Equality and Difference

Abstract

This chapter explains how in the German—Jewish encounter with political modernity, the contradictory presuppositions constitutive of every nation-state are revealed. Now that the weaknesses of the Westphalian state-system are becoming increasingly apparent, whereas the alternative institutions that ought to transcend this system are still remote, scholars can identify some of these paradoxes more vividly. The dignity of equal citizenship for all and the sovereignty claims of the nation are the dual sources of legitimacy in the modern nation-state, and the tensions among them have accompanied and enframed the people's political experiences since the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The chapter shows how Jewish political and legal thinkers of the twentieth century have grappled with both dimensions of this paradox.