States of Glory: Sovereignty, the Sacred and Religious Resistance in World Society

• In Event: 2104 - New Directions in Religion and the State

Abstract

This paper develops the argument that underlying sovereignty is the claim that one is the source of glory – of civilization and transcendence. Numerous scholars have suggested that political authority is rooted in a desire for glory. Agamben (The Kingdom and the Glory) has analyzed it in a theological genealogy of modern economy and government, suggesting it is a Western phenomenon. Yet earlier Geertz (Negara) introduced the idea that glory and ceremony are characteristic of the state, overlooked by Western theory, consistent with Eliade’s contention that cultures generally establish an axis mundi connecting the center to the cosmos. These works tend to focus on the ceremonial aspects of states, but more is involved. Material, instrumental programs from economic development projects to medical “miracles” to brutal exercises of repression are analyzed as performative displays of glory: putatively heroic engineering and administrative projects are the means of claiming glory. The cultural interpretation of the instrumental practices of the modern nation-state is consistent with analyses of the nation-state in terms of its ontological claims (Eisenstadt), “recognition” (Wendt), and moral purposes (Reus-Smit). Recently, even war has been analyzed in similar terms (Hironaka, Tokens of Power).
I pursue this line of scholarship by conceptualizing claims to sovereignty as claims to glory and self-glorification and linking these claims to global institutional/cultural contexts. I develop several implications. (1) This line of argument suggests that we shift our focus from a history of the state as organization traceable to Westphalia (1648) to the external institutionalized contexts that made Westphalia possible. (2) Recognizing that the modern secular liberal state is a project of glorification helps us better understand why many religious groups and especially political religious fundamentalisms almost universally depict the modern state as idolatrous.

Author

• George M. Thomas, Arizona State University