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- Author: Ted A. Smith
- Full Title: Weird John Brown
- Category: #books
- For the rule of law to be able to contribute to the legitimacy of a political order, the law must be something other than the rules made by the people who happen to have the greatest capacity for violence when the laws were made.
- Casting anything that appears to be beyond the empirical order as nothing more than projections from the empirical order, demythologization pulls heaven down to earth.
- the Great Separation that promises to demythologize the political order, to cleanse it of every trace of theology, ends up denying the reality of anything but the existing political order. It elevates “what is” to the status of “all there is.”
- An insistence on the rule of law as an absolute principle enables the state to become an end in itself without having to declare itself as such.
- We should not seek to eliminate exceptions to the rule, then, but to cultivate forms of life that can engage in reasoned discourse about exceptions.
- Prerogative involves reasoning beyond the law for ends higher than the preservation of the law.
- Like the wild margin at the edge of a plowed field or a pharmakon that sustains the health of a body in small doses, exceptions to the law can, on rare occasions and in trace amounts, contribute to the wider project of a liberal society.
- “The ultimate paradox,” as Clement Fatovic argues, “may be that only virtue can make up for the failures of institutions that have been specifically designed to compensate for the fallibility of virtue.”32
- Political theology exercises prerogative, even when it lacks the power to implement its decisions. It reasons about singularities that cannot be made to fit existing structures of law. It can imagine violence in ways that do not reduce to (even a theologically motivated) ethics of the immanent frame. It can think the exception. It can, in Locke’s words, make appeals to heaven.