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AFTER SOVEREIGNTY? - Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion. By Robert A. Yelle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $100.00 (cloth); $32.50 (paper); $32.50 (digital). ISBN: 9780226585451.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2021
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
References
1 The words are those of seventeenth-century Cambridge theologian John Spencer. John Spencer, A Discourse Concerning Prodigies: Wherein the Vanity of Presages by Them Is Reprehended, 2nd ed. (London, 1665), 29.
2 See also Robert A. Yelle, “‘An Age of Miracles’: Disenchantment as a Secularized Theological Narrative,” in Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity, ed. Robert A. Yelle and Lorenz Trein (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 129–48.
3 See the following reviews: Paul C. Johnson, review of Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion, by Robert A Yelle, Sociology of Religion 81, no. 2 (2020): 240–42; Nancy Levene, “The Outside,” review of Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion, by Robert A. Yelle, History of Religions 60, no. 2 (2020): 132–50; Michelle C. Sanchez, review of Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion, by Robert A. Yelle, The Square (blog), June 21, 2021, Religion and Its Publics, http://relpubs.as.virginia.edu/sovereignty-and-the-sacred-secularism-and-the-political-economy-of-religion-a-review-by-michelle-c-sanchez/.
4 Amesbury, Richard, “Religion as the Carnival of the Secular: Historicizing the History of Religions,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).
5 Cavanaugh, William T., “Peeling away the Cellophane: Political Theology and the Exceptional God,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue). The phrase “iron cage” is not used by Cavanaugh, but comes from Talcott Parsons's translation of a line in the conclusion of Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 1998), 181. The term is often invoked as a shorthand description of the consequences of “disenchantment” for the modern subject.
6 See Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, trans. Francis W. Kelsey, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 2:13 (prolegomena para. 11).
7 Cavanaugh co-edited a volume that reflects a theological rather than secular approach to this subfield. See Peter Manley Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
8 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
9 My own contribution to such genealogical critiques has extended over a series of earlier publications. See, especially, Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). In that book, I demonstrate the impact of Protestant theological presuppositions on the British colonial encounter with Hindus and begin a series of studies of the Christian roots of disenchantment.
10 Cavanaugh, “Peeling away the Cellophane.”
11 This repeats Georges Bataille's earlier substitution of sovereignty (souveraineté) for the sacred (see 11).
12 For further analysis along these lines, see Robert A. Yelle, “Hobbes the Egyptian: The Return to Pharaoh, or the Ancient Roots of Secular Politics,” in Sacred Kingship in World History, ed. A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
13 Amesbury, “Religion as the Carnival of the Secular.”
14 For this reason, I also co-convened a conference, “Deprovincializing Political Theology” at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich in October 2019, and I am guest editing a special issue of Political Theology on this topic.
15 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 1.
16 Levene, “The Outside,” 134.
17 Levene, 135.
18 Levene, 144.
19 Levene, 150. This is one reference to “the outside” of the article's title—namely, that my dream, also, of an exit from tradition is utopian or ideological in nature, indistinguishable from a religious commitment. For a similar statement of the difference between a history of religions and a religious history, see also now Robert A. Yelle, “History,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. Robert A. Segal and Nickolas P. Roubekas, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley, 2021), 289–301. However, in this essay, I do not question the possibility of an anthropological study of religion that incorporates the historical archive.
20 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (Chicago: HAU Books, 2017), 74.
21 Even Agamben has taken a sort of comparative turn. Giorgio Agamben, Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
22 Cavanaugh, “Peeling away the Cellophane.”
23 Cavanaugh does not note that my characterization of the Jerusalem-Athens dialectic as “unstable” was a direct quotation from Francis Oakley.
24 Cavanaugh, “Peeling away the Cellophane.”
25 Sanchez, review of Sovereignty and the Sacred.
26 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, ed. Kalberg, Stephen, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107Google Scholar. Of course we cannot speak of “nominalism” in the Hebrew Bible without anachronism; the affinity, noted by Weber, between these two moments of disenchantment is grounded on the shared idea of divine omnipotence, which was central to medieval nominalism. In the case of the early Reformation, Weber highlighted both predestination and the related attack on Catholic rituals, which were direct consequences of the emphasis on divine omnipotence.
27 The emphasis on the potentia absoluta led to absolutism and to the hollowing out of intermediary institutions, such as the church, analogous to the manner in which nominalism made everything depend on direct divine intervention and evacuated intermediary causes, such as the sacraments. Cavanaugh cites Kantorowicz as a counterexample to my Schmittian focus on the exception. Yet the fiction that the king never dies was designed precisely to avoid the interregnum, one form of the exception, with its associated violence, which only shows how closely the concepts were connected. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), chapter 7. Kantorowicz and some of his sources, including von Gierke and Frederic William Maitland, were concerned to trace the rise of absolutism, which was another manifestation of nominalism. Lack of time and space precludes pursuing these connections further here; however, see the discussion below of the contributions by Winnifred Sullivan and Joseph David.
28 Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Banton (London: Tavistock, 1966), 1–46, at 7–8.
29 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 3–16.
30 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, “Spiritual Economy,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).
31 Vincent Lloyd, “From the Sovereign to the Church,” (blog post), March 18, 2021, Political Theology Network, https://politicaltheology.com/from-the-sovereign-to-the-church/.
32 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 12–31.
33 Frederic William Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation,” in Selected Essays, ed. H. D. Hazeltine, G. Lapsley, and P. H. Winfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 104–27, at 104, quoting Frederick Pollock, First Book of Jurisprudence (London: MacMillan, 1896), 113.
34 Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. Frederic William Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 87.
35 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), chap. 16, §13.
36 Haskell, John D., “The Profane/Sacred Oeconomy of Law and Religion,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).
37 Friedrich Max Müller, Comparative Mythology, ed. A. Smythe Palmer (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1909 [1856]).
38 Haskell, “The Profane/Sacred Oeconomy of Law and Religion.”
39 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 707.
40 For a survey of this literature, see Robert A. Yelle, “Imagining Sacrifice in Ancient India: A Genealogy of Heesterman's ‘Broken World,’” in South Asian Rituals in Archaeological Context: Power, Presence and Space, ed. Henry Albery, Jens-Uwe Hartmann, and Himanshu Prabha Ray (London: Routledge, 2020), 19–38.
41 Lily Weiser, Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen und Männerbünde: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen und nordischen Altertums- und Volkskunde (Baden: Konkordia, 1927), 15, 27, 36. It is unclear whether Weiser had read Schmitt.
42 Joseph E. David, “From Schmitt to the Hebrew Bible and Back: A Conceptual Odyssey of the Sacred and Sovereignty,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021) (this issue).
43 David, “From Schmitt to the Hebrew Bible and Back.”
44 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Shapiro, Ian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 21Google Scholar9.
45 David, “From Schmitt to the Hebrew Bible and Back.”
46 Sullivan, “Spiritual Economy.”
47 See especially Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
48 See, for example, Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.