MODERN DEMOCRACY AND THE THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL PROBLEM IN SPINOZA, ROUSSEAU, AND JEFFERSON RECOVERING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY SERIES EDITORS: THOMAS L. PANGLE AND TIMOTHY BURNS PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN: Lucretius as Theorist of Political Life By John Colman Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom By Timothy Burns Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Perennial Challenges to the Philosophic Life Edited by Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax Eros and Socratic Political Philosophy By David Levy Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s Edited by Martin D. Yaffe and Richard S. Ruderman Xenophon the Socratic Prince: The Argument of the Anabasis of Cyrus By Eric Buzzetti Modern Democracy and the Theological-Political Problem in Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson By Lee Ward MODERN DEMOCRACY AND THE THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL PROBLEM IN SPINOZA, ROUSSEAU, AND JEFFERSON Lee Ward MODERN DEMOCRACY AND THE THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL PROBLEM IN SPINOZA, ROUSSEAU, AND JEFFERSON Copyright © Lee Ward, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-47504-6 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-50171-7 ISBN 978-1-137-47505-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137475053 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, Lee, 1970– Modern democracy and the theological-political problem in Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson / by Lee Ward. pages cm.—(Recovering political philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Democracy. 2. Religion and politics. I. Title. JC421.W37 2014 321.8—dc23 2014024452 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Mary Nichols, my friend and teacher This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: A Pre-history of Democracy 1 1. Spinoza and Democracy as the Best Regime 35 2. Rousseau and Democratic Civil Religion 83 3. Thomas Jefferson: Bringing Democracy Down from the Heavens 133 Conclusion 187 Notes 193 References 205 Index 219 This page intentionally left blank SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE Palgrave’s Recovering Political Philosophy series was founded with an eye to postmodernism’s challenge to the possibility of a rational founda- tion for and guidance of our political lives. This invigorating challenge has provoked a searching re-examination of classic texts, not only those of political philosophers, but also of poets, artists, theologians, scientists, and other thinkers who may not be regarded conventionally as politi- cal theorists. The series publishes studies that endeavor to take up this re-examination and thereby help reinstill a classical understanding of civic ideals, as well as studies that clarify the strengths and the weak- nesses of modern philosophical rationalism. The interpretative studies in the series are particularly attentive to historical context and language, and to the ways in which both censorial persecution and didactic concerns have impelled prudent thinkers, in widely diverse cultural conditions, to employ manifold strategies of writing—strategies that allowed them to aim at different audiences with various degrees of openness to uncon- ventional thinking. The series offers close readings of ancient, medieval, early modern, and late modern works that illuminate the human condi- tion by attempting to answer its deepest, most enduring questions, and that have (in the modern period) laid the foundations for contemporary political, social, and economic life. In this volume, Lee Ward plumbs the foundations of the seminal arguments that grounded the two most profound innovations in Western political life: the moral and theoretical victory of democracy over other regimes, and the replacement of theocracy by secular governments. He argues that the three thinkers who are the focus of this study, Benedict Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson, were most responsible for planting “democracy” in the term “liberal democracy.” Ward shows how each of the three contributed something crucial to the foundational combination of the liberal principle of natural rights with the democratic principle of popular sovereignty. At the same time, Ward argues that the tension among these thinkers in their more optimistic