Kierkegaard, Statecraft and Political Theology

Influenced by the backdrop of the contemporary issues facing Christianity and a trend toward ’political theology’, Christopher Barnett explores Kierkegaard’s relation to politics and the modern state.

By tracing the birth and development of the modern secular state, he argues that Søren Kierkegaard’s repudiation of “politics” in the nineteenth century should be read as early resistance to the totalizing claims of the nation-state. For Kierkegaard, a modern preoccupation with politics is a symptom of the deification of the state: the more the state grows, the less God matters - a problem that would lead to the demoralization of Western culture. Barnett places Kierkegaard’s analysis in dialogue with authors such as Jacques Ellul, Eric Voeglin, René Girard, and Wendell Berry, to explore how politics in the modern state is not marked by liberation but by bureaucracy, propaganda, technocracy, and disenchantment. Kierkegaard's critiques of state power are startlingly relevant to contemporary debates in political theology.

Kierkegaard, Statecraft and the Question of Political Theology allows Kierkegaard’s political thought to speak for itself, pulling out overlaps with twentieth-century thinkers who bear a “family resemblance” to his political philosophy. By applying his thought actively to the challenges facing Christianity today, this book explores the politization of theology in all its complexity.