The Federal Animal-Daniel J. Elazar: Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions. Volume I of the Covenant Tradition in Politics.(New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1995. Pp. xvi, 477. 54.95.)

摘要: Initially conceiving a trilogy on the foundations, manifestations and vicissitudes of the covenant idea in Western political thought, the author of these important volumes now projects a tetralogy. Volume 1 introduces the vocabulary of covenantal political thinking (with a nod to Max Kadushin's writings on organic concepts), supplies a handbook of orientation to the biblical covenants, and comments on the basic republican disposition of the Hebrew Bible. Volume 2 examines the occlusion of covenantal thinking in the rise of the Roman Catholic Church, and charts its reemergence in successive, often loosely connected, waves of fundamentalist rebellion among peoples comprising a" covenant belt" that arcs from the Swiss Alps and the Rhine Valley through the Low Countries and crosses the North Sea to Scotland and portions of the British Isles. An excursus at the end of Volume 2 considers the eclipse of …