Gershom Scholem wrote his famous article, “Redemption through sin”, in 1937, and J.L. Talmon gained the inspiration for his first book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, in the years 1937–1938 at the time when the Moscow trials revealed to the world the bitter reality of what was happening in the Soviet Union. Scholem and Talmon were contemporaries and witnesses of the transformation of communism in the Soviet Union from a vision of egalitarian and universal redemption into a bureaucratic and nationalistic (...) despotism. The major scholar of the history of religious Messianism and the major scholar of the history of secular Messianism both widened the scope of their investigations—the first extending them into the history of Sabbataianism and the second into the French Revolution—and both reached a similar conclusion: both recognized, as Scholem put it, “the profound truth relating to the dialectics of history … of the historical process whereby the fulfilment of one political process leads to the manifestation of its opposite. In the realization of one thing its opposite is revealed”. The two great Israeli historians of ideas plumbed the depths of one of the most fascinating and at the same time tragic manifestations of la condition humaine: the human challenge of bringing the heavenly city down to the vale of tears, and the price that men have to pay for their Messianic passion. (shrink)

Night: The presence of the absence, the dissolution of the person in the night, the horror of being, the reality of the unreal, it takes us more to the absence of God than to God, to the absence of every entity. Dawn: Not being conscious of the existence of that unchangeable supposed centre of the person within time does not mean that we cannot be able to explain the not static changeable and relational personal identity in other ways. Day: It (...) is me who flows, but I am not in the flow like a support from where life flows, I am flowing in my own reality. This is not similar to an egology, it does not mean that everything exists and is loved to me, but it does mean that everything is seen and loved for me. (shrink)

When political rationality deployed itself on the terrain of the biological life of the human species with the purpose of making this life healthier, more capable, and more "worthy of being lived," it also postulated that some life could be potentiated only at the price of killing off other life. Foucault therefore introduces the idea of biopolitics together with that of thanatopolitics (1990, 137) .Since Foucault, one of the urgent questions has been how biopolitics turns into a thanatopolitics and under (...) what conditions can this turn be prevented or reversed into an affirmative politics of life. In this article I offer a reading of Benjamin's project that leads from thanatopolitics to an affirmative biopolitics. .. (shrink)

The paper begins by engaging Mircea Eliade’s undervaluation of the importance of classical sociology of religion, namely, Durkheim and Weber, and goes on to show how much they share with him, particularly with regard to a critique of modern European civilization, and of the foundational importance of religion in society. This “other”, non-positivist, non-reductionist face of Durkheim and Weber is elaborated by showing their religious, even “primordial” approaches to the religious bases of society and culture. Eliade’s criticism of sociology is (...) further misplaced, given the decline of the sociological regime of knowledge, and the accuracy of Eliade’s prescient expectation of a cosmic rather than historical orientation, and the current importance of religion and “spirituality” for socio-cultural life, generally. The displacement of secular social theory by social and psychological understanding explicitly based in religious thought is explored in several domains and religious traditions. The paper emphasizes, however, a sociology created from within the streams of Jewish mysticism, and examples are offered. The line of Romanian scholars of religion, including Eliade, Idel and Culiano, is seen as less than apparently dissonant with both the sociology of religious experience, and the post-sociological turn to creating social theory from within religious, and particularly, mystical traditions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop a model of life history theory that incorporates environmental influences, contextual influences, and heritable variation. I argue that physically or psychologically stressful environments delay maturation and the onset of reproductive competence. The social context is also important, and here I concentrate on the opportunity for upward social mobility as a contextual influence that results in delaying reproduction and lowering fertility in the interest of increasing investment in children. I also review evidence that (...) variation in life history strategies is influenced by genetic variation as well. Finally, I show that cultural shifts in the social control of sexual behavior have had differential effects on individuals predisposed to high- versus low-investment reproductive strategies. (shrink)

Erich Fromm and Gershom Scholem met each other in Frankfurt in the early 1920’s. Both were young, intelligent and ambitious and would later become famous celebrities, Fromm as a psychoanalyst and social critic, Scholem as a pioneering historian of Jewish mysticism. But they did not become friends. Rather the opposite, one can say that a certain animosity arose between the two. Scholem has published nasty comments on Fromm. In one Fromm was quite unjustly called a “psychoanalytical Bolshevik”. Scholem’s claim that (...) Fromm was an enthusiastic Trotskyist is not correct either, although Fromm expressed some admiration of Trotsky as a person. Fromm, on the other hand, did not publicly comment Scholem as a person, but criticized his theories on messianism on some points. The question why the two felt an antipathy towards each other is not easy to answer. On some issues they had different views, which of course is not a sufficient reason not to be friends. The fact that they developed along contrary lines might have been of importance. And finally, some reasons for the fact that certain persons just don’t fit together are not possibly to determinate. (shrink)

I model an attempt by radical parties to topple a modus vivendi between a ruling government and a moderate opposition group. Cooperation between the regime and the moderate opposition is possible if each player prefers mutual cooperation to mutual confrontation. If each player also prefers mutual confrontation to cooperating while the other defects then radical parties have a chance at breaking up this accord. Radical parties can succeed in bringing the government and opposition to mutual confrontation if they can agree (...) on power-sharing arrangements after regime change. This paper also resolves central questions surrounding the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I use an institutional approach to infer player preferences from historical and biblical sources and then use game theory to model the interactions between participants in these events. In so doing, I clarify aspects of the Gospel narrative that have puzzled readers for the past 2000 years. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to analyze an important decision Brzozowski took at the end of his life, i.e. his late turn towards Catholicism, which, despite his own objections, we should nonetheless call a religious conversion. The main reason why Brzozowski resisted the traditional rhetoric of conversion lies in his often repeated conviction that faith cannot invalidate life, because “what is not biographical, does not exist at all.” Brzozowski, therefore, rejects conversion understood as a radical and abrupt revolution of the (...) soul, which annuls everything that happened before, and turns to a model of religiosity (“Catholicism, undoubtedly”) which preserves his entire biographical past. In this manner, Brzozowski seeks his own formula of faith, more adequate to the “situation” of the modern man who lives in and through History. I argue that the model of “conversion without conversion” Brzozowski chose as representative of modern man is typically, though avant la lettre , post-secular: closer to the Jewish sources of past-oriented tschuva than to the mystical timelessness of traditionally Christian metanoia . The idea that redemption consists not in a liberation of a pure spirit but in a patient working-through of the universal history of creation is an implicit credo of the whole modern age, first fully articulated by Brzozowski and only later in the writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin. Brzozowski emerges as a relatively early precursor of the future post-secular option whose advocates, like the author of The Diary , will not allow themselves to “lose a single moment,” either of their lives or the world’s history. (shrink)