Is the World Redeemable? Anarchic Cosmopolitanism and Nation States in Franz Rosenzweig’s Messianism

Abstract

Although in a sense a follower of both Isaiah and Machiavelli, Rosenzweig did not share their perception of a conflict between idealism and realism in human experience. His Star of Redemption advances a theory of the redemption of the world inspired by both Isaiah and Machiavelli, and at the same time critical of both of them – a theory in which ethics and politics are strongly connected but where ethics renounces the opposition to history and historical laws, and politics renounces the opposition to ethical ideas.