Sovereign Tensions: <i>Sacred Kingship in World History</i>

SACRED KINGSHIP IN WORLD HISTORY: BETWEEN IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE.. Edited by A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 390. Paperback, $40.00. This bold comparative project is arranged around the argument that, in the Axial Age, there was a widespread shift from immanentist to transcendentalist framings of the world, a transformation in worldview that led to “a revolution in cultural order,” notably a new model of politics, including modern understandings of sovereignty as rooted in people and institutions (48). Society before the Axial Age resembled, as Marshall Sahlins puts it in his contribution to this volume, the “traditional societies of the Central Inuit, certain Amazonians, Aboriginal Australians, and Min and Hagen peoples of New Guinea, among others,” egalitarian societies of “so-called animists” whose polity followed a cosmic pattern, “subordinate to cosmic authorities with life and death powers over them.” In such societies, “the state of nature had the nature of the state,” and “historical kingship” emerges via “the humanization of divinity” (31). With the Axial Age, societies around the world reorganize their worlds, conceptual and political, along—again, in Sahlin's words—“a new ontological basis that realized the transcendental divide in a suite of classic binary oppositions: as between spiritual and material, culture and nature, natural and supernatural, subject and object” (49). Yet, as the editors insist in their jointly authored introduction, the earlier model of the world never went away. There are two important ways in which this is the case. First, “transcendentalism can only ever develop and embed in culture in a meaningful way through a tension-filled accommodation with immanentism, which finds ways of suspending its truth claims and monopoly over morality. In addition, it makes recourse to immanentist techniques of purity to propagate and preserve itself, the most ironic case being the use of taboos to sanctify and canonize the books containing doctrinal truths, treating them like a type of ‘speech-temple’” (13). The second way explains why this collection is organized around the seemingly archaic model of “sacred kingship,” for such a model, the editors insist, never fully disappear from human history and politics. Rather, the concept “was repressed. As such, it continually springs back—in Freudian speak, returns—making its presence felt in distorted forms, a mélange of the familiar and spectral, liberal and totalitarian, enshrined in constitutions and magnified in charismatic breaks from the law” (1). Sovereignty, in the ways we understand it in contemporary society, is both; then, a site of tension and a zone for the return of the repressed. Sovereignty is a fraught and haunted category, and the essays collected here serve as case studies for better understanding such tension and such instability. For instance, Faisal Devji, in a remarkable chapter on the Islamic State (Daesh or ISIS), argues that this movement “was apolitical, despite its project to create an Islamic state, and its engagement with politics was correspondingly opportunistic and therefore violent” (318). To advance this claim, Devji explores a history of Sunni Islamic wariness regarding political sovereignty. Throughout history, as he puts it, “Islamists were critical of the modern state, whether manifested in a democracy or dictatorship, because they thought its desire for sovereign power would subordinate the sacred law and its universal ideal of justice to the transient whim of individuals and assemblies. Such forms of human authority could never be truly sovereign, in the sense of possessing that absolute and legitimate power that the legal concept of sovereignty demanded, and thus could only betray it in violence as itself a perversion and indeed limitation of power” (301). Such wariness about political sovereignty reaches a head with the Islamic State, whose extreme acts of publicized violence were, in Devji's reading, rooted in a refusal of politics, intended to be illegible politically. Beyond their function as recruiting materials, the media created and propagated by the Islamic State (of beheadings, for instance, or the destruction by bombing of a prison full of prisoners) sought to render visible what would otherwise be “the open secret of sovereign power” (315). Sovereign political power is rejected in favor of a model of divine, universal law as always above, always outside of, the human realm. In such view, “shari'a bore a largely negative character because it was meant to prevent the exercise either of democratic or dictatorial sovereignty—the power to constitute and abrogate law being reserved for God alone, with only minor details being left for religious specialists to decide upon . . .” (318). Such purity of devotion to transcentalism leads to an essential paradox, the Islamic State's project of state-building predicated on resistance to the very “immanentist rites of embodiment and emplacement that all nation-states use to harness their citizens together to a common cause,” as the editors observe in a final, “synthesis,” chapter (343). The Islamic State sought simultaneously to resist politics and to institutionalize politics as a state. Two other chapters on Islam consider the relation of the divine to the stately. Aziz al-Azmeh looks at the classical caliphate in terms of its paradoxical immanentist nature. Jos Gommans and Said Reza Huseini argue for a Neoplatonic character to Islamic kingship in the Mongol period. Other chapters look to different corners of the world. Nicole Brisch writes on Mesopotamian kings and their relationships to the gods. Michael Puett contributes an analysis of shifting roles of ritual and salvation in Axial Age China. Peter Gose examines the immanentist structures of pre-contact Andean society, demonstrating how such an immanentism “was not the crude idolatry, empiricism, or metaphysics of presence that transcendentalism disparagingly perceives it to be” (67). Tensions over sovereign power are also considered historically, as in Jan Assman's contribution, a chapter on “Pharaonic Kingship and its Biblical Deconstruction,” which lays out the argument that the Hebraic covenantal law represented a rejection of the Pharaonic model of sacred kingship. The Exodus, then, is also a narrative of a shift in political worldviews. Assman shows how, for instance, “[r]epresentation and mediation were the principal functions of the king in the ancient world” and the covenantal model rejects both, aiming instead to destroy “any forms of mediation, to radically eclipse the figure of sacred kingship, and to establish an immediate link between God and the people” (104). Robert Yelle returns to this history to argue that Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, seeks to collapse religion and politics and bring back a model of sovereignty that, rather than emerging from the Exodus narrative, derived from Pharoah. “Hobbes implicitly sought to reverse the Exodus and, with this, the possibility of a revolutionary politics carried out in the name of religion” (226). As the editors observe, the context of the civil war, in which Hobbes wrote, revealed “the disorder that may result when the transcendentalist subordination of sovereignty to the arbitration of the moral community of the faithful is allowed to run amok” (339). Hobbes, in this reading, longs for a return to an immanentist organization of society, a revival, in some ways, of sacred kingship, imagined as an alternative to the chaos of contested human sovereignty. The general shift from immanentist to transcendentalist worldviews also involved the conception of law as “a second order principle,” a means by which the order of the state could be critiqued, challenged. Law, as Lynette Mitchell writes in her chapter on ancient Greece, functions not only as a first-order measure of right and wrong “but also as an exterior and abstract force to which everyone has access as a power of constraint within society, and particularly the constraint of mortal rulers” (111). The Greek material points to a paradox at the heart of this (dominant, modern) conception of law, one of as much interest to those studying contemporary law and sovereignty as to those studying historical examples. Mitchell shows how law's modern role as transcendent control on the power of human leaders is subverted via the embodiment of this idea (in a king), an embodiment necessary for its conception to be fully fleshed out. Thus, Mitchell argues that, in ancient Greece, rather than “a transition from immanentist thinking to transcendent thinking or even transcendentalism in relation to kingship, we can see that in the Greek experience, these strands of thought existed in parallel” (129). With Alexander and Great and after, kings became gods, meaning that they were law; thus, while law “acted as the abstract judge of even kings,” at the same time “law was understood in essentially charismatic terms,” such that Alexander was, simultaneously “charismatic king,” “a living god” and “the authority of law” (114). In what at first seem like something of a departure from the other material collected here, Nicole Jerr writes on Henrik Ibsen's 1873s Emperor and Galilean, a play about the fourth-century Roman emperor and his “remarkable, if thwarted, attempt to revive the worship of pagan gods and curb the spread of nearly sanctioned Christianity” (249). Yet Jerr's fascinating essay read Ibsen's work as revealing both in relation to Julian's historical conception of sovereignty—one of “limitless scope,” in which he seeks to be seen “as divine himself, not merely divinely appointed as emperor” and in relation to Ibsen's context, a moment of “modern shift—messy and incomplete—away from a conception of sovereignty in strictly political terms and toward an understanding of the significance of sovereignty in personal, individual terms” (250). This Norwegian play, then, speaks to the “fourth-century crossroads of immanence and transcendence” and to “nineteenth-century existentialist preoccupations with self-sovereignty and the freedom and self-narration such sovereignty implies” (250). Jerr's essay proves essential to this collection and its comparative reflection on the tensions between immanentist and transcendentalist mappings of the world and the varied “political-theological entanglements attendant to the concept of sovereignty” (249). One audience for this book is those who think about sovereignty in its multiple forms today, including under such rubrics as political theology or even political science. One rich source of theories and practices of sovereignty in the contemporary world is indigenous, with indigenous communities and thinkers offering alternatives to many of the transcendentalist models discussed here. Attention to such refusal of contemporary sovereignty's predications—not merely in reactionary rejection of sovereign power, as in the avowedly fundamentalist case of the Islamic State, but in a variety of traditionally rooted indigenous political systems—would have been a valuable addition here, and those who teach this book might think of supplementing and complicating it with additional case studies. Yet another audience here is those pursuing comparative studies, those working in a mode that, having weathered its own political critiques, has been subject to some recent revival and self-reflective reframing. The editors of this volume site Yelle's Sovereignty and the Sacred as a notable predecessor. The work of Sahlins and David Graeber is also important throughout, and, indeed, the volume is dedicated to their memory. In particular, Sahlins and Graeber's On Kings is cited explicitly as helping “to establish the respectability of a modern form of comparative anthropology in which it is taken for granted that the sophistication of recent specialist literature may be duly respected” (3). This is an admirable—inspiring, even—goal. It feels useful here in large part due to the focus on a (somewhat) shared (Axial Age) history and on particular problems with the move from immanentist to transcendentalist thinking. As Puett puts it in his essay, “One of the interesting aspects of comparative studies is to find societies facing comparable problems and tensions, to trace the debates and struggles that emerged out of these tensions, and to explore the historical implications of the different ways these struggles played out” (159). Human responses to tensions, to paradoxes, are always interpretively creative and worthy of examination. They are also frequently multivocal, facilitating the survival of the sort of “repressed” memories the editors identify with sacred kingship, simultaneously offering a solution to a problem and potential critiques of said solution. This, too, is part of what is both exciting and potentially productive in the material gathered here. As the editors put it, “a very general sense, the Axial Age allowed the centrality of divinized kingship to become subject to new forms of critique that opened the possibilities of other visions of sociopolitical organization” (328). One final essay is worth discussing, particularly in relation to what Jerr describes as this volume's interest in how “the shift to transcendentalism is unable to completely blot out or override the underpinnings of immanentism” or to “destroy the lingering resonance of kingship” (253). In his contribution, “The Last Hindu King: How Nepal Desanctified Its Monarchy,” David N. Gellner writes on the transition of Nepal, in 2007, from Hindu monarchy to a “secular, inclusive, democratic, socialism-oriented, federal democratic republican state” (273). As part of this process of desanctification, the king and the trappings of kingship needed to be framed as “part of history, as no longer relevant to the present or future of the country. It was not enough to remove the king's and queen's portraits from governmental offices, to remove the king's image from the country's currency, and to rewrite the national anthem so that it was no longer a paean to monarchy” (287). The royal residence was transformed into a museum, with palace staff retrained to be museum staff. The editors refer to this as a mummification, but that implies that what was entombed was, first, fully, killed. One implication of this essay—and this impressive collection as a whole—is that kingship, while it might sleep beneath the hill, still lives. Lingering the palace rooms now opened to the public, “where every Nepali citizen could now wander through rooms that had been strictly out of bounds before,” is all of the aura and cosmic power of that previous, temporarily supplanted, model of the living sovereign. Likewise, in transcendentalist worldviews, the immanentist remains, in our naturalized models of political sovereignty tensions, alternatives, and alternative possibilities, linger—repressed, at best, but never erased. In engaging assorted, far-flung case studies of such tensions, Sacred Kingship makes for essential reading for thinking about problems (and possibilities) of sovereignty, both historically and today.