Theoria

In 2005 Theoria 105 was themed “Fundamentalism, Authority and Globalization” and included papers by Avishai Margalit and S.N. Eisenstadt that pointed to the religious origins of modern political thought and movements. The centrality of religion in recent conflict in the world and the seeming resurgence of religious fundamentalism of all persuasions poses specific challenges to the wider project of modernity. What Eisenstadt and Margalit pointed to is that the very core of modern political thought is underpinned by religious ideas and that we need to examine more carefully the seeming clash between modern and anti-modern tendencies.

Because Hobbes is understood to be a proto-liberal thinker, a great deal hinges on how we understand his writings. Does he contribute to the development of a purely secular political self-understanding, as many liberals today claim? And, by extension, does that mean that liberal thought today best stands on a purely secular foundation? What, then, should we make of the extensive theological speculation throughout his Leviathan ? Here, I argue that to reconcile the seemingly purely secular claims in Leviathan with the obviously religious claims found there we must move beyond reading him in terms of what I here call 'the fable of liberalism', and comprehend Leviathan as a whole in terms of Reformation era debates between Protestants and Roman Catholics about the limits and purview of reason. Understood in that way we see his claims about 'reason' in a new and important light. Rather than being an inevitable development that comes to supercede honour and glory, as the fable of liberalism suggests, 'reason' is seen to have an historically contingent character, whose parameters are established by wagers about the meaning of religious experience.

The separation of church and state in the USA and the critical role of disestablishment in the political doctrines of that country is no indication of a secular polity. In fact, the separation of church and state as developed in 18th century American political thought was itself a religious doctrine and rested on the unique religious beliefs of certain Protestant Churches there. One consequence of this particular mode of accommodating religion has meant that the challenge of pluralism and difference in the United States of America is met, most often, by liberal indifference. Differences are trivialized, aethetisized and, more critically, privatized. They are shielded from public scrutiny and conceptualized as irrelevant to public concern. This is an increasingly inadequate response to the challenge of difference and the plurality of the human experience. Challenges to contemporary modes of accommodating religious and ethnic pluralism are necessitating the formulation of new sets of answers which are not based on such Protestant or post-Protestant assumptions.

George W. Bush's controversial effort to direct government funds to religious social-service groups—his so-called 'faith-based initiative'—was influenced by confessional ideas about political order that are little understood in U.S. politics. Two key ideas from the Christian Democratic tradition in Europe played a formative role: the Dutch Calvinist theory of 'sphere sovereignty,' and the Catholic principle of 'subsidiarity'. This article describes what Bush set out to do with his faith-based initiative and investigates the confessional influences on this policy agenda in their European context. Viewed in this comparative light, Bush's vision of faith-based welfare is shown to be deficient in its understanding of the religious ideas on which it draws.

The concept of recognition has been employed as a term of art in sovereign diplomacy, and in a philosophical tradition ranging from Plato to Hegel as an archetype of the emergence of political association leading to ethical civil relations. Recent liberal theorists have adapted the Hegelian 'struggle for recognition' to strengthen the argument for humane respect and human rights in the modern, multicultural state. This article emphasizes the cognitive processes and perceptual capacities of recognition. Drawing on Kant and Arendt, this article argues for a broadly aesthetic view of politics as a basis for ethical and moral appraisal, and illustrates this approach with hypothetical and actual examples of politics and art.

Modernity believed that processes of secularization and rationalization are universally applicable. What is taking place in the 21st century, however, suggests that the reverse, a process of de-secularization, is becoming the hallmark of the present age. In the case of Islamic civilization, in which law is shari'a, the challenge to secularization takes the form of a process of shari'atization. This is not the traditional or inherited shari'a, restricted to civil matters and to a penal code, but an invented shari'a, one which also claims to be a constitutional law. Moreover, the constructed shari'atized constitutional law, in conflict with secular constitutionalism and appearing to offer no middle way, has been universalized to engender an international conflict between secularization and de-secularization. Since, for most Muslims, Islam without shari'a is unthinkable, this article examines the potential for religious reform of the shari'a in the direction of cultural change, freedom and democratic constitutionalism.

Kant’s Theory of A Priori Knowledge by Robert Greenberg

Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness by Paul Guyer

Kant’s Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality by Samuel J. Kerstein

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