“The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which we see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre…” (Leviathan II.17) Next year marks the 340th anniversary of the death of Thomas Hobbes, for my money one of the most brilliant theorists of the liberal state and most insightful writers on any number of subjects (political authority, human nature, ethics, you name it) that ever lived. All this, for me, is true, even as I part ways with Hobbes on many matters. Still, if at some future point I ever do get around to putting together a seminar on foundations of legal rights, Hobbes will hold a central place in the reading list. Here is a new book published by Chicago focusing on Hobbes’s criticisms of the classical tradition: Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light: A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy, by Devin Stauffer.

Was Hobbes the first great architect of modern political philosophy? Highly critical of the classical tradition in philosophy, particularly Aristotle, Hobbes thought that he had established a new science of morality and politics. Devin Stauffer here delves into Hobbes’s critique of the classical tradition, making this oft-neglected aspect of the philosopher’s thought the basis of a new, comprehensive interpretation of his political philosophy.

In Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light, Stauffer argues that Hobbes was engaged in a struggle on multiple fronts against forces, both philosophic and religious, that he thought had long distorted philosophy and destroyed the prospects of a lasting peace in politics. By exploring the twists and turns of Hobbes’s arguments, not only in his famous Leviathan but throughout his corpus, Stauffer uncovers the details of Hobbes’s critique of an older outlook, rooted in classical philosophy and Christian theology, and reveals the complexity of Hobbes’s war against the “Kingdom of Darkness.” He also describes the key features of the new outlook—the “Kingdom of Light” —that Hobbes sought to put in its place. Hobbes’s venture helped to prepare the way for the later emergence of modern liberalism and modern secularism. Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light is a wide-ranging and ambitious exploration of Hobbes’s thought.

Several years ago, I had the chance to study the great Renaissance republican writing of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. In both, and particularly in Machiavelli, the goddess, “Fortuna,” plays a central role. Fortuna is usually portrayed as unpredictably destructive or generative of political arrangements, a fickle and dangerous being. The object of the good republican politician, the politician who acts with virtù, is to tame the goddess in the service of republican ideals. But Fortuna is a pagan deity of much older lineage than the Renaissance, a deity of ancient and republican Rome as this new book published by Oxford attests: Fortuna: Deity and Concept in Archaic and Republican Italy, by Daniele Miano.

What is good luck and what did it mean to the Romans? What connections were there between luck and childbirth, victory in war, or success in business? What did Roman statesmen like Cicero and Caesar think about luck? This volume aims to address these questions by focusing on the Latin goddess Fortuna, one of the better known deities in ancient Italy. The earliest forms of her worship can be traced back to archaic Latium, and though the chronological scope of the discussion presented here covers the archaic age to the late Republic, she was still a widely recognized allegorical figure during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The primary reason for Fortuna’s longevity is that she was a conceptual deity, symbiotically connected to the concept of chance and good fortune. When communities, individuals, and social groups interacted with the goddess, they were inevitably also interacting with the concept: renegotiating it, enriching it with new meanings, and challenging established associations. All the available literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources on Fortuna are explored here in depth, including analyses of all the attested sanctuaries of the goddess in Italy, an updated study of inscribed gifts offered to her by a variety of individuals, and discussion of how authors such as Cicero and Caesar wrote about Fortuna, chance, and good luck. This study of the goddess based on conceptual analysis serves to construct a radically new picture of the historical development of this deity in the context of the cultural interactions taking place in ancient Italy, and also suggests a new approach to polytheism based on an exploration of the connection between gods and goddesses and concepts.

We’ve had occasion to observe before in this forum that equality seems to have become the overriding, master value of our time, particularly in the ongoing contests between religious rights and other rights of sexuality and equality, and even more particularly for academics writing in the field. Still, there remains disagreement among scholars on the subject. Here is a volume published by Cambridge that gathers authors to “rethink” the “balance” among these commitments: The Conscience Wars: Rethinking the Balance Between Religion, Identity, and Equality, edited by Susanna Mancini and Michel Rosenfeld. The book is rather tilted, however, in the direction of re-weighting and re-ranking values and interests against religious conviction and in favor of equality. Reviewing the list of contributors, it is somewhat striking, though not too surprising, that in a collection of more than 18 chapters (some with multiple authors), none of the contributors is much known in prior work for ranking religion comparatively highly in these contests.

In this work, Professors Rosenfeld and Mancini have brought together an impressive group of authors to provide a comprehensive analysis on the greater demand for religions exemptions to government mandates. Traditional religious conscientious objection cases, such as refusal to salute the flag or to serve in the military during war, had a diffused effect throughout society. In sharp contrast, these authors argue that today’s most notorious objections impinge on the rights of others, targeting practices like abortion, LGTBQ adoption, and same-sex marriage. The dramatic expansion of conscientious objection claims have revolutionized the battle between religious traditionalists and secular civil libertarians, raising novel political, legal, constitutional and philosophical challenges. Highlighting the intersection between conscientious objections, religious liberty, and the equality of women and sexual minorities, this volume showcases this political debate and the principal jurisprudence from different parts of the world and emphasizes the little known international social movements that compete globally to alter the debate’s terms.

The twentieth century saw the twin expansion of constitutional rights of free speech and “substantive” due process, a symbiotic mix that was no accident. The combatants in the fight for that expansion are often thought to be the religious–and especially Christian, on the one hand, and the non- or anti-religious, on the other. And yet in this new book published by Hachette, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics, historian of religion R. Marie Griffith argues that intra-Christian divisions were just as important in understanding the fracturing that occurred in this period.

Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control–sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Both those who advocated for greater openness in sexual matters and those who resisted new sexual norms turned to politics to pursue their moral visions for the nation. Moral Combat is a history of how the Christian consensus on sex unraveled, and how this unraveling has made our political battles over sex so ferocious and so intractable.

Sir Roger Scruton, our Tradition Project lecturer for our session on “Tradition, Culture, and Citizenship” (see above for the lecture) has a new collection of essays coming out in January 2018, The Politics of Culture and Other Essays (St. Augustine Press). This particular collection seems to center on Sir Roger’s manifold aesthetic and literary interests.

This work brings together Scruton’s best essays from many sources, arranging them thematically. The book has four sections: Language and Art, Writers in Context, Architecture, and Culture and Anarchy. Though the essays are diverse, certain themes are developed in particular and then in general ways, and there are several important essays on writers and critics, that contribute to the reappraisal of their work – among them Dante, Andre Breton, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Jacques Lacan, and Yukio Mishima.

Here’s what looks like a fascinating account of a historical struggle in nineteenth and early twentieth century America: Ronald R. Rodgers, The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit vs. the Press, 1833-1923 (University of Missouri Press). Of course, the struggle resulted in the ostensible triumph of the press over the pulpit in the twentieth century. Or did it? In the new era of “fake news” and the systematic loss of authority of institutions like the press (and the church), one wonders just who vanquished whom. Perhaps everyone lost.

In this study, Ronald R. Rodgers examines several narratives involving religion’s historical influence on the news ethic of journalism: its decades-long opposition to the Sunday newspaper as a vehicle of modernity that challenged the tradition of the Sabbath; the parallel attempt to create an advertising-driven Christian daily newspaper; and the ways in which religion—especially the powerful Social Gospel movement—pressured the press to become a moral agent. The digital disruption of the news media today has provoked a similar search for a news ethic that reflects a new era—for instance, in the debate about jettisoning the substrate of contemporary mainstream journalism, objectivity. But, Rodgers argues, before we begin to transform journalism’s present news ethic, we need to understand its foundation and formation in the past.

Recently I have written about what I have termed “anti-Christian identity politics,” an emerging style of political identification and argumentation in an increasingly fragmented country. Here is a new book by historian Matthew Bowman, Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (HUP) that explores political divisions among groups that identify as Christian in America.

Religious diversity has long been a defining feature of the United States. But what may be even more remarkable than the sheer range of faiths is the diversity of political visions embedded in those religious traditions. Matthew Bowman delves into the ongoing struggle over the potent word “Christian,” not merely to settle theological disputes but to discover its centrality to American politics.

As Christian: The Politics of a Word in America shows, for many American Christians, concepts like liberty and equality are rooted in the transcendent claims about human nature that Christianity offers. Democracy, equality under the law, and other basic principles of American government are seen to depend upon the Christian faith’s sustenance and support. Yet despite this presumed consensus, differing Christian beliefs have led to dispute and disagreement about what American society and government should look like. While many white American Protestants associate Christianity with Western Euro-American civilization, individual liberty, and an affirmation of capitalism, other American Christians have long rejected those assumptions. They maintain that Christian principles demand political programs as wide-ranging as economic communalism, international cooperation, racial egalitarianism, and social justice.

The varieties of American Christian experience speak to an essentially contested concept of political rights and wrongs. Though diverse Christian faiths espouse political visions, Christian politics defy clear definition, Bowman writes. Rather, they can be seen as a rich and varied collection of beliefs about the interrelationships of divinity, human nature, and civic life that engage and divide the nation’s Christian communities and politics alike.

Here’s another entry in an emerging genre that includes Mark Lilla’s “The Once and Future Liberal”: liberal public intellectuals arguing for an American “common good” that is intended to “unify” what appears to be an increasingly fractured country. Here, it is Robert Reich in The Common Good (Penguin Random House). Of course the idea of the “common good” is an ancient one, and finds one very powerful and influential expression in the writing of religious figures with philosophical interests. But it is interesting to note that though Reich aspires to “save America’s soul,” such accounts do not seem to figure at all in Reich’s account, which the blurb for the book claims is grounded “in everyday reality and common sense.”