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

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

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

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

Of Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought

This essay examines the thought of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1938-1977). It situates his once-famous depiction of savage politics as a premonitory rejection of the state at the crossroads of several traditions, long- and short-term. First, Clastres's thought resonates with the primitivistic appeal by French "moralists" since the early modern period to the lifestyle of prehistoric societies; second, it casts light on the history of French anthropology in the crisis years of structuralism; and third, it reflects the revival of Friedrich Nietzsche in French thought of the era. Above all, however, the essay explains Clastres's thought as an attempt to resist and to overcome the well-known communist allegiances of postwar French intellectuals. Early in rejecting communism, Clastres owed his prominence to the 1970s popularization of the critique of "totalitarianism." The so-called "passing of an illusion" of communism, one version of which Clastres pioneered, is often interpreted as the replacement of confusion with truth. It is more interesting, the essay suggests, to situate it in its time, as a complex achievement as defective as it was creative, if Clastres's thought is taken as an example. In closing, the essay suggests some legacies, often unintentional, Clastres left behind in French political thought of the years since his death

Two Regimes of Memory

The development of post-Holocaust culture is coming to be understood as a transition between two regimes of memory. An initial period of repression gave way, after twenty years or more, to one of obsession. Before he turns to a careful discussion of the second of these regimes in international context, Omer Bartov deals with the first only briefly and then in largely negative and summary terms. In this short comment, I want to try to complicate this somewhat undifferentiated account of the first twenty years after the war. The period is critical, I suggest, because it may offer some important resources for escaping the vicious circle of enemies and victims that Bartov identifies