Ethics Out of Law by Hollander Dana;

Author:Hollander, Dana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Atlantic Provinces – Antiquities, Atlantic Coast (Canada) – Antiquities, Québec (Province) – Antiquities, Maine – Antiquities, Atlantic Provinces – History, Atlantic Coast (Canada) – History, North Atlantic Region – History, Québec (Province) – History, Maine – History
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Chapter Five

Against “Affective Expansiveness”: Cohen’s Critique of Stammler’s Theory of “Right Law”

The previous chapter showed Cohen to be making a decisive argument, in the course of the “Law” chapter of Religion of Reason, for a Jewish political task, a Jewish politics that is oriented toward a messianic universal humanity. I suggested that this Jewish politics takes shape in Cohen’s argumentation by way of a kind of substitution of one meaning of “law” by an entirely other meaning. In the course of the argument I traced, Cohen’s vehement objections to a politicization of Judaism à la Spinoza, in which “law” applies to the Jewish nation as a particularity, for the sake of its material and temporal advantage and good fortune, is replaced by an understanding of a law of “religion,” serving a universalist international politics.

A move Cohen makes in his attack on Spinoza’s politicization of Judaism, in the famous polemical “Spinoza” essay of 1915, is worth a second look: At one point in the essay, Cohen criticizes Spinoza’s view that the law that is given to the Jews is bound to a promise of “temporal happiness” and “prosperity” for their state, and is merely for the sake of a material, political advantage1 by asking rhetorically: “Are the laws only state laws, or are they also laws of faith/belief [Glaube]?” What Cohen finds objectionable above all is that Spinoza fails to acknowledge any universalist aspect to Jewish election.2 Thus, Cohen contends that Spinoza ignores the fact that God’s covenant with Abraham promises: “You shall become a blessing for all families of the earth.”3 Instead, Cohen writes, Spinoza identifies God’s political covenant with the Israelites as merely an instance of “egotism,” “utilitism,” and “opportunism.” Consistently with this, Spinoza regards all biblical laws as political, as state laws, and is not interested in whether biblical laws have any relevance for general human morality. Cohen’s prime example for this is that Spinoza, as he puts it, “does not remember” (to which he adds in parentheses, “but does he really not remember?”) “that the Talmud invented and erected the laws of the sons of Noah” – laws whose purpose according to Cohen was to avoid excluding the non-Jewish peoples from divine law.4 In particular, according to Cohen, Spinoza ought to have “remembered” that the concept of the Noahide represents “a main objection to his entire theory.”5

Postponing a more detailed discussion of the category of the Noahide, and Cohen’s interest in it, to the next chapter, for now let us note that, as part of his argument against Spinoza, Cohen identifies a mistaken politicization of Jewish law with a forgetting of the non-Jew, that is, of the foreigner. We can connect this with the argument we traced in the “Law” chapter of the Religion: Judaism is a religion insofar as it is a “nationality” (and not, in Cohen’s terminology in that chapter, a “nation”); and “nationality” entails plurality, the embrace of the “manifold of cultural phenomena” for their “share in reason” (RV 423/364). In the argument of

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