As Charles Lesch employs the concept of solidarity in his provocative book, it is synonymous with “fraternity” and with what Ronald Dworkin called “integrity”: the third, more obscure, and ultimately religious principle that turns the modern revolutionary promise of “liberty” and “equality” into a reality for all. Without solidarity, liberal democracies cannot get their citizens to sacrifice themselves for country, stand up against injustice, and help those in need because the motivation for these sorts of actions does not come “by liberal ideals or institutions, but by the untamed, nonrational parts of our psyche” that are associated with religion (p. 11). According to Lesch, it was Carl Schmitt who first identified a fatal flaw in liberal democracy: it relies on religious sources of solidarity that it simultaneously needs to disavow in the name of secularism and religious neutrality. The only way to resolve this problem, which Lesch calls “Schmitt’s challenge,” is for liberal democracy to understand itself as a “political theology.” That is, liberal democracy needs to secularize and rationalize political concepts drawn from religion to generate “liberal solidarity,” a combination of the willingness to transcend self-interestedness while adhering to the absolute values of individual freedom and human dignity. In the first part of the book, Lesch reconstructs the “political theology” of Rousseau, Kant, and Habermas as forms of “solidarity through secularization” of the divine. However, for Lesch these liberal political theologies remain too rational; they fail to grasp that “liberal solidarity cannot subsist on reason alone” (p. 12). For this reason, in the second part, Lesch turns to the Jewish thought of Levinas and Buber, who better channel the “nonrational psyche… into forms of solidarity supportive of liberalism” and develop “solidarity through imitation” of the divine (p. 12).
Through a series of sophisticated interpretations of Rousseau, Kant, Habermas, Levinas, Buber and George Eliot, Lesch makes a strong argument for the hypothesis that these thinkers seek to reduce dependence among citizens by appealing to conceptions of solidarity that leverage the analogy between theological and political concepts. For reasons of space, I focus on the contraposition between Rousseau’s and Kant’s political theologies and the religious ethics of Levinas and Buber. In the case of Rousseau, the idea of the “general will” is meant to resolve the paradox that only by giving their will entirely over to the sovereign or political body is each citizen guaranteed their freedom “against all personal dependence” (Rousseau, cited on p. 31). Following other commentators, Lesch argues that the general will is a political and secularized transposition of Malebranche’s occasionalism, a theory of relationship between divine and human agency according to which “every time a person acts, his action is only effective because God wills it” (p. 43). God always wills what is good, just like Rousseau’s sovereign will is always right. But as particular individuals endowed with the capacity for arbitrary choice, we may not always see how these divine or political general laws are really in our best interest and may thus choose to do otherwise in the belief that we would be better off. That is why, as Rousseau famously put it, we have to be “forced to be free.”
Lesch finds Rousseau’s expression problematic because it turns the analogy between divine and sovereign will into a political myth, as if the sovereign will, which is supposed to emerge out of a social contract between individuals, instead were “a metaphysical collective agent” (p. 53) whose existence is independent of the consent of individuals and in the end generates solidarity in ways that contradicts the liberal belief in individual liberty. Now, the problem of how to render compatible the general will with the particular choices of citizens can also be understood in terms of the tension between state and civil society. The politico-theological analogy that accounts for, and perhaps also resolves, this tension is based on analogies with the Trinitarian structure of God, in particular with the idea of a “divine economy” based on the government of Christ rather than the rule of God. This is how Giorgio Agamben, for instance, mobilizes Malebranche’s occasionalism to account for the “economic” coordination between individual choices and general laws in modern societies. Lesch never mentions the Trinity in his account of Rousseau’s or Malebranche’s political theology, and I would like to ask him why.
For Lesch, Kant veers into political theology with his idea of spontaneity, which is analogous to “God’s spontaneity” because both require the “miraculous” interruption of natural laws (p. 66). Unlike most commentators, including Habermas, who see the kernel of Kant’s political thought in his system of rights, Lesch thinks that the purportedly antinomian structure of human spontaneity takes Kant’s politics beyond the juridical and into the sphere of religious ethics. I have doubts that this is the case, because after all the moral law is a fact of reason for Kant; however, I do agree with Lesch that Kant did not believe that a society in which my freedom is the limit of your freedom, and vice versa, is sufficient to guarantee the realization of our moral capacity. Lesch argues that only in Religion within the boundaries of mere reason and its conceptions of radical evil and of a rational ethical community does one near “the heart of Kant’s long-anticipated political theory” (p. 71). The ideal of ethical community corresponds to the messianic “kingdom of God on earth” and complements a political society where citizens are bound by “juridical” laws by setting up a “public moral culture” (p. 76). Lesch understands Kant’s ethical community as the opposite of Rousseau’s civil religion: whereas the latter justifies the political realization of ethical being by forcing people to be free, via the earthly god of the sovereign, Kant wants a religious ethics to perfect politics and the human sovereign to be replaced by the intervention of “the deity itself” (p. 78). Without “the management of the moral ruler of the world” (p. 79), the good society remains unattainable. Lesch is unconvinced by Kant’s turn toward the messianic, but it is unclear why. I missed in this context a discussion of Kant’s approach to Jesus’s teachings, no longer taken as the foundation of the “visible” church but in light of a more enlightened, constitutional, and republican ideal of an “invisible” church.
In the second part of the book, Lesch argues that the ideal of Kant’s religious ethics is best realized by Levinas’s proposal that we should approach others “as we would the divine being” (p. 114). According to Lesch, Maimonides’s negative theology stands behind Levinas’s ethics: just like God is “beyond being” and beyond categorization, so too each individual should be treated as if they were radically other (p. 129). Maimonides assumes the unknowability of God’s essence but argues that human imitation is possible in relation to God’s actional attributes; that is, to God’s providential or governmental manifestation in history. Yet Lesch does not speak about divine providence or government in this context (p. 129, esp. n85). If Lesch is right, and Levinas does borrow from Maimonides the belief that “how human beings should relate to God provides a model for how we should relate to other human beings” (p. 130), then doesn’t this possibility of imitation make sense only if the Godhead is structured legally and politically from the start; for example, if divine revelation takes the form of law or even of a constitution, as in Deuteronomy? Additionally, if Levinas is right and our metaphysical desire to know God (what is truly true and really real) somehow translates directly into the motivation “to improve the well-being of my fellow man” (p. 131), it is unclear how this avoids Rousseau’s problem: given that liberal and democratic governments exist for the sake of improving this well-being, wouldn’t the Levinasian program encourage seeing government as an earthly god?
This question also seems to guide Lesch’s brilliant discussion of Buber’s conception of “theopolitics,” which calls for “human beings to mutually subject themselves to God’s kingship” (p. 149) as a direct response to Schmitt’s “political theology.” For Buber, the biblical idea of God’s kingdom contains a political axiom: “when all people are mutually dependent on divine rule, none are dependent on merely human rule” (p. 150). However, if liberal democracy and theopolitics share the ideal of organizing political society to diminish relations of dependence and domination between persons, they would seem to be at odds on the means to achieve this. For Buber, nondependence can only be achieved if God’s rule “potentially interpenetrates all” spheres of life (p. 152). This would seem to go directly counter to the spirit of liberalism, which holds onto a radical separation of private and public, church and state. In what sense is theopolitics still a form of liberal politics?
I end my discussion by returning to the idea of solidarity. If I understand the book correctly, the ultimate meaning of solidarity or fraternity corresponds to the biblical virtue of chesed, or charity—which Lesch translates as “putting vulnerability first.” Ultimately, “to imitate God” (p. 174) means to be charitable. Lesch argues that the centrality of chesed is derived from God’s covenant with His people, which manifested itself in the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea and the destruction of the Pharaoh’s army: just like God showed chesed toward the Israelites, so, too, “the Israelites themselves are enjoined to show chesed toward every ‘individual dependent on others, lacking security, subject to the might of the mighty’” (p. 177). For Lesch, this understanding of the covenant reveals the possibility that human beings, “without divine assistance” (p. 178), can attain the kind of ethical community that even Kant believed was attainable only messianically. My final question is this: Does Lesch think that the Jewish conception of the covenant with God somehow excludes the messianic development of a people’s relation with God? Or is it rather the other way around—that God’s covenant with this specific people assigned them, and no other, a messianic function in human history?
Lesch’s book offers one of the most convincing arguments in the current literature as to why liberalism needs a political theology to counteract clear ethical deficits that emerge because of basic social structures that in many ways exacerbate what Kant called the “unsocial sociability” of human beings. Lesch is convinced this ethical supplement has a religious source. His book offers a concrete model, drawn from Jewish thought, as to how liberalism can draw from such sources the nectar of solidarity while keeping out some of the poison that has always made liberalism wary of receiving religious support for its social and political order. In so doing, Lesch assumes that religion is fundamentally an ethical and moral enterprise. In my view, however, the point of political theology is to show that “religion” and “theology” are political and legal constructions from the start. This is what gives them not only their evident capacity to secure political and social order, but it is also what keeps them from being pure vehicles of ethical redemption.
