Who Governs when God Rules? Jewish Theocracy from Kingship to Democracy

Under Contract with Cambridge University Press for a New Series on Comparative Political Theory

Since Plato, Western thinkers have shared a basic assumption about politics: some people rule and others obey.  Political order necessarily entails what Max Weber called "a relation of men dominating men…supported by means of legitimate violence."  Across millennia of Jewish political thought, by contrast, a fundamentally different view prevailed.  Legitimate rule (arche) is the possession neither of one human being (monarchy), nor the few (aristocracy), nor the many (democracy).  It is the province of God alone, a concept which the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus called “theocracy.”  

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Yet embedded in the idea of theocracy is a paradox.  In theory, divine rule eliminates the need for earthly politics.  God’s ultimate sovereignty forbids all human violence and domination; secular power is at best illegitimate, at worst idolatrous.  In practice, something like human political agency always remains necessary.  The deity, after all, does not punish criminals, collect taxes, defend borders, or feed the hungry; these tasks must be performed by people.  What, therefore, does human politics look like in light of divine sovereignty?  How does theocracy translate into reality?  Or, to rephrase Robert Dahl’s famous question, who governs when God rules?  

In this book, I compare the responses to the theocratic paradox taken by two figures who are central in classical Jewish thought but largely neglected in political theory: Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) and Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel.  Maimonides, medieval Judaism’s most important philosopher, argues that divine rule entails kingship by the Davidic dynasty, a royalist theocracy.  A king, he proposes, should have the authority not only to enforce Jewish law (halakhah), but to enact new legislation according to his discretion.  In this way, he can ensure that the social order as a whole aligns with the idea of divine justice and that divine rule is made manifest.

By contrast, Abarbanel, the leader of Spanish Jewry during and after the Spanish Inquisition, argues that God’s rule necessities a participatory, federated, and substantially democratic republican theocracy.  Human kingship, he contends, is not only less suited to divine rule but essentially antithetical to it.  Far from ensuring justice, it actually invites tyranny.  Thus against theocratic royalism, Abarbanel proposes that in the Torah’s conception the people themselves hold the right to appoint their judges; power is diffused between multiple, quasi-representative legal bodies; and final say in political matters—including the right to declare war and make exceptions to the law in times of emergency—is held by the highest court, the Sanhedrin.  

I conclude the book by addressing lingering theocratic impulses in contemporary Judaism as well as in Christianity and Islam.  At a time when the relationship between religion and democracy remains fraught and complex, Who Governs when God Rules? sets out to redraw our horizons about politics and theology by recovering an overlooked but important strand of political theory.

Messianism and Politics from Jesus to ISIS: Religion, Philosophy, Democracy

In Progress

Political theorists usually assume that messianism is a strictly religious phenomenon, associating it with faith groups either ambivalent about democracy or opposed to it entirely.  I aim to challenge this view.  First, I will argue that messianic thought has historically been secularized into politics, for example by Marxists, who saw communism’s advent as a kind of messianic rupture; by France’s radical revolutionaries, who justified the Terror’s violence in terms of realizing an “ultimate justice”; and by Nazis, who saw the Fuhrer as the Volk’s savior.  Second, I will show how messianic ideas were secularized by important philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.  Finally, I will propose that messianic beliefs are deeply embedded within liberal-democratic discourse itself: the West’s nineteenth-century belief in its “civilizing mission”; its twentieth-century belief in hastening the “end of history”; and the language employed by anti-slavery advocates like Frederick Douglass and civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King.  

This raises important questions: Why has messianic thinking been so attractive? Is it always problematic and violent, or is some version of it beneficial, or even necessary, for liberal democracy?  To answer these questions, I will draw comparatively from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious writings, the history of political thought, social theory, and empirical research on messianic movements.  I aim for the book to be grounded in political theory and also interest scholars in multiple disciplines.

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