Rogue Theodicy

How should we understand the place of justice in politics? For some, including Rawls and Dworkin, justice is simply a matter of superimposing norms on political structures that are designed to accommodate them. Others, including Honig and Geuss, doubt whether the transfer of abstract principle to politics can proceed so simply. In this provocative essay, Glen Newey reviews this as a debate in political theology, which understands concepts in political theory as theological in origin. Modern secular liberal thinkers no longer take seriously the idea that outcomes in the world could be subject to the sway of omnipotent forces, least of all supernatural ones. Principles of justice can properly be formulated in abstraction from questions of power. But Newey contends that this is problematical for two reasons. First, the question of theodicy gained much of its urgency from the notion that God's power might, after all, be limited in the face of evils, and second, the very idea that formulated principles set a standard to which political outcomes can be held accountable seems itself to assume a kind of omnipotent thinking. Newey's essay is subjected to critical interrogation by interlocutors including Rainer Forst, Veronique Munoz-Darde, John Milbank and Lea Ypi, and the volume concludes with a response by Newey.