Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society

by Jonathan Chaplin

Overview

The twentieth-century Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) left behind an impressive canon of philosophical works and has continued to influence a scholarly community in Europe and North America, which has extended, critiqued, and applied his thought in many academic fields. Jonathan Chaplin introduces Dooyeweerd for the first time to many English readers by critically expounding Dooyeweerd’s social and political thought and by exhibiting its pertinence to contemporary civil society debates.

Chaplin begins by contextualizing Dooyeweerd’s thought, first in relation to present-day debates and then in relation to the work of the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Chaplin outlines the distinctive theory of historical and cultural development that serves as an essential backdrop to Dooyeweerd’s substantive social philosophy; examines Dooyeweerd’s notion of societal structural principles; and sets forth his complex classification of particular types of social structure and their various interrelationships. Chaplin provides a detailed examination of Dooyeweerd’s theory of the state, its definitive nature, and its proper role vis-à-vis other elements of society. Dooyeweerd’s contributions, Chaplin concludes, assist us in mapping the ways in which state and civil society should be related to achieve justice and the public good.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268077129
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	02/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Chaplin is director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Cambridge, England.

Read an Excerpt

This book introduces a distinctive christian philosophical approach to the question of the relationship between the polity and the plural institutions of “civil society.” This approach was developed by the twentieth-century Dutch Protestant thinker Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977), a remarkable and original philosopher and the most influential intellectual successor to the nineteenth-century Calvinist theologian and statesman, Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Recent years have witnessed stirrings of a revival of Kuyper’s thought in North America, in particular, among social and political theorists investigating potential religious resources for a renewed appreciation of civil society. The central principle of Kuyper’s social thought is the “sphere sovereignty” of many distinct social institutions, each expressing a certain facet of a dynamic order of divinely created possibilities and each fitted to make a unique contribution to the realization of justice and the public good. This principle is capturing attention as an illuminating way both to designate the distinctive identities of the institutions of civil society and to frame a conception of the role of the state capable of doing justice to those identities and their interrelationships.

Whereas the Kuyperian origin of this principle is becoming better known today, the sophisticated elaboration of the principle in the writings of Dooyeweerd remains insufficiently appreciated. The principal aim of this book is to remedy that situation by critically expounding Dooyeweerd’s social and political thought and by exhibiting its pertinence to contemporary civil society debates. I seek to show how his work amounts to a striking and characteristically Protestant philosophy of social pluralism and civil society, comparable in range and depth to contributions emerging from twentieth-century Catholic social thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Heinrich Rommen and no less capable of speaking beyond the religious community from which it arose.

Dooyeweerd’s work remains largely unknown in English-speaking social and political theory, even among those interested in its Christian currents. There are several reasons for this state of affairs, but two stand out. Probably the most important is that Dooyeweerd is not only a very complex thinker but also a difficult and often obscure writer. He uses several concepts forged out of early-twentieth-century Continental philosophy, many of which are alien to those schooled in English-language social theory, but he also coins numerous novel terms bearing distinctive and sometimes quite idiosyncratic meanings. A second reason is that, by comparison to Catholic thinkers like Maritain or Rommen, he adopts a markedly “antithetical” stance toward his interlocutors (including his coreligionists). While his strategic goal—as I explain in chapter —is ultimately to promote dialogue across perspectival divides, his method is to penetrate to and expose the deepest differences between his own thought and that of his opponents rather than to search out existing or potential points of convergence with a view to maximizing consensus. He is a demanding interrogator of his putative dialogue partners.

If this book does no more than make Dooyeweerd’s thought intelligible to English-language social and political theorists it will have been worth the effort. Yet it also seeks to introduce this readership to a neglected Protestant contribution to the field. There are, of course, many towering twentieth-century Protestant theologians who have written extensively on social and political theory: Reinhold Niebuhr, John Luther Adams, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Emil Brunner, for example. Yet there seem remarkably few Protestant philosophers who have offered much of lasting value in this area. Dooyeweerd, I will show, is among the foremost. He left behind him an impressive canon of philosophical works (many of which are now translated) and generated a small but energetic scholarly community that has over several generations extended, critiqued, and applied his thought in many academic fields. His work spawned the establishment in the 1930s of a philosophical association and a philosophical journal based in the Netherlands, both still active, and, later, centers of sympathetic scholarly activity in several locations around the world. Much of this work has been done in the areas of social, political, and legal theory.

Before beginning a detailed exposition of Dooyeewerd’s writings I seek to contextualize his thought, first in relation to contemporary civil society debates (chapter 1) and then in relation to the Kuyperian movement out of which it grew (chapter 2). Chapter 1 surveys and analyzes contemporary streams of theorizing about civil society, records the recent interest in identifying the connections between Christianity and civil society, and locates civil society theorizing against the larger background of earlier schools of what I shall call “normative institutional pluralism”—a family of social and political theories seeking to overcome mainstream neglect of the many intermediate institutions standing between the state and the individual. Chapter presents salient details of Dooyeweerd’s biography, describes his aspirations as a philosopher, and sketches the particular historical and intellectual context in which his thought took shape. I introduce his social and political thought as a comprehensive philosophical articulation of the democratic pluralist Calvinian vision projected by Kuyper. I then offer an extended summary of the flow of the book’s themes, intended to assist readers—especially those unfamiliar with Dooyeweerd’s work—to navigate the sequence of complex systematic concepts unfolded in subsequent chapters.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Christianity, Civil Society, and Pluralism

Bringing Civil Society Back In

Bringing Christianity Back into Civil Society

Bringing Civil Society Back into Pluralism 13

2. Dooyeweerd in Context

Calvinism, Modernity, and Pluralism

From “Calvinist” to “Christian” Philosophy

A Guide to This Book

3. Religion and Philosophy

The Necessity of Religious Presuppositions

The Biblical Ground Motive

Foundational Philosophical Ideas: Meaning, Time, Law

4. Plurality, Identity, Interrelationship

Modality and Analogy

Laws and Norms

Individuality

Interlacement

5. A Philosophy of Cultural Development

Human Normative Disclosure

Integration and Differentiation

Critique and Clarification

6. A Philosophy of Social Pluralism

The Identity of Social Structures

A Critical Reformulation

7. A Medley of Social Structures

Categories of Social Structure

Enkaptic Social Relationships

Pluralism, Individualism, and Universalism

8. The Identity of the State

Political Philosophy in Crisis

Power in Service of Justice

9. The Just State

Law and Justice

Spheres of Justice

The State’s Sphere of Justice

Constitutional Democracy

10. An Active, Limited State

The Meaning of Public Justice

The Task of the State

11. Civil Society and Christian Pluralism What Is Civil Society?

What Is Civil Society For? Three Models Assessed

Epilogue: Religious Discourse in State and Civil Society

Appendix 1. Dooyewerd’s Conception of the Task of Social Philosophy

Appendix 2. Dooyeweerd on Natural Law and Legal Positivism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“[Herman Dooyeweerd] is loaded with provocative ideas, arguments, questions, and proposed revisions to Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. Those who know the work of Dooyeweerd will find the book illuminating and thought provoking. Those who are new to Dooyeweerd will find the book a helpful introduction, though it cannot make Dooyeweerd’s difficult and complex philosophy less difficult and complex than it is. The book is an important step forward in Dooyeweerd studies.” —Philosophia Reformata

“[Chaplin’s book] will provide those new to Dooyeweerd studies with an introduction that is both accessible and competent. . . . A clear strength of this book is that it does not assume any detailed prior understanding of Dooyeweerd’s systematic philosophy.” —Pro Rege

“Chaplin has written a masterful book. He has partaken deeply of a profoundly Christian theorist, and the fruit of his reflection is an incisive text written in a palatable idiom that is (largely) free of the original Dutch Reformed dialect and convoluted linguistic inventions. More importantly, it is a rare author who can, in one book, introduce and summarise the work of a great thinker, critically assess the value of that thinking, and then utilize it in fashioning his own constructive proposal—and do all that in a clear and engaging manner.” —Studies in Christian Ethics

". . . if you are working in social theory or political philosophy—actually, if you have any personal or professional interest in reading philosophy—or if you are intrigued by ways in which the ideas of Abraham Kuyper can be nuanced and brought to bear on the social and political questions of the 21st century, I recommend this book to you with unbridled enthusiasm." —Books and Culture

"To unpack Dooyeweerd is no small task, especially given his penchant for neologisms and a highly nuanced use of common vernacular. Given the challenge of such an undertaking, one can appreciate Chaplin's cumulative exposition of Dooyeweerd's thought; his skillful development provides an effortless transition from Chaplin's unique philosophy to his distinct political and social thought to the application of both in contemporary issues." —Journal of Church and State

“As intellectual heir to Abraham Kuyper . . . Dooyeweerd might seem to belong to an earlier generation of Christian political thought, amongst the Christian Democrat thinkers who opposed Nazism and contributed to the post-war reconstruction of Europe . . . Chapin situates him in more contemporary debates by drawing attention to his critique of liberalism, or the ‘humanistic ground motive’ as he calls it, and his account of ‘Christian pluralism’ and how this might contribute to recent debates about Civil Society.” —Modern Theology

“Jonathan Chaplin offers us a thorough, lucid, widely accessible, and reliable guide (critical but deeply sympathetic), to the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, especially his philosophy of law, society, and politics in a way that should surely bring illumination to the uninitiated and perplexed reader of this undoubtedly important but neglected Christian (Reformed Protestant) thinker of the twentieth century.” —Journal of Markets and Morality

“Given the challenge of such an undertaking, one can appreciate Chaplin’s cumulative exposition of Dooyeweerd’s thought; his skillful development provides an effortless transition from Chaplain’s unique philosophy to his distinct political and social thought to the application of both in contemporary issues . . . . More sophisticated readers will appreciate the realistic portrait Chaplin paints of Dooyeweerd’s thought, one that rescues Dooyeweerd’s important contribution to political and social theory from its obtuse philosophical husk and places it back into the center of the contemporary debate.” —Journal of State and Religion

“Herman Dooyeweerd was both deep and original. Much of his writing is an articulation of rather undeveloped lines of thought in his Dutch predecessor, Abraham Kuyper. In the course of his exposition, Chaplin effectively highlights Dooyeweerd's significance for a theory of civil society and for present-day social theory in general." —Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University and the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Virginia

"Finally, an authoritative book that brings to brilliant light and life Herman Dooyeweerd’s Christian philosophy of law, politics, and society. For the past half century, the profound and original teachings of this prolific Dutch sage have been lost on most readers. Jonathan Chaplin has rescued Dooyeweerd from his own obscure prose, poor translations, and cultic mystique to reveal his astonishing and engaging insights into our lives as persons and peoples, rulers and citizens, preachers and parishioners, parents and children. This will be the go-to book on Dooyeweerd for many years to come." —John Witte, Jr., Emory University

From the Publisher

2016 Herman Dooyeweerd Prize from the Association for Reformational Philosophy, Winner