Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

An Intellectual History of Modern Legal Conservatism

The historian Johnathan O’Neill is the author of one of the best treatments of the history of originalism in law and politics in the 20th century. Here he is with a new, somewhat broader book on similar themes that looks more like an intellectual history and well worth picking up: Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal (Johns Hopkins Press).

The New Deal fundamentally changed the institutions of American constitutional government and, in turn, the relationship of Americans to their government. Johnathan O’Neill’s Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal examines how various types of conservative thinkers responded to this significant turning point in the second half of the twentieth century.

O’Neill identifies four fundamental transformations engendered by the New Deal: the rise of the administrative state, the erosion of federalism, the ascendance of the modern presidency, and the development of modern judicial review. He then considers how various schools of conservative thought (traditionalists, neoconservatives, libertarians, Straussians) responded to these major changes in American politics and culture. Conservatives frequently argued among themselves, and their responses to the New Deal ranged from adaptation to condemnation to political mobilization.

Ultimately, the New Deal pulled American governance and society permanently leftward. Although some of the New Deal’s liberal gains have been eroded, a true conservative counterrevolution was never, O’Neill argues, a realistic possibility. He concludes with a plea for conservative thinkers to seriously reconsider the role of Congress—a body that is relatively ignored by conservative intellectuals in favor of the courts and the presidency—in America’s constitutional order. Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal explores the scope and significance of conservative constitutional analysis amid the broader field of American political thought.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

“Stealing My Religion”

I’ve been thinking about the Rise of the Nones, particularly, the significant percentage of Americans who are “unaffiliated believers.” Something like 20% of us, according to surveys, claim to have non-institutional religious commitments that draw from many different sources. This is an old story in America, going back at least as far as Thoreau, who drew heavily from Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. (About Christianity, he was much less enthusiastic). But eclectic, expressive individualism has now gone mainstream. There are a lot more Thoreaus than there used to be.

Not everyone loves the new eclecticism–including, especially, practitioners of the old traditions themselves, who sometimes feel wronged. For example, can one just “do” yoga, without accepting the spiritual commitments on which yoga is based? Is treating yoga as an exercise regimen an affront to Hindus for whom yoga has transcendental meaning? An interesting-looking new book from Harvard, Stealing My Religion, addresses these questions. The author is Northeastern religion professor Liz Bucar. Here’s the publisher’s description:

From sneaker ads and the “solidarity hijab” to yoga classes and secular hikes along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, the essential guide to the murky ethics of religious appropriation.

We think we know cultural appropriation when we see it. Blackface or Native American headdresses as Halloween costumes—these clearly give offense. But what about Cardi B posing as the Hindu goddess Durga in a Reebok ad, AA’s twelve-step invocation of God, or the earnest namaste you utter at the end of yoga class?

Liz Bucar unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, economic, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from another’s religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Bucar sees religion as an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because faiths overlap and imitate each other and because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. Indeed, if we are to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are.

Stealing My Religion guides us through three revealing case studies—the hijab as a feminist signal of Muslim allyship, a study abroad “pilgrimage” on the Camino de Santiago, and the commodification of yoga in the West. We see why the Vatican can’t grant Rihanna permission to dress up as the pope, yet it’s still okay to roll out our yoga mats. Reflecting on her own missteps, Bucar comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isn’t to borrow less but to borrow more—to become deeply invested in learning the roots and diverse meanings of our enthusiasms.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Eliot’s Prose Works

“We can never, I mean wholly, explain the practical world from a theoretical point of view, because this world is what it is by reason of the practical point of view, and the world we try to explain is a world set out upon a table — there!”

— Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley

“Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

— Tradition and the Individual Talent

Just a couple of lines from two of T.S. Eliot’s essays, the second comparatively well-known and the first less so. Eliot’s prose work has been an important influence in some recent law and religion scholarship, including Steve Smith’s “Pagans and Christians in the City,” as well as in some recent reflections on politics and populism. It has also provoked forceful reactions and objections. Eliot’s prose, however, has been less carefully studied than his poems.

This new compilation in 8 volumes, therefore, is well worth looking at (I am celebrating a birthday soon, just in case anybody is thinking of giving me a $700 gift) and sure to stimulate many responses: The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (Johns Hopkins Press), edited by Ronald Schuchard.

This monumental eight-volume edition of modern literature brings together, for the first time in print, all of the vastly influential prose writings of Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, the poet and dramatist whose theories and criticism shaped twentieth-century thought and literature around the world. This complete collection provides access to over 6,000 pages of Eliot’s nonfiction prose writings on literature, philosophy, religion, cultural theory, world politics, and other topics of urgent and enduring import. It includes all of the essays that he collected in his lifetime, but also more than 1,000 uncollected, unrecorded, or unpublished items, many of which were missing or inaccessible for decades. From the formative “Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” (1913), written in graduate school at Harvard, to the summative “To Criticize the Critic” (1961), the Complete Prose offers readers full access to the immense scope and variety of Eliot’s works in their biographical, historical, and cultural context.

The individual volumes have received the highest praise from prominent scholars: volume II won the Modernist Studies Association’s 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection, while volumes V and VI were jointly awarded the 2017 Prize for a Scholarly Edition by the Modern Language Association. They display “uniform excellence,” wrote the Awards Committee: “Their thorough textual introductions, sophisticated annotations merging intelligent commentary with brevity and completeness, make the volumes a pleasure to read… and enlarge our understanding of Eliot as the public intellectual at work.” Together with recent editions of the Poems, the eight volumes of Letters, and the sensational opening in 2020 of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, the Complete Prose brings us to the threshold of a new age for the study of Eliot and the modernist writers of his day.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Salafism

Salafism is a movement within Islam that seeks to return to what it understands as the earliest, and therefore purest, expressions of Islamic law and practice, from the time of the first few generations of Muslim believers. In a sense, it can be seen as a kind of originalism, opposed to the more conventional Islamic law traditionalism that views the earliest expressions as mediated through the writings of succeeding legal scholars.

A new book from Stanford University Press, On Salafism: Concepts and Contexts, by scholar Azmi Bishara, argues that Salafism is best understood as a contemporary phenomenon based, not in early Islam, but in the current social and political context. Here is the publisher’s description:

On Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations. Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11 Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by specific sociopolitical contexts.

Bishara offers a sophisticated account of various movements—such as Wahabbism and Hanbalism—frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and examines patterns of modernization in the development of contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms, plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Human Rights and Islamic States

Several years ago, I wrote an essay on the concept of human dignity in different legal systems, including the Islamic. Most legal systems honor human dignity, but the concept has different meanings, depending on history, culture, tradition, and deep political and religious commitments. I believe the same thing is true for the concept of human rights. The universal acknowledgement of human rights obscures real differences across the globe.

A new book from Bloomsbury, Human Rights Commitments of Islamic States, by Paul McDonough (Cardiff), examines questions at the intersection of international human rights and Islamic law. Looks very interesting. Here is the publisher’s description:

This book examines the legal nature of Islamic states and the human rights they have committed to uphold. It begins with an overview of the political history of Islam, and of Islamic law, focusing primarily on key developments of the first two centuries of Islam. Building on this foundation, the book presents the first study into Islamic constitutions to map the relationship between Sharia and the state in terms of institutions of governance. It then assesses the place of Islamic law in the national legal order of all of today’s Islamic states, before proceeding to a comprehensive analysis of those states’ adherences to the UN human rights treaties, and finally, a set of international human rights declarations made jointly by Islamic states.

Throughout, the focus remains on human rights. Having examined Islamic law first in isolation, then as it reflects into state structures and national constitutional orders, the book provides the background necessary to understand how an Islamic state’s treaty commitments reflect into national law. In this endeavour, the book unites three strands of analysis: the compatibility of Sharia with the human rights enunciated in UN treaties; the patterns of adherence of Islamic states with those treaties; and the compatibility of international Islamic human rights declarations with UN standards. By exploring the international human rights commitments of all Islamic states within a single analytical framework, this book will appeal to international human rights and constitutional scholars with an interest in Islamic law and states. It will also be useful to readers with a general interest in the relationships between Sharia, Islamic states, and internationally recognised human rights.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Terror of “the Rights of Man”

A new book, Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most (Princeton UP), by the French historian, Marcel Gauchet, looks very interesting in connecting the light side of the revolutionary leader (the ardent and uncompromising crusader for human rights) with the dark features of his zealous commitment in the coming of the Terror. They were two sides of the same coin, in this telling, it seems. Interestingly, the blurb below suggests that it is part of the author’s thesis that the transition occurred at the point where governing, rather than revolutionizing, became necessary.

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other protagonist of those dramatic and violent events. The fervor of those who defend Robespierre the “Incorruptible,” who championed the rights of the people, is met with revulsion by those who condemn him as the bloodthirsty tyrant who sent people to the guillotine. Marcel Gauchet argues that he was both, embodying the glorious achievement of liberty as well as the excesses that culminated in the Terror.

In much the same way that 1789 and 1793 symbolize the two opposing faces of the French Revolution, Robespierre’s contradictions were the contradictions of the revolution itself. Robespierre was its purest incarnation, neither the defender of liberty who fell victim to the corrupting influence of power nor the tyrant who betrayed the principles of the revolution. Gauchet shows how Robespierre’s personal transition from opposition to governance was itself an expression of the tragedy inherent in a revolution whose own prophetic ideals were impossible to implement.

This panoramic book tells the story of how the man most associated with the founding of modern French democracy was also the first tyrant of that democracy, and it offers vital lessons for all democracies about the perpetual danger of tyranny.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Locke

Few, if any, philosophers have had the impact on American constitutional law that John Locke has had. This is especially true with respect to the Religion Clauses. Lockean ideas about the proper separation of church and state, filtered through the early Virginia experience and the writings of Madison and Jefferson, are so familiar to us today that it takes real effort to examine them objectively. A new book from the University of Chicago Press, America’s Philosopher: John Locke, by historian Claire Rydell Arcenas (University of Montana) suggests that throughout history Americans have appropriated Locke for their own ends. Looks very interesting. The publisher’s description follows:

America’s Philosopher examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history.

The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas’s new book tells the story of Americans’ longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker’s ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon.

The first book to detail Locke’s trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America’s Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers—from any nation—ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke’s often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Obedience and Freedom

It’s probably fair to say that most people today regard obedience and freedom as antonyms, and that obedience is regarded as the bad side of that duality. We might even say that we are free just insofar as we obey no one, except perhaps ourselves or our own will. Going further, obedience seems like the kind of orientation to the world that depends upon there being unquestionably rightful authority, but perhaps we don’t regard authority, any authority, in that way any longer–as having unquestionably right claims on us. Sometimes obedience is thought to be a kind of mindless servility or rote submission, though older conceptions of obedience incorporated an important element of free choice. Is it then not obedience if one chooses to submit oneself to the authority whom one obeys? Again, that position would assume that choice and obedience are necessarily antagonists, but the structures of authority to which one might voluntarily submit oneself might actually make one more free to achieve certain objectives than one would be without the submission (think here of the structures of excellence in sports or writing or some other practice).

Ok, enough already. I raise all this in light of an interesting new book by Jacob Phillips, Obedience is Freedom (Polity Press). The abstract is below, and here is an interesting review of the book that came out a few months back.

The virtue of obedience is seen as outdated today, if not downright toxic – and yet, are we any freer than our forebears?

In this provocative work, Jacob Phillips argues not. Many feel unable to speak freely, their opinions policed by the implicit or explicit threat of coercion. Impending ecological disaster is the ultimate threat to our freedoms and wellbeing, and living in a disenchanted cosmos leaves people enslaved to nihilistic whim. Phillips shows that the antiquated notion of obedience to the moral law contains forgotten dimensions, which can be a source of freedom from these contemporary fetters. These dimensions of obedience – such as loyalty, discipline and order – protect people from falling prey to the subtle forms of coercion, control and domination of twenty-first-century life.

Fusing literary insight with philosophical discussion and cultural critique, Phillips demonstrates that in obedience lies the path to true freedom.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Liturgy Matters

I thought I was reasonably well informed about the English Reformation, but a new book from Yale recounts an episode of which, I confess, I had never heard, the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, in which the people of Cornwall and Devon revolted when the government forbade Latin liturgies and required use of the new, English-language Book of Common Prayer. The government quickly put down the rebellion–but at the cost of 4000 lives. I’m not sure if the rebellion passed out of general knowledge, or if their antipathy to Catholicism led the Framers to pass over it, but I have never seen a reference to the Prayer Book Rebellion in the Framers’ frequent warnings about the dangers of establishment. Odd, because the rebellion seems a good example of such dangers–as well as the importance of liturgy to religious identity. Few things matter more to believers than the language they use to pray, as current controversies in the Catholic and other Christian churches reveal even today.

The book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549, by historian Mark Stoyle (University of Southampton). The publisher’s description follows:

The fascinating story of the so-called “Prayer Book Rebellion” of 1549 which saw the people of Devon and Cornwall rise up against the Crown

The Western Rising of 1549 was the most catastrophic event to occur in Devon and Cornwall between the Black Death and the Civil War. Beginning as an argument between two men and their vicar, the rebellion led to a siege of Exeter, savage battles with Crown forces, and the deaths of 4,000 local men and women. It represents the most determined attempt by ordinary English people to halt the religious reformation of the Tudor period.

Mark Stoyle tells the story of the so-called “Prayer Book Rebellion” in full. Correcting the accepted narrative in a number of places, Stoyle shows that the government in London saw the rebels as a real threat. He demonstrates the importance of regional identity and emphasizes that religion was at the heart of the uprising. This definitive account brings to life the stories of the thousands of men and women who acted to defend their faith almost five hundred years ago.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Spirit of Capitalism With No Protestant Ethic

A little something for Labor Day:

“The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us.”

This passage, from Chapter 2 of the renowned sociologist Max Weber’s famous tract, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” illustrates one of the principal themes of the work: to discern the relationship between the Calvinism that was so influential in the United States and the capitalist “work ethic” that was once so important in the country’s self-understanding.

Here is a new book that considers the fate of this association in a very different time–one where Calvinism and the Protestant “ethos” more generally is in decline (though the book perhaps disputes this premise), and what that might mean for our orientation toward work generally: Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class-Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work, by Andrew Lynn (OUP).

Protestant orientations to work and economics have shaped wider American culture for several centuries. But not all strands of American Protestantism have elevated secular work to the highest echelons of spiritual significance. This book surveys the efforts of a religious movement within White Protestant fundamentalism and its Neo-Evangelical successors to “make work matter to God.”

Today, bearing the name the “Faith and Work movement,” this effort puts on display the creative capacities of religious and lay leaders to adapt a faith system to the changing social-economic conditions of advanced capitalism. Building from the insights and theory of Max Weber, Andrew Lynn draws on archival research and interviews with movement leaders to survey and assess the surging number of new organizations, books, conferences, worship songs, seminary classes, vocational programming, and study groups promoting classically Protestant and Calvinist ideas of work and vocation . He traces these efforts back to early-twentieth-century business leaders and theologically trained leaders who saw a desperate need to foster a new “work ethic” among religious laity entering into professional, managerial, and creative class work.

Leaders interviewed for the study recount the challenges of rerouting energies that were previously steered toward inward spirituality, cultural separatism, and proselytization. Through these interviews, Saving the Protestant Ethic captures ongoing in-group tensions and creative adaptation among American Evangelicals as they navigate changing class and political dynamics that shape American society.