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Well thank you very much Bernie for the wonderful introduction and thank you to Hillel for agreeing to host this. I also want to extend my thanks to the Harvard bookstore for sponsoring this event as well and to welcome Lindsay waters my editor at Harvard University Press for being a fervent believer in this project and talking me off the

ledge on more than one occasion. Thank you very much. And of course thank you to all of you for making time to come tonight. This book takes up a very big question and that is the question of how political thought in the West becomes modern That is how it came about that we ended up with this constellation of political commitments which are recognizable to all of us republican government religious toleration a particular understanding of the state its relation to individual rights. That entire constellation of ideas which as a whole is largely constitutive of what we mean when we talk about modernity and political thought. How did we end up with that cluster of views. What was the process like and where should we turn for the origins of modernity in that sense the way into that question.

Everyone has tended to agree is to look at the early modern period in European history particularly the 60 the 16th and 17th centuries in Latin Christendom because it has seemed self-evidently to be the case that so many of these ideas enter the political mainstream of European writing thinking philosophizing at that moment. And so the question really becomes why is it that in the early modern period we begin to see the emergence of these ideas the most dominant and influential way of answering that question has always been to talk about secularization that is the notion that before this period in early modern Europe when we look at the European worldview as a whole and politics as a part of that we find a world that is still deeply see all of John's in which

questions about politics how should we organize our political lives would inevitably turn into questions about how God wishes for us to arrange our politics. And that that was the dominant idea of talking about these questions in the earlier period in the medieval period and in the early Renaissance then however on this standard account something quite extraordinary begins to happen at the beginning of the 16th century there's some debate over exactly when we should be drawing these lines. But broadly speaking beginning of the 16th century a series of forces and factors. The new science scientific revolution and its demolition of Aristotelian physics. The deeply unsettling effect or set of effects that this had in terms of the way that Europeans understood their relationship to the cosmos as a whole. The development of the tradition of philosophical skepticism in the hands of figures like Montana and crucially the wars of religion

which had so devastated European Christendom that. A whole series of philosophers of the period are said to have produced something called in some literatures the great separation that is they decided that because of these religious claims about organizing political life were of dubious authority in the first place on philosophical grounds and because they were dangerous as a way of organizing politics on the on the other hand we should just get rid of them. We should create a sort of hermetically sealed political science which doesn't have to resort to religious arguments or foundational claims drawn from the realm of theology. It will be self-sufficient. It will have its own internal logic it will resort only to reason and it will give us the sorts of political maxims that we need in order to organize our lives

safely sequestered from these divisive and dubious religious claims. It's at this moment on the standard reading and as a result of these forces that we begin to see the development of these crucial western modern commitments toleration Republican government of a particularly radical form a particular view of the state a notion of individual rights et cetera. So that's the story the story is we get religious arguments and foundational claims excluded from political science. And that gives us what we're looking for this this modern distinctively Western approach to politics. Well my book really begins or sets out from the conviction that that way of telling the story is virtually backwards. That is if we look at the period before the 16th and 17th centuries

before the early modern period if we look at the political thought of the humanists the Renaissance humanist what we actually find is a remarkably secular tradition of doing political science. These were after all thinkers who drew their foundational texts and beliefs from the broader project of the recovery of Greek and Latin antiquity. Their sources were pagan when it came to politics. They looked to Aristotle and Plato to Cicero to the Romans to the great histories as guides for thinking about their politics and generating Prudential maxims about how to organize their common life. It was in the 16th century in contrasts that theology really returns with a vengeance into European political theory particularly in the Protestant world. And this is to some extent a story about the Reformation the Reformation which

sends Christians back to the text of the Bible to an unprecedented degree. And as a result demands knowledge of the original biblical languages. Hebrew for the old testament or the Hebrew Bible as I'll call it and Greek for the New this demand for skilled interpreters and exit needs of the original Hebrew Bible spawned the first generation of professors of Hebrew at all of the major European universities in Oxford and Cambridge in Leiden. A bit later in the 16th century in Paris Tubingen of all that Basel wherever you like this is the moment in which suddenly professors pop up these learned Christian hip breasts who not only teach Hebrew to others but produce extraordinary works of scholarship then which they provide Latin translations of much of the corpus of

rabbinic literature under the belief that this corpus although deeply imperfect because we have to remember these were not people who like Jews they would have preferred to ask anybody else the questions that they had to ask the questions about how to read the Hebrew Bible how to understand it. But they became convinced that even though these people might be day sides who had been punished justly with exile and dispersion as a as an indirect testimony to the truth of the Gospel nonetheless they had preserved an oral tradition which disentangled or at least promised to disentangle a number of these interpretive conundrums. How did you understand opaque passages from the Biblical text. How could you reconstruct institutions and practices that are described in the Hebrew Bible which are where that description or those descriptions are extremely fragmentary seemingly contradictory and they don't get us very far. They decided that

these sources although imperfect and they would begin each discussion by saying listen I'm really sorry that I have to rely on my monitor or the Talmud or the Midrash or whatever it is. Deep apologies but this is what we've got so let's let's go with it. They ended up turning to these guides and it became a really unquestioned orthodoxy in the Protestant world. There are extremely important Catholic Hybris as well. But for the most part we're talking about the world of the Protestant Reformation. That part of biblical criticism and of Jesus and part of biblical scholarship in general involve a return to this last corpus of literature which was now being made available not only to people who knew Hebrew in Aramaic the languages of the rabbinic court but also to those who didn't because all of this had now been rendered into Latin. Certainly the entire mission of the end of the 17th century and at least 15 Tractatus much earlier. So they get this entire corpus. And

the way that this story intersects in a very powerful way with the overarching question that I began with is that when these Protestants turned newly armed with their Hebrew guides to the original text of the Hebrew Bible they began to read it very differently from how it had been read before no longer regarding it as the old law which had simply been abrogated with the coming of the Gospel and and the only continuing relevance or utility was simply that it seemed to prophesied were prefigure events in the life of Christ or the Christian sacraments. They came to regard the Hebrew Bible instead as a political constitution as a commonwealth that God Himself had designed for his chosen people at a moment before they had fallen from grace. This was the only time on their account that God had ever designed a commonwealth. As they

repeated over and over again Jesus gave no law his kingdom was a spiritual King. So the only time God had ever done this was in the case of the ancient Israelites. And so because God is perfect and his Commonwealth is perfect the entire project of political science had to be radically reimagined. Instead of turning to the sources of ancient history philosophy etc. to generate the sorts of Prudential maxims about the structure of political life that people had been accustomed to one should instead turn to the Hebrew Bible suitably interpreted with the help of one's rabbinic guides and replicate as closely as possible the perfect Commonwealth that God Himself had designed. It's that thought that generates what is without any question I think the most dominant genre of political writing in the 100 year period that I'm concerned with

and that is a series of literally dozens of text that are over 100 between 15 74 and the end of the 17th century which give themselves titles like on the Jewish constitution on the Hebrew Republic on the the constitution of Moses. Or what have you. Extremely famous contributions to this genre were written by otherwise famous European political theorists. Figures like Grotius like hods like Harington but also by rather less well-known Christian hip breasts and scholars who became deeply influential in this period and whose ideas filtered to a remarkable degree into the mainstream discussions and the sort of canonical philosophical presentations of these issues that we're familiar with from the from the writers of the period. So that's really the

phenomenon that this book is attempting to grapple with the phenomenon by which European Christians in the Protestant world decide that the Bible produces or reproduces God's ideal constitution and that the way to figure out how this Constitution in fact operated was to turn to the corpus of rabbinic literature. And the reason I think this is so important is because that encounter the encounter between these Christian hip breasts and their Jewish sources in my view was responsible for introducing several of these distinctive features of the modern political mindset. Several of these commitments that we regard as connected to and indeed constituent of of modernity in the West. And so I just want to say something very quickly about the three that I'm interested in and

then I'm going to be quiet and invite your questions. The first is to do with the idea of political science itself and what it was up to because in the period before the late 16th and 17th centuries when we look around at European political theory we encounter the complete hegemony of what we might call constitutional pluralism. This is the idea most famously discussed by Aristotle in the politics but certainly also discussed by any number of other classical authorities and all of their early modern readers that there are several correct constitutional forms. The rule of one the few and the many in their proper form that is monarchy aristocracy and this form of government that Aristotle called polity but which we translate as republic following a tradition begun in the 15th century as just as just

as opposed to the degenerate corrupt versions of each of these forms. Tyranny oligarchy and democracy. Each of these forms was acceptable. A theorist might have a view about what was the best either the best Absolutely or the best under particular circumstances or most circumstances. But it was taken for granted that each of these forms was in theory legitimate perfectly acceptable and in fact that different constitutions would match up better or worse with different at different cities different states different sorts of peoples in different parts of the world leading different sorts of lives et cetera. This was a virtually unchallenged norm of the practice of political science. So the first transformation I'm interested in is the one that brings an end to this hegemony such that for the first time we find European Republicans arguing that republics are the

only legitimate constitutional forms. And the argument that I make in this chapter of the first one is that they are driven to this argument through this process of trying to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible the Hebrew Republic with the use of their rabbinic sources and they are struck and then and then transformed by a way of reading the Bible that they encounter for the first time in these texts. At issue was the account of biblical monarchy which had been a major problem for Christian exaggerates as well as Jewish executes going all the way back to August and then the other fathers of the church which took on a very very new character in this period. The question was straightforward in Deuteronomy 17 God says to the people look when you enter the land you will say let us have a king like all the other nations and that's fine. Just make sure it's the right sort of king and then he tells us what the right sort of king will look like. Then you get to first Samuel

8. The moment when the people do in fact ask for a king and god and Samuel get very angry. And so for interpreters who didn't have the luxury of identifying these texts as products of radically different historical environments written by different people etc. The question was how to harmonize these two seemingly contradictory passages. There was a whole tradition of doing this you could say well it wasn't asking for a king per se. That was the sin that was fine. It was simply to ask for the wrong kind of king or they asked for him at the wrong moment. Or in the wrong manner. All of these explanations were on offer but these Republicans find a very radical new reading of these verses in the Midrash to Deuteronomy which had entered widespread circulation. By the by the period we're talking about and the figure who first makes the move is John Milton writing in his first defense of the English people published in 651. It's

Milton. Who looks at the Midrash through an intermediary source which is in which I'm happy to talk about and question but looks at the Midrash and sees the following when the Midrash gets to the first Samual passage. It reads very differently. It looks at God's precise words to Samuel and what he says is don't be angry at the people. It's not you they've rejected but me in asking for a king. Well the Midrash reads this literally to mean that when the people asked for a king they were deposing God as their king that God was not only peculiarly or in a very special manner the political sovereign of Israel which was a position that had been attested before by Josephus among others but that asking for any kind of human king was a sin was impermissible because it was tantamount to the act of idolatry replacing a Hune a God the

King with a flesh and blood man whom you're going to treat as a god. This is a sin and therefore illicit. Which prompts Milton and those who follow after him to argue for the first time that monarchy is simply an unacceptable constitutional form illicit. And this is a tradition not only the argument itself but it's pairing with this particular reading of the Biblical text which survives into the 18th century. And in fact is the only way into the end of the 18th century to make this argument. If you wanted to make that argument as for example Tom Paine did in common sense in January of 1776 this is how you did it. You had to go back to Milton and and these other radical Republicans of the 60s 50s and reproduce their midrashic analysis of these verses. So that's the first. The second is to do with the idea of redistribution. The idea that one of the powers and prerogatives of the

state is to redistribute wealth. This was virtually unanimously agreed to be a terrible idea in European political theory before the 17th century. There were people who argued for the abolition of private property. That was an attested view and there were people who for various reasons argued for very strong rights to private property but there was nobody who argued for the middle position. That is redistribution. People should have private property but the state should divvy it up and decide who gets what and and enforce maximum amounts for example. The reason that that taboo was so powerful was because of the place of a particular historical example in the consciousness of these early modern Europeans and that's the example of the Roman agrarian laws. These are all people who are studying ancient Roman history. They know that an attempt was made. Most famously in the second century B.C. to divvy up the

lands in the Italian peninsula that had been conquered by Rome in wars and then had been divvied up by patricians to redivide this territory and to sign it in more equitable chunks to the clubs. They knew all about this and they knew that virtually all of the surviving sources which are which tend to be favorable to the patricians regarded this moment as the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. This was the terrible calamity. It was not only a violation of the principle of justice. It was deeply impolitic and dangerous it produced faction ultimately civil war and finally Caesar ism and Caesar himself was very closely associated with the agrarian laws because he had famously proposed one rather later. So that's the view that they all inherited. So they just repeat the the the the convictions of all of their Roman sources whom they've been studying in school. This is what you don't do. You either have private property or you don't. But if you have it you don't monkey around with it because that's what the Romans did and look

what happened to them. Well what happens when again the model of the Hebrew Republic comes into view is that you begin to get these Hybris looking at the land laws of the Hebrew Bible the Jubilee the sabbatical year the release of debt. But the Jubilee in particular and beginning in 16 17 when an important Dutch Hybris named Peter Corineus writes his great study of the Hebrew Republic. He looks at these things and he says Well gosh these were quite a lot like agrarian laws. This is what the Roman agrarian laws were doing well but God has told us that we should have such laws in his perfect Republic. Well if God has said that then Cicero has to be wrong. It's just that simple. Because in that head to head Godwins So you begin to get. This quite radical reconfiguration whereby Republican authors reconsider the role of redistribution in their politics leading most

famously to James Harrington's Oceana and 16:50 sex where an agrarian law what he calls the agrarian law is the fundamental institutional grounding or foundation of his Republic. So that's the second the third is to do with religious toleration and it's in this case that the traditional secularization story seems to me has been the most powerful because the standard view is that religious toleration both historically and at the level of theory was really only made possible by the retreat of religious conviction. Only when people had lost faith in the authority of their religious claims could they begin to contemplate broad protection to nonconformists religious beliefs. And the mechanism for securing that protection was the separation of church and state. And this obviously has an intuitive ring to it. For those of us who are familiar with this arrangement

from the modern world but it seems to me that both of these things are very largely mistaken. Both of those claims. The first is it seems to me straightforwardly the case that the advocates for religious toleration in the period we're talking about were deeply religious and deeply motivated by a particular religious account of the desirability of toleration and also their route to toleration was not the separation of church and state. They regarded the separation of church and state as inimical to toleration because to separate church and state raised the specter of a possible independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The people I have in mind were instead the advocates of a state church those who argued that church and state should come together under the control of the civil sovereign who sits in the seat of Mose's occupies that station which God had authoritatively set out in the Hebrew republic and they began when consulting

the treatment of non-Jews in the Hebrew Republic as it was described to them in their rabbinic sources. They became convinced that this arrangement whereby the civil sovereign was the only source of law both civil and religious naturally conducive to toleration because if a civil sovereign is the only one who can make religious laws why would he be making them. Well he would only be making them for civil reasons. What counts as a civil reason for a religious law here they turned to their texts describing the practices of the Hebrew republic and they convinced themselves that God had actually defined that category of permissible religious law quite narrowly that only those laws which explicitly endangered civil peace and threatened the constituted order where pernicious and therefore not to be

tolerated. All others were. And that is the approach to the question that we get through the line of the most important 17th century commentators on this question beginning with gracious and ending with POBs and Spinoza. So that's the third that I'm interested in the implications of this if it's correct if this view is correct is that when we turn to an analysis of our political ideas and we want to know why it is that we hold them what their structure is what assumptions and premises they rest upon. We're going to go astray if we suppose that their roots were secular. We're going to miss their original nature and as a result we will be very confused by the faultlines and dissonances in our contemporary political discourse that they produce.

And I think we'll leave it there and take your questions. Please. Yeah. Yeah I mean it's it's a it's a fascinating question and and it's an enormous one and the view that I gave as a sort of a caricature because it's it's much more complicated. But in general it's fair to say I think that the Protestant rejection

of the traditions of biblical interpretation that were associated with the magisterium of the church provoked this readiness to look at the Hebrew Bible in a very different way. That isn't to say that they rejected all typological readings they just tended to come up with different ones. So for example whereas the standard typological reading was flawed is a symbol of baptism the binding of Isaac prefigures the crucifixion. This kind of thing they were more likely to see the Hebrew Bible as a national epic which was being reenacted in their own times. These were after all people who regarded themselves in many of these cases as the new Israel. And that was extremely important to their self-understanding. Certainly if we're talking about the Huguenots in France English Puritans the the the Dutch Protestants these were all kind of populations of Protestants

who saw the events of their own time as reenactments of these events which had been had been brought to pass in the first instance in the case of God's first elect people but since they were no longer his elect people had gone in search of another namely them. And and so these these events were recurring. So they didn't reject all kinds of typology but they did tend to steer clear of the notion that what's of interest in the Hebrew Bible is simply its potential as an authenticator of the Gospel. Yet the standard view is look the ceremonial law has been abrogated the dietary laws all of these laws that were given originally to the Jews no longer have any purchase because the gospel has freed us from the bondage of the law. The moral law has been perfected in the Gospel so it was only a sort of shadowy intimation of its true self in

in the first go around it's been it's been perfected. So we don't really have to look at the Hebrew Bible for that either. So the only thing that's left really is just. That it prophesies the coming of Christ. And it prefigures the sacraments or it does all these different things that they wanted it to do. The. The alternative was to look and see this third set of laws. These were not people who denied and it's important I'm glad you give me an opportunity to say this. These were not people who denied that the ceremonial law had been voided they did nor that the dietary laws had been had been voided. They had no interest in any of these although there and they did have some historical interest but they identified this third set of laws not ceremonial dietary not morals strictly speaking but judicial political. These laws which explained how government was conducted how cases were tried what the law

was like how non Israelites were to be treated filtered through their rabbinic sources which are in many cases not particularly faithful to the text of the Bible itself. But they think of this as a pristine authoritative oral tradition. So that's that's basically the move that's that's going on so it's not a complete rejection of all kinds of type policy but certainly this kind of very allegorize understanding where once one had to sort of decrypt the Hebrew Bible in order to understand what it was getting at. They do move away from in a very dramatic way and that's what makes possible all of these other developments. You know. The people in the 16th century. So none of these people. Yes I mean not me and

not him. This is this is yes this is you know 500 years old. Of the sorry. Well yeah. I mean it's I don't I don't agree with that necessarily in the sense that the phenomenon we're talking about the authors of these books and the places where all these people are studying are not only in German speaking countries they are in

they're really scattered throughout the Protestant world. It really begins in those areas which had sought some Jewish community for example Hallen the United Provinces the northern or the Dutch Republic because. Well OK. So. And the first generation of Hybris who tend to be from Germanic or Dutch speaking background we get their students who travel to England to Scotland and and throughout. OK so you mean OK if we define Germanic to mean all of those things and yes yes. Right. Yes. It's now. Now it has to be said that the story isn't that neat.

So the second text on the Hebrew Republic the first one was written by Excuse me. The other problem with that story is France because you have french speaking Cubanos who who are very important unless they're also Germanic. OK. OK. But anyway I'll just I'll just leave you with this since we'll all agree that that that Italy is not dramatic. I'm still OK because I'm talking about Naples. Naples is not Germanic. The second the second author of of the. Yes you have to go back a ways. Yeah. The the the second author of of of a text on the Hebrew Republic is a figure called Carlist to gono who is an Italian antiquary and this was an extremely influential text in the Protestant world even though he was some

sort of bizarre heterodox Catholic. But it's it's it's it's certainly a more nuanced story than I've been able to convey in these comments. Yeah. Yeah. Well I think you actually put your finger on it. That is if you're

interested in explaining the particular conception of liberty or a particular aspect of the conception of liberty that English Republicans were operating with then I think it's very instructive as a way to understand the wholesale de-legitimization of monarchy. I think it's not as helpful for exactly the reason that you mention because it was perfectly possible to be in near Rome and about liberty and be tolerant of constitutional monarchy. Many many of them were. And in the 16 forties I have not found. I mean I'll just put it this way I have not found anyone before the regicide who is really prepared to make the argument that republics are the only acceptable constitutional forms however neo-Roman they might be. So for example the act abolishing monarchy and 16:14 of the languages is remarkable. What it says is something like it having been shown that the tendency of monarchy is to

degenerate into tyranny. We choose instead to erect the Free State and to abolish and to abolish the office of King but put in those terms. The distinction between monarchy and tyranny remains. I mean the monarchy is dangerous because it seems to degenerate or risks degenerating into this other thing. But the antonym of monarchy is not Republicans tyranny. Right. And that's that's a key fact. So I think that it depends what you're interested in. But if you're interested in trying to explain why it was that in the 16 50s as opposed to 16 40s when none of this is going on. Why in the 16 50s these Republican authors find themselves willing and able to argue that any kind of monarchy is illicit. The argument that's doing the work is that it's set that it's idolatrous. That's that's the word. Yeah. But a very good question. Yes.

Yes it's a great question. I mean the the the the place that's the nose in this story is I think is endlessly fascinating. And I you know I have to discipline myself. But the one of the points that I'm trying to make is that when the nose I mean when Spinoza writes the theological political treatise I mean when you know this is 60 70 when does that this had been going on for 100 years. That is his contribution to this genre which is by no means the last was fully 100 years after after the first and 100 of them had appeared in the middle. And the as for his his biblical term hermeneutical and his role as a father of kind of higher biblical criticism along with some of the other figures in this kind of radical Dutch circle. One of the things I'm trying to point out is that it would be helpful to think about Spinoza's position in relation to this genre of writing in much the same way that we think of Machiavelli's

position in relation to the two century old tradition of writing mirrors for princes in the 14th and 15th century. That is when he writes the prince. There had been a hundred books written by humanists called that all offering their advice but in a can. But but but what Machiavelli is doing by writing in that genre is subverting it quite radically turning it upside down and Spinoza's doing very much the same in the in the track artist. Well Spinoza I mean I think yes. And that's what makes the question is whether whether Spinoza's the rule or the exception. So. So. But you're you're I mean you're exactly right. Unspin Spinoza particularly with respect to this last theme I was talking about toleration from a certain point of view he replicates this argument. This cluster of arguments absolutely

perfectly. He's an Erast in which is to say he's a defender of the state church the idea that there's only one source of valid law including religious law. That's the civil sovereign. He argues that that form of of of political sovereignty lends itself to toleration for non-arbitrary reasons. He defends the quite broad toleration so far so good. You know he's he's just kind of you know reading out of the playbook that that gracious and all of these other figures had been deploying the difference is he tells us in the ethics that that God the Biblical God doesn't exist. I mean that is that OK there's this thing called god it's underlying substance but it certainly isn't somebody who can talk to anybody or have constitutional preferences except in some extremely remote sort of bizarre way. And the the laws that Moses gave were just that they were the laws that Moses gave. They don't have any universal purchase. And

and it was a one off deal. That's the that's that's that's his subversion of this tradition. The other people in this tradition take a very very different view. They're looking at this this model and believing that although these laws are not strictly binding on Christians they are authoritative for Christians. And if you're a Christian you should be in the business of trying to figure out what the spirit of that constitution was and replicating it as closely as possible you know adjusting for certain important differences but nonetheless faithfully reenacting it. And so I think it's exactly right to see Spinoza as a very important part of this story. But I hope that one of the things this does is it contextualizes because it makes us makes it clear exactly the radicalism of what he was doing and the kind of genre subversion that he was that he was up to. So yes I should probably yeah yeah.

I do. It's not in the book. I do. It's. And I can't and I can't get it here. But but I mean suffice it to say that what happens is that when this initial move of identifying the biblical land laws and with agrarian laws was the sort of battering ram it was what allowed this this consensus about redistribution to be punctured. And then you begin to get this this this

attempt to rethink. That attempt extended far beyond the Biblical sources. That is because someone like Corineus can say to you well God told us we should have agrarian laws. But he can't really tell you why. Because the biblical account doesn't really get into this and neither do the rabbinic sources. They don't give you what we would call let's say philosophical reasons normative reasons for why they do this. They might say well it's Prudential preserves the stability of the republic but what happens is that in search of a kind of a moral framework that could make sense of this commitment could explain why an omniscient God would introduce such measures into his Republic. They turn to other sources namely Greek ones. And that this kind of hegemony of the Roman sources and the Roman accounts of the agrarian laws were left behind and you get people turning to Greek philosophers and Greek historians which seemed to embody a very very different understanding of the state the principle of

justice and all the rest. And it's that that really that really carries over. But I know where you live I can give you a fuller a fuller explanation at some other moment. Ken. Absolutely it's a great question and the the the immediate historical and political context of all of these debates is enormously important. So somebody like I mean these were not academic questions so someone like Cornelius writing his study of the Hebrew Republic is writing at a moment in which the proper form of church government in the Republic its relationship to the civil sovereign when all of these questions are the questions and.

And that and we're resolved very violently. The English Republicans for sure. And you know I try and in the book to make clear that I resist the picture of these kind of talking heads existing in the ether and running into sources and being battered you know you know that it hither and yon. That's not what was happening. These were people who were Moeder who were being driven by very real events moving very quickly. And certainly the sorts of radical arguments about Republicanism that you find English parliamentarians former parliamentarians English Republicans making an 16:15 arguments it would have been unthinkable in the early 16:14. And the fact that you know they cut the king's head off and 16:14 on was not incidental. By way of explaining that fact. So. So this is a period of violence of turmoil and someone like Harington is actually proposing a Republican Constitution for the new English Republic at a time in which the Cromwellian

protectorate had been installed. Harrington was deeply unhappy about this. The book is dedicated in effect to Cromwell and he is very explicit about the fact that he's he's he's trying to get his picture of how of how the English free state should be protected and and perpetuate. So those are just two examples. But all of these people are operating in extremely charged political environments often violent political environments and so these are not academic debates these are debates that had very real significance. And I mean in the Dutch context the the the the proponents of this tolerant Erast in ASM that is a kind of tolerant environment in which the civil sovereign controls the church and is the only source of coercive law that had been the regime up until 16:19 when it was overthrown. And these were all debates that were you know taking place you know at that at that moment.

So no it's these are very much public intellectuals. Yeah. Yeah. Too early to tell. I think the. Well I mean I I mean my prognosis. Well I hope that that it that it's something that people will take seriously and consider. It's it's not necessarily I mean that is subscribing to this to this view that I try to argue for you know taking a position of one kind or another on these on these matters concerning the origin of our ideas isn't necessarily to take a position on contemporary questions about the relationship between church and state and the various ways in which that should be carried out.

It simply but that is to say it's neutral with respect to those questions. The argument is simply that. And what I hope it will help do it will it will help do one of these things that the history of political thought should be doing and that is explaining sort of taking this and having a kind of diagnostic function explaining why it is that we arrive at muddles in contemporary political thought. How is it something doesn't seem to be working to keep the two commitments that people think go together that somehow they can make them work. What's happening here is very smart people. And what what the history political thought at those moments can do is come in and say well there's a reason you know they don't go together because they have different histories and it's just an incidental fact that we've ended up with both of them. And if we end if we realize that that clarifies the choice that we face namely identifying what the grounds for them are whether they're acceptable to us. If not can we find other grounds that are that are acceptable

to us or do we have to part with the commitment. So I think that kind of exercise is really what what I have in mind. It's not to give aid and comfort to one side or the other of the debate about the relationship between religion and politics to be sure. But to that. Lindsay is entirely innocent. It's my own you know my own you know in conclusiveness that's to blame. What I tried to I can I can point to a couple in general. My principle was that I should try to navigate through this material with with some caution in

that there is virtually no aspect of political thought in the period that doesn't get coloured by this exchange by this encounter. But often I think most often what that means is simply that arguments which already existed and which were already kind of in circulation and had currency and sources in their favor found new ones. So now you know the example I give an example of this in the introduction in the 16 40s late 60s 40s around the regicide everybody was citing my monitors to the effect that you can judge a king and if he's found guilty you can punish him you can whip him you can do all these other things. And my Monitise was a perfect source to plug in there. You know Bill I'm going to I'm going to quote this source this source's source and my money is my money he's isn't really adding anything to that discussion because the notion that that Kings may be judge that they can be punished was not a new position and it had independent grounds going back a very long way as you know.

So the what I was trying to do was to be careful about that and to be sensitive to the difference between an author or deploying a rabbinic text or a Hebrew source in service of a freestanding preexisting argument. Distinguish that from the case where the encounter with the sources he's actually moving the ball producing something something quite new. I I have some thoughts about about other areas in which I see this one of them is federalism actually because the. And a couple of very good scholars who have commented on this that that the notion of a tribal Federation being incorporated into the into the ideal constitution was very important in a number of early modern contexts and sort of gave a certain plausibility to the kind of new form of the federated republic with obvious resonances in the American context in the 18th century when people were citing

the biblical account in the service of defending the new federal republic. So you know they were saying Look and it's not only not only did you know the Hebrew Republic have have a federation by tribes. There were 12 were 13 that's close. You know you know 12 plus the District I mean that's that's that's it. So you know that's that's. So that would be one. But I'm sure there are others. These are the ones that seem to me to be the most important. The ones that are really just kind of transforming the landscape such that it's never the same again. Never. Yes.

Yes. And it was extremely contentious among Republicans. That is OK. We know that monarchy is unacceptable. But what what is it. Because there were there were all there's all this uncertainty about first of all chronology. You know they knew that at some point or another there were kings judges priests rabbis scribes and the Sanhedrin they knew all of this. They didn't know what the chronology was. So there was. There were those who argue that the Sanhedrin came later. Those who argued that and they had rabbinic sources for this view that the man that Sanhedrin was actually coeval with monarchy and so someone like Milton for example will disagree very strongly with Harrington even though they're both Republicans and even though they're both taking this Hebrew model very seriously Milton argues that the that the proper constitutional lesson to draw from the Republic is that you should have a perpetual Senate exactly as you suggest. And he explicitly models this on the Sanhedrin that's the view that he argues

that's the position he argues in the ready and easy way in 16:6 the right on the eve of the restoration whereas Harrington argues for for a much wider kind of participatory regime which he also justifies with respect to an argument about about the Hebrew Republic. It's a great question and there was there was no consensus about this this this was a major point of debate and and conflict going forward. Well thank you. Oh sorry Greta go ahead. So the it's a great question. The the story doesn't end in 7500. And so the allure of this tradition doesn't end and you do have texts on the Hebrew Republic that continue to be written into the early 18th century and then as I said you get a sort of revival of some of these earlier

17th century debates in America around the time of the revolution Paine's Common Sense and the responses all of that is true that having been said the 18th century sees a gradual and and pronounced retreat in the sort of power of this way of thinking because in large part and although you know this gets us into dangerous territory we have to generalize. We're talking about the Enlightenment. We want to distinguish between the German enlightenment the indictment of the fillers et cetera. But if we're interested in the philosophic. It's for sure the case that you end up as a result of the of the advance of biblical criticism and other forces with a very very transfigured picture of the Hebrew Bible where someone like Voltaire has a say in the epilogue can argue that the Hebrew Bible is simply the absurd narrative of the goings on of this primitive group of tribal chiefs and we should have no interest. And you know that view becomes a possible view becomes

quite dominant certainly among Philos. offs. And so the notion that the biblical example has a particular kind of authority such that we should then go to our rabbinic sources and figure out how it works so we can reproduce it. That too begins to lose plausibility for quite a lot of European intellectuals as we get to the end of the 18th century. But of course these commitments survive and they survive their original justifications and that in a sense is the problem. So. Well thank you very much. Professor. Professor Nelson will be kind enough to sign books in the back you're invited to purchase books and continue the conversation.