http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/2/6/main-feature/1/the-dangerous-mr-nelson
Eric Nelson is a danger to academia.
“In sum, in The Hebrew Republic Nelson has thrown down the gauntlet of a revolution. He means to overturn the accepted foundations of modern intellectual history by re-evaluating the early modern period and asking whether biblical and Jewish ideas were as foundational as Greek and Roman thought in creating the modern world. And Nelson, in being persuaded that the Bible was a motive force in early modern political history, is not alone.
A lot of ink will be spilled, and careers and reputations will lie bleeding on the ground, before this battle ends. It is likely to be exciting, not least because it is fun to watch evidence-based scholarship triumph over dogma defended as truth.”
You would not think so from his background. He is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Governmentat Harvard University. He has had a proper education, at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge. Although both of these institutions were founded by believing Christians, Harvard and Trinity got over all that a long time ago.
Nelson knows that taking the Bible seriously as a source of political theory is simply not done. His first, highly regarded book, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, establishes the central importance of Greek texts—which had been newly recovered in the Renaissance—in the formation of early modern republicanism. His second book was a scholarly edition of the translation of Homer done by Thomas Hobbes—that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century thinker who helped found modern political philosophy by rejecting ancient authority and arguing that the principles of just government can instead be reasoned out by an intelligent mind closely observing nature and its mechanisms. Intellectual historians understand that Hobbes and the philosophers who followed him drew on Greek and Roman ideas but most certainly not on the political ideas found in the Bible.
We have all been taught that it was the dethroning of revealed religion that produced political modernity. Everyone knows this, knows that European political thought was not transformed and made modern by reading the Bible (let alone the Talmud); it was remade by a rejection of the Bible in favor of rationalism. So how can a Harvard professor like Nelson have produced the book he did, entitled The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought?
