A01=Julie E. Cooper
Author_Julie E. Cooper
baruch spinoza
Category=JPA
Category=QDTS
early modern justification
empowerment
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
europe
finitude
historical study
history
humanity
humility
jean-jacques rousseau
limitations
modesty
mortality
philosophy
place of the individual
political thought
politics
rationalism
secular
secularism
self rule
self-love
social considerations
thomas hobbes
Product details
- ISBN 9780226081298
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 28 Oct 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God's authority in order to take his place. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires. Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularity's inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging one's limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability.
Rather, it challenges us - today as then - to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity.
Julie E. Cooper is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
