Law, Narrative and Politics in a Jewish Key: Hannah Arendt and Robert M Cover in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Both Hannah Arendt and Robert Cover articulated visions of law reflecting the Jewish diaspora and thus offered an alternative to state-centred hierarchical models. That the Jews historically were able to preserve themselves as a distinct people over thousands of years without possession of a territorial homeland in the face of changing patterns of voluntary dispersion, forced exile, discrimination and persecution has always raised particularly acute questions about the character of belonging, the meaning of collective identity, and the relationship of membership between particularistic communities and their host polities. Such questions were central to the concerns of Arendt and Cover. In his jurisprudence, Cover described his standpoint as 'very close to a classical anarchist one - with anarchy understood to mean the absence of rulers, not the absence of law'. Against positivistic approaches in jurisprudence, he emphasised the thick interconnections among legal, moral, customary and religious norms that are bound together through the shared interpretive commitments of particularistic communities. For her part, Arendt rejected entirely any understanding of law predicated on a command/obedience relationship and thereby the conceptual logic of sovereignty as antithetical to freedom and the fundamental character of human diversity. As an alternative, she proposed a model of federal republicanism divested of any attribute of sovereignty. While a diaspora perspective strongly informed Arendt's and Cover's approaches to law, their personal contexts for thinking about the Jewish question and their self-understandings of their relationships to the Jewish community differed markedly.