by Andrew Kuiper

Editorial Note: In the following series, Andrew Kuiper continues his own reflection on the roots of concepts like religious liberty that we generally associate with the modern world. This series also develops some earlier posts at the Regensburg Forum on how careful interconfessional inquiry about early modern theology and about the Augustinian tradition can enrich and qualify the “modernity criticism” that shapes theological, philosophical, and political debates today.

Following in the wake of Alasdair Macintyre’s project, a startling number of sophisticated intellectual histories have been produced across multiple disciplines in the last several decades. Most of these have to do, at least in some respect, with the advent and genealogy of modernity. Through their interdisciplinary and evaluative approach, these histories have had the beneficial effect of forcing scholars to render judgements on the state of their own discipline, the university system, and the justification for academic research (and what would constitute criteria for success). However, the comprehensive nature of these genealogies has had predictably negative results as well. Scholars skilled in a particular area or period find easy targets for polemical correction among these grand narratives. And while currents of agreement can be found among particular genealogists, many of these metanarratives seem doomed to perpetual agonistic performance and counter-performance: gigantic narratives hurling whole worlds at each other in an endless titanomachia. 

Dan Edelstein’s On the Spirit of Rights certainly shares the ambition of these capacious genealogies. He is explicitly concerned with the genesis of modernity and the major shifts and discursive recombinations which had to occur in order to get where we are. His erudition allows him to move easily between French Huguenots, Hobbes, Spinoza, Grotius, the Physiocrats, Calvin, Beza, Bellarmine, and anyone or anything else he finds relevant under the early modern sun. At the same time, the scope of Edelstein’s account is moderated by primarily focusing on the 16th through the 18th centuries and restricting his arguments to one question: how did the particular understanding of natural rights in the  French and American revolutions come to prevail? The question is specific enough to provide a clear through line for each chapter, yet capacious enough to allow extensions and subextensions: why did almost everyone agree on some form of natural right in the 16th century while almost no one had a shared account of what happened to those rights in society? How did the specific account of the preservation of natural rights in society come to prevail over its rivals? Edelstein also manages to indicate throughout how the emergence of modern political economy as well as modern human rights are intimately related to this more restricted exploration of natural rights regimes.

While useful for anyone interested in the intellectual tectonics of the early modern period, legal and political shifts are the tremors which he registers with the most precision. Naturally, his most critical engagements are with the genealogies of legal and political historians. Against Leo Strauss, Michel Villey, Richard Tuck, and Jerome Schneewind, Edelstein denies any absolute conceptual antagonism between subjective and objective rights. Hence, a supposed invention of subjective right cannot be the inception point of the modern. Going even further, Edelstein does not even find the argument that early modern politics is characterized primarily by rights-based discourse to be empirically convincing. He argues that, at the very least, the emphasis on nature and its laws as the basis for society and politics was as significant as the transformation and deployment of natural rights (he has elaborated on the link between these discourses in his previous work The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution). He has more moderate disagreements with others, like Samuel Moyn, who privilege discontinuity over continuity in intellectual history; though, he shares Moyn’s distaste for over-teleologized whiggish accounts of rights that march in undisturbed columns from Cicero to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Substantively and methodologically, Edelstein is closest to Annabel Brett, Brian Tierney, and Francis Oakley with whom he shares a complicated and complicating narrative of the transition from classical republicanism, Roman jurisprudence, scholastic natural law, Neo-Thomistic justifications of tyrannicide, and conciliar ecclesiology, to revolutionary natural rights. 

One feature that distinguishes Edelstein and, in my mind, elevates his work above many other intellectual historians is his sensitivity to the strange. He is attentive not only to mainstream Catholic and Protestant political theology but also to more subterranean discourses. It is this faculty which allows him to challenge simplistic accounts of the Enlightenment as an exclusively secular effort (see his edited volume  Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality which includes Matthew Gaetano’s helpful essay on early modern Aristotelianism) but to positively address the contributions of hermetic and occult influences on early modern thought (in my favorite project of his to date The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much). In The Spirit of Rights this comes through in his fascinating treatment of the French Physiocrats, Jansenism, and the spirit of capitalism (a subject which I will cover in detail in a later essay). Admittedly, this kind of detail and keen sense of how discourses survive or emerge subtly transformed makes Edelstein’s work both detailed and daunting to read. Nothing is ever really annihilated and discourses haunt texts long after their “official” demise.

Edelstein’s mid-range (though by no means mid-tier) account stands on its merits without needing any further justification. Though as a reader helplessly addicted to magisterial genealogies of modernity, I cannot help but think how Edelstein enriches the conversation and allows us to come closer to understanding that bewildering thing we call “modernity”–an understanding which is always complicated by being a self-understanding. His wide-ranging curiosity is always disciplined but never far beneath the surface. His reflections on the significance of the split between civil society and nature are (and I mean this as a compliment) as much political theory as they are political history. Books like this cannot replace the scope of a MacIntyre, Taylor, Milbank, Dupré , Blumenberg, Gadamer, Israel, or Pfau and I doubt Edelstein would desire to do so. However, it seems that, in one form or another, metanarratives about the modern are inescapable and we must join the ambition for understanding the whole with an eye for detail and the humility to revise (even radically revise) our previous assessments. Edelstein is a master of his subject and his craft and in further essays I will focus on and examine moments in his narrative that have direct relevance to the kind of theological and spiritual questions posed here at The Regensburg Forum.