2016/01/01 by Jeffrey W. Robbins, Robbins, Jeffrey W
Social Sciences · #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · pdf · doi:10.26021/313
openalex publication_date 2016/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
In my books Radical Democracy and Political Theology and the co-authored book with Clayton Crockett, Religion, Politics and the Earth, I've sometimes been accused of being a bit too rosy-eyed.My professed faith in the revolutionary power of the people-of a democratized public that always demands more democracy-has been criticized for failing to give sufficient attention to the social antagonisms within the body politic where questions of economic class and identity pose persistent challenges.The points are made of democracy's Western-even more, its colonial and imperialistic-pedigree, of democracy's capture by consumer capitalism, and of its logic of exclusionary inclusion built on the backs of slave, immigrant and domestic labor.Perhaps my tone struck when declaring democracy the political instantiation of the death of God came across too celebratory.What I wish to have made clear is that Alexis de Tocqueville's expressed "terror" at God's apparent self-willed annihilation with the people's claim to the sovereignty that was once the exclusive province of God's should be regarded as no different from Colonel Hurtz's horror at his own "heart of darkness," and by extension, the nearly orgiastic violence and hatred that lies at the heart of Western man's civilizing project.Or, there is the more familiar reference from Nietzsche's proclamation that God is dead.The pathos and foreboding from both Tocqueville and Nietzsche are real.After all, without the working hypothesis of God, we are left with the ambivalent conclusion that our fate is in our hands.It is the ultimate theo-political question of sovereignty in that it poses to us the