Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society [Hardcover]

The twentieth-century Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (18941977) left behind an impressive canon of philosophical works and has continued to influence a scholarly community in Europe and North America, which has extended, critiqued, and applied his thought in many academic fields. Jonathan Chaplin introduces Dooyeweerd for the first time to many English readers by critically expounding Dooyeweerds social and political thought and by exhibiting its pertinence to contemporary civil society debates.

Chaplin begins by contextualizing Dooyeweerds thought, first in relation to present-day debates and then in relation to the work of the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper (18371920). Chaplin outlines the distinctive theory of historical and cultural development that serves as an essential backdrop to Dooyeweerds substantive social philosophy; examines Dooyeweerds notion of societal structural principles; and sets forth his complex classification of particular types of social structure and their various interrelationships. Chaplin provides a detailed examination of Dooyeweerds theory of the state, its definitive nature, and its proper role vis-?-vis other elements of society. Dooyeweerds contributions, Chaplin concludes, assist us in mapping the ways in which state and civil society should be related to achieve justice and the public good.

This book introduces a distinctive christian philosophical approach to the question of the relationship between the polity and the plural institutions of civil society. This approach was developed by the twentieth-century Dutch Protestant thinker Herman Dooyeweerd (18941977), a remarkable and original philosopher and the most influential intellectual successor to the nineteenth-century Calvinist theologian and statesman, Abraham Kuyper (18371920). Recent years have witnessed stirrings of a revival of Kuypers thought in North America, in particular, among social and political theorists investigating potentialló”