IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-62006-3_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Economics of Theocracy

In: The Political Economy of Theocracy

Author

Listed:
  • Mario Ferrero

Abstract

As Josephus’s opening quote unambiguously states for ancient Israel, theocracy literally means government by God. Since, however, God is not known to have ruled worldly government directly, the word is usually understood to mean government by a clergy, or a self-appointed group who claim to speak and act on God’s behalf. This will be our understanding of the term in this chapter: a political arrangement by which the main functions of secular government are discharged by a priesthood who double as secular officials. It bears noting that theocracy in this strict sense is by no means coterminous with overarching power of a church or religion; to take a current example, Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by a lay royalty, is arguably more tightly dominated by religion in everyday life than Iran, which is ostensibly ruled by clerics.

Suggested Citation

  • Mario Ferrero, 2009. "The Economics of Theocracy," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Mario Ferrero & Ronald Wintrobe (ed.), The Political Economy of Theocracy, chapter 2, pages 31-55, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62006-3_3
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230620063_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mario Ferrero, 2018. "Why the Arab Spring turned Islamic: the political economy of Islam," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 29(2), pages 230-251, June.
    2. Fabio Padovano & Ronald Wintrobe, 2012. "Theocracy is just another Form of Dictatorship: Theory and Evidence from the Papal Regimes," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes & University of Caen) 201302, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes, University of Caen and CNRS.
    3. Mario Ferrero, 2013. "The rise and demise of theocracy: theory and some evidence," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 156(3), pages 723-750, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62006-3_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.