Benjamin L Berger
Biographic Data
| ID | 4796472 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin L Berger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin L |
| FAMILY NAME | Berger |
| SIGNATURE | BERGER B L |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9907-2247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Making Promises: Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Societies
How should we understand promises as public, private, or political commitments? What are the conditions for promise-making in religiously diverse societies with competing jurisdictions and sovereignties? Making Promises addresses how promises are made meaningful not only through law, but also through appeals to transcendent powers across diverse traditions. Each contribution in this volume takes a closer look at specific kinds of promises: oaths,…
Political Theory and the Volunteer: Lessons from Kahn’s Ethnography of ‘Our Unhappy Politics’
This article offers a reading of Paul Kahn’s Democracy in Our America that places this intimate “work of local political theory” in a central position in the landscape of his political thought. The article argues that the figure of the volunteer, as it appears in the volume, holds a space for love and meaning—and for political happiness—that secures for it a critical role in the system of beliefs and practices that sustain self-government in the …
Être ou avoir son corps: À propos de trois genres de multiplicités chez Ruyer
In “To be or to have his own body : about three kinds of multiplicities in Ruyer’s thought”, Benjamin Berger strives to clarify the place of the body in the philosophy of Ruyer. The body is located at the croassroads of two crucial axes : that of appaearing and that of multiplicities. It is therefore the object where the phenoménology is tied to the ontology, a philosophy of incarnation to a philosophy of living body
The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis
This timely and accessible book is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar (Burma) in its historical, political and social context. The book identifies and articulates the principles of the Constitution through an in-depth analysis of legal and political processes and practices, particularly since the 1990s. The core argument of this book is that the 2008 Constitution is crucial to the establishment and mainte…
Freedom of Religion
This chapter examines freedom of religion in the Canadian Constitution. After locating the modern protection of freedom of religion within Canadian constitutional history, the chapter explores the Supreme Court of Canada’s interpretation of that right, drawing particular attention to how constitutional law defines and understands religion itself. The chapter then turns to three themes that have emerged as central in the freedom of religion jurisp…
Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity
The Virtues of Law in the Politics of Religious Freedom
The moral force and capacity for inspiration of both religion and politics alike arise in part from the sense that they authentically map the world as we find it, yielding claims about how it should be. This paper asks what role we might imagine for law in this “hyper-real” world of religion and politics, arguing that law can display distinctive virtues linked to its capacity for strategic agnosticism about the real. Applying Sunstein's idea of “…
Belonging to Law: Religious Difference, Secularism, and the Conditions of Civic Inclusion
This article examines the appeal to law as the basis for civic identity and political belonging under conditions of religious diversity. Beginning by assessing the descriptive utility of the concept of ‘secularism’, the article argues that secularism is best approached as a repertoire of moves available in negotiating the relationship between religion and political authority, focusing then on one such move evident in the contemporary project of l…
Religious Diversity, Education, and the “Crisis” in State Neutrality
Education—and particularly public education—has become a crucible for the relationship between state and religious diversity, a principal site for contemporary debates about the meaning of secularism and the management of religious difference. This is so across a variety of national traditions, and despite wide differences in the historical and “emotional inheritances” surrounding the configuration of law, politics, and religion. Through an explo…
Judges, Juries, and the History of Criminal Appeals
The three articles offered in this forum on the early history of criminal appeals do us the great service of adding much of interest on this important but neglected issue in the development of Anglo–North American criminal procedure. The opaqueness of the legal history of criminal appeals stands in stark contrast to their centrality and apparent naturalness in contemporary criminal justice systems in England, Canada, and the United States. These …
The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination
In much contemporary constitutional thought the exercise of state power unbounded by or contrary to the law is nothing other than the failure of justice in the constitutional order. Yet it has not always been so. For a substantial period of common-law legal history the exercise of judgment despite the law was viewed as essential to seeing that justice was done. This article argues that attention to the imaginative architecture of our criminal jus…
Law’s Religion: Rendering Culture
This article argues that constitutional law’s inability to deal with religion in a satisfying way flows, in part, from its failure to understand religion as, in a robust sense, culture. Once one begins to understand the Canadian constitutional rule of law itself as a cultural form, it becomes apparent that law renders religion in a very particular fashion, and that this rendering is a product of law’s symbolic categories and interpretive horizons…
The Grand experiment: Law and legal culture in British settler societies
In the late nineteenth century, the English legal historians Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland coined the phrase "the grand experiment" to describe the spread of English law throughout the British Empire. For Pollock and Maitland, this was an unequivocally positive process that would uplift settler societies. The work of recent legal historians, however, has alerted us to the more complex impact English law had on the peoples, both settler and …
The Cultural Limits of Legal Tolerance
This article presents the argument that our understanding of the nature of the relationship between modern constitutionalism and religious difference has suffered with the success of the story of legal tolerance and multiculturalism. Taking up the Canadian case, in which the conventional narrative of legal multiculturalism has such purchase, this piece asks how the interaction of law and religion - and, in particular, the practices of legal toler…
On the Book of Job, Justice, and The Precariousness of the Criminal Law
The criminal law has been subject to both increased demands in the societal functions that it is expected to perform, and heightened scrutiny for those points at which it fails to achieve these ends. The resulting pressures put into question the criminal law's capacity to perform justice. Rather than turning to contemporary sources to assess the criminal law's relationship to claims of justice, the author uses an analysis of the ancient myth foun…
The Limits of Belief: Freedom of Religion, Secularism, and the Liberal State
Les tribunaux canadiens sont de plus en plus confrontés au défi de réconcilier une politique laïque libérale avec la protection de la liberté de religion de la Charte. Les approches traditionnelles envers le libéralisme et la laïcité ont rendu cette réconciliation particulièrement difficile, en promouvant une vision insatisfaisante, sur le plan conceptuel, d'un espace public areligieux, hyper-rationnel et dénué d'engagements moraux. En même temps…
Picturing the prophet: Focalization in the book of Jonah
This article approaches the book of Jonah from a narratological perspective in an effort to understand the way in which the story is presented to a reading audience. This emphasis on the presentation of the text combined with an affirmation of the inadequacy of the concept of "point of view" leads to a consideration of focalization theory and focalization in the book of Jonah. The theoretical positions of Genette, Rimmon-Kenan and Sanders are app…
The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis
This timely and accessible book is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar (Burma) in its historical, political and social context. The book identifies and articulates the principles of the Constitution through an in-depth analysis of legal and political processes and practices, particularly since the 1990s. The core argument of this book is that the 2008 Constitution is crucial to the establishment and mainte…
The Limits of Belief: Freedom of Religion, Secularism, and the Liberal State
Les tribunaux canadiens sont de plus en plus confrontés au défi de réconcilier une politique laïque libérale avec la protection de la liberté de religion de la Charte. Les approches traditionnelles envers le libéralisme et la laïcité ont rendu cette réconciliation particulièrement difficile, en promouvant une vision insatisfaisante, sur le plan conceptuel, d'un espace public areligieux, hyper-rationnel et dénué d'engagements moraux. En même temps…
Religious Diversity, Education, and the “Crisis” in State Neutrality
Education—and particularly public education—has become a crucible for the relationship between state and religious diversity, a principal site for contemporary debates about the meaning of secularism and the management of religious difference. This is so across a variety of national traditions, and despite wide differences in the historical and “emotional inheritances” surrounding the configuration of law, politics, and religion. Through an explo…
Belonging to Law: Religious Difference, Secularism, and the Conditions of Civic Inclusion
This article examines the appeal to law as the basis for civic identity and political belonging under conditions of religious diversity. Beginning by assessing the descriptive utility of the concept of ‘secularism’, the article argues that secularism is best approached as a repertoire of moves available in negotiating the relationship between religion and political authority, focusing then on one such move evident in the contemporary project of l…
Picturing the prophet: Focalization in the book of Jonah
This article approaches the book of Jonah from a narratological perspective in an effort to understand the way in which the story is presented to a reading audience. This emphasis on the presentation of the text combined with an affirmation of the inadequacy of the concept of "point of view" leads to a consideration of focalization theory and focalization in the book of Jonah. The theoretical positions of Genette, Rimmon-Kenan and Sanders are app…
The Limits of Belief: Freedom of Religion, Secularism, and the Liberal State
Les tribunaux canadiens sont de plus en plus confrontés au défi de réconcilier une politique laïque libérale avec la protection de la liberté de religion de la Charte. Les approches traditionnelles envers le libéralisme et la laïcité ont rendu cette réconciliation particulièrement difficile, en promouvant une vision insatisfaisante, sur le plan conceptuel, d'un espace public areligieux, hyper-rationnel et dénué d'engagements moraux. En même temps…
The Grand experiment: Law and legal culture in British settler societies
In the late nineteenth century, the English legal historians Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland coined the phrase "the grand experiment" to describe the spread of English law throughout the British Empire. For Pollock and Maitland, this was an unequivocally positive process that would uplift settler societies. The work of recent legal historians, however, has alerted us to the more complex impact English law had on the peoples, both settler and …
The Cultural Limits of Legal Tolerance
This article presents the argument that our understanding of the nature of the relationship between modern constitutionalism and religious difference has suffered with the success of the story of legal tolerance and multiculturalism. Taking up the Canadian case, in which the conventional narrative of legal multiculturalism has such purchase, this piece asks how the interaction of law and religion - and, in particular, the practices of legal toler…
On the Book of Job, Justice, and The Precariousness of the Criminal Law
The criminal law has been subject to both increased demands in the societal functions that it is expected to perform, and heightened scrutiny for those points at which it fails to achieve these ends. The resulting pressures put into question the criminal law's capacity to perform justice. Rather than turning to contemporary sources to assess the criminal law's relationship to claims of justice, the author uses an analysis of the ancient myth foun…
Law’s Religion: Rendering Culture
This article argues that constitutional law’s inability to deal with religion in a satisfying way flows, in part, from its failure to understand religion as, in a robust sense, culture. Once one begins to understand the Canadian constitutional rule of law itself as a cultural form, it becomes apparent that law renders religion in a very particular fashion, and that this rendering is a product of law’s symbolic categories and interpretive horizons…
Judges, Juries, and the History of Criminal Appeals
The three articles offered in this forum on the early history of criminal appeals do us the great service of adding much of interest on this important but neglected issue in the development of Anglo–North American criminal procedure. The opaqueness of the legal history of criminal appeals stands in stark contrast to their centrality and apparent naturalness in contemporary criminal justice systems in England, Canada, and the United States. These …
The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination
In much contemporary constitutional thought the exercise of state power unbounded by or contrary to the law is nothing other than the failure of justice in the constitutional order. Yet it has not always been so. For a substantial period of common-law legal history the exercise of judgment despite the law was viewed as essential to seeing that justice was done. This article argues that attention to the imaginative architecture of our criminal jus…
Religious Diversity, Education, and the “Crisis” in State Neutrality
Education—and particularly public education—has become a crucible for the relationship between state and religious diversity, a principal site for contemporary debates about the meaning of secularism and the management of religious difference. This is so across a variety of national traditions, and despite wide differences in the historical and “emotional inheritances” surrounding the configuration of law, politics, and religion. Through an explo…
The Virtues of Law in the Politics of Religious Freedom
The moral force and capacity for inspiration of both religion and politics alike arise in part from the sense that they authentically map the world as we find it, yielding claims about how it should be. This paper asks what role we might imagine for law in this “hyper-real” world of religion and politics, arguing that law can display distinctive virtues linked to its capacity for strategic agnosticism about the real. Applying Sunstein's idea of “…
Belonging to Law: Religious Difference, Secularism, and the Conditions of Civic Inclusion
This article examines the appeal to law as the basis for civic identity and political belonging under conditions of religious diversity. Beginning by assessing the descriptive utility of the concept of ‘secularism’, the article argues that secularism is best approached as a repertoire of moves available in negotiating the relationship between religion and political authority, focusing then on one such move evident in the contemporary project of l…
Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity
Freedom of Religion
This chapter examines freedom of religion in the Canadian Constitution. After locating the modern protection of freedom of religion within Canadian constitutional history, the chapter explores the Supreme Court of Canada’s interpretation of that right, drawing particular attention to how constitutional law defines and understands religion itself. The chapter then turns to three themes that have emerged as central in the freedom of religion jurisp…
The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis
This timely and accessible book is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar (Burma) in its historical, political and social context. The book identifies and articulates the principles of the Constitution through an in-depth analysis of legal and political processes and practices, particularly since the 1990s. The core argument of this book is that the 2008 Constitution is crucial to the establishment and mainte…
Être ou avoir son corps: À propos de trois genres de multiplicités chez Ruyer
In “To be or to have his own body : about three kinds of multiplicities in Ruyer’s thought”, Benjamin Berger strives to clarify the place of the body in the philosophy of Ruyer. The body is located at the croassroads of two crucial axes : that of appaearing and that of multiplicities. It is therefore the object where the phenoménology is tied to the ontology, a philosophy of incarnation to a philosophy of living body
Political Theory and the Volunteer: Lessons from Kahn’s Ethnography of ‘Our Unhappy Politics’
This article offers a reading of Paul Kahn’s Democracy in Our America that places this intimate “work of local political theory” in a central position in the landscape of his political thought. The article argues that the figure of the volunteer, as it appears in the volume, holds a space for love and meaning—and for political happiness—that secures for it a critical role in the system of beliefs and practices that sustain self-government in the …
Making Promises: Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Societies
How should we understand promises as public, private, or political commitments? What are the conditions for promise-making in religiously diverse societies with competing jurisdictions and sovereignties? Making Promises addresses how promises are made meaningful not only through law, but also through appeals to transcendent powers across diverse traditions. Each contribution in this volume takes a closer look at specific kinds of promises: oaths,…
Sociology (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies (6 works) · Democracy (5 works)