Moses as Political Scientist

Some of my friends from Front Porch Republic have helped launch a new interdisciplinary, academic journal called ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine.’ Issues explored by the journal’s contributors will include “civil society, agrarianism, human scale, localism, the limits of reason, the role of custom and history, logos, natural law theory, and mythos.”

Check out some of their articles, including a new look at Moses as a political thinker :

The Mosaic tradition, for Wildavsky, centered on the historical figure of Moses. Moses’ errors are as important as his successes, and the processes involved in his decision-making become the basis for this study. His work Moses as Political Leader stresses the experiential element as the ground for all political knowledge, but, ironically, the author argues that Moses may not be so different from many individuals who assume positions of leadership in contemporary society. Wildavsky’s Moses becomes a specimen of general leadership instead of a model of a unique leader responding to a particular crisis. Initially, we must question the presentation of the mundane Moses, removed from the Kosmos of the ancient Near East and transposed on a larger world, no longer as a leader of a people inspired by a theophanic experience, but as an archetype of how leadership can be improved.