Living Law asks if there is such a thing as a Jewish political theory. In this superb book, Miguel Vatter's answer is that there is. Looking at a series of key Jewish political and theological thinkers, Vatter finds that the common thread to these figures is a sense of community that is independent, and even possibly resistant, to states and governments of various sorts. Living Law describes how the Jewish tradition contains inside
itself a radical, anarchic kernel, a kind of material practice that permits both vast differences in thought and application even as it also holds that community together. If you want a book that really gets to the bottom of how a theological tradition can translate itself into a set of coherent albeit radically unlike practices,
this is the book for you.
Miguel Vatter is Professor of Politics at Flinders University, Australia. He is author of Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt and The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society.