Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics

This work reopens the question of the relation of the Protestant Reformation to the emergence of a distinctively modern view of political activity. Providing a highly original reading of John Calvin's major work and an examination of some key interpretations of Calvinism, Ralph C. Hancock argues that Calvin should be considered a founder of modern civilization along with such "secular" thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Descartes. According to Hancock, however, leading interpretations assume a dichotomy between the "worldly" and the "religious" which a close reading of Calvin's writings does not sustain. Hancock provides an illuminating commentary on Calvin's four-volume Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), addressing both Calvin's political and ethical argument and the theological foundations of this argument. In Hancock's view, Calvin radically distinguishes between the religious and the secular in order to bind them together in a summons to worldly activity for the preservation of the species and the glory of God. The author thus uncovers the theological basis of Calvinism's historical activism and demonstrates the complex unity of Calvin's practical teaching and his theology. Hancock concludes by speculating on the implications of his findings for interpretations of the modern political theory of Strauss, Voegelin, and Blumenberg. The republication of Ralph Hancock's Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics is most timely. Overhanging modernity is the clash between religious faith and enlightenment rationalism. It is insisted that the latter must supersede the former and that the secular society inevitably replaces the sacral. Hancock shows through close analysis of Calvin's theology that in modernity there is interpenetration of the spiritual and material spheres such as to infuse the enlightenment project of continual forward looking renewal with religious seriousness while, conversely, the realization of the religious spirit manifests itself in the world, spiritualizing the material. Hancock argues powerfully that political theorists need to take Calvin more seriously, and to assess more critically the claims of enlightenment rationalism and the religiosity lurking within it. This is an auspicious catalyst for deeper reflection in contemporary political thinking. In this penetrating volume, based on a close reading of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, Ralph Hancock argues that the Whig historians, Hegel, the Progressives, and Max Weber were more correct than they knew in suggesting an affinity between the Reformation and the modern project. If he is correct - and he may well be - modern Enlightenment rationalism cannot give a full and fully rational account of itself, its this worldly orientation can only be defended from a standpoint outside this world, and the radicalism and unabashed acquisitiveness of the moderns make no sense when fully divorced from holy zeal. Book jacket.