Law, Politics, and Liberal Hope: A Literary and Anthropological Analysis of Secular Society
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Richard Mullender
Richard Mullender holds a chair in Law and Legal Theory in Newcastle Law School, England. After studying as undergraduate in Exeter University and as a postgraduate in Oxford University, he lectured in Exeter before moving to Newcastle Law School. He teaches Tort Law and Legal Theory. He undertakes research in the fields of Tort Law, Legal Theory, Public Law, and Law and Literature. He is currently working on essays that concern the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin and a former member of the UK’s Supreme Court, Jonathan Sumption. The essay that appears in this edition of
Pólemos develops a number of points that first saw the light of day in a paper on ‘Ronald Dworkin and the Secular State’. This paper was a contribution to a symposium on law and religion that took place at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge in February 2019. Jonathan Burnside, David Feldman, Tom Holland, Patrick Nash, and Robert Tombs each made helpful responses to this paper (for which the author now takes the opportunity to express his gratitude).
Abstract
This essay argues that efforts to accommodate religion within the contemporary liberal-democratic and secular state give rise to difficulties that liberals struggle to understand. It also argues that practical impulses that exhibit intensity of the sort present in religion threaten to destabilize the operations of the contemporary liberal-democratic state. This essay develops these arguments by reference to Hilary Mantel’s novel A Place of Greater Safety (a fictionalized account of the French Revolution). In this novel, Mantel explores Maximilien Robespierre’s ambiguous relationship with the Christian faith. As well as drawing on Mantel, this essay also makes use of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera’s account of the ‘Grand March’ of the political left provides a basis on which to explore practical impulses that are reminiscent of religion in their intensity and that threaten to destabilize the liberal-democratic state. The two literary reference points that feature in this essay also provide resources with which to probe the contributions to contemporary liberal political philosophy made by Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. The result is an analysis that supports the conclusion that contemporary liberal-democratic states may be destabilized by practical impulses that, in their intensity, have affinities with religion. This essay also finds support for this conclusion in the writings of Stanley Fish and Carl Schmitt. Fish and Schmitt each argue in terms that give expression to a pessimistic political anthropology. This pessimistic political anthropology throws light on the difficulties that those who wield power within the liberal-democratic state face when they seek justly to accommodate religion. These difficulties lend plausibility to an observation made by John Adams (one of the founders of the USA): ‘[t]here is a germ of religion in human nature’ and it is ‘strong’.
About the author
Richard Mullender holds a chair in Law and Legal Theory in Newcastle Law School, England. After studying as undergraduate in Exeter University and as a postgraduate in Oxford University, he lectured in Exeter before moving to Newcastle Law School. He teaches Tort Law and Legal Theory. He undertakes research in the fields of Tort Law, Legal Theory, Public Law, and Law and Literature. He is currently working on essays that concern the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin and a former member of the UK’s Supreme Court, Jonathan Sumption. The essay that appears in this edition of Pólemos develops a number of points that first saw the light of day in a paper on ‘Ronald Dworkin and the Secular State’. This paper was a contribution to a symposium on law and religion that took place at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge in February 2019. Jonathan Burnside, David Feldman, Tom Holland, Patrick Nash, and Robert Tombs each made helpful responses to this paper (for which the author now takes the opportunity to express his gratitude).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Secularization as a Paradigm of ‘Cross-Thought’
- Political Theology from Satan to Legitimacy
- Desacralized Law: Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Sovereignty
- Law, Politics, and Liberal Hope: A Literary and Anthropological Analysis of Secular Society
- An Uncertain Secularisation: Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Italy
- Research
- Spatial Vulnerability at the Spectral Threshold
- Digging Holes and Building Walls: Spatial Imaginations of the Law in Stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor
- Broken Justice: Justice and Relativism in the Work of Friedrich Dürrenmatt
- Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations
- Book Reviews
- Carlo Pelloso: Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future: From the Athenian Agora to e-Democracy, from the Roman Republic to Negative Power
- Björn Quiring: Trials of Nature: The Infinite Law Court of Milton’s Paradise Lost
- Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Secularization as a Paradigm of ‘Cross-Thought’
- Political Theology from Satan to Legitimacy
- Desacralized Law: Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Sovereignty
- Law, Politics, and Liberal Hope: A Literary and Anthropological Analysis of Secular Society
- An Uncertain Secularisation: Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Italy
- Research
- Spatial Vulnerability at the Spectral Threshold
- Digging Holes and Building Walls: Spatial Imaginations of the Law in Stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor
- Broken Justice: Justice and Relativism in the Work of Friedrich Dürrenmatt
- Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations
- Book Reviews
- Carlo Pelloso: Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future: From the Athenian Agora to e-Democracy, from the Roman Republic to Negative Power
- Björn Quiring: Trials of Nature: The Infinite Law Court of Milton’s Paradise Lost
- Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England
