1,720,990 research outputs found
Sacrifice Before the Secular
No full textEarly modern secularism——and early modern religion——are plagued by tales of demystification, where each is made into the other's mutual secret, token of bad faith and self-alienation. This essay hopes to chart an alternative story, by looking at an early modern moment when the practices of legal and theological reason worked in tandem on the problem of sacrifice. Before the secular, it argues, sacrifice did not mark sacrality as such, but was rather the material that helped rethink both the functions of authority and the transactions between contingent humanity and the universal demands of law and God
The Poetics and Politics of Theodicy
No full textIf Exodus was the paradigm of revolutionary politics in the seventeenth century, Job was the book that most resonated in the Enlightenment, a period when political, aesthetic, and religious ambitions far exceeded their real powers. Poetry emerged as a central concern at precisely the moment when these limitations were realized, both as a vehicle for recuperating the Biblical text and for imagining a certain divine and political order. Job's theodicy provided a meeting ground for an entwined poetics and politics during the Enlightenment and, this essay suggests, today as well. The Enlightenment, I suggest, illuminates that version of Biblical poetry articulated by Robert Alter, backlighting it to show some of the political implications of a poetic Bible
The Altars of the Idols. Religion, Sacrifice, and the Early Modern Polity
No full texthis essay is an attempt to think through some of the problems of idolatry and sacrifice for the early modern period and more generally, for the constitution of religious and political community. In particular, it argues that the altars of the idols condensed two problems: first, the problem of communion, and specifically the Protestant ability to communicate with God; and second, the problem of distinction. At a time when the nature of the religious polity was in question, the analysis of idolatry and sacrifice produced a conceptual structure for understanding, in anthropological fashion, the very constitution of religious and political community. In fact, this essay will suggest, this structure lives on, alive and well, among modern theorists seeking to diagnose the ailments of modernity
Invisible Hands. Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century
No full textWhy is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systemsnatural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and otherswhose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effectbut with them also a new ability to imagine the world s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture
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