Political theology: A critical introduction
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Political theology: A critical introduction By Saul Newman Polity Press, Cambridge, 2019, vii + 198 pp., ISBN: 9781509528400 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00325-z
Saul Newman’s new critical introduction to political theology appears at a time when scholarly interest in the dialogue between politics and theology is peaking. Compared to the existing introductory texts, however, such as those by Michael Kirwan and Elizabeth Philips, which are written from the perspective of the theologian, Newman’s text addresses political theorists, explicitly reading political theology as a discourse of power. Indeed, Newman’s argument is that political theology is a modern invention the rise of which paradoxically overlaps with the gradual displacement of religion from the public space since early modernity. In trying to fill the empty space of transcendence caused by the retreat of religion, secular political power – be it in the form of traditional sovereignty, global economic governance or ‘the reign of technics’ (p. 148) – has appropriated the symbolic resources of theology. Despite the formal decline of the influence of religious ideas in public discourse, secular power structures have usurped, or competed to occupy, the place of the sacred (religion’s transcendent dimension) around which societies construct their principles of legitimacy and representation. In the first chapter, Newman establishes what is behind ‘the permanence of the Theologico-Political’, as Lefort put it. Picking up on Carl Schmitt’s influential association of the modern concept of sovereignty with divine transcendence, he argues that Schmitt’s notorious sovereign state of exception was a political– theological weapon designed not so much to counter the threat posed by liberalism but rather the threat posed by more radical forms of politics, especially anarchism. Newman, however, admits that Schmitt’s attack on anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin, for remaining trapped in the political–theological predicament, was probably right on the mark. The idea here is that revolutionary action, aiming either to capture or topple the state apparatus, remains wedded to the idea of power as organised around a sacred vacant space. Newman concludes the chapter with a consideration of alternative takes on the relationship between the political and the theological that contest Schmitt’s symbiotic model, such as Leo Strauss’ sharp distinction between revelation and reason, Peterson’s rejection of the possibility of Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
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political theology, and Jacob Taubes’ revolutionary apocalypticism that has strongly influenced Giorgio Agamben’s messianism, too. In the second chapter, Newman introduces a thinker whom he knows well from his previous work, Max Stirner, an early critic of secular humanism that, according to Newman, sustains the political-theological machine. Stirner is presented as a neglected prophet of a type of ‘ethical anarch
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