One not infrequently hears talk today of the “weaponization” of rights–particularly the rights of religious freedom and free speech in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Indeed, as I discuss in this paper, that rhetoric has even made its way into some opinions in the Supreme Court’s most recent term. Whether the rhetoric of weaponry is just that, or represents something more, is a major question. Clifford Bob seems to argue in this new book for something like the latter view. The book is Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power (Princeton University Press).

Rights are usually viewed as defensive concepts representing mankind’s highest aspirations to protect the vulnerable and uplift the downtrodden. But since the Enlightenment, political combatants have also used rights belligerently, to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Delving into a range of historical and contemporary conflicts from all areas of the globe, Rights as Weapons focuses on the underexamined ways in which the powerful wield rights as aggressive weapons against the weak.

Clifford Bob looks at how political forces use rights as rallying cries: naturalizing novel claims as rights inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He shows how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode whole societies. And he demonstrates how the targets of rights campaigns repulse such assaults, using their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements; the American civil rights movement; nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today’s Europe; and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights.

Comparing key episodes in the deployment of rights, Rights as Weapons opens new perspectives on an idea that is central to legal and political conflicts.

It is often said that two of the canonical purposes or justifications for a robust free speech legal regime are that free speech facilitates and promotes the search for truth (or Truth, in some formulations), and that free speech is a necessary support for democratic self-governance. Sometimes these justifications can run together in interesting ways–as in Justice Brandeis’s appropriation of Justice Holmes’s truth/marketplace-of-ideas justification to incorporate a civic-democratic function. At other times they are treated as distinct. But these two justifications have long been advanced as part of the standard genealogy of the American commitment to free speech (there is a third justification that concerns speech’s value for individual identity–a very powerful justification today, but that was far less prominent before the mid-twentieth century).

Here is what looks like an extremely interesting new book that argues for the deep and perhaps insoluble tension between these justifications: Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Sophia Rosenfeld.

“Fake news,” wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.

The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today’s political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture.

In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our “post-truth” public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.

To conclude the Christmas week, here is an interesting collection of essays generally about the work of the influential 20th century natural law philosopher, Jacques Maritain. The book is The Things That Matter: Essays Inspired by the Later Work of Jacques Maritain (CUA Press), edited by Heidi Giebel.

In the final year of his long life, eminent Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain prepared a final book for publication: a collection of previously unpublished writings entitled Approches sans entraves, later translated into English as Untrammeled Approaches. That collection, both in its conversational yet reverent tone and in its weighty topics – faith, love, truth, beauty – gives the reader the sense that she is receiving from a great teacher and friend the most important nuggets of wisdom for the next generation. Throughout the book, Maritain shares with his readers, from his heart as well as his intellect, regarding the things that really matter; that book – and those things – are the primary inspiration for the present volume.

This volume, comprised of original essays by twenty English-speaking Thomists on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Untrammeled Approaches’ first English appearance, explores several of Maritain’s still-untrammeled (or at least less-trammeled) themes. While following his unbeaten paths, the contributing authors find and refine hidden treasures at every turn. They develop some of his more speculative ideas regarding the spiritual world – including the last things, the fate of the fallen angels, and a possible angelic role in evolution. They reflect deeply on a few of Maritain’s recurring themes: for example, the nature of beauty and intuition. They analyze the implications – positive and negative – of Maritain’s philosophy of love, marriage, and sexuality. And they consider and apply his arguments regarding appropriate roles and interactions of Church and state. The volume concludes with big-picture reflections on Maritain, his thought, and his enduring relevance.

One of the themes of our most recent Tradition Project conference concerned the relationship between liberalism, populism, and nationalism, respectively, and tradition. And one of the readings for the workshop groups was a piece of Yoram Hazony’s recent book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which argues in favor of nationalism from a non-liberal perspective (you can hear more about these issues in this Legal Spirits podcast).

Here is a new book that also considers nationalism’s merits, but from an expressly liberal progressive perspective, arguing for nationalism’s contributions to and structural support for liberalism. A kind of Left nationalism. The book is Why Nationalism (Princeton University Press), by Yael Tamir.

Around the world today, nationalism is back—and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic purposes, reinforcing the view that it is fundamentally reactionary and antidemocratic. But Yael (Yuli) Tamir makes a passionate argument for a very different kind of nationalism—one that revives its participatory, creative, and egalitarian virtues, answers many of the problems caused by neoliberalism and hyperglobalism, and is essential to democracy at its best. In Why Nationalism, she explains why it is more important than ever for the Left to recognize these qualities of nationalism, to reclaim it from right-wing extremists, and to redirect its power to progressive ends.

Far from being an evil force, nationalism’s power lies in its ability to empower individuals and answer basic human needs. Using it to reproduce cross-class coalitions will ensure that all citizens share essential cultural, political, and economic goods. Shifting emphasis from the global to the national and putting one’s nation first is not a way of advocating national supremacy but of redistributing responsibilities and sharing benefits in a more democratic and just way. In making the case for a liberal and democratic nationalism, Tamir also provides a compelling original account of the ways in which neoliberalism and hyperglobalism have allowed today’s Right to co-opt nationalism for its own purposes.

Provocative and hopeful, Why Nationalism is a timely and essential rethinking of a defining feature of our politics.

Thomas Cromwell is a crucial figure in the destruction of monastic life in England and the overthrow of Roman Catholicism to be replaced by the Church of England. His portrayal in contemporary, popular accounts has changed over the years–from Robert Bolt’s villain to Hilary Mantel’s secular liberal hero. Here is what looks like a very important biography of the man: Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking) by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Here’s a little something from a recent review of the book by Richard Rex: “[I]t is the overwhelming importance of religion in this revolution that puts paid to the Elton thesis of the birth of the modern nation-state. [Sir Geoffrey] Elton’s modernity was very much a postwar modernity—meritocratic, technocratic, and above all secularist—and his Cromwell tends to reflect that. His analysis presupposed a division between religion and politics that is normative today, but completely anachronistic for the sixteenth century. One of the key elements of MacCulloch’s achievement is to put religion back where it belongs, at the center of the story.”

Since the sixteenth century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king’s insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540. After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry’s mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell.

History has not been kind to the son of a Putney brewer who became the architect of England’s split with Rome. Where past biographies portrayed him as a scheming operator with blood on his hands, Hilary Mantel reimagined him as a far more sympathetic figure buffered by the whims of his master. So which was he–the villain of history or the victim of her creation? MacCulloch sifted through letters and court records for answers and found Cromwell’s fingerprints on some of the most transformative decisions of Henry’s turbulent reign. But he also found Cromwell the man, an administrative genius, rescuing him from myth and slander.

The real Cromwell was a deeply loving father who took his biggest risks to secure the future of his son, Gregory. He was also a man of faith and a quiet revolutionary. In the end, he could not appease or control the man whose humors were so violent and unpredictable. But he made his mark on England, setting her on the path to religious awakening and indelibly transforming the system of government of the English-speaking world.

Authored by the incisive Peter Augustine Lawler (he died tragically and untimely last year) and by our friend, Richard M. Reinsch, here is a very interesting book to conclude the week, published by the consistently excellent University of Kansas Press: A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty. The thesis of the book is that the concepts and ideas manifested in the text of the Constitution cannot be understood without immersion into the social, cultural, religious, and political assumptions of the period. That is, without recourse to the several traditions that were widely shared by the founders. For those interested in the nature and political theory of constitutional government, it’s a must-read book.

When political debates devolve, as they often do these days, into a contest between big-government progressivism and natural rights individualism, Americans tend to appeal to the “self-evident” truths inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But Peter Lawler and Richard Reinsch remind us that these truths understood in the abstract are untethered from a prior, unwritten constitution presupposed by the Framers—one found in culture, customs, traditions, experiences, and beliefs. A Constitution in Full is Lawler and Reinsch’s attempt to return this critical context to US constitutionalism—to recover a political sense of individualism in relation to country, family, religious community, and nature.

Power, the authors suggest, is a public trust, not a form of obedience to either majoritarian suppression of particular liberties or the endless rights-claims lodged by autonomous individuals against society. Instead, power is ordered to the demands of a shared political enterprise that emerges from man’s social nature. Building on political insights from Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, John Courtney Murray, and others Lawler and Reinsch seek to restore the relational person—the individual grounded in family, work, faith, and community—to a central place in our understanding of republican constitutionalism. Their work promotes the ongoing development of constitutional self-government rooted in our historical, legal, and religious foundations.

The shared middle-class values that once united almost all Americans as well as any confidence in democratic deliberation or political liberty are rapidly atrophying. This book aims to rebuild this confidence by helping us think seriously about the complex interplay between political and economic liberties and the relational life of creatures and citizens.

Here’s certainly a book at the intersection of law and religion, a very worthwhile looking study from an expert in the law and politics of international religious freedom on the condition of religious liberty in the Islamic world. The book is Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today (OUP), by Daniel Philpott, who very much adopts a universalist perspective on the right of religious freedom as a matter of international law.

Since at least the attacks of September 11, 2001, one of the most pressing political questions of the age has been whether Islam is hostile to religious freedom. Daniel Philpott examines conditions on the ground in forty-seven Muslim-majority countries today and offers an honest, clear-eyed answer to this urgent question.

It is not, however, a simple answer. From a satellite view, the Muslim world looks unfree. But, Philpott shows, the truth is much more complex. Some one-fourth of Muslim-majority countries are in fact religiously free. Of the other countries, about forty percent are governed not by Islamists but by a hostile secularism imported from the West, while the other sixty percent are Islamist.

The picture that emerges is both honest and hopeful. Yes, most Muslim-majority countries are lacking in religious freedom. But, Philpott argues, the Islamic tradition carries within it “seeds of freedom,” and he offers guidance for how to cultivate those seeds in order to expand religious freedom in the Muslim world and the world at large.

It is an urgent project. Religious freedom promotes goods like democracy and the advancement of women that are lacking in the Muslim-majority world and reduces ills like civil war, terrorism, and violence. Further, religious freedom is simply a matter of justice–not an exclusively Western value, but rather a universal right rooted in human nature. Its realization is critical to the aspirations of religious minorities and dissenters in Muslim countries, to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries or under secular dictatorships, and to relations between the West and the Muslim world.

In this thoughtful book, Philpott seeks to establish a constructive middle ground in a fiery and long-lasting debate over Islam.