Appealing to Heaven: Jephthah, John Locke, and Just War

This paper asks why John Locke relied so heavily on the biblical exemplum of Jephthah in the "Second Treatise of Government." The proposed answer is that Locke took Jephthah to stand for the situation of judgment about the validity of norms under uncertainty. It was the contention of norms in a moment of potential warfare, not the absence of applicable norms, that Jephthah symbolized. On this specific point, Locke fits within a tradition of Protestant invocations of the story. If so, there was no need for Locke’s political theory to follow the details of the Jephthah story in other particulars. The paper pursues this argument by attributing to Locke a distinction between subjective conviction and objective validity, the latter of which he thought God alone could judge

Intellectual History and Democracy: An Interview with Pierre Rosanvallon: Introduction

Brief introduction to an interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, conducted by Javier Fernández Sebastián, in Madrid, September 28, 2006

The International Law That Is America: Reflections on the Last Chapter of the Gentle Civilizer of Nations

A history of moralism, the late intellectual historian Henry May once observed, would come close to being a history of American thought. It was a forgivable exaggeration, for his point still stands when it comes to the exceptionalist American self-understanding that May\u27s comment as much enacted as described. From the beginning, Americans have often been prone not simply to assume an uncomplicated belief in what May called the first and central article of faith in the national credo . .. : the reality, certainty, and eternity of moral values. They have also overwhelmingly tended to infer that, as perhaps the most often stated corollary of all, the United States, as a special leader in moral progress, had a special responsibility for moral judgment . . . . This fact helps explain why, during the era in which their straightforward allegiances to these longstanding truths remained uncontested, Americans signed on with uncommon alacrity and enthusiasm to the mission of European international law to provide moral reform of the world. Improvement in the name of America\u27s special insight into the ethical realities of the universe could not, to be sure, remain restricted to the nation\u27s own borders. One might have predicted that the country\u27s self-image would not survive the stress of its evolution from self-appointed exemplar for the world to tentative engagement in the world. Yet, in the initial age of American empire, no serious disturbance followed. For that matter, how fundamentally did America\u27s self-image ever change under pressure? This question is what seems to be most at stake when reckoning with the powerful story told in the last chapter of Martti Koskenniemi\u27s classic masterpiece, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations

Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism

It is not, of course, a new suggestion to turn history on itself in order to discover the historical conditions for the possibility of the modern historical outlook. This project began in the early modern period, taking on a new direction and momentum with J. C. Gatterer's complaint that his discipline had studiously exempted itself from the methods it pioneered. Few recent contributors to this ongoing endeavor, perhaps, have undertaken as interesting or fundamental a version of it as the late Amos Funkenstein. As his student Abraham P. Socher has recently observed, "One of Amos Funkenstein's central historical concerns was the development of the discipline and methods of history itself." Nonetheless, Funkenstein's contribution in this realm of inquiry remains little-known and ill-understood; this paper attempts a critical overview of it

Response to Nathan Bracher's review of Samuel Moyn, "Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics"

The tenor of the review's praise of what I have written, and the accuracy of its rendition of what I covered, could leave no author dissatisfied. I should turn, therefore, directly to Professor Bracher's reservations. He offers a smaller criticism and a larger one

Intellectual History and Democracy: An Interview with Pierre Rosanvallon: Introduction

Brief introduction to an interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, conducted by Javier Fernández Sebastián, in Madrid, September 28, 2006

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Challenge of Religion

As its title indicates, Johannes Morsink’s new book takes stock of the grounding and prospects of human rights ideals in the face of what people often call “the return of religion.” He starts by claiming that, given its Holocaust origins, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 reflected secular assumptions—a common agreement transcending all faith commitments and requiring none in particular and, in fact, no faith of any kind. I think he proves his case, but scants the reasons why human rights were compatible with so many religions at the time and sidesteps the considerable recent debate about whether “secular” ideals are ever that distant from religious and especially Christian ones

Knowledge and Politics in International Law

What does it mean to say knowledge is power? Francis Bacon is alleged to have said it first. In that version, the remark is supposed to have captured the signature aspiration of modernity - to deploy knowledge for the sake of the mastery on which human progress depends. The inquiry of experts would unlock the arcana of nature, and provide a mode of beneficial rule that could escape old criticisms of the power of ill-informed and thus to some extent illegitimate monarchs. [T]he sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge, Bacon wrote, wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity ... [but] we should command her by action. Expertise, that is, would offer liberation from the age-old yoke of nature by taking humanity beyond the realm of mere opinion. Kings had proved themselves powerless to lift this yoke, but experts would do so for the sake of man\u27s advancement and sovereignty. It was an optimistic, untroubled, and even visionary statement. In the several centuries since, expert governance - rule by elite knowledge claimed to be superior to mere opinion - has fallen under suspicion. But there is a serious debate about how to diagnose its possible failings