Interview with Oliver O’Donovan (O’Donovan, 2001)
What did you find when you went looking for the roots of political theology for your book “The Desire of the Nations,” and were you surprised at what you found?
Yes I was, though it was quite a moment of discovery, I think. I came at it from a series of moral questions about the just war, having been well taught by my ethics teacher Paul Ramsey at Princeton. In the early 80s I decided I had to get into this much more thoroughly, so I went back then to the founding texts of the just war tradition from the 17th century and found, to my amazement and delight, not just a sort of just war theory but a whole political theory, a whole elaboration of political concepts that covered a huge range of things and was deeply theological in inspiration. That helped me understand what Hobbes was doing, and when, coming out of this tradition and using this tradition, himself having a great theological interest, he set apart the political thought from the theological thought, creating, as it were, a sort of autonomous structure of political thought that lived on its own, and so I said to myself at that point, “What I’ve got to do is actually get back behind that great division and see finally what was going on.”