It is a common belief that scripture has no place in modern, secular politics. Graham Hammill challenges this notion in The Mosaic Constitution, arguing that Moses’s constitution of Israel, which created people bound by the rule of law, was central to early modern writings about government and state. Hammill shows how political writers from Machiavelli to Spinoza drew on Mosaic narrative to imagine constitutional forms of government. At the same time, literary writers like Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, and John Milton turned to Hebrew scripture to probe such fundamental divisions as those between populace and multitude, citizenship and race, and obedience and individual choice. As these writers used biblical narrative to fuse politics with the creative resources of language, Mosaic narrative also gave them a means for exploring divine authority as a product of literary imagination. The first book to place Hebrew scripture at the cutting edge of seventeenth-century literary and political innovation, The Mosaic Constitution offers a fresh perspective on political theology and the relations between literary representation and the founding of political communities.

Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.

There has been renewed and growing interest in exploring the significant role played by law in the centralization of power and sovereignty – right from the earliest point. This timely book serves as an introduction into state theory, providing an overview of the conceptual history and the interdisciplinary tradition of the continental European general theory of the state.

In this novel and lucid work, Christopher Houston clarifies a particular modern style and practice of politics that he calls anthropocracy. In the name of popular sovereignty, anthropocracies de-legitimize the rule of God(s) even as they re-deploy it to stabilize the rule of the representatives of the people, all the while obfuscating their political conscription of the divine. In distinguishing anthropocracy from varieties of other secular and laicist political arrangements, as well as from theocracy, this book also gives readers a brilliant solution to what it calls the Turkish puzzle, the dilemma over how to best describe and analyze state-religion and state-society relations in the Turkish Republic. This work convincingly undermines two orthodox presumptions about Turkish politics: the claim that Turkish modernity should be considered an example of secularity; and the accusation that the current AKP government should be interpreted as Islamic. On the contrary, it argues that both Kemalism and the AKP continue to institute an anthropocratic Republic.

The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law provides a conceptual and historical account of the Jewish understanding of law.

This book looks back in order to look forward. It is a sustained reflection on the great disillusion Europe experienced after World War I. Europeans understood that bombs had buried the Enlightenment. They knew that, to avoid catastrophe, they had to think anew. The catastrophe came, but Cohen, Benjamin, Kafka, and Rosenzweig had sounded the warning.

In this first volume of a trilogy, Daniel J. Elazar addresses political uses of the idea of covenant, the tradition that has adhered to that idea, and the political arrangements that flow from it, Among the topics covered are covenant as a political concept, the Bible as a political commentary, the post-biblical tradition, medieval covenant theory, and Jewish political culture.

This book discusses the degree of federalism contained within the Constitution.

The emergence of the early American republic as a new nation on the world stage conjured rival visions in the eyes of leading statesmen at home and attentive observers abroad. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the newly independent states as a federation of republics united by common experience, mutual interest, and an adherence to principles of natural rights. His views on popular government and the American experiment in republicanism, and later the expansion of its empire of liberty, offered an influential account of the new nation. While persuasive in crucial respects, his vision of early America did not stand alone as an unrivaled model. The contributors to Rival Visions examine how Jefferson’s contemporaries—including Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall—articulated their visions for the early American republic. Even beyond America, in this age of successive revolutions and crises, foreign statesmen began to formulate their own accounts of the new nation, its character, and its future prospects. This volume reveals how these vigorous debates and competing rival visions defined the early American republic in the formative epoch after the revolution.

Early Americans have long been considered "A People of the Book" Because the nickname was coined primarily to invoke close associations between Americans and the Bible, it is easy to overlook the central fact that it was a book-not a geographic location, a monarch, or even a shared language-that has served as a cornerstone in countless investigations into the formation and fragmentation of early American culture. Few books can lay claim to such powers of civilization-altering influence. Among those which can are sacred books, and for Americans principal among such books stands the Bible. This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful intellectual design that has inspired everything from national religious and educational practices to a wide spectrum of artistic endeavors to our nation's politics and foreign policy. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview--rich with bibliographic resources--to those interested in the Bible's role in American cultural formation.