Christianity

Ben Peterson

Chapter 10 in Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought, 2024, pp 110-120 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Historical scholarship and historically informed political reflection on Christian political thought has become enmeshed in the debate over liberalism, postliberalism, and Christian perspectives on contemporary politics. This chapter considers two strands in recent historical scholarship and historically-based Christian political theory. The first, the liberal narrative, explores the Christian roots of liberal democracy or ideas and institutions associated with modern political thought such as individualism and individual rights, equality, consent, constitutionalism, rule of law, religious tolerance, and religious freedom. The second, ressourcement, approaches Christian political thought as a lost preliberal heritage offering resources for a renewed moral, spiritual, and civic order. Mixed into the discussion are works by scholars I treat as pure historians or students of political thought with whom the liberal narrative and ressourcement proponents engage. In this chapter, I take each strand in turn, reflecting on exemplary contributions and the insights and further questions they leave in their wake. Historians have illuminated the premodern, preliberal roots of institutions and values often considered distinctive of modern constitutional democracy. Yet they also reveal the limits of simple stories of continuity between ancient and medieval Christian political thought and the institutions and liberal institutions and values of our own day. One such limitation has to do with the centrality of the church in Christian political thought.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800373808.00019 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20103_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().