I am grateful to Miguel Vatter for his very kind words about my book, the seriousness with which he approached it, and his thoughtful questions. In his précis of my argument, Vatter describes the original theory of solidarity I develop as a political theology. I would like to challenge that description, and, in doing so, elaborate on the book’s interpretive, conceptual, and normative claims. Debates about political theology might seem abstruse. I believe their moral and political stakes are high.
Schmitt proposed two theses on political theology: an historical thesis, in which important concepts in modern political thought originated from analogies to theology: and a psychological thesis, where human beings’ cognitive orientation toward politics mirrors their orientation to the divine (Political Theology, 2005, p. 36). I believe that Schmitt’s historical thesis is correct, and the first part of Solidarity in a Secular Age shows how Rousseau, Kant, and Habermas, contrary to standard readings, each theorize features of solidarity by turning to concepts inherited from religion. Unlike nearly all liberal theorists, I also think that Schmitt’s psychological thesis contains an important insight: human beings have certain nonrational desires, historically associated with religion, that are crucial for moral motivation but are not satisfied by liberal institutions alone. In responding, the book’s second part draws from Levinas, Buber, and Eliot to theorize a solidarity that accounts for the nonrational psyche but promotes liberal ideals.
The fundamental divide between Vatter and me is this: for Vatter, religion is always already political. Every theology implies a politics and every politics a theology—a discourse that is deployed to serve power. The key for him, therefore, is to balance that power, to find a political theology that will turn us all into gods. I believe this response surrenders too much to politics. To be sure, no one writing after Machiavelli, Marx, and Dostoevsky can be naïve about religion. But that does not make politics dispositive. Our lives unfold within a universal moral order that is prior to any considerations of power. Religion, as the earliest and most constant human institution to grasp that order, can provide us with resources for understanding and acting within it. Moreover, acknowledging such resources requires neither faith nor theology—only the shared intuition that we are called to do good. My point, then, is not that modern Jewish thought gives us an alternative political theology. It is precisely that it provides an alternative to political theology, a different way of gleaning religion’s insights without reducing them to political analogues—without instrumentalizing religion in the service of politics.
This nonreductive approach to political theology also grounds my response to Vatter’s questions. With Levinas and Buber, for example, Vatter assumes the ontological priority of politics: in Levinas, that “divine revelation is structured legally and politically from the start”; whereas in Buber, that theopolitics implies a “political society” at odds with liberalism. Yet in both cases, this is imposing political theology where it does not exist. Levinas argues that we should apprehend people just as we apprehend God in negative theology, yielding an ethical relation to the other that I call “solidarity as sacrifice” (pp. 133–40). He takes Maimonides’s apophatic account as a model for our moral epistemology, not political order (pp. 127–33). Buber’s theopolitics, which I show he consciously developed as a response to Schmitt’s political theology (pp. 150–61), is likewise incompatible with liberalism only if we disregard Buber’s own stipulated distinction between institution and ethos. Our interaction with a coworker, for instance, might formally fit into the “economic” sphere. But in actually relating to this person, he should be seen not as an interchangeable economic actor, but as a unique human being with his own needs and vulnerabilities (pp. 179–81). Liberalism’s “art of separation” (Michael Walzer, “Liberalism and the Art of Separation,” Political Theory, 12(3), 1984) between spheres is maintained in law; but in our solidarity with others, we recognize that such boundaries are in fact fictional.
What kind of solidarity can liberalism achieve and how?If politics is as ubiquitous as Vatter suggests, then our moral agency is limited. Power and domination are ineluctable—except by God’s grace. This, I showed, was in fact Kant’s conclusion in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: if spontaneity, the kernel of our moral agency, is “radically evil”—predisposed to spurn the moral law—then a fully realized solidarity, what Kant calls the “ethical community,” can be achieved only through a miraculous transformation of human nature (pp. 78–82). To this fundamentally Christian notion of redemption-via-grace, Buber counters with Judaism’s vision of redemption-via-freedom. Human beings themselves, without divine assistance, can achieve a genuine solidarity (pp. 175–79). They can choose to practice chesed, a word most accurately defined not as “charity,” which implies formal and mutual obligations (and is associated with the Hebrew tzedakah), but “kindness”—a giving to the other without expectation of reciprocity, an imitation of God’s “overflow” of being into the world (pp. 173–75–).
Although this vision is derived from Jewish sources, it is intended as a model for all people. God need not part the sea for us. Nor is our solidarity fated by some political theology. To the contrary: it is created by us through sharing fate with others. We identify with the welfare of some group of people. We sacrifice for them and put their vulnerability first. We envision a collective destiny in which relations of power are not balanced in antagonism but minimized into irrelevance. Can liberalism succeed in cultivating such a solidarity? That is in our hands to decide.
