At the center of Elshtain's work is a passionate concern with the relationship between political rhetoric and political action. For Elshtain, politics is a sphere of concrete responsibility. Political speech should, therefore, approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. Elshtain finds in the writings of Vaclav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday...

Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, sovereignty has cut across the diverse realms of theology, political thought, and psychology. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, the debates about sovereignty--complete independence and self-government--have dominated our history. In this seminal work of political history and political theory, leading scholar and public intellectual Jean...

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