Political Theory

Martin Buber’s political thought has enjoyed renewed attention lately, particularly his concept of “theopolitics,” a type of political practice that recognizes God as the ultimate political authority. In Buber’s biblical exegesis, theopolitics is a condition of everyday life in premonarchical Israel, but following the installation of the monarchy, it becomes a specialized activity of prophets, consisting chiefly in divinely commanded intercession against state actions. Buber suggests that a version of this prophetic activity is manifest in present-day socialist cooperatives, especially the kibbutzim. Indeed, for Buber, these cooperatives can be seen as laying the groundwork for messianic redemption. This essay probes some potentially troubling implications of Buber’s theopolitical framework, taking objections raised in Walter Benjamin’s correspondence as an entry point. A central concern for Benjamin is Buber’s nationalist articulation of Jewish identity, which appears all the more problematic when considered in tandem with the teleological view of history evident in Buber’s framework.

In 1972 Angela Davis stood trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder before a White jury. A professor of philosophy, a Communist, and a member of the Black Panther Party, she had no reason to believe that any of the jurors were her peers. Yet, after three days of deliberation, they returned a Not Guilty verdict on each of the counts. Through an analysis of the case, this essay argues for a new approach to peerhood that defines it as a combination of (1) demographic similarities to the defendant and (2) a worldview orientation of contestation and anticorruption that emerges from the jury’s function in the trial. Greater clarity on how these factors are important for peerhood provides insights into how jurors can best fulfill their role and what remedies are necessary to achieve a jury of one’s peers.

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed into an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men.

Thomas Hobbes’s infamously severe accounts of the phenomenon of laughter earned the condemnation of such varied readers as Francis Hutcheson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and he has maintained his reputation as an enemy of humor among contemporary scholars. A difficulty is raised by the fact that Hobbes makes ample use of humor in his writings, displaying his willingness to evoke in his readers what he appears to condemn. This article brings together Hobbes’s statements on laughter and comedic writing with examples of his own humorous rhetoric to show that Hobbes understands laughter as a species of insult, but that there are conditions under which humor can be made to serve the cause of peace. Drawing on evidence from across Hobbes’s works, and in particular from an understudied discussion of “Vespasian’s law” in the Six Lessons, this essay theorizes the conditions under which Hobbes found witty contumely to be conducive to peace. On this reading, Hobbes models the discreet use of humorous rhetoric in defense of peace, a defense that will be ongoing even after the commonwealth has been founded. Hobbes offers insight into how we can remain attuned to laughter’s inegalitarian tendencies without foregoing the equalizing potential to be found in laughing at ourselves and at those who think too highly of themselves.

Tolerance is claimed not just as central to liberalism, but increasingly as the sole preserve of a liberal order. This essay opens up a critical space for examining the naturalized relationship between liberalism and tolerance by focusing on the political thought of Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (1951–), a prominent Pakistani public intellectual who is often labeled as a “liberal” Islamic thinker. Ghamidi has never identified himself as one. Using as an investigative opportunity the disjuncture between his self-identification and how his ideas are labeled, and placing Ghamidi’s ideas within the wider tradition of Islamic thought, this essay elaborates on his vision of non-liberal tolerance predicated on individual responsibility infused with humility and shari’a-inspired state minimalism. Insight into the depth of nonliberal conceptions can facilitate a reconsideration of the relationship between liberalism and tolerance.