This, from the back cover blurb of Eric Nelson's The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, seems like a strong claim:
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book’s central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson’s work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light.
Eric Nelson is an associate professor at Harvard and was a Harvard Junior Fellow, so he's certified as respectable. On the other hand, any book with the back cover blurbing
According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation.
strikes me as setting up a straw man (though there may be a more nuanced version of this that isn't a straw man, at least if situated against some of the less historically aware English language literature -- see the escape phrasing of 'according to a commonplace narrative'). On the other hand, marketing is important in academia. The foils for Nelson appear to be Mark Lillia, Charles Taylor and Jerome Schneewind, but at least in terms of the formulation above the contrast seems to rest on a misreading of these authors.
Reviews of the book seem sparce and come from the current political press, not so much academic publications: TNR, Hoover, Azure, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Reviews in History, a Yeshiva University Law School blog.
More later...one comment is that the Hebrew bible is just one more piece of 'context', context choosen by particular people strategically in order to use ancient but not yet orthodoxified sources.
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