Elshtain 1

I have been a long-standing admirer of Jean Elshtain’s writing, through which, over the last twenty or so years, she has fashioned a body of work that glitters like few others in contemporary American political theory and international relations. Broad in range, fiercely articulate and unique in tone, she has contributed to a bewilderingly wide spectrum of topics: the public/private dichotomy, ² the character and role of the history of political thought, ³ the importance of the family in social and political thought, ⁴ the character, obligations and requirements of democratic politics, the intertwining of the ethical and the political in international politics ⁵ and, most recently, the centrality of religion in people’s lives and in political life. ⁶ One theme that has especially recurred in her writing and teaching over the years has been a concern for the various manifestations of what she often terms ‘civic virtue’ and especially for the particular manifestation of it that occurs in connection with war. Indeed, along with perhaps Michael Walzer and James Turner Johnson, ⁷ Elshtain has become one of the best-known contemporary advocates of the just war tradition. In her prize-winning Women and War, in her edited book on just war theory and in her book on Augustine, as well as in many essays in many different places, Elshtain has sought to ram home the message that the world in which we live is often a hard world, as well as sometimes a wonderful one. What we need, therefore, are ways of acting in such a world that are compatible with our deepest ethical beliefs but can also stand with the reality of that world; if we forget that crucial linkage and either seek to collapse politics into ethics or proclaim that ethics has no role in politics then we forget the essence of politics itself. This is the essence, one might have thought, of a modern ‘anti-Pelagian’ sensibility.