Slavery and Liberty: Talmud and Political Theory in Dialogue
While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three concepts of liberty - negative, positive, and republican - this article offers an original reading to Bab...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
[2018]
|
| In: |
Harvard theological review
Year: 2018, Volume: 111, Issue: 2, Pages: 147-173 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Talmud
/ Berlin, Isaiah 1909-1997
/ Freedom
/ Slavery
|
| IxTheo Classification: | BH Judaism NBE Anthropology NCB Personal ethics |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
|
| Summary: | While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three concepts of liberty - negative, positive, and republican - this article offers an original reading to Babylonian Talmud Giṭ 12a-13a. The talmudic passage's pivotal question - whether liberty is necessarily beneficial to a slave - enables us to reconstruct its fundamental, albeit implicit, understandings of both slavery and liberty. The talmudic approach to slavery and liberty emerges as concrete, and hence yields a thick and multi-faceted notion of liberty. Considering that a person might prefer the benefits of slavery reveals a paradox in Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty. Therefore, as this article concludes, his conceptual distinction between two concepts of liberty is unsustainable and needs to be replaced by a concrete and thick notion of liberty. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0017816018000032 |