Covenant and Civil Society

Constitutional Matrix of Modern Democracy

Daniel Elazar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351291422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essence of the covenant tradition is the idea of human beings freely associating for common purposes through pacts of mutual commitment. In the political realm, the idea of covenant has been particularly influential in frontierlands. Reinformed by the idea of the federated commonwealth that emerged out of the Protestant Reformation, covenant eventually fostered the establishment of the United States of America and our modern idea of federalism. More recently, these great products of the covenant tradition helped to bring about the collapse of twentieth-century totalitarianism and fueled a new spirit in contemporary political life throughout the world. A return to political covenantalism seems to be an appropriate response to the crisis of modern civilization and the new epoch after World War II. Covenant and Civil Society is the final volume in Elazar's monumental series The Covenant Tradition in Politics. In it, he traces the tradition's rebirth and development in the modern epoch.Covenant and Civil Society also considers issues of communal solidarity on a postmodern basis. Elazar traces the transition from the covenanted commonwealth of the Protestant Reformation to the civil society of the modern epoch, and explores the covenant's role in the modern statist era and the development of modern democracy. Scandiriavia, and the Latin-Germanic borderlands, many of which are typically thought of as examples of organic or hierarchical models. Elazar argues that a covenantal model is more appropriate and is part of the Western tradition as such.The book concludes with examination of the present and future of covenantal thought. Today, the global spread of federalism, most clearly seen in the formation of the European Union, is also seen in local and private arenas. Elazar considers the benefits of covenantal thought while balancing such optimism with a realistic sense of its limits. As a prescription for change, Covenant and Civil Society is a fundamental and original contribution. Along with the previous volumes in this series, all available from Transaction, it will be of deep interest to historians, social scientists, political theorists, and theologians of all persuasions.

Part I

Covenant: From Commonwealth to Civil Society

1

Prologue: Toward a Civil Constitutionalism

The cleavage between the modern and premodern epochs is generally acknowledged. We may argue over the extent of the cleavage and the degree of continuity across the premodern-modern divide, but the fact that the cleavage was and is a reality for most people who have undergone modernization has been well-documented. Nevertheless, covenant is one of those concepts and its tradition one of the cultures that did manage to cross the divide and survive; transformed, indeed, but in the process having an enormous influence on the shaping of the modern epoch, especially in its political dimension, and continuing to compel certain populations or at the very least to serve as the rock of refuge to which they return for reinvigoration in times of need. It is no less important to recall that the political transformations of modernity were initiated by and achieved their greatest success in those countries where the covenantal tradition had been strongest, particularly Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland and England, and the United States.

Circumstantial evidence alone would suggest that there should have been a connection between the covenant tradition and modern constitutionalism. That evidence is strengthened by the record, which shows real connections, and also by the results. Indeed, the most successful results, even from the perspective of the first modernists, came when the tradition of the covenantal commonwealth and that of modern civil society found common ground and served as mutual modifiers, as in the founding of the United States.¹ Moreover, the record of constitutionalism in those countries and polities without a covenantal tradition is so sharply different as to suggest the same. This book seeks to tell the story of the crossing of that gap and its consequences, and to analyze the results and present status of the covenant tradition in Western, now increasingly world, politics.

To do so we must look at covenant in all its many dimensions, as generator of theory, as fundament of culture, as ideological manifestation, as shaper of institutions, and as influence on behavior within the matrix constructed by all, many, or some of the foregoing. Covenant theory and practice had its greatest flowering in the Bible and its second greatest during the Protestant Reformation as the basis for Reformed Protestantism.² It may be at the beginning of its third great revival today, early in the postmodern epoch.

Although we can uncover the beginnings of covenant theory, ideology, and institutions in the Bible and Biblical Israel, the ultimate origins of covenantal cultural predispositions, especially political culture, and behavior remain unclear. Even the most careful investigation fails to uncover those origins beyond certain elements in Mesopotamian culture with any certitude. Even the lines of continuity of covenantal culture or political culture tend to be obscured for certain times and in certain places. What we have pieced together from the past is a kind of incomplete puzzle where many of the pieces are still missing or, if not ultimately missing, have yet to be uncovered. In the modern epoch, the problem is less one of missing pieces than of inadequate information regarding the many pieces that we have, often because they have been reported to us without addressing the covenantal dimension, either taking it for granted or considering it unimportant. In such cases, only a return to the most original sources can help us, and it has not been possible to do so in all cases.

Covenant, Compact, Contract

A covenant is a morally informed agreement or pact based upon voluntary consent and mutual oaths or promises, witnessed by the relevant higher authority, between peoples or parties having independent though not necessarily equal status, that provides for joint action or obligation to achieve defined ends (limited or comprehensive) under conditions of mutual respect which protect the individual integrities of all the parties to it. Every covenant involves consenting, promising, and agreeing. Most are meant to be of unlimited duration, if not perpetual. Covenants can bind any number of partners for a variety of purposes, but in their essence they are political in that their bonds are used principally to establish bodies political and social.

Covenant is tied in an ambiguous relationship to two related terms, compact and contract. On the one hand, both compacts and contracts are derived from covenant, and sometimes the terms are even used interchangeably. On the other hand, there are very real differences between the three which need clarification.

Both covenants and their derivative, compacts, differ from contracts in that the first two are constitutional or public and the last private in character. As such, covenantal or compactual obligations are broadly reciprocal. Those bound by one or the other are obligated to respond to one another beyond the letter of the law rather than to limit their obligations to the narrowest contractual requirements. Hence, covenants and compacts are inherently designed to be flexible in certain respects as well as firm in others. As expressions of private law, contracts tend to be interpreted as narrowly as possible so as to limit the obligation of the contracting parties to what is explicitly mandated by the contract itself.

A covenant differs from a compact in that its morally binding dimension takes precedence over its legal dimension. In its heart of hearts, a covenant is an agreement in which a transcendent moral force, traditionally God, is a party, usually a direct party, to or guarantor of a particular relationship; whereas, when the term compact is used, a moral force is only indirectly involved. A compact, based as it is on mutual pledges rather than the guarantees of a higher authority, rests more heavily on a legal though still ethical grounding for its politics. In other words, compact is a secular phenomenon. This is historically verifiable by examining the shift in terminology that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While those who saw the hand of God in political affairs in the United States continued to use the term covenant, those who sought a secular grounding for politics turned to the term compact. While the distinction is not always used with strict clarity, it does appear consistently. The issue was further complicated by Rousseau and his followers who talked about the social contract, a highly secularized concept which, even when applied for public purposes, never develops the same level of moral obligation as either covenant or compact.

Covenant is also related to constitutionalism. Normally, a covenant precedes a constitution and establishes the people or body which then proceeds to adopt a constitution of government for itself. Thus, a constitution involves the implementation of a prior covenant—an effectuation or translation of a prior covenant into an actual frame or structure of government. The constitution may include a restatement or reaffirmation of the original covenant, as does the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, but that is optional.

Although perhaps more difficult than tracing covenantal ideas expressed in political thought, covenant as ideology is more easily identifiable since ideology is a very public form of theory. Covenant-as-culture persists even when it is not necessarily recognized as such, while covenantal ideology had its ups and downs in the modern epoch. It was strong in the mid-seventeenth century in the British Isles, the Low Countries, and in the American colonies; again at the time of the American Revolution; and periodically thereafter in covenant-based civil societies, but never again during the modern epoch did it achieve the same status.

One of the tests of the presence of the covenantal dimension is to be found in the institutions that developed within the covenantal matrix, particularly in matters of their institutional governance and culture. These, indeed, can be identified throughout the epoch. Even if the larger environment is less covenantal, institutions remain carriers, at least until some massive change comes to transform them. Thus the behavior of people functioning within those institutions, particularly their political behavior, is a clear manifestation of covenant where it exists. Less easy to identify than institutions, nevertheless political behavior can be studied sufficiently well in most cases.

Covenant entered the modern epoch as a manifestation of Reformed Protestantism and in every respect it was tied to the rise and fall of Puritanism and the residues Puritanism left in certain parts of the world. Reformed Protestantism had two principal sources: one was in Ulrich Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, and their colleagues and disciples in Zurich and the Rhineland, principally in the German-speaking territories of Switzerland and western Germany. The other was the product of John Calvin and his associates and students in Geneva. Calvin came on the scene after Zwingli had been killed and Calvin’s doctrines rapidly became the most influential in the Reformed Protestant world.

As these influences affected the Huguenots in France, the Netherlanders, the Scots, and the English Puritans as well as the Puritans in British North America, in matters theological Calvinism was the stronger influence, but in matters political the influence of Zwingli and Bullinger was the greater. While every nation influenced by Reformed Protestantism developed its own synthesis of the two, the most influential synthesis in the world was that formed by the English Puritans. In no small measure, this was because of the power of first England and then its successor, Great Britain, in the world as the greatest power from the mid-seventeenth century until nearly the end of the modern epoch, with influence that stretched far beyond its tight little island. That influence was further increased by the fact that the Puritans fought, and in the short term won, a civil war in England itself which not only brought them to power in their own country, but enabled them to conquer Scotland and Ireland, and settle a good part of British North America as well.

Religiously based covenantal thinking undoubtedly reached its most sophisticated level of development under Reformed Protestantism and most particularly Puritanism, finding major expression on the European continent, in the British Isles, and in New England where it had lasting impact on subsequent generations, even after the Puritan commonwealths had passed from history, to be replaced by modern, secularized civil societies. Only at major historical intervals has a movement had as much impact as Reformed Protestantism has had on the history of the world.

Nevertheless, the kind of integral society that was required to maintain Reformed Protestantism came under great assault in the seventeenth century. Ultimately it was brought down in favor of a far more heterogeneous world view, in part because the demands of Puritanism, and Reformed Protestantism in general, on flawed individuals were too high. For better or for worse, most people did not want to live Puritan lives, seeing Puritanism as far too serious, demanding, and unsatisfying. Moreover, those who saw Puritanism as an appropriate way of life often could not personally sustain its demands and hence were perceived by others to be hypocrites.

Thus we had a paradox. On one hand, Reformed Protestantism developed very important and compelling theories, ideologies, and cultures supporting liberty and equality, two of the principal political aspirations of the modern epoch, but the Reformed way to achieve them required institutions insufficiently broad or free and behavior of an impossibly high standard to be realized by the vast majority of people. It remained for the new science of politics and its developers and exponents, who began with a very secular, if equally pessimistic, approach to human nature (the development of which Reformed Protestantism actually facilitated) to provide not only a bridge but a more satisfying framework for political theory and practice, both of which drew on covenant ideas in new ways.

The New Political Philosophy

The first steps toward the new science of politics were taken through the new political philosophy, the philosophic revolution brought by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. All three were products of covenanted commonwealths and all three developed systems of political thought that moved people from covenanted commonwealths to their modern equivalents, constitutional civil societies. The new political philosophy began by breaking with traditional conceptions of human nature which held that the good was as much a part of human nature as other elements and that humans would naturally strive for the good if circumstances permitted that side of human nature to nourish. From a philosophic perspective, premodern theories saw natural law as overarching the entire human enterprise, built into the very foundations of the world or humanity and including all of the ideal aspirations of humankind. This overarching character was also manifested in Christian theology, which indeed was grounded in a synthesis between natural law and Divine revelation, first developed by the Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria for Jews living at the time of Jesus and subsequently embraced by the Church and its theologians. Thus it was not difficult for the Protestant reformers to go back to what, for them, was the Old Testament and still remain within an overarching system which believed that the good could be brought out in humans because it was within them by virtue of their very nature or by Divine grace, or both.

It was this edifice that was demolished by the new political philosophy, which held that the psychology of individual humans, grounded in human passions, provided the foundations for human nature, not some overarching system that included virtue; that humans had certain elemental rights by virtue of their being humans that could only be protected by the establishment of civil society, through which order could be maintained to protect the weak against the strong and strong individuals against the combination of many weak ones against them. Grounded in methodological individualism, this new political philosophy viewed individual human beings not only as the building blocks of the social order but as radically independent from one another except insofar as they chose to or felt the necessity to combine, which the political philosophers themselves believed they would inevitably do for sheer survival if for no other reason.

To effect their combination, the new political philosophers drew upon covenant ideas put forward by Reformed Protestantism, but in a secularized way. Hobbes, indeed, secularized the very term “covenant,” apparently seeing within it the moral dimension and the importance of that dimension to make covenants work in an otherwise highly individualistic world.⁴ Thus Hobbes, who has come down to us with a reputation as the most “pessimistic” of the new philosophers of the seventeenth century, actually rested his ph...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Covenant: From Commonwealth to Civil Society
• Part II: Covenant and the Age of State-Building
• Part III: Covenant and Constitutionalism
• Part IV: Present and Future
• Excursus 1. The Language of Covenant
• Excursus 2 The Biblical Covenant as the Foundation of Justice, Obligations, and Rights
• Index