GOV 170C: THE ENLIGHTENMENT, RELIGION AND COMPARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL SECULARISM

(Spring 2012: T and TH 9:30 10:55 AM) Professor: Giorgi Areshidze Office: Kravis 240 Email: gareshidze@cmc.edu COURSE DESCRIPTION This course offers students an engagement with the major debates in political philosophy during the modern Enlightenment over religion, liberalism and secularism. This is also a course in comparative constitutional law. The course will explore a central and unifying question: is liberal democracy rooted in rationalism or Christianity, and are the values that it promotes and protects universal (because rational) or uniquely Western (because theological)? Throughout the course we will compare the Enlightenment approaches to religion to present-day institutional practice and constitutional law (especially vis--vis Islam), both in the West (the US and the EU) as well as in a comparative perspective (Turkey and India). We will begin with an immersion in the modern Enlightenment and its approach to religion in the thought of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. These giants of modern rationalism proposed drastically divergent visions of human religiosity, competing interpretations of Biblical Christianity, and opposing institutional approaches to the role of religion in the modern state. What is the significance of this internal philosophical disagreement over religion within the modern liberal West, and which approach bears greater costs and benefits for religion? Did these thinkers seek to destroy religion, or did they seek to reform and incorporate it in liberalism, and how and why? What insights can be gleaned from this for the future of political Islam in the post-Arab Spring Middle East for an Islamic reformation? Next, we will confront the contemporary political theory of John Rawlss liberalism as well as its practical manifestation in EU multiculturalism. Writing from the vantage point of post-WW II America, long after religious warfare had ceased to be an issue in the West, Rawls attacks Enlightenment rationalism for not being liberal enough, and for undermining religion by driving it out of the public sphere. He seeks to transcend the truth-claims of rationalism and proposes that liberalism be reformed so that it is neutral towards religion and morality, in order to make liberal democracy more inclusive, stable and just. We evaluate Rawls paradigm of neutrality in practice through an exploration of the challenges that Muslim immigration is

posing to European multiculturalism and to its post-national vision of citizenship. In the final section of the course we will turn to case studies in constitutional law on religion, and focus on the way constitutional courts succeed and fail in balancing the demands of religion and liberalism in practice. From a perspective moored in both the Enlightenment and postmodern Rawlsian liberalism, we will critically examine and evaluate major US Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment; as well as the religion jurisprudence of the Supreme Courts of India and Turkey and the European Court of Human Rights.

TEXTS Note: Please purchase the specific editions and translations of the books that I specify below, and always bring the book we are reading to class. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley (Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), ISBN 0872201775 Gary Jacobsohn, The Wheel of Law (Princeton University Press), ISBN 9780691122533 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Tully (Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), ISBN 091514560X John Rawls, Political Libearlism, Second Edition, (Columbia University Press), ISBN 9780231130899 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield and Winthrop (University Of Chicago Press, 2002), ISBN 0226805360 Selections from Court cases