Love’s Empire

In the latest issue of Telos, I review two books by Paul Kahn of Yale Law School, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation. In both books, Kahn reads contemporary American law and politics through a framework influenced by the writings of Carl Schmitt. The theme of the issue is “After Faith” (for readers not based in a university, I’m afraid the issue is behind a pay wall).

In the review, I write that Kahn’s books “crisply document and provide a provocative theoretical account of an important feature of America’s distinctiveness: its social imaginary of ‘the political,’ particularly the conceptual, cultural, and affective place the social imaginary affords to law. In Kahn’s view, law in America is different. Most notably, law is imaginatively inextricable from the willingness of American citizens to engage in sacrificial acts of political violence. The reason for this potent union, he explains, is theological. The American nation-state—born of revolution and deriving its legitimacy from a trans-generational popular sovereign (‘we, the people’)—provides a source of ultimate meaning for its citizens analogous to religious belief. In Kahn’s analysis, that is, both the American experience of judicial review and the nation’s openness to the use of existential violence stem from a common source: the fact that ‘our political practices remain embedded in forms of belief and practice that touch upon the sacred.'”

Written last October, my review, titled “Love’s Empire,” begins with a reference to Vladimir Putin’s critique of the notion of American exceptionalism in his New York Times editorial of September 11, 2013. It concludes this way:

“Kahn’s compelling description of the American social imaginary thus would seem to raise more insistently Schmitt’s question about the capacity of societies governed by liberal normativity to survive. This question seems especially significant in the context of contemporary pessimism about trans-Atlanticism. For the past seventy years, the security of those European nations that most embody the de-politicized bourgeois liberalism that Schmitt deplored was underwritten, ironically, by a nation that Kahn convincingly describes as living entirely within the exception. Whether an increasingly centralized European Union or some future system of international law can provide similar security and stability while preserving essential domains of human freedom—including by resisting elite managerialism at home and the blandishments of authoritarians from abroad—remains an open question.”

Islamic Law and the State

Today I had the chance to read a fascinating essay titled “The Political Failure of Islamic Law,” by Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton (who admits from the start that his title is “deliberately provocative and somewhat misleading”). The essay is based on a lecture he gave at Yale Law School, and it’s the most recent edition in the law school’s Occasional Papers series.

Haykel argues that the modern Sunni Reform movement and its Islamist followers have “failed to achieve the political vision of a powerful and confident Islamic order” because of their statist vision.

The Reformer’s program, writes Haykel, “represents a double rupture from the past: first, the Reformers deliberately chose to sweep away the teachings of the established schools of law; second, they opted for the state rather than society as the means by which to impose their program.”

Notably, among the consequences of the writings of Reformist scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) were a rejection of “the epistemology of traditional legal rulings, most of which had been built by a process of analogical reasoning”—much, one might say, like the rules of the English common law—and the replacement of premodern legal principles with “concepts of public welfare (maslaha) and the ‘purposes of law’ (maqasid al-sharia‘a).”

“Very few are the voices of opposition to this state-centered vision,” concludes Haykel. “One of them is the Lebanese intellectual and scholar Ridwan al-Sayyid. Al-Sayyid … argues that for centuries Islamic beliefs and practices were determined by the community (jama‘a) and not by the state. The meaning of Islam was explicated by the societies in which the jurists lived and developed their views. And because it was a societal and collective enterprise, it was open to a multiplicity of views and to a degree of tolerance for difference. For al-Sayyid, the great danger today lies in giving the state, with narrow-minded Islamists at its helm, the exclusive right to determine the content and contours of Islamic law.”

Do Haykel’s arguments point to another untapped connection between the Islamic and Anglo-American legal and political traditions?

Liberal Society and the Dialectic of the Clan

The Erasmus Law Review has published a special issue on legal pluralism edited by Sanne Taekema of Erasmus Law School in Rotterdam and Wibo van Rossum of the University of Utrecht. I contributed an essay in which I reflect on the intellectual context in which I wrote The Rule of the Clan and try to recuperate a culturalist approach to the study of the rule of law.

The introduction to the issue can be found here. My essay, “Imagining the Rule of Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Liberal Society and the Dialectic of the Clan,” can be found here. The links are to the website of international publisher Eleven Journals.

Here’s how my contribution begins:

“In this essay, I provide a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the imaginative relation between the liberal rule of law and the kin-based form of socio-legal organization I call ‘the rule of the clan’ – a classic example of law created ‘from below.’ Specifically, I believe that a culturalist disciplinary perspective reveals that the modern liberal state and its more centralized rule of law always stand in an ironic, dialectical relation to the rule of the clan as a legal form. Liberal society, that is, nurtures itself through an anti-liberal utopian imaginary.

“This article provides an intellectual history backdrop for theorizing that dialectical relationship by examining two contrasting ways in which nineteenth-century British intellectuals imagined the rule of law. Following the work of Charles Taylor and, more specifically in the legal field, Paul Kahn, my goal is to depict a social imaginary of modern liberalism that has been neglected within contemporary liberal theory – and, in doing so, provide a way to appreciate the cultural foundations of liberal legality. The article considers the stories that nineteenth-century British intellectuals told about the relation between the rule of law and the rule of the clan as a way to think about the rule of law today. It thus tacks between three different shores: the world of legal pluralism (the rule of the clan), the world of nineteenth-century British analysis of the rule of the clan and the contemporary relation between culture and modern liberal society.”

I associate the “culturalist approach” to the rule of law with a group of nineteenth-century intellectuals I describe this way: “Writing before the full professionalization of the disciplines, these men forwarded a vibrant if unsystematic form of analysis that sought to describe in precise, anthropological detail the cultural foundations of the new liberal nations they were seeking to wrest into being, and they were attentive to the aesthetic qualities of liberalism and its legal traditions.”

In Britain, the group includes the novelist Walter Scott. Internationally, it includes Domingo Sarmiento in Argentina, Jón Sigurðsson in Iceland, and István Széchenyi in Hungary.

Maine Meets Maine

My new video is about an ancient institution. You can view it below, or you can watch it directly on YouTube by clicking here.

Tomorrow, I’ll be visiting the rare books room at Yale Law School, where my friend Mike Widener will be showing me some of his treasures, including the library’s collection of Blackstone—the subject of a future video. Stay tuned. And thanks for your comments and support.

“Three”

At Sotheby’s auction house this July, a single medieval manuscript sold for £541,250, or about $879,000. At over $8,700 per page, the price strikes me as a bargain, if not a steal. Why? The reason has to do with the extraordinary history of the country my wife and I saw as we walked along Offa’s Dyke and looked to the west, across the River Wye and into the distant green hills. It also has to do with the number three.

Although it’s part of the United Kingdom, Wales has a long, proud history of legal independence. Even after the country was united with England under Henry VIII, the Welsh administered English law in their own court, the Court of Great Sessions, for almost three hundred years, until 1830. Today, guided by the evocative expression “Legal Wales,” the country is developing a range of autonomous legal institutions and practices as part of devolution.

The stakes of this process are high. If in time it leads to a fully independent Welsh nation, for which an independent system of law would be a prerequisite, the politics of Britain and Europe would be profoundly changed.

A Walk in Wales, Part II

As my wife and I walked across Wales this summer, we developed an inside joke that probably only a couple of historians on vacation could find quite as hilarious as we did. Whatever sight happened to be before us—whether an ancient, ruined castle, a range of green hills in the distance, or the ham and cheese sandwiches in our backpack—we described (in grandiloquent tones, often with one arm outstretched) in terms of the number three. Thus:

“Three are the towers on that fine fortress of Edward I!”

“Three are the delicious ales we have consumed this evening!”

“Three are the miles we walked totally off course earlier this afternoon!”

Forgive us. Like I said, we were on vacation, and we were overcome by mirth. We were also entertaining ourselves with a sly reference to an especially interesting—and revealing—feature of Welsh legal history.