„All the Maddest Divinity“: Religion in Leviathan and How the Bible Shaped Modern Political Philosophy

In collaboration with the newly founded „Hermann Cohen Institute for Critical Political Theology“ at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem we offer a public panel debate with two keynote lectures by Prof. Alison McQueen from Stanford University and Prof. Ronald Beiner from the University of Toronto. They engage with Thomas Hobbes‘ legacy for today’s theo-political struggles.

Prof. Alison McQueen (Stanford University)

“All the Maddest Divinity”: Religion in Leviathan

Henry Hammond’s outraged description of Leviathan (1651) as “a farrago of all the maddest divinity that ever was read” captured a common reaction: in its treatment of religion, Hobbes’s masterpiece was a very different creature from his earlier works of political philosophy. In Leviathan, Hobbes not only deepened his engagement with religious questions but also advanced strikingly heterodox doctrines—among them mortalism, a materialist account of spirits, and a deflationary view of hell. This talk explores why Hobbes introduced these arguments, tracing where philosophical explanations suffice and where contextual factors offer better insight. Far from being a confused farrago,” Hobbes’s “mad divinity” was a calculated effort to persuade a fractured audience toward civil obedience.

Alison McQueen is an Associate Professor of Political Science and History (by courtesy) at Stanford University.  She is the author of Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge, 2018).  She is finishing a book on Thomas Hobbes and religion and starting a new project on treason in the history of political thought.

Prof. Ronald Beiner (University of Toronto)

Mosaic Democracy? Hobbes, Milton, Harrington, and Spinoza on the Biblical Origin of the Democratic Regime

There are a couple of large paradoxes concerning the long-delayed valorization of the democratic regime within the tradition of normative theorizing that we call political theory or political philosophy. The first large paradox is that while we associate the rise of democracy as a possible regime with the ancient Greek polis, and ancient Athens in particular, the major political philosophers within that culture were not defenders of democracy but tended rather towards hostility to democracy. In fact, it took millennia before explicit defenders of democracy arose within the history of political thought and eventually gained the upper hand. Who were the first of these thinkers? A strong case can be made on behalf of two mid-17^th-century theorists: James Harrington writing in the 1650s, and Baruch Spinoza writing in the following decade. This leads us to our second large paradox, which will be the focus of this essay. Rather than focusing on the democratic experience in ancient Athens, as one might have expected, both thinkers instead tended to privilege ancient Israel as the site of the archetypical democratic regime. They obviously had reasons, rooted in their respective cultural-historical contexts, for tracing democracy all the way back to the Israelites forged into a political community by Moses. I hope to illuminate these interesting questions with short commentaries on Hobbes, Milton, Harrington, and Spinoza.

Ronald Beiner is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1982 he published an edition of Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (foreign-language editions have appeared or are forthcoming in 15 other languages). He is the author of Political Judgment (1983); What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (1992); Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit (1997); Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship (2003); Civil Religion (2011); Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (2014); and Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (2018). His other edited or co-edited books include Democratic Theory and Technological Society (1988); Kant and Political Philosophy (1993); Theorizing Citizenship (1995); Theorizing Nationalism (1999); Canadian Political Philosophy (2001); and Judgment, Imagination, and Politics (2001).