Franz Rosenzweig and Religious Constitutionalism

This chapter discusses Franz Rosenzweig’s political theology in light of the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Christian political theology is based on a message of universal love and brotherhood, but Rosenzweig points out how the reception of this message in the West took the form of nationalism and a sanctification of imperialism. This chapter offers a new reading of Rosenzweig’s wartime unfinished work on geopolitics, Globus, as an early meditation on what we now call “globalization.” It then reconstructs his masterpiece The Star of Redemption as a treatise on political theology that opens an alternative path to peoplehood based on the possibility of a cosmopolitan empire of law that is not territorially delimited and an access to citizenship that is not ethno-culturally predetermined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the contested interpretation that Rosenzweig gives of Islam in the Star of Redemption and the problem of “holy war.”