter and Stout is simply the target of their ire. Whereas Carter is principally concerned with American legal culture, Stout provides a critical analysis of, and response to, modern political philosophy and theology, specifically the

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tradition of Rawlsian liberalism, as well as what he calls the “new traditionalists,” a group of postliberal philosophers and theologians led by Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Milbank. The problem, as Stout sees it, is that modern liberal philosophy inevitably treats religion as a “conversation stopper”—meaning that once a religious believer states his or her conviction, there can be no argument, no effort at moral suasion, no discussion about competing visions of the good—whereas the new traditionalists fail to recognize how democracy itself functions as a tradition with its own ethical norms. As Stout explains, “religion is not a conversation-stopper, as secular liberals often assume.  .  .  . Neither, however, is religion the foundation without which democratic discourse is bound to collapse, as traditionalists suppose.”14 Therefore, against the liberal secularists, Stout shows how religion functions as a tool of instruction, as a mobilizing force within a community, and as a point of negotiation requiring constant reflection and scrutiny. “It is true that the expression of religious premises sometimes leads to discursive impasse in political debate,” Stout admits. “But there are many important issues that cannot be resolved solely on the basis of arguments from commonly held principles” (10). It is in this sense that Stout proclaims, “traditionalists are right . . . to argue that ethical and political reasoning are creatures of tradition and crucially depend on the acquisition of such virtues as practical wisdom and justice” (11). The new traditionalists go too far, however, in portraying modern democratic societies as being essentially nihilistic, without any unifying framework, and thus in stark contrast to the comprehensive visions offered by the religious traditions. Again, the key for Stout is to recognize democracy itself as a tradition: Democracy  .  .  . is a tradition. It inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror. This tradition is anything but empty. Its ethical substance, however, is more a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct than it is a matter of agreement on a conception of justice in Rawls’s sense. (3)

In carving out a middle position between Rawlsian liberalism and the postliberalism of the new traditionalists, Stout articulates a

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distinctly postsecular vision of democracy. “One of my central claims,” he explains, “is that modern democracy is not essentially an expression of secularism, as some philosophers have claimed and many theologians have feared. Modern democratic reasoning is secularized, but not in a sense that rules out the expression of religious premises or the entitlement of individuals to accept religious assumptions” (11). By distinguishing between the ideology of secularism and how democratic reasoning has been secularized, Stout does not rule out the legitimacy of the religious voice. According to this vision, democratic politics is a secularized politics in the sense that religious authority has been deprivileged. That is to say, it is one voice among many—or, more appropriately to a religiously pluralistic society, there is no one, single religious voice, but there are many. Thus, by understanding how democracy need not be ruled by the theo-logic of the one, there is room for religious and nonreligious individuals and groups to join the cacophony of voices. This is a postsecular vision because on the one hand there is an autonomy from religious authority to the various spheres of public life (politics, economics, and culture), but on the other, the reign of secular reason that seeks to contain, if not silence, religion has also been delegitimated. For Mouffe, Carter, and Stout, democracy functions best when it is plurivocal and agonistic and allows for a vigorous debate over sincerely held and authentically expressed values and convictions. At its best the public, political sphere is not neutral but conflictual, involving competing religious (and nonreligious) conceptions of the good. The problem with the way in which religion has been dealt with in the past by staunch secularists in the modern liberal tradition is that it forces the religiously faithful to translate their beliefs into a purely secular idiom. Not only does this breed resentment and foster blowback in the form of the political mobilization of religious fundamentalists, but it also cheapens the transformative potential of democracy as a constant work in progress (which, according to their analysis, would effectively make the civil-rights movement—which if not religiously inspired was at least religiously mobilized—virtually impossible to conceive, let alone to implement).15 While Mouffe, Carter, and Stout do not use the language of political theology in their analyses, their work certainly models a postsecular reconfiguration of the rightful place of religion within the public sphere. Additionally, their understanding of religion as an autonomous intermediary within a much broader public discourse is akin to those thinkers examined earlier who make the argument for more democ-

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racy as the cure to what ails democracy. That is because while religion is recognized as a potent, transformative force that has both a positive and negative impact on society, its power is best mediated, not contained. In this sense, what democracy requires most when it comes to religion is not secularism but diversity. By simply giving religious individuals, communities, and traditions the air to breathe, their own excesses might develop into a new consensus and contribute in the shaping of public policy and mobilizing the electorate. But more likely, by providing the institutions and mechanisms—indeed, the political power—to make their voices heard and to hash out their differences, history shows us that the democratizing impact on religion is that religions do not become more excessive and fanatical, but less. Again to return to Tocqueville, the irony, therefore, is that by granting religion its autonomy, it is at once simultaneously politically empowered and moderated—if not defused—by its very own proliferation and diffusion. This thesis has been persuasively proven by the sociologist of religion Alan Wolfe in his study One Nation, After All, wherein he presents the data gathered from the Middle Class Morality Project, a quantitative and qualitative study that examined the attitudes on religion, family, work, immigration, and race from the “typical” middle-class American at the dawn of the twenty-first century.16 As Wolfe concludes, in spite of the bombast of many religious leaders and political pundits over the culture wars, the red-state/ blue-state divide, the hyperpartisanship of elected officials, and the continued impact of social atomization, most Americans actually prefer a “quiet faith” and a morality “writ small.” Far from the secular leveling that Carter detects within the American legal and political culture, this generalized sense of moderation and toleration from the vast American middle is not a manifestation of hostility against religion but, on the contrary, a direct consequence of Americans living out their own particular religious convictions. By being thrown together with other religious communities and individuals, Americans are apparently forced to reconcile the conflict between exclusive religious truth claims and the social and cultural realities of religious pluralism. While not always conscious of this process of reconciliation at work, the fact that by and large the many different religious communities get along, sometimes by ignoring one another, other times by finding opportunities to cooperate, is a testament to the strategic political wisdom of democracy. And further, when applied to the postsecular reconfiguration of the proper relation between politics and religion and between the public

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and the private, it suggests that there is value in bringing what has been traditionally thought to be the potentially combustible elements within our private lives into the public light of day. In other words, what the postsecular teaches us is that not only does religion remain in spite of the modern anticipation of its demise, not only do privately held religious beliefs and convictions have public consequence, and not only does the attempt to sequester religion inevitably fail by breeding precisely the virulent forms of religious extremism it means to contain, but also and therefore, it is the modern, secularist selfunderstanding of the state that has it wrong. A rigid secularist ideology operates no less by the theopolitical logic of the one than does a theocratic regime. Whether taking the cues from the left or right on the American political spectrum, from postmodern deconstructionists to the radically orthodox in contemporary theory, and from the political mobilization of the Religious Right or the more recent impact of the selfstyled progressive evangelicals, all agree that there is no religion without public consequence and that a rigid secularism—or more broadly, the separation of powers between religion and politics—is not only unsustainable but is itself an outgrowth of a particular religious history and perspective.17 When taken to the extreme, this secularist ideology has been forcibly imposed on many for whom it is rightfully perceived as an assault on their most cherished convictions and traditions.

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To be clear, making the case that we have entered into a postsecular world is not meant to suggest that the modern process of secularization has somehow been reversed or undone. Rather, the “post-” designation here is meant to indicate an end to the reign of secular reason that has long functioned as an ideology within modern liberalism in order to keep religion sequestered as exclusively a private matter of individual conscience. In other words, the postsecular world is decidedly not a desecularized one. This is a distinction that is key to the work of Gianni Vattimo, who sees the secularization of the modern world as the destiny of the Christian West, and in this process of secularization he sees an analogue to both the weakening of being within the history of Western metaphysics and the Christian theological concept of kenosis, or the self-emptying of God. Regarding

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the notion of desecularization, he frankly admits, “I don’t know what a desecularized world would be,” after first making the case that “real religion relies on secularization because religion is no longer single or uniform and there is no longer a central religious authority.”18 In this way, as a hermeneutical philosopher Vattimo is both a defender of the modern process of secularization as the necessary historical horizon out of which we must understand our contemporary situation and a champion of a postsecular form of politics, by the attention he gives to the postmodern return of the religious. Likewise, there has been a reconsideration of the basic secularist assumption that has been operative throughout much of the history of the academic study of religion. The so-called secularization thesis was questioned by scholars of religion long before the events of 9/11. However, after 9/11 these academic discussions became part of a much larger and more public dialogue, leading some, such as the conservative political columnist David Brooks, to describe themselves as “recovering secularists.” As Brooks wrote in a column for the Atlantic Monthly in March 2003, the secularization thesis has proven to be “yesterday’s incorrect vision of the future.” This secularist assumption is a residue of the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment. As the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith once wrote, “the academic study of religion is a child of the enlightenment.”19 As the product of the Enlightenment, the very concept of religion reinforces an intellectual tradition that has domesticated religion by delimiting it within the sphere of secular reason alone and that promotes an attitude of skepticism, if not outright hostility, toward faith as a lesser form of knowledge and toward religion as exclusively either a matter of superstition or dogma. Correlatively, the anthropologist of religion Talal Asad, who is equally interested in the construction of religion as an academic category, has shown how in conjunction with the Enlightenment rationalist project outlined by Smith there are the political consequences of the colonial subjugation by the West of other cultures and religions. For Asad, the political promise held out by the West for emancipation carries with it the religiocultural significance of normalizing secularization as the proper mode by which religion ought to be practiced, meaning the liberal strategy of containment wherein religion is treated exclusively as a private matter of individual conscience. When applied to the academic study of religion, this has all too often resulted in an undue priority being placed on belief over ritual and a treatment of religion as an “essentially cognitive” matter made up of a “set of

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propositions.”20 This reduction of religion to individual belief shows how religion has become increasingly marginalized in the modern world and betrays the covert theological bias that continues to exist within the field of the study of religion—namely, that the academic treatment of religious belief “is a modern, privatized Christian one” (47). Asad writes: “This modest view of religion (which would have horrified the early Christian Fathers or medieval churchmen) is a product of the only legitimate space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society, the right to individual belief ” (45, emphasis his). It is true, as Asad and Smith have pointed out, that the terms “religion” and “secular” are not translatable, that they have a Latin root, and they carry with them a history into which they have been forcibly imposed. This becomes most apparent when we consider the assumptions made about the connection—or lack of connection—between religion and politics. For Asad, behind the Western mandate of the separation of church and state rests a twin assumption that on the one hand associates modernization with secularization and on the other treats religion as an exclusively private, individual affair of personal conscience. As he writes, “this is at once part of a strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians) of the defense, of religion,” and further that “this separation of religion from power is a modern Western norm, the product of a unique postReformation history. The attempt to understand Muslim traditions [for instance] by insisting that in them religion and politics are coupled must, in my view, lead to failure” (28). With this current interest in the political dimension of religion and with studies supporting a certain resurgence of religion on an individual level and the public visibility of religion within the political realm, it is clear now, as Peter Berger once cautioned, that “those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.”21 Berger, a one-time advocate of the secularization thesis, notes that now that we have moved into a postsecular world it can no longer be safely assumed that the public is best served by keeping religion private. Indeed, one could say that this same insight is the driving motivation behind Charles Taylor’s most recent work, The Secular Age. This book by the renowned philosopher and Templeton Prize winner begins with Taylor posing the question: “How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naively within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which everyone’s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbe-

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lief has become for many the major default option?”22 How is it that religious belief is “no longer axiomatic,” that there has been a “breach of naïveté” in which “immediate certainty has been largely eroded?” (12). In short, how is it that religion has become a choice, one option among many, like any other commodity in our consumer society? In asking these questions, Taylor is not only describing what Berger once termed the modern West’s “heretical imperative”23 but is calling into question what he considers to be the hegemony of secularization’s master narrative in the West. But Taylor is no reactionary, and this work is no jeremiad against a hostile secular culture à la Bill O’Reilly or Pat Robertson. Not only does Taylor explicitly disavow the conspiracy theory of a “secularist regime [out to] marginalize believing Christians,”24 but he also correctly refutes what he calls the “subtraction stories” of secularization, wherein secularization is seen as the inevitable effect or byproduct of scientific and cultural inquiry (569–579). For him, the important thing in the making of the secular age is not the whittling away of old beliefs but the grappling toward something new, the fact that we are now faced with a choice between a belief in God and all that that implies and an immanent sense of value or a worldly ascetic that may or may not be as satisfying. In addition, by his admission that the secular age is the long-term cumulative effect of the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, and scientific revolution, there is the practical acknowledgment that as a historical process and cultural transformation it cannot be simply willed away, dismissed, or rejected. Nevertheless, Taylor does worry about the “immanent frame” by which we currently make sense of the world (539–593). He fears that a world without reference to the transcendent order leaves humanity devoid of the “fullness” that gives life meaning. In this way, Taylor shares a common concern with the Radical Orthodox critique of the reign of secular reason. But while Taylor provides an impressive defense of the positive value of religious belief, his work is decidedly not theological. By inquiring into the conditions of belief, his concern is a proper philosophical one. In other words, while Taylor might believe that life lacks meaning without belief in God, he is reluctant, if not unwilling, to dictate what precisely that belief means and what individuals ought to believe. So even though his work bears a certain resemblance to the preoccupation of the school of Radical Orthodox theology, Taylor actually has more in common with Vattimo, with whom he has collaborated and been in frequent conversation.25 Both Vattimo and Taylor are sufficiently postmodern in their orientation to

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know that philosophy’s task is not either to prove or disprove the truth of religious belief, let alone the existence of God. This is the great irony of the so-called postmodern return of religion, for while postmodernism begins with its incredulity toward all metanarratives and is rightly known for its iconoclastic imperative, it is not only traditional religious belief that is upended but the reign of secular reason and the reductive approach to understanding religion outlined above. In this way, as Vattimo argues, secularism actually paves the way and establishes the condition for the current global resurgence of religion. As Vattimo writes, “today, it seems that the main outcome of the death of the metaphysical God and of the almost general discrediting of philosophical foundationalism is the renewed possibility of religious experience.”26 While Taylor does not go this far in his analysis and would no doubt reject Vattimo’s triumphal reading of secularism as the destiny of the Christian West, he does share with Vattimo the sense that the task of contemporary philosophy of religion, if not to prove the truth of religion, is, more modestly, to at least persuade us of the possibility of belief. For this, his work has been seen by many as the antidote to the wildly popular atheistic diatribes by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. While they persist in the twofold rationalist mistake of treating religious belief as a lesser form of knowledge and in conflating religion with belief, Taylor more judiciously chronicles our present cultural predicament while asking us to inquire as to the costs of the religious autonomy that we enjoy. In this way, Taylor proves more existential in his approach than political.

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To conclude, therefore, we can contrast Taylor’s notion of religious autonomy with our earlier discussion of Carter. By this contrast we are presented with the two seemingly incompatible realities of the postsecular world. By chronicling the characteristics, costs, and benefits of what he terms the secular age, Taylor is correct that on the individual level our religion is determined by our own personal preferences and thus that society is bereft of a unifying sacred canopy. But when this essentially existential insight is applied to the present political situation, it becomes evident that this long-term process of the privatization and individualization of religion has important public

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ramifications. Put otherwise, the modern process of secularization breeds a postsecular form of politics. When considering the role played by religion within public life, we have moved from the one to the many, wherein religion has become another outlet for political expression and another means of political empowerment and mobilization. While this is a consequence of the modern process of secularization, it is also a rejection or turning away from a rigid ideology of secularism. This is the meaning of the postsecular and the starting point for our reconfiguration of political theology along democratic lines.

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Interlude

The Iranian Revolution Redux The situation in Iran can be understood as a great joust under traditional emblems, those of the king and the saint, the armed ruler and the destitute exile, the despot faced with the man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people. —Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?”

In June 2009, thirty years after the Iranian revolution that toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shaw Pahlavi and eventually established Iran as an Islamic republic, the people of Iran again took to the streets, with the cries of “Allah akbar!” heard from rooftops throughout the city of Tehran. But this time the revolutionary Islamic rallying cry was not to be heard as a rejection of a Western secular political norm and a propped-up authoritarian regime but as a complaint against fraud—a complaint that was inspired at once by the ideals of both democracy and Islam. Despite its uncertain future, what seems evident is that Iran is once again poised on the forefront of a dramatic shift in global politics, and thus it serves as an apt illustration of both the postsecular and radical democracy. But first, before exploring the 2009 protests, an important matter needs to be laid to rest. While the 1979 revolution eventuated in the establishment of Iran as an Islamic republic and the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, it was not properly speaking an “Islamic Revolution.” As Martin Amis points out, “the 1979 revolution wasn’t an Islamic Revolution until it was over. In its origins, it was a fullspectrum mass movement.”1 The importance of this distinction is that while the 1979 revolution is rightly seen as signaling the rise and

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potency of political Islam, especially as an alternative to the bipolar logic of cold-war geopolitics, the revolution was democratic first and foremost. The overthrow of the Shah depended on a broad coalition united against a decadent monarchy that, in the words of Amis, “had lost the farr—the inherent aura of kingship.” Thus, by the time that Khomeini had actually secured his power, it only came by way of the violent suppression of many of those individuals and groups who had originally helped bring him to power in the first place. “Khomeini had more or less secured the monopoly of violence,” Amis adds, “and the Iranian people found themselves living under the world’s only revolutionary theocracy. The Islamic Republic was Islamic now, but it was no longer a republic. Iranians have since enjoyed only a shadow of popular sovereignty.” So while an Iranian variant of political Islam was originally part of a broad-based, mass democratic movement, by the time it established itself as an Islamic republic, its claim on democracy had already been surrendered. This leaves certain questions unresolved, exemplified best by Michel Foucault, who suggested the following in the days leading up to the 1979 Iranian revolution. First, Foucault believed the case of Iran would teach the world that religion might function not only as a site and voice of resistance but also as a source for political creation. And in a related fashion, not only would religion be a source for politics, but there remains a potential for the introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life. In other words, not only was the Iranian revolution a clear case of the potential political power when religious groups and individuals are mobilized but also, and this is why the situation fascinated Foucault, when religion becomes a source for political creation, it has the potential to remake politics—politics given a spiritual dimension. That the Iranian experiment degenerated into a violently authoritarian and now patently fraudulent regime does not by itself invalidate the original democratic ambitions that inspired its cause. But it certainly does stand as a cautionary tale. As does the case of Foucault. In their excellent study Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson make the case that Foucault was both prescient and mistaken in his reading of and support for the Iranian revolution. He was prescient in the sense that when he repeatedly heard ordinary Iranians speaking in support of an Islamic form of government this signaled a new form of “political spirituality” that would prove to be a scandal to Western political and religious categories of understanding. As Afary and Anderson write:

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Long before most other commentators, Foucault understood, and this to his credit, that Iran was witnessing a singular kind of revolution. Early on, he predicted that this revolution would not follow the model of other modern revolutions. He wrote that it was organized around a sharply different concept, which he called “spiritual politics.” Foucault recognized the enormous power of the new discourse of militant Islam, not just for Iran, but globally. He showed that the new Islamist movement aimed at a fundamental cultural, social, as well as political break with the modern Western order, as well as with the Soviet Union and China.2

For instance, in an early article on the subject from October 1978 entitled “The Shah Is One Hundred Years Behind the Times,” Foucault was one of the first to articulate the connection between postmodernism and a postsecular form of politics. While the Shah’s plan for secularization and modernization came in the form of a modernizing disciplinary state, at least to Foucault’s ears the call for an Islamic government held within it the potential for an alternative state form, one that would be neither secular nor theocratic. We can see how if the Iranian revolution was its first fruits, this promise of altering the “global strategic equilibrium” becomes even more seductive after the fall of the Berlin Wall ten years later. With the apparent triumph of global capital and the collapse of the communist alternative, viable forms of protest and political mobilization have been severed from a comprehensive revolutionary ideology. This gives way to the politically disconnected, if not disenfranchised, globalized individual. It is in this sense that Foucault was right in that radical political Islam stands in, or fills the vacuum, left vacant by the absence or discrediting of a viable revolutionary ideology that can withstand or promise an alternative to the economic, cultural, and political forces of globalization.3 Foucault’s mistake, however, was in his uncritical stance toward Islamism as a political movement. For instance, in words that he would later come to regret, Foucault even went so far as to proclaim the following: “One thing must be clear. By ‘Islamic government,’ nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.”4 For Afary and Anderson, they attribute this “problematic treatment of Iranian Islamism” on Foucault’s part “to the fact that he ignored the warnings of Iranian and Western feminists as well as secular leftists, who, early on, had developed a more balanced and critical attitude toward the revolution.”5 Others, such as the prominent French scholar of Islam Maxime Ro-

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dinson, refused to allow this political miscalculation on Foucault’s part to tarnish his legacy. Rodinson suggested that Foucault’s writings on Islam were aberrations, a product of his ignorance of Iranian history and culture, and were not in any significant way symptomatic of a flaw in his thinking itself. But nevertheless, Rodinson did find it necessary to make clear the astonishing fact of “one of the best attested laws of history. Good moral intentions, whether or not endorsed by the deity, are weak basis for determining the practical policies of states.”6 Others were not nearly so generous. At roughly the same time as Rodinson was pouring cold water on Foucault’s hopes of an emancipatory outcome in Iran but stopping short of calling Foucault out by name, the Nouvel Observateur published a letter from a pseudonymous author who went by the name of “Atoussa H.,” an Iranian woman living in exile in France. While Foucault seemed “deeply moved by ‘Muslim spirituality,’ which, according to him, would be an improvement over the ferocious capitalist dictatorship,” she asked why, “after twenty-five years of silence and oppression,” must Iranians be forced to choose between “the SAVAK [the domestic security and intelligence service of Iran from 1957 to 1979 known for its torture and execution of regime opponents] and religious fanaticism?” Likewise, in a direct response to Foucault, the French feminist journalists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle called on Foucault to confess that his support of the Iranian revolution had been in error. In an early critique of the regime of the Islamic Republic that has since become familiar, they write: Returning from Iran a few months ago, Michel Foucault stated that he was “impressed” by the “attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics” that he discerned in project on an Islamic government. Today there are little girls all in black, veiled from head to toe; women stabbed precisely because they do not want to wear the veil; summary executions for homosexuality; the creation of a “ministry of Guidance According to the Precepts of the Koran”; thieves and adulterous women flagellated.7

Though repeatedly called to respond, Foucault was never able to mount a satisfactory defense of his enthusiastic and uncritical support of the revolution. He criticized his critics for “merging together” all the different forms of political Islam into a single form of fanaticism, but as shown by Afary and Anderson, he himself consistently failed to make “any social or political differentiation among

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the Iranian ‘people’ ” and only grudgingly, after much prodding, “acknowledged that the religious and nationalist myths through which the Islamists had mobilized the masses were full of ‘chauvinism, nationalism, exclusiveness.’ ”8 Therefore, keeping this cautionary tale from Foucault in mind, we might expect contemporary commentators to approach the present political upheaval in Iran with great caution. But far from it. Even as Iranians poured out into the streets to protest what was widely regarded as a rigged presidential election and suffered brutal retaliation from the self-same state whose legitimacy they were questioning, Western observers lined up to proclaim the end of theocratic rule and, more broadly, the discrediting of political Islam entirely. For instance, a former CIA operative writing in the New York Times announced: “One thing is clear: we are witnessing . . . the unraveling of the religious idea that has shaped the growth of modern Islamic fundamentalism since the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.”9 Likewise, Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham mapped the postelection protests in Iran into the narrative of the making of a Jeffersonian democracy in the founding of the United States. As Meacham writes, “the events [in Iran] seem to be a chapter in the very Jeffersonian story of the death of theocracy, or rule by the clerics, and the graduate separation of church and state.” Still accepting the largely discredited secularization hypothesis, Meacham proclaims the Islamic Republic of Iran doomed by the forces of modernization because “theocracies cannot finally survive modernity.” After all, as any Jeffersonian democrat knows and Meacham repeats here without any qualification, “the work of politics is not the same as the work of religion.”10 A more nuanced interpretation is provided by Fareed Zakaria in the same issue of Newsweek as Meacham’s column. Where Meacham projects the American experience from the nation’s founding onto contemporary Iranian society, Zakaria at least admits that this is far from the first time that there have been serious questions and a potential popular uprising over the legitimacy of Iran’s religiously based political authority. The difference between the 2009 protests and previous ones is that instead of the clerical establishment uniformly siding with the state, in the case of 2009, both the people and the clerics themselves were divided. And where Meacham treated the failure of the Iranian experiment in the establishment of an Islamic Republic as a fait accompli, Zakaria offers a more conditional assessment:

Yet where even Zakaria fails in his analysis is in his lack of attention to the very words of the protestors on the streets in Tehran. When the Mousavi supporters cry out “Allah akbar,” this is clearly not a repudiation of the founding of Iran as an Islamic republic, the voice of pro-Western reform, or a secular reaction to the Islamic jurists’ stranglehold grip on power. As Slavoj Žižek has written, “the green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of ‘Allah akbar!’ that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption.” Žižek continues, “we are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.”12 As such, the fact that the protestors were largely organized around their support for Mousavi and not Ahmadinejad’s other main rival, Mehdi Karroubi, is not by accident. As Khomeini’s own prime minister, Mousavi was a one-time political insider who, though he had long retired from politics, continued to be associated with the popular, utopian dream that had animated the 1979 revolution in its origins. It is in this way that the 2009 protests might be seen as the Iranian revolution redux, the genuinely democratic clamor to start over anew, to make things right after they have gone so desperately wrong. As Žižek writes, “to put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the ‘return of the repressed’ of the Khomeini revolution.”13 What gives hope that this time the outcome might be different is precisely the themes outlined in the pages of this book. When the Ahmadinejad regime tried to dismiss the protests as a Western-backed conspiracy, his dismissal was itself dismissed with ridicule. The fact of the matter is that not only does the mapping of the “protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists” no longer make sense, but it no longer even works for domestic political consumption in Iran. What is happening within the borders of Iran is

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The faltering of the Islamic Republic will have repercussions all over the Muslim world. Although Iran is Shia and most of the Islamic world is Sunni, Khomeini’s rise to power was a shock to every Muslim country, a sign that Islamic fundamentalism was a force to be reckoned with. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, tried to co-opt that force. Others, like Egypt, repressed it brutally. But everywhere, Iran was the symbol of the rise of political Islam. If it now fails, a 30-year-old tide will have turned.11

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clearly not a clash of civilizations, a case of Islam protecting itself against the encroachments from the West, but it is instead a crisis within the Iranian government’s own political authority and legitimacy. Nor does the mapping of the protests along the axis of religious versus secular rule work any longer. If Foucault linked the awakening of political Islam in Iran with the onset of a postsecular form of politics, then it is only now that the Iranian postsecular political revolution can throw off the shackles of its own reactive posturing against the Western norm of the secularist self-understanding of the state, because it is only now that that secular norm has relinquished its hold on the political imagination of political theorists and politicians alike. In addition, what gives hope that the 2009 protests marks something new and different even as it evokes the dreams of the past is the state’s inability, in spite of its monopoly on violence, to control the flow of news and information. From almost the very start of the postelection protests, it was deemed the “Twitter Revolution.” Martin Amis tells the story of the 0.5 percent opposition that Khomeini had to forcibly silence in order to consolidate his hold on power after the 1979 Revolution. That 0.5 percent eventually turned to terror, assassinating more than a thousand government officials in 1981 alone. But the government eventually prevailed, matching the resisters’ violence with more violence, executing as many as fifty people a day for the officially stated offense of “waging war against God.” While still brutal and bloody, the same tactics when tried by the Ahmadinejad regime are instantly exposed. And try as it might to shut down, disable, or sabotage social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter and text-messaging services that connect the Iranian people directly to the wider public, the state’s methods of control were no match for the technology. As one reporter wrote, “even when the government successfully shuts down networks, the impact is limited. Everyone has a cell phone, and their cameras work even when the service does not.”14 In other words, Big Brother gives way to Little Brother as the state’s surveillance rebounds against it in the democratic potential of each individual’s capacity as watchdog. The surveillance and information technology developed to buttress the state’s sovereignty has now slipped into the hands of the people, and in the process, the people have been reconstituted as a multitude not so much by speaking in a uniform voice but by speaking out together. As the Iranian filmmaker and chronicler of the postelection protests has written: “Thirty years ago we supported each other. When the police used tear gas, fires would be lit to neutralize its effects. People would

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set their own cars on fire to save others. Since then, the government has tried to separate people from one other. What we lost was our togetherness, and in the past month we have found that again.”15 Over thirty years ago, Foucault asked the question of what the Iranians were dreaming about. At the time he saw the political upheaval and democratic ambitions of a rising tide of political spirituality in terms of a “great joust under traditional emblems, those of the king and the saint.” By his disillusionment with the king as “armed ruler” and “despot,” he failed to make the distinction between the forms of political Islam taking shape, and that failure led to his uncritical and unapologetic support for the revolution. Today we know better. It is not a question between political Islam and its opposite, not a choice between religious or secular rule, but a political contest between different political movements that share the rallying cry of “Allah akbar!” With or without religion, democracy remains the measure of a political revolution’s promise.

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Political Theology, Beyond Despair What we need is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty. . . . We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory this has still to be done. —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Traditionalists claim that democracy undermines itself by destroying the traditional vehicles needed for transmitting the virtues from one generation to another. Because traditionalists see democracy as an essentially negative, leveling force—as the opposite of culture—they tend to underestimate the capacity of democratic practices to sustain themselves over time. Because they suspect that moral discourse not grounded in true piety is actually a form of vice, they are tempted to withdraw from democratic discourse with the heathen. . . . I argue that this move represents an unwarranted form of despair over the current condition of ethical discourse and that it tells a largely false story about the kind of society we live in. —Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition

While an appreciation of how the postsecular provides for a reconceptualization of the proper relation between religion and politics is important, we are still far from our goal of articulating a democratic political theology. This book has already repeated the claim that political theology as conceived by Carl Schmitt and predicated on the concept of sovereignty is antidemocratic in its thrust. In addition, there is no shortage of those who believe that any form of religious influence on politics is a harbinger of theocracy and thus should be rooted out and exposed. Likewise, we have noted the concerns of those such as Jeffrey Stout that normative legal theory and political philosophy regards religion as a threat to the public order and the functioning of its political institutions. On the other side, there are many who locate the problem not with the religious influence on politics but with the political trivialization or containment of religion. Stephen Carter calls this the “secular leveling” of our culture. Others,

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most prominently Richard John Neuhaus, fundamentally reject the “naked public square” as an expression of a hostile secular culture. Political theology is related, but not defined by, this debate over the proper role of religion in public life. At its most basic, political theology is a critical inquiry into the fundamental religious assumptions that undergird political philosophy and practices. While there has been much attention given to the so-called theological turn of contemporary philosophy, there has just as assuredly been a political turn in theology.1 Indeed, as early as 1968 in his book Theology of the World, the German Catholic theologian Johannes Baptist Metz demanded that church theology be deprivatized and engage in an institutionalized critique of society.2 Metz’s argument for the public role of theology coincided with what many observers have called a period of the democratization of the Roman Catholic Church as a consequence of the Vatican II reforms, which gave more power to the laity and opened the church authorities up to greater public scrutiny. Metz’s use of the term “political theology” was not lost on Schmitt, who cited Metz favorably in his final book, Political Theology II (1970), as vindication against those who argued that political theology was incompatible with the Christian faith. It was almost two decades later when Metz announced political theology as the new paradigm of theology.3 In doing so, Metz had two distinct interests in mind. The first is the observation that much of contemporary theology is increasingly concerned with issues of its public consequences—that is to say, the appreciation of the relation between religion and power, together with the growing theological commitment to the global struggle for liberation. The second concerns not only the public consequences of theology but also the broader societal concern with how its own public policies are informed by certain religious presuppositions and are therefore in need of greater theological scrutiny.

I With regard to this first observation, it seems evident that the public’s interest in religion(s) and the correlative recognition of the need for greater theological scrutiny has only grown more evident and urgent during the intervening two decades. However, the main interest here is with Metz’s second concern—which is, namely, the shape that this new paradigm of political theology is taking. As to the contemporary

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form of political theology, let us return to the argument from Schmitt, that all the important concepts of modern political thought are nothing more than secularized theological concepts. In other words, while contemporary politics might operate according to secular reason, it is nevertheless founded on or constituted by a certain theology— specifically, a theology of a sovereign and thus transcendent God. Just as God transcends the world, so too does the sovereign stand above society—and not only above society but also outside the law. While Schmitt’s conception of political theology was addressed to the particular political crisis present within the Weimar Republic during the interwar years, it should not be lost that this argument legitimates a certain form of political authority that at least as Schmitt would have it is not so much extralegal as it is the structural basis for legality itself, by acknowledging the necessary power of the sovereign to decide on the inevitable exceptions to the rule that arise within any constitutional system. Put more directly, as evidenced by a work from the same period as Political Theology, it legitimates and defends a commissary dictatorship.4 As Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward explain: “For Schmitt dictatorship is not necessarily a negative term  .  .  . [Schmitt] seeks to demonstrate that the office of the dictator was introduced to protect the republic in times of crisis. The so-called commissary dictator was given extraordinary powers to suspend individual rights written down in the constitution for the sake of the very existence of the republic.”5 Or, as Schmitt himself writes in 1928: Therefore, the suspension [of the constitution] does not mean the breach of the law in an individual case (because no valid legal regulation has been violated); moreover, its validity has been sublated. Nor does it mean an amendment, because after the end of the suspension of law, which is only possible as a suspension within certain temporal limits, the law regains its normativity.6

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However, for those interested in the development of a democratic political theology, this predication of political theology on the concept of sovereignty and the related legal justification of dictatorship are unacceptable. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put this in Multitude: “The sovereign is defined positively as the one above whom there is no power and is thus free to decide, and negatively as the one potentially excepted from every social norm and rule.”7 As the actualization of a theology of transcendence within the political order, this theology undergoes its own process of secularization—meaning

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that it is transformed and rendered unrecognizable to most. This political actualization is not without its own problems, as it provides the potential rationale for the sovereign authority’s disregard, if not abuse, of “every social norm and rule.” Further, as argued by Heinrich Meier in his study of Schmitt, so long as there is an equation of politics and theology, modern political forms and institutions, not to mention governing ideologies, have the status of revealed truth closed off from all forms of critical scrutiny.8 Based on this, we can come to at least two conclusions with regard to the contemporary forms of political theology that take their lead from Schmitt. First, along with Meier, we can say that by reading Schmitt as a political theologian (rather than as a political philosopher) first and foremost, his theological and religious presuppositions govern his purportedly objective assessment of the true nature of the political. But this just reiterates the critical argument made against Schmitt in chapter 2, wherein the case was made that his rejection of democracy was as confused as it was disingenuous. More importantly for our present purposes is how this political theology is employed to give sanction to the “state of exception” as a working paradigm of contemporary government. This is the argument made by the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben. Agamben argues that the state of exception functions as a totalitarian threat immanent to modern liberal democracies, which “allows for the elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” Far from being exceptional or extraordinary, Agamben asserts that the state of exception has in fact “become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.” The state of exception is not a law per se; rather, it “defines law’s threshold or limit concept,” elsewhere described as a “no-man’s land between public law and political fact” or as a “zone of indifference” and a “threshold of undecidability.”9 Drawing on Agamben, we can see how Schmitt’s work is somewhat at cross purposes with itself. On the one hand, his political theology is a sweeping historical generalization that relies on the structural parallels that he sees between traditional theology and modern secular politics. One example would be how just as a miracle testifies to how a transcendent and omnipotent God can suspend the natural order of creation, so too might the sovereign decide on the state of exception and thus suspend or stand outside of the rule of law. Likewise, as Schmitt and others have observed, there is a correspondence between a traditional theistic worldview and a monarchical state.

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More specifically, there is a correspondence between Schmitt’s understanding of a Catholic, metaphysical worldview and his notion of decisionism, which is the basis of his political theory. As he outlined in chapter 3 of Political Theology, the formula for political theology is “One God—One king,” meaning that according to Schmitt’s view, sovereignty can never be divided. The sovereign is always, and necessarily, one. But beyond this analogy between the theological and the political, in which to a certain extent contemporary politics are explained, Schmitt’s legacy rests in his fundamental inquiry into the very nature of the political and its conditions of possibility. For Schmitt, the political crisis within the Weimar Republic during the interwar years was a testament not only to the limits of its own constitutional system but was more generally a crisis wrought by the very nature of liberalism itself. So given, the solution required not a patching up of a broken system but rather, to borrow an image from Slavoj Žižek in Tarrying with the Negative, “the wound is healed only by the spear that smote you.”10 In other words, Schmitt’s answer to the crisis of liberalism, which he sees as both a crisis of political legitimation and a problem of political neutralization or depoliticization, is not by a reassertion of standard liberal orthodoxy calling for peace, toleration, and respect for individual liberties but instead a hastening of its very end by a fundamental reconceptualization of the political according to the friend/enemy distinction. Schmitt highlights and intensifies the politics of enmity as the very essence of the concept of the political. Put briefly, it is only by putting liberalism to death, once and for all, that a proper politics might be restored.

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This shows how Schmitt’s accounting of the political requires an enemy—any enemy, in fact—for its very existence. Where there is none, an enemy must be created, for without it, the very nature and urgency of politics would dissolve. It is by this perverse logic, or what Derrida identifies as a “political crime against the political itself,”11 that a particular political regime has a vested stake in generating or at least identifying its enemies, in stoking the flames of fear so as to consolidate its power and to perpetuate its rule. Accordingly, to lose sight— or even worse, to make peace—with one’s enemy is the worst evil. Derrida writes:

Continuing with Derrida’s critique, Schmitt is victim to his own “implacable logic.” In Derrida’s words, it is an “implacable logic of absolute hostility” (156)—implacable, but also one that is artificially imposed and insisted upon by Schmitt himself. It presents itself as proceeding by a juridical necessity, but even more, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: by defining politics in terms of the enemy, a politics of enmity is the necessary outcome. There becomes no other way by which one can properly understand the concept of the political. Meanwhile, as Derrida notes, by stripping politics down to its bare essence in the friend/enemy distinction, it is telling that we are left in a “certain desert,” with “not a woman in sight.” To be sure, as a proper political sphere, it is an “inhabited desert . . . some might even say a desert teeming with people. Yes, but men, men and more men, over centuries of war, and costumes, hats, uniforms, soutanes, warriors, colonels, generals, partisans, strategists, politicians, professors, theologians. In vain you would look for a figure of a woman . . . and the slightest allusion to sexual difference” (155–156). Beyond merely a standard feminist critique of Schmitt for this “phallogocentric neutralization of sexual difference” (158), following Schmitt’s own logic, this lack—whether by oversight or deliberate interdiction—goes to the heart of the theologico-political and leaves us at a point of decision. According to Derrida’s analysis, either we accept Schmitt’s analysis of politics as inherently masculine—that is to say, “to admit that the political is in fact this phallogocentrism in act”—or we enter into a deconstruction of the concept of the political itself: in Derrida’s words, we commit ourselves to the “de-naturalization of fraternal authority” (159). This commitment is the very demand of deconstruction and the basis for what Derrida calls the “politics of friendship.” And as such, Derrida tells us, it is also the demand of a “democracy to come [which] is already what makes such a deconstruction possible” (159).

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Following this hypothesis, losing the enemy would not necessarily be progress, reconciliation, or the opening of an era of peace and human fraternity. It would be worse: an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable to its unprecedented—therefore monstrous—forms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable. (83)

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In other words, it is not a choice between the political and the apolitical or political neutralization, as Schmitt would have it. Rather, there are rival conceptions of the political, each politicized and gendered. Furthermore, though it is important to Schmitt’s own selfunderstanding that he be read as a jurist and not as a theologian, it could and indeed has been said by the likes of Meier, Derrida, and even Schmitt himself, if we are to follow the logic of his understanding of modern political theory, that he is first and foremost a theologian, that his formulation of political theology not only gives priority to the theological over the political as a point of historical precedent and analogue but also gives license to preferences shown in his own political program. Thus when Schmitt exclaims “I am a jurist, not a theologian,” it is as if Derrida cannot help himself. “Oh really?” he asks. And as for his refusal to be a theologian, one wonders who said—and often in so convincing a manner—that all the concepts of the modern theory of the State are secularized theological concepts, and that one must start from theology if one is to understand them, and if one is to understand the concepts of decision, exception and sovereignty. What game is this man playing, then, when he says he is a “jurist,” not a “theologian”? Should he not be the first to smile at this distinction? (162)

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Of course, these are Schmitt’s own words echoed back to him in Derrida’s critique. As such, it illuminates Schmitt’s conflicted psyche. Schmitt was seen by some (and with good reason) as a craven opportunist and by others as a high-minded philosopher caught in the high-stakes game of power politics and genocidal warfare. Yet through it all, he steadfastly refuses to disavow his Nazism, and whenever he stood to benefit he was more than willing to overlook what he considered Hitler’s vulgarity and shortsightedness. But back to the question of theology. For Derrida, the significance of this game that Schmitt plays whereby he is indicted by his own words, pretending to have it one way while convincingly arguing its opposite, extends beyond the case of Schmitt and his embrace of fascism by highlighting not only the theological but the theologicoexistential nature of his project. As “the thinker of the enemy, he who in this century will have become famous for having made the enemy his theme, his concept, his theatre” is left with the vexing realization that the enemy is oneself. By defining politics in terms of the enemy, the enemy is not only necessary to a proper conception of the politi-

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cal; it is also inescapable as that which puts the very constitution of oneself into question. It is the enemy who puts oneself on trial, and just as without the enemy there is no properly constituted state, without the enemy there is no self. The self is beholden to the enemy. The enemy is oneself. As Derrida writes: “One can be called into question only in calling oneself into question. The enemy is oneself, I myself am my own enemy . . . for nothing is less proper, proper to self, than one’s enemy” (163). With this turnabout in Schmitt’s thinking, we find ourselves back in the familiar theological terrain of St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which the self becomes a question and a problem unto itself resolved paradoxically only through recourse to the mystery of God. The difference being that with Schmitt the game of disavowal plays on, the pretense that the difference between the theologian and the jurist is that the theologian desires the annihilation of the enemy while the jurist understands its true necessity and value within the political sphere. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. For in Schmitt’s disavowal of theology he actually generates an enemy, or at least an opposition, where there need not be one. This is the fatal flaw in his concept of the political, or what Derrida terms “the political crime against the political itself ” (83), in that by requiring an enemy Schmitt’s concept of the political unleashes—if not sanctions—a form of political violence and consolidation that makes cooperation, let alone compromise, impossible. Therefore, with Schmitt we are left with a series of either/or decisions that require no real choice, for, in the words of Derrida, it is a decision that “consists in deciding without excluding.” By following the demand of a democracy to come, one moves out “beyond this politics [as defined by Schmitt] without ceasing to intervene therein to transform it” (159). To move beyond while remaining within: this is the perennial political challenge as seen by Derrida. On the one hand, Derrida succeeds in deconstructing Schmitt by exposing his supposed implacable logic to its arbitrary and exclusive point of origin. But on the other, we are still left bereft of a reason for inclusion over exclusion, for democracy over fascism. Which leaves us with the question of whether a political theology might provide the necessary supplement to contemporary democratic theory and practice without falling prey to the same exclusive logic as Schmitt. And further, in addition to the phallogocentric concept of the political as advanced by Schmitt and the messianic concept of the political as advanced by Derrida, might there also be another conceptual alternative that provides a

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robust political ontology that grounds the theologico-political choice for democracy?

III Meanwhile, moving from Derrida’s critique of Schmitt and the lingering questions that its messianic politics leaves unanswered, we should note how many others have made a link between this form of political theology that rests on a politics of enmity with the making of law in the U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In other words, moving from the deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political, what is the effect of this concept’s historical and political actualization? On this point, the argument has been made that if politics truly requires an enemy—and when there is none, then the deliberate making of one—then in this fundamental way Schmitt can be seen as an architect of the American neoconservative movement, and the American-led war on terror is not simply or even primarily an effort to bring terrorists and their state sponsors to justice but, more ambitiously, represents an opportunity to remake the American political landscape.12 Indeed, in yet another perversion, this time a perversion of the maxim from Carl von Clausewitz that “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” many high-ranking justice officials within the Bush administration made use of the law as the continuation of war by other means, even going so far as coining the term “lawfare” to describe the practice. Lawfare is defined as the “strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective.”13 And as the neoconservative lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey put it, it aims to “gain a moral advantage over your enemy in the court of world opinion, and potentially a legal advantage in national and international tribunals.”14 As the investigative journalist Scott Horton details in his article on this subject from Harper’s Magazine, “this is a remarkable departure from traditional legal and military doctrine . . . that best reveals the degree to which the Bush administration has effectively declared war on the rule of law itself.” The policy was most evident in the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, where both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government “actively subverted attempts to provide its prisoners with legal representation.” As the scholar

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William Scheuerman has written, the post-9/11 context forces an entire reevaluation of Schmitt’s corpus, one wherein his work is “disturbingly relevant to the political and legal world in which we now find ourselves, in which the U.S. government has responded to 9/11 in part by placing accused terrorists outside the Geneva Convention’s category of ‘legal combatants’ and outfitting the executive with a stunning array of discretionary powers to determine their fate.”15 Scheuerman goes on to show how the legal briefs from Bush’s Justice Department actually mirror the specific details of Schmitt’s claims, specifically Schmitt’s “expectation that the dynamism of modern warfare potentially clashes with any attempt to develop a firm legal framework for the rules of war” (121, emphasis his). In sum, for Scheuerman, Schmitt’s legal and philosophical argument for the surrender of the rule of law found historical and political actualization in the American-led “war on terror” under the Bush administration. “If we hope to preserve our basic political and legal ideals,” he concludes, “and not allow the downward spiral of terror and counter-terror to destroy them, we will need to reestablish a legal universe without black holes” (122). Like Scheuerman, in searching for some precedent, if not rationale, for this radical departure from the history of American jurisprudence, Horton also eventually arrives at Schmitt, whom he describes as “a convinced enemy of the liberal democratic principles embodied in the Weimar Constitution that was adopted after the close of World War I.” “For Schmitt,” Horton continues, “the notion of dispassionate and independent administration of justice was a dangerous liberal illusion. He sought to restructure the legal profession—ensuring that judges were not independent but essentially extensions of the executive, that prosecutors were fully politically subordinated, and that defense counsel were, in general, silenced.” Horton also shows how Schmitt “laid the foundations for a new attitude toward warfare and the role of law in the conduct of war.” This new attitude “derided the weakness of liberalism and its efforts at consensus building and instead embraced the legitimacy of a process of extreme demonization of political adversaries.” Horton then concludes that “Schmitt’s thinking and analysis—the weakness of liberalism, the utility of ‘law-free’ zones, the demonization of adversaries, the subordination of justice to politics—align almost perfectly with the Bush administration’s concept of lawfare, and with many other legal tactics the administration has adopted in the war on terror and elsewhere.” This is a parallel that Horton finds frightening and unacceptable, because excepting

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the sovereign from the application of the rule of law has long-term consequences that have the potential to unleash a new, antidemocratical, constitutional order within the United States and elsewhere. Indeed, on this point both Horton and Agamben agree that if the U.S. response to 9/11 is any indication, then the state of exception has become the dominant working paradigm of government today. It has been proven as an immanent threat to modern liberal democracies by the readiness by which the United States suspended and eventually codified the denial of the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus rights to noncitizen “enemy combatants” who were effectively rendered as nonpersons, to say nothing of the U.S. government’s acknowledged use of torture, wiretapping, secret prisons, and extraordinary rendition.

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Given this case for how Schmitt’s political theology is both antidemocratic by design and in its historical and political actualization, one way that this chapter—indeed, this entire book—can be read and understood is as an attempt at a dialectical reversal of Schmitt’s political theology. While Schmitt’s analysis proceeds from the theological to its secular actualization in contemporary politics and legal theory, I am proposing that we interrogate how radical democratic theory gives rise to a new form of political theology, one that will help us to better understand and direct the forces of globalization. Of course, regardless of how vociferous or persuasive the critique, it is a tricky business granting someone like Schmitt such privilege in one’s analysis. The facts of Schmitt’s strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi commitments are well known. Due to the importance of Schmitt’s legal defense of the emergency powers assumed by the Nazi state, he was known as the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich. He was a committed and unrepentant advocate of the Nazi regime. Throughout his life, he displayed a violent distaste for liberal society. As Schmitt himself acknowledged in his final book Political Theology II, his formula for political theology, “One God—One king,” was “dangerously relevant” to the current situation in 1930s Germany—even “more so when the monarch is occasionally also called Führer,” as Schmitt admits, looking back some forty years later. Thus, for opponents of Schmitt, all it took was for this association to be made, and “this was seen then as contemporary criticism and protest; as a well-

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disguised and intelligently masked allusion to the cult of the Führer, the one-party system and totalitarianism.”16 Recognizing, though never apologizing for, this unfortunate “coincidence” or alignment between his work in political theory and Hitler’s rise to power, Schmitt’s postwar years were spent largely in vain, searching for vindication. After two years in detention, where he was held as a potential defendant at Nuremberg and forced to undergo a program of reeducation so that he was deemed appropriately “deNazified,” his bitterness grew almost to the point of paranoia. As Gopal Balakrishnan chronicles, Schmitt even went so far as to insist that he was the one who had been victimized by the Nazis. Convinced that the victors’ justice was more about vengeance, his bitterness became so deep that he even retracted his initial concession that the Nazi genocidal crimes had been worse than the Allied firebombing of German cities. From his detention cell, he found himself incredulous at the thought that he would be treated as a common criminal. “I have been imprisoned,” he protested, “my most intimate property, my library, has been confiscated, and I have been locked up in a cell as a prisoner; in short, I have fallen into the hands of this mighty American empire.” As Balakrishnan tells it, reading his personal notebooks from this time read like “the ranting of a humiliated and broken man.”17 In this state, he adopted “a posture of aristocratic pessimism,” shared by many of his contemporaries, in which democracy was identified as the culprit and point of blame for poisoning the political atmosphere. All of which leaves Balakrishnan to conclude: Schmitt’s unwillingness to criticize himself was no mere psychological idiosyncrasy—it was a political decision. Despite his ambivalence towards its ideology, Schmitt had been willing to embrace National Socialism because it seemed to represent a solution to what he had identified as the main problems of political legitimacy in an age of mass politics; and until it was absolutely clear to him that the war was a lost cause, he reservations about national Socialism concerned only its most self-destructive tendencies. (257)

Nevertheless, and in spite of the man, Schmitt’s conception of the political as “the most intense and extreme antagonism” has proven to be enormously influential for many of those on the left who are increasingly concerned about the apparent triumph of global capital and the accompanying crisis of liberal democracy. For instance, after

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noting Jacob Taubes’, Walter Benjamin’s, and Alexander Kojève’s positive references to Schmitt, Hoelzl and Ward write: The left-wing interest in Schmitt was not restricted simply to Kojève. In his book Right and Left, after a conference in Turin in 1994 on the question What Is Left?, the Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio  .  .  . rightly states that Schmitt’s ideas were first discovered by left-wing theorists during the crisis of the Left after 1989. The reception of Schmitt by the Left is manifold and ranges from figures like Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Zizek up to the contemporary interest in political theology.18

And much earlier in 1969, in an essay called “A Political Mandate for the Church?” Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde argued: The contemporary political left and the theology which sympathises with it discovered something of what Carl Schmitt already foresaw and formulated forty years ago. Namely, that the political now has no discrete object. Moreover, it designates a certain degree of intensity of association or disassociation, which draws its material from all subjects, whatever the given situation and conditions of a society may be. Therefore one cannot circumvent the political by retreating to a neutral position, to some prepolitical natural law or to the pure proclamation of the Christian gospel. Even those positions become politically relevant whenever they enter the matrix of the political. This is unquestionably right, empirically and analytically.19

And turning to the present day, when Schmitt suggests that liberalism “wants to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion”20—or, as summarized by Mark Lilla, that “the ultimate problem with liberalism . . . is that it fears decisions more than it fears enemies”21—this critique rings true with the results of recent electoral politics. (Who can forget the labeling of the Democratic candidate for president John Kerry as a “flip-flopper,” the commercial catching him in the Senate saying “I voted for the $87 million before I voted against it,” or the footage of him windsurfing, blown this way and that depending on the winds of public opinion? The reason that these images were so damaging was because they captured something fundamental about the public’s frustration with liberalism. They worked because at least on some level they were true.) 118

There are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies. Still, Schmitt’s way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.22

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If Schmitt has proven to be influential for those on the left who are rethinking the nature of the political after the collapse of communism, then he is seen as equally discerning about the strategies and tactics by which contemporary political battles will be waged, specifically by those on the right. As Alan Wolfe writes:

One of the ironies of the contemporary fascination with Schmitt, therefore, is that he is influential on the left in spite of himself and his personal proclivity for various forms of totalitarianism, and he is absorbed though seldom read by those on the right as the exemplary political philosopher of realpolitik. Put otherwise, he is valued as political philosopher for his descriptive analysis of the actual nature of the political, but whether this descriptive analysis is therefore to be taken as a prescriptive manual for getting one’s way is where those on the left and right of the political spectrum typically part company. One problem, however, is that his analysis of the translation from theology to its actualization in secular politics treats this transformation as if it is an already accomplished and irreversible fact. As Schmitt’s 1923 book Roman Catholicism and Political Form reveals, beneath the surface of Schmitt’s political realism lies an idealized notion of the once unified Christian world that has since been lost. This wistfulness for a time and a world before the “crisis of the modern problematic of church/state/society” and before the “state lost its monopoly on the political,”23 when religion and politics were clearly distinguishable, remains determinative in Schmitt’s political theology even until the very end, with the publication of Political Theology II, which was to be his final appraisal of his work and how it had been received. Consider, for instance, these words from Political Theology II, which relay Schmitt’s dismal assessment of the outcome of the Vatican II reforms: “The time for Roman ecclesiastical triumphalism is over, and the glorious pomp of a form of power that impacted on the 119

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history of the world  .  .  . has become ‘only the glorious pomp of a dysfunction in the history of the world’ ” (48). From glorious triumph to pomp and dysfunction, such is how Schmitt reads the modern history of the church as it opens itself up to the secular public. It is for this reason that Lilla labels Schmitt a “reckless mind,” because in drawing the limitation of liberalism, Schmitt falls prey to what Lilla calls “the politics of theological despair.”24 By despair, Lilla means that there is a deep and dangerous nostalgia that pervades Schmitt’s work, which then provides sanction for the hard-edged cynicism and calculation that is falsely equated with today’s so-called political realism. As has already been discussed in chapter 2, Schmitt presents us with a false dilemma and a false choice. The false dilemma is that the tensions between liberalism and democracy make for a nonviable political regime, leading the way to Schmitt’s repudiation of both liberalism and democracy alike. The false choice comes by Schmitt’s position of democracy and political theology as equally potent, but opposing, political strategies to combat the seemingly irresistible force of the technocratic state. However, once democracy is radically conceived, it paves the way for an alternative conception of political theology that is decidedly not antidemocratic in its thrust but, on the contrary, radical democracy’s necessary and indispensable supplement. This would be a postsecular political theology that has passed through the crucible of the modern process of secularization but that simultaneously recognizes the enduring power of religion not simply as a source of consolation but also as a politically mobilizing force that attests to a society’s most cherished values and ideals. À la Stout, this would be a form of democratic theory and practice that understands democracy to be a substantive tradition in its own right, one that inevitably draws on religion as an expression of individuals’ and entire communities’ convictions, and thus, one in need of some form of theological scrutiny and reflection.

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Turning again to Hardt and Negri, they provide us with a theory of radical democracy that is also a political philosophy of globalization. As they argue, the shift from the modern to the postmodern parallels the shift from the imperialistic age of the sovereign nation-state to the postnational age of Empire. Correlatively, we might say that an

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alternative theology of Empire is one that moves beyond, on the one hand, the (neo)conservative apologetics for American exceptionalism and Christian triumphalism and, on the other, the reactionary liberal strategy of political opposition and theological deconstruction. The former, though nominally committed to a hard political realism, has proven itself either to be hopelessly naïve or desperately cynical by remaining dogmatically wed to its utopian visions in spite of the hard lessons of history both past and present. Further, its uncritical imperial theology provides both sanction and rationale for American hegemony. The latter—that is, the reactionary, liberal strategy of opposition and deconstruction—though concerned with the long-term consequences of American hegemony and the ideology that undergirds the doctrine of military preemption, has failed to acknowledge how its own commitments to, and the current global tendency toward, indeterminacy, hybridity, and mobility reflect their own position of privilege on the global stage. As Hardt and Negri point out, while these commitments mean liberation for some, they spell oppression, isolation, and alienation for others. As such, they see this deconstructive variant of postmodern discourse as the twin symptom or shadow side of the passage to Empire along with the various forms of fundamentalism that it so vehemently opposes. It is one thing to deconstruct fundamentalism and to oppose the religious militancy it so often inspires, but it is quite another to develop an alternative political ontology. This is why Hardt and Negri argue that even though the multitude is an already existing subject as the force of social production, the multitude still needs to be formed into a political body. In other words, “the multitude needs a political project to bring it into existence.”25 Likewise, along with this political project, the multitude stands ready for an alternative theology that is able to generate and sustain a meaningful piety. It is toward that end that the earlier distinction made between the process of secularization and the ideology of secularism is so important. Secularization not only protects the inalienable right of individual conscience, but as Gianni Vattimo suggests, it is also our way of living the postmodern return of religion in the most democratic fashion. Not an oppositional or antireligious secularization, but secularization as a political commitment that grows out of the realities of living in a multireligious world. With regard to the politics of religion, it is a shift from the one to the many, from an absolute religious authority that insists on the exclusivity of its truth to the social and cultural reality of religious pluralism. This is in direct contrast to Schmitt who, as we have already seen, argues that the

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sovereign is always and necessarily one. By the secularization or relativization of religious authority that occurs in the post-Reformation Western world, the concept of sovereignty that asserts “One God— One king” gives way to multiple spheres of sovereign authority and, thus, the pluralization of political theology. This is also where Hardt and Negri’s distinction between the people and the multitude is key. That is to say, as the religious history of secularization leads to the political disestablishment of religion and eventually to a new form of postsecular politics characteristic of a plurivocal democracy, so too might the old form of political philosophy that conceptualizes democracy in terms of the people as sovereign give way to the multitude. Whereas “the people is one, the multitude remains plural.”26 Returning to the dialectical reversal of Schmitt that I proposed earlier, his argument is that contemporary political and legal theory is the secular actualization of traditional theological concepts. The root concept is the theological notion of a sovereign and transcendent God in whom power and authority rested. For modern political theory, this notion of sovereignty gets refashioned from the transcendent to the immanent realm, from God to the people, and thus the concept of popular sovereignty is born and becomes the conceptual basis upon which liberal democracy rests. However, what happens when the very concept of the people reveals itself as betraying a form of absolutism in the sense that it remains wed to the theopolitical logic of the one? This structural logic of popular sovereignty is something that Schmitt notes in reference to Hobbes, when he writes that “the Highest, the sovereign, can be a single human being, but also an assembly or a majority of people capable of action. If the formula is no longer: One God—One King, but: One God—One People, and if the political side of political theology is no longer oriented towards the single monarch but towards a people, then we turn to democracy.”27 As the conceptual basis for democracy is being rethought, this has profound significance for theology as it informs the contemporary understanding of authority. Mirroring the modern processes of secularization, what we are now in a position to see is how even the theological voice suffers from its own disestablishment and displacement. This is a reversal of Schmitt’s analysis, because whereas he follows the logic from theology to politics, here we have the political driving and reforming the theological. Now, if we accept Hardt and Negri when they write that “the challenge of the multitude is the challenge of democracy,” and if the multitude, though already an emerging his-

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torical subject, still requires a political project to bring it into existence, then it is a specifically disestablished and thus secularized theology that provides the requisite theological supplement to help complete this conceptual revolution in political ontology. It is this political and theological project that remains the unfinished business of secularization and is still the unclaimed legacy of modernity. For at least one case in point, it is toward this end that several progressive Christian organizations have formed and begun to win a hearing. Borrowing from the playbook of the political ascendancy of the religious right, groups such as the Sojourners and the more recently formed Christian Alliance for Progress have organized themselves on the grassroots level and are trying to reclaim the public relevance of Christianity beyond the narrowly defined culture values so prominent within conservative evangelical circles. Sojourners identifies itself as a progressive, evangelical Christian organization devoted to political action and discussions of faith, politics, and culture. They came to national prominence via their early and strong stands against the post-9/11 militarization of America and, more specifically, the almost Manichean moral vision of President Bush that has driven his self-proclaimed “war on terror.” In the fall 2003 issue of its magazine, its founder Jim Wallis wrote a cover story on “George W. Bush’s theology of empire,” in which he faults Bush not only for his counterproductive and unjust doctrine of preemption but also for his “bad theology.” As Wallis writes, “American’s foreign policy is more than pre-emptive, it is theologically presumptuous; not only unilateral, but dangerously messianic; not just arrogant, but bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous.”28 But what makes this a case of not only bad theology but even more “dangerous religion,” as the article asserts, is its ideological sanctioning of an American empire. This is the overtly aggressive foreign policy charted by the “neoconservative” policy advisers to Bush even before he came into office, in their 1997 foreign-policy statement, “The Project for the New American Century.” In this document, the prospect of peace was predicated on “unquestioned U.S. military pre-eminence.” This long-term strategic vision called on the United States to “accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Wallis’s response is that “that, indeed, is empire,” with the clear implication that as such, it must be resisted. In response to Wallis’s central claim—namely, that the U.S. military’s taking on the responsibility for preserving and extending a

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friendly international order effectively constitutes an empire—it does, and it does not. It is true, as critics such as Tariq Ali in his The Clash of Fundamentalisms have argued, that America has many of the traditional characteristics of an imperial power—most notably in the fact that it has a military base on every continent and, at least by Ali’s count, a military presence in 120 out of the 189 member states of the United Nations.29 More damaging, perhaps, is the perception that it operates by a double standard, turning a blind eye to its allies, whether they be Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, and singling out unfriendly regimes such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for various human-rights violations. For Ali, this follows the age-old rule of empires: they always act out of their own self-interests by championing ideals of equality and justice while exploiting the fabric of power. This fundamental hypocrisy intrinsic to imperialism breeds resentment and hostility, and eventually leads to what Chalmers Johnson terms “blowback” in the form of terrorism. It is also why Ali argues in a characteristically provocative style that American imperialism is the most dangerous form of fundamentalism today, because it is the “mother of all fundamentalisms” (12). One might argue that Ali needs a better understanding of the historical rise of religious fundamentalism, or that his neo-Marxist critique of the current political economy needs to be supplemented or corrected by a more nuanced theory of religion, but even more fundamental to both his and Wallis’s respective critiques is the operative definition of empire out of which they are working. For both, empire is inseparable from imperialism, and therefore, when Ali speaks of “American imperialism,” and Wallis of Bush’s “theology of empire,” they rightly critique the dangers of American hegemony and arrogance but wrongly locate its source within the spirit of nationalism. The problem with this notion of empire as imperialism, as Hardt and Negri explain, is that it is based on an antiquated ontology of sovereignty, in which the nation-state stands as the autonomous subject. It operates by an exclusively linear logic of cause and effect and will to mastery. It grants to the ideologues on the right their first premise— namely, that the United States, as the lone superpower, is truly the master of its fate, that world events are subject to its control, and that overwhelming force will always have the power to squelch resistance, even the resistance of asymmetrical warfare. Put simply, it belongs to the past paradigm of modern political economy. To borrow from Hardt and Negri: Such a view “cannot account for the real novelty of the historical processes we are witnessing today. In this regard these

The first time of trial had to do with the question of independence, whether we should or could run our own affairs in our own way. The second time of trial was over the issue of slavery, which in turn was only the most salient aspect of the more general problem of the full institutionalization of democracy within our country. . . . We have been overtaken by a third great problem which has led to a third great crisis, in the midst of which we stand. This is the problem of responsible action in a revolutionary world, a world seeking to attain many of the things, material and spiritual, that we have already attained.34

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theories can and do become harmful, because they do not recognize the accelerated rhythm, the violence, and the necessity with which the new imperial paradigm operates. What they do not understand is that imperial sovereignty marks a paradigm shift.”30 This is a new political order of globalization that moves from the understanding of empire as an extension of nationalism to Empire as a postcolonial, even postimperialistic, concept and form of political intervention. This is a supranational global order in which the United States indeed occupies a privileged position, but it “does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project.”31 This concept of Empire is also explicitly a challenge to what Hardt and Negri label as the “conspiracy theory of globalization,” which both Ali and Wallis subscribe to in certain degrees by attributing the present world order to “a single power and a single center of rationality transcendent to global forces, guiding the various phases of historical development according to its conscious and all-seeing plan.”32 Therefore, in accordance with this new concept of Empire, the more damning critique of American foreign policy in general and Bush’s moral leadership in particular is that they are in service to, if not pawns of, the new supranational global order. In other words, American treasure and lives are spoiled on feeding a system that already is, and that will continue to be, its own undoing. This is the great irony and paradox that we must now face, the fact that “Empire is born and shows itself as crisis” and that “the becoming of Empire is actually realized on the basis of the same conditions that characterize its decadence and decline.”33 Long before Hardt and Negri, the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah detected a similar critical point of transition with regard to both relations between nations and between religion and politics. For instance, in the conclusion to his article “Civil Religion in America” (1966), he speaks of a “third time of trial” that Americans then faced:

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With the first two times of trial, the major symbols and themes of American civil religion emerged, such as the ideals of religious liberty and equality. The third, however, has less to do with the United States and its own national sovereignty than with “the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order” and “the emergence of a genuine trans-national sovereignty.” A true appreciation of this moment of crisis and transition would result not in the exportation of specifically American values or the establishment or extension of American hegemony but rather, in Bellah’s estimation, “it would result in American civil religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion in the world.” To put Hardt and Negri together with Bellah, this realization of the current world order as a postimperialistic Empire and the recognition of the emergence of transnational sovereignty allows for a postnational theology of Empire that is not driven by self-interests, not predicated on military prowess, and, more positively, that makes possible new forms of transnational solidarity and a more potent agonistic political strategy. In Bellah’s mind, this was the unfinished business of democracy. As we come to terms with the new paradigm of political theology in a postsecular age, we might add that it also remains the unfinished business of secularization.

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The question that remains is why this vision of a postsecular democracy is more viable than Schmitt’s eventual rejection of democracy, which resulted from his potent analysis of the failures of liberalism. Put otherwise, is it really possible to move beyond the politics of theological despair? This chapter is intended to provide an affirmative answer to that question, so long as our understanding of the contours of the future is not driven by a nostalgia for a past unity that never was, whether in the form of unity of belief under the sovereignty of a transcendent and unknowable God or in accordance with the modern ideology of secularism that prematurely silenced the religious in favor of its own faith in secular reason. For the first time, perhaps, as the state of exception has increasingly become the norm of government in a globalized world, we are in a position to commit ourselves to a truly radical form of democracy—a genuine form of democracy by which even the modern political concept of sovereignty as expressed through the will of the people might give way to the revolutionary embrace of the

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multitude. This is a vision of the future that is imbued with hope rather than cynicism and promise rather than despair. Set within the political context of the state of exception and with the contemporary turn to the political, the question that is raised is not whether and how it is possible to return to the state of law, because, as Agamben rightly points out, “at issue now are the very concepts of ‘state’ and ‘law.’ ”35 Instead, the question is whether and how a true and thoroughgoing commitment to democracy can overcome its current crisis and can have its proper political status restored. In generations past, critics such as Schmitt doubted that this project of recovery and restoration was a viable possibility, seeing the crisis of liberal democracy as so dire, so far-ranging, and so entrenched in bourgeois, consumer culture that our future required a wholesale rejection of modern liberalism and all that it implied, including democracy. He would eventually find this alternative by way of his political theology, which linked the transcendence of God together with the political concept of sovereignty, and thus he effectively curtailed the modern democratic commitment to the will of the people by arguing for a return to the inscrutable will of a mysterious God. Yet there are at least two forms of political theology found in Schmitt’s thoughts—the one revolving around the idea of sovereignty giving way to and exploiting the state of exception, the other an inquiry into the proper relationship between the political and the religious. The first is part and parcel of Schmitt’s eventual embrace of fascism and is fundamentally nostalgic theologically; the second keeps open the possibility of democracy in the wake of the collapse of liberalism. The first receives its just condemnation from Agamben; the second is picked up and expanded upon by the likes of Hardt and Negri. For while they agree with Schmitt’s basic diagnosis of the limitations, if not crisis, of liberal democracy, what this chapter has tried to demonstrate is that the solution he offers is both too nostalgic and too severe, which is not to say that it is too radical. For in the place of Schmitt’s political theology, which disdains democracy for the limitations and failures of modern liberalism, this chapter has instead made the argument for a more radical commitment to a genuine and thoroughgoing democracy, a commitment that goes beyond the modern liberal concept of popular sovereignty by appealing to the disparate and sometimes unruly voices of the multitude befitting a religiously diverse and politically mobilized world.

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Political Theologies, or Finding an Alternative to Schmitt Carl Schmitt’s clerico-fascist conception of the political is a matter of the past, it must serve as a warning to all those who want to revive political theology. On the other hand, the motivation for such attempts continue to this day. —Jürgen Habermas, “ ‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology”

If the Schmittian paradigm of political theology is unacceptable, then what other options are available? Returning again to Metz’s article on the new paradigm of political theology, he delineates three existing schools of thought, which he identifies as the neo-Scholastic, the transcendental-idealist, and the postidealist. The neo-Scholastic, which Metz calls “a defensive and nonproductive confrontation with modernity,” is most prevalent, reflecting the neoconservative tendencies not only within the church but also within society at large.1 This can be seen in the contemporary revival of particular ethnoreligious traditions and identities that characterizes the so-called postmodern return of religion in the age of globalization. This is a nostalgic form of political theology that hearkens back to a past age of religiocultural unity, and as such, it stands in defiance to the present age of pluralism. It is within this school of thought broadly conceived that Schmitt and his heirs would fit. While this paradigm has been most prevalent according to Metz’s analysis, he sees the transcendental-idealist school of thought as having been “the most penetrating and influential” (144). That is because it has provided a productive engagement between theology and modernity by learning the most from and adapting to the modern challenges of existentialism, secularism, and sci-

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ence. This form of political theology embraces—indeed, takes its lead from—the values and norms of the present age and thus forces religion into an almost permanent state of accommodation. While this adaptation and accommodation has been responsible for some of the most creative work in contemporary theology, the transcendentalist-idealist school of thought is nevertheless caught in what is essentially a modern, secular mindset. Thus it is the third school of thought, which Metz identifies as a postidealist political theology, that he believes is most promising, for it most fully enters into the postmodern age by which it recognizes the crisis of truth. Put otherwise, it neither hearkens back to a past age of religiocultural unity nor embraces without qualification the dictates of modern science and secularity; instead, it recognizes the postmodern crisis of truth and knowledge but still strives to articulate a theology that meaningfully engages the political challenge of its times. Among the challenges that Metz has in mind here include the Marxist challenge to epistemology, which teaches us that all knowledge is bound by interest, and the Auschwitz challenge, which shows us the inability of theological idealism to confront actual historical experience. In Metz’s words, after Auschwitz, “there is no truth of history which one can defend, no God in history which one can worship. Theology must take seriously the negativity of history in its interruptive and catastrophic character” (149). But most significant is what Metz calls the “Third World challenge,” in which he includes the questions of exploitation, oppression, and racism and the need for the church to cure itself of its Euro-American bias and come to recognize, perhaps for the first time, the polycentric nature of the universal church. While Metz’s delineation of the three existing schools of thought within political theology still holds great relevance, in what follows I want to examine two more recent works as representative of what options lie before us within this new paradigm of political theology. As in chapter 1, where I examined recent works in democratic theory along the scale of whether they were more or less democratic, here we will encounter contrasting genealogies and definitions of political theology, each with its own articulation of the present challenges either by, or as a consequence of, political theology. This shows, not unlike our examination of democratic theory, that political theology is a contested term, that rather than being exclusively defined in terms of the concept of sovereignty and employed as an alternative to democracy as envisioned by Schmitt, its possibilities remain open and can be mapped along our democracy scale. Put otherwise, what this

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shows is that there is not one single political theology but rather that there are political theologies from which we must choose—or better, on the basis of which we might make our stand in our effort to better understand the present challenges and opportunities we face and to direct our energies toward a more democratic end. To map the investigation that will follow: The first representative view comes from Mark Lilla, whose work A Stillborn God critiques modern liberal philosophy for what is essentially its tolerance for political theology. Lilla views the persistence of political theology as a repudiation of the “great separation” advised by Thomas Hobbes at the dawn of the modern world and thus as a sign of the failure of modern liberalism and the modern political order, which has bequeathed to us a legacy that is not only riddled with unresolved tensions and conceptual confusion but also apocalyptic in its obsession with the prospects of messianic redemption. A contrasting position is provided by Michael Allen Gillespie, whose The Theological Origins of Modernity raises serious objections to any of those who would wish to purge either theology or religion from our contemporary political and philosophical deliberations. Although we recognize the theological roots of modernity, we should be cautious of using political theology as a form of critical inquiry. The problem as Gillespie sees it, in contrast to Lilla, is not that there has been a repudiation of the rigid secularism advised at the dawn of modernity by Hobbes but that there has been a “great concealment,” a hiding or obscuring of the theological roots of modernity, even the religious roots and theological assumptions of Hobbes himself. While neither Lilla nor Gillespie take their lead from Schmitt, both share with Schmitt certain elements of his analysis into political theology. Lilla, like Schmitt, poses political theology in stark opposition to democracy. Meanwhile, Gillespie provides a historical illustration of Schmitt’s claim that modern political philosophy is a form of secularized theology. Nevertheless, both Lilla and Gillespie provide meaningful alternatives to a Schmittian political theology. My argument ultimately will be that it is Gillespie who provides the most meaningful way forward in our effort toward the conception of a democratic political theology. He best makes the case for the enduring and timely significance of political theology befitting a postsecular world, by demonstrating how political theology is required for a fuller understanding of not only whence we came but also what our future might hold. In a related fashion, Habermas also singles out Gillespie’s work as an important corrective to Schmitt. Specifically,

I For the first representative contemporary understanding of political theology, let us turn to Mark Lilla. Lilla is an intellectual historian, based at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, who has become a prominent public intellectual through his frequent contributions to The New York Review of Books. His book previous to The Stillborn God was entitled The Reckless Mind and chronicled the political missteps and miscalculations of modern and postmodern philosophers, including well-known and indisputable cases such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, along with others that require more of a stretch, such as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. The argument that Lilla develops from these respective profiles concerns how easily and destructively great thinkers can be deluded by the ideologies and paroxysms of their times. The cause of such recklessness among these great intellectuals is their own failure to master their passions, thus allowing themselves to be swept up into the concrete political sphere, which is beyond their theoretical understanding and capacities. In this way, Lilla shows himself to be both pragmatic and platonic in his approach, judging thinkers according to the fruits they bear in the consequences of their thinking and action and envisioning a proper and responsible philosophy as one where reason rules over the passions. This approach is carried forward in The Stillborn God. The context and overarching concern of this book is what Lilla considers to be a new era of religious passions driving world politics, from the political mobilization of the Religious Right in the United States to the specter of religious fanaticism, violence, and terrorism around the globe, all of which gets neatly catalogued according to the so-called clash of civilizations or the postmodern return of religion. In the face of this,

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for Habermas, what Gillespie convincingly shows is that the political neutralization and depoliticization that Schmitt lays at the door of modern liberalism is more accurately seen as the long-term effect of the nominalist revolution of the late medieval period. As Habermas writes, “Schmitt is mistaken in attributing the dissolution of the amalgamation of religion and politics that we associate with the political in its traditional form only to the time, when the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century ratified the secularization of state authority.”2

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Lilla expresses both surprise and disgust, and he seeks to mobilize his readers by the common recognition of the true threat that this religious passion represents to the proper functioning of our society’s political institutions and hard-earned liberties. As he writes in the opening paragraph to the book: “Today we have progressed to the point where we are again fighting the battles of the sixteenth century. . . . We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”3 It would not be an overstatement to say that as far as Lilla is concerned political theology is a scourge that must be eliminated. As he concludes in the final pages to the book: “There is no effacing the intellectual distinction between political theology, which appeals at some point to divine revelation, and a political philosophy that tries to understand and attain the political good without such appeals” (307). That is not to say that political theology is without its own rationale or appeal. On the contrary, it is precisely because it has been a primary means by which Western society has been organized throughout our history that it remains a permanent threat. As Lilla defines it, political theology is “a primordial form of human thought [that] for millennia has provided a deep well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and inspiring action, for good and ill” (3–4). What makes it distinct from other means for organizing society is that it is “a discourse about political authority based on a revealed divine nexus” (23)—or more simply, it is an appeal to God in political thought and for political legitimation. In contrast to political theology, Lilla pays tribute to what he terms “the great separation,” that product of modern political philosophy that based its claims not on theology but anthropology. The great separation is Lilla’s term for modern Western political philosophy’s effort to separate politics from religion, to talk about politics in exclusively human terms, without appeal to divine revelation or cosmological speculation. The great separation is both radical by its severing of the old theopolitical order and modest as an expression of epistemological humility. It is this delicate balance that his book is meant to both spotlight and salvage: “It is a book about the fragility of our world, the world created by the intellectual rebellion against political theology in the West. . . . Our world is fragile—not because of the promises our political societies fail to keep, but because of the promises our political thought refuses to make” (6–7). By this, Lilla has in mind the notion of how human beings naturally crave assurance. Thus the enduring

The stillborn God is not necessarily identical with Nietzsche’s more familiar “dead” God, though both are haunting figurations. They are tropes that remind us . . . that what the gloomy prophet of Sils Maria derided as

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appeal of political theology is its comprehensiveness, founded as it is upon the firm foundation of the divine revealed nexus and secured as the unwavering and certain path as promised by God. The novelty of modern political philosophy, by contrast, was to have relinquished such comprehensive claims. In this way, its modesty is its ambition— renouncing the promises of reassurance and certainty offered by political theology and thus breaking from all previous forms of human thought and societal formation. While Lilla acclaims and seeks to emulate the great separation achieved at the dawn of modernity, which requires a delicate balancing act between the radicality of its novelty and the modesty of its self-limitation, he is not calling for some compromise position that would mediate between political theology and philosophy. On the contrary, the great bulk of his analysis seeks to expose the “real dangers [in] trying to forge a third way between them” (307). It is on this count that Lilla rejects the dominant tradition of modern liberalism, for by its efforts at recalibrating and salvaging religious belief, it has unwittingly provided theological sanction to a single form of political life and thereby contributed to the widespread spiritual despair that characterizes contemporary society. In other words, modern political history is marred by a certain tragic irony: When presented with the great separation that would require society to assume the full responsibility for its own political affairs, the modern mind recoiled and sought a middle path between the extremes of political theology and philosophy. But in so doing, modern philosophy failed to establish the political and cultural conditions for a more peaceable future. Instead, it opened up a breeding ground for both political totalitarianism and religious extremism. By refusing to choose, modern philosophy has bequeathed to us the worst of both worlds. In his review of Lilla, Carl Raschke calls The Stillborn God “a kind of heritage book, an archaeology of the misread and misunderstood.”4 For Raschke, Lilla provides the occasion for his critique of what he terms the “religion of politics” and of the preoccupation with political theology among postmodernists. Where Raschke is best and most insightful is when explaining the meaning of Lilla’s own title, an explanation that is even better and more precise than Lilla himself ever manages to provide. Raschke writes:

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the “Christian moral interpretation of the world”—the melding of Jewish legalism with Platonic idealism and German pietism that alchemized into modern liberalism—has never been any real match for primitive religious passions or profound, innocent faith convictions. . . . The deceased God is in many ways the liberal God. . . . Such a God was “born” not in ancient, but in modern times. And he was born dead. (106, emphasis his)

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Raschke continues: “The modern liberal God was stillborn . . . because he is a God that has been conceived, not ‘revealed.’ A God that serves primarily a hermeneutical or a ‘constructive’ . . . function in authorizing what are largely autonomous and ‘godless’ social or political agendas is no God at all. He is dead on arrival” (106, emphasis his). Thus, in a nutshell, we have Lilla’s concern not only with modern liberal theology—namely, the God of liberal theology is a stillborn God—but also with the dominant strand of modern Western political philosophy. Put simply, when it comes to its reckoning of religion, modern Western political philosophy fails by wanting to have its cake and eat it too. In making this argument, Lilla has in mind the likes of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, each of whom was responding in his own way to the perceived extremes of the dark religiopolitical vision of Hobbes. As Lilla writes of Hobbes’ Leviathan, it “contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken.” What makes Leviathan such an important work is that it effectively reversed the order of theological understanding: “To understand religion and politics,” Lilla explains in reference to Hobbes, “we need not understand anything about God; we need only understand man as we find him, a body alone in the world.”5 This changes the traditional subject of theology from God and God’s creation to humanity and humanity’s own religious nature. As Ludwig Feuerbach once observed, theology so understood is nothing more than talk of humanity in a loud voice. For Lilla, it is Hobbes who paves the way for the advent of modern liberal theology with Friedrich Schleiermacher and his more radical heir Feuerbach. And while it is well known how Karl Barth was critical of Schleiermacher for his theology-turnedanthropology, Lilla seeks to salvage the political possibilities that this reordering of our religious epistemology presents. By changing the subject of Western political and theological discourse, Hobbes was the chief architect in the great separation wherein “we learned to separate our investigations of nature from our thoughts about God or the duties of man” (89). This was to put an end to political theology

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in the modern West, because if Hobbes were to have his way all appeals to divine revelation and religious authority would be considered illegitimate for the purposes of political philosophy. Yet beneath Hobbes’ constructive argument concerning the proper nature of modern political discourse was a scathing portrait of humanity’s religious psychology, a psychology born of fear, anxiety, and need. While it is true, as Lilla writes, that Hobbes’ principles “did not necessarily touch on the truth of Christian revelation, or any revelation” (103), in the words of Žižek, he did leave the distinct impression of the “perverse core” of religion,6 and it is precisely this denigration of religion from which Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel recoil. In so doing, Lilla explains, they sought a third way between the extremes of the Godless irreligion of Hobbes and the theocratic ambitions of the church, whether in its medieval Catholic guise or as witnessed in Calvinist Geneva. While certainly modern in their philosophical orientation, the irony is that this strand of modern Western thought represented by Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel also, and perhaps unwittingly, laid the foundations of a new political theology, one that successfully defused the power of priestly authority by reining it in within the limits of reason but also elevated the cult and culture of religious life to the point that it “sanctified the banality of modern bourgeois life, offering reconciliation on the cheap.”7 As Lilla explains it, “liberal theology proved to be a dead end, religiously and politically,” and when chronicling how so many could go so wrong, Lilla finds it astonishing to see how easily they were “lulled to sleep by their faith in the natural goodness of man and the benevolence of the historical process that had issued in their bourgeois world” (249). “In the end,” Lilla concludes, “this liberal theology did what all political theologies eventually do: it sanctified the present, putting God’s seal of approval on the modern European state” (300). These modern liberals—or “children of Rousseau,” as Lilla refers to them—who bequeathed to us a stillborn God and an ineffectual political theology, represent a wrong turn, a missed opportunity, or, more forcefully even, an erasure of a hard-fought legacy that is still, perhaps now more than ever, worth retrieving. In other words, while we are heirs to the great separation, we have taken another path, the path of liberal theology that already concedes religion as a human projection but that still nevertheless argues for the rational religion of moral progress and the all-too-easy harmonization of church and state wherein the church sanctions the political state as its own consummation. Thus, Lilla offers the following critical assessment:

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Liberal theology was a political theology—an implicit one, a weak one, a complacent one, but a political theology nonetheless.  .  .  . The liberal theologians did not preach a revealing God who dictated the character of the good society. Instead, they divinized human religious yearnings as institutions of a God who works through history, and then divinized history as the sacred theater where human morality is developed and realized. (231)

In other words, not only was the God of liberal theology a stillborn God, but the modern political theology it both developed and sanctioned was a complacent and impotent one, utterly unable, if not unwilling, to rise to the various political crises with which the twentieth century was besieged. Liberals could not, and cannot, have their cake and eat it too. To summarize and, admittedly, to twist Lilla’s analysis toward my ends, we might say that the test of the liberal theological tradition is in its politics. That is because, as Lilla’s genealogical account shows, Rousseau and his liberal heirs had good philosophical, cultural, and religious reasons for softening the blow that Hobbes had landed against the ancient political theological order. Yet in so doing they set the stage for a still more virulent—if only because it was more modern and thus more ruthlessly proficient—form of messianic political theology that would stake a claim on the passions of modern-day societies. Meanwhile, as these passions turned to bloodlust in all too many cases, liberal theology stood on the wayside, not entirely idly, but certainly impotently, making good sense, cataloguing the horrors of the modern age, but unwilling or incapable of mounting a response. Of course, Lilla stands in good company with this harsh assessment of modern liberal theology. Not only is there Barth, whose theology of revelation first articulated in his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans landed like a bombshell on the playground of modern theologians, but there is also his American neoorthodox counterpart Reinhold Niebuhr, who faulted liberal theology for its overly optimistic assessment of human nature or, more precisely, for its failure to take seriously the Christian doctrine of sin. More recently, there is the British school of Radical Orthodox thought, which rejects not only the humanistic starting point of liberal theology but, even more, modern liberalism writ large, as being essentially nihilistic and for being in league with the postmodern consumer culture of late capitalism. And finally, there are those from the various schools of liberation

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theology, for whom modern liberal theology was insufficiently political, because its lack of a critical theory kept it from meaningfully confronting the ruling episteme and regimes of power. Given my earlier critique of modern liberalism that comes to expression in a liberal democratic theory in league with global capital, I do not fault Lilla for his indictment of the political impotence of liberal theology. Indeed, his analysis provides a compelling genealogy to the death of God in his argument that the God conceived by modern rationalism was a stillborn God at birth—the liberal God was dead on arrival. But given what has been said about the historical transition and the cultural and political transformation from the modern to the postmodern and from the secular to the postsecular, one cannot help but wonder at the viability of Lilla’s secularist approach. It is he, after all, who opens his work with a note of frustration at how “we have progressed to the point where we are again fighting the battles of the sixteenth century.” Yet in his critique of political theology and his response to the challenges spawned by the contemporary global upsurge of religious passions, his solution is that we give Hobbes another try, only this time with more vigilance. In this way, Lilla does not so much provide us with an alternative to political theology as defined by Schmitt as much as he represents merely the other side of the same coin. Most significantly, like Schmitt, Lilla agrees that political theology and democracy stand in stark opposition. Whereas Schmitt employs political theology in order to combat the milquetoast nature of the modern technocratic state, Lilla rightfully notes the recklessness such a position represents, because it flirts with religious passion as a means to legitimate and strengthen a weakened and ineffectual government. Thus that Lilla ultimately makes a different choice when posed with the alternatives of political theology and democracy should be commended. Nevertheless, he leaves the structural duality firmly in place, never acknowledging how secularism itself has functioned as a rigid ideology in service to Western hegemony. It is here where the insights of someone like Talal Asad must be recalled as point of intervention. We live in an age of globalization, in which our mode of cultural contact and exchange is mediated by the mechanisms of commerce and power. In this way, the story of, and remedy to, modern liberalism cannot be told with reference to the West alone. The great separation conceived by Hobbes has been rendered untenable not only with the onset of postsecularity but perhaps more significantly by the cultural, economic, and political fact of our interreligious commingling. The challenge, in other words, is not a

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choice between a form of politics conceived in either theological or secular terms—a choice that would maintain that rigid separation of powers and the public/private split that has been called into question with the onset of the postsecular—but the urgent need for crosscultural and interreligious understanding. More forcefully, while Lilla presents his critique of political theology as a means to salvage the political and philosophical conditions of possibility for Western democracy by purging it of the divine revealed nexus, he does so without acknowledging the dangers inherent in a rigid secularist ideology. In this way he is not unlike the recent slate of so-called new atheists, who have provocatively seized on the cultural angst of many of those who feel left out or beaten down by the cultural warriors on the right and who worry that the two successive terms of President George W. Bush set the United States on a perilous path toward theocracy. For these new atheists, religion is identified as one of the principal causes of human suffering, because of its tolerance for extremism and its promotion of violence. In addition, they argue that the religious mindset thwarts the rationalistic approach to the world and human problem solving, allowing untestable and unsupported mythological stories to serve as explanations for natural phenomena. And even more, when actually examining what religious believers believe when they attest to their faith in God or in sacred scripture, they find them riddled with contradictions that should either outrage the mind or offend moral sensibilities. Whether taken in isolation or in sum, one can recognize the appeal of this argument and wish to be done once and for all with fanaticism of every stripe. But again, with our earlier discussion of the postsecular in mind, I cannot help but question the wisdom of this approach. Following the principle laid out in the earlier examination of democratic theory—namely, that democracy is the cure for what ails democracy—perhaps the best way to curtail the dangers inherent to religion and the occasional fanaticism it sparks is not by seeking to purge it from public, for history suggests this only further emboldens the believer, but instead by giving air for it to breathe. Indeed, it is precisely by forcing religion into the public eye that the critical scrutiny of its claims and their public consequences can begin. This is not because the public sphere functions as a secular space that provides a neutral arbiter but because in the public sphere no single religion is granted exclusive privilege. In short, it is not secularity that secures democracy but diversity. And thus, it is not by eliminating but by exposing,

II Turning from Lilla, we find an alternative account of modern philosophy and political theology in Michael Allen Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity. While this book is primarily a historical study of the theological roots of modern philosophy, it is driven and explicitly contextualized by a series of timely concerns. For instance, by his expressed argument concerning the theological origins of modernity, he is questioning the equation of modernity with secularism. In addition, while it is only directly discussed in the very opening and closing of the book, Gillespie makes it clear that this study is meant to be of relevance to how we go about construing the present age of globalization—specifically, what are its terms of mediation for cultural contact and thinking through our religious differences? It is with this in mind that Gillespie begins the book with what he regards as the two dominant images that have shaped the understanding of our current times: the first being the fall of the Berlin Wall and the second the collapse of the World Trade Center. With regard to the first, when this symbol of totalitarianism fell, it gave rise to what is by now the familiar narrative of the belief in a neoliberal future of peace and prosperity and revived the modern faith in human progress. We have encountered this mindset already in our discussion of Francis Fukuyama. Where Fukuyama speaks of the end of history, Gillespie speaks of the age of globalization, which at least in this first phase he understands to mean the spread of Western values and institutions to the rest of the world. Yet shortly a decade after this supposedly monumental event of history, which was to put an end to the history of ideological conflict, the world was forced to reckon with the second great collapse, this time bringing down with it “the idea of a fruitfully agonistic multicultural world,” which has “been replaced by the fear of an impending clash of civilizations.”8 The Twin Towers were equally significant in their symbolic importance, as they represented the neoliberal vision of a unified world made possible by global capital’s opening up of borders and free trade. With their fall, fears of religious fanaticism were kindled and the entire modern project of globalization dramatically called into question. Now in this new

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critically evaluating, and even redirecting political theology that the future of Western democracy is best assured.

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phase, “globalization suddenly appeared in a new light, not as a oneway street to modernity but as a complex and confusing intersection of paved roads, dark alleys, and mountain pathways” (ix). As such, 9/11 was a direct challenge to Western modernity, because it “forces us to confront an issue that is buried at the bottom of the modern psyche.” This claim warrants a much fuller elaboration: “I am of course referring to the decision about the place of religious belief in the modern world. Modernity came to be as a result of the displacement of religious belief from its position of prominence at the center of public life into a private realm where it could be freely practiced as long as it did not challenge secular authority, science, or reason.” And further, Gillespie continues mapping out the argument that will follow. “In order to come to terms with the current challenge to modernity, we must return to the question of the origin of the modern project” (x). While the displacement of religion was central to the formation of the modern Western world, this is not to suggest that religion or theology did not play a role in the formation of the idea of modernity. On the contrary, while there has been much opposition to religion within modernity, and much of the modern project has sought to suppress religious superstition and authority, Gillespie cautions us that this “should not be taken as proof that at its core modernity is antireligious” (xi) or that to be modern required the “rejection of religion as such” (xii). Putting his argument most succinctly, he writes: “It is a mistake to imagine that modernity is in its origins and at its core atheistic, antireligious, or even agnostic.” Instead, “modernity sought not to eliminate religion but to support and develop a new view of religion and its pace in human life, and . . . it did so not out of hostility to religion but in order to sustain certain religious beliefs” (xii). Here is a first point of distinction between Gillespie and Lilla, for whereas Lilla poses a stark choice between religion and secularism, Gillespie seeks to show how even modern expressions of secularism have a religious root. This distinction can be seen most explicitly in the discussion of Hobbes that will follow. As to why this alternative reading of modern history is of such timely importance, Gillespie writes: I will argue that the attempt to read the questions of theology and metaphysics out of modernity has in fact blinded us to the continuing importance of theological issues in modern thought in ways that make it very difficult to come to terms with our current situation. Unless and until we

Before getting at that greater understanding of the current confrontation which Gillespie speaks of, we must first examine his claim about the metaphysical/theological core of modernity. This is the argument that consumes the great bulk of Gillespie’s attention, an argument that centers around nominalism, that late medieval school of thought typically associated with William of Ockham and that Gillespie reads largely as a great assault on, or “revolution against,” the medieval scholastic synthesis of reason and faith (14). Whereas the God of medieval scholasticism was infinite and “the glory of his works and certainty of his goodness everywhere manifest,” the nominalist God “was frighteningly omnipotent, utterly beyond human ken, and a continual threat to human well-being” (15). Gillespie finds ample evidence to show how this new vision of God evoked awe and dread through its emphasis on divine power and unpredictability. But the crisis of faith that the nominalist revolution inspired within the medieval mind was not confined to the late Middle Ages; rather, it remained constitutive in the intellectual debates that followed from then to the present, exposing the fault lines between the great cultural movements that shaped the modern world (the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment). In short, the modern world came to be as a result of an entire series of efforts to find a way out of what Gillespie terms this “nihilistic crisis” (14). And as his historical investigation is meant to show, the best that could and has been done—whether in the person of Erasmus or Luther, Descartes or Hobbes—is simply to “ameliorate the conflict” and never to eliminate the antagonism that is the conflictual essence of modernity. Thus, as Western history progresses from the nominalist assault on the medieval scholastic synthesis—from humanism to the Reformation and eventually to the new science of nature—there remains a fundamental and intractable conflict over the role of reason and the will that is never resolved but instead increasingly concealed. It is precisely this great concealment that lies at the root of our present predicament over the proper relationship between religion and politics. To make this point, Gillespie ushers the reader through a series of debates, the most consequential of which, because they are the most

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understand the metaphysical/theological core of modernity, we will remain unable to understand religiously motivated antimodernism and our response to it. The current confrontation thus demands of us a greater understanding of our own religious and theological beginnings. (xii)

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revealing, are the debates between Erasmus and Luther at the dawn of the Reformation and between Descartes and Hobbes, each of whom sought an alternative grounding for politics in the wake of the devastation that the Reformation wrought. Because each of these figures and the movements they represent are so well known, it is not necessary to go into details as to their respective backgrounds and guiding approaches to the great matters of reason, faith, and politics. More important for Gillespie is understanding how each represented a distinctive response to the fundamental crisis raised by the nominalist God and how the debates that these approaches spawned merely replayed the ancient and enduring theopolitical options that lie before us. First then, to the debate between Erasmus and Luther on the role of the will: As most accounts attest, this was a public debate that the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus was not eager to have; Luther, consistent with his nature, seemed itching for the fight. Additionally, it is important to remember how both figures adopted the mantle of Christian reformer, hearkening back to the original simplicity of the church, opposing the worldliness and corruption of the present religious order, and citing the ancient works from the Christian tradition as a guide, if not an authority, for their side. In Gillespie’s words: Both criticized scholasticism and agreed that the corruption of the church was intolerable. Both also opposed realism and shared an ontological commitment to individualism. Both were sincerely interested in reform, and both believed that this required a return to Scripture and a new hermeneutic based on an encounter with Scripture in its original languages and historical context. And finally both gave great prominence to will over reason in both God and man. (135)

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As critics of medieval scholasticism who were committed to individualism, reform, and to the will over reason, Gillespie includes both Erasmus and Luther within the broad nominalist camp and shows how each was educated in accordance to, and identified with, certain nominalist thinkers and preoccupations. Given these many overarching similarities, Gillespie adds that “what is so surprising is that they ever became entangled in a debate, let alone one so vitriolic” (135). While surprising, perhaps, given their affinity, the two were also presented with the opportunity to delve into and explore the ramifications of the precise nature of their differences: in this case, not the

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prominence of the will over reason but the role of the will in the matter of salvation. On this point, both turned to scripture and the work of Augustine. Of course, citing Augustine as guide in a debate on the role of the will is problematic, to say the least, for in this matter there is not one but at least two different Augustines. The first, which finds its expression in his rejection of the Manicheans, elevates the will by speaking of the human individual as having the capacity for free choice and thus being responsible for the sin and evil that marks God’s good creation. Sin and evil are not the result of a rival or opposing divine power to God but a direct consequence of humanity’s own disobedience, God-forgetfulness, and perversion. In this way, the freedom of the will is affirmed and God’s sovereign power is maintained. But there is also the later Augustine, who in his debate against the Pelagians spoke of the bondage of the will, rejecting outright any notion that would suggest that human beings had the capacity to live a life pleasing to their creator and worthy of God’s grace. By this account, human beings were incapable of the good works and righteousness deserving of salvation, for this would invalidate and render superfluous God’s gift of grace. Thus by one account, the debate between Erasmus and Luther was a reiteration of the irreconcilable positions held by Augustine himself at different times, meaning that both could rightfully claim the authority of tradition for their side, with Erasmus preferring the “earlier anti-Manichean Augustine and Luther the later anti-Pelagian Augustine” (147). Likewise, both could cite evidence from scripture. It is for these reasons that Erasmus opens his diatribe by stating that he wished to avoid debate and confrontation with Luther and instead hoped for a friendly discussion. After all, if neither scripture nor tradition provide a clear and certain answer on the subject, and the best that can be hoped for is probable opinion, then piety requires the spirit of compromise, and accommodation can been seen as a religious principle. Therefore, if Erasmus was to have his way, what was needed was “not the uncompromising assertion of what one believes Scripture to mean, but a broad, communal discussion that reflectively compares the multiple views of one’s contemporaries and one’s predecessors” (149). Or, more forcefully, what Luther needed were firm philosophical arguments, not merely theological assertions of faith. Yet Luther rejected precisely this, for it was his view that the Christian believer is required not to “discuss but profess their faith” (152). Erasmus’s preference for peace above all else made him suspect in Luther’s eyes. Thus whereas Erasmus spoke of compromise and

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accommodation, Luther wrote unapologetically that the task of the Christian theologian is “not to collect the world into a harmony but to set it in opposition to itself: not collation but collision” (152). In considering how these two figures represent two great efforts to answer the fundamental crisis raised by the nominalist God, we must understand how both were dealing with the same problem—namely, an unknown and unknowable God. Furthermore, when addressing how their differences ought to best be adjudicated, both giving preference to revelation over reason, the question of a hermeneutical criterion becomes paramount. In speaking of the limited freedom of the will, Erasmus is elevating the dignity of humanity and trusting in the goodness of God. But in so doing, he is also deemphasizing God’s grace. By claiming humanity as freely choosing moral beings, Erasmus is both acknowledging and asserting that human actions do in fact make a difference, not only in this earthly life but also for their salvation. Luther, on the other hand, asserts the omnipotence of God’s sovereign will and thereby requires of the believer a tremendous act of faith—it is grace alone that saves. Indeed, apart from grace, individuals would be utterly lost in despair, trapped between God’s absolute demand for righteousness and the knowledge of their utter incapacity to attain to such perfection. In Gillespie’s words: “While Luther would like his God to be both omnipotent and good, in the end he is more concerned to preserve divine power than divine justice. Here the contrast with Erasmus is palpable, and it leads Luther to assert that Erasmus’s God is Aristotle’s God . . . God asleep, entrusting everything to men” (160). To Luther’s mind, God and God’s grace are all, about which there can be no compromise. This was nothing less than the recovery of the Pauline gospel, the only proper foundation for the Christian faith and the only means for the true reformation of the church. Here we have two responses to the problem of a distant and inscrutable God turning on the role of the human will in the matter of salvation. Two paths to reform: one philosophical, the other theological. By Gillespie’s assessment, the figure of Erasmus shows Christian humanism to be the “less disruptive and less violent path to reformation that by all estimates had a good chance of success” (132). Yet in spite of this, Gillespie shows us how “Luther categorically denied the central humanist thesis that man is an independent being, committing himself to a theology that saw God and his grace as the source of everything” (136). This in a nutshell is the fault line exposed in the

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foundations of modernity. Both Erasmus and Luther seemed to grasp what the future forebode but ultimately were powerless to divert it. Erasmus first reached out to Luther in the spirit of Christian dialogue, but Luther refused to play by his rules. Luther’s vitriolic response eventually pushed Erasmus back into the fold of the very church he had hoped to reform. In trying to play the mediator between Luther and the church, Erasmus had hoped to prevent the general breakdown of society and mitigate against the violent passions he saw looming on the horizon. While Erasmus hoped for a dialogue, Luther forced “those interested in reform to choose between him and Erasmus” (138). In so doing, he admitted that the practical consequences of his vision of Christianity were not peace but war. Even when seeing this come to pass in the Peasants’ Rebellion, he expressed no regret, simply remarking: “I see other great troubles in times to come, by comparison with which these present seem no more than the whisper of a breeze or the murmur of a gentle stream” (161). If his theological dogmatism brought violence, then let it be so, for just as God need not justify Godself to humanity, so too might the Christian “sin boldly” resting assured in God’s grace. Thus, Gillespie concludes, by rejecting Erasmus and the Christian humanism he represented, Luther “also rejected the notion of a moral foundation of the social and political order” (168). While Gillespie’s account clearly makes Luther the foil to Erasmus’s path of peaceable reform, he nevertheless acknowledges the tremendous democratic potential unleashed by Luther’s teaching. For instance, if it is faith alone that saves, then the sacramental order mediated by priestly authority is diminished, an argument that Luther makes explicit in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520). Further, if individual belief is bound by personal conscience as convinced by the testimony of scripture, which is what Luther asserted in his defense before the Holy Roman emperor and the papal emissary at the Diet of Worms (1521), then not only were priestly intercessors unnecessary, but they also might be in service to tyranny. In the place of spiritual hierarchy, Luther suggested the possibility of a priesthood of all believers, a democratic theopolitical ideal of equality. While Luther himself might not have drawn these direct political implications from his theology, the fact remains that his readers and followers did, and it was not long before those such as the radical Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer moved beyond where Luther himself was willing to go. In this way, the democratic potential of Luther’s teaching and of the Protestant

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Reformation more broadly is a potential that still stands as both a promise and a warning, both inspired by the democratic ideal of equality and seemingly governed by a law of unintended consequences. Which, for what it is worth, raises the question of Luther’s actual, or at least implicit, political theology: How, after all, could he be so cavalier when faced with the slaughter of over one hundred thousand German peasants, especially considering how many took their inspiration for revolt directly from him? Why was he so acerbic when responding to Erasmus, his erstwhile ally in the common cause for church reform? In short, in what ways were the religious wars, violence, and political strife that tore Western Europe apart in the century after the Protestant Reformation a result of Luther’s own failed political theology? Much has been made of Luther’s biography, specifically how his personal obsessions and neuroses were played out on the grand stage of world-historical drama and political conflict.9 As a figure from the late Middle Ages, he not only inherited a world beset by chaos and death, but he also found theological sanction and solace in its perpetuation. As Gillespie puts it, according to Luther’s worldview, “the desire for peace may actually undermine salvation, for the proclamation of the word causes conflict, especially in the last days when Satan rages against the world. Thus, the attempt to establish worldly peace may only be possible by the suppression of the Gospel.”10 In this way, while Luther was certainly a central figure in the making of the modern world, he himself was a tragic figure who could not quite make that epochal leap.11 Additionally, while this apocalyptic mindset might have predominated in the late Middle Ages, it is worth noting how it still resonates within a certain segment of conservative evangelicalism, wherein the focus on the end times coincides with both neoconservative militancy and neoliberal laissez-faire economic policy.12 Nevertheless, Luther not only benefited from but also helped to schematize a theological rationale for secular political authority. Taking his lead from Augustine’s political theology of the two cities, Luther affirms government as a necessary evil befitting a fallen humanity, wherein both subjects and rulers have reciprocal duties. The world cannot be ruled by the Gospel, for in Luther’s words, it would be like “loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everyone”;13 thus secular political authority has a rightful role in restraining human wickedness. But its authority rules only over such external matters and therefore cannot and must not compel belief. So conceived, Luther was neither an

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uncritical authoritarian nor a revolutionary in his political theology. While legitimating secular political authority, he also insists that the obedience owed by the subject to its ruler must not violate the dictates of Christian duty. There are distinct spheres of sovereignty belonging to the church and state. As for political revolution, it was Luther’s belief that not only was it unnecessary because the Christian’s sights should be set on the hereafter, but it was also a sign of sinful pride, because only God alone could reform government. Again, in Gillespie’s words, Luther “aimed at salvation and not at improvement of life on earth. Thus, for Luther religious purposes supersede all political or moral purposes” (124). Returning to Luther’s debate with Erasmus, we might say that Luther actually gets the better of the argument, for it is he that best exposes the fault line and thus hastens the end of the old theopolitical order. Luther no doubt believed that this was the best that a theologian could hope for in a political theology, because it made one ever more mindful of the radical dependence on God. While secular authority had a rightful place, one’s faith belonged in God alone. Therefore it should come as no surprise that while he expresses no regret when he saw the outbreak of violence—indeed, even famously calling on German princes to squelch political rebellion at any costs in his “Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation” (1520)—he does recoil from the violent fanaticism that flies under the banner of the Radical Reformation, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to put the genie back in the bottle. Viewed from this lens, we can conclude that while Erasmus was unable to persuade, Luther was unable to rein in the radical wing of his own movement, and both were quickly rendered almost superfluous by the events of their day. The debate between them, therefore, reveals the modern instantiation of a theopolitical crisis: from an unknown and unknowable God to the weight of human responsibility for human affairs. It would take time and much bloodshed before this realization would be made, but from this great debate and the violence that it left in its wake, we might posit yet again our guiding motif: once democracy takes root, it can find no relief but in more democracy. Democracy is both the cause and cure for the modern theopolitical crisis, as the people swept up in the passion of their newfound autonomy born of religious liberation are not yet willing or able to recognize the burden of political responsibility that they now bear. There is no going back to the unified church of old, because the logic of division will continue to subdivide the

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theopolitical logic of the one into greater and greater numbers of sects and denominations. Individuals now reign supreme, but they have not yet learned or claimed their true political potential or power. René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes pick up where Erasmus and Luther leave off—namely, in a revolutionary world astir with religious passions, bereft of a meaningful (or at least common and effectual) political order, and in a seemingly perpetual state of religious war. Both sought an alternative basis for an enlightened humanity that would provide the theopolitical foundation for the modern age. Both were well acquainted with the religious controversies and theological debates of their time, studied in scholasticism and nominalism, and coming of age in a time when their nations were riddled with religious strife. Descartes’ family was Catholic but had connections to Protestant France. Born in fear during the attack of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes lived to witness the English Civil War break out in 1642, which saw the execution of Charles I and the ascendancy to power of Oliver Cromwell. As one historian put it, this was a “world turned upside down” by the religious and political ideas associated with the Protestant Reformation.14 What is most interesting and significant for Gillespie, however, is how they too are caught up in the same intractable conflict at stake in the debate between Luther and Erasmus, even after they helped complete a conceptual revolution in metaphysics and political philosophy. In this way, while they are often portrayed as avowed secularists for their rejection of religious authority and their conviction that religion endangers public peace, Gillespie repeats his claim that it would be a mistake to see either of them as irreligious or atheistic. No less than Erasmus and Luther, they too are consumed by the effort to solve the fundamental crisis raised by the nominalist God. But unlike Erasmus and Luther, they have seen at first hand the calamity that befalls a society when the old theopolitical order breaks down. As children of the Reformation, they are also architects of the modern world. Concerning Descartes’ rationalist revolution, Gillespie writes that it was an effort “to construct a bastion of reason against this terrifying God of nominalism, a bastion that could . . . bring an end to the religious and political strife that were tearing Europe to pieces.” But unlike earlier humanists’ efforts at such a program, Descartes “grounds human freedom not in the power of the individual will but in the fact that our will, like the will of God, is infinite. . . . In this respect, Descartes’ science rests in an almost paradoxical way on the God he both fears and worships.”15 Unlike Erasmus, therefore, whose tolerance for

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uncertainty and ambiguity evoked the ire of Luther, Descartes pursued what would become a distinctly modern philosophy that promised apodictic certainty through the mathematical sciences. As Gillespie shows, for Descartes, certainty was achieved not as an act of the mind but of the will, arising only when the inquiring mind can no longer will itself to doubt any longer. Doubt is a form of willing that reaches its cessation in the certainty of its own logical end. In this way, human beings actually become like God, with the differences between them existing not in their will but in their knowledge. Whereas the human will is infinite, wanting everything that its insatiable desire can conceive, knowledge has always been finite. Now, with the promise of certain knowledge, human beings can once and for all take God’s power upon themselves. Thus, beyond the fear of the Lord that characterized the nominalist faith of the late Middle Ages lies the aspiration for human omnipotence. By this radical affirmation of the human will, Descartes believed that he had resolved not only the crisis of faith spawned by nominalism but also the religious authoritarianism that fed off of halftruths, superstition, and a rigid dogmatism. Compared to Erasmus’s rhetorical brilliance, Descartes thought the promise of certainty now finally carried with it the power to persuade even the believing mind and an impassioned public. Continuing with Gillespie’s historical narrative, if Descartes plays the role of Erasmus in this reified debate, then that consigns Hobbes to Luther. In Gillespie’s words, “I will argue that [Hobbes’] dark view of the world is the result of his acceptance of the basic tenets of nominalism, especially as it is received and transmuted by the Reformation” (209). But in inhabiting this role, Hobbes does not so much carry on the work of the Reformation as he exposes its great theopolitical irony—namely, Hobbes’ notion that the logic of Luther’s political theology demonstrates religion’s irrelevance for life in this world, completely eradicating religion’s authority in secular affairs. Put otherwise, while Luther insisted on the bondage of the will, that there is nothing humans can do to affect the chance of salvation, and the sovereignty of God’s will in divine election, Hobbes turns this argument on its head, making it not merely a matter of soteriology but the very basis for the modern secular state. Thus, concludes Gillespie, “it is not the rejection of religion that produces modern natural and political science but the theological demonstration of religion’s irrelevance for life in this world” (210). This philosophical argument, which founds the modern secular state, arises out what is essentially a theological crisis of faith. In the

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words of Schmitt, “Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is the fruit of a particular theologico-political era.”16 But whereas previously this unknown and unknowable God of nominalism was a source of tremendous anxiety and dread, now it is reconceived as God’s gift to humanity. While the distant and omnipotent God may still reign, it is the space that God leaves for humanity that is the proper realm of politics. In this realm, religion is utterly irrelevant because God has left it to us to decide. In the words of Gillespie: Hobbes in this way provides the foundation for the acceptance of the radically omnipotent God that nominalism proclaimed by showing how this God was compatible with the human mastery of both the natural and the political world. In doing so, he articulates a doctrine that in contrast to both Descartes and the humanists diminishes the divinity of man and that also in contrast to Luther diminishes the role that God and religion play in human life. . . . It was an achievement that was rooted as much in a new theological vision as in science. And unless and until we understand this theological vision we will be unable to understand either modern science or modernity itself.17

The differences between Descartes and Hobbes are a reiteration of the debate between Erasmus and Luther. They share a common theological origin, but they fundamentally differ on the role of the human will, which we can see in the degree of confidence or optimism that each has with regard to the management of human affairs. In affirming the power of the will, Erasmus sought to mediate between competing factions and thus secure a peaceable future. Luther insisted on the bondage of the will, believing that the price of peace could only be purchased by compromising the integrity of the gospel. By hunkering down, standing his ground, if Luther did not hasten the end, he at least helped fuel a protracted period of religious warfare. Like Erasmus, Descartes affirmed the power of the will, going even further by demonstrating the will’s capacity to provide clear and certain knowledge. In this way, he believed that religious and political disputes could be peaceably resolved by an appeal to reason. Not only would humanity, therefore, become master and possessor of nature, but by owning our aspiration for omnipotence, we could actually become like God. Hobbes, by contrast, shared Luther’s dark and pessimistic view of human nature. By our nature we are caught in state of war of all against all. Unlike Luther, the recent history of religious 150

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warfare was enough to prove to Hobbes that there was no God to save us. The distant and inscrutable God of nominalism was just another way to say that God had evacuated the world. In what could not have been a more counterintuitive claim, given how religion had been employed to enflame politics, Hobbes argued that what the Reformation actually taught was religion’s utter irrelevance for life in this world. It is thus not a God but the Leviathan who will save us, our own monstrous creation by which we ironically secure our liberty. It is a reiteration with a twist, to be sure, most notably by Descartes’ and Hobbes’ alternative grounding of politics and metaphysics in a new naturalistic lens. In this way, they accomplished an ontic revolution that propelled modernity forward. But as Gillespie argues, this ontic revolution from the supernaturalism that marks the premodern mind to the naturalism that marks the modern does not resolve but conceals the earlier conflict between humanism and the Reformation. In Gillespie’s words: “While this revolutionary approach seemed at first to eliminate the conflict  .  .  . it was finally unable to erase it and in the end actually reinscribed it within modern metaphysics as the contradiction between natural necessity and human freedom” (262). Descartes, like Erasmus and the humanist school of thought before him, gave priority to human freedom. Hobbes, like Luther and other Protestant reformers who insisted on the absolute nature of God’s sovereign will, gave priority to natural necessity. Thus, while they agreed about the dangers of religion, the difficulties that confronted understanding, the priority of epistemology, the need for science, and the importance of a mathematical method at the basis of such a science . . . they disagreed about the nature of the world hidden behind the veil of perception, about the capacity of science to comprehend it, and most importantly about the nature and relationship of man and God within this naturalistic worldview. (263–264)

Gillespie argues that the common ontic revolution accomplished by both Descartes and Hobbes, which allowed for the self-distancing from religion that subsequently characterized the modern age, was so profound that it obscured the still irresolvable conflict that gave birth to it in the first place—namely, the nominalist crisis of faith wherein we are left unsure as to what we are to make of human nature, 151

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specifically, the role of the human will. Are we free or (pre)determined? These essentially metaphysical questions are theological in their origin and thus irresolvable, revealing the “necessary and irremediable brokenness at the heart of modernity” (265). As previously noted in reference to Habermas, by locating the theological origins of modernity in the late medieval nominalist crisis of faith, Gillespie provides an important corrective to Schmitt’s repudiation of modern liberalism. Returning to the opening comments, in which we saw how Gillespie framed this historical analysis in relation to the question of how we go about construing the present age of globalization, it should not come as a surprise that for Gillespie the terms of the debate have shifted yet again but the matter at stake has remained the same. No longer principally concerned with soteriology or finding a new basis for science, our consuming issues today orient around matters of trade, finance, and the global market. Here we can compare the defenders of globalization during its first phase, which came to articulation immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and which rested on a liberal view of history as a process producing ever greater peace, freedom, and prosperity, to Gillespie’s reading of Erasmus and Descartes. Meanwhile, the opponents of globalization believe that such a positive view, which rests on an absolute faith in the free market, is deluded, because it puts too much emphasis on the free choices of individuals and does not recognize the determining logic of global capitalism. This much darker and pessimistic rendering of globalization resonates with our discussion of Luther and Hobbes. With the 9/11 attacks, globalization enters into a new phase. And it is here according to Gillespie that the great concealment of the theological origins of modernity is most consequential, for depending on whether one is a proponent or opponent of globalization, whether one believes humans are essentially free or determined, the 9/11 hijackers will be seen as either a group of religious fanatics out of step with the modern world or as an expression of resistance to the global injustice done to those exploited by American hegemony. If one adopts the first view, the solution is clear—those out of step with modernity must be eliminated or neutralized. For the second, the problem of terrorism is rooted in American imperialism, so it is not enough to go after the few isolated extremists—such militancy only spawns greater resistance. “Thus,” Gillespie concludes, “only by coming to terms with our own tradition can we hope to transform the current clash of our two cultures into a more productive, although undoubtedly at times still painful, encounter of beliefs and ideas” (287).

By this historical analysis of the theological origins of modernity driven by a matter of such timely concern, Gillespie has shown us the urgency of political theology as a means of critically exploring the fundamental religious assumptions that undergird contemporary political philosophy and practices. Remembering the quote from Peter Berger from chapter 3 that captures the postsecular sentiment: “Those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.” By this reckoning, political theology is not to be mistaken as a normative discourse, understood in this sense as an attempt to prescribe the rightful relation between religion and politics or the rightful role of religion in the public sphere. What we see in Gillespie instead is political theology understood as a first philosophy, and as such, as a necessary component to both the practical considerations of the rightful relation between religion and politics and the theoretical questions as to the meaning of God, the nature of the will, and the concept of the political for our postsecular age. Gillespie successfully sets us on this path, but he ultimately stops short of developing a full democratic political theology, by rendering political theology as essentially a theological problem undergirding the history of modern philosophy in the West. While this rendering is effectively tied to our current global political crisis, it is not one that sufficiently develops its own material, economic, or even political basis. On the contrary, when it comes to that, it is there where we find Gillespie somewhat equivocating, showing the historical precedents and enduring rationale of present positions but refusing to align himself in one fashion or another. To be sure, aspects of Schmitt’s original conception of political theology are hereby retained—most notably, employing political theology as a transcendental mode of inquiry into the philosophical, cultural, and religious conditions of possibility for our present politics and offering up political theology in service to our actually existing political situations and programs—but they are now severed from its antidemocratical bias. This can be seen at work in the contrasting genealogies of modernity provided by Lilla and Gillespie. For both, our modern predicament can only be understood by appreciating its religious roots. But whereas Lilla seeks to retrieve the great secularist separation first advocated by Hobbes, Gillespie shows how this separation is in fact only a concealment contributing further to our conceptual confusion and intercultural strife.

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III

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In contrast to Schmitt, who sees political theology and democracy as two opposing political options, and Lilla, who regards the endurance of political theology as a sign of modern liberal democracy’s failure, and beyond Gillespie, whose historical analysis is essentially exploratory and stops short of providing its own historical, political intervention, we need a political theology in which the question of democracy is paramount. Put otherwise, what are the philosophical, cultural, and religious conditions of possibility by which democracy can take root and thrive? Is there an implied political theology to our conception of radical democracy? If so, where might it be found? If not with Schmitt, then with whom?

The modern age is not, or not only, a secular one. It has produced new forms of religion, new ways of thinking about God’s presence in the world, new ways of imagining that “something more” than man. —Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted

chapter six

The Theopolitics of Democracy

In an observation already repeated several times over, with its theopolitical implications hinted at but never developed, Tocqueville famously wrote: “The people reign over the American political world like God over the universe. It is the cause and aim of all things, everything comes from them and everything is absorbed in them.”1 By this—almost a half century before Nietzsche—Tocqueville acknowledged democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. By the people’s assumption to rule, the role once consigned to God—or at least to God’s assigned representative in the person of the monarch—was now usurped. Democracy thus spells not only the end of the divine right of kings but also the death of God as a transcendent authority lording over, or dictating, earthly human affairs. To the extent that we live in a democratic age, to the extent that we allow democratic governance to settle our differences and determine our collective fate, there can be no God to save us. We are our own lords and masters. Or at least, such is democracy’s political aspiration and presumption. This is the meaning and task of a democratic political theology. And it is only by owning up to this awesome responsibility that the shadow of Carl Schmitt can be vanquished once and for all.

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I Soon after Tocqueville’s  Democracy in America was published, John Stuart Mill touted it as “the first philosophical book ever written on Democracy, as it manifests itself in modern society.” In his authoritative study of Tocqueville, Sheldon Wolin develops Mill’s observation further: “Tocqueville was the first political theorist to treat democracy as a theoretical subject in its own right and the first to contend that democracy was capable of achieving a genuine, if modest, political life-form.” By developing this first comprehensive theory of democracy, Tocqueville also gave birth to a new genre of political theory, one that concentrated on political culture and thus freed democratic theory from the framework of constitutionalism bequeathed by modern liberal political philosophy. Instead of democracy being defined in terms of electoral politics and a representative system of government, Tocque­ville pictures it, in the words of Wolin, “not only as a form of government but as a massive social pressure resulting from the actions of countless free individuals.” “Democracy represents,” Wolin continues, “the weight of diffused power.” Power diffused—and consequently, defused. To Tocqueville’s mind, this is both democracy’s blessing and its curse. It is a blessing because, as Tocqueville observed throughout his travels in America, a participatory democracy provided its own political education. If the modern age, in contrast to the ancient regime, was characterized by its egalitarian culture whereby the democratic revolution was made irresistible, then it was precisely this political education that was required to make the members of society into true citizens. Returning to the earlier discussion of “self-interest rightly understood,” for democracy to work, it did not and does not require altruism from its citizens, only a certain level of engagement, a politics of self-interests that eventually develops into the recognition of long-term common interests. This is why Tocqueville counsels the use of democracy to moderate democracy, because in so doing that which is traditionally conceived as democracy’s great vice—namely, majority rule—can even become its virtue. In other words, the remedy to democratic excess comes not by way of some external, nondemocratic means but within the political culture of democracy itself. As Wolin argues: Democracy did not require an elite to instruct it in the ways of its own politics. Tocqueville went even further and broke with the long-standing

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Democracy does not require its power diluted because it always already is a mixture of competing interests and wills. To repeat, democracy represents the weight of diffused power, a power that even resists power’s natural inclination at consolidation. It is in this sense that democracy is correctly understood as a power game or, more precisely, a power play by those long kept outside the proper political domain. It is why, as we have already seen with Rancière, there is a natural fear, if not hatred, of democracy. If the end result of democracy is a political education that makes members of society into actual citizens, it must not be forgotten that, at least by Tocqueville’s reckoning, it begins in common grievances. Again, recalling what Rancière theorizes, for Tocqueville, democratic politics must be seen for what it is: a takeover from those who are “naturally” in power, a great social upheaval and overturning from which there was no turning back. Though revolutionary to be sure, by understanding democracy in terms of political culture, whereby it is defined principally as the common pursuit of ordinary human beings, risking an oxymoron, democracy is a modest revolution, an eminently practical form of politics arising out of the historical necessity of a radical cultural transformation. “The democracy represented by Tocqueville,” Wolin writes, “was the best that modernity might realistically hope for”:

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tradition in political thinking that saw no remedies to democracy’s ills except from some wise and disinterested “outside” agent who could somehow dilute a democracy system with a “mixture” of non- or antidemocratic principles.2

Although Tocqueville did not identify democracy with the most exalted political life, a life of disinterested service to the common good and the striving for a politics of grandeur, he found in it a plenitude of civic vitality, an intensity of involvement in common concerns by large numbers of citizens, and a lack of bitterness among social groups that was unmatched. . . . Among their citizens he recognized a new political animal, not the rustic, virtue-loving member of Rousseau’s community of the general will, but an ordinary being who learns to acquire a political identity, first and foremost, out of physical necessity and self-interest, but then, as civic concerns gradually become an integral part of his life, to find that he cannot do without them. (166)

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Not only was this modest positive appraisal of democracy part of Tocqueville’s general theory, but it was also in part his own political strategy. While his observations were based on his travels in America, his audience was postrevolutionary France, whose political climate was even more skittish with regard to democracy’s revolutionary fervor. By his argument that democracy can be used to moderate the effects of democratization, therefore, Tocqueville was using America as an illustration. While America was uniquely gifted in achieving its democratic revolution without the need for a revolution in society, it also stood the permanent risk of losing its own gains in the forging of a political citizenry, a risk that Tocqueville viewed as intrinsic to, if not the fatal flaw of, democracy. If democracy’s blessing is the high level of civic participation that is key to the moderating effects of its political culture, then without this civic and political engagement, democracy can easily devolve into a tyranny of the majority whereby public opinion stifles dissent and the egalitarianism that is democracy’s hallmark becomes indistinguishable from uniformity. It is in this way that democracy is a curse, because, ironically by the diffusion of power, the individual loses its individuality. In a democratic culture wherein equality is the greatest virtue, the risk is that everything becomes the same. Indeed, this cultural uniformity, which Tocqueville saw as part and parcel of democracy’s tendency toward political neutralization, was the very problem that Wolin argues was “the abiding concern of Tocque­ ville’s thinking, the referent point by which he tried to define his life as well as the task before his generation” (5)—namely, when political life is driven by the apolitical forces of culture and the economy, then how can the political be revived? Put otherwise, is a democratic politics a self-contradiction? After all, as we learn from Tocqueville, when democracy is constituted by a diffused power, it is “less consciously shaped by an active demos than by its interaction with the new forms of power represented by public administration and private industry” (308). This was the great paradox of democracy that Tocqueville observed: it begins with the taking of power by individuals and groups refusing their subservient status but leads to a generalized sense of powerlessness. Wolin quotes Tocqueville: “The most striking characteristic of the times is the powerlessness of both men and governments to direct the course of political and social changes” (13). There was no question that there was a radical, even revolutionary, change at hand. With the dawning of the modern world and the democratic revolution that it wrought, the social order was upturned; the

theorists were confronting a world of diverse powers and dominations, which humankind had brought into existence but no one had legislated. There were concentrated powers, like those of emergent industrial capitalism and the centralizing nation-state; diffused powers, such as those represented by small entrepreneurs, local notables and an unorganized citizenry; and mysterious powers, which came into existence when large masses of people were aroused by appeals to liberty, patriotism, and nationalism. (14)

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ancient regime was passing away. And with it, the old constellations of power were losing their hold. The paradox is that this was clearly the doings of humankind, but it had the force of a historical and cultural necessity without a directing will—“an irresistible revolution.” “By the nineteenth century,” Wolin writes:

As the first comprehensive theorist of democracy, Tocqueville singles in on this central paradox of democracy, which goes to the heart of how modern power is constituted. The transfer of reign from God to the people is not a simple or one-way transaction such that the original notion of political sovereignty is kept intact. On the contrary, the divine sovereign will that was single and undivided has now become diffused and no less mysterious: Politics was relocated from an absolute center and diffused throughout society. Even power’s forms changed in ways that would have astonished ancient or mediaeval thinkers, accustomed as they were to locating power in some person or class. Authority in the modern world is no longer personified in a king or a great family. It is anonymous, as diffused as politics itself, yet nonetheless powerful. Its form is cultural, its agent the unconscious majority, its expressions intangible rather than material, its power more the conditioning resulting from simultaneity of belief rather than from self-conscious concerted action. (199)

While constitutional measures provide for some semblance of power sharing, by attending to the domain of political culture it is seen how social forces exert an almost irresistible, though anonymous, will. Borrowing the arresting image from Marx and Engels in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, “modern bourgeois society  .  .  . is like the sorcerer who is unable to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells.”3 Tocqueville and Marx were in complete

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agreement on this point. By the constitution of modern power, political life is subsumed by economic and cultural forces. In the face of this felt sense of powerlessness, one could just as readily give oneself over to despair as join together in the revolutionary temper of the times. How to counter this sense of powerlessness is where Tocqueville and Marx part company. For while Marx embraces the revolutionary nature of modern power, which gave the moral justification to the proletariat’s struggle against capitalist rule, Tocqueville was a reluctant modernist, who eventually conceived democracy in terms of a “postrevolutionary culture that would be antirevolutionary.”4 Continuing with Wolin’s analysis, with Marx, “revolution is pitted against revolution, a titanic struggle between two world-changing, world-destroying powers” (17). Whereas for Tocque­ ville, “the very point of [his] conception of a culture whose purpose was to make democracy safe for the world was not to prepare democratic man for political action but to neutralize him” (336). As Wolin sees it, this essential conservatism on Tocqueville’s part, which becomes more pronounced between the first and second volumes of Democracy in America, reflects his aristocratic ambivalence in welcoming the onset of modernity. To Wolin, no one saw the democratic implications of modern life more clearly than Tocqueville, and indeed, he might have been “the last influential theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political life” (5),  but in the end his political strategy at making democracy palpable led to a shift in his own emphasis from democracy as a participatory practice toward a mere means of self-expression and personal satisfaction. As Wolin laments, Tocqueville not only saw but hastened “a redirection of the demos, away from politics toward personal satisfactions.” This shift was as imperceptible to most as it was surprising in its ease and efficiency: “All that is needed to produce a politically neutralized demos is a combination of structured work haunted (but not demoralized) by unemployment; public education that provides the utensils to consume popular culture; and representative government that regulates mass politics according to a timetable of periodic elections leaving the rest to commentary by the clerks” (378).

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Nowhere is this ambivalence on the part of Tocqueville more apparent than when it comes to his treatment of religion. Tocqueville’s

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views on religion in America are well known. He is the first to set out the irony of religion in America, whereby the disestablishment of religion is key to the religious vitality within society. By untethering religion from state support and sanction, religious life in America apparently becomes more responsive to modern culture. Its adaptive nature ensures its relevance, because religious leaders and groups are forced to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. At the same time, while religious belief and identification remain high, their impact might very well be negligible, because religion’s responsiveness, which is key to its continued vitality, makes it more a reflection than a directing force of social and cultural powers. In this way, just as democracy almost precludes the possibility of the political statesman, it is also a breeding ground for religious charlatans. This is not so much a critique by Tocqueville as it is a demonstration of the moderating effects of democratization and thus further proof of democracy’s palpability for a postrevolutionary world. By allowing it free reign, democracy makes use of religion as a method of social control, as it is the one societal force that exhibits the soft-power capability to cool the revolutionary ardor of equality. As Wolin explains: The democratic passions of the Many would have to be toned down, even repressed, and discouraged from direct expression without, however, differentiating them. This had to occur within society rather than through political processes. The obvious means was religion—or at least it seemed to Tocqueville the obvious remedy, given the deep impression left on him by the wholly salutary role of religion in the United States. (323)

Yet beyond or beneath this well-known domesticated vision of civil religion in America lies a much darker one, from which Tocqueville recoils. In the introduction to Democracy in America, for instance, he tells the reader that “the whole of the book in front of the reader has been written under the pressure of a kind of religious terror exercised upon the soul of the author.”5 His immersion in American culture, which he describes as seeming to have the necessity of “the habit of changing place, of turning things upside down, or destroying,”6 engenders within him a crisis of faith. As Wolin describes: Tocqueville was not a practicing believer in the institutional sense but he was far from being a resolute atheist or agnostic or skeptic. He might be called an uncertain theist who was assailed by religious anxieties arising

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from a nagging worry that the universe was being governed either by a dying deity, a god who, like the absolute monarchs, had lost his potency, or by a god who had changed his mind, and transferred his favor from aristocracy to the multitude. His deepest fear was that the deity might be neither and that men were condemned to live in an abandoned world, a chance arrangement devoid of any immanent meanings. (108)

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For instance, in a well-known correspondence from 1835, Tocque­ ville wrote the following: “After all,” he observed, “it may be God’s will to spread a moderate amount of happiness over all men instead of heaping a large sum upon a few by allowing only a small minority to approach perfection.” While some have interpreted this as an argument from Tocqueville that the modern spread of democracy was providential, Wolin instead points out the hesitancy in Tocqueville’s voice. By writing that it “may be God’s will,” it is clear that at least in Tocqueville’s mind, it may not be God’s will just as well, that when it comes to the revolutionary changes wrought by democracy in the modern world, who could know the mind of God, and who could tell whether God’s will was even determinative for life in this world or not. All that could be said with assurance was that, in the words of Wolin, there was a “fundamental shift in the order of divine dispensation,” a fact of modern life that Tocqueville meets with great apprehensiveness and that leads to what he describes as his “struggle against God.” The modern democratic age staked its preference for the happiness of the many over that of the few. But with this regime of equality, which Tocque­ville fears will produce a culture of uniformity, where does God stand? Where do God’s political preferences lie? To this question, Tocque­ville was destined to remain forever uncertain. The most he could do was admit his quarrel with God: “What seems to me decadence is thus in His eyes an advance; what wounds me is agreeable to Him.”7 Such is the nature of Tocqueville’s religious torment as he reluctantly comes to terms with an advancing democratic culture in which his presumed natural privileges as an aristocrat are slowly but ineluctably being stripped away—denatured, as it were. But what is most significant for our purposes in this story is its ramifications for political theology. We have already seen how the constitution of modern democracy, by its nature of diffused power, leaves us with a politics not where sovereignty has been transferred from God to humanity in a simple one-way transaction but rather where the nature of political

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sovereignty itself has been transformed by this transfer, suggesting to Tocqueville the terrifying prospect of a politics without sovereignty, a society bereft of any conscious directing will and thus entirely whim to the irresistible social and cultural forces at play. Modern democracy represents a diffused, unlocatable, and anonymous form of power. Tocqueville’s quarrel with God over democracy, therefore, can be seen as Tocqueville’s efforts not simply to salvage his own privileged station but actually to save God himself from his own apparently willed annihilation, and to do so by staving off the cultural revolution that was democracy’s irresistible force. Tocqueville is angry with God for not having the sense to foresee what Tocqueville saw looming on the horizon, in which the people’s presumption to power alters the very nature of power itself all the way from the ground up, from the innocent actions of the individual civic activists championing his or her rights to the very conception of divine sovereign power, now tragically hidden from the affairs of humankind. Not only is Tocqueville angry with God, caught as he is in a kind of “religious terror” wherein his quarrel with God is played out before the public, but again much like Marx, he also adopts the posture of the religious prophet making pronouncements as if he has actually seen the future. Democracy is that irresistible revolution that, Tocque­ ville tells us, “has advanced for centuries and which continues to advance in the midst of the ruins it has made.” Not only do his observations and predictions make the case for a kind of historical determinism at work in culture, but also, as Wolin demonstrates, the tone throughout Democracy in America is one of apprehensiveness and foreboding. It is a strange and tragic fate on the one hand to be plagued by religious anxieties, fearing that your world has been abandoned by God—or at the very least, fearing that God has rendered himself utterly anonymous by the weight of democracy’s social force—and, on the other hand, to pose as the voice of God, as the lone seer of what the future foretells, but all the time not even sure that God cares, let alone that there even is a God of the sort who still has power in reserve to act. To be clear, from a theopolitical perspective, with democracy it is God’s power that is at stake. If the democratic nature of diffused power apparently leaves politics without sovereignty, then what does it make of God? As Wolin asks: “What kind of god is suited to a democratic age?” (327). And the related question: “What was the cosmology projected by democracy?” (314). Concerning the latter, Wolin again gives us the key:

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Assuredly not the riotous atheism of nonbelievers, a free-for-all of anarchic forces. Tocqueville would claim that democracy’s “principal effect on philosophy” was to promote “pantheism.”  .  .  . Possibly he may have been thinking of Spinoza’s conception of a total system in which every being is reflection of an order that derives from one substance, God. Tocqueville’s pantheism was closer to an ideology, a projection of a mass belief-system. (314)

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Here we can see Tocqueville’s religious terror at work with the notion of the individual’s experience of massiveness, of being lost and swallowed up in the indiscriminate, the realization that the most powerful forces at work in society are unlocatable, untraceable, anonymous. It is in this way, only once its latent political theology was exposed, that even Tocqueville, that first and great theorist of democracy, recoiled from what he saw. When met face to face with the theopolitical implications of the democratic revolution, Tocqueville’s conditional embrace turned to outright hesitation. Democracy comes to be seen as “a desire to dissolve all differences,” even “the primary division of things” between “creation and creator.” Because this so obviously smacked of idolatry, because its presumption was too much to bear, and because it precluded all prospects of the individual rising above the undifferentiated mass, it was here on this theopolitical terrain that Tocqueville issued his clarion call: “Within the different systems which help philosophy in its attempt to explain the universe, pantheism seems to me one of the most likely to entice the human mind in democratic ages. All those who are smitten with the nobility of man must join forces and fight against this idea.”8 Believers of the world, unite! While democracy may very well be an irresistible revolution, in the end for Tocqueville a line must be drawn. If God does not have the will or power to act or the sense to even know when enough is enough, then the task falls to humanity. By salvaging the prospect of the individual from the undifferentiated mass, Tocqueville also stumbles upon political theology and the effort at saving God from God’s own annihilation. Once seen in this light, it is clear to Tocqueville that democracy goes too far by its conjuring up a world and a future that it knows nothing of. While the civil religion in America is commendable both as a training ground for political citizens and as a tool of moderation, if not social control, Tocque­ville resists the latent theology that goes hand in hand with the democratic revolution. In short, it is the theology of democracy that makes the politics of democracy ultimately untenable.

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Of course, even by this very strategic distinction between the civil religion and theology of democracy, Tocqueville is showing himself to be a man of the modern world. By doing the work that in his mind should belong to God, Tocqueville is putting himself in the place of God. Democracy’s massive social pressure and the weight of diffused power prove themselves yet again, as the sovereignty that was once the exclusive domain of divine power now passes itself on to humankind, and in the process, it renders itself anonymous and thereby irresistible. Once the people reign over the political world (“like God over the universe”), that power cannot be easily or readily returned to its source. The God of sovereign power is dead, and democracy is its political instantiation.

III Tocqueville was right to recognize the radical potential of the altered political theology ushered in by the modern democratic age. Where he failed is in not trusting his own original salient reading of how the nature of democracy’s diffused power works. The benefit of democracy is the recognition that the world is left to be what we make of it. It is this truth that has both inspired people to act and prompted dread. With the cultural revolution wrought by the social force of democracy, it is easily shown how religion is likewise left to be what we make of it. Just as assuredly as democracy is the political instantiation of the death of God, with this fundamental shift in the order of divine dispensation, religion is reborn and given a new lease on life, claiming for itself a central role in the transformation of the social and political order. After all, it should come as no surprise that the two volumes of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America were published around the same time as Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity: both have a theorist coming to terms with what has by then become obvious within society and culture—namely, religion is of humankind’s making, even as it simultaneously remakes humankind in its image. While this insight does fundamentally alter the religious terrain, it need not be seen as an attack on orthodoxy or as an extension of the Enlightenment suspicion of religion as dogma and superstition. More than anything else, what it means is a transposition of religious authority from the established centers of learning and power to that of ordinary people. Religious belief, therefore, remained strong. But it is the ability to define that belief and, even more, to channel its

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energy and enthusiasm that is altered. It is a question of toward what ends religious passions serve—is it a method of social control for a world weary with revolution, or is it fuel in the fire continuing the work that the democratic revolution left undone? These are the questions pursued by the historians Gary Nash and Nathan Hatch in their masterful studies of early America. We encountered Nash in chapter 2, when discussing his attempt at writing a democratic history of the American Revolution, a history that would “expand our conception of revolutionary American society and to consider the multiple agendas . . . that sprang from its highly diverse and fragmented character.”9 Here our concern is with his portrayal of the integral role played by religion in the radical revolution to reinvent American society. As Nash argues, “the American Revolution was not only a war of independence but a many-sided struggle to reinvent America. It was a civil war at home as well as a military struggle for national liberation” (1). By chronicling this “revolution within the revolution,” or the struggle for democracy that took place simultaneously with and in some cases even laid the groundwork for the war for independence, Nash reminds us how during the early days of the American republic, just as now, there was a battle between those who placed a premium on freedom, security, and order versus those driven by concerns for equality and equity. Further, just as independence does not necessarily constitute democracy, democratic action does not necessarily require independence as its prerequisite. Therefore, even though the war for independence was eventually won, the democratic revolution for a free, just, and equal society is never complete. In Nash’s words: To think of the American Revolution as incomplete is very different from arguing that it was a failure, even for those with the most expansive ideas about a truly free, just, and equal society. Revolutions are always incomplete. Almost every social and political convulsion that has gone beyond first disruptions of the ancien régime depended on mass involvement; and that in itself, in every recorded case of revolutionary insurgency, raised expectations that could not be completely satisfied. In this sense, there has never been such a thing as a completed revolution. (453–454)

As for the mass involvement and the raising of expectations that Nash has in mind, integral to this story is the role played by the radi166

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cal religious visionaries, itinerant preachers, and newly emboldened communities astir with the religious passion that came with the belief that they were direct agents of God. The religious effect on the emerging American democracy can first be seen in what is commonly referred to as the First Great Awakening, which was a series of religious revivals that swept through the colonies during the middle of the eighteenth century, at least a full generation before the actual war for independence was fought. This outburst of religious enthusiasm has been called “the most powerful—and diffuse—religious movement since the [Protestant] Reformation itself.”10 The main catalyst was the English Calvinist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies as a traveling evangelist. Whitefield was nicknamed “the Grand Itinerant,” indicating that although he was ordained as a priest by the Church of England, had formal theological training within the Calvinist tradition, and was a friend and contemporary of John Wesley (the founder of the Methodists) during his studies at Oxford, his primary identity and influence was as “a preacher who is not confined to one particular church and pulpit but who proclaims the Word wherever he can find listeners.”11 With the great success of Whitefield’s emotionally stirring sermons, the colonies had perhaps their first united and unifying cultural experience. It was as though everyone had either heard Whitefield for themselves or knew someone who had. In this way, the First Great Awakening proved instrumental in the birth of a national consciousness and the making of a political federation. An examination of the politics of religion during this period shows how the cultural led the political as this shared religious experience helped to form a collective identity. More native to our present concerns, while the Great Awakening is seen by historians as one of the first common and unifying experiences within the American colonies, equally important was its message of social leveling, which was seen by many contemporaries as especially incendiary. As Nash writes, “Whitefield challenged traditional sources of authority, called upon people to become instruments of their own salvation, and implicitly attacked the prevailing upperclass notion that the uneducated masses had no minds of their own.”12 The effect of this message, again in the words of Nash, was the relocation of “authority collectively in the mass of common people” (10). Needless to say, one can imagine that there would be many established interests that resented, feared, and resisted this movement. One contemporary, for instance, accused traveling itinerants such as

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Whitefield of being “a set of incendiaries, enemies not only of the Established Church, but also common disturbers of the peace.”13 Worried Anglican clergymen in Virginia were able to convince the governor “to restrain ‘strolling preachers’ who conjured up a world without properly constituted authority.”14 While in hindsight this widespread and emotionally potent series of religious revivals might have proven enormously effective in creating a common culture and forging the beginnings of a national identity, at the time its leaders were seen by many as irresponsible and unrefined agitators. The notion that they were conjuring up worlds without the legitimate authority to do so leaves the impression that they worked more as sorcerers and magicians than as authentic preachers of the gospel. They offered an unapologetically radical and egalitarian interpretation of the gospel. In so doing, they upset the established social order and planted the seeds of democracy within the emerging culture of the American colonies. Nash spells out the radical democratic implications of this movement well: The Great Awakening provided a “radical model” for revolutionary activists. . . . The Awakeners created a mass movement; they challenged upperclass assumptions about social order and the deference due to established figures; they seceded from churches they regarded as corrupt and built new, regenerated ones in their place, even without license; they forced religious toleration on those arrayed against it and broke apart attempted unions of church and state; they fractured established churches such as those in Virginia and thereby threatened the existing social order. (11)

In short, neither the revivalist preachers nor the converts they attracted knew their place or observed proper decorum. The First Great Awakening can and should be seen as a democratic movement not only because it endowed individuals with the gumption if not the right to question authority but also because in its wake it left individuals organized and mobilized as collective congregations. It is not that the emphasis on personal conversion merely undermined the authority of established churches and the existing social order but rather that a new locus of authority was established—an authority whose legitimacy lay squarely with the people acting as agents of God. Likewise, Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity shows how religion played a democratic, even revolutionary, 168

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role in early American history. Specifically, Hatch is examining the period in U.S. history between 1780 and 1830, a transitional period that he argues transformed not only the structure of American Christianity but also American political life. What we see abounding in this period are “mass movements that were deeply religious and genuinely democratic at the same time.”15  And by these “deep and powerful undercurrents of democratic Christianity” (5) the United States was distinguished from the rest of the modern industrial world. With this unique history and culture, observers and scholars have long been at odds when explaining the precise role that religion plays in American society. If we consider its theopolitical implications, is it as devastating and world altering as Tocqueville suggests? Or, on the contrary, is the continued prevalence of religious belief and activity in the United States a sign of a retrograde culture, one that operates by the very dynamics of social conformity laid out by Tocqueville and making belief in God the absolute social norm? Hatch acknowledges this confusion and debate, making it central to his argument about how the shakeup in the locus of religious authority reflects and hastens the radical cultural and political transformation that American society was undergoing at this time. “As common people became significant actors on the religious scene,” he writes, “there was increasing confusion and angry debate over the purpose and function of the church. A style of religious leadership that the public deemed ‘untutored’ and ‘irregular’ as late as the First Great Awakening became overwhelmingly successful, even normative, in the first decades of the republic” (5). This new style of religious leadership was reflective of the new class of individuals invested with the authority to speak, preach, and lead, a transfer of power that was not granted without a fight. Hatch labels this phenomenon “religious populism,” which is defined according to the “passions of ordinary people” and which has the “charisma of a democratic movement.” As by now we should come to expect, as a democratic movement, it was met with resistance, the suspicion being that it was an uncivil, anarchic force in society, one made up of “common folk not respecting their betters, organized factions speaking and writing against civil authority.”  And to be sure, as Hatch makes clear, this conflict was “not merely a clash of intellectual and theological differences but also a passionate social struggle with power and authority. Deep-seated class antagonism separated clergy from clergy.”  On one side were “those who defended clerical authority as a right of a gentry minority.” On the

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other were “rough-hewn leaders who denied the right of any one class of people to speak for another” (5–9). This description hearkens back to our earlier chapter’s discussion of Rancière. But Rancière’s focus was on the structural parallels from democratic detractors from the past to the present; Hatch’s attention is much narrower. His emphasis is not on the resistance to religious democratization but on the constructive work done by various religious populist movements led by, and in response to, common people. As Hatch writes, “Christianity was effectively reshaped by common people who molded it in their image and who threw themselves into expanding its influence” (9). And further, “the rise of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution” (9). In the words of Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Disciples of Christ who set out restore the primitive form of Christianity unencumbered by creeds or denominations, this story of success amounted to “a declaration of independence of the Kingdom of Jesus.”16 As he described it, this was an independence hard earned, for it required nothing less than renunciation of the traditions and errors from one’s theological education and religious heritage: “My mind was, for a time, set loose from all its former moorings,” Campbell explains. “It was not a simple change: but a new commencement . . . the whole landscape of Christianity presented itself to my mind in a new attitude and position.”17 Likewise, the Methodist evangelist Charles Finney likened this religious transformation to a Copernican revolution, whereby religious life was adapted to “the language of common life.”18 Which is why when it comes to Hatch’s own assessment, he writes that “this vast transformation, this shift away from the Enlightenment and classical republicanism toward vulgar democracy and materialistic individualism in a matter of decades, was the real American Revolution” (23). Once recognizing ordinary people’s ability and willingness to shape religion to their own needs—whether defined spiritually or politically in terms of social transformation—Hatch identifies three ways that these popular religious movements “articulated a profoundly democratic spirit.” First, they extended the Protestant Reformation conviction of the priesthood of all believers by denying the distinction that set the clergy apart from ordinary people and refusing to defer to learned theologians and traditional orthodoxies: “All were democratic or populist in the way they associated virtue with ordinary

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people rather than with elites, exalted the vernacular in word and song as the hallowed channel for communicating with and about God, and freely turned over the reigns of power” (10). Second, by taking ordinary people’s spiritual needs and impulses “at face value rather than subjecting them to the scrutiny of orthodox doctrine and the frowns of respectable clergymen,” the people were effectively enfranchised and empowered. Third, not only were ordinary people empowered, but now one-time outsiders and fringe leaders were more fully incorporated into the religious and social landscape. These religious outsiders, “flushed with confidence about their prospects” and with “little sense of their own limitations . . . dreamed that a new age of religious and social harmony would naturally spring up out of their efforts to overthrow coercive and authoritarian structures. This upsurge of democratic hope, this passion for equality, led to a welter of diverse and competing forms, many of them structured in highly undemocratic ways” (10–11). With that last statement making conditional Hatch’s otherwise positive appraisal of this religious and social transformation, he leaves the reader to ponder the still paradoxical role that religion plays in American society and, by extension, the theopolitical paradox of democracy itself. As Hatch writes in his conclusion: Forms of popular religion characteristic of [the early American] cultural system bound paradoxical extremes together: a reassertion of the reality of the supernatural in everyday life linked to the quintessentially modern values of autonomy and popular sovereignty. . . . By raising the standard “no creed but the Bible,” Christians in America were the foremost proponents of individualism even as they expected the open Bible to replace an age of sectarian rivalry with one of primitive harmony. Like the egalitarian credo of the early republic, this vision has taken a powerful hold on the American imagination despite the disparity between the quest for unity and actual religious fragmentation and authoritarianism. (213)

IV Contrasting Nash and Hatch with Tocqueville, we can say that their concern is not so much with religion’s moderating effects on democracy as much as it is with the dialectical relationship that they see between religion and democracy: religion is democratized as it

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simultaneously becomes a force for democracy. Continuing where the democratic cultural revolution leaves off, it empowers ordinary people to craft a world of their own making. Tocqueville recognized the unsettling theopolitical implications of this democratic revolution: divine sovereign power is now transferred—and thus, dispersed and diffused—to the people. Nash and Hatch extend this analysis to the social and political impact of democratized religion. In a democratic age, religion cannot and could not remain as it was, which was essentially a means of social control that moderated the effects of democracy’s otherwise irresistible social revolution. Instead, it too becomes subject to that revolution, and from the very start it is drafted into efforts at social and political transformation, if only because religion’s open access provides an ever-present opportunity for ordinary people to have their voices heard. In short, while Tocqueville’s analysis implied a distinction between the civil religion and the theology of democracy, commending the one and recoiling from the other, Nash and Hatch make clear that no such distinction is possible. Religion in America was not, nor could it ever be, merely the moderating influence that Tocqueville portrayed. On the contrary, just as the latent political theology led Tocqueville to a state of religious terror, revealing an anonymous God now subject to the weight of democratic social forces, so too was the religious life in the early republic radically destabilized, even as it was proving to be a destabilizing, world-transforming force, if only because it was the primary means by which common people were politically empowered. Put otherwise, we might say that while it was on the theopolitical terrain that the terrifying change that democracy represented was revealed to the likes of Tocqueville, the religious terrain made manifest the ongoing struggle to complete the work left undone by the democratic revolution still underway within American society. In this way, the religion and political theology of democracy were one and the same, both testifying to the tumult that was democracy’s coming of age in the form of the people’s coming to power.

The transcendence of God does not mean God towers above being as a hyper-being. Rather, God pitches his tent among beings by identifying with everything the world casts out and leaves behind. —John Caputo, The Weakness of God

Interlude

The Messianic as a Democratic Political Theology

There is room for hope: the renewal of the theological-political in the Spinozan way. Agamben could do it. —Antonio Negri, “Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly Life”

In a deliberate contrast to the use of the phrase in the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which at last count have sold over sixty-five million copies, I want to twist and distort this phrase “left behind” toward another purpose, with specific reference to the messianic figure of Christ who was left for dead, for the purpose of rethinking the conceptual possibilities of political theology. As the deconstructive philosopher of religion John Caputo writes in What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: “The crucified body of Jesus proposes not that we keep theology out of politics but that we think theology otherwise, by way of another paradigm, another theology, requiring us to think of God otherwise, as a power of powerlessness, as opposed to the theology of omnipotence that underlies sovereignty.”1 Following Caputo’s lead, then, this brief interlude poses the possibility of a messianic political theology, a possibility that very well may prove to be an impossible possibility, given the way in which “the messianic” and “political theology” have been defined in terms of their cross purposes or as being mutually exclusive. For instance, consider the introduction to the English translation of Schmitt’s Political

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Theology, where Tracy Strong makes the argument that the work as a whole should be read essentially as an effort at restoring transcendence in a world governed by the immanent logic of secular reason. As Strong writes, “the point of the analysis of the centrality of the exception for sovereignty is precisely to restore, in a democratic age, the element of transcendence that had been there in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries. . . . Failing that, the triumph of nonpolitical, inhuman technologizing will be inevitable.”2 We see this effort confirmed as Schmitt details the different conceptions of God within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as compared with the nineteenth, the former two maintaining a transcendent view and the latter governed by conceptions of immanence. This change in the theological and metaphysical mindset of the respective ages is reflected in the transition from monarchy to democracy and eventuates into the ideological battle against all forms of traditional religiosity, even as the new democratic forms of government find themselves called into question by the anarchists. In light of this theopolitical transformation, Schmitt admits: “Conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people,” as “mankind had to be substituted for God.”3 As was discussed in the last chapter, it was precisely this epochal transformation that posed the “religious terror” for Tocqueville. But we must ask whether it is true, as Schmitt’s argument suggests, that without a robust conception of transcendence, our life together inevitably devolves into a nonpolitical, inhuman, technologizing will. Put otherwise, must political theology rest upon the concept of sovereignty? And does the sovereign necessarily not only reflect a transcendent authority but also give it its license as the one by whom the state of exception is decided? This interlude will take these questions up in turn and show how they might be answered in the negative. To put my position succinctly, by following the way of the messianic, we find our way to both an immanent and a democratic political theology, which would be a stark and irresolvable alternative to the political theology as conceived by Schmitt and those who follow in his wake. By messianic, I have in mind something along the lines of Caputo’s weak theology of the event, wherein Christ is identified with those who are left behind and the mark of the incarnate God remains on the one who was left for dead. For Caputo, the weak God is a God “without sovereignty.”4 Caputo’s theology is a postmetaphysical the-

Suppose [he asks] we raise the possibility of a “God” who belongs, not to the fixed order of presence, but to the (dis)order of the deconstruction of presence? . . . Suppose we abandon the top-down schema of one Father Almighty, one king to rule the land . . . in favor of a paradigm where such sovereign power slips out of favor? (33)

And most significant to our present concerns: Suppose God is not conceived as the rock-solid ground on which the onto-theo-political edifice of sovereignty is erected but is systematically associated with the different, the marginal, the outsider, the left out; with the naked ones, not the long robes in the sanctuary within, with the least among us, the destitute, the anawin, those who are plundered and ground under (Amos 8:4), and hence as a subversive and “revolutionary” impulse? (34)

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ology that arises in the wake of the death of God, or at least it is a theology that grants to his radical death-of-God theological forebears the shared notion that “the task of thinking about God radically otherwise has been inescapably imposed upon us” (23). And with this, Caputo raises a series of questions so as to round out this thought experiment.

Supposing this, the task appointed to political theology is not to restore transcendence over against the immanent logic of secular reason; nor is it the reversal of the supposed democratic logic of modernity whereby mankind has been substituted for God. On the contrary, following the way of the crucified Christ, we are thrust inextricably into this world. In a similar fashion, when discussing the Apostle Paul’s change in name from Saulos to Paulos, Giorgio Agamben notes how the substitution of pi for sigma “signifies no less than the passage from the regal to the insignificant, from grandeur to smallness,” and, as such, is testimony to Paul’s messianic vocation. Agamben writes: “According to Paul, messianic power does not wear itself out in its ergon; rather, it remains powerful in it in the form of weakness. Messianic dynamis is, in this sense, constitutively ‘weak’—but it is precisely through its weakness that it may enact its effects.”5 175

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The messianic, so conceived, far from being a title of power or exclusion, is instead a weak force indicating both God’s solidarity with the poor and the outcast and the paradox of the messianic community—namely, it lives in a state of anticipation for that which is already past. As such, this weak theology of the event, which arises from the conception of God without sovereignty, demonstrates its stark theopolitical conceptual alternative to that of Schmitt. To borrow the assessment from Jacob Taubes, just as Paul moves from the regal to the insignificant, and from grandeur to smallness, Schmitt stands to the revolutionary constellation of Caputo and Agamben as “an apocalypticist of counterrevolution.”6 As Agamben points out, Schmitt’s political theology is “explicitly anti-messianic” (104). And whereas Schmitt claims the second chapter of II Thessalonians for a possible foundation for a Christian doctrine of state power, Agamben shows how messianic time unveils “the mystery of lawlessness”: “The unveiling of this mystery entails bringing to light the inoperativity of the law and the substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in messianic time.” Agamben concludes: “2 Thess. 2 may not be used to found a ‘Christian doctrine’ of power in any manner whatsoever” (111). To reiterate: the alternative political theology posed by Caputo and Agamben could not be any starker to that of Schmitt’s. It is perhaps why, in his review of Agamben’s most recent work, Antonio Negri writes, “there is room for hope: the renewal of the theologicalpolitical in the Spinozan way. Agamben could do it.”7 So in contrast to Schmitt’s efforts at restoring transcendence in a democratic age, let me offer the following assertion, to which I will return at the close of this interlude—namely, so long as our political theology is reliant on the element of transcendence, we are not yet, nor can we ever be said to be, living in a democratic age. And further, so long as our God is defined and revealed by the miraculous case of sovereign power, we have both forgotten and betrayed the specific lesson of Jesus, the one proclaimed as the messiah and that most peculiar of messianic figures who was left for dead. Given what has already been said throughout the pages of this work about the constituent power of the multitude—how it might diminish the priority of the concept of sovereignty within contemporary democratic theory, how it calls to question the unrestrained exercise of authority by the sovereign, and most especially, how it is an already existing social subject awaiting a political project for its actualiza-

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tion—we begin to see how this conception of the multitude is analogous to the messianic. For instance, consider the story of Jesus, the one proclaimed and killed as the messiah, the one whose very name comes down to us in history as Christ, meaning messiah: On the one hand, we are told he came to fulfill the law and, thus, Israel’s expectations for renewed glory. But his was an eschatological expectation, inaugurating a kingdom that already is but yet is still to come. As the anointed one, he died as a king without a kingdom, and as at least as the Gospel of Mark originally had it, he died confused, abandoned, even forsaken. As the revelation of God, whatever sovereignty he may possess he foregoes into the hands of his accusers and executioners. Some may object here that it was not Jesus’s sovereignty to forego, as it was not his will but his father’s in heaven that would be done. To this, I would respond with Rene Girard’s objection about the sanctioning of sacred violence that this implies. For Girard, it is absolutely essential that Jesus’s death is not understood as that of a scapegoat or a sacrifice but as an innocent victim. As Girard states, “the Passion is presented as a blatant piece of injustice. Far from taking the collective violence upon itself, the text places it squarely on those who are responsible.”8 As such, his death was not necessary in the sense that it was required by a sovereign authority in the form of a bloodthirsty God to pay the pardon for humanity’s sins, but it was inevitable given the endemic nature of violence within all human societies and at the root of all mythic religions. Just as inevitable, perhaps, is the fact that this founding act, which understood and denounced the scapegoating mechanism “as the lie that it really is,” would ironically and tragically be transfigured into the latest myth casting the “victim as savior and the event of his death as sacrifice” (219). This talk of Jesus is not intended for the purpose of moral suasion or as pastoral incantation but rather as a caution against the theological triumphalism that pervades the renewed theological interest in the political. Any political theology that goes by the name of Christ must never forget not only his ignominious death but also that death so many times over in the nameless and the silent multitude. To learn the lesson of Jesus is to remember that just as he was left for dead, thus revealing the nature of our sin and the depth and extent of our rebellion and ignorance, so too have innumerable others been left behind, forgotten, and betrayed. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “weak messianic power,”9 this is to hear and to be laid claim to by the voice of the dead. Therefore, just as the multitude provides an alternative founding concept for contemporary political

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theory to that of sovereignty, so too does the messianic lay low the mythic vision of a God who is orchestrating all of human history. It is here where Girard and Agamben part company, for Girard would take this last statement one step further by adding not only how the messianic lays low the mythic vision of God but also how it redeems—or better, exempts—God from the pattern of sacred violence. What we have left then is a purified Christianity as a nonreligion exempt from the critique of religion. This salvaging or cordoning off of Christianity is not the work of Agamben. On the contrary, his reflections on the messianic lead him to the following: He who upholds himself in the messianic vocation no longer knows the as if, he no longer has similitudes at his disposal. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer’s words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he may not disguise this world’s beingwithout-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact of representations . . . cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as though it were saved. In Benjamin’s words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved; this is how difficult it is to dwell in the calling.10

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I will conclude by pressing the analogy between the multitude and the messianic one step further: just as the multitude is an already existing subject awaiting a political project for its realization, likewise the messianic belongs to “the time that remains,” to borrow the phrase from Agamben. The promise of the messiah is not that the messianic age will come, but that it already has come and gone and will come again, been inaugurated but not yet fulfilled, realizable but not yet fully realized. It is the between time, or better, “the time that remains between time and its end,” wherein the end has already begun.11 In the words of St. Paul, it is “the time of the now,” a “contracted time,” as Agamben tells us.12 But further, and this is where its connection with democratic theory is apparent, as a contracted or imploded time it is “not ulterior but interior,” a representation of time that takes up the remaining time that is left to us.13 Messianic time, in other words, remains a thoroughly human project. It is not something that happens to us—

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an objective continuum upon which we might plot our existence—but as Agamben writes, “the time that we ourselves are . . . the only real time, the only time we have left” (68). We the multitude stand in and by this time that remains. It is the time for democracy, but only by virtue of the messianic nullification in the form of the as not. Which is another way of saying that whenever the state of exception has become the rule or the working paradigm of government, democracy is at an end as we know it. How we should live in this remaining time of the end is the question for political theology in the time of the now.

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From the One to the Many [Democracy] is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. —Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy Democracy today takes the form of a subtraction, a flight, an exodus from sovereignty, but, as we know well from the Bible story, the pharaoh does not let the Jews flee in peace. The ten plagues have to rain down on Egypt before he lets them leave. . . . Every exodus requires an active resistance, a rearguard war against the pursuing powers of sovereignty. “Flee,” as Gilles Deleuze says, “but while fleeing grab a weapon.” —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude

With the postsecular reconfiguration of the proper role of religion within the public sphere, it is no longer a question of whether religion and politics mix, but how. More specifically, since the postsecular indicates a change in mindset about the enduring nature of religious beliefs and practices and, consequently, a change with regard to the secularist self-understanding of the state, then how might religion contribute to making our politics more democratic? And to what extent might an alternative political theology assist with and help complete the work of developing new conceptual bases for contemporary democratic theory and practice? By alternative political theology, I have something different from Carl Schmitt in mind—that is to say, not a political theology predicated on the concept of sovereignty and thus beholden to the theopolitical rule of the one. Instead, it would be a political theology that emerges out of the critiques of sovereign

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power, breaking away from the monopolar theopolitical tradition that conceives of sovereignty in terms of unity and indivisibility—from the logic of the one, to the many, from a political theology conceived in the singular as a means to shore up or consolidate power in the face of liberal despair and the crisis of modern political legitimation, to its pluralization by its acknowledgment of the multiple and competing spheres of sovereign power. As discussed in chapter 3, with such a pluralization of political theology, the relativization, if not dissolution, of the concept of sovereignty is bound to follow. In its place stands the constitutive power of the multitude—a political theology without sovereignty at least as traditionally conceived, which is to be a politics otherwise, to be sure.

I Picking up where things were left in chapter 6, while Tocqueville is rightly credited as developing the first comprehensive theory of democracy, his theory ultimately falls short by its failure to follow through on its own theopolitical implications. His observations and analysis tacitly acknowledged democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. Nevertheless, his strategic efforts at demonstrating democracy’s palpability for a postrevolutionary world rested on his argument that religion essentially served as a moderating force. As Wolin shows, this led Tocqueville disingenuously to make the New England town meetings, where the legacy of a highbrow form of Calvinism was still decisive, the norm in his treatment of religion in America, while the tradition of radical democracy was excised from his published writings. The former, which practiced a domesticated form of civil religion, was seen as a laboratory for political citizenship; the latter, which Tocqueville described as “the experiment of a democracy without limits,” was seen as wildly uncivil and uncontained.1 Recalling Rancière’s unveiling of the logic of the hatred of democracy from chapter 2, we can see how Tocqueville fits within that ancient and enduring pedigree, caught as he is in that classic double bind: on the one hand, recognizing democracy as an irresistible revolution by the force of its massive social pressure, and on the other, seeking above all else to demonstrate democracy’s palpability by showing the means by which its irresistible force might be nevertheless contained and its politics more effectively managed. As Rancière 181

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might put it, by his emphasis on the moderating impact of civil religion to those who, like him, might otherwise be deeply troubled by the theological implications of democracy, Tocqueville effectively inserts a “dead-man-god” to comfort modern humanity in its “great distress as orphans condemned to wander in the empire of the void.”2 This image of a “dead-man-god” captures the same sentiment as does Mark Lilla when he writes of the “stillborn God.” In both cases, modern theology is crafted in terms of modern liberal philosophy, as a concession to the revolutionary torment wrought by democracy. But as a God conceived to fill the void left vacant by the death of God, it is at best only a stopgap measure and thus utterly impotent to counter or redirect the revolutionary social forces it is meant to tame. By attending to both the tradition of prophetic dissent and the theological void revealed by democracy’s social and cultural revolution, we come closer to the unhesitating political theology of democracy for which we have been striving throughout the pages of this work, one that begins not from the premise of the undivided sovereign power of God but from the diffused nature of democratic power—a political theology without sovereignty, as it were, or at least a new form of sovereignty that nevertheless provides for a meaningful sense of political will and power. The point is that when divine power is divested—or better yet, seized by a people claiming their own—the very nature and understanding of power is transformed. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in their book Empire, this is a new global form of sovereignty best described as a “network power,” which includes as its primary elements not only the nation-states but also supranational institutions, transnational corporations, and other powers that must cooperate together in order to maintain the current global order. Key to their analysis is that this new form of sovereignty, this network power, is “imperial,” not “imperialistic,” meaning that it operates without a controlling center. The problem with an imperialistic understanding is that it is based on an antiquated ontology of sovereignty in which the nation-state stands as the autonomous subject. It operates by an exclusively linear logic of cause and effect and will to mastery. Put simply, it belongs to the past paradigm of modern political economy. To borrow from Hardt and Negri, such a view “cannot account for the real novelty of the historical processes we are witnessing today. In this regard these theories can and do become harmful, because they do not recognize the accelerated rhythm, the violence, and the necessity with which the new imperial paradigm

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operates. What they do not understand is that imperial sovereignty marks a paradigm shift.”3 As Tocqueville correctly sensed and as Rancière later made central to his theory of democracy, this transformation in the very nature of sovereign power would be a source of religious terror for many, inspiring a hatred of democracy that connects the ancients with our contemporaries no matter the social revolution that modern democracy has wrought. In this state of terror we are faced with a choice: to accept our democratic fate as orphans interwoven and inseparable from this vast web of network power, which both establishes our limits and our conditions of possibility, or to reconstitute sovereign power by which the “natural” order dividing the rulers from the ruled is restored, to search for, rely upon, or stand awaiting some power outside ourselves. Given this stark choice, it may come as a surprise when Hardt and Negri proclaim in the opening line of Multitude that the possibility of democracy is emerging today as if for the very first time.4 As they explain, this is not simply an expression of desire but of necessity, for the social revolution of democracy has gone as far it can without reversing itself into the totalitarian culture of homogeneity that Tocque­ ville feared, by which the technocratic reign of economic life usurps whatever political power or potency is still kept in reserve. What is needed to complete this democratic revolution is the accompanying political will. For while the multitude, as the engine of social production, is an already existing subject, “it does not arise as a political figure spontaneously” knowing that the same forces that are the conditions of possibility for its formation could just as easily “lead toward liberation or be caught in a new regime of exploitation and control.” In other words, “the multitude needs a political project to bring it into existence.”5 Because the political project of democracy requires a level of consciousness that the social force of democracy mitigates against, a democratic political theology is important as a critical means of laying bare the fundamental religious assumptions that undergird political philosophy and practices. If democracy works according to the weight of diffused power, by unveiling that power—by showing the wizard behind the screen, or, more appropriately, the human beings behind the wizard—political theology becomes an instrumental part of the political project that aims at redirecting and taking ownership of the common will for the people’s life in common.

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II This brings us to the question: What would a truly democratic political theology look like? For sure, it is not the political theology envisioned by Schmitt. As I have argued throughout, Schmitt’s explicitly antidemocratic political stance was as confused as it was disingenuous. For one, as argued in chapter 2, Schmitt pairs democracy with modern liberalism as if there were a necessary relation between the two, and then he safely concludes that liberal democracy represents a nonviable political regime. As the contemporary democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe writes, this is a “false dilemma” not entirely concocted by Schmitt but certainly advanced by him and serving his own ideological agenda and political ambitions. By the force of his critique of modern liberal democracies as essentially technocratic states that had entered into a devil’s bargain with the corporatist mentality, effectively neutralizing politics and depoliticizing the people, Schmitt failed to recognize the alternatives open to those who might conceive of democracy otherwise. While he remained certain that the tension between liberalism and democracy marked an irreparable breach, Mouffe effectively shows how this very tension might instead be conceived as a productive paradox, opening democracy to a more pluralistic conception of the state befitting the age of globalization. By exploiting the tensions between modern liberalism and democracy, Schmitt’s prescient indictment of the liberal tradition leaves little or no room for the possibility of democracy without liberalism, what I have identified here as radical democracy. In short, Schmitt throws the baby out with the bathwater. Second, as shown in chapter 4, Schmitt’s political theology not only arises out of a deep sense of cultural malaise and the crisis of political legitimation, but by its essentially nostalgic lament for the lost unity of Western Christendom, it remains trapped in what Mark Lilla terms “the politics of theological despair.” As a consequence, he links democracy with modern liberalism and exaggerates the opposition between political theology and democracy—indeed, the very posing of them as mutually exclusive political options represents a false choice. For Schmitt, political theology and democracy represent two equally potent but opposing political strategies to combat the seemingly irresistible force of the technocratic state. This is where the work of those such as Jeffrey Stout and Stephen Carter is so important, for not only do they provide a sense of the postsecular reconfiguration of the proper role of religion in the public sphere, but they

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also show how democracy itself is a substantive tradition in its own right, one which inevitably draws on religion as an expression of the convictions of individuals and entire communities, and thus is a tradition in need of some form of theological scrutiny and reflection. In other words, political theology and democracy are not mutually exclusive, but democracy contains within it its own political theology by virtue of its institutions, mores, traditions, and cultural resources. My third and final reason why Schmitt’s political theology is not the desired option is how easily and naturally this political theology is employed to give sanction to the “state of exception” as a working paradigm of contemporary government. This is the critique made by the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben. The state of exception functions as a totalitarian threat immanent to modern liberal democracies, which “allows for the elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” Far from being exceptional or extraordinary, Agamben asserts that the state of exception has in fact “become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.”6 Drawing on Agamben, we have seen how Schmitt’s work is somewhat at cross purposes with itself. On the one hand, his political theology is a sweeping historical generalization that relies on the structural parallels that he sees between traditional theology and modern secular politics: just as a miracle testifies to how a transcendent and omnipotent God can suspend the natural order of creation, so too might the sovereign decide on the state of exception and thus suspend or stand outside of the rule of law. Likewise, as Schmitt and others have observed, there is a correspondence between a traditional theistic worldview and a monarchical state. More specifically, there is a correspondence between Schmitt’s understanding of a Catholic, metaphysical worldview and his notion of decisionism at the basis of his political theory. As Schmitt’s formula for political theology makes clear—“One God, One king”—by his conception, sovereignty can never be divided. The sovereign is always, and necessarily, one. This demand for unity and indivisibility comes at a cost, or better, it exacts a price. It highlights and intensifies the politics of enmity as the very essence of the concept of the political, requiring an enemy—any enemy, in fact—for its very existence. Jacques Derrida has described this as a “political crime against the political itself.”7 Others have shown how it can be seen as the theoretical and juridical underpinning for the American neoconservative movement and the American-led war on

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terror, specifically in the legal and political use of “lawfare.” This practice, which the investigative journalist Scott Horton has described as effectively declaring “war on the rule of law itself,” is sanctioned by the state of exception that Schmitt theorizes and finds license for in his political theology. The point here is not that Schmitt’s work was deliberately or explicitly employed in the U.S.-led war on terror or that there is some causal connection between Schmitt’s theorizing of the state of exception and the Bush administration’s efforts at consolidating power within the executive branch of government as part and parcel of its conception of the imperial presidency. Instead, by examining the abuses of power and the assault on the democratic rule of law and constitutional limits of power, whether in the German Nazi regime or echoes of the same within recent American governance, we are able to see more clearly the threat to democracy that Schmitt’s work represents. As Schmitt himself acknowledged in his final book, his work in political theology was “dangerously relevant” to what was then happening in 1930s Germany. Likewise, we might say, the continued flirtation with Schmitt by contemporary political philosophers, social theorists, and theologians, as well as the effort to salvage his critique of modern liberalism from his manifest fascist tendencies, is no mere academic or intellectual exercise, but, in the words of Lilla, a “reckless” ideological choice and political decision that remains as much a threat to the practice and theory of democracy today as ever.8

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If not to Schmitt, then to whom can we turn for a democratic political theology? Hent de Vries’ pluralization of political theology is a good place to begin. As I argued in chapter 3, by pluralizing political theology, de Vries effectively strips it of its predication on the concept of sovereignty, and thus the notion of political theology set in opposition to democratic theory and practice is effectively relativized, paving the way for a political theology that is democratically conceived. Like Schmitt, de Vries acknowledges a certain crisis of political legitimation. But unlike Schmitt, who seeks to restore the traditional notion of political sovereignty as being necessarily singular and indivisible, de Vries demonstrates how this understanding has “been rendered virtually obsolete or [is] at least steadily undermined by the flows of capital and information, immigration and migration, bodies

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and ideas.”9 Of course, Derrida plays a very prominent role in de Vries’ analysis, and from Derrida we get a literal pluralization of political theology, in his call for the reconceptualization of democracy in light of a plural divinity. As Derrida argues, not only has the modern notion of sovereignty been rendered obsolete by global capital, but it has also contributed to the abuse of the law and is in contradiction to the democratic principle of the rule of law. Therefore, to the extent that the modern political notion of sovereignty is the secular actualization of a monotheistic theology, then it is that very theology that must come under explicit scrutiny. It is worth recalling here where Tocqueville chose to draw his own battle line and issue his clarion call. It was on the theopolitical terrain, specifically over the issue of what he perceived to be the pantheistic inclinations of modern democratic culture. As Tocqueville wrote, democracy’s “principal effect on philosophy” was to promote “pantheism,” by which he understood the individual’s experience of massiveness, of being lost and swallowed up in the indiscriminate, the realization that the most powerful forces at work in society are unlocatable, untraceable, anonymous. It is in this sense that he came to see democracy as “a desire to dissolve all differences,” even “the primary division of things” between “creation and creator,” and thus as a force to be curtailed. Returning to Stout and Carter, they see this less as an expression of pantheism and more simply the consequence of the disestablishment of religion. It is true, as Tocqueville perceived, that with democracy there is no governing, or mutually agreed-upon, theo-logic that gives coherence and order to the diffuse social sphere. There is no controlling center or single source of power from which all else emanates. There is no presumed natural hierarchy likened to the great chain of being. Such differences are indeed dissolved. But Tocqueville forgets his own discovery of the great irony of religion in American life—namely, by this great dissolution, differences are not eliminated but multiply exponentially. By denaturalizing religion, religion finds— if only by necessity—its own force and vitality. Thus while differences are equalized, this need not necessarily indicate the reign of cultural uniformity. It is why for Stout and Carter religion’s great benefit lies in its potential status as an autonomous intermediary institution. It does not, and need not, speak in the same voice or even in accordance with the same logic or rationale as that of the normative legal and political discourse. In short, if the nature of democratic power is diffused, the religious groups represent a power center, albeit in a

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radically decentralized system. And if the concept of sovereignty is transformed, if not rendered obsolete, by democracy, then by virtue of religion’s role as an autonomous intermediary, religion represents a sphere of sovereignty—but a sphere that is overlaid, even fractured and broken open by innumerable others that also face the force of democracy’s massive social pressure.

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To conclude, it is incumbent that we face another irony, perhaps the greatest irony of all the ones running through the pages of this work. Namely, while making the argument for the critical importance of political theology for the project of radical democracy, and while affirming the postsecular reconfiguration of the public sphere by which religion is recognized as a vital and inescapable dimension of our politics, the democratic political theology that I am advancing is largely a secularized one. First of all, to reiterate the argument made by Stout: democratic reasoning might be secularized in the sense that it functions autonomously from religious control and independent of religious authority, but it is not necessarily an expression of secularism in the sense that it rules out religious expression or the logic of religious conviction as it pertains to public policy. For Stout, this is an expression of the middle ground that he is forging between what he terms Rawlsian liberalism on the one hand and the new traditionalists on the other. The problem, as Stout sees it, is that modern liberal philosophy inevitably treats religion as a “conversation stopper,” whereas the new traditionalists fail to recognize how democracy itself functions as a tradition with its own ethical norms. Against the liberal secularists, Stout shows how religion functions as a tool of instruction, as a mobilizing force within a community, and, indeed, as a point of negotiation requiring constant reflection and scrutiny. “It is true that the expression of religious premises sometimes leads to discursive impasse in political debate,” Stout admits. “But there are many important issues that cannot be resolved solely on the basis of arguments from commonly held principles.” It is in this limited sense that Stout proclaims: “Traditionalists are right .  .  . to argue that ethical and political reasoning are creatures of tradition and crucially depend on the acquisition of such virtues as practical wisdom and justice.”10 The new traditionalists go too far, however, in portraying modern democratic societies as being essentially nihilistic, without any unify-

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ing framework, and, thus, in stark contrast to the comprehensive visions offered by the religious traditions. In carving out a middle position between Rawlsian liberalism and the postliberalism of the new traditionalists, Stout articulates a distinctly postsecular vision of democracy. But like his point about democratic reasoning being secularized without itself being an expression of secularism, we might say the same about the alternative political theology envisioned here. By making the case for a democratic political theology the aim is not to assert or restore religion as the base of society or as its necessary cultural norm, apart from which our politics and culture would degenerate into a mere expression of our forever unsatiated self-interests. And certainly political theology is not being posed here as the alternative to the dominant political philosophy. The problem with the first is not only that it denies the inescapable fact of religious diversity in modern society and the consequent conflict of interpretations that is central to contemporary hermeneutical theory,11 but also that it is so clearly an ideological argument that uses religion as a weapon or tool to advance a purely political agenda. It is one thing, as we saw done so masterfully by Michael Allen Gillespie in chapter 5, to demonstrate the theological origins of the modern world—how even the ideal of the modern secular nation-state is a product of a particular religious history and thus might make sense only within a specific cultural context—but it is quite another to allow that history to blind us to the other important genealogical strands in the making of the modern world, to fall prey to the myth of pure origin and monogenesis. The problem with the second is that even while recognizing the almost irresistible power of the reigning political ideology, which governs by the systemic collaboration between the economic and political elites and has no qualms in using the military force of state power to ensure worldwide compliance, its resistance relies on some power outside ourselves, by its insistence on the transcendent base of authority. But as Wittgenstein has long since taught us, “the world is all that is the case.” By understanding the nature of democratic power as a diffused power, or as what Hardt and Negri describe as “network power,” this should not be understood merely as an acknowledgement of limitation and weakness—for example, Tocqueville’s fear of the individual’s experience of massiveness, of being lost and swallowed up in the indiscriminate, the realization that the most powerful forces at work in society are unlocatable, untraceable, anonymous— but also as the inescapable condition of political possibility. Contrary

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to what Tocqueville’s predecessors and peers in political theory have thought, democratic politics is not an oxymoron. With democracy, political power is construed in a radically immanent form to be sure, but within that immanent frame there remains infinite possibility. This is precisely what is given voice in the questions that Negri asks in his introduction to “Kairòs, Alma Vensu, Multitudo” from Time for Revolution: now that “the capitalist regime has made itself totalitarian and certainly fiercer” by its investment in the “whole of life,” “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of reappropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?”12 Thus, the democratic political theology envisioned here is neither an ideological argument for restoring religion to a place of centrality for what is otherwise feared to be a nihilistic culture nor a positing of some transcendent base of authority by which a more potent form of political resistance might be developed and deployed. It is instead only a supplement to a much larger effort at rethinking the conceptual bases for democratic theory and practice. While it is only a supplement, it is a necessary one, one without which the emerging political subject would be bereft of one of its historically most potent animating forces in religion and blind to its own underlying religious assumptions, even if these are of an antireligious or purely secular bent. What political theology brings is a sustained focus on the nature of sovereign power. What this study has tried to demonstrate is how democracy fundamentally alters the experience and understanding of sovereign power. In this way, it is not only the political instantiation of the death of God but also a theological affirmation of the political power particular to humanity. On this last point, Negri contrasts the “City of Man” with the “City of God” in a reversal of St. Augustine’s classic work in political theology. He calls the City of Man an “irreversible decision” that “loosed the arrow of the revolutionary temporality of the common.” In the face of this democratic revolution, he goes on to say, “the City of God is now only a bad stench” (261). The point here, which is also part of his own political strategy, is the utter and absolute repudiation of any and all forms of transcendental authority. This is where political theology becomes radically democratic: not only in the City of Man, which is the world shared in common—in the words of Negri, “the world of everyday life, is the teleological machine of the common”—but in common opposition to the City of God, “because,” as

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Negri writes, “materialist teleology poses the eternity of finitude against the transcendental or eschatological infinite” (236). Radically immanent but still nevertheless, and as such, containing within itself worlds of infinite possibility and a political potency that rests on its own generative potential: democracy as the theological affirmation of the power particular to humanity is “the decision of the multitude over itself” (258). So understood, the political potency that is key to radical democracy’s resistance to all forms of hegemony comes not by way of a transcendent authority—by an appeal to some power outside ourselves—but by way of an exodus emanating from within: “In postmodernity,” Negri writes, “the eminent form of rebellion is the exodus from obedience, that is to say, from participation in measure, i.e., as the opening to the immeasurable.” This is not an exodus that checks out, absolving oneself from one’s own complicity in the capitalist regime, which is as antidemocratic as it is antipolitical—which, as we have seen, are one and the same—nor is it a spiritual retreat, a merely temporary reprieve to shore up the soul. On the contrary, as Negri insists, “Exodus is a creative event”: Therefore, in the biopolitical postmodern, “doing politics” means first of all to resist and rebel. . . . For that reason, “doing politics” means to take leave of domination, to take leave of the Power of the State and every transcendental illusion in order to produce new common cooperative temporalities and spaces on the edge of being, and to realize the amorous innovation that bestows meaning on common being. (260–261)

As a radical democracy that insists upon the immanence of our common life together and the generative power that comes from our modes of cooperation, both already present and still to come, this is a project that is theopolitical as well. A valorization of the City of Man as our home, a grappling with the nature of sovereign power as it has become radically transformed by its divestment and diffusion, and an affirmation of humanity’s own creative capacities and political potency—this alternative political theology proves itself both possible and a necessary supplement to radical philosophy’s project at rethinking the conceptual bases of democracy itself.

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Notes

Introduction 1. John Caputo, On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 37. 2. Jürgen Habermas, “ ‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” as delivered at the Symposium on the Power of Religion in the Public Sphere at New York University on October 22, 2009. This lecture, along with those from Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor, is scheduled for publication in a forthcoming volume edited by Eduardo Mendiata and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press). 3. Eric Hobsbawn, The New Century: In Conversation with A. Polito, trans. A. Cameron (London: Abacus, 2000), 50. In their forthcoming book Hermeneutic Communism, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala expand on this observation by Hobsbawn to make the argument that liberalism is in practice a form of “armed capitalism” that while providing for procedural change actually precludes the possibility of any meaningful political change whatsoever. 4. Habermas, “ ‘The Political.’ ” 5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), xii. 6. Der Spiegel interview with Martin Heidegger (1966). http://web.ics. purdue.edu/~other1/Heidegger%20Der%20Spiegel.pdf.

introduction

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7. See Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYRB, 2001). 8. See John Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972). 9. See Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (New York: Routledge, 2001). 10. For instance, see Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 79. 11. For instance, see Winquist, Desiring Theology, 28–30. See also Charles E. Winquist, The Surface of the Deep (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2003), 119–121. 12. Nick Brown, “The Conservatism of Radical Theology,” Political Theology 4, no. 1 (November 2002): 83. 13. Ibid., 87–88. 14. Richard Fenn, “The Death of God: An Analysis of Ideological Crisis,” Review of Religious Research 9, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 179. 15. Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 1995), 149. 16. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 163–164. 17. Another model of political theology that might be considered is that of process theology. Like the radical theology discussed above, process theology has effectively called into question much of traditional Christian thought, most especially the notion of God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. And like liberation theology, it has incorporated analyses of power and raised questions of justice that have often been neglected by the radical theologians. For instance, see Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, God-Christ-Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1989), especially chaps. 7 and 17; and C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology: A Basic Introduction (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1993), especially chaps. 3 and 9. My critique of process thought is twofold: First, it still operates almost exclusively from within a Christian confessional framework and thus remains questionable as a resource for a public theology and limited as an analysis of postmodern pluralism. Second, process theologians remain by and large wedded to the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, with the ironic result of turning his famous image of speculative thought as the “flight of an aeroplane” into, at times at least, a rigid system of Whiteheadian dogma. 18. Alistair Kee, “The Conservatism of Liberation Theology: Four Questions for Jon Sobrino,” Political Theology (November 2000): 32.

1. democracy, mo re o r l ess

19. Ibid., 42. For a fuller account of this critique, see Alistair Kee, Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1990). 20. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7. 21. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36. 22. See Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), 180. 23. See Habermas, “ ‘The Political.’ ” 24. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 25. Ibid., 12. 26. Alan Wolfe, “A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us to Understand Contemporary Politics,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 30 (April 2, 2004): B16.

1. Democracy, More or Less 1. For instance, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 168–174. 2. See Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986). 3. See Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (New York: HarperOne, 2006). 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 611. 5. See ibid., 271. 6. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), xiii. 7. Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 4. 8. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 46–47. 9. Ibid., 212. 10. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 230. 11. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), 13. 12. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 19. 13. Ibid., 20. 14. Ibid., 23–24. 15. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 116.

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1. dem o cracy, more or less

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16. For instance, see Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004). 17. http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm. 18. For instance, see the contemporaneous coverage from the New York Times in David Kirpatrick’s story from August 22, 2004: “Fukuyama Makes History; War Heats Up in the Neoconservative Fold.” 19. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 54. 20. For one of the most exhaustive treatments of this subject, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 16–17. 22. Ibid., vii. 23. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: Norton, 2003), 13. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. Ibid., 17. While Zakaria intends this as a cautionary tale, anticipating our discussion of Carl Schmitt that will come in later chapters, it should be noted here how Schmitt provided a legal defense of Hitler’s coming to power. This can be seen most directly in his essay “The Führer Protects the Law,” about which Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward write: “It is undisputed that Schmitt’s essay ‘The Führer Protects the Law’ follows the rhetoric of the party of which he was now a member. The Reichspräsident, the pouvoir neuter, the commissionary dictator who was seen as a protector of the constitution became a tyrant. Politically, this was the end of the Weimar Republic, and it came about legally and in accordance with the constitution.” In Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 14. 26. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 17. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 243. 29. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 174. 30. Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006), 8. 31. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 176. 32. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 242, 248. 33. Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, 8. 34. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 18, 17. 35. Ibid., 11–12. 36. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 242.

Interlude: Managing Democracy Abroad 1. Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 2. 2. Ibid., 52. 3.  http://www.c-span.org/executive/transcript.asp?cat=current_event& code=bush_admin&year=2005. 4. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172. 5. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), esp. 325–384. 6. For instance, see James K. Galbraith, “Doing Maths in Mexico,” Guardian (July 17, 2006). For a fuller discussion of the controversies surrounding this election from the perspective of common citizens in Mexico, see Luis Mandoki’s documentary Fraude: Mexico 2006. 7. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 117. 8. See “A Chaotic Kenya Vote and a Secret U.S. Exit Poll,” New York Times (January 31, 2009).

2. democracy, radi cal l y co ncei ved

37. Ibid., 244. 38. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 112. 39. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, xxvi–xxvii. 40. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 29. 41. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 81.

2. Democracy, Radically Conceived 1. Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006), 2. 2. As cited in Bertlinde Laniel, Le mot democracy aux Etats-Unis de 1780 a 1856 (Presses Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 1995), 65. 3. Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, 65, 2. 4. Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin, 2005), 13. 5. Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, 37. 6. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: Norton, 2003), 22. 7. Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, 7. 8. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 9. Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, 23. 10. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), 9.

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2 . dem o cracy, rad ically conceived

198

11. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988). 12. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 13. 13. Schmitt, quoted in Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 53. 14. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 54. 15. Schmitt, quoted in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 2000), 264. 16. See Dean Baker, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (New York: Polipoint Press, 2009). 17. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003), 249.

3. Political Theology and the Postsecular 1. Hent de Vries, “Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Politcal,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3. 2. This understanding of secularization contrasts with the other understandings, most notably the French model of laïcité. These contrasting contemporary models of secularization is perhaps best explained by the anticlerical tradition in France, which does not have a precise analogue in the American experience. 3. Peter Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (New York: Anchor, 1993), 37. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 71. 5. De Vries, “Introduction,” 27. 6. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 102, 101. 7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3. 8. Michael Hardt, “Jefferson and Democracy,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (March 2007): 59. 9. De Vries, “Introduction,” 25. 10. Chantal Mouffe, “Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 320. 11. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Anchor, 1994), 6.

3 . political theolo gy and t he po st s ecul ar

12. See “Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective.” http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575. 13. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, 9, 16. 14. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 10. 15. Incidentally, this is also the argument from the recent bestseller from the progressive evangelical Christian pastor Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (New York: HarperOne, 2006). In his mind, the left jettisons religion at its own peril, creating a soulless and cynical politics that the right easily exploits. 16. See Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left, and Each Other (New York: Penguin, 1998). 17. For instance, see Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). The final three chapters chronicle the tangible public impact of religion in shaping contemporary American politics, from the civil-rights movement, to the political mobilization of the Religious Right, and finally to emergence of what he terms the “Religious Left.” 18. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 98, 95. 19. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104. Emphasis his. 20. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 44, 41. 21. Peter Berger, Jonathan Sacks, David Martin, Tu Weiming, George Weigel, Grace Davie, and Abdullahi An-Naim, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 18. 22. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (New York: Belknap, 2007), 14. 23. Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor, 1980). 24. Taylor, A Secular Age, 4. 25. For instance, see their roundtable discussion with Richard Rorty on the tasks of progressive politics in the age of globalization: “A Roundtable on Globalization,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 8, no. 2 (Spring 2007). http://www.jcrt.org/archives/08.2/roundtable.pdf. 26. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 16.

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i nterl ude: t he i rani an revolution redux

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Interlude: The Iranian Revolution Redux 1. Martin Amis, “The End of Iran’s Ayatollahs?” The Guardian (July 17, 2009). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/17/martin-amis-iran. 2. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4. 3. See Eqbal Ahmad, “Straight Talk on Terrorism,” delivered at the University of Colorado at Boulder on October 12, 1998. This speech was later published in Monthly Review (January 2002) and included as a part of a published collection of Ahmad’s writings entitled, Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001). Edward Said once described Ahmad as “one of the most brilliant and unusual political thinkers and activists of the last thirty-five years” and as “perhaps the shrewdest and most original antiimperialist analyst of the post-war world, especially in the dynamics between the West and the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa.” AlAhram Weekly (May 9, 1999). 4. Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” http:// www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/007863.html. 5. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, “The Seductions of Islamism: Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution,” New Politics 10, no. 1 (Summer 2004). http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue37/Afary37.htm. 6. Quoted in ibid. 7. Quoted in ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Reuel Marc Gerecht, “The Koran and the Ballot Box,” New York Times ( June 21, 2009). 10. Jon Meacham, “Theocracies Are Doomed. Thank God,” Newsweek ( June 29, 2009): 9. 11. Fareed Zakaria, “Theocracy and Its Discontents,” Newsweek (June 29, 2009): 30. 12. Slavoj Žižek, “Will the Cat Above the Precipice Fall Down?” This was posted in a blog as early as June 24, 2009. http://www.htlblog.com/?p=519. 13. Ibid. 14. Mark Hosenhall, “Wired for Revolution,” Newsweek (June 22, 2009): 14. 15. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, “I Speak for Mousavi. And Iran,” The Guardian ( June 19, 2009). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/19/ iran-election-mousavi-ahmadinejad.

1. For two contrasting assessments of this so-called theological turn in contemporary philosophy, see Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Francoise Courtine, Jean-Louis Chretien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); and Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 2. Johannes Baptist Metz, Theology of the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969). 3. Johannes Baptist Metz, “Political Theology: A New Paradigm of Theology?” in Civil Religion and Political Theology, ed. L. Rouner (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 141–153. 4. See Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur. Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1928). 5. Hoelzl and Ward’s “Editors’ Introduction” to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 12. 6. As quoted by Hoelzl and Ward, ibid., 11. 7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 330–331. 8. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 9. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2, 4, 1, 23, 29. 10. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 171. 11. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 83. 12. This is the argument made by the historian of religion Ira Chernus in his chronicling of both the genealogy of the neoconservative movement and the impact that its ideology had in shaping the Bush administration’s response to 9/11: Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (New York: Paradigm, 2006). 13. Scott Horton, “State of Exception: Bush’s War on the Rule of Law,” Harper’s (June 2007). 14. Quoted by Horton.

4. political theolo gy, beyo nd des pai r

4. Political Theology, Beyond Despair

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4. po l i t i cal t heo l o gy, beyond despair

15. William Scheuerman, “Carl Schmitt and the Road to Abu Ghraib,” Constellations 13, no. 1 (2006): 108. 16. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 38. 17. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 2000), 254. 18. In Schmitt, Political Theology II, 20. 19. As quoted by Schmitt in Political Theology II, 45–46. 20. See Schmitt, Political Theology II, 21. 21. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYRB, 2001), 60. 22. Alan Wolfe, “A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us to Understand Contemporary Politics,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 30 (April 2, 2004): B16. 23. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 44. 24. Lilla, The Reckless Mind, 76. 25. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 212. 26. Ibid., 99. 27. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 72. 28. Jim Wallis, “Dangerous Religion: George W. Bush’s Theology of Empire,” Sojourners Magazine (September–October 2003). http://www.sojo.net/ index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0309&article=030910. 29. Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (London: Verso, 2003). 30. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8. 31. Ibid., xiv, emphasis theirs. 32. Ibid., 3. 33. Ibid., 20. 34. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. 35. Agamben, State of Exception, 87.

5. Political Theologies, or Finding an Alternative to Schmitt

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1. Johannes Baptist Metz, “Political Theology: A New Paradigm of Theology?” in Civil Religion and Political Theology, ed. L. Rouner (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 144. 2. Jürgen Habermas, “ ‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” as delivered at the Symposium on the Power of Religion in the Public Sphere at New York University on

5 . political theolo gi es , o r fi ndi ng an al ternative to schmitt

October 22, 2009. Forthcoming in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendiata and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press). 3. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), 3. 4. Carl Raschke, “The Religion of Politics: Concerning a Postmodern Political Theology ‘to Come.’ ” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 103. 5. Lilla, The Stillborn God, 75, 76. 6. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Boston: The MIT Press, 2003). 7. Lilla, The Stillborn God, 213. 8. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 10. 9. For the classic case of this, see Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1962). 10. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 122. 11. For this read on Luther’s life and times, see Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 12. For instance, see Ira Chernus, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (New York: Paradigm, 2006); and Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Viking, 2006). Chernus shows how the Bush administration’s war on terror is simply the latest round in the ongoing American culture wars, wherein the right’s perception of the decadence of American society requires the invention of enemies as monsters to destroy as a means to rearm the moral fight of good versus evil. Chernus’s argument is that the war on terror is not based on a realistic assessment of threats against American national security but rather an ideological one impermeable to critical scrutiny. Phillips shows how the influence of the Religious Right’s focus on the end times precludes the implementation of longterm policy prescriptions, especially when it concerns energy and the transition to a post-oil economy. 13. As quoted in Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 122. 14. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1984). 15. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 171. 16. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 101. 17. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 254.

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6. t he t heo po l i t ics of democracy

6. The Theopolitics of Democracy 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 71. 2. Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 194–195. 3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,  The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), 21. 4. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, 336. 5. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 15. 6. Quoted in Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, 109. 7. Quoted in ibid., 186. 8. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 521. 9. Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin, 2005), xiv. 10. Peter Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the TwentyFirst Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 140. 11. Ibid., 142. 12. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 9. 13. Quoted in Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Revolution (New York: Franklin Watts, 1986), 34. 14. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 10. 15. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 58. 16. Quoted in ibid., 186. 17. Quoted in ibid., 71. 18. Quoted in ibid., 197.

Interlude: The Messianic as a Democratic Political Theology 1. John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007), 88. 2. Tracy B. Strong, “Foreword,” in Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25. 3. Schmitt, Political Theology, 50, 51.

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conclusion: from t he o ne to t he m any

4. See John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), esp. 23–41. 5. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 97. 6. As quoted in ibid., 104. 7. Antonio Negri, “Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly Life,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, no. 1 (2008): 100. 8. Rene Girard, The Girard Reader, ed. J. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 168. 9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 254. 10. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 42. 11. Ibid., 62. 12. Ibid., 63. 13. Ibid., 67.

Conclusion: From the One to the Many 1. Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 136–137. 2. Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006), 31. 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8. Italics theirs. 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), xi. 5. Ibid., 212. 6. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 83. 8. For a full development of the dangers and contradictions inherent in the contemporary fascination and flirtation with Schmitt, see Alan Wolfe, “A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us to Understand Contemporary Politics,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 30 (April 2, 2004): B16; and Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYRB, 2001). 9. Hent de Vries, “Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the

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Theologico-Political,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 27. 10. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 10–11. 11. See especially Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. Charles Freilich (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974). 12. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (New York: Continuum, 2003), 144–145.

Index

Adams, John, 59 Afary, Janet, 99 Agamben, Giorgio, 118, 127; on the Apostle Paul, 175–179; on the state of exception, 14, 109, 116, 185 Ali, Tariq, 124 American hegemony, 121, 124, 126, 152 American imperialism, 124, 152 American Revolution, 57, 60–62, 166, 170, 197, 204 Anderson, Kevin, 99–101 Aristotle, 22–23, 57–58, 144 Asad, Talal, 93–94, 137, 139 Augustine, 113, 143, 146, 190 Authority: of the people, 168–169; priestly, 135, 145, 169; religious, 13, 80, 90, 93, 121–122, 135,

140, 148–149, 165, 169, 188; secular, 2, 140, 146–147; sovereign, 109, 122, 177; of the state, 2, 3, 88, 131; of tradition, 143, 167; transcendent, 155, 174, 191 Balakrishnan, Gopal, 70–71, 117 Barber, Benjamin, 3, 42–49, 70, 82; on savage capitalism, 45–47 Barth, Karl, 134, 136 Bellah, Robert, 125–126 Benjamin, Walter, 118, 131, 177–178 Berger, Peter, 79–80, 94–95, 153 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 7, 178 Brown, Nick, 8 Bultmann, Rudolf, 7 Bush, George W., 21, 39, 114–115, 138, 186; and the Iraq War,

index

Bush, George W. (continued) 51–52; and neoconservatism, 32– 35; second inaugural address, 52; theology of empire, 124–125; and the war on terror, 55, 115, 123 Capitalism, 45, 159; armed capitalism, 193; and democracy, 40, 43, 45–46; free-market, 5; global, 41, 45, 53, 70, 152; laissez-faire, 43; Caputo, John, ii, 2, 173–176 Carter, Stephen, 86–88, 90–91, 96, 106, 184, 187 Chop, Rebecca S., 57 Civil religion, 80, 125–126, 161, 164–165, 172, 181–182, 201–202 Civil Rights, 9, 21–22, 86, 90, 199 Civil society, 2, 65 Citizenship: in contrast to consumerism, 45; and democracy, 38, 42, 48, 158; engaged, 23, 40, 157; making of, 23, 156, 157, 164; need for, 158; political capacity of, 38; rights of, 39 Clash of Civilizations, 104, 131, 139 Community, 2, 13, 37, 65, 89, 157, 176, 188, 197 Consumerism, 41, 47 Corporate power, 4, 26–27, 54, 56, 72 Crouch, Colin, 26, 32, 38–42, 44–45, 50–51, 54; on postdemocracy, 26, 42 Cupitt, Don, 8 Democracy: as anarchic government, 14, 57, 59–60, 63–64, 72, 74, 164, 169, 174; axiom of, 29, 32, 71, 81, 95; culture of, 24, 158, 162, 187; deliberative de-

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mocracy; 43, 48, 68; as the political instantiation of the death of God, 6, 80, 155, 165, 181, 190; as the principle of politics, 62, 65, 74; radical 5, 6, 15, 19–20, 61, 67, 71–72, 74, 77–78, 98, 120, 154, 181, 184, 188, 191; representative, 64; theory of, x, 1, 4–6, 15, 20, 22, 66, 68, 81–82, 84, 113, 116, 120, 129, 137–138, 156, 176, 178, 180, 186, 190; Derrida, Jacques, 118, 131; critique of Carl Schmitt, 110–114, 185; on democracy, 28, 49, 187; on sovereignty, 81–82 Descartes, Rene, 141–142, 148–152 De Vries, Hent, 79, 81–82, 84, 186–187 Dewey, John, 19 Empire: age of, 82, 120; American, 117, 123–124; and global capital, 5; and military force, 27; postimperialistic, 126; theology of, 121, 123–126. See also M. Hardt and A. Negri. Energy, 4, 64, 71–72, 203 Enlightenment, 2, 23–24, 60, 93– 95, 141, 148, 165, 170 Equality cult of, 24; and democracy, 27–30, 37, 39, 67, 146, 158; and modernity, 24; passion of, 27, 171; political, 22; and the priesthood of believers, 145; : in tension with political liberty, 29, 38, 60, 61, 66, 166; universal, 67 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 141–152 Exception, state of, 13–14, 31, 109, 116, 126–127, 174, 179, 185–

Faith, 9, 21, 38; Christian, 8, 107, 144; crisis of, 141, 149, 151– 152, 161; in democracy, 15; and knowledge, 93; and politics, 90–91, 123; and reason, 126, 141 Fanaticism, 91, 101, 131–132, 138– 139, 147, 152 Fascism, 26, 35–37, 112–113, 127– 128, 186, 195, 202, 205 Fenn, Richard, 9 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 134, 165 Foucault, Michel, 14, 106; on the Iranian Revolution, 98–105 Founding Fathers, 59–60, 64 Freedom: and democracy, 29; and equality, 166; and G.W. Bush, 32–35, 51, 52; and individualism, 8, 38; and liberalism, 3; religious, 20, 79, 87–88; of the will, 143– 151. See also liberty Freud, Sigmund, 8, 103 Fukuyama, Francis, 33–38, 41–42, 44, 66, 71; and the end of history, 139 Fundamentalism, 11, 46, 90, 102– 103, 121–124, 127, 202 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 130–131, 139–142, 144–154, 189 Girard, Rene, 177–178 God: death of, 6–7, 9, 80, 134, 137, 155, 165, 175, 181–182, 190, 194, 199; and omnipotence, 14, 185; and power, 6, 141, 143–144, 165, 182; and sovereignty, 82, 84, 108– 110, 122, 126, 155, 185; and transcendence, x, 14, 82, 84, 108–110,

122, 126, 155, 174, 185; weakness of, 6–7, 173–174, 205 Goodchild, Phillip, 10 Great Awakening, 167–169

index

186, 201–202, 205. See also G. Agamben and C. Schmitt

Habermas, Jürgen, 2–3, 13, 20, 68, 128, 130–131, 152 Hardt, Michael, 4–6, 108, 124–127, 180, 189; on the multitude, 121– 122, 183; on network power, 182, 189; on political theology, 84; on postnationalism, 82; on radical democracy, 120; on sovereignty, 83–84 Hatch, Nathan, 166, 168–172 Hegel, G.W.F, ii, 134–135 Hegemony, 4, 45, 72, 82, 95, 191; American, 121, 124, 126, 152; Western, 137 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 13, 74, 131 Heterogeneity, 67, 69 Hitler, Adolf, 13, 39, 67, 112, 117 Hobbes, Thomas, 31, 83, 122, 130, 134–137, 140–142, 149–153 Homogeneity, 67, 69, 183 Horton, Scott, 114–116, 186 Humanism, 14, 136, 141–142, 148, 150–151; Christian, 144–145 Ideology: and American hegemony, 121, free-market, 4, 33, 43, 47; and global capitalism, 9, 100; jihadist, 35–36, 100; neoconservative, 27; secular, 79, 86, 90, 92, 97, 121, 126, 137–138 Iran, 98–105, 124 Iraq, 33, 34–36, 51–54, 124 Jefferson, Thomas, 30, 60, 83, 102

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index

Jenkins, Philip, 11–12 Jesus, 170, 173, 176–177 Kant, Immanuel, 134–135 Kee, Alistair, 11 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 98–99, 103–104 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 28, 86 Klein, Naomi, 53 Law: abuse of, 82, 187; immutability of, 58; and justice, 28; lawfare, 114–115, 186; natural, 14, 118; and popular sovereignty, 29; rule of, 13, 22, 35, 37, 57, 59, 66, 82, 109, 114–116, 185–187, 201; Sharia, 87; and the state of exception, 109, 127; suspension of, 108, 176 Lazier, Benjamin, 155 Liberalism: critique of, 3, 14–15, 77, 184, 186, 194; failure of, 4, 77, 126, 130, 195; modern, 1–5, 13– 15, 19–20, 67–68, 70–71, 77, 83, 90, 109, 116, 127, 130–131, 133– 137, 152, 154, 182, 184–186, 188; philosophy based on, 2, 4–5, 36, 45, 89, 130, 156, 182, 188; neoliberalism, 3–4, 33–34, 36, 41, 44– 45, 71, 139, 146; postliberalism, 4–5, 15, 66, 89, 189 Lilla, Mark, 6, 118, 120, 130–140, 153–154, 182, 184–186, 188; on the great separation, 130, 132– 135, 137; and the politics of theological despair, xi, 6, 120, 126, 184; A Stillborn God, 130– 131, 133–137, 182 Luther, Martin, 141–152

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Madison, James, 79 Marx, Karl, 8, 14, 159–160 Meier, Heinrich, 109, 112 Metz, Johannes Baptist, 107, 128–129 Milbank, John, 89 Mill, John Stuart, 156 Modernity, 2, 46, 80, 102, 123, 128, 130, 133, 139–141, 145, 150– 153, 157, 160, 175, 191 Monarchy, 99, 109, 116, 122, 155, 162, 174, 185 Money, 4, 73, 203 Morgan, Edmund, 30–31 Mouffe, Chantal, 14, 66–72, 84–86, 88, 90, 118, 184 Multitude, 57–59, 73, 121, 122, 127, 162, 177–179; constituent power of, 73, 83–84, 176, 181; and cooperation, 73; decision of, 73; madness of, 61; in contrast to the people, 6, 104, 122; and sovereignty, 83; as unruly/ ungovernable, 32, 58, 65. See also M. Hardt and A. Negri Nash, Gary, 57, 60–62, 166–168, 171–172 Nationalism, 102, 124–125, 159 Nation-state, 5, 43, 45, 47, 49, 120, 124–125, 159, 182, 189 Nazism, 13, 67, 112, 116–117, 186 Negri, Antonio, 4–6, 108, 127, 173, 176, 180, 183; on the multitude, 73–74, 121–122, 183; and network power, 182, 189; on political theology, 84; and the politics of love, 72; on postnationalism, 82, 124–126; on radical democ-

Obama, Barack, 21 Paul, 136, 144, 175–176, 178 Plato, 57–59, 64, 131, 134 Pluralism, 2, 20, 68–70, 73, 80–82, 84–85, 90–91, 121–122, 128, 181, 184, 186–187, 194 Political: concept of, 13, 67, 69, 71– 72, 74, 81, 84, 106, 108, 110– 111, 113–114, 122, 126–127, 129, 153, 174, 180–181, 185– 186, 195, 204; culture, 86–88, 91, 156–159; neutralization, 13, 70–71, 110, 112, 131, 158, 160, 184; post-political, 3; resistance, 6, 15, 190 Political theology: as antidemocratic, 1, 4, 12–13, 19–20, 25, 106, 116, 120, 153, 184; contemporary interest in/new paradigm of, 118, 128–130; as critique of modern liberalism, 14–15, 77; and democracy, 1–3, 5–6, 15, 19, 22, 78, 81, 97, 113; immanent, 83–84; “one God—one King,” 110, 116, 122, pluralization of, 81, 186; postsecular, 120, 126; and the public role of religion, 107; radical, ii, 6, 9, 12; as rejec-

tion of/opposition to democracy, 5, 15, 71, 78, 84, 109, 126, 127, 130; and sovereign power, 4, 13 42–43, 84, 108, 127; and the state of exception, 109. See also M. Gillespie, M. Lilla, J. Metz, C. Schmitt and B. Spinoza Popular sovereignty, 5, 24, 29–31, 66, 71, 99, 122, 127, 171, 195 Power: coming-to-power, 6, 98, 172, 196; democratic, 5, 74, 182, 187, 189; diffused, 5, 71, 156–159, 162–163, 165, 167, 172, 182, 183, 187, 189; generative, 73, 191; network, 182–183, 189; political, x, 5, 22, 32, 48, 52, 71, 73, 87, 99, 190; sovereign, 4–6, 45, 74, 82, 143, 163, 165, 172, 175–176, 181–183, 190–191; of the state, 65, 176, 189 Putnam, Robert, 65

index

racy, 78, 120; Time for Revolution, 190–191 Neoconservativism, 27, 32–34, 38, 53, 114, 123, 128, 146, 185 Neoliberalism, 3–4, 33–34, 36, 41, 44–45, 71, 139, 146 Neuhaus, Richard John, 20, 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ii, 8, 133, 155 Nominalism, 141, 148–151

Rancière, Jacques, 41, 60, 62–65, 70–72, 157, 170, 180–183; critique of Plato, 58–59; “deadman-god”, 182; on democracy as the principle of politics, 62, 74; The Hatred of Democracy, 40, 50, 57, 59, 64, 66, 71–72, 157, 180– 181, 183; on radical democracy, 63, 78 Raschke, Carl, 7, 133–134 Rationalism, 68, 93, 96, 137–138, 148 Rawls, John, 2–3, 14, 20, 68, 89, 188–189 Rebellion, 6, 15, 83, 132, 145, 147, 177, 190–191

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Reformation, 79, 94–95, 122, 141– 144, 146–149, 151, 167, 170; Radical Reformation, 147 Religion: disestablishment of, 80, 122, 161, 187; as a mobilizing force, 89, 120, 188; politics of, 121, 167; return of, 1, 10, 78, 96, 121, 128, 131 Religious Right, 92, 123, 131, 199, 203 Religious theory, 2, 199, 203, 205 Revelation, 132, 135, 136, 144, 177 Revolutionary, 5, 7, 12, 57, 60, 64, 98–100, 125–126, 147–148, 151, 157–158, 160–162, 166, 168, 175–176, 182, 190; Postrevolutionary, 5, 158, 161, 181 Robinson, John, 7 Rodinson, Maxime, 101 Rorty, Richard, 3, 20 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134–136, 157 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane, ii, 1

enmity, 72; and the politics of theological despair, 6, 106–127, 184; Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 119; on transcendence, 173–174, 176 Scholasticism, 141–142, 148 Science, 63, 129, 140–141, 148– 152 Scripture, 138, 142–143, 145 Secular reason, 2, 88, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 108, 126, 174–175 Secular state, 3, 80, 149 Secularization, 1–2, 79–80, 85, 92– 95, 97, 100, 102, 108, 120–123, 126, 131, 198–199 Separation of Church and State, 20, 80, 85–87, 94, 102 Socrates, 59, 71 Spinoza, Baruch, 12–14, 83, 164, 173, 176 Stout, Jeffrey, 10, 86, 88–90, 106, 120, 184, 187–189 Strong, Tracy, 174

Scheuerman, William, 115 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 134 Schmitt, Carl, 3, 14–15, 43, 66–72, 77, 78, 81, 128–131, 133, 137, 150, 152–154, 155, 176, 184– 186; on the concept of sovereignty, 81, 83–84, 106, 129, 180– 181; The Concept of the Political, 67; contrast with Baruch Spinoza, 13–14; The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 67; on the critique of liberalism, 4, 19–20, 66–71, 152, 184; and Nazism, 67, 186; Political Theology, 13–14, 72, 108, 110; Political Theology II, 77, 107, 116, 119; and the politics of

Taubes, Jacob, 118, 176 Taylor, Charles, 2, 94–96 Theology: Academic, 10–11; classical, 7, 14; death-of-God theology, 7, 9, 175; liberal theology; liberation theology; 11–12, 194– 195, 134–137, postmodern theology, 7–8; radical theology, xi, 1 3, 6–12, 15, 194; secular theology, xi, 7, 14; weak theology, 174, 176 Tillich, Paul, 7 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 23–27, 29, 39, 58, 63, 80, 91, 155–165, 169, 181–183, 187, 189–190; Democracy in America, 5, 23, 156, 160, 161, 163, 165; on democratic

Vattimo, Gianni, ii, 92–93, 95–96, 121

Wallis, Jim, 123–125 Weimar Republic, 13, 108, 110, 115, 196 Whitefield, George, 167–168 Williams, Rowan, 87 Wolfe, Alan, 14, 91, 119 Wolin, Sheldon, 26–27, 31–32, 40– 41, 43, 46, 50–51, 54, 56, 62; on fugitive democracy, 32, 37, 54; on inverted totalitarianism, 26– 27, 195; on managed democracy, 26–27, 50–56, 62, 195

index

power, 5, 162–163, 183, 190; and the paradox of democracy, 158– 159; on popular sovereignty, 29; on religion, 80, 91, 160–165, 169, 171–172, 174, 187; on “selfinterest rightly understood,” 23; on the “tyranny of the majority,” 25 Totalitarianism, 26–27, 31, 41, 48, 50–51, 109, 117, 119, 133, 139, 183, 185, 190, 195. See also S. Wolin Transcendence, xi, 6, 84, 108, 127, 173–176 Twitter, 104

Zabala, Santiago, 193 Zakaria, Fareed, 19, 38–44, 48, 63– 64, 66, 71, 102–102 Žižek, Slavoj, ii, xii, 103, 110, 118, 135

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