Thursday, April 20, 2006
(12:31 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Shots Over the Bow
Working on a paper with J. on religious freedom, biopower, and state racism in early colonial america (Roger Williams specifically) and can't help taking a few preliminary potshots ...Sir Edward Coke: a critical figure in the birth of biopolitical state racism in prerevolutionary seventeenth century England according to Society Must Be Defended and extraordinarily influential on early American thinking. Roger Williams was his protege, for instance, and every lawyer trained in America for three centuries cut their teeth on his legal treatises (this only ended when law schools moved to almost exclusively case law curriculums). Coke's writings were some of the few that made it over already on the Mayflower. (John Lilburne, founder of the Levellers and the other English figure important in Society Must Be Defended, is translated to America via another stream through John Locke.)
Then as now, it's all about Israel. The Puritans saw themselves as a "New English Israel" and put to use what Society Must Be Defended terms a "mythico-religious discourse of the Jews" in their struggle against the king. Truly revolutionary discourse, but ultimately swept up into the power of the state ...
