Americans on the political right and left have had concerns about our presidents and their monarchical tendencies. Yet there was a time when monarchies were considered legitimate, even divinely ordained. It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that leading European political thinkers began to question the rationale for monarchies. How did this questioning come about?
It’s often thought that our republican form of government was a consequence of the Enlightenment-era separation of politics and theology. This idea banishes theological discourse from the public square. But as Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony and Harvard professor Eric Nelson each have shown, the real story may be quite different. Hazony explains that “the modern age was born out of an intellectual matrix that was steeped in Hebraic texts.” Nelson, in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, discusses how political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, influenced by “rabbinic Biblical exegesis,” began “to claim that monarchy per se is an illicit constitutional form and that all legitimate constitutions are republican.”
