Strange Gods: Legal Theology and the æModernityÆ of Law

Legal Theologyprovides a genealogy of modern law as a secular theology, calling into question the received ideas that modern law is radically different from its religious antecedents, and that modernity involved a repudiation of theological concepts. Peter Fitzpatrick charts the lineage of this secular theology through three '¬Ühistoricities'¬": the creation of the world'¬"s imperium, of the modern world-system, in the sixteenth century; the time of revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the high modernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Respectively condensed here in the writings of Vitoria, Hobbes and Nietzsche, Fitzpatrick documents the substitution of a monotheistic God by successive articulations of a persistently 'deific' law. Legal Theologythus questions the story of secularism'¬"s triumph, by eliciting the essentially religious force of modern law: a force that is, moreover, recognisable in secularism's contemporary imperial mission.