Political Theology and Early Modernity

Hammill Graham, Reinhard Lupton Julia

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology.

"Political Theology and Early Modernity" explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.

Reviews

"The essays collected in this superb volume seize upon the current 'turn to religion' in global politics (and academia) in an effort to rethink the history of secularization as a fitful, inconsistent, and perhaps interminable process that cannot help but draw upon the energies of what it aims to surpass. The political theology of early modern Europe, along with its intense and agonistic theorizations by so many thinkers in Weimar Germany, provide the source material for these groundbreaking investigations. The volume helps us to grasp the ways in which the political theological matrix transmits its urgencies into the present" – Eric Santner, University of Chicago

"This stellar collection of essays demonstrates why political theology in recent years has become such a vibrant area of critical inquiry. An unusually wide and brilliant range of scholars turn attention to the early modern period as the time when the relation of politics and theology receives a jolt that will have lasting consequence for modernity. Together in all their variety these essays provide a broad and solid base on which all future work on the subject will have to take place" – Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania

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