At the very beginning of the history of the covenant idea, human beings were conceived as entering into a morally grounded and informal pact with God. Politically, this pact, or covenant, involves the coming together of basically equal humans who consent with one another through a morally binding pact, setting the partners on the road to a new task. As a theological and political concept, covenant is designed to keep the peace in the face of conflicting human interests, needs, and demands. This pioneering continuation of Daniel J. Elazar's work is concerned with political uses of the idea of covenant and the political arrangements that flow from it. Covenant and Commonwealth is the second in a series of volumes exploring the covenantal tradition in Western politics. The first, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, analyzed how the Bible set forth ideas of covenant in ancient Israel and the Jewish political tradition. In this volume, those themes are taken a step further to examine covenant as a political idea and tradition along with the culture and behavior that they produced. The book focuses on the struggle in Europe to produce a Christian covenantal commonwealth, a struggle that climaxed in the Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also briefly examines covenant and hierarchy in Islam and other premodern polities that shape our present. The third volume in this series will examine the progressive secularization of the covenant idea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Covenant and Commonwealth is a fundamental and original contribution to the scholarship of Western civilization. It ranks with commensurate efforts of Ferdinand Braudel and Joseph Needham. As such it will be of deep interest to historians, social scientists, and theologians of all persuasions.

At the very beginning of the history of the covenant idea, human beings were conceived as entering into a morally grounded and informal pact with God. Politically, this pact, or covenant, involves the coming together of basically equal humans who consent with one another through a morally binding pact, setting the partners on the road to a new task. As a theological and political concept, covenant is designed to keep the peace in the face of conflicting human interests, needs, and demands. This pioneering continuation of Daniel J. Elazar's work is concerned with political uses of the idea of covenant and the political arrangements that flow from it. Covenant and Commonwealth is the second in a series of volumes exploring the covenantal tradition in Western politics. The first, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, analyzed how the Bible set forth ideas of covenant in ancient Israel and the Jewish political tradition. In this volume, those themes are taken a step further to examine covenant as a political idea and tradition along with the culture and behavior that they produced. The book focuses on the struggle in Europe to produce a Christian covenantal commonwealth, a struggle that climaxed in the Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also briefly examines covenant and hierarchy in Islam and other premodern polities that shape our present. The third volume in this series will examine the progressive secularization of the covenant idea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Covenant and Commonwealth is a fundamental and original contribution to the scholarship of Western civilization. It ranks with commensurate efforts of Ferdinand Braudel and Joseph Needham. As such it will be of deep interest to historians, social scientists, and theologians of all persuasions.

This volume traces the trends and the developing relationships of constitutionalism and covenant that ultimately led to the transformation of the latter into the former. Elazar explores the paths that emerged out of the constitutionalized covenantal tradition in Europe such as federalism, communitarianism, and the cooperative movement.

In this first volume of a trilogy, Daniel J. Elazar addresses political uses of the idea of covenant, the tradition that has adhered to that idea, and the political arrangements that flow from it, Among the topics covered are covenant as a political concept, the Bible as a political commentary, the post-biblical tradition, medieval covenant theory, and Jewish political culture.

In Commonwealth and Covenant Marcia Pally argues that in order to address current socioeconomic problems, we need not more economic formulas but rather a better understanding of how the world is set up -- an ontology of how we and the world work. Without this, good proposals that arise lack political will and go unimplemented. Pally describes our basic setup as "separability-amid-situatedness" or "distinction-amid-relation." Though we are all unique individuals, we become our singular selves through our relations and responsibilities to the people and environments around us. Pally argues that our culture's overemphasis on "separability" -- individualism run amok -- results in greed, adversarial and deceitful political discourse and chicanery, resource grabbing, broken relationships, and anomie. Maintaining that separability and situatedness can and must be considered together in public policy, Pally draws on intellectual history, philosophy, and -- especially -- historic Christian and Jewish theologies of relationality to construct a new framework for addressing present economic and political ills.