Law, Love and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular. By Joshua Neoh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 216. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108427654.

Abstract

Joshua Neoh's highly original, insightful, and signicant Law, Love and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular traces the routes of these three concepts in the Judeo-Christian tradition from their sacred to their secular manifestations. Traversing law, love, and freedom through their sacred and secular manifestations has political implications. As Neoh observes, one can create a community through law (for example, constitutionalism) or by virtue of love and unity with the nation (3-4). The language of rights, which is the typical liberal mode of intersubjective relation governed by law, is an "alienating and imprisoning discourse" that "places us in a combative and antagonistic posture" (4). For this reason, a scholar like John Milbank can say he is "against human rights." 1 An alternative paradigm, governed by love, is a communitarian ethic of care (4). Neoh explores this dialectic to "shed some light on the puzzle" and "introduce a gentle reorientation of perspective" (4).Neoh's argument has three aspects. First, law, love, and freedom are each internally polarized, with each concept containing conicting imperatives. Second, these conicting imperatives must be combined into a singular life of coherence in one of at least two religious ideals: monastic and antinomian. Finally, the Reformation transformed these religious ideals into political ideologies: the monastic is constitutionalism while the antinomian is anarchism. As such, a polity of law, love, and freedom can be created either constitutionally or anarchistically (4-5). Neoh clearly and helpfully provides a chapter outline (5-6) and a discussion of how different kinds of readers and interests may nd the book useful. Most relevantly, Neoh explains that scholars interested in law and religion issues will nd chapters 1, 4, and 5 of most benet (6-7).After drawing on the narrative of Eden in Genesis to suggest why law, love, and freedom make life good (fundamentally, in a fallen world akin to the Hobbesian state of nature, law makes love possible and provides true freedom) (24-26), Neoh examines the concepts of law, love, and freedom analytically, demonstrating that these concepts are beset with bipolarities and disentangling the multiple and contradictory senses in each concept (43). This means each concept has two opposing ideals embedded in it "which reect profoundly divergent conceptions of the good life" (46). For law, one ideal is law as "authority"; the normative signicance of law is necessary to realize the common good-for example, this is one reading of how the Leviathan functions in Hobbesian ontology. Law implements authority to produce security from the state of nature (49). The other ideal is law as "resistance": law allows subjects to resist authority, limits the power of the sovereign, and prevents the concentration of power in a single entity (53, 55). This latter conception of law focuses on the imperative of individual independence and agency (autonomy), while the former conception focuses on a collective plan for communal life (comm...