This chapter looks at Mehmed Akif’s fundamental acceptance of the nation-state and reconciliation of Turkish and Islamic identity and sets that against Sabri and Kevseri’s theoretical objections, which centre on the argument that the shariʿa system with its notion of a legal and moral core above the manipulations of politics and society was superior to man-made law. Noting that their work came (1) as Egypt finalised the process of codification and de-Islamisation of its courts and (2) as the era of military authoritarianism began its long reign in the Arab region, it goes on to examine Sabri’s development of a radical view of Islamic faith and identity in the context of the modern state and how this may have impacted Sayyid Quṭb’s thinking.

Chapter 5 reads Carl Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy as an account of a rhetorical crisis. Schmitt characterizes twentieth-century parliamentary speech as an empty ritual and proposes a turn toward effective rituals of speech that might supplant it. Schmitt’s assimilation of rhetoric and ritual is an important insight. But his rhetorical theory takes a troubling, authoritarian turn in its understanding of the conditions under which ritual becomes meaningful. For Schmitt, “eloquence is only possible against the background of an imposing authority,” and ritual must actively shape the political world. But with a richer understanding of ritual, we can retain what is of value in Schmitt’s account without following him to his authoritarian conclusions. Just such a richer understanding of ritual is available in the work of Adam Seligman et al. For them, ritual is action in the “subjunctive” mood, “the creation of an order as if it were truly the case.” Ritual is not an effort to shape the world, but a response to the world’s perceived brokenness. In this light, what the rhetorical tradition has to offer us is not a way of resolving the tension between speech and action, but a way of living in that tension.

Justice is a political value that holds across reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I introduce the notion of a frame of human life. For Aristotle, the polis does that job, but nowadays the institutions and practices that do so are embedded into the human web. To call something a “political value” – beyond the generic sense of pertaining to the creation of order – means that it pertains to the design of that frame. Justice is the value of giving each their own within this frame. The political value of distributive justice gives rise to principles of justice, which generate rights and duties. Justice honors the distinctiveness of each within the distinctively human life. That is why the value of distributive justice is the most stringent value. Justice as a value radiates into different domains of practical reasoning in ways that principles, rights, or duties do not. It takes exceptionally strong considerations to offset justice.

This chapter argues that a negative political theology helps to address the problem posed by the persistence of the sacred. Giorgio Agamben argues that, whether it derives from religious worship or national identity, reverence for the sacred functions to neutralize resistance. My account of hope indicates on the contrary that a concern for transcendence can intensify critique. Rather than affirming the sacred uncritically or disavowing it altogether, communities can acknowledge the special significance of particular texts and traditions while maintaining an ethical discipline that loosens their authority. Some political movements find it difficult to combine critique of the status quo with concrete proposals, but hope offers a way to affirm particular policies while subjecting them to ongoing critique.

Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the katechon - a theological figure of the ‘restrainer’ - it is argued that two different accounts of ‘restraint’ operate within contemporary historiography. In one, the USA and the Soviet Union assume the role of the katechon during the Cold War, holding at bay an earthly apocalypse, securing stability through their mutual enmity. In the other, liberal account, it is the Cold War itself that acts as the restrainer, holding back the promises of Kant’s enlightenment project of world government, and of the securing of global peace through law. Each of these accounts has problematic effects: either by operating as an apology for the power of the guarantors of order, or by denying/deferring responsibility for the present state of affairs. We are therefore asked to think, instead, about international law and its history through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘weak messianic power’.

The Introduction sets out the questions at stake in the book. It argues that while practical political life is always guided by a pretheoretical understanding of politics, among theorists today there is no common agreement on the question of what politics actually is. The most illuminating response to this question has come from Hannah Arendt, but to fully grasp her response we have to do two things: to make explicit the understanding of politics implicit in her work; and to follow the way of thought by which she reached this understanding.

This chapter takes up the friends and enemies of the liberal world order of 1919, beginning with the anti-liberal provocations of the postwar avant-garde. At its center it focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to liberal internationalism. I propose a new reading of the political Virginia Woolf as a writer devoted to rethinking liberal governance, rather than a critic writing “against empire,” and read her breakthrough anti-bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room, as an extended inquiry into liberal governmental order. I put Woolf’s approach to liberal government in dialogue with H. G. Wells’s World State fiction and his Outline of History, a major intellectual event of the postwar period.