Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought

By Julie E. Cooper

Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God’s authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires.
Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularity’s inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging one’s limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability. Rather, it challenges us—today as then—to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226081328

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JULIE E. COOPER is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08129-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08132-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226081328.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cooper, Julie E.

Secular powers : humility in modern political thought / Julie E. Cooper.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-08129-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-08132-8 (e-book)

1. Modesty.   2. Humility.   3. Secularism—Europe—History.   4. Philosophy, European—17th century.   5. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679.   6. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677.   7. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778.   I. Title.

BJ1533.M73C66 2013

179'.9—dc23

2013011401

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

ISBN: 978-0-226-08132-8 (e-book)

SECULAR POWERS

Humility in Modern Political Thought

JULIE E. COOPER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

To my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility

CHAPTER 2. Modesty: Hobbes on How Mere Mortals Can Create a Mortal God

CHAPTER 3. Humility: Spinoza on the Joys of Finitude

CHAPTER 4. Self-Love: Rousseau on the Allure, and the Elusiveness, of Divine Self-Sufficiency

CONCLUSION. A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the Ethics, which was published anonymously, Spinoza cites an adage from Cicero to illustrate the power and pervasiveness of ambition. "As Cicero says, Every man is led by love of esteem, and the more so, the better he is. Even the philosophers who write books on how esteem is to be disdained put their names to these works" (DefAffXLIVE). Unlike Spinoza, I do not have the option of publishing this book anonymously. If, by putting my name on this work, I risk joining the ranks of the philosophers whose ambition Spinoza scorns, I also gain the opportunity to thank, by name, the many individuals and institutions without whose support I could not have completed this project.

I first explored the themes that this book develops in a dissertation submitted to the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee—Fred Dolan, Wendy Brown, Vicky Kahn, and Marianne Constable—for their intellectual engagement and unstinting support. Over the course of the book’s completion, I have been provoked and inspired by colleagues in the scholarly communities to which I have been privileged to belong: the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University; the Political Science Department at Syracuse University; the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago; and, on a sabbatical leave in 2009–10, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. I owe my greatest professional and intellectual debts to my colleagues in political theory at the University of Chicago. Bob Gooding-Williams, Bernard Harcourt, Patchen Markell, John McCormick, Sankar Muthu, Jennifer Pitts, Nathan Tarcov, and Linda Zerilli all read multiple chapter drafts, and entertained my queries and confusions in countless hallway conversations. Their penetrating insights and sage counsel have enriched this book immeasurably.

I am obliged to friends and colleagues who have commented on parts of the manuscript, and with whom I have had illuminating conversations about its themes: Tamar Abramov, Danielle Allen, Rick Avramenko, Chris Brooke, Mark Button, Ed Curley, Mary Dietz, Richard Flathman, Carlos Fraenkel, Dorit Geva, Yuval Jobani, Reha Kadakal, Vicky Kahn, Anna Kornbluh, Mogens Laerke, Mara Marin, Nedim Nomer, Joan Scott, Hasana Sharp, Quentin Skinner, Steven Smith, Sharon Stanley, Annie Stilz, Richard Strier, Jeanne Theoharis, Michael Walzer, Ian Wei, Yves Winter, Tara Zahra, Melissa Zinkin, Catherine Zuckert, and John Zumbrunnen. When translating passages from early modern texts, I relied on Antonia Syson and David Petrain for Latin expertise, and Katherine Ibbett for French expertise. Keven Ruby provided invaluable assistance with citations and bibliography. Arash Abizadeh, Dan Garber, Stephen White, and Liz Wingrove read and commented on the entire manuscript at a workshop at the University of Chicago in Fall 2010. Their astute interventions, and those of the workshop audience, helped to clarify the book’s stakes, and sharpen the framing of its arguments. Special thanks go to Jimmy Klausen, who read several versions of the Rousseau chapter and, more important, provided electronic solidarity at critical junctures; and Shalini Satkunanandan, who read multiple drafts of the introduction, carrying on a running dialogue about religion, ethos, and fungibility. In a Spinozist spirit, I would also like to thank those who engaged my work anonymously through the peer review process.

Portions of this book have been presented, in various incarnations, at various conferences and workshops. For their generous and thoughtful responses, I am grateful to all those who participated in the following exchanges: Workshop on the Politics of Time and Value, Yale University; Practical Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago; Political Theory Workshop, University of Chicago; Chicago Area Renaissance Society; Spinoza Day, Princeton University; Political Theory Workshop, Columbia University; Modern Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago; Political Theory Workshop, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Princeton Workshop on Jewish Thought; Spinoza and Modernity Colloquium, Colgate University; American Political Science Association; Renaissance Society of America; Western Political Science Association; and Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

The camaraderie of friends and family has sustained and enabled me through the years that this project has been a preoccupation. Alp Aker has long been my trusted consultant on matters scholarly, aesthetic, and affective. His discerning judgment has saved me from many a misstep. Erica Werner has come to feel like kin, as if we had sprung from the same ancestral bulgur patch. Her wry sensibility is a constant source of levity and wisdom. My sister, Emily Cooper, has provided gracious and stylish hospitality in Givat Shmuel and Tel Aviv. My parents, Fredi and Heshie Cooper, are unparalleled in their capacity for love and unwavering in their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm. Combining modesty and irreverence in equal measure, they are also fun to be around. This book is dedicated to them.

An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as a journal article: Julie E. Cooper, Vainglory, Modesty, and Political Agency in the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Review of Politics 72, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 241–69.

INTRODUCTION

Two Chapters in the History of Humility

I know how great is the effort needed to convince the proud of the power and excellence of humility, an excellence which makes it soar above all the summits of this world, which sway in their temporal instability, overtopping them all with an eminence not arrogated by human pride, but granted by divine grace. For the King and Founder of this City which is our subject has revealed in the Scripture of his people this statement of the divine Law, God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. This is God’s prerogative; but man’s arrogant spirit in its swelling pride has claimed it as its own, and delights to hear this verse quoted in its own praise: To spare the conquered, and beat down the proud.¹

For men, as they become at last weary of irregular justling, and hewing one another, and desire with all their hearts, to conforme themselves into one firme and lasting edifice; so for want, both of the art of making fit Lawes, to square their actions by, and also of humility, and patience, to suffer the rude and cumbersome points of their present greatnesse to be taken off, they cannot without the help of a very able Architect, be compiled, into any other than a crasie building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity.²

I begin with two accounts, from the history of Western political theory, of what humility means—of the reasons why, and the contexts in which, humility is a virtue.

Augustine offers what is arguably the canonical account of humility’s meaning and value. In City of God, Augustine equates humility with obedience to and love of God.³ On Augustine’s reading, the first sin, of Adam and Eve, illustrates why humility is highly prized in the City of God and especially enjoined on the City of God during the time of its pilgrimage in this world.⁴ Citing the adage that ‘pride is the start of every sin,’ Augustine reads Adam and Eve’s fall as a willful defection from God, the supreme and real ground of their being.⁵ Seduced by a delusional estimate of their capabilities (moral and otherwise), Adam and Eve dare to defy God’s prohibition. When Adam and Eve eat the apple, however, they learn that self-mastery is illusory. Scarcely able to control their own bodies, Adam and Eve find themselves enslaved to the passions—a slavery far worse than the salutary subjection for which they were created. The elusiveness of autonomy reveals Adam’s folly in abandoning the one who is really sufficient for him—namely, God.⁶ If pride involves delusions of self-sufficiency, the humble own their inadequacy, and, consequently, submit to God. Only through this subjection can humans attain true exaltation.

Thus, in a surprising way, there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it. It certainly appears somewhat paradoxical that exaltation abases and humility exalts. But devout humility makes the mind subject to what is superior. Nothing is superior to God; and that is why humility exalts the mind by making it subject to God.⁷

The humility/pride antithesis tracks a series of oppositions—between the city of God and the city of man; between love of God carried as far as contempt of self and love of self reaching the point of contempt for God; between worship of God and self-worship.⁸ Making subjection to God and self-direction mutually exclusive, these oppositions deny human sufficiency, and discredit human initiative. The humble recognize that it is to man’s advantage to be in subjection to God, and it is calamitous for him to act according to his own will, and not to obey the will of his Creator.⁹ For humility’s Augustinian partisans, to assert human sufficiency is to forsake God—indeed, to usurp divine prerogative.¹⁰

Thomas Hobbes offers a less familiar paean to humility in De Cive. In that text, Hobbes defines humility as the acknowledgment that humans are naturally equal. When Hobbes enumerates the laws of nature, the rational Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of humanity, he identifies the presumption of equality as a necessary condition for peace.¹¹ If men consider themselves unequal, Hobbes contends, they will struggle for power; thus, "the pursuit of peace requires that they be regarded as equal.¹² In other words, reason, which dictates the pursuit of peace, also militates against pride. And therefore the eighth precept of natural law is: everyone should be considered equal to everyone. Contrary to this law is PRIDE [superbia].¹³ If pride—or the Aristotelian conviction that some are natural masters, others natural slaves—is inimical to peace, humility is eminently rational. When Hobbes adduces scriptural support for the laws of nature, he casts the eighth law of nature in positive terms, as an endorsement of humility. Law 8, on acknowledging natural equality, i.e. on humility [de humilitate], is confirmed by a plethora of scriptural verses.¹⁴ Hobbes adduces scriptural support for the laws of nature to demonstrate the identity of the natural law to the divine law. The precepts for living derived from the natural law are the same as the precepts which have been promulgated by God’s own Majesty as the laws of the Kingdom of heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Prophets and Apostles."¹⁵ Although Hobbes disclaims innovation, noting humility’s Christian pedigree, he does not share Augustine’s low estimation of human sufficiency. In Hobbes’s account, cultivating the virtue of humility enables humans to achieve this-worldly aims (e.g., peace) without supernatural assistance. Indeed, Hobbes celebrates humility as a spur to, rather than a prophylactic against, independent human agency. For political purposes, Hobbes argues, reason is sufficient, enabling humans to construct and sustain a commonwealth.

I have juxtaposed these accounts to highlight their continuities and discontinuities—and thereby introduce the discourse whose emergence and development, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is the subject of this book—the secular critique of pride. Augustine and Hobbes both profess Christian convictions, and both adduce scriptural support for their definition of humility. Yet they differ regarding the possibility, and the desirability, of human independence from God. While Augustine contends that humans need God’s grace to be virtuous, Hobbes counters that natural reason suffices for the achievement of virtue.¹⁶ Unlike Augustine, Hobbes’s motivations for attacking pride and endorsing humility are secular—he hopes to encourage, rather than discredit, independent human agency. In other words, Hobbes mounts a secular critique of pride, a critique that subsequent political theorists will extend and develop. On my definition, a theory is secular if it conceives the political as a realm of human agency, independent of divine oversight or authorization. Secular theory need not be atheist—theological convictions can inspire claims for the autonomy of politics. Thus, in this book, the term secular is not synonymous with terms such as atheist, libertine, antireligious, nonreligious, postreligious, and so forth. Rather, the adjective secular describes a view, endorsed by theists and atheists alike, that politics is a human construction. On this definition, Hobbes is a secular theorist—he entrusts humans with the task of building, authorizing, and sustaining a political world. Yet Hobbes is also a fierce critic of pride. Indeed, Hobbes predicates political stability on the cultivation of (a certain kind of) humility. In this book, I recover the secular critique of pride, recounting the surprising story of secular theorists’ attempt to enlist humility and related dispositions for emphatically non-Augustinian projects.

I study this chapter within the history of philosophy because it provides a unique avenue of approach to questions that preoccupy us today, at a moment when secularism’s legitimacy and viability are increasingly in dispute: What does it mean to be secular? In other words, how have we come to see ourselves as self-authorizing political agents? Revisiting the secular critique of pride can help us to reframe debates about secularity’s origin, meaning, and prospects. Once we appreciate the historical significance of this tradition, we can tell an altogether different story about the sources of secular political agency. Specifically, we can tell a story about the rise of secularity that resists the Augustinian conflation of human agency with pride.¹⁷ The secular turn rests on an estimation of human capability that is generous by Augustinian standards—but it also involves a new reckoning with human finitude. My wager, in this book, is that studying this historical episode will enable us to understand secular politics as a collective project powered by appreciation of our capabilities and our limits—not, as Augustinians have long argued, as a bid for self-aggrandizement.

Secular Powers

In Secular Powers, I present an alternative genealogy of secular subjectivity, recovering a strand of early modern political theory that views acknowledgment of human finitude as a source for collective human empowerment. In this tradition, the critique of pride is not an atavism, a relic of traditional piety at odds with the ostensibly promethean aspirations of secular thought. Rather, puncturing delusions of grandeur is an integral part of secular projects to authorize, and encourage, human self-government. The theorists who figure in this genealogy—Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—understand that, if politics is a human prerogative, it must also be a human project. Canonical portraits have long depicted the secular subject as a stereotypical sovereign subject—an individual bent on mastery and blind to limitation. What these portraits fail to capture, however, is the insight, central to one strand of early modern political theory, that fantasies of omnipotence deplete human power. Precisely because secularity’s architects ask us not to rely on God, they must remind us that we are not Gods.

To demonstrate that God-like mastery has not always been, and need not be, the pinnacle of secular aspiration, I marshal arguments both historical and theoretical. One of my primary goals is to present a revised history of humility’s fortunes within modern political thought. Readers who view humility through an Augustinian lens may be surprised to learn that secular political theorists enlisted modesty and humility for their projects. In Christian ethics, modesty and humility have traditionally expressed a theology of human dependence, as the passages from Augustine attest. For many seventeenth-century philosophers, the Augustinian understanding of humility remained definitive. If this approach exhausted humility’s meaning, humility would appear to have no place in secular political theory. Admittedly, some modern philosophers reject humility wholesale, as a vestige of superstition that can neither be recast nor rehabilitated. Yet there are alternative voices within early modern political thought—philosophers who enlist these virtues for their own purposes, transforming them along the way. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau attack pride not, as an Augustinian would, as an affront to God, but as an impediment to human power.¹⁸ Instead of abandoning the notion of finitude for a fantasy of absolute self-sufficiency, these theorists refigure finitude, and reevaluate its political implications.¹⁹ Indeed, redefining terms (like humility) with Augustinian resonance is one way that early modern theorists envision, and cultivate, the power requisite for independent political agency. Although not immune to challenge, humility proves tricky to dispense with. Thus, humility’s demise is neither a foregone conclusion nor a historical inevitability.

Indeed, from a theoretical perspective, humility’s persistence in secular political thought arguably proves more interesting than its alleged demise. Examining the reasons why modesty and humility remain compelling, and the kinds of revaluation to which they are susceptible, yields a counterintuitive take on the virtues themselves—they can be empowering, as well as self-abnegating. More important, appreciating the continued appeal, for secular theorists, of certain kinds of modesty and humility tells us something about their vision of individuality—namely, that it incorporates keen awareness of human limitation. The secular turn does not only reconfigure the institutional relationship between religion and state—it also celebrates, and tries to produce, certain kinds of individuals.²⁰ In the tradition I excavate, the exemplary secular individual is often a modest individual. Thus, we caricature secular empowerment projects when we reduce them to a bid for sovereign mastery.

In short, a revisionist history of modesty and humility yields striking theoretical conclusions. My primary theoretical aim is to capture a novel insight, which the non-Augustinian critique affords, about the sources of secular agency: a sober appreciation of limits to human power is a necessary condition for realizing its full extent. At base, the secular project is a project of human empowerment. When it comes to politics, secular theorists contend, humans have the capacity to rule themselves. Yet secular theorists still need a vocabulary that can capture, and orient us toward, human limitation. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau need such a vocabulary because they understand that, if humans want to rule themselves, they must come to terms with their limitations. When God’s sovereignty no longer extends to the political, or God is no longer a sovereign, appreciating the limits to human power becomes just as important as grasping its extent. Thus, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau assert human finitude as vehemently as they assert human power. To make these twin assertions, they adapt the idiom that philosophers, moralists, and theologians have traditionally used to figure human limitation to their own (secular) purposes. Unlike their Augustinian counterparts, however, secular critics of pride do not posit a zero-sum relationship between autonomy and dependence, chastening and empowerment.²¹ Rather, the tradition’s central insight is that appreciating the limits to human power is a condition for realizing its full extent. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau chasten human pretension not to discredit, but rather to enhance, human power.²²

Because delusions of grandeur squander human powers of political association, chastening vanity is integral to the project of justifying secular authority. By uncovering the contribution of these chastening projects to the constitution of secular subjectivity, I challenge narratives that equate secularization with self-deification. The most influential accounts of what it means to be secular found secularity on an experience—or, perhaps, a conviction—of absolute self-sufficiency. To declare independence from God for political purposes, it is assumed, secularity’s early modern architects must have placed supreme confidence in human power. Indeed, a storied tradition narrates the rise of secularity as a usurpation of properties once reserved for God. From the moment of their inception, critics of secular projects have sought to discredit self-government by taxing its proponents with sinful pride. For seventeenth-century Augustinians, the only conceivable motive for asserting independence from God is the desire to supplant God. Forsaking moral animus for social scientific rigor, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have nevertheless relied on tropes of transfer and usurpation, tracing the migration of sovereignty from God to the state and the self. In this, more temperate, idiom, the secular individual is a sovereign individual—an autonomous, capacious agent who seeks ever-increasing power. For modernity’s critics and defenders, ideals of mastery, independence, control, and self-sufficiency are the hallmarks of secular subjectivity.

It is undeniable that promethean aspirations permeate texts of modern philosophy. The notion that secularity’s architects were besotted with human power does not come out of nowhere. Secular theorists do entertain fantasies of apotheosis—but, contrary to received wisdom, these fantasies neither exemplify nor exhaust secular subjectivity. Too often, unreflective (and, in many cases, unwitting) Augustinianism leads scholars to conclude that tropes of self-deification provide the most telling index of secularity’s character. Yet passions other than pride, and projects other than self-congratulation, have animated secular estimations of human power. Fixated on modernity’s ostensible hubris, received genealogies offer impoverished accounts of the very phenomenon to which they rivet scholarly attention—namely, the vindication of human agency.

We need a non-Augustinian genealogy of secularity—not because Augustinian assumptions are objectionable, antiquated, or theistic, but because they cannot account for the full spectrum of powerful selves on offer in early modern political theory. The stereotypical sovereign individual does not exhaust secular subjectivity. Contemporary debates about secularity’s meaning and prospects remain trapped within frameworks inherited from Christian polemic, because we have failed to appreciate the ways that chastening and empowerment, finitude and sovereignty, were entwined in early modernity. Too often, scholars assume that we can, and must, choose between political theology and political theory, finitude and sovereignty. We should worry about secularity, it is implied, because its architects evinced no reservations about unfettered human power. Indeed, if we judge the project of mastery over nature corrosive of democracy and the environment, we must exit secularity—either by rehabilitating theocracy or by embracing a nontheistic ethos of nonsovereignty. If secular empowerment projects are not tantamount to hubris, however, concerns about overly robust constructions of agency need not drive us outside of or beyond secularity—for secularity’s ostensible architects shared these very concerns. Chastening human pride and individual vanity were central preoccupations of theorists who defined the political as a realm of human construction. Precisely because they affirmed human agency, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau worried that humans would squander their power in delusions of grandeur. Recovering their insights can help us envision a broader range of alternatives to the stereo typical sovereign subject—expanding our horizons beyond theocracy and nonsovereignty—because it recalls different, finite subjectivities at secularity’s inception.

To resist the equation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity is not to deny that secularism has been complicit with Western imperialism, or that it has often professed an impossible, and disingenuous, neutrality. Hubris, self-delusion, and corruption are part and parcel of secularism, just as they are part and parcel of Christianity. But hubris, self-delusion, and corruption are not the whole of secularity, understood as a discursive regime, nor of secularism, understood as a political settlement. It would be premature to bid farewell to secularity when we have yet to engage the resources it affords for thinking about the intersection of power and vulnerability.

Modernity, History, Genealogy

Because secularity positions itself as coming after, or, in some cases, superseding, traditional authority, debates about its complexion and ideological power turn on rival accounts of our historical location. My story about the fortunes of modesty and humility under secularity provides a fresh angle of approach to these debates. Beginning in the seventeenth century—one conventional starting point for modernity—this study presents a revised portrait of the rationalist philosophy often credited with secularity’s theoretical founding.²³ In adopting the seventeenth century as a point of departure, I do not endorse the historical accuracy of this periodization against its myriad competitors—for establishing secularity’s precise historical origin is not my concern.²⁴ Rather, I accept the convention in order to engage it—to challenge the stories told about what it means to be secular when we date secularity to the seventeenth century. Using Descartes as a touchstone, these stories often depict modernity as self-confident to the point of self-delusion. As Susan James observes, The seventeenth century continues to be portrayed as the dawn of modernity, the cradle of a culture in which man becomes set over against nature and nature takes on a purely instrumental significance, and in which a range of emotional responses to the natural world give way to dispassionate calculations of utility.²⁵ In other words, these stories blame seventeenth-century philosophers for introducing a set of impossible, incoherent, and dangerous ideals—ideals inimical to the very condition of human plurality. Scholars are not wrong to view a philosophy that aims at transparency, control, and invulnerability with suspicion. Scholars err, however, when they conclude that these aspirations exhaust or exemplify rationalist ethics. Thus, while I voice concerns (e.g., finitude) made familiar by contemporary critics of modernity, I challenge the historiography that provides the occasion for their critique. As Leo Strauss writes, With the questioning of traditional philosophy the traditional understanding of the tradition becomes questionable.²⁶ The conflation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity rests on a reductive caricature of seventeenth-century philosophy.²⁷ I restore humility to the historiographical conversation to challenge this caricature. Contrary to what we have been taught to expect, seventeenth-century rationalism turns out to be a key site for the articulation of secular, philosophical ideals of humility. With this challenge, I expose the reliance of many secularization stories on a tendentious history of philosophy.

Indeed, focusing on humility allows us to craft an especially pointed exposé, because it adjusts the scale of the inquiry into secularity’s meaning and force. Secularization stories end up perpetuating reductive caricatures, in part, because they tend to unfold on a grand scale. To expose the lust for mastery that purportedly animates secular modernity, theorists have often felt the need to craft master narratives of sweeping scope.²⁸ A methodological claim—secularity is the kind of phenomenon that can only be grasped on a grand scale—mirrors a substantive claim about secularity’s ostensible grandiosity. When working on a grand scale, the narrative arc matters more than the minutiae of any given period. Because I share concerns, voiced by many critics, about the elisions and omissions that riddle master narratives of secularity, I have opted to work on a minor scale.²⁹ I zoom in on a specific historical period, and, more important, I zoom in on a constellation of passions that many would deem unworthy of sustained analysis. Exhortations to humility remind us that we are small—and, for political theorists trained to number obligation, legitimacy, justice, democracy, and toleration among the discipline’s central questions, the virtue itself is liable to appear paltry, beneath consideration. It is no surprise, then, that humility fails to register for many master narratives of secularity. When master narratives do address humility, they generally do so in passing, confident that we already know what humility means, and what work it has performed. By contrast, I scrutinize a discrete set of passions to expose our failure to understand what they mean, and what work they have done in articulations of modern subjectivity. The luster of master narratives dims when we expose the shortcuts, elisions, and uninterrogated assumptions on which they rely.

One can only assume that we already know what humility means, and whether it thrives or withers in a secular age, if one forgets Nietzsche’s dictum that only that which has no history is definable.³⁰ Theorists who accept the story of humility’s modern demise treat humility like a concept with a fixed, invariant meaning, and a fixed, invariant social function (namely, to encourage docile submission). To shatter these assumptions, I scrutinize, in minute detail, early modern debates about humility’s meaning and value. The details are crucial for a project of this kind—essentially, a case study in the Nietzschean theme of the revaluation of values—because they allow us to grasp nuances that master narratives miss. To recover neglected interpretive and evaluative contests, we need to muster erudition and return to the archive.³¹ Putting canonical figures like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau in dialogue with now forgotten peers, I uncover rhetorical, theological, and philosophical nuances that would otherwise fail to register for twenty-first-century readers. Over the course of the book’s narrative, I introduce an eccentric cast of characters, including philosophical lexicographers, Christian polemicists, and Enlightened plagiarists. Restoring these minor characters allows us to see that interpretations now considered authoritative were pioneered to meet the polemical exigencies of local struggles (e.g., defending Cartesians against charges of Spinozism). Thus, in many respects, my argument employs resources conventionally associated with the contextualist history of philosophy. Yet I reconstruct the intellectual contexts of canonical works not to determine what their authors intended to say, and thereby establish their (historically accurate) meaning, but rather to highlight the ways that meaning emerges through interpretation and contestation.³² Excavating forgotten struggles surrounding terms whose meaning and value we take for granted, I invite critical reflection on the stories we tell ourselves about how we arrived at the present juncture, and the constraints these stories place on our political, theoretical, and ethical options.

In other words, I practice genealogy, by which I mean a method of historical inquiry that shatters the unitary veneer of received terms, like humility and secularity. To demonstrate that a term like secularity lacks a single correct definition, the genealogist disentangles strands that, over the course of history, have been woven into what looks like a seamless whole. This exercise in historical unraveling reveals the contestability of a given term’s meaning, and the contingencies that have united disparate elements under a given term’s banner.³³ Instead of establishing, once and for all, a philosophically adequate definition of a term like humility, a genealogist recovers contests over humility’s meaning and value, contests in which philosophers bend inherited terms to their own purposes, only to meet with resistance from the accumulated weight of history, and from contemporaries with contrary purposes. My approach is genealogical, then, because I scour the archives for evidence of these contests, exploring the parties to whom humility proved attractive, the reasons why they found it compelling, and the projects for which they managed (or failed) to recruit it. The value of such an approach is often thought to reside in its ability to reveal the secret that our most cherished things have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.³⁴ As Raymond Geuss reminds us, however, to say that concepts lack intrinsic meaning is not to say that they are infinitely plastic.

Although concepts are flexible they are not tabulae rasae. They carry their history with them. This history does not strictly determine how they must be used, but it does affect to a very significant extent how easy or how diffcult it will be to modify them, changing their meaning and reference in one direction rather than another. There are limits to how far one can actually succeed in reflecting and probably even more narrowly set limits to the extent to which one can gain any control.³⁵

Nietzsche’s agonistic rhetoric notwithstanding,