Commonwealth And Covenant

At the very beginning of the history of the covenant idea, human beings were conceived as entering into a morally grounded and informal pact with God. Politically, this pact, or covenant, involves the coming together of basically equal humans who consent with one another through a morally binding pact, setting the partners on the road to a new task. As a theological and political concept, covenant is designed to keep the peace in the face of conflicting human interests, needs, and demands. This pioneering continuation of Daniel J. Elazar's work is concerned with political uses of the idea of covenant and the political arrangements that flow from it. Covenant and Commonwealth is the second in a series of volumes exploring the covenantal tradition in Western politics. The first, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, analyzed how the Bible set forth ideas of covenant in ancient Israel and the Jewish political tradition. In this volume, those themes are taken a step further to examine covenant as a political idea and tradition along with the culture and behavior that they produced. The book focuses on the struggle in Europe to produce a Christian covenantal commonwealth, a struggle that climaxed in the Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also briefly examines covenant and hierarchy in Islam and other premodern polities that shape our present. The third volume in this series will examine the progressive secularization of the covenant idea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Covenant and Commonwealth is a fundamental and original contribution to the scholarship of Western civilization. It ranks with commensurate efforts of Ferdinand Braudel and Joseph Needham. As such it will be of deep interest to historians, social scientists, and theologians of all persuasions.

The struggle in Europe to produce a Christian covenantal commonwealth, that climaxed in the Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the focus of this volume. It also examines Islam and other premodern polities that shape our present. "[W]ould make a rewarding text for a course on the history of European political thought." --George M. Gross, Review of Politics

In Commonwealth and Covenant Marcia Pally argues that in order to address current socioeconomic problems, we need not more economic formulas but rather a better understanding of how the world is set up — an ontology of how we and the world work. Without this, good proposals that arise lack political will and go unimplemented. Pally describes our basic setup as “separability-amid-situatedness” or “distinction-amid-relation.” Though we are all unique individuals, we become our singular selves through our relations and responsibilities to the people and environments around us. Pally argues that our culture’s overemphasis on “separability” — individualism run amok — results in greed, adversarial and deceitful political discourse and chicanery, resource grabbing, broken relationships, and anomie. Maintaining that separability and situatedness can and must be considered together in public policy, Pally draws on intellectual history, philosophy, and — especially — historic Christian and Jewish theologies of relationality to construct a new framework for addressing present economic and political ills.

Reveals how early modern religious conceptions of covenant and community were deployed for surprisingly radical political ends.

In 1975, after three centuries of colonial rule, the people of the Northern Marianas exercised their right of self-determination to become U.S. citizens in a self-governing commonwealth under U.S. sovereignty. An Honorable Accord is the remarkable account of their tenacious efforts to shape a political future separate from other Micronesian peoples, of the negotiations that produced the Covenant defining the commonwealth relationship, and its eventual approval by the Northern Marianas people and the U.S. Congress.

Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.

Establishes the intellectual foundations of a new movement in American thought: communitarianism. Emerging in part as a response to the excesses of American individualism, communitarianism seeks to restore the balance between individual rights and social responsibilities.