Hebrew Republic

I didn’t find Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought as revolutionary as some of the blurbs indicate, but it is a very intriguing study.  Contrary to the standard story of early modern political thought, Nelson argues that political science was shaped by writers who regarded “the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel,” so that “many of the central ideas we associate with the emergence of modern political thought” developed during what historians describe as “the Biblical Century.”

After a brief summary of the revival of Hebraic learning in the late medieval and Reformation periods, and the increasing availability of Jewish sources, Nelson focuses on three areas where the Hebrew Republic ideal had an impact on the development of modern political thought.  In contrast to earlier political thinkers, who recognized the validity of various constitutional arrangements (monarchy, oligarchy, republican), writers who were gripped by the model of the Hebrew Republic argued that the republican system was the only legitimate system and that all forms of monarchy are usurpations of God’s authority as king.  At the center of the debates were varying interpretations of Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8, and particularly rabbinic debates on these passages.

Theories of religious toleration emerged from the same matrix: “The pursuit of toleration was primarily nurtured by deeply felt religious convictions, not by their absence; and it emerged to a very great extent out of the Erastian effort to unify church and state, not out of the desire to keep them separate.”

The most intriguing section of the book, however, is chapter 2, where Nelson traces early modern schemes for redistribution of property, particularly land, to the influence of Old Testament land laws.  He sets the discussion by noting the contemporary debate between “republican” conceptions of liberty as “non-domination” and liberal conceptions of liberty as “absence of interference or impediment.”  Communitarians resonate to the republican conception because it recognizes that “economic dependence   . . . is a form of unfreedom with important civic consequences,” and because it dovetails with the communitarian conviction that “a good society must constrain extreme inequalities.”

Prior to the seventeenth-century, Nelson argues, Western political thought was almost universally opposed to schemes for redistributing property, and often cited the Roman agrarian laws in support of this position.  It was widely believed that the agrarian reforms “constituted unjust expropriations of private property, and that the controversy surrounding their proposal and passage ultimately brought about the fall of the Republic.”

According to writers working within the “Hebrew Republic” tradition, though, things looked very different.  In his book on the Hebrew republic, Petrus Cunaeus turned the argument from Roman history on its head: For him, “it was in fact the lack of  effective agrarian laws that doomed Rome to civil war.”  James Harrington agreed.  He argued that the constitution outlined in the Bible is “made by an infallible legislator, even God Himself,” and saw the basic principle of Hebrew property distribution as one of “balance.”  Land distribution, Harrington argued, determines the form of government: A single landowner is an absolute monarch; land ownership by the few creates an aristocracy; but “if the whole people be landlords,” then the polity is a genuine commonwealth.

He saw this balance achieved through the original tribal distribution of land and through the periodic redistribution of the Jubilee: “The whole people of Israel, through a popular distribution of land of Canaan among themselves by lot, and a fixation of such popular balance, by their agrarian law, or jubilee, entailing the inheritance of each proprietor upon his heirs forever, was locally divided into twelve tribes.”  Again, “The over-balance of land unto the like proportion in the people, or where neither one nor the few over-balance the whole people, createth popular government; as in the division of the land of Canaan unto the whole people of Israel by lot.  The constitution of a people in which, and like cases, it capable of entire freedom, nay, not capable of any other settlement.”

The ideas made their way to the new world.  Perez Fobes, preaching in Boston in 1795, argued that “we feel also, and revere the wisdom of GOD in the appointment of a jubilee, as an essential article in the Jewish policy.  This, it is probable, was the great palladium of liberty to that people.  A similar institution perhaps may be the only method in which liberty can be perpetuated among selfish, degenerate beings in every government under heaven.”

I’m not endorsing the exegesis of the political arguments here, only noting the intriguing direction that “theonomy” took in the seventeenth century.