Dense and rewarding.
An elegant and timely investigation of the rise, and fall, and rise, of political theology.
Once upon a time, everyone assumed religion and politics went hand in hand. Here, Lilla (Committee on Social Thought/Univ. of Chicago; The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, 2001, etc.) traces the relatively recent Western divide between the two. Lilla opens by distinguishing three different kinds of political theology—those that imagine God as immanent, remote or transcendent—and by sketching the different ways Judaism and Christianity conceive of God’s involvement with the world. He then tours post-medieval Western thought. On one end sits Hobbes (who, with Locke and Hume, untangled religion from statecraft); on the other end sit Kant and Hegel. In between those two poles is the most significant section of the book—Lilla’s reading of Rousseau’s “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” a section of Emile (and the most sustained treatment Rousseau ever offered of religion). Rousseau was the first to articulate the belief that religion is an expression of man’s essential goodness. In wanting to have it both ways—wanting a secular politics shot through with some domesticated sense of piety—Rousseau was, in a sense, undermining the profound break that his forebears had made with religion. The titular stillborn God is Rousseau’s step-child: The liberal religion Emile spawned was dealt a paralyzing blow in the mid-20th century, because it ultimately couldn’t stand up to the monstrous reemergence of the political theology of Nazi Germany. Lilla offers no tidy answers at the end of the book. Given the purchase political theology has on so many people, even today, Westerners must ask whether they wish the separation between politics and religion to continue.
Dense and rewarding.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4367-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
