Paul Kahn

‘De uitdrukking ‘Europees humanisme’ is op zich al een uiting van de tweeslachtige aard van ons bestaan: tegelijkertijd eindig - omgrensd - en oneindig - altijd buiten die grenzen. Op het kruispunt van het eindige en het oneindige - van Eros en stof - stuiten we op de oorsprong van het kwaad. Dat zou geen verrassing hoeven te zijn, als we bedenken met welke andere gemeenschap we allemaal sterk verbonden zijn: het gezin. Ook daarin zie je dat de liefde en het kwaad met elkaar verstrengeld zijn. Terwijl we op zoek zijn naar liefde, merken we maar al te vaak dat we zelf kwaad berokkenen.’

Belief in the rule of law characterizes our society, our political order, and even our identity as citizens. The Cultural Study of Law is the first full examination of what it means to conduct a modern intellectual inquiry into the culture of law. Paul Kahn outlines the tools necessary for such an inquiry by analyzing the concepts of time, space, citizen, judge, sovereignty, and theory within the culture of law's rule. Charting the way for the development of a new intellectual discipline, Paul Kahn advocates an approach that stands outside law's normative framework and looks at law as a way of life rather than as a set of rules. "Professor Kahn's perspective is neat and alluring: We need a form of legal scholarship released from the project of reform so that we can better understand who and what we are. The new discipline should study 'not legal rules, but the imagination as it constructs a world of legal meaning.'... [C]oncise, good reading, and recommended." —New York Law Journal.

In this strikingly original work, Paul W. Kahn rethinks the meaning of political theology. In a text innovative in both form and substance, he describes an American political theology as a secular inquiry into ultimate meanings sustaining our faith in the popular sovereign. Kahn works out his view through an engagement with Carl Schmitt's 1922 classic, _Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty_. He forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary. The result is a contemporary political theology. As in Schmitt's work, sovereignty remains central, yet Kahn shows how popular sovereignty creates an ethos of sacrifice in the modern state. Turning to law, Kahn demonstrates how the line between exception and judicial decision is not as sharp as Schmitt led us to believe. He reminds readers that American political life begins with the revolutionary willingness to sacrifice and that both sacrifice and law continue to ground the American political imagination. Kahn offers a political theology that has at its center the practice of freedom realized in political decisions, legal judgments, and finally in philosophical inquiry itself.