Hermann Cohen was a Jewish-German thinker with a passion for philosophy. Two forms of national engagement influenced his philosophical system and his Jewish thought: a cultural-political 'Germanness' (Deutschtum) and a religious Judaism beyond the political.

Hermann Cohen was a Jewish-German thinker with a passion for philosophy. Two forms of national engagement influenced his philosophical system and his Jewish thought: a cultural-political 'Germanness' (Deutschtum) and a religious Judaism beyond the political.

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) is often held to be one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Nahme, in this new consideration of Cohen, liberalism, and religion, emphasizes the idea of enchantment, or the faith in and commitment to ideas, reason, and critique—the animating spirits that move society forward. Nahme views Cohen through the lenses of the crises of Imperial Germany—the rise of antisemitism, nationalism, and secularization—to come to a greater understanding of liberalism, its Protestant and Jewish roots, and the spirits of modernity and tradition that form its foundation. Nahme's philosophical and historical retelling of the story of Cohen and his spiritual investment in liberal theology present a strong argument for religious pluralism and public reason in a world rife with populism, identity politics, and conspiracy theories.

Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.

This is the first book in English to lay out the philosophical ethics and philosophy of law of Hermann Cohen, one of the leading figures in both Neo-Kantian and Jewish philosophy.

This book is a collection of specifically commissioned articles on the key continental European philosophical movements since 1914. It shows how each of these bodies of thought has been shaped by their responses to the horrors set in train by World War I, and considers whether we are yet ‘post-post-war’. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914,set in chain a series of crises and re-configurations, which have continued to shape the world for a century: industrialized slaughter, the end of colonialism and European empires, the rise of the USA, economic crises, fascism, Soviet Marxism, the gulags and the Shoah. Nearly all of the major movements in European thinking (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Hegelianism, Marxism, political theology, critical theory and neoliberalism) were forged in, or shaped by, attempts to come to terms with the global trauma of the World Wars. This is the first book to describe the development of these movements after World War I, and as such promises to be of interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy around the world.

"In his 1935 treatise on divine sovereignty, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber introduced the idea of an 'anarchic soul of theocracy.' A decade before, the German jurist Carl Schmitt had coined the term 'political theology' in order to designate the Christian theological foundations of modern sovereignty and legal order. In a specular and opposite gesture, Buber argued that the covenant at Sinai established YHWH as the King of the Israelites and simultaneously promulgated the principle that no human being could become sovereign over this people. In so doing, Buber offered an interpretation of Jewish theocracy that is both republican and anarchic. Republican because, by pivoting on the idea that democracy is a function of a people's fidelity to a prophetic higher law, theocracy displaces the central role of the human sovereign. Anarchic because this divine law is saturated with the messianic aim to put an end to relations of domination between peoples. In this book I show that this republican and anarchic articulation of the discourse of political theology characterises the development of Jewish political theology in the 20th century from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt"--