Living Law

Abstract

Living Law Eugene Avrutin and Bruce Rosenstock (bio) Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt By Miguel Vatter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 348 pp. IN MEMORIAM Professor Bruce Rosenstock (1951–2023), passed away on the morning of January 5, 2023 after a long battle with cancer. A passionate activist for justice, equality, and pluralism, Professor Rosenstock taught at the University of California, Davis and at Stanford University before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty in 2002. Professor Rosenstock was the author of numerous well-received books on political theology and modern Jewish philosophy, including New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile (2002), Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond (2010), and Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (2017). Most recently, Rosenstock was at work on a book titled "Hegel and the Holocaust," an exploration of four thinkers who have attempted to respond to the Holocaust in the terms of Hegel's philosophy. An inspiring teacher, Rosenstock was a longtime member of the Executive Committee in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society and served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion. [End Page 213] _______ Over the last couple of decades, miguel vatter has established him-self as one of the most original and penetrating scholars of Continental political thought working today. Since 2014, he has published three monographs that cover the most significant themes in the field, from biopolitics, the constitutional basis of state sovereignty and international law, to human rights and political theology (Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, Fordham University Press, 2014; Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt, Oxford University Pres, 2020; and the volume under review). In his always illuminating and thought-provoking close readings of the major figures of modern political philosophy, Vatter returns again and again to a set of fundamental claims around which his argument is structured: the ontological grounding of human rights in the unique emergent property (my phrasing) of humanness; state sovereignty as the usurpation of the power residing in humanness; republican democracy as the political expression of humanness; and Jewish and Christian political theology as competing discourses about the divinity of humanness versus the divinity of sovereignty. I read Vatter's work as being squarely located within the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach and the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and their concern to liberate humanness (they call it the human "species being") from its political-theological alienation. For Vatter, the deification the human sovereign is the quintessential alienation of humanness, whereas the "living law" that vests humanity with inalienable dignity restores humanness to its rightful place in the scheme of creation. What makes Vatter's work so richly rewarding is that his engagement with his chosen themes is always mediated through deep and erudite readings of the primary sources of modern political thought. The book under review here is a tour de force exposition of the major Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, from Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig to Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, and Hannah Arendt (with [End Page 214] a brief discussion of Martin Buber and his influence on Arendt). Vatter's stress on the centrality of the category of Creation as the ground of human dignity makes his book a fitting complement to Benjamin Lazier's treatment of the anti-Gnostic tendency of these thinkers in God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton University Press, 2008). Each of Vatter's chapters builds toward a synthetic understanding of modern Jewish political theology as founded on the principle that divine sovereignty is revealed in the power of the human to freely form republican communal life under an egalitarian legal order grounded in dignity as a natal property of every human. In the book's epilogue, Vatter argues that, with the creation of the human, the "Throne of God" is emptied of its glory and transferred to the human being. Each new human birth inaugurates a new rights-bearing creature who is the only sovereign power on earth. In a synoptic statement near the conclusion of...