Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013)

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 show more 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. show less

One thing that really bothers me here is that in all of the talk surrounding "just" war she never makes any mention of war-fighting capabilities, and the massive gap that now exists between a few nations and the rest of the world in those capabilities. Terrorism is obviously not "just", but is fighting with a vast, overwhelmingly technological military force against people who can NEVER meet you openly on the battlefield due to their inability to wield that technology "just"? Does it follow show more that because most of the world can not even close to matching U.S. military technology on a conventional battlefield that if they are invaded they should just have to take it? Certainly when we talk about just war theory in this day and age this should be considered, right? By condemning any tactics that do not fit into a "conventional war" mold, and excusing those that do, she is condemning the majority of the world's population to have no "just" option for their own defense against superpower states. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Jean Elshtain examines how the myths of Man as "Just Warrior" and Woman as "Beautiful Soul" serve to recreate and secure women's social position as noncombatants and men's identity as warriors. Elshtain demonstrates how these myths are undermined by the reality of female bellicosity and sacrificial male love, as well as the moral imperatives of just wars.