Kierkegaard and the Political Theory of Love: Love is a Revolution (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

What is the significance of the absence of God in Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan? What is the significance of a mercifulness that is able to give nothing or do nothing? Kierkegaard takes on these questions, these political questions, in his magisterial work Works of Love.

Through an exegesis of the text of Works of Love, this book offers a reinterpretation of the work and its author, and subsequently places Kierkegaard squarely within the powerful tradition that strives to imagine the political and social contours of love, a tradition which includes Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Love, for all of these authors, was understood to be not merely sentimental, but subversive and revolutionary. By placing Kierkegaard into dialogue with contemporary political theorists such as Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and others, he is shown to be indispensable to any contemporary effort that seeks to further delineate the nature of a politics of love and its relations to issues of justice, equality and revolution.

Kierkegaard and the Political Theory of Love is an invaluable resource for students of political theory, theology, philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies.