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Jewish Political Studies Review Abstracts
Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2 (Spring 5753/1993)
"Communal Democracy and Liberal Democracy
in the Jewish Political Tradition"
This article describes the emergence of liberal democracy,
then compares and contrasts liberal democracy with communal
democracy, showing the latter to be a prior form of democratic
self-government. It then discusses the two in the perspective of
self-government and rights, the two dimensions of democracy.
Having given the United States as the best example of liberal
democracy and Switzerland as the best modern example of communal
democracy, it then goes on to explore the Jewish political
tradition and how it is also an example of communal democracy.
The article then turns to the crisis of modernity and the Jewish
polity and how the modern commitment to liberal democracy won
over a majority of Jews even as it posed problems for the Jewish
polity, examining classical Judaism and pluralism, looking for
accommodations between the two in the contemporary Jewish polity.
It suggests a series of accommodations that have been developed,
especially for less traditionally observant Jews, and examines
their implications for the Jewish political tradition. In
conclusion the article suggests that a bridging between modern
conceptions of liberal democracy and premodern conceptions of
communal democracy has begun and that one way to help that
bridging would be for Jews to turn to the concept of federal
liberty as it was developed by the English Puritans and their
heirs out of the biblical tradition, at the beginning of the
modern epoch, as a source of ideas and directions to pursue.
Medieval Jewish thought, following Platonic and Muslim
political philosophy, on the one hand, and halakhic concepts, on
the other, was basically, although reluctantly, monarchist, and
inherently anti-democratic. It rejected outright what we term
here as the ancient Greek variety of liberal democracy, which
went against its basic philosophical and theological assumptions.
This essay considers the place of democratic ideas within
the context of Judaic political thought, with special reference
to the idea of equality. The views of Louis Finkelstein, Simon
Federbusch, and Sol Roth on this question are considered.
Distinctions are drawn between descriptive and prescriptive
concepts of equality, as well as between absolute equality and
the uniquely Judaic concept of infinite human value. Also
discussed is the conflict between complete equality and absolute
liberty and its resolution in the prescriptive concept of
equality of negative liberty. The essay concludes that although
there are fundamental ideological differences between democracy
and the religious and ethnical system of Judaism, the democratic
form of government has the greatest current potential for
accommodating the Judaic search for higher values.
Contemporary communitarian thought critiques liberalism for
the latter's anemic conception of community. Liberalism requires
a doctrine of community and common good in order to ground its
predilection for distributive justice. For communitarians,
liberalism here tries to square a circle. Mishnah, Talmud, and
Maimonides anticipate this contempoorary debate by conceiving of
community and common good in a way thick enough to allow for
distributive justice, yet limited enough to preserve individual
rights.
This essay connects the theme of communal democracy and the
Jewish political tradition with the twin themes of nationalism
and modernity. The modern idea of communal democracy, it is
argued, is best understood within the context of the modern
phenomenon of nationalism. In Part I, the emergence and meaning
of the modern nation and nationalism is explored in Alexis de
Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution and Ernest
Gellner's Nations and Nationalism. Part II revises Gellner's
understanding of modernity to include a non-historicist
appreciation of the founding ideas of modernity, and the new
sciences of nature and of politics from which they issue. The
new conventions based on the new sciences make inevitable the
"crisis of identity" that is characteristic of modernity, and the
idea of a "primordial community" is vitiated. This crisis is not
only one of the roots of ideological nationalism, but also the
modern idea of non-political "freedom," or the will to self-
liberation. Part III discusses the fate of the Jewish political
tradition within modernity. It is argued that the Jewish
political tradition contains an intrinsic natural principle of
political liberty, t'shuvah, that addresses the decay, under the
impact of modernity, of the other two principles of political
liberty, virtue and self-interest.
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