Sherwin on The Challenge of Legal Chorology: Rethinking Political Theology

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published The Challenge of Legal Chorology: Rethinking Political Theology as NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4960463. Here is the abstract.

Liberal democracy has historically been associated with an assumption of neutrality concerning religious or moral feelings and beliefs. Illiberal critics like Carl Schmitt have seized on this assumption to argue that moral neutrality deprives liberal democracy of any claim to legitimation or, for that matter, political coherence. But liberal democracy’s core commitment to a creed of freedom among equals belies this critique. As illiberal forms of governance gain strength worldwide, it is incumbent on allies of freedom to articulate a compelling and comprehensive narrative in its defense. To this end, legal chorology brings to light the historical, cultural, emotional, and spiritual conditions under which ‘constitutive power’ founds, transforms, or sweeps away political and legal states. This originary, generative force exceeds, even as it courses through, the names we assign it throughout history. That unbearable excess (“the sacred”) is the defining feature of constitutional over-beliefs. Constitutional over-beliefs embody different clusters of ideas, beliefs, and affective states around which polities arise and cohere. By tracing the rise and fall of discrete, historically privileged, constitutional over-beliefs, legal chorology holds out the prospect of identifying potent cross- cultural and interreligious resources for political belief and commitment. At the same time, reconceiving political theology as a genealogy of the sacred releases the field from Schmitt’s narrow illiberal vision. Liberal democracy, chorologically construed, rests upon an ethical metaphysic that conceives freedom among equals as an offshoot of each other’s infinite worth. As it turns out, liberal democracy’s ethos of epistemological modesty and experiential openness amidst abundance also emulates the very nature and dynamics of khôra herself.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.