Ran Hirschl is Professor of Political Science and Law, and holds a senior Canada Research Chair in Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Toronto. Besides Constitutional Theocracy, featured in his Rorotoko interview, Hirschl is the author of Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Harvard University Press, 2004 & 2007) and of numerous articles and book chapters, and he is currently writing a book on the evolution, purpose and logic of comparative inquiry in legal studies. Ran Hirschl has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Fellow at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs. Most recently, he served as the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, received a University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award, and delivered the 2010 Annual Lecture in Law and Society at Oxford University.
As of 2010, perhaps more than half of the world’s population lives in polities where religion not only has remained public but also has been playing a key role in political and constitutional life. Of these people, approximately one billion live in national or sub-national polities that feature key elements of what I have termed “constitutional theocracy.”Populist academic and media accounts tend to portray the spread of religious fundamentalism in the developing world as a near-monolithic, ever-accelerating, and all-encompassing phenomenon. The reality in most pertinent settings is notably more complex and nuanced. Various secularist, modernist, or otherwise anti-religious stakeholders vie to advance their worldviews and policy preferences against the backdrop of religion-infused politics and morality.Regimes throughout the new world of constitutional theocracies—as well as in countries where religion-centered morality has been dominating law and politics for generations: think India or Catholic Europe and Latin America—have been struggling with questions of a profoundly foundational nature. They are forced to navigate between cosmopolitanism and parochialism, modern and traditional meta-narratives, constitutional principles and religious injunctions, contemporary governance and ancient texts, and judicial and pious interpretation.Constitutional courts find themselves at the forefront of this struggle as they attempt to address constitutional theocracy and translate its uneasy bundle of seemingly contradictory aims and commitments into practical guidelines for public life.The constitutional incorporation of religious directives is not done for the pure love of religion. It is a response to fundamentalist threats—and at times even a preemptive move: appropriation of religion to counter to fundamentalist threats.As support for theocratic governance continues to grow, the constitutional establishment of religion becomes an increasingly attractive—the lesser evil—solution for secularists, statists, modernists, and other religion-taming interests that strive to protect or advance their agendas in a non-secularist world.
Ran Hirschl Constitutional Theocracy Harvard University Press314 pages, 9 1/4 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0674048195
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