Book Review: Chains of Persuasion: A Framework for Religion in Democracy, by Benjamin R. Hertzberg

• Date: 01 December 2020
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720901608
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

828 Political Theory 48(6)

be both frustrating, imperfect, and conflict-laden and necessary to the task of

generating and sustaining new, solidaristic relationships up to the task of politi-

cal transformation. But straightforwardly “self-styled” it is not.

Second, understanding panache as arising from a wellspring of individual

authority undermines the lessons of accountability to others and to history

that the preceding chapters build toward. Holding oneself or others to the

standard of self-generated authority alone, while perhaps sometimes heroic,

is precisely the kind of thinking that misguidedly holds individuals person-

ally accountable for structural problems. Equally, it obscures the fact that

intersubjective accountability requires us to accept that others do, in many

ways, have the authority to demand things from us. Hemmings’s reconstruc-

tion of Goldman’s lost letters to Almeda Sperry are again a testament to this;

both women demand things of one another in ways that are difficult to hear—

they contain angry demands for recognition and desperate pleas for forgive-

ness alongside frustrated desires and their yearning for solidarity. These

demands are incompatible with a narrative of self-generating authority.

Indeed, Hemmings’s own points about reevaluating what we demand from

history seem to far exceed this framework, which in the end collapses back

onto a narrative that would have us canonize an “E.G.” who performs our

own desires yet again.

Notes

1. Alix Kates Shulman, “Women of the PEN: Dances with Feminists,” The Women's

Review of Books 9, no. 3 (December 1991): 13.

2. As Hemmings and many others have noted, “E.G.” is a representational form

used by Goldman to signify her political persona. As Hemmings writes, “It is

not just our own need for Goldman that catapults her across the ages to take her

place as an exemplar of passionate radicalism, then, but her self-fashioning as an

available figure in this dynamic.” Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman, 5.

Chains of Persuasion: A Framework for Religion in Democracy, by Benjamin R.

Hertzberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, 224 pp.

Reviewed by: William P. Umphres, Department of Political Science, University of

Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720901608

Current political discourse seems beset by factions mobilized around founda-

tional claims immune to engagement or critique from the outside. Prominent