Sovereignty: God, State and Self

by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, sovereignty has cut across the diverse realms of theology, political thought, and psychology. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, the debates about sovereignty—complete independence and self-government—have dominated our history.In this seminal work of political history and political theory, leading scholar and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of “sovereignty” as it relates to all the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self. Examining the early modern ideas of God which formed the basis for the modern sovereign state, Elshtain carries her research from theology and philosophy into psychology, showing that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self. As the basis of sovereign power shifts from God, to the state, to the self, Elshtain uncovers startling realities often hidden from view. Her thesis consists in nothing less than a thorough-going rethinking of our intellectual history through its keystone concept.
The culmination of over thirty years of critically applauded work in feminism, international relations, political thought, and religion, Sovereignty opens new ground for our understanding of our own culture, its past, present, and future.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History, Religion, Nonfiction, International Relations

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 9, 2007

About the author

Jean Bethke Elshtain is an American political philosopher. She is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and is a contributing editor for The New Republic. She is, in addition, newly the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and she has served on the Boards of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has received nine honorary degrees. In 2002, Elshtain received the Frank J. Goodnow award, the highest award for distinguished service to the profession given by the American Political Science Association.

The focus of Elshtain's work is an exploration of the relationship between politics and ethics. Much of her work is concerned with the parallel development of male and female gender roles as they pertain to public and private social participation. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks she has been one of the more visible academic supporters of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, scholar of religion and political philosophy, 1941-2013 http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2013...

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did learn a lot form this book don't get me wrong. I just disagree on some points. The author appears to have a pro-life stance in every possible circumstance. While on the other hand I believe that aborting a pregnancy if it is known that the birth would result in an extremely diseased or handicapped human being is justified. I also feel that there is more bad than good in this world. Which is why I personally would not choose to bring life into it. All the war, disease, death and suffering has a heavy weight to it. Also personally for me I feel that I have bad genes and would not wish to pass them on.

Alas, I am already here myself therefore I will do my best to seek justice and equality for all who are here. But I cannot think of bringing someone into this world. The author also brings up the novel Children of Men where the world becomes chaos because men have become infertile. Personally, I'm more concerned that our existence is archived and documented so that if there is any other life out there in this vast universe, they may one day find our left behind data and history. It is not my concern as to whether humanity continues on. Humanity has proven to be, let's say, less of what its potential could have been. It has utterly failed on terms of ending war. That alone proves its ineptness. I won't even get into its failure to take climate change seriously. Shame.

Of course not everyone has such a negative outlook as mine. I am also a deist and don't subscribe to the authors religion.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most infuriating book I've read in a very, very long time. Elshtain's 'argument' (maybe 'statement' is a better word) is that the idea of sovereignty can be traced from a Thomist sovereign God of reason and love through a nominalist sovereign God of will to a sovereign state of will to a sovereign, willing individual. She provides no evidence for this, but it makes some kind of sense.

What makes no sense at all is her refusal to distinguish descriptive from prescriptive passages in the authors she references; her refusal to distinguish statements of ideas from the way people actually live their lives; and her concomitant refusal to show how these ideas - almost all of which are taken from the highest of high philosophers and theologians - have an impact on daily life. This wouldn't be a problem if this was just an intellectual history, but it isn't. It's a polemic against, well, people she doesn't like: abortion doctors, geneticists, atheists in general, philosophers in general, feminists who aren't lovey-dovey enough for her liking, and... wait for it... moralists who are always judging other people. Um, okay.

It's meant to be the fault of Ockham/Hobbes/Descartes/Kant/Hegel/Emerson/Nietzsche/de Beauvoir that people get abortions, and treat each other like shit. Okay then. If only the masses stopped reading Quodlibeta Septem and the Phenomenology of Geist, I'm sure the world would be just nifty.

I suppose JBE could be going for irony with her high theory in praise of embodiment, nature, history and social relationships. Ironic, because she ignores actual embodiment (nothing about physical suffering, for instance, makes it in; she only sneers at the way people actually use their bodies most of the time, "writhing and contorting and self-mutilating" ). She ignores social life (there's no indication that she's even aware that social conditions have changed a little since, say, Augustine's time; if you think there's such a thing as structural racism, you're being sovereigntist- although surely the point of saying there's structural anything is to dispute individual sovereignty?). She ignores history (the idea that the above thinkers might have been *responding* to something, rather than making grand claims about an immutable human nature, is never even mentioned. To wit, she criticizes Kant in *exactly the same way* that Hegel criticizes Kant, and then criticizes Hegel for being a Nazi or something).

Her solution to this 'problem,' whatever it is, is to believe in concrete embodiment (= "some institutional or relational form that has some sturdiness and capacity for perdurance".) Ordinarily I would avoid pointing out that the Soviet Union was a sturdy institutional form with a capacity for perdurance, but since JBE doesn't hesitate to pull out the Hitler Argument at every conceivable opportunity (if you like the Human genome project, you're a nazi etc...), I have no qualms: she simply says we should be part of institutions without recognizing that institutions can be just as evil as sovereign selves. Maybe she can beg this question by saying that we must also "insist... on the fact that there is a human nature and resist all attempts to turn it into the rubble of historic forces." So then a good institution is one that enables us to fulfill our human nature. But since she doesn't give any evidence that such a thing exists, let alone describe what it is, I can't quite see the point.

I'm obviously very upset at this book, and for good reason. First, the topic is a good one- both tracing the concept 'sovereignty' and criticizing contemporary society. So I had high hopes. But the result is morally over-bearing. It's massively self-contradictory (she accuses others of being 'prisoners of a picture,' while ignoring anything that doesn't fit into her postmodern, quasi religious anti-utopianism - how can you call yourself Christian and *not* yearn for a perfect world???) And it's intellectually weak: JBE lumps together people who think we're just the result of genes, or utility maximizing machines, with Pelagians and German idealism. She defines a totalitarian society as "a story of unbridled freedom to kill," which describes almost every society known to human or animal kind.

Most disturbing of all, for me, is that she misses the true target: our problem is not sovereignty, but positivism. JBE, like most recent intellectuals (but unlike, say, Augustine or Thomas or Hegel or any number of the thinkers she quotes here), thinks that things are a certain way and that's how they have to be and we have to just deal with it. She quotes Benedict XVI: "In a world that in the last analysis is not mathematics but love... the smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things." It's a lovely thought, but she does nothing to show that we're living in that world. In this world, everything is, in the last analysis, mathematics: we need to *fight* for a world in which everything would be love. You can't do that when you're weighed down by pomo human naturalism.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though not flawless, Elshtain's basic arguement is sound. I would rate this as a very important contemporary work, especially for Christians. For far too long, Christians have not recognized that our theological ideas have crucial political ramifications. Our politics always imperfectly but truly reflect the worship of some deity, and it is high time that we returned to the worship of our sovereign triune God in our political concepts and practices.

[Stephanie Marcinkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

DNF - read most of the book for a graduate level course on the History of Sex and Gender. This book provided a foundation for how we arrived at modern cultural beliefs, challenges, and discourse on sexuality and gender. As the title suggests, Jean Bethke Elshtain walks the reader through history of humanity connected to God and in relation to the State (governments) and oneself which is important in order to understand how humanity approaches its ideas on how to affect change in the areas of sex and gender.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elshtain's elaborate language made reading this book a time-consuming business. But apart from me being a bit unfamiliar with the prose, her task of going through world history by focusing on the relationship God-state, and state-self, respectively, is an interesting one.

[Joe Beery · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the content but really struggled with the writing; not the best conversion-to-book of the Giffords.

[Sam Andrus · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

wanted to review this with my response paper for class but i havent written it yet

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea of sovereignty, like almost any other politically or culturally meaningful term, was not born in a vacuum, remaining unchanged through the centuries. In many ways, Elshtain’s “Sovereignty” is a history of this complicated idea from its deeply religious and theological associations in Augustine and Aquinas to what she refers to as a “monist,” psychologized sovereignty of the self that holds the most sway in our fractured modernity. As the title of the book indicates, Elshtain discusses sovereignty at what she perceives to be the three critical junctures of its development, with the sovereignty of the self being a product, or so she seems to think, of Enlightenment’s secular humanism.

In the first part of the book, Elshtain sees an important shift from Thomistic conceptions of sovereignty, which emphasize God’s love and rationality and especially the ability of the human being to use her intellect to deduce these things about God, toward the nominalism of William of Ockham. She associates Ockham’s nominalism with a prevailing trend toward voluntarism, which shifts the focus away from God’s love and rationality toward the omnipotent, volitional will. While theology was the locus classicus of this paradigmatic shift, it eventually spills over into the political realm wherein there is a consolidation of power into a single body (either the Pope or the prince), as opposed to the idea of the Gelasian Two Swords doctrine (as articulated by Pope Gelasius in a 494 letter titled “Deo sunt” to Emperor Anastasius I). Elshtain’s intellectual genealogy is right to see in this historical moment both the origins of the all-powerful secular prince and those of the archetypical medieval Pope, one of whose missions was to purposively blur the lines between the political and spiritual realms.

The second part of the book gives several adumbrations of thinkers Elshtain associates with the view that the rightful place of sovereignty is in the state, including Hobbes, Hegel, Schmitt, and Machiavelli. Elshtain explains how these thinkers, along with Martin Luther whose fear of civil disorder and unruliness lead him to give increasing numbers of powers to the king, built the theoretical absolutism which James I and Louis XIV used as justification for their reigns. While the author limns the origins of shifts in the idea of sovereignty, she never locates a “cause” or a rationale; she points to Hegel and shows (convincingly) that he places ultimate sovereignty in the state, and later says that movements such as radical feminism have even further atomized sovereignty, locating it at the site of the individual’s body. But as a reader, I would have appreciated an investigation of the shifts themselves – of how one conception, over time, turned into the other.

While the first two-thirds of the book honed in tightly on the examination of carefully made arguments about ideas, the last part completely falls into politically conservative homiletic. Instead of following arguments, this part of the book blames everything from radical feminism to eugenics to cloning as being part of the irresponsible shift of sovereignty to the level of the human body. Elshtain sees these as breach of deeply Christian humanism which she seems to espouse in her admiration of Augustine and Aquinas. While one can easily agree or disagree with her opinion, it was ultimately the lack of a well-presented defense of God-centered sovereignty that made me think less of the book. Throughout the book, she also seemed to downplay or ignore the atrocities of our ventures in God-centered sovereignty (like the burning of heretics), doing the same for all of the progress made during post-Enlightenment modernity (like representative democracy and women’s suffrage).

For those interested in more on the topic: Elshtain openly admits to not having a deep background in theology in the introduction to the book. Anyone looking for a correction in this should look to Quentin Skinner’s much more theologically grounded and scholarly two-volume “The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,” especially the second volume which focuses on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political theory.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I commend Mrs. Elshtain for taking it upon herself to address a topic of such breadth and importance in the intellectual and moral development of the civil society. Rather than presupposing basic understandings about sovereignty (i.e. that it fully belongs to some amorphous mass, "the people"), she tackles the fundamental questions surrounding it, penetrating to the core of the matter. She begins with an analysis of the nature of God's sovereignty, relying heavily on the thoughts of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The underlying theme discussed in this portion of the book will tie all three sections together: that is, is sovereignty bounded or unbounded, absolute or divided? The author makes the courageous claim that an individual's answer to this question, as it pertains to one's attitude toward the nature of God's sovereignty, will inevitably shape his attitude toward the sovereignty of the state and the self.

Of the three sections, arguments about the sovereignty of the self (and its inherent danger) was easiest for me to understand. It amounted to a cultural critique of modern day individualism that has taken root in secular progressive circles and radical feminist ideologies. Discussion of the sovereignty of God and the state were much more abstract and extremely difficult to grasp, even as a student well versed in history and philosophy. The author does not stoop to the level of the common reader, but rather chooses to express herself in very academic and lofty language. For anyone considering this book, I recommend having a strong academic background and vocabulary, otherwise it will be extremely difficult to read. In fact, the only reason I rated this book four stars (instead of five) was because I believed it to be unnecessary abstract in language and arcane in content. Ironically, the author finishes the book with a plea for the return to reality, the corpeal, the fleshly relationships that give meaning to life itself. We have a moral responsibility to dwell on things above, but we must be careful not to lose our heads in the clouds of philosophical abstraction and lose touch with those people and things which we love.

[Kevin Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elshtain's Gifford Lectures

[Meepspeeps]

I didn't get very far and it was too much of a textbook for me.