This book argues that sovereignty is the first-order question of political order, and that seventeenth-century England provides an important case study in the roots of its modern iterations. It offers fresh readings of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as lesser-known figures and literary texts. In addition to political philosophy and literary studies, it also takes account of the period's legal history, exploring the exercise of the crown's feudal rights in the Court of Wards and Liveries, debates over habeas rights, and contests of various courts over jurisdiction. Theorizing sovereignty in a way that points forward to later modernity, the book also offers a sustained critique of the writings of Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century's most influential, if also most controversial, thinker on this topic.
Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression.
This book argues that sovereignty is the first-order question of political order, and that seventeenth-century England provides an important case study in the roots of its modern iterations. It offers fresh readings of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as lesser-known figures and literary texts. In addition to political philosophy and literary studies, it also takes account of the period's legal history, exploring the exercise of the crown's feudal rights in the Court of Wards and Liveries, debates over habeas rights, and contests of various courts over jurisdiction. Theorizing sovereignty in a way that points forward to later modernity, the book also offers a sustained critique of the writings of Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century's most influential, if also most controversial, thinker on this topic.
In the Anteroom of Divinity focuses on the persistence of Pseudo-Dionysian angelology in England's early modern period. Beginning with a discussion of John Colet's commentary on Dionysisus' twin hierarchies, Feisal G. Mohamed explores the significance of the Dionysian tradition to the conformism debate of the 1590s through works by Richard Hooker and Edmund Spenser. He then turns to John Donne and John Milton to shed light on their constructions of godly poetics, politics and devotion, and provides the most extensive study of Milton's angelology in more than fifty years. With new philosophical, theological, and literary insights, this work offers a contribution to intellectual history and the history of religion in critical moments of the English Reformation.
This book argues that sovereignty is the first-order question of political order, and that seventeenth-century England provides an important case study in the roots of its modern iterations. It offers fresh readings of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as lesser-known figures and literary texts. In addition to political philosophy and literary studies, it also takes account of the period's legal history, exploring the exercise of the crown's feudal rights in the Court of Wards and Liveries, debates over habeas rights, and contests of various courts over jurisdiction. Theorizing sovereignty in a way that points forward to later modernity, the book also offers a sustained critique of the writings of Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century's most influential, if also most controversial, thinker on this topic.
In the Anteroom of Divinity focuses on the persistence of Pseudo-Dionysian angelology in England's early modern period. Beginning with a discussion of John Colet's commentary on Dionysisus' twin hierarchies, Feisal G. Mohamed explores the significance of the Dionysian tradition to the conformism debate of the 1590s through works by Richard Hooker and Edmund Spenser. He then turns to John Donne and John Milton to shed light on their constructions of godly poetics, politics and devotion, and provides the most extensive study of Milton's angelology in more than fifty years. With new philosophical, theological, and literary insights, this work offers a contribution to intellectual history and the history of religion in critical moments of the English Reformation.
Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression.
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