Theology and World Politics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction: Religion or Theology? (Re)introducing Political Theology into the Study of World Politics

   • Vassilios Paipais

   Pages 1-22

3. Metaphysics

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

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   2. ‘Obligations Written in the Heart’: Burke’s Primacy of Association and the Renewal of Political Theology

      • Adrian Pabst

      Pages 25-52

   3. The Political Theology of Thomas Hobbes and the Theory of Interstate Society

      • William Bain

      Pages 53-73

   4. A Matter of Faith: Derrida, Žižek, and the Fourth ‘Overcoming of Gnosis’

      • Agata Bielik-Robson

      Pages 75-104

   5. The Cosmology of Mādhyamaka Buddhism and Its World of Deep Relationalism

      • Shannon Brincat

      Pages 105-128

4. Genealogies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 129-129

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   2. Between Transcendence and Necessity: Eric Voegelin, Martin Wight, and the Crisis of Modern International Relations

      • Nicholas J. Rengger

      Pages 131-155

   3. Political Theology and Sovereignty: Sayyid Qutb in Our Times

      • Mustapha Kamal Pasha

      Pages 157-179

   4. The Nation, the Nations, and the Third Nation: The Political Essence of Early Christianity

      • György Geréby

      Pages 181-209

   5. On a Stasis of Memory or Disrupting the Postliminium

      • Ilias Papagiannopoulos

      Pages 211-233

5. Political Theologies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 235-235

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   2. Total War and Limited Government: The German Catholic Debate at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

      • Michael Hollerich

      Pages 237-263

   3. Love as a Practice of Peace: The Political Theologies of Tolstoy, Gandhi and King

      • Liane Hartnett

      Pages 265-288

   4. Reading Kant in the Light of Political Theology

      • Seán Molloy

      Pages 289-314

   5. Religiosity with/out Religion: Hans J. Morgenthau, Disenchantment and International Politics

      • John-Harmen Valk

      Pages 315-343

6. Back Matter

   Pages 345-349

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Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this volume focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this collection highlight the political theological foundations of international theory and world politics, recasting theology and politics as symbiotic discourses with all the risks, promises and open questions this relation may involve. The overarching claim the book makes is that all politics has theology embedded in it, both in the genealogical sense of carrying ineradicable traces of rival theological traditions, and also in the more ontological sense of being enacted by alternative configurations of the theologico-political. The book is unique in bringing together a diverse group of scholars, spanning knowledge areas as varied as IR, political theory, philosophy, theology, and history to investigate the complex interconnections between theology and world politics. It will be of interest to students andscholars of political theory, international relations, intellectual history, and political theology.

• political theology
• secularisation
• IR theory
• Burke’s political theology
• Thomas Hobbes
• Theory of Interstate Society
• international society
• modern materialism
• Mādhyamaka
• nihilism
• cosmopolitanism
• crisis of the modern
• world order
• sovereignty
• biblical origin of nationhood
• nuclear weapons
• Kant and IR
• ethics

"A new generation of scholars, often with more interdisciplinary backgrounds, many of whom are represented in this path-breaking book, mark out what can be called ‘the theological turn’ in politics and international relations. They argue that world politics is paradoxically more deeply political and theological at the same time. It was this way in the past, it is in the present, and it will always be so insofar as the ‘secular’ itself is an invention of political theology. This cutting-edge volume contributes to a new challenging research agenda for understanding the ways religion, theology, and spirituality influence ideas of world order, peace, violence, and care for creation – and, even love, brotherhood, and sisterhood in the globalised multi-cultural world of the twenty-first century." (Scott M. Thomas, Associate Professor of International Relations, University of Bath, UK)

• University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

  Vassilios Paipais

Vassilios Paipais is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews, UK. He is the author of Political Ontology and International Political Thought: Voiding a Pluralist World (2017).

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