HeyJ LVI (2015), pp. 454–546
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The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life. By Bettany Hughes. Pp. xl, 486, London,
Jonathan Cape, 2010, £25.00.
The Ironic Defense of Socrates: Plato’s Apology. By David Leibowitz. Pp. ix, 194, Cambridge University Press,
2010, $64.00/£50.00.
Bettany Hughes’ new book is a work of popular or
journalistic history, rather than of scholarship sensu
stricto. Written both by and for the enthusiast, it
has the strengths and weaknesses of its kind. On
the plus side, it is well enough written to draw
readers in to the narrative and well enough structured to make a good read; on the minus side, there
are exaggerations (often resulting from no more
than her breezy style), occasional inaccuracies,
unsupported assertions, philosophical naivety and a
bit of repetition (the book is written in a deliberately sprawling fashion). The information is, on the
whole, reliable, but, for instance, she trusts the
sources far more than any academic would.
The book purports to be a ‘biography of Socrates’, but it is far more than that. It sets Socrates and
his trial in their historical and cultural contexts,
with plenty of information, even of a microhistorical kind, about ancient Athens both before and during Socrates’ lifetime. She focuses particularly on
his relation to Alcibiades, and on the devastating
effects of the Peloponnesian War on Athenian
spirits before the trial. There are other books that
successfully do exactly this, however, for the same
or similar audience, and one wonders whether the
book is really needed. She is fascinated by the
material culture of Athens, and some of the best
bits of the book report recent archaeological discoveries with enthusiasm (but she goes too far
when she claims that Socrates can be revealed by
the material remains). Throughout, the narrative is
supported by plenty of excerpts from ancient
authors.
Naturally, Hughes’ book revolves around the
central facts of Socrates’ life – his trial and death.
Plato’s Apology – the defence speech he put posthumously into his mentor’s mouth – is the sole focus
of Leibowitz’s book. His thesis is that the speech is
far more ironic than is usually noticed, and that this
leads one inevitably to some startling conclusions.
The first chapter, nominally about the prooemium of
the speech, is actually a justification of his approach.
He finds the jury and Socrates so far apart that Socrates is bound to lie to them; he finds that Socrates
will speak on two levels at once, for the uninitiated
jury and for the more enlightened, or ‘careful’, members of the audience (see e.g. p. 59); this is irony,
and the method of leaving a trail of hints is a good
teaching method because it allows us to discover for
ourselves. In other words, Leibowitz has cleverly
found a way of justifying his Straussian agenda, to
read Apology as a text with subterranean layers that
can only now be revealed.
Subsequent chapters proceed by minute interrogation of the text, in such an orderly fashion that it
reads like an extended commentary. Sometimes the
questions Leibowitz asks are fresh and interesting;
sometimes, they are not the kinds of questions an
author could conceivably expect to be asked of his
text, and therefore come close to the documentary
fallacy of asking questions from outside the universe of the text. The same goes for his frequent
reference to other dialogues as aids to understanding Apology.
But in actual fact, despite his somewhat tortuous approach, most of Leibowitz’s conclusions
are unsurprising. Mainly, he rediscovers the
defects that others have found in the speech as a
defence: that Socrates never really replies to the
charge of failing to worship the city’s gods; that
the entire defence is designed to work only if
the dikasts were already convinced Socratics;
that he explains away rather than answering the
corruption charge; that he appears to scorn and
provoke both the dikasts and his prosecutors. For
Leibowitz, the first defect is a deliberate hint by
Socrates that he is in fact a natural scientist,
while the second and third are part and parcel of
Socrates’ speaking at two levels at once. It is
interesting to see how his Straussian approach
reaches the same point as more conventional
methodologies.
There is a good deal of over-interpretation and
explicit speculation in the book, but it is intelligent,
C 2015 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by JohnWiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
V
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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clearly written, and thought-provoking. Plato’s
Apology perennially disturbs its readers; used with
caution, Leibowitz’s commentary will enable readers to discover some of the subtleties and delights
455
of the text, and to puzzle over exactly what kind of
defence speech it was supposed to be.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Eros and Socratic Political Philosophy. By David Levy. Pp. ix, 202, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013,
£57.50/$90.00.
The book is essentially a study of Plato on eros.
Levy devotes a chapter each to Symposium and
Phaedrus, the two main dialogues on love, but also
to Republic, because it seems to disparage love,
while the other two dialogues praise it. The political dimension promised by the book’s title emerges
as Levy considers Plato’s position on the family in
Republic, which appears to involve a suppression
of erotic attachments, and the role of eros in a
tyrant’s soul. Levy’s overall intentions are to reconcile the apparent discrepancies between Plato’s
accounts of eros, and to show the relation of eros
to political life.
The reconciliation he seeks is not that of developmentalism, such that Plato’s views on eros
evolved over time. He believes that there is a common core to the various passages on eros, and in
fact that Plato restricts the term eros to interpersonal relationships, leaving the philosophic life
‘profoundly unerotic’ (8). This is because eros
opens us to the gods, and religious beliefs may, in
their irrationality, oppose philosophy and so
threaten the rule of the philosopher kings.
It seems to me that certain aspects of this project are radically ill-conceived. Levy’s attitude
towards love is post-romantic. He claims (2) that
‘lovers for millennia have believed that Plato
understood the depths of their own hearts’, when a
highly influential paper by Vlastos took Plato to
task precisely for the impersonality of his approach
to love; he claims (4) that the family is an arena
for eros, which is very far from clear in a preHellenistic Greek context. And Levy’s original
claim, that the philosophic life is unerotic, clashes
with a number of passages in the dialogues where
eros and philosophy are linked, such as Gorgias
481d. At Republic 474c-475c, 485a-e, 490b and
499c Plato says explicitly that his philosopherrules must be gripped by eros for philosophy. So
far from being threatened by eros, they make use
of its energy. Levy pays insufficient attention to
these passages.
So, his study of Republic (Chapter 1) concludes
by attempting to detach eros from the philosophic
life and by connecting it instead to irrational religious beliefs. But what is this connection? Levy
finds the answer in Phaedrus (Chapter 2): thanks to
its eros, the soul grows wings that take it up to the
gods. But this conclusion again operates in something of a vacuum: yes, granted that the soul’s
wings take it up to the level of the gods, but they
also allow it to see the Forms. In other words, in
Phaedrus too, eros is central to the philosophic life.
Levy’s study of Symposium (Chapter 3) faces the
problem that the ascent passage, in which the ascent
is apparently motivated by eros, is surely a philosopher’s ascent. So how will he detach eros from the
philosophic life this time? He does so by restricting
the domain of eros, properly speaking, to interpersonal relationships, and then noting that during the
ascent the aspirant moves away from interpersonal
relationships (which is in itself a controversial interpretation). But, again, it seems to me that this position can be maintained only at some distance from
the text, for it seems explicit that eros governs the
entire ascent from beginning to end. Even if the
term does not appear for a page or two of the text,
the ascent passage begins, obviously, with a strong
emphasis on eros, and ends with the general conclusion that ‘in the business of acquiring immortality
[i.e. becoming a philosopher] it would be hard to
find a better partner than eros’ (212b).
While I disagree fundamentally with much of
this book, it must be said that, unlike the wilful
obfuscation practised by many of its postmodern
peers, it is at least well written. But the main theses seem to me to be so flawed that I can only recommend caution in approaching the book.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
New Essays on Plato: Language and Thought in Fourth-century Greek Philosophy. Edited by Fritz-Gregor
Herrmann. Pp. viii, 227, Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006, £45.00.
The essays in this volume stem from an unthemed
Plato conference in Glasgow in 2002. The editor
points out that all the contributors take words,
phrases and concepts as the foundation of their
studies, but that is hardly a unique tactic, and the
book is best approached simply as a collection of
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good essays, by some of the best (mainly younger)
scholars working on Plato today.
R.F. Stalley considers how Plato handles the
issues surrounding the familiar distinction between
law and justice in four early dialogues. He finds
that uncertainties and unclarities in Euthyphro,
Apology and Crito are all resolved in Gorgias:
while recognizing a higher order of justice which
human laws could violate, Plato also recognizes
that some laws embody principles that are fundamental to legal order of any kind; it is in one’s
interest to observe proper laws because doing so
maintains good order in one’s soul. Verity Harte
teases some useful insights into Plato’s epistemology out of his analogy of mistaking something for
something else which it resembles. In what
amounts to little more than an extended footnote,
Herrmann then traces the history of the word ousia
in Plato’s early dialogues, distinguishing its usage
as a metaphysical term, referring to what something really is, from a usage that is closer to its
everyday meaning as ‘property’. The former usage
Herrmann claims derives from Philolaus.
In a packed, interesting paper, Stefan B€uttner
revisits the tripartite soul. He finds that the three
parts are aspects of a single soul; that the soul’s
essential cognitive function is to distinguish things
(which it therefore does in three different ways);
that the distinction between feeling and thinking is
modern and should not be imposed on Plato, for
whom all forms of cognition involve feeling; and
that the three parts of the soul therefore desire their
appropriate pleasures. Antony Hatzistavrou tackles
the old question of whether rulership compromises
the philosopher-king’s happiness and argues that it
doesn’t, because a philosopher-king is at least in
part fulfilled by rulership. This is not an original
conclusion, but he approaches the matter by finding
an implicit distinction in Plato’s use of the word
physis, as ‘natural capacity’ or ‘developed personality’. Patricia Clarke conducts a largely linguistic
enquiry into Theaetetus 152a, and concludes that it
would be wrong to restrict Protagoras’s view to
beliefs, rather than perceptions, or some combination of the two.
Against the run of recent commentary, Vasilis
Politis defends a ‘tiered’ interpretation of Sophist
248e-249d, that makes it at least compatible with
Plato’s middle-period ontology. Of course, if correct, this raises more questions than it answers, but
the paper is well argued. Andrew Mason introduces
the curious, but possibly correct notion of ‘degrees
of eternity’ to solve a puzzle in Timaeus: how
Plato can think of both the changing world as a
whole and the changeable forms as eternal. Finally
Stephen Halliwell challenges the view (powerful
support for the traditional way of reading Plato’s
dialogues) that Aristotle regarded the views put forward by Socrates (and others) in Plato’s dialogues
as Plato’s own. Much of the paper considers a single sentence in Aristotle (Politics 1265a10-13), and
concludes that while Aristotle was impressed with
Plato’s style, he was less inclined to attribute the
ideas to the author, rather than just to engage with
them as ideas.
One of the contributors mentions in a note that
her paper had been given at, among other venues,
the ‘Old Chestnuts’ Greek philosophy seminar at
King’s College, London. By and large each of
these papers revisits well-trodden territory. This
makes the volume as a whole seem solid rather
than exciting – but ‘solid’ has a lot to commend it
in times when so much flaky stuff is being written
about Plato.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
The Painter of Constitutions: Selected Essays on Plato’s Republic. Edited by Mario Vegetti, Franco Ferrari and
Tosca Lynch. Pp. 344, Sankt Augustin, Academic Verlag, 2013, e54.00.
Within the scholarly community, the strongest
argument for the adoption of Esperanto, or (better)
the revival of Latin as a common language, is
based on the frustration of being unable to read
others’ work, communicate freely at conferences,
and so on. Many English-speaking scholars are
admirably fluent in one or more modern languages,
but there are always languages with which one
struggles, resulting in the uncomfortable feeling
that one has missed nuances intended by the writer
or speaker. In ancient philosophy, in addition to all
the European languages, there is good work going
on in Japanese and I have heard that the field is
opening up in China too.
The frustration is increased, naturally, the more
important the foreign-language work. One of the most
impressive projects in ancient philosophical studies in
Italy over recent years has been the publication, in
seven fat volumes, of a multi-authored commentary
on Plato’s Republic, that perennial source of scholarly
interest, under the general editorship of Mario
Vegetti. Each of these volumes contains an introduction, an annotated translation of whichever book or
books are covered by that volume, followed by a
BOOK REVIEWS
series of interpretative essays by various hands. The
book here under review is a selection of fifteen of
these essays (not always quite under their original
Italian titles), culled from all seven volumes. The
book consists of a very brief preface, the essays, and
then a combined bibliography. The essays tend to be
introductory rather than arguments for abstruse theses,
and so should in theory be good for students, but density of expression, combined with the occasional
grammatical error and infelicity in the translations
somewhat hinder comprehension.
Vegetti demonstrates the importance of Thrasymachus’ contribution; the entire dialogue is a
response to him. Gastaldi gives us a thorough evaluation (in 45 pages) of Plato’s criticisms of poetry as
imitative and his project to revise such work for the
purposes of his ideal city. Calabi (in 7 pages) reads
the Noble Lie as Plato’s attempt to provide the city
with a founding myth. De Luise and Farinetti tackle
the question of ‘the unhappiness of the guardians
and the happiness of the polis’; they grasp the nettle
and accept that the guardians must sacrifice some of
their happiness, or learn to redefine their happiness,
for the sake of the greater good.
Vegetti next gives us a sound response to the
question whether Plato intended his ‘ideal city’ to
be practicable: it is not in itself practicable, but as
a paradigm it has practical effects. In a similar
mode, Ferrari argues that the apparent uselessness
of Forms for guiding politicians working in the
real world is offset by their acting as paradigms
(and so that the two-world theory remains valid).
Next, Vegetti surveys the multiple functions of the
Form of the Good in Republic, and then Ferrari
focuses on its role as cause – as final cause of
human action, but also as responsible for knowledge of Forms and the being of Forms. In the
course of his discussion, Ferrari considered the Sun
metaphor; next Repellini turns to the Line and the
457
Cave, in a speculative attempt to align the different
phases or stages of the two images.
Vegetti next considers ‘dialectics’ as a methodical ascent to the Idea of the Good and descent to
its application, via the interrelated network of
Forms now seen as good. Its function is not just
epistemological – guaranteeing the veracity of
beliefs – but also ethical, in that it provides a basis
for connecting truth with value. Cattanei next surveys the state of mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, stereometry) in Plato’s time and the reforms he
was proposing so that the mathematical sciences
would not just draw philosophers away from contemplating the material world, but would also be
useful in warfare. Plato’s remarks on harmonics
receive their own chapter, with an essay by
Meriani, highlighting Plato’s disdain for an empirical approach to the subject.
Bertelli considers Plato’s criticism of democracy
and oligarchy, against the background of Plato’s
own experiences as a citizen of Athens, and snippets of information from other dialogues. Against a
trend of recent scholarship, he finds Plato totally
opposed to democracy, as well as oligarchy.
Gastaldi rightly sees the happiness of the just man
(proof of which is the whole point of Republic) as
lying in his psychic harmony. Finally (in a rather
better translated contribution than most), Fronterotta considers Plato’s language in Book 10 in so
far as it seems to imply that the Forms are created
by some demiurge and concludes that this is a
metaphor, useful to persuade ordinary, nonAcademic readers.
There is enough here to whet the appetite, and
make those of us who struggle with Italian wish
we could now go on to the main course, the sevenvolume version.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Ancient Approaches to Plato’s Republic. Edited by Anne Sheppard. Pp. v, 137, London: Institute of Classical
Studies, 2013, £24.00.
Confining itself strictly to the reception of Plato’s
Republic by ancient authors (rather than Byzantine or medieval authors, say), this slim volume
contains seven disparate essays arising from a
London seminar series some years ago. The
introduction is brief and uninformative, then there
are the seven chapters, then an index of passages
cited.
John Finamore surveys the passages of De anima
where Aristotle criticizes the Platonic idea that the
soul has parts. He concludes that Aristotle’s fundamental notion is that, given the range and complexity
of psychic faculties, the soul is too complex to be
encapsulated in just three parts.
Jed Atkins shows that, rather than seeing, as
the majority of modern scholars do, some deep
incompatibilities between Republic and Laws,
Cicero acknowledged their differences but saw
them as complementing each other, as Aristotle
and a few modern scholars do. He took Republic
458
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to be largely about constitutions (and of course
especially the ‘best’ one, Kallipolis), and Laws,
being largely about laws, as the completion of
Republic.
J.G.F. Powell argues that Cicero’s engagement
with Plato in De re publica and De legibus is far
more than ‘ornamental’. So far from rejecting
Plato’s whole approach, his engagement was substantive and profound, and he believed that he was
fundamentally involved in the same project as
Plato: hence the homage of the book titles.
The Middle Platonist view of how much of life is
predetermined was heavily influenced by their reading of the Myth of Er that ends Republic. Taking
Alcinous’ Didascalicus as a representative text, Erik
Eliasson shows that the situation is not quite so
straightforward, arguing that Alcinous reflects two
different readings of the myth and gives two different
versions of how much or little of life is ‘up to us’.
James Wilberding also considers the Myth of Er,
but now we are among the Neoplatonists. On
Porphyry’s interpretation of the myth, souls do not
specify their next incarnation in detail, but only in
broad outline. Wilberding approves of this interpretation and recommends it to us as satisfying what
we have been led to expect from the myth given
its role in Republic.
Anne Sheppard supplies some brief prolegomena
to Proclus’ little-studied commentary on Republic,
which comes in the form of a series of seventeen
essays. She outlines their content and speculates
that twelve of them were delivered as a course of
lectures, and that the rest, with disparate contents,
were added later.
Finally, Sebastian Moro Tornese reflects on the
role of music in Proclus’ commentaries on Timaeus
and Republic. He pulls Proclus’ comments together
and argues that they are essentially triadic – that
music has the power to lead the soul from the sensible to the intelligible via an intermediary stage
where nous is awoken and the soul is oriented
(attuned) towards intelligible harmony.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Plato: Republic 1-2.368c4. Edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Chris Emlyn-Jones. Pp. vi, 194,
Oxford, Oxbow (Aris & Phillips Classical Texts), 2007, £18.00.
For many years now, Aris & Phillips have published a series of editions of classical texts, philosophical or otherwise, consisting basically of
introduction, text with facing English translation,
and commentary. The series broadly seems to be
aimed at undergraduates and graduates with some
knowledge of the relevant language, though the
quality of the series is such that scholars working
in the field always profit as well. This new edition
of the opening moves of Plato’s Republic fits perfectly into the series, and will, I am sure, prove
just as valuable as many of its shelf-fellows.
Emlyn-Jones’s choice of text makes good sense,
but an unusual book title! The first book of Republic approaches the topic of justice gradually, in the
fashion of a typical ‘Socratic’ dialogue, or dialogue
of search, by asking more or less amenable interlocutors what they think it might be. Once Socrates
has demolished the first couple of replies, however,
he is faced with a far more formidable opponent,
the sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, who not
only challenges Socrates’ working methods, but
also produces a radical definition of justice. The
movement of the dialogue is thus reminiscent, as
Emlyn-Jones points out (p. 9), of the earlier
Gorgias.
The dialogue is also rich in Plato’s dramatic
flourishes, to which Emlyn-Jones is sensitive, while
sensibly falling short of basing entire interpretations on just this. Thrasymachus, anyway, is made
to express his position with such force and bluster
that it has proved hard to extract a coherent position from his words. But whatever else he says, he
claims that it is injustice, not justice, that benefits
agents – justice being a position of subservience
to the superior man or stronger government, who
dictate what justice is. This is indeed an important
point, and so when the first book ends inconclusively (and, again, typically of the dialogues of
search), a fresh set of interlocutors begin the
second book by restating at least this aspect of
Thrasymachus’s case, and by challenging Socrates
to prove that justice benefits agents in and of
itself, even apart from its consequences. And this
is the challenge Plato takes up in the rest of
Republic. So Emlyn-Jones’s book, which finishes
at the end of Glaucon and Adeimantus’s restatement, serves as a general introduction to Republic
as a whole.
In the introduction, he discusses general questions of style and composition and cultural background, before turning to an analysis of the
arguments. He gives us a charitable interpretation
of Cephalus, and a good analysis of the argument
with Polemarchus, which leads him to wonder
whether Plato is not having certain doubts about
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the Socratic method in general, or at least some of
the arguments he typically deploys. Certainly, later
in Republic Plato has Socrates express dissatisfaction with his performance in Book I. But the meat
of the introduction lies in Emlyn-Jones’s attempt to
unravel Thrasymachus’s position. He does a good
job. He finds Thrasymachus to be generally consistent, holding that justice disadvantages its practitioner, and suggests, interestingly, that at least
some of the apparent coherence is due to the way
Socrates himself is made to pose the problem, so
that Thrasymachus is doing no more than responding to Socrates on his own terms. He also makes
the plausible suggestion that, in a sense, Socrates
and Thrasymachus are arguing at cross-purposes
(p. 24). The introduction ends with the easier task
of clarifying Glaucon’s and Adeimantus’s
speeches.
The text is Slings’s Oxford Classical Text, with
minimal apparatus. Emlyn-Jones lists a very few
textual variants, and sometimes just for the sake of
information, in that not all the variants are not dis-
459
cussed in the commentary. The translation is plain
and modest; for instance, at a couple of points in
the commentary, he expresses approval of slightly
more racy versions of this or that phrase, but does
not adopt them in his own version. This in a sense
summarizes the approach of the whole book, which
aims not so much to set the world alight, as to be
useful. It succeeds admirably.
The commentary, then, contains further analysis
of arguments (those not already covered in the
Introduction), and also discusses points of philosophy, philology, drama, history, mythology, and
general background. We are rarely taken deep into
the text, but we are given a good basis on which to
think for ourselves about the issues raised by these
opening arguments of what many regard as Plato’s
greatest work. This will be a very useful edition
for students, and scholars will profit from the
introduction and some acute remarks in the
commentary.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth in Politics. Edited by Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday. Pp. vii, 248, Indiana
University Press, 2013, $25.00/£16.99.
The intention of this volume is to provide a
multi-authored commentary on Laws as a whole,
or the most ‘fruitful’ aspects of it. So, of the
fourteen chapters, the first two give us synopses,
and the remaining twelve tackle some topic in
Laws, starting with Book 1 in Chapter 3, and
proceeding to Books 11 and 12 in Chapter 14.
But, in their introduction, the editors pinpoint,
as a common theme, the balance between coercive and consensual politics. Hence the book’s
subtitle.
In the first of the two synopses, Mitchell Miller
stresses, via certain key passages, the secondbestness of Laws. Nevertheless, Miller believes that
Plato still hopes to inspire his readers, and he goes on
to reveal something of the artistry and structuring of
this rather awkward dialogue.
Next, Mark Munn relates the dialogue to its historical context. While acknowledging that, as a
work of Plato’s, the dialogue has a certain timelessness, he sees the mood and some details as
products of their times in the fourth century.
Eric Salem guides us through Book 1, seeking to
explain what he calls the ‘murkiness’ of the work.
He attributes this to the non-Athenian setting (not
conducive to philosophy), to the subject-matter,
and to the Athenian Stranger’s need to get his
interlocutors to trust him.
John Russon tackles Book 2, which is concerned with education. Though the educational
system seems quite ‘repressive’ (60), Russon
believes that an alternative picture lurks beneath
the surface. His delving for this alternative, less
repressive, more flexible form of education seems
to me somewhat strained. For instance, if in Book
1 everyone is treated as equal, and yet Book 6
talks of proportional rather than simple equality, I
cannot see that this passage points to an alternative educational system in which an individual
student’s character and needs are taken into
consideration.
Just as Plato sees new beginnings after cataclysms in human history, John Sallis, in a meandering, reflective chapter (which lacks notes and
bibliography), sees Book 3 as a new beginning, a
restatement of the question of the dialogue: what is
the origin of constitutions? He traces four stages
from primitivism to polis life.
As well as surveying the main elements of Book
4 (the location of the foundation, its population,
and the need for a primary source of authority)
Michael Zuckert focuses on drama and rhetoric, not
always plausibly. It is implausible, for instance, to
read the Athenian’s criticism of Athenian sea-power
as merely a rhetorical strategy, when Isocrates was
saying the same at much the same time. I missed
460
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discussion of what seems to me the most important
aspect of Book 4, namely the important theme of
finding the balance between ideal and realistic
legislation.
Patricia Fagan continues with Book 4. She asks
how terrain affects the polis, and what role the
gods play. She constructs a very negative picture
of the foundation, as a closed, xenophobic, inflexible society.
Robert Metcalfe analyses the great preamble of
Book 5 and finds that it would have been more
persuasive, less dictatorial, if it had been dialogue
rather than monologue.
Book 6 is concerned with the city’s administrative apparatus. Gregory Recco returns to the distinction between simple and proportional equality,
shows how it is put to use in the establishment of
the city’s offices, and argues that it maintains the
city in a balance between democracy and monarchy, and so avoids factional disputes, but does so
at the cost of coerciveness, since it is designed to
dupe both monarchists and democrats.
At 803b, in the course of Book 7, the Athenian
claims, surprisingly after all these pages, that
human affairs are not worth treating seriously, but
still must be treated seriously. David Roochnik
investigates this paradox, and finds a kind of ‘oscillation’ between play and seriousness, details and
abstractions. Human life is worth only qualified
seriousness, and recognition of the divine is needed
to maintain a proper perspective.
Francisco Gonzalez investigates a stretch of
Book 8, 835b-842a, on how legislation is to
restrain lust. He finds that lust has the potential to
derail the entire legislative project, since it cannot
be entirely regulated by legislation and coercion
must be employed.
Catherine Zuckert argues, reflecting on Book 9,
that, given human nature, laws themselves are
insufficient to inculcate virtue or the common
good; education is also needed. In fact, she claims,
Plato draws near to the Republic position that,
ideally, philosophers should rule, not the laws.
Sara Brill, considering the preludes on atheism
in Book 10, argues that the soul is not only a
natural product, but has the ability also to transcend nature. The city’s laws on atheism are to
be the means of bringing order to a disordered
soul (if it is not incurable) by embedding it
within the right psychological and political
structure.
Finally, Eric Sanday provocatively argues that
the city founded in Laws is bound to degenerate,
and that its health can be measured by how it
copes with that breakdown. The function of the
Night Assembly of Book 12 is to turn this weakness into a strength – to use it to educate the citizenry in virtue.
I found the quality of these essays patchy. The
two synoptic essays seem sounder than many of
those that engage more closely with the text,
where occasional insights are offset by rather
rambling ‘readings’ of the text, throwing up issues
of dubious philosophical value. For a deeper and
more fruitful engagement with the philosphical
issues of Laws, I recommend the collection of
essays edited by Bobonich and reviewed in HJ
53, 508.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Plato, Aristotle, and the Purpose of Politics. By Kevin Cherry. Pp. xiii, 232, Cambridge University Press, 2012,
£60.00.
Plato and Xenophon were attracted by the idea that all
forms of rule are essentially identical: the same knowledge is involved whether one is ruling a household, an
army, or a state. Aristotle, by contrast, held that politics
was special, and not to be assimilated to other forms of
knowledge. This is the contrast that lies at the core of
Cherry’s stimulating book. He develops the implications of the two positions to widen the gap between the
two thinkers and to sharpen up their views.
But, first, a quibble: since Cherry belongs to the
Straussian school, which holds, among other things,
that it is important that Plato wrote dialogues,
keeping himself and his own views in the background; and since Cherry consistently adheres to
this principle throughout the book (never writing
‘Plato says’, for instance), then the book’s title is a
misnomer, because Cherry would have to say that
we learn nothing about ‘Plato’.
Still, Aristotle clearly rejects Plato’s position at
the start of Politics. This position of Plato’s is
found most clearly in Statesman, at 258b-259d. In
Chapter 1, Cherry develops the contrast between
the two positions. For Plato (or ‘Plato’) the knowledge is the same, and the communities differ only
in size. For Aristotle, communities differ in kind,
not just in size, because they have different goals.
The goal of politics is to maximize the good for all
citizens, and for this knowledge is not the only factor: a person’s moral character is also relevant.
Besides, a politician’s knowledge is not, or not
only, theoretical knowledge, as Plato would have
it, but practical knowledge.
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In Chapter 2 Cherry further heightens the contrast
by arguing that, at bottom, Plato and Aristotle are
operating with different conceptions of ‘nature’. For
Plato, nature is hostile (Cherry’s reading of the cosmological myth), communities form for selfpreservation, and therefore stability is the ultimate
political goal. For Aristotle, nature is benign, and
shows the way for humans to form political communities and work towards attaining the good life.
The stability that for Plato is the end of politics is for
Aristotle just a stepping-stone towards the attainment
of goodness. This chapter raised concerns in my
mind about Cherry’s use of the idea of ‘nature’: the
ancient Greeks very rarely thought of Nature as a
unified force, but as the aggregate of all individual
natures, with their own teleologies, but at times
Cherry seems to come close to regarding it as a
reified global force.
Chapter 3 develops a related contrast, concerning
knowledge and power. For Plato, knowledge is a
rarity, and strict adherence to the rule of law is a
necessary safeguard against the inevitability of rulers who lack knowledge. Since Aristotle is concerned with practical knowledge, however, not the
theoretical knowledge of Plato’s rulers, political
knowledge is more easily obtainable, even by the
majority. This in turn (Chapter 4) shows that
Aristotle is inclusive, whereas Plato limits political
knowledge to very few; Aristotle encourages political investigation as a way to keep improving
things, Plato effectively denies its value.
461
Cherry has done an excellent job of highlighting
the differences between Plato and Aristotle, with
illuminating insights into both thinkers along the
way. In Chapter 5, against the background (see
above) of his Straussian views, he develops a contrast between what he calls Socratic politics (where
the value of inquiry and investigation is fully recognized) and the position of the Eleatic Stranger in
Statesman, and locates Aristotle somewhere
between the two, disagreeing with Socrates that
politics has only to do with individuals, and disagreeing with the Stranger about the relative worthlessness of inquiry.
Finally, in Chapter 6, Cherry widens his scope
and considers the relations of all this to modern
political thinkers. Plato’s position resembles that of
Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Locke, with their emphasis on stability and on politics as a cure for brute
nature. Aristotle should therefore, Cherry argues,
be brought in to help us critique political views
that are based on those of these early modern
thinkers.
This is a brave book, and its bravado has led
Cherry on a few occasions not to devote quite
enought space to an interpretation or argument to
be persuasive. But the basic tactic of comparing
Aristotle’s Politics with Plato’s Statesman proves a
very effective way of illuminating the political
positions of both thinkers.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Aristotle on the Nature of Community. By Adriel M. Trott. Pp. xiii, 239, NY/Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2014, £60.00/$95.00.
Trott gives us a sophisticated defense of Aristotle’s
political thinking against those who would criticize
it as reactionary for legitimating the exclusion of
certain groups, such as women and slaves, from
access to political power; she does so, however, by
going to the opposite extreme and transforming him
into a radical democrat and fanatical inclusivist as a
matter of principle, as the only means whereby the
political community can both decide upon the best
type of ‘constitution’, given its particular geographical, historical, and economic situation, and the best
means to get there (‘deliberation’). Maintaining such
an ‘open’ process becomes the state’s main concern
until it reaches Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, with
something like democratic capitalism as the official
policy with a strong socialist ‘safety-net’ to catch
the weak and vulnerable who ‘fall through the slats’
in the dominant meritocratic competition. Such a
process may be a valid criterion by which to measure a state’s success at achieving political justice,
but what happened to Aristotle as the cool, nonideological political scientist, strategist, and physician who recognizes the ‘polis’ or communal living
as the inevitable fate of any group of humans who
want to advance to the stage of division of labour
so that they can offer themselves a version of the
‘good life’ better than each person or family doing
everything for itself? Aristotle’s discussion of the
strengths and weaknesses of the different types of
political ‘constitution’ was more shrewd and disinterested, preferring to avoid the worst, in the form
of political revolution and public violence, than to
achieve the best, for which all he felt the state could
do was to supply the proper conditions, including a
reliable material base and political stability, leading
to a reasonable amount of leisure allowing for the
development of good habits, education, and political
discussion. One misses with Trott any discussion of
Aristotle’s awareness of the difficulty for a state to
flourish without a large middle class, which allows a
462
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majority of its citizens to adopt a point of view in
their deliberations that seeks what is best for the
state as a whole, as distinct from their personal class
or economic interest (the difference between a ‘polity’ and a ‘democracy’, the latter being only ‘the
best of the worst’). Without that, even a fully ‘inclusive’ democracy cannot save itself from descending
into a partially-camouflaged and undeclared ‘civil
war’ between two ‘states’ that exist beneath the
cover of one, each with a radically different ‘end’
for the constitution to aim at, with ‘deliberation’
taking the form of a struggle over who becomes
‘qualified’ to exercise the franchise. Trott’s strength
is in showing Aristotle’s consistency in invoking
‘nature’ as an internal source of movement at every
level from the lowest biological specimen, through
the human person with their use of reason (whose
products are thus not merely ‘conventional’ or
‘artificial’ as in the regnant Social Contract interpretation, but fully ‘natural’ as well), up to the political
community as it debates its own primary institutions.
The latter remain ‘open’, negotiable, and flexible as
Trott emphasizes, but in the subsidiarity that
Aristotle recognizes as conditioning the human
development towards excellence, there is no ‘formula’ the state can adopt to guarantee success, but
only maxims and recipes for avoiding disaster.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy. Edited by Verity Harte and Melissa Lane. Pp. xv, 399, Cambridge
University Press, 2013, £65.00/$110.00.
The majority of the papers in this prestigious volume stem from a 2011 conference in honour of
Malcolm Schofield, on his retirement. Anyone
working in any field of ancient philosophy knows
Schofield’s work and will immediately have an
idea of the stellar cast of fifteen colleagues and former students who contributed to the conference.
The extra two papers were written after the conference by the two editors. Of the seventeen papers,
two are on Presocratics (Alcmaeon and Xenophanes), ten focus chiefly on Plato (although one
of those is on Protagoras in Plato), two are on
Aristotle, and three are on post-Aristotelian
thought. The chapters are divided among four sections, which reflect Republic 591e-592b: the first
section (five papers) concerns the ‘vocabulary of
politics’; the second (four papers) the ‘practice
of politics’; the third (four papers) the ‘politics of
value’ (i.e. ethics); and the fourth (four papers) an
extension of politics to a human being’s relations
to the gods and the cosmos as a whole.
Following an introduction, the chief purpose of
which is to suggest that the papers in the volume
owe their inspiration directly to Schofield’s work,
Long (A.G., not A.A.) argues that in Republic Plato
changes the terms of political debate in a nonpolitical direction, so as to claim that philosophy,
not politics itself, is what counts. In Chapter 2,
Farrar argues that Plato does not disdain historical
reality, and compares his view with that of the
historian Thucydides, to whom she sees Plato
responding. In Chapter 3, Lane argues that when
Plutarch, in his Lycurgus, claims that ancient
Sparta did without written law, he was writing as a
Platonist (and therefore an unreliable historian),
for whom the rule of the sage was superior to
written law. In Chapter 4, Mansfeld shows how
Alcmaeon’s definitions of health and disease were
influenced by political discourse, particularly
Herodotus’ constitutional debate. In Chapter 5,
Griffin argues that Roman philosophers (such as
Cicero and Seneca) drew on the language of
Roman law to help them assimilate Greek philosophy in a Roman environment.
Part II: The first two papers, by Wardy and
Harte, focus on the Noble Lie of Republic. Wardy
argues that not only practical politics, but even
political philosophy, is bound to involve such compromises; and Harte shows that the problem is not
so much the falsehood of the lie as that it appeals
to ignorance, which elsewhere it is the philsopher’s
concern to remove. In Chapter 8, Denyer argues
that Protagoras had a distinct political philosophy,
in which conventional standards replace natural
ones, which allows for criticism (for its utility, at
least), and which is designed to produce social harmony by producing consensus on the ‘wholesomeness’ of those values. In Chapter 9, Barnes attacks
the idea that Proclus (or any other late Neoplatonist) was politically active.
Part III: Rowett (formerly Osborne) argues that
many of the peculiarities of Protagoras are comprehensible if we understand Socrates to be using
Protagoras’ own tactics back at him. She ties this
in to the theme of the volume by claiming that this
makes Socrates ‘more of a political animal’ (193)
than Protagoras. In Chapter 11, Burnyeat argues
against the Sachsian fallacy: an ideal citizen has
respect for the rule of reason in his soul and this is
equivalent to respect for the laws of the city; therefore, someone with his soul in the right condition
will obey the rules and regulations of his
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community. In Chapter 12, Kraut seeks to restore
the original meaning of to kalon, that is ‘beauty’,
in the Nicomachean Ethics, thus giving ethics an
aesthetic dimension. In Chapter 13, McCabe tries
to accommodate the notion of impartiality within
Stoic ethics; she finds that oikei
osis, since it
involves self-perception, creates an understanding
within the Stoic sage of the similarity of his interests with those of others, and hence a sense of
what we can recognize as social justice.
Part IV: In Chapter 14, Lloyd explores the
application in Aristotle’s thought of cognitive and
political properties to non-human animals and finds
a tension in that non-human animals do indeed
have humanlike cognitive abilities, and yet
Aristotle wants to drive a wedge between their
sociability and ours. In Chapter 15, Warren considers the common ancient philosophical tendency to
think of human perfection as assimilation to God
in the context of Xenophanes’ abstract deity, and
463
shows that Xenophanes is an outsider to the tradition, in that there can be no assimilation to such a
deity. In Chapter 16, Rowe places Aristotle’s
remarks on serving god in Eudemian Ethics within
the Socratic-Platonic tradition whereby traditional
notions of piety are intellectualized, and attributes
his caution in doing so to the memory of Socrates’
trial for impiety. Finally, in Chapter 17, Sedley
argues that the atheistic position criticized by Plato
in Laws 10 was not a product of Plato’s imagination, but was held by certain thinkers, who
remained ‘underground’ because of the dangers of
being atheists at the time, and was based on the
science of the day.
This is an excellent collection of essays, several
of which are destined to become important within
their field, and therefore a worthy offering to
Schofield.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought. Edited by Ryan K. Balot. Pp. xxviii, 659, WileyBlackwell, 2009, £110.00.
This is a boom time for ancient political thought.
No longer the domain of classicists, historians, and
ancient philosophers, in the past twenty or so years
political scientists, especially in America, have rediscovered ancient theories and views. This new
interdisciplinary work looks both ways, backward
and forward. As ancient philosophers have known
for ages, modern theories and perspectives, when
carefully handled, can afford good insights into the
ancient world; and ancient political thought has
enlivened modern thinking in much the same way
as the rediscovery of ancient ethical thought has
stimulated a new wave of ethical theory (‘virtue
ethics’).
The virtues of this cross-fertilization are stressed
in Balot’s slightly evangelical introductory chapter.
There are thirty-four essays in the book, divided
among eight sections, with the criterion of division
being theme rather than chronology or individual
thinkers. The only exception to this is that, for
obvious reasons, Plato and Aristotle get their own
section. The sections are: ‘The Broad View’ (8
essays); ‘Democracies and Republics’ (6 essays);
‘The Virtues and Vices of One-Man Rule’ (3 essays);
‘The Passions of Ancient Politics’ (3 essays); ‘The
Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle’ (6 essays);
‘Constructing Political Narrative’ (3 essays); ‘Antipolitics’ (3 essays); and ‘Reception’ (2 essays).
Apart from the obviously historical section on
Plato and Aristotle, all the other essays are explicitly or implicitly involved in the programme of
cross-fertilization. The starting-point is always
historical: this is a book about the ancient world,
not in the first instance about modern political
thinking. But the very choice of structuring the
book by topic rather than thinker invites involvement in that programme. The authors are sensitive
(some more than others) to ancient texts and contexts, but on the lookout for the more universal lesson. And, if the essays in this volume are anything
to go by, this is a productive approach. On the face
of it, there are enormous differences between the
political life of ancient Europeans and us: for
instance, we believe in, or pay lip service to, the
ideal of universal human rights, which an ancient
Greek or Roman would have struggled to understand (‘You mean slaves too?’). Nevertheless, the
essays in this volume suggest the lesson that there
are timeless truths embedded in all societies, just
by virtue of the fact that all societies involve
human beings living and working with one another,
and raise at least some of the same questions,
such as whereabouts on the spectrum of individual
freedom and state authority it is best to be
positioned.
The programme of cross-fertilization explains
some oddities. There is a section, for instance, on
the ‘passions’ of ancient politics. Ancient political
thinkers paid far more attention to human emotions, and their role in making people model or
aberrant citizens, than their modern counterparts
have generally done. By creating a three-essay
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section on this aspect, Balot is inviting modern
political scientists to take more account of human
feelings. And two of the three essayists expressly
issue the invitation.
In the ‘Broad View’ section, Balot’s introduction
is followed by essays that expose and discuss the
fundamentals of ancient political theory: what politics was like in the ancient world, ideas on citizenship, how secular or infused by their religions
ancient political practice was, and so on. Kurt
Raaflaub’s essay positioning ancient Greek political
thinking within its wider Mediterranean context
stands out, and Josiah Ober as usual puts modern
social models to good use in his study of Athens
and Rome.
‘Democracies and Republics’ explores the differences between ancient and modern concepts, but
also contains some more historical essays (including one provocatively entitled ‘Roman Democracy?’, by W. Jeffrey Tatum, which, in imitation of
Polybius, brings out the democratic elements to the
‘mixed’ constitution enjoyed by Rome). Two
essays discuss the important topic of how different
the ancient Greek idea of personal freedom and
rights was from nowadays.
‘The Virtues and Vices of One-Man Rule’ selfevidently discusses ancient views on tyranny and
monarchy. The section ‘Constructing Political Narrative’ is particularly interesting, with its accounts
of how writers of all hues, from historians to dram-
atists, participated in the political theorizing of
their communities. Philip Stadter’s ‘Character in
Politics’ is especially valuable: a study of how various ancient authors attributed success or failure in
politics, and even civic catastrophe, to the character
of their leaders, as much as to his policies.
‘Antipolitics’ has an essay on that philosophical
fancy, cosmopolitanism; on the reasons and strategies for dropping out of political life in ancient
Athens; and a brilliant essay by Todd Breyfogle on
how Augustine made use of political ideas developed in earthly communities to point us towards
membership of the heavenly city. In ‘Receptions’,
Christopher Nadan follows ancient republican ideas
through Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu;
and Catherine Zuckert considers the work of
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, two (very different) political thinkers who have openly looked
back to ancient political thinking in developing
their own ideas.
This is an extremely valuable volume, a must
for every library; perhaps the paperback will be
priced within the reach of at least some individuals. There is a similar volume available: The
Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political
Thought (2009), with some coincidence of
authors; but the Blackwell Companion is both
better and more thorough.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Reason and Analysis in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Essays in Honor of David Keyt. Edited by Georgios
Anagnostopoulos and Fred D. Miller, Jr. Pp. xvii, 329, Springer, 2013 (Philosophical Studies Series 120),
$179.00/£117.00.
David Keyt has played a long and substantial role
in ancient philosophy, especially ancient political
philosophy, and this collection of fifteen essays is a
worthy tribute.
The book is topped and tailed by a personal
memoir by Keyt of his ‘life in the Academy’ and by
a list of his publications to date. The essays begin
with Brickhouse and Smith reprising one line of
their 2010 Socratic Moral Psychology by arguing, based on certain passages of Plato’s Apology, that Socrates is not the strict intellectualist
he is usually made out to be: even if our thinking is primarily and directly responsible for what
we do, emotions and appetites can affect our
thinking.
The next three essays address Socratic politics.
Jean Roberts tackles the old chestnut of the alleged
clash between Apology and Crito on disobeying the
laws. She argues, in effect, that Socrates holds the
Aristotelian distinction between equity and legal
justice, and so that there is no real clash because
even if he is obliged to obey the law of Athens, his
moral obligation to avoid injustice is not exhausted
by this law.
Next Stephen Gardiner argues that Socrates’
basic political concern was with the very possibility of a reasonable politics. His pessimism about
this explains the naivety of his reported political
views. Much of the essay is taken up with interesting criticism of alternative views, especially
Kamtekar’s.
Merrill Ring argues, to telling effect, that Socrates’
argument in Crito for the wrongness of any attempt
on his part to escape is seriously flawed, in that
neither premiss (Retaliation is wrong; escaping
would be retaliating) is properly secured.
The final essay on Socrates, by Nils Rauhut,
argues that Socrates was not a moral exemplar, in
that, as Alcibiades’ speech in Symposium shows, he
had to struggle against lust. This is so obvious that
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it was stated in a single sentence by G.M.A. Grube
eighty years ago.
Turning to Plato, Allan Silverman, in an essay
that is likely to be controversial, argues that the
Principle of Specialization in Republic does not
depend entirely on a citizen’s ‘antecedent nature’,
but is a product of nurture as well; that Plato
allows for a higher degree of social mobility than
is usually recognized; and that all the citizens, of
whatever metal, are educated for their moral
improvement and happiness.
C.D.C. Reeve surveys the passages in Republic
on the tripartite soul, to conclude, as others have
before, that only the rational part is truly a soul, or
a person, while the other parts are accretions on to
the rational soul. He finds this view confirmed by
some passages from other dialogues.
Gerasimos Santas revisits Republic’s analogy
between city and soul. Arguing that the parts of the
soul are faculties (not agents), he concludes that they
can perform their functions better or worse. Even
reason has a virtue, which is wisdom. From this
Santas concludes that every member of Kallipolis,
not just the philosopher rulers, can be just in their
own way. This paper dovetails nicely with that of
Silverman.
Still on Republic, Mark McPherran focuses on the
Myth of Er, and finds a new way to charge the dialogue with radical inconsistency. That is, throughout
the dialogue justice has been due to the agent herself,
but the myth seems to introduce other pressures on a
soul in Hades, such as chance, which push it towards
a just or an unjust life in its next incarnation.
Christopher Shields discusses Plato’s assertion
that logos arises out of the interweaving of forms
465
(Sophist 259e). He rejects the standard interpretation, that the forms are meanings, and suggests that
they form the deep metaphysical structure of the
universe, which is reflected in a meaningful sentence. We do not interweave the forms ourselves
by forming sentences, but the mind requires
already existing forms for rational discourse.
The final five papers are on Aristotle. S. Marc
Cohen discusses the peculiar concept of ‘accidental
beings’ and their place in Aristotle’s ontology.
Frank Lewis discusses Metaphysics Z6, and in particular why Aristotle uses Platonic forms as examples when he does not believe in their existence. It
is because forms do play a suitable role in Plato’s
metaphysics, as the kind of primary entities that
Aristotle is searching for. Cass Weller argues, from
a consideration of Metaphysics Z11, that Aristotle
thought of a human being chiefly in terms of function and only secondarily in terms of his material
parts; that the material parts must be such as to
support the function. Fred Miller elaborates a
theory of the importance of belief for Aristotle,
based on a survey of his use of relevant terminology. Finally, Charles Young discussed kharis in
NE book 5: he sees it as ‘grace’ rather than ‘gratitude’, because it involves some return on a favour,
not simply its acknowledgement, and he develops
the concept accordingly, concluding that it is fundamental to the health of a community.
It is a pity that this highly rewarding collection
of essays comes with a price tag that will keep it
out of the reach of many libraries, let alone
individuals.
Lakonia, Greece
Robin Waterfield
Christian Origins and the Ancient Economy. By David A. Fiensy. Pp. xvi, 231, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2014,
£22.50/$45.00.
Fiensy has canvassed all the scholarship on economic conditions in Palestine in the first century
CE, weighed and carefully sifted the evidence that
comes to us from different sources, including more
recently archaeology, and presents, almost inadvertently, a devastating indictment of the Jewish upper
classes, including the high priestly families, as
exploiting, disenfranchising, and ruining the Jewish
peasant farmers, creating an army of impoverished
and bitter former free holders and renters who had
been thrown off their land because they could not
pay their debts, who became tinder waiting for a
spark to rise up against their oppressors that led to
the rebellion of 66-70 CE and to the subsequent
destruction of Temple and Jerusalem with Jews
excluded from the city. As Josephus reports,
almost the first thing the mobs did was burn down
the archives where the tax and debt records were
kept. What made the deterioration of conditions
more difficult for the peasant farmers to accept
was the vision of the sacredness of the land, which
was to be each tribe’s permanent possession and
which could not be alienated, regularly presented
to them through readings from the scriptures; the
‘sabbatical’ and ‘Jubilee’ cancellation of all debts
and return of land to its original owners, however,
had been suppressed upon the return of the exiles
from Babylon. The ‘prosbul’ was enacted by Hillel
during the first century BCE precisely to counter
the provision in the Torah for the cancellation of
debts every seven years. Land was the only investment in which to place extra wealth, and one had
to have more land to acquire wealth. This
unleashed a ruthless competition among the upper
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classes of ‘possessive individualism’ that effectively shredded the social justice and national solidarity that was the cornerstone of the vocation of
the chosen people, who through the gift of the
Law were supposed to function as a ‘light to the
nations’. Not only were the high priestly families
no exception to this mad scramble; they became
the chief offenders. The Talmud has nothing good
to say about ‘the houses of Boethus, Hanan,
Phiabi, and Kathros (Kadros)’. However, this process began just after the execution of Jesus; during
his lifetime economic conditions in Galilee, if not
in Judah, were positive and equitable. There seems
to have been modest prosperity all around, and the
amalgamation of small holdings into larger estates
had not really begun. Jesus was calling for justice
within the system, rather than a revolutionary
replacement of the system. His ‘Kingdom of God’,
however, was also inspired by a return to the traditional scriptural ideal of the ‘Jubilee’, which the
messiah was to restore. The Jewish leaders were
unfortunately unfaithful to their own traditions;
with each seeking more, the nation as a whole lost
everything.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy. By Michael P. Zuckert & Catherine H. Zuckert. Pp. xii,
387, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, £31.50.
In 2008 the Zuckerts published The Truth about
Leo Strauss primarily to defend Strauss against the
charge of being the ideological source behind
unpopular initiatives within American foreign policy. This book seeks rather to explain Strauss’
political philosophy from within by showing the
various influences to which he was responding
and to test his philosophy for completeness and
coherence. In this second project they succeed
admirably.
Strauss’ view of the history of philosophy may
be described as a variation of the familiar pattern
available in text books with certain unusual
emphases and consequent tensions that led him to
both striking insights and to possible contradictions. Before there was philosophy, mankind was
served by pre-philosophical explanations of the
cosmos and how to behave, primarily in terms of
‘ways’ or ‘laws’ which an entire community was
expected to follow and which were traced back to
a divine or semi-divine source. This is the realm of
‘opinion’ from which philosophy inevitably begins
and with which it maintains a prickly relationship,
as it attempts to rise from opinion to a higher level
of knowledge or science. Philosophy is unavoidably perceived as subversive by the ‘city’, which is
the only home it can have due to the increased
education and leisure that the city affords and by
the very project to develop an alternative explanation to that already available through the orthodoxy
of the ‘opinions’. Strauss sees philosophy as a
‘way of life’ characterized, as in Lessing’s famous
dream, by a perpetual search rather than a definitive ‘finding’ or ‘system’, which is reserved for
God alone; this itself is controversial, for he is
clearly opting for a modern view of philosophy
rather than a classical one, the latter of which he is
ostensibly urging us to return to. The first philosophers tried to give a naturalistic explanation for
the universe based on reason, which made their
accounts reductive; the differences between them,
however, meant that they were not much of a challenge to the traditional domination of opinion in
the city. Things changed with Socrates who interrogated his fellow citizens about civilized values
such as the ‘good’, the ‘noble’, the ‘just’ and the
‘true’, and raised the possibility that these may
have only a human, conventional basis rather than
an objective one. At the same time, however, he
overcame the reductive tendencies of his predecessors by ‘pulling up’ philosophy to the human level
and opening up a place for teleology, and thereby
the personal, in the realm of the objective. Finally
his fate showed the limits to which ‘philosophy’ as
a way of life can challenge ‘opinion’, and the limited extent to which philosophers can expect a
‘conversion’ by the city in response to or as a consequence of their teachings. This mutual hostility
was particularly marked in societies whose ‘opinion’ took the form of a law which had been
‘revealed’ and would not suffer challenge, as in
Judaism and Islam; here philosophy was still the
most noble life and could be maintained privately
in subsidiarity permitted by the state. However, its
practitioners frequently had to resort to ‘esoteric’
writing to conceal beliefs that ended up conflicting
with the official view so as not to outrage public
opinion. Ironically the possibility of an authentic
philosophical way of life has been lost in modern
period, primarily because ‘modern’ philosophy,
which has been officially granted unlimited freedom of expression, has also ‘lowered its sights’
with regard to the knowledge, science, or ‘conversion’ it proffers so as to render the latter more
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palatable, less difficult, and consequently less
offensive to the city’s ‘opinion’, thereby undermining or denying the possibility of the uniquely valuable way of life it was supposed to be instantiating
for the benefit of the state - as in the currently
influential positions of positivism and historicism.
467
So in freeing itself from all restriction or correction by ‘opinion’, philosophy compromised,
diluted, and finally killed itself. This is a fascinating study.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
A History of Political Ideas: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. By Philippe Nemo, translated by Kenneth
Casler. Pp. ix, 665, Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press, 2013, $36.00.
First published in French in 1998, this book summarizes twenty centuries of ‘western’ writings on
political theories in their historical context. He
does not claim specialized expertise in all that he
treats and relies heavily on other authors for his
material. Specialists may disagree with his interpretations of the primary sources but all readers will
profit from his clearly written overview of the
development of political thought.
Following a general introduction on anthropology and politics, the book is divided into three
parts: Ancient Greece, Rome and the Christian
West. The introduction gives the author’s requirements for political theory – the existence of a state
and of rational thought – and describes the gradual
emergence of these conditions from pre-state societies and sacred monarchies to their fulfilment and
subsequent decline in Athens.
Although the best-known and most influential
works of Greek political thought were Plato’s
Republic, Statesman and Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, they were preceded and influenced by several
centuries of political developments and criticism in
three phases: ‘1. The formalization of notions on
justice (themis, dike) and social order (eunomia), in
contrast with “feudal” violence and excess. . .; 2. A
realization that justice can only be ensured by a
law (nomos) which is equal for all (isonomos) and
that the law must be explicit and written, therefore,
in the hands of men. . .; 3. Then it is realized that
the law itself can be tyrannical and that, consequently, it can be criticized; to provide a basis for
such criticism, a distinction is made between what
is natural (physie) and what is conventional
(nomo)’ (p. 22). These developments can be seen
from the works of Homer, Hesiod, Solon,
Cleisthenes, Heraclitus, Pericles and Herodotus.
Although the Athens of Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle is usually considered to be the epitome of
democracy in the ancient world, according to
Nemo, ‘Plato’s political thought is essentially a
long argument against the very principle of democracy’ (p. 74). The principal failings of democracy
are its tendency to degenerate into mob rule and
the susceptibility of the common people to demagogy. Of the other types of government – timocracy, oligarchy, tyranny and aristocracy – only the
latter can ensure justice and therefore the wellbeing of all citizens. Plato’s Laws provides a
detailed blueprint for an ideal state governed by an
aristocratic Nocturnal Council.
In Nemo’s estimation, ‘Plato imagined that
political science was aprioric, like mathematics,
whereas his pupil, Aristotle, and most of the great
political thinkers after him, imagined political science to be experimental’ (p. 109). Having observed
different forms of government, Aristotle settled on
a variation of aristocracy that he named simply a
politeia. It borrowed some features from the government of the few and others from the government
of the many. To avoid any one faction abusing
power, he called for a three-fold division of state
functions, in modern parlance, the legislative, executive and judicial. Given the different interests of
the rich and the poor, compromise is necessary to
provide stability and ensure justice for all.
Plato and Aristotle were not the only critics of 4th
century Athenian democracy; their contemporaries,
Xenophon, Isocrates and Demosthenes, also rejected
this form of government. Xenophon advocated ‘a
reactionary Spartan-type political program. A return
to the virtues of the ancestors. . .’ (p. 145). Isocrates
favoured a mixed form of government, a nonegalitarian democracy run by a Council of the
Areopagus for which the membership criterion is
wisdom (p. 168). Demosthenes echoed the criticisms
of Athenian democracy of the other thinkers but
Nemo says little about his preferred alternative.
The city-state for which these Greek thinkers
provided models of government was not to last
beyond the fourth century BCE. Beginning with
the conquests of Alexander the Great (336-332),
empires swallowed up city-states and destroyed
what remained of democracy. The philosophies of
Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism flourished in
these circumstances. With the spread of the Roman
Empire, Greek political philosophy gave way to a
very different Roman brand.
Since ‘in Rome, political ideas rarely achieved
expression in the form of general theories; more
often than not, they were commentaries on Roman
political life’ (p. 198), Nemo begins with an overview of Roman history, followed by discussions of
Roman public law and political institutions and
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civil law, and only then treats Roman political doctrines. The four periods of Roman history are the
kingdom (mid-eighth century to 509 BCE), the
republic (509-31 BCE), high empire (31 BCE-285
CE) and Low Empire/Late Antiquity (285-565 CE).
The republic experienced a series of reforms that
enabled its long survival and the enormous expansion of its territory. Its last years saw power struggles and civil war and following his defeat of
Antony’s forces at Actium, Octavian became the
first Roman emperor and consolidated in his person
and his successors all the powers of an absolute
monarch. From 285 onwards the empire became
divided into two, East and West; the latter effectively ended in 565 with the invasion of Rome by
the Lombards.
Following his descriptions of Roman political
institutions and private law, Nemo concludes, ‘If
Roman law was so innovative. . ., it was because
the Roman Republic, followed by the Empire, was
the first truly “multi-ethnic” state in the history of
humankind. Legal expedients had to be invented to
create a social bond between people originating in
many different ethnic groups, and so that throughout the empire there could exist an equality before
the law, which until then was found only in smaller
monoethnic communities’ (p. 256). The result was
a concept of ‘natural law’ or ‘law of nations’.
The principal Roman political philosopher was
Cicero. His contributions included doctrines of society, humanity and human dignity, of law as founded
in human nature, of the state, of private property
and contract and of mixed government (pp. 266-7).
Like the Stoics, he emphasized the dignity and
autonomy of individual humans. The preservation of
individual human nature is the purpose of law, both
natural and positive, and the state’s role is to uphold
the law. The three forms of government – monarchy,
aristocracy and democracy – can all fulfil this role,
but Cicero preferred a mixture that combines the
advantages of each.
Although most of Cicero’s doctrines proved
enduring, his critique of absolute monarchy had no
effect. Instead, the emperors took on the trappings
of Oriental monarchs, encouraged by Virgil and
others. As time went on, ‘the monarchic “legal person” became indistinguishable from the private
holder of the charge, and accordingly the imperium
of the former became indistinguishable from the
dominium of the latter. The state belonged to the
king like his personal property or his family’s
patrimony’ (p. 325). Seneca aproved this development although he encouraged his emperor, Nero, to
show mercy. Dio Chrisostom, Tacitus and Pliny the
Younger also approved of absolutism as long as
the emperor observed the rule of law. Absolutism
accorded well with the divinization of the emperor
which, during the Low Empire, was modified under
the influence of monotheism so that ‘the emperor
was no longer a god but the supreme earthly servant of a single heavenly God, that is, a “vicar of
God” ’ (p. 356). Eusebius of Caesarea was an eloquent Christian proponent of this doctrine.
Nemo’s account of the Christian West begins
with the political ideas of the Bible which, however,
do not constitute political thought in the GrecoRoman scientific sense (p. 406). In their concern for
transforming society in order to achieve social justice, ‘Hebrew prophets introduced something totally
different in the art of government. Henceforth, politics becomes inseparable from eschatology and messianism’ (p. 412). The state is not the instrument of
justice; God is, working through individuals of all
social status. If the righteous do not receive justice
in this life, they will in the messianic era. When the
New Testament identified Jesus as the messiah, it
became clear that his reign of justice will not occur
within history but afterwards. For Nemo, the two
major contributions of the Bible were ‘the eschatological “energizing” of historical time [as linear
rather than cyclical] and the discrediting of temporal
power,’ both of which were unknown to the GrecoRoman world (p. 445).
By far the most important early Christian political
analyst was St. Augustine. His two key concepts for
understanding the role of the state vis-a-vis the
church were political authority as punishment for
sinners and the action of Providence in history
(p. 456). With the fall of the western Roman
empire, political thought virtually disappeared for
several centuries, although churchmen filled the void
with canon laws attempting, often without success,
to assert the authority of the church over secular rulers, whether feudal lords or the new Holy Roman
Emperors. From the 11th to the 13th centuries several unitary states came into being, at the same time
that the church was undergoing reform and reviving
the study of old Roman law. Although there were
inevitable conflicts over jurisdiction between church
and state, both benefitted from the establishment of
a rational basis for laws and the separation of
morals and law (sins and crimes): ‘Henceforth, the
state would be concerned only with crimes and misdemeanors. It would have no legitimacy in matters
of conscience and, in general, in the private lives of
individuals’ (p. 533).
Although Thomas Aquinas acknowledged the
theological genius of St. Augustine, the two differed significantly in their political thinking. For
example, ‘Aquinas undoubtedly continues the
ancient Greco-Roman tradition and disagrees with
the Pauline and Augustinian idea of a direct Godgiven authority to certain individuals because of
sin’ (p. 550). Thus, he rejected both absolutism and
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government based on secrecy. Moreover, human
law must be in accordance with natural law for it
to be legitimate; this provides an additional safeguard against despotism. However, the natural law
is open to misinterpretation and so God has
revealed the divine law to provide certainty on
doctrinal and moral issues.
During the 14th and 15th centuries the supremacy
of the church over the state was successfully challenged by writers such as Dante, Marsilius of
Padua and William of Ockham and by the heads of
increasingly powerful states in France, Germany,
Spain and Italy. Although attempts by the advocates of conciliarism to restrict papal absolutism
ultimately failed, in several states (e.g., England)
political absolutism met with at least partially successful resistance. This period also saw the rise of
millenarian movements in many parts of Europe
469
that rejected, often violently, the political and intellectual developments that were taking place in both
church and state.
Nemo’s history ends rather abruptly, likely
because it has been followed by an even longer
companion volume, A History of Political Ideas
in the Modern Era and Contemporary Times
(2002). Some of the secondary sources on
which he relies heavily were written many decades ago but he does refer to contemporary
authors (e.g., Rene Girard) as well. Although
the common practice of multiple authorship on
topics such as this can provide more specialized
treatment, an important advantage of a single
authored volume like Nemo’s is its unity of
style and approach.
University of Ottawa
John R. Williams
Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam. By Neguin Yavari. Pp. vii, 197,
London, Hurst, 2014, £35.00.
Yavari is offended with the current state of Western political science, especially the ‘Cambridge
School’ represented by Quentin Skinner and J.G.A.
Pocock, which posits the separation of religion and
kingship that occurred in the Enlightenment West
as the terminus ad quem that all forms of society
and all stages of political development are working
their way towards. These secular values are held to
have universal validity; this consigns the Muslim
world, which has not gone through such an
‘Enlightenment’ and is wary of much of what it
notices in this supposedly ‘eschatological’ stage of
world history, to a stubbornly, perplexingly, and
deliberately arrested or ‘un-modern’ phase of
development. She joins Armando Salvatore in arguing that ‘[t]he purportedly anti-modern, or at least
modernity resistant, role of Islam’ is a symptom of
the reluctance of Western sociological discourse ‘to
attribute a transformative potential to non-Western
social formations, with a corresponding devaluation
of their religious and more broadly cultural traditions.’ (quoted pp. 150-1) She puts forth a rich
banquet from the genre known as ‘Mirror of Princes’ or advice given to rulers to argue the contrary,
that Islam had and has its own way of giving
instruction and imparting corrections to rulers who
are failing to rule correctly, and that such correction is done in the name, not of religious orthodoxy, but of a Reason fully as secular as anything
known in the West, a Reason that specifies the
order and place of religion rather than the other
way around, and that is operating out of a different,
but fully respectable model of political develop-
ment that is not inherently inferior, but sees itself
rather as superior, to the social breakdown, individual aimlessness, and moral decay it notices accompanied the ‘triumph’ of the abstract values of the
rights of man, democracy, and liberalism in the
West.
All this can be conceded, as well as the grace
and artistry of the ‘anecdotes’ (or ‘parables’) told
about rulers and viziers who are deliberately posited as living long in the past or far away (to
allow a disinterested approach to the lesson), and
of the ‘animal fables’ which again leave it to the
ruler – or potential reader – to interpret the story
in a way that best fits their own situation – thus
imparting correction in the gentlest, most respectful, and self-initiated way possible, rather than
delivering a thunderous moral in an external,
heavy-handed fashion. Further, the political ruler
must always operate in tandem with the religious
authority, even if he specifies the latter’s proper
‘place’; banishing the latter completely would
immediately deprive his dynasty of legitimacy in
the eyes of the population. Still the ruler, even if
he makes mistakes, is to be borne patiently, in
Lutheran fashion; his errors will themselves lead
to his downfall, and man should not presume to
do what only God’s inscrutable Will can bring
about. Strong-man rule is the only game in town,
the only system known or indeed deemed possible; anything else is a non-starter and falls below
the radar screen. In fact, the ideal prince is in
many ways the ‘stronger’ man. The ‘Reason’
Yavari celebrates is a Machiavellian skill in
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survival and triumph over one’s enemies, typically
through asking for advice but never trusting completely even the ‘wisest’ counselor. Islam does not
suspect concentrations of power, but rather expects
and even longs for such, because such is preferable to its opposite - chaos. The price one pays is
dynastic competition and turbulence in transition –
‘when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled’;
and the attempt to ‘educate’ any particular ruler
is inevitably an activity fraught with anxiety and
thus an attempt at ‘damage control’. The West
has opted for a system of checks and balances
that limits concentrations of power; we pay our
distinctive price in an evaporation of cultural
values unless individually chosen. By default, the
reason for the difference can only be that in
the dominant myth of the West, the ‘Son’ goes
beyond the ‘Father’ to accomplish what the
Father wanted to do but was unable to achieve
himself.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory. By Rumee Ahmed. Pp. 176, Oxford University Press, 2012, £50.00.
This book focuses on medieval Islamic legal theory
(usul al-fiqh) focusing on Dabusi who died in 430/
1038 and Sarakhsi (who died probably in the final
decade of the 11th century C.E.). Both jurists were
part of the Baghdad Hanafi tradition, which greatly
influenced the classical and post-classical Hanafi
legal tradition. Most medieval legal theory manuals
have the same structure, the same topic headings,
and even draw the same conclusions. In other
words, the manuals functioned fundamentally as a
venue for jurists to prove that their legal school
was intellectually superior to other, competing
legal schools. Rather than apologizing for the law
by giving reasons for its inclusion in the canon,
medieval jurists used legal theory to justify the
law, i.e., to argue for its definition, application, and
contemporary relevance.
The author then takes a page out of the playbook
of Charles S. Pierce who coined the term, ‘abduction,’ or a study of the facts and devising a theory
to explain the facts. In ‘abduction’ facts are
accepted, explained, and justified, rather than created or presupposed. Justification tries to show why
the axioms and injunctions of one’s legal tradition,
e.g., the Hanafi, are applicable in a particular case.
At this juncture Ahmed makes the important point
that Islamic jurisprudence represents the will of
Allah, hence it impinges on every aspect of communal and individual life. The author notes that the
works of both Dabusi and Sarakhsi are based on
their predecessor, Abu al-Hasan al-Karkhi (d.340/
951) and Abu Bakr al-Jassas (d.370/981). For
example, both jurists use the identical terms and
arguments of al-Jassas to make their case. How
then do Dabusi and Sarakhsi differ? They justify
the same term differently, hence demonstrating that
the application of the shariah can change without
affecting the principles or injunctions. Medieval
jurists like Dabusi and Sarakhsi have a larger perspective or Weltanschauung in mind into which the
shariah functions as a Gestalt or whole. In short,
Dabusi and Sarakhsi differ concerning the function
of Islamic law as a whole.
In Chapter One Ahmed examines the thought of
Dabusi and Sarakhsi in their use of the Qur’an. He
notes that the Hanafi traditions stressed the absolute
superiority of the Qur’an vis-a-vis other sources of
Islamic law such as the sunna or the normative
practice of the Islamic community (ummah). In
regard to the Qur’an, Sarakhsi views the shariah as
both transcendent and universally applicable. He
felt that one must submit to the Qur’an uncritically,
rather than interact with it creatively. For him the
Islamic law aims to engender belief in the hearts
and minds of the Muslim faithful. In Sarakhsi’s
eyes the faith perspective colors the justification
of both the principles and the injunctions of the
shariah. In contradistinction to Sarakhsi, Dubasi
believed in only using definitive, authoritative sources, as opposed to basing divine law on sources of
questionable origin. Context, purpose, and circumstances count for everything for Dubasi in regard
to the application of Islamic law.
In Chapter Two Ahmed argues that the hadith (or
the words and actions of Muhammad) abrogated the
sunna of pagan Arabia before the time of the
Prophet. For the Hanafi legal tradition Muhammad
possessed infallibility in the sense that Allah protected him from error. The sunna of Muhammad
then became available to future generations as the
hadith that defined normative practice for Muslims.
Chapter Three deals with the limits of ra’y or ‘considered opinion’ in Sarakhsi and Dubasi. For
Dabusi jurists can never quite know the divine
truth fully, but only approach this truth asymptotically. The divine truth remains basically detached
from the jurist’s purview, hence no individual
jurist’s view of ‘considered opinion’ is binding on
another jurist. Sarakhsi takes another tack arguing
that the individual jurist does know the divine
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truth. While Dabusi cared deeply about the context and circumstances that accompanied the
application of the shariah, Sarakhsi, appealing to
the transcendence of God, opted for a ‘less critical application of inherited injunctions in pursuit
of perfection.’
What takes Ahmed’s monograph to the next
level is his ability to transcend legal theory qua
legal theory as such. He does this by noting that
legal theory texts must understood in the context of
religious devotion and obligation. In other words,
legal theory texts may best be understood as religious ritual enacted by faithful, pious practitioners
471
and that the basic concern of Sarakhsi and Dubasi
has to do with the application of legal texts to the
life of their respective communities. The manuals
of legal theory attempt, then, to compensate for the
failure of the Muslim community to apply Islamic
law correctly. The author comes to these conclusions by a careful and rigorous study of the text of
Dubasi and Sarakhsi. In sum, this book is absolutely first-rate and it is difficult for me to praise
this book too highly. It augurs well for the future
of the Oxford Legal Studies Series.
Auburn University, Alabama
Richard Penaskovic
Inevitable Democracy in The Arab World: New Realities in An Ancient Land. By Wissam S. Yafi. Pp. xiv, 207.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, $28.00.
Yafi is a Harvard scholar who chairs the MENA
Democracy Group which concerns itself with the
contemporary dynamics in the Arab world and their
world-wide consequences. He divides his subject
into two main parts. In Part 1, New Realities, four
chapters focus on economic, geosocial, technological, and geopolitical realities in the Arab world.
Part 2, Inevitable Arab Democracy, looks at the
paradox of Arab weakness, change, and potential
outcomes, misconceptions about Arab democracy,
and the complex relationship between Islam and
democracy. The book includes an epilogue, a brief
glossary of commonly used terms, a bibliography
and a helpful index.
In Part 1 Yafi argues that because of globalization, a stagnant economy, a burgeoning population
explosion, and high unemployment, the Arab
nations, in particular, have had enormous difficulty
in keeping pace with other countries, externally,
while internally, these countries have had massive
unrest, as seen in the ‘Arab Spring.’ Another element that has to be factored into the equation has
to do with the various governments in the Arab
world that were or are ruled by autocratic leaders,
as seen in Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,
and Tunisia. Although the number of people who
are literate in the Gulf, for example, has risen dramatically in recent years, this has not translated
into an increase in economic prosperity and
growth. Why not?
First, the various governments in the Arab
countries play too dominant a role in their economies, hence crowding out private investments. In
Egypt, for example, there are over six million jobs
in the public sector, while in the United States
there are but three million jobs in the federal government. The Egyptian government cannot afford
to hire any more graduates from their universities
without going into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the
young become restless and disillusioned. Second,
we have in the Arab world a veritable population
explosion, ever since the oil boom. When these
young children mature and graduate from college,
jobs are few and far between, particularly for
women. Third, in the Arab countries many items
like electronics, cars, and food are imported, at
great expense, along with foreign workers who
take jobs away from native workers. Fourth, the
Arab nations like Saudi Arabia have invested
heavily in expensive weaponry to protect their oil
wells, thus contributing to the depletion of their
wealth. Moreover, technology has had a huge
effect on life in the Arab countries. Until recently,
news reporting in the Arab world involved micromanagement by the government. Censorship was
widespread. Thus a tight lid was kept on any
information that dare criticize the regime. With
the advent of cell phones, the Internet, satellite
T.V., and videoconferencing, government censorship is, for the most part, a thing of the past.
Governments have little defense against these
technological ‘weapons,’ which have sufficient
power to topple any regime. Because of these economic, demographic, and technological realities,
autocratic governments will have an extremely difficult time remaining autocratic. The train to
democracy will win out, since its momentum will
make it unstoppable.
How does Islam the religion factor into this
equation? Yafi sees Islam as a grassroots voice
for the Arab world and perhaps the most powerful force ‘pushing the region toward reform.’
According to the Western media, Islam constitutes
the problem with the Islamic world. Yafi argues
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that this is a fundamental error that the Western
media makes, along with thinking that the Muslim law, shariah, is at loggerheads with secular
law. The West feels there should be a sharp
separation between church (mosque) and state,
whereas in some Islamic countries like Iran, mosque (church) and state are one. However, one can
ask whether there is really a sharp separation
between church and state in the West? Has not
the British monarch headed the Church of England for almost five hundred years? Have not the
Jewish lobby and the Christian right heavily influenced the political process in the U. S., particularly in regard to moral issues like abortion and
gay marriage? Finally, it should be noted that
shariah, has existed along with secular law in the
Islamic world ever since the genesis of Islam in
the seventh century. In Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, the shariah is consulted in regard to personal issues, but civil, constitutional, and criminal
issues are settled in accordance with the Napoleonic Code.
Finally, Yafi sheds a bright light on the new economic, demographic, and technological realities in
the Arab world today. He realizes that once the
autocratic regimes are replaced by democracies,
political and economic structural change must
occur, but the ride will be neither smooth, nor
easy. It will take one or more decades to accomplish the necessary changes. The international community must be there to assist the move toward
democracy. Billions of aid must be forthcoming
from the international community, including the
oil-rich Arab countries themselves. In sum, Yafi
has penned a brilliant book, one that theologians
should read carefully in order to understand the
Arab world at a time when an Arab Spring
beckons.
Auburn University, Alabama
Richard Penaskovic
Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: the G€
ulen Movement. By M. Hakan Yavuz. Pp. 300. Oxford/NY, Oxford
University Press, 2013, £21.53.
It is a mistake, the author tells us, to treat ‘Islam’
as though it were a single monolithic entity; rather
it is a series of interpretations of the Qur’an and
the traditions which derive from it. The Qur’an
itself, in spite of the often willful denials of some
‘literalists’, like the highly influential and vocal
Wahhabists, ‘consists of very general and poetic
exhortations toward faith and virtue’; ‘specific
political and social legitimacy and practice’ were
‘always fiercely contested’ by the Prophet’s immediate followers and their successors (2). One of the
most remarkable of the movements constitutive of
Islam in recent times is that which is spearheaded
by the Turkish author Fethullah G€ulen, himself a
follower of Said Nursi. The claim of the writers of
this school is that a renewed Islam may and should
embrace science and what one might call enlightenment values, including democracy; and that the
Qur’an should be interpreted to this effect. They
are radically opposed to the stark opposition often
insisted upon between science and democracy on
the one hand, and loyalty to Islam on the other.
The Turkish revolution brought about by Kemal
Atat€urk (surely, by the way, one of the most
remarkable leaders in the whole of human history)
took the former way out; the influence of Islam
was to be at worst eliminated, at best radically
restricted, in public affairs. ‘Kemalists’ are apt to
interpret science in positivistic terms; the G€ulen
movement, on the contrary, sees the enthusiastic
practice of science and pursuit of democratic ideals
as themselves aspects of the service of God. G€ulen
reproaches the Arabs for ‘generating a negative
image of Islam by reducing Islam to Wahhabism
and Gulf Arab norms and practices’; and makes a
sharp distinction between ‘urban Ottoman’ and
‘tribal Arab Islam’ (58).
I myself wish that all Muslims were followers of
G€ulen’s movement, which I take to be wholly
admirable; but there are considerations which make
me uneasy. In spite of confident assertions to the
contrary by influential contemporary atheists, it is
easy to be convinced that essential theism (our
author would say ‘deism’) on the one side, and the
worldview of natural science on the other, fit
together perfectly; positivist atheism is no corollary
of science, however often it is stated or assumed to
be so. Essential theism explains what natural science at once assumes and demonstrates; that we
live in an intelligible universe, the divine intelligence explaining its intelligibility as such, the
divine will explaining why it has the particular
kind of intelligibility that science progressively
finds it to have - in terms of ninety-two naturallyoccurring chemical elements rather than four, of
mutation and natural selection of life-forms rather
than special creation of each species, of the arcana
of quantum theory rather than a less zany set-up at
the microphysical level, and so on and so on.
Among the many splendours of the Qur’an are passages which may clearly be interpreted as praise of
such a Creator. It is not absurd to suppose that this
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Creator is in general on the side of co-operative
rather than anti-social behaviour - though it must
honestly be acknowledged that faith in God can
have a very different effect.
It is when one comes to alleged special revelations
of this Being, and their specific features, that difficulties are apt to arise. There are shocking passages in
the Judeo-Christian scriptures, as when God deprives
Saul of his kingdom for not committing genocide
thoroughly enough (1 Samuel 15), or commands people not to let any medium stay alive (Exodus 22.18).
But (non-fundamentalist) Christians have some freedom of manoeuvre in relation to their sacred book,
which may be seen in terms of an emergent trend,
represented by the Old Testament, leading to full realization in the New. The frequent divine injunction to
war in the Hebrew scriptures can be disturbing; yet
Christians may properly remind themselves that they
are indeed called to a kind of warfare, but that it consists in a struggle against the powers of evil, within
oneself as well as without, which impede the realization of the Kingdom of God. (Enlightened Muslims
do well to speak in this connection of the ‘inner
jihad’.)
As well as the magnificent generalities, there are
some specifics in the Qur’an too; if Dr. Yavuz can
accuse Wahhabists of some disingenuousness in neglecting the former, they may fling back the charge in
regard to the latter. A few of the specifics are a source
of concern to non-Muslims. (Others are of course
excellent, and sometimes astonishingly advanced for
their time. According to the Qur’an, women are to
retain the property which they bring to a marriage
rather than automatically making it over to their husbands; Western countries did not catch up with Islam
on this matter until the Enlightenment. And it should
never be forgotten that, in the early centuries of its existence, Islam led the world in philosophy and science.)
The typical Enlightenment view, that convicted thieves
should at worst be imprisoned, and in the course of
their incarceration be humanely advised to take up a
less anti-social way of making ends meet, is not so
much an interpretation as a contradiction of the plain
473
words of the Qur’an, to the effect that they should have
their right hands cut off.
There are other disturbing features still which seem
to cling to the religious, moral, legal and political traditions which derive from the Qur’an, and to societies
which pride themselves on being Islamic. There is
what one might call a consensus of Enlightenment
values. These may be a somewhat ill-defined bunch,
but one may safely say that they imply the following:
that adulteresses should not be publicly stoned to
death; that women should be allowed access to education and medical resources; that they should not be
subjected to genital mutilation; and that apostates
from one’s religion have not thereby necessarily made
themselves worthy of death. Whatever the ultimate
outcome of recent reformist tendencies, these values
are at present flouted as a matter of course in many
Islamic societies. On the value of religious toleration,
there is a verse in the Qur’an, to be sure, which says
that no compulsion should be exerted on people in
matters of religion; but there are other passages, like
the notorious ‘sword Sura’, which seem to tell a very
different story. And most schools of Sharia law agree
that a Muslim commits no sin if she or he puts to death
an apostate from Islam. It is difficult for a sympathetic
non-Muslim to be quite happy with the recent statement of a spokesman for Islam, in response to the
aspersions of a well-known atheist, that this fact is
‘unimportant’. It has sometimes been remarked that
Islam has ‘bloody borders.’ I have read of a district in
western Africa, where churches are routinely damaged
and Christians assaulted, being told that they will
have no peace until they convert to Islam.
I wish the G€ulen movement success with all my
heart; but I think that it has a hard row to hoe. On
the other hand, there has been very good news
recently of members of the Muslim community in
Britain and Canada, including some imams, actively
discouraging ‘radical Islamic’ terrorism, and helping to bring to book those who engage in it, or are
plotting to do so.
Calgary, Canada
Hugo Meynell
The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy. By Aristotle Papanikolaou. Pp. x, 238, Notre
Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2012, $27.00.
A blistering attack on liberalism, both in its theological and political forms, is a key element of
the agenda pursued by Radical Orthodoxy, beginning with the early development of that movement
in the 1990s. In contrast to Radical Orthodoxy,
Papanikolaou argues that a clear understanding
of Eastern Orthodox theology embodies valuable
resources for a defense of liberal democracy, for the
justification of talk about human rights, the common
good and free speech, as well as about the separation
of church and state. The most important of these
resources, identified at the outset of his argument, is
the traditional Orthodox mystical theology of divinehuman communion. Against the background of such
a theology, the importance of certain liberal principles
can be illuminated, with the Radical Orthodox
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critique of those principles being exposed as problematic. This book represents a productive retrieval of
certain traditional religious ideas for contemporary
theological purposes. In the process, Papanikolaou
develops a compelling account that stands in tension,
not only with Radical Orthodoxy, but also with some
standard Eastern Orthodox perspectives on the relation between religion and politics.
Rather than regarding liberalism as a ‘political
philosophy that was constructed as part of the modern critique against religion’ (46), Papanikolaou
perceives it as being ‘grounded in the love of God’
(35). His is an account that emphasizes Christian
ascetic practices for the role that they play in
removing obstacles to love, as the ‘kinds of
practices that one needs to perform so as to make
oneself available to God’s love’ (3). This is the
very heart of his argument. While not rejecting a
eucharistic ecclesiology—i.e., one that identifies the
eucharistic assembly as church and the Eucharist
itself as the ‘space of divine-human communion’ —
Papanikolaou argues that such an ecclesiology must
be ‘tempered by the ascetical tradition within Christianity,’ moreover, that doing so ‘leads to an
endorsement of modern liberal democracy’ (56).
Divine-human communion is a eucharistic event,
not something limited to the experience of individuals, but one that has public, political implications;
‘the mystical is the political’ (70). That event is not
something that has been realized, once and for all,
in any particular eucharistic gathering; rather, ‘the
movement toward that mode of existence is through
practices that allow for the divine presence to be
more fully manifested’ (82).
Papanikolaou proceeds to argue further that liberal human rights talk makes perfect sense only
against the Trinitarian background of an Orthodox
theology that conceives of personhood as being
essentially relational. Similarly, he argues that the
democratic notion of a common good cannot be
identified with but nevertheless must be ‘analogically related to the eschatological good of divinehuman communion’ (157). In a qualified defense of
free speech, Papanikolaou envisions how conversations conducted in freedom can potentially deepen
understanding and reduce the risk of demonization;
but this ‘power to shape relationships’ can also be
misused with hateful and destructive consequences
(194).
Divine-human communion is not achieved
apart from God’s love, and depends fully on
God’s initiative. But from the human side it is a
struggle to realize, enjoy and fully participate in
the love that God always already offers. Fulfilling the love commandment, on Papanikolaou’s
view, is not simply a matter of volition, not simply something that one decides to do; it takes
practice. Because the political community is
always removed at some distance from the reality
of perfect communion, Christians must speak in
a prophetic voice, engage continuously in a critique that measures the gap and marks the differences. But they are also a part of that imperfect
community and so their politics must somehow
be ‘reconceived as an ascetical practice’ (197).
On his account, ‘Christian politics must be a performance of practices that either emerge from or
attempt to contribute to the Christian struggle to
learn to love’ (197).
As already indicated, I judge this account to be
persuasive and compelling. I do not regard it, however. as completely unproblematic. I worry, for
example, about Papanikolaou’s apparent hostility to
voluntarism. There is certainly some truth to the
claim that one cannot simply will to love, but rather
that ‘one must learn how to love’ (the author’s central claim in this book). Yet there might still be some
important role that volition plays in the ascetic struggle, so that one wills to engage in this rather than
that sort of practice, to become this rather than that
sort of person. Here volition is not something that
operates just in the moment to shape some decision
immediately at hand, but has the long term effect,
mediated by praxis, of producing determinate outcomes. It is volition nevertheless, a kind of choosing
to love, to engage in love’s practices, even to remain
constant in love.
I also worry about the extra burden that
Papanikolaou places on his argument, not merely to
show that Orthodoxy is compatible with liberal
democratic principles, but rather, that it alone can
provide a fully adequate rationale for such principles. What would be wrong with Christians forming
an overlapping consensus with others who endorse
democracy for a whole variety of non-Christian
reasons? Why might there not be reasons other than
Trinitarian ones, for example, (the pragmatic reasons articulated by George Herbert Mead come to
mind) leading one to conclude that personhood
‘must be defined in terms of relationality’ (99)?
But these are minor worries that in no way serve
to undermine Papanikolaou’s achievement in this
admirable book.
Lehigh University
Michael L. Raposa
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475
Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art. Edited by Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and
John N. King. Pp. 285, Cambridge University Press, 2013 (paperback). £19.99/$29.99.
‘It is difficult,’ say the editors, ‘to describe Henry
VIII wholly as a “tyrant”.’ (p.1). ‘Nor,’ they add,
‘was Henry’s exercise of violence sufficiently
extreme to turn him into a compelling “portrait of
evil”.’ (p.10) Evidently, they have written their
Introduction without a glance at the contents of the
very volume they have edited. Well, let’s take a
glance. ‘There can no longer be any doubt,’ says
Dale Hoak, ‘that Henry VIII was ‘the greatest of
English tyrants.’ (p.62) ‘He hath been known,’
declares a contemporary Protestant, ‘and noted
over all, to be the greatest tyrant that ever was in
England.’ (p.76) The name of Henry VIII, adds the
Catholic Reginald Pole, ‘is notorious throughout
the Christian world like no other for centuries.’
(p.83) He is described by the Puritan Anthony
Gilby as ‘that tyrant and lecherous monster’. (p.87)
Even the Whig historians, Edward Herbert, Gilbert
Burnet and David Hume, agree ‘that Henry was a
cruel, capricious, and despotic king’ (p.128).
Reflecting on their opinions, Swift sees him as
‘one of the worst princes of any age or country’
(p.129), as ‘that monster and tyrant’ and ‘among
all the princes who ever reigned in the world’ as
‘never so infernal a beast’ (p.130). Dickens, too,
dismisses him as ‘a disgrace to human nature, and
a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England’. (p.262) Finally, to all these descriptions one
may add the glaring omission of the famous words
of Sir Walter Raleigh in the Preface to his History
of the World, ‘If all the pictures and patterns of a
merciless prince were lost in the world, they might
all again be painted to the life out of the story of
this king.’
Then how, we may ask the editors, can they condone what the more recent historian Sir Charles
Oman has condemned as ‘the cold-blooded deliberate cruelty’ of such a tyrant ‘that marked not only his
advancing years but his whole reign’? (p.253) Well,
wasn’t he ‘England’s last great medieval prince’?
(p.3) Wasn’t he moved by a desire ‘to display magnificence in peace and war’? (p.55) Mayn’t he be
seen as ‘the last of the troubadours and the heir of
Burgundian chivalry’? (p.55) Mayn’t he be admired
as ‘the heavy Holbein figure, legs outspread like the
Colossus of Rhodes’, as ‘the jolly, bluff Harry, the
gormandizer, hunter, and womanizer’? (p.115)
Doesn’t he mark what historians like J.J. Scarisbrick
recognize as “England’s transition to modernity’?
(p.54) Mayn’t he even be hailed, as the AngloCatholic Maynard Smith hails him, as ‘the Maker
of Modern England’? (p.255) Even the abovementioned Whig historians, who condemn him as a
tyrant, admit that ‘in the long run his acts were justified by the triumph of English Protestantism’.
(p.128) Only, Swift can’t agree with them, on seeing
such a tyrant ‘celebrated as an instrument in that glorious work of the Reformation.’ (p.129) To put it
very crudely, as a contemporary author put it, ‘the
Reformation here in England’ might be attributed to
‘Henry VIII’s codpiece’ (p.176), or what Shakespeare calls ‘the rebellion of a codpiece’ (Measure
for Measure iii.2).
‘Poor Henry VIII!’ one feels like exclaiming,
‘Was he really such a bad man?’ ‘Yes,’ says
Scarisbrick, ‘Henry VIII was not only a bad man
but an egregiously bad king as well’, and insofar as
he may have achieved anything, it was ‘a disunity
from which (we) have not yet fully recovered.’
(p.259) AL Rowse, as another recent historian, goes
so far as to affirm that Henry was ‘the nearest thing
the English have ever had to an Ivan the Terrible or
a Stalin’ (p.254). Such an affirmation is qualified by
a reminder of ‘that historian’s proclivity for provocation and controversy than indicative of any deep
groundswell of historical opinion’, but this whole
volume is precisely indicative of just such a groundswell, extending over so many generations. On the
other hand – for in such matters of moral judgment
there has always to be an other hand – what about,
we may well ask, poor Stalin, and poor Ivan the
Terrible, not to mention poor Hitler? Weren’t they
all human beings? Didn’t they all show a certain
tenderness towards women and children? Weren’t
they variously moved by a patriotic desire to spend
their lives, their money, and their people, for the
good of their nation? It is so reminiscent of a certain
old lady, who had nothing but good to say about
others. ‘Then what about the devil?’ she was challenged. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you must admit he does
his job very efficiently.’
Now, I feel prompted to add, poor editors! Evidently they set out with the commendable desire to
celebrate the fifth centenary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne of England in 1509, and I imagine them farming out the requisite contents to the
appropriate contributors. Only, what have they
reaped but a whirlwind of condemnation instead
of commendation, or at least condonation? And
mayn’t I be accused of having made matters worse
for them, by picking out the plums of condemnation? But that isn’t all. Now, I feel further promptings to point out other plums I was looking for in a
book of this kind, but which I have failed to find.
Even in their Introduction the editors excuse themselves for their omission of ‘any sustained
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treatment of Henry VIII among English Catholics’
(p.4). Why is this? I ask. Because Catholics are
certain to condemn him, they may answer. But, as
I have shown with all the plums I have pulled out
of the pie, almost all of them are Protestant plums.
Apparently, Protestants have been no less loud in
their condemnation of Henry as a tyrant than Catholics, even though it was he who set afoot the
whole process of Reformation in England – when
they would have preferred another to have done so.
At least, in the subsequent discussion of the old
Whig historians or the later modern historians, they
might have made mention of John Lingard, if only
in contrast to Lord Macaulay. Then, on the Protestant side, why have they omitted all mention of
John Milton, who is one of the few Protestant
advocates of Henry VIII, if only for Henry’s advocacy of divorce and implicitly of pro-choice? And
then, delving further into ‘the dark backward and
abysm of time’, if they admit mention of Reginald
Pole (p.83), why do they omit all mention of the
book that drew down Henry’s ire more than anything else, his Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione? Not only was that book the immediate
Catholic response to Henry’s claim to be Supreme
Head of the Church in England, but it also drew
down the royal revenge on Pole’s mother, the
saintly Countess of Salisbury.
Above all, what about Shakespeare? He is only
glanced at towards the end of this volume, and
only for the play of Henry VIII to which he merely
contributed some minor scenes in conjunction with
John Fletcher, and for which he can hardly bear
full responsibility – least of all the final Act with
its dependence on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and its
fulsome praise of the future Elizabeth put into the
mouth of Cranmer. Yet it isn’t only over this play
but over not a few of the preceding Jacobean plays,
that the shadow of Henry VIII is cast – not only in
the characters of Cymbeline as king of Britain and
Leontes as king of the three-cornered island of
Sicilia (as England), but even in the earlier characters of Othello and Lear. After all, if Henry’s reign
has, in the words of Scarisbrick, ‘left deeper marks
on the mind, heart, and face of England than did
any event in English history’ from the Norman
Conquest till the Industrial Revolution (p.54), how
could it have been ignored by England’s dramatist
– apart from his plaintive description of ‘bare
ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’ (in
Sonnet 73), and a romance at the very end of his
dramatic career which is pock-marked by collaboration with the Protestant John Fletcher?
Finally, I have a complaint to make not only
against this book but against so many academic
books published in these postmodern times. What,
I wonder, is the need of a sub-title, when a wellchosen title should be sufficient? Isn’t ‘The Afterlives of Henry VIII’ apt enough as a description of
the contents of this book, without the unnecessary
addition of ‘Literature, Politics, and Art’? Or even
if, as sometimes happens, a cryptic title is chosen,
why does it have to be explained in the sub-title?
Why not keep the reader guessing, as Shakespeare
loves to keep his spectators guessing, so as to
oblige them to open the book and read the explanatory preface? Then, of course, they may well find
it is just ‘much ado about nothing’/
Sophia University, Tokyo
Peter Milward
Rethinking Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan. By Alex Schulman. Pp. 227, Edinburgh
University Press, 2014, £70.00.
Why, oh why, must postmodern scholars choose to
relapse into an incomprehensible academic jargon?
Why must they feel obliged to refer again and
again to the writings of their various academic colleagues to prove that they are abreast of all the
latest books and articles and even unpublished doctoral theses on their chosen subject? And why must
academic editors and university publishers require
the use of such jargon before consenting to edit or
publish such books? Such a book by such an author
is, needless to say, the present book now under
review, dealing though it does with such a fascinating subject as the political theory implicit in the
plays and poems of Shakespeare. (Yet again one
may wonder about the need of such a sub-title as
“From Lear to Leviathan”, considering that King
Lear is but one of the many plays and Hobbes’
Leviathan offers but one of the many political theories discussed in these pages.)
After all, Shakespeare was living and writing in
an age when political theory had become inextricably linked as well with religious controversies as
with the consciences of common people, and he
himself draws attention to the fact that his plays
are presented not just for the entertainment of his
audiences but also as ‘the abstracts and brief
chronicles of the time’ (Hamlet ii.2). In particular,
in his assessment of the political philosophy of
Shakespeare, the author draws an apt distinction
between the impact of antiquity on the Roman
plays and that of modernity on the tragedies and
problem plays. Only by ‘antiquity’ he refers chiefly
to the dialogues of Plato, in which he is far better
versed than Shakespeare could have been, and by
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‘modernity’ he draws comparisons between the
plays and modern political thought from Hobbes to
Marx, while omitting the millennium of medieval
Christian tradition, which was after all much more
familiar to the dramatist than either Plato or those
modern thinkers.
True, Shakespeare was by no means ignorant of
classical antiquity, but his knowledge came to him
not only through the Renaissance with its revival
of Platonic studies in Florence, but also through
the Aristotelian philosophy studied at all the universities. In either case, however, the knowledge
was largely filtered through the Catholic faith of
the medieval scholars. As for the modern thinkers
from Hobbes onwards, concerning whom the
author is again far better versed than Shakespeare
could possibly have been, they could hardly have
exercised any influence on him, though on many of
them, notably on Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, it
was the dramatist who exercised his profound influence – as G.K.Chesterton humorously remarked
in an essay ‘On Writing Badly’, ‘How can we
discuss how we should have written Shakespeare?
Shakespeare has written us.’
As for the medieval tradition which Shakespeare
inherited as his birthright, though it was already in
process of strangulation under the long rule of the
Protestant ‘Virgin Queen’, there is no doubt – and
the author graciously admits it – that both in his
poems (such as Sonnet 73, with its sad mention of
‘bare ruined choirs’) and in his plays (such as especially As You Like It, with its setting in the Forest
of Arden) we cannot help recognizing a deep
undercurrent of nostalgia, as when the sorrowing
father laments over the dead body of his dear
daughter, ‘Thou’lt come no more,/ Never, never,
never, never, never!’ Yet in spite of it all, the
author makes the bold assertion at the end of his
Introduction, ‘I cast my vote with modernity, and
with Shakespeare the modern.” (p.19)
Needless to say, the author goes on to present
his detailed reasons for making this assertion, in
terms of what he sees as ‘the interaction between
emergent English nationalism and the Protestant
Reformation’ (p.138), and the ‘novel religious
energy’ of the Protestant reformers rather than a
‘backward-looking religious tradition’ – and he
concludes, without the shadow of a proof, that
Shakespeare was (as we say) ‘with it’. In order to
maintain this negative, however, I can hardly be
expected to consider all the plays, whether standing
for antiquity or for modernity, and so I may be pardoned for concentrating my attention on two of the
plays chosen by the author for his discussion of
‘modernity’, the tragedy of King Lear, which
receives special mention in the sub-title, and the
problem play of Measure for Measure, which
477
comes in for longest discussion over some 40
pages.
Concerning King Lear in general, the author
makes the unnecessary negation that the play ‘is not
a journey from Old Testament legalism to New Testament agape’ (p.106) – as if there were anyone
making such an affirmation. Obviously, it is a
journey of the old king from the lack of selfknowledge as originally noted in him by his daughter
Regan through a progressive growth of selfknowledge in ‘the school of adversity’ till he comes
to the full knowledge of himself in Cordelia. Secondly, concerning the connection between Cordelia
and Edgar, he proposes that ‘hers is the moral apotheosis, his the secular inheritance’ (p.105), while
going so far as to suggest the further possibility of
‘aligning Cordelia with Edmund’ (p.114). Evidently,
however, Cordelia and Edgar are the two ‘saints’ of
the play leading their long suffering parents to their
salvation. From the beginning Cordelia is welcomed
by France with words that, so far from being
restricted to what is called ‘a Gospel last-shall-befirst flavour’ (p.106), are a tissue of Messianic
prophecies, implying that she is a Christ-figure. As
for Edgar, in his flight from his father’s house and
his decision to have resort to disguise, so far from
being a ‘sadomasochist’ (p.114), he is clearly the pattern of a hunted priest against whom anachronistic
‘proclamations’ are published, ‘intelligence’ is given,
and all ports are watched. As for Edmund, what on
earth, one wonders, is there in common between his
villainy and Cordelia’s sanctity? Finally, as for the
sad ending of Act V, it is here interpreted as a transition ‘not from Paganism to Christianity, but from
religious enchantment to materialism’ (p.116) – as if
anyone had hitherto seriously proposed either of
these alternatives. Rather, out of a succession of ‘broken hearts’ and ‘side-piercing sights’ in Act IV,
recalling the Biblical piercing of the side of Christ
on the Cross (John xix.34), there comes the nonBiblical climax of the Pieta, when the sorrowing
father is seated on stage holding the dead body of
his innocent daughter to the accompaniment of
Albany’s exclamation, ‘O see, see!’ from the Lamentations of Jeremiah (i.12), ‘Behold and see, if there
be any sorrow like unto my sorrow!’
Next, as for the problem play of Measure for
Measure, the author comments that ‘the disturbance
to order is novel religious energy rather than
backward-looking religious tradition’ (p.158),
whereas it rather, and more obviously, consists in
the contrast between Catholic tradition, represented
by the duke turned friar and by the would-be novice seeking admission to the convent of Poor
Clares, and the Puritanical judge Angelo – for
which reason it has been called, by Christopher
Devlin in his Hamlet’s Divinity (1983) ‘the most
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Catholic of Shakespeare’s plays’. As for Isabella,
the author speaks twice of her hoped for ‘progress
towards holy orders’ (pp.183,198), whereas the sacrament of ‘holy orders’ in the Catholic Church is
only for priests, not nuns. He also ascribes to the
mind of the dramatist a see-saw ‘between Isabella’s
valuation of purity as admirable and as absurd’
(p.175), whereas this is his own imagination – if
also the imagination of all too many unsympathetic
critics. Lastly, it is again his imagination that sees
Isabella accepting the twice repeated proposal of
Duke Vincentio, as if she is choosing ‘the secularpolitical world of marriage and procreation’,
whereas the dramatist leaves an ambiguity between
what may be seen as a realistic refusal and an
allegorical acceptance.
Much more remains to be said about the strange,
yet sophisticated, interpretations of this author, but
sapienti satis. It is enough for me to have given a
taste of his arguments on behalf of Shakespeare’s
‘modernity’, whereas, in contrast to what I would
rather emphasize as the dramatist’s pervasive nostalgia, the author fails to admit his commitment to
those whom he himself seems to criticize as ‘the
new political technicians of the age of Bacon’
(p.57).
Sophia University, Tokyo
Peter Milward
Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre.
By Jonathon Israel. Pp. viii, 870. Princeton University Press, 2014, £27.95/$39.95.
Israel here recounts the history of the French Revolution in light of the ideas behind the events. Without entirely discounting the role played by other
social, material, cultural, political, and economic
factors, Israel argues that radical Enlightenment
thought was the chief cause of the Revolution.
Israel describes his work as filling ‘the gaping,
causal void’ left all too often by a purely social or
socioeconomic interpretations. (6) That this void
gapes even in other ‘revisionist’ literature available
about the French Revolution is the reason why this
book was written and should be read. (29)
Israel supports his claims with 25 chapters in
addition to a prologue. These are researched with
attention to primary sources. The first chapter is an
introduction, identifying the central role played by
‘la philosophie’ in propelling the Revolution forward. Israel admits that even within French thought
traceable to the Enlightenment there were multiple
philosophical stances. The true Revolution was
sparked by a strain traceable to Rousseau, Diderot,
and Helvetius, and generally opposed to that of
Montesquieu, Locke, Voltaire and Hume, especially in their approval of moderate British government. (23) The core of revolutionary thought was
characterized by a commitment to rationally knowable human rights with a strong focus on the radical equality of all men.
The following chapters proceed with a joint historical and thematic movement. In reasonable short
chapters, Israel gives a careful narration of the
events of the Revolution. He places the beginning
of the French Revolution in the cultural ‘Revolution of the Press’ in 1788 (Chapter 2) and its close
in the ratification of the New Constitution of 1799,
identified as the ‘Failure of the Revolution’ (Chapter 24). Chapter 23 looks abroad to consider the
impact of the Revolution on Holland, Italy and the
Levant. Throughout these chapters, Israel co-relates
the dissemination of ideas with historical events.
The detail with which he writes means that this
book could serve as an introductory history,
although the intricacy of his treatment will probably appeal most to those who already have an
interest either in the historical events or their propelling ideas.
In several of the chapters, Israel pauses the forward motion of his account to clarify particular submovements within it. Such pauses include Chapter
7: ‘War with the Church,’ Chapter 11: ‘Republicans
Divided’, Chapter 14: ‘Education: Securing the
Revolution’, Chapter 15: ‘Black Emancipation’, and
Chapter 18: ‘De-Christianization’. These chapters
are still written as historical narrations, but deal
with subsets of events and themes. While they supply needed considerations to the work as a whole,
they could be enjoyed individually by anyone familiar with the outline of the Revolution. Since it falls
under the theme of equality, Israel is careful to trace
the role of women in the philosophy and action of
the Revolution but does not devote a unique chapter
to this issue.
In the concluding Chapter 25, Israel reaffirms his
thesis in the light of the evidence he has amassed.
He clarifies the three main ideological movements
present in the Revolution: radical Enlightenment
thought, moderate Enlightenment thought, and an
authoritarian populism. The first of these was the
true spring of the Revolution, and the reason for its
enduring relevance. As an instance of why such
clarification is of crucial importance, Israel distinguishes the bloody Reign of Terror from the
Enlightenment center of the Revolution. The Terror
was a temporary undoing of the Revolution. It was
caused by peripheral authoritarian currents and
quickly reversed, submerged again by the dominant
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humanistic philosophy. The French Revolution
proved the power of a secular egalitarian conception of human life, which, although it was eclipsed
in France, has had an impact on almost all modern
systems of government.
Israel’s sorting, tracing and classifying of the
various strains of thought present in the French
Revolution results in several provocative conclusions. Among these could be placed the idea that
certain strains thought which were influential during the French Revolution should not be considered as truly belonging to it. Israel himself
recognizes that many of his theses cut across conventional ideas. His interpretation of the Reign of
Terror is one of the most obvious instances of this.
Israel also rejects the idea that the Revolution, at
its core, was compatible with Christianity so that
479
the de-Christianizing impulse in the movement was
non-essential. (28) He maintains that radical
equality based on the grounds of reason alone is
inimical to both the doctrines and structures of
Christianity as it was known in France in the
1700s. This seems to be a valid historical claim.
Israel, however, speaks as though real concern for
the good of the people belongs exclusively to secular democracies.
Help in navigating through the multitude of
names and dates referenced in the work is provided
by a glossary-type ‘Cast of Main Participants’ with
167 short entries. 22 illustrations depict mostly
these figures or revolutionary emblems. The book
includes a Bibliography and Index.
Ave Maria University Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski
The Dark Side of Church/State Separation: The French Revolution, Nazi Germany, and International
Communism. By Stephen Strehle. Pp. xviii, 383, New Brunswick/London, Transaction Publishers, 2014,
£38.11.
Strehle has patrolled the Church/State frontier in
four previous books. Basically he thinks the separation of spheres is a good thing, but in this book he
shows that since the Enlightenment this separation
has gone too far and become a hostility. Specifically,
from Rousseau, Voltaire, and the French Revolution
onwards, left-wing and sceptical thinkers have
indicted the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a thinlydisguised ideology and tissue of lies used by the
Ancien R
egime to stay in power. The Catholic
Church made the mistake of resisting reform movements towards the dismantling of hereditary privilege and the promotion of a more egalitarian society
that has been the chief social dynamic of the West
since the Renaissance, and has paid a terrible price.
An equally extreme counter-position has as a consequence repeatedly come to power and erected a
‘wall’ between church and state, developed a Deist
(or atheistic) natural religion and philosophy to
provide a foundation for morals (the only recognized
socially useful role for religion), feigning a false
‘respect’ for the Judaeo-Christian tradition by hypocritically guaranteeing it a separate sphere where it
is effectively marginalized and prevented from having any real impact on society or politics, and insisting on controlling the educational system, whereby
this alternative and openly-hostile view of nature
and history counters any religious influence young
people are exposed to on the Sabbath or at home, so
as to gradually wean them away from the religion of
their ancestors. Strehle considers three famous
cases: the French Revolution, Nazi Germany, and
International Communism (with a fourth case, the
United States, where Thomas Jefferson dupes Bap-
tists in Virginia and Congregationalists in New England to achieve the same result). ‘Only connect’ said
E. M. Forster, and Strehle connects all the dots, supplies a mountain of data, and basically builds an
unanswerable case.
A surprising thesis Strehle establishes is that the
Enlightenment, rather than being a ‘friend’ to the
Jews (after all, Jewish Emancipation occurred as a
result of Napoleon spreading the results of the
French Revolution to the rest of Europe) was actually
the source of virulent and rabid modern antiSemitism. Earlier the latter was a baseless prejudice
repeatedly countered by the Church; the Enlightenment established a ‘ground’ for this hostility by tracing their objections to the Christian god back to the
‘god’ of the Jewish Old Testament, whose irrational,
egotistical, exclusivist, territorial, cruel and materialistic tendencies they held the Jewish people themselves took on. The Jews were ‘liberated’ from their
ghettos, but only if they gave up their entire previous
identity and assimilated, not to their ‘daughter’
Christianity, but to the new hostile and disfigured
portrait of their previous selves and their god – a feat
Enlightenment ideologues themselves thought was
impossible. There could therefore be only one
‘enlightened’ solution to this social problem – a
‘final’ solution. Strehle ratifies Theodore Herzl’s
insistence on the necessity of Zionism: the Enlightenment has turned the modern ‘liberal’ nations of
Europe more anti-Semitic than they ever were before,
despite their protests to the contrary. Don’t believe
them: Sal si puede. Get out while you still can.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
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Statecraft and Salvation: Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism as Secularized Eschatology. By Milan Babık. Pp. x,
267, Waco, TX, Baylor University Press, 2013, £39.44.
In this expansion of his doctoral dissertation, Babık
succeeds in establishing Wilson’s liberal internationalism as a movement to ‘immanentize the
eschaton’, which in a sense is true of all utopian
thought, deriving ultimately from the heterodox
philosophy of history of Joachim of Fiore. Unlike
St. Augustine, who held that the ‘City of Man’
could never coincide with the ‘City of God’, that
‘salvation’ happens along an axis distinct from secular ‘progress’, and thus that good and evil will be
with us until the final judgment, no matter how
many scientific and technological breakthroughs we
make, Joachim fused the two and engaged in Biblical and theological exegesis in an attempt to read
God’s purposes within secular and political history.
Babık overreaches, however, in attempting to lift
Wilson’s program to the same level of urgency and
ruthless, uncompromising dedication to an abstract
‘vision’ or ‘scheme’ that must be realized at all
costs, as was true of the ‘totalitarian’ programs of
Nazism and Bolschevism, trampling the rights of
individuals and entire nations in desperate and
single-minded pursuit of an all-consuming ‘dream’.
What is disappointing about this book is that the
evidence the author musters does not support his thesis. As Babık shows, Wilson’s program with regard
to both democracy and capitalism was reformist at
heart, not revolutionary; he was a gradualist who
worked from the ‘bottom up’ to improve existing
institutions, rather than from the ‘top down’, razing
everything and rebuilding according to an ideal
scheme. Babık has Wilson opposing a Biblicalmatrix approach to the ‘salvation’ of social problems
to one predicated on rational study and secular analysis. The ultimate sources of Wilson’s psychology
were certainly his Presbyterian Christianity, but
there is nothing to suggest that he thought this
excluded reason or secular analysis of the ills that
afflict society. Further, he correctly saw that the only
rhetoric that could move Americans (and hold them
together) at this time to make the painful but necessary changes was one that harked back to the Puritan
Fathers, invoking Biblical and Gospel images extolling America’s vocation in world history.
Babık’s thesis is further unsupported by his reading of history. What fell into crisis during the latter
half of the 19th century was not only religious
faith, but crucially as far as statecraft is concerned,
the Enlightenment faith that reason and Stateinterest could somehow produce both domestic
peace and a ‘concert of nations’ internationally.
In the face of the apparent collapse of these
assumptions, the ‘secular’ option of the totalitarian
thinkers was to ramp up the intensity and rigor of
Enlightenment critique to produce a ‘hyperrational’ vision that alone, they believed, could
save us from the abyss that threatened to swallow
the earth. The ‘religious’ response was to confess
our sinful abuse of existing institutions and work to
purge corruption so that they could serve everyone.
In the wake of the First World War, the League of
Nations could never bring ‘salvation’ or ‘the end
of history’ in the form of a guaranteed peace, nor
could it enforce ‘conversion’, personal or corporate; what it could do, which its successor the
United Nations is attempting to do, is to supply
mechanisms that allow every other option to be
explored before two groups become belligerants.
Babık’s thesis stumbles over its own inflated,
hyperbolic rhetoric.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
Politics and Faith: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York. By Ronald H. Stone.
Pp. xix, 486, Macon, GA, Mercer University Press, 2012, £39.95/e47.00.
Stone was a student of both Niebuhr and Tillich at
Union Seminary and draws upon extremely thorough
research to produce this, the seventh book he has
authored or edited on his mentors, and almost
certainly the definitive statement on the political theology they cooperated in producing, as they both –
from German backgrounds on opposite sides of the
Atlantic – came out of the First World War and in
their despair saw Europe falling impotently into yet
another World War. They both protested the social
inequities and economic injustice the capitalist order
had engendered, which led them to jointly propose a
Christian Socialism; they did not believe, however,
that the ‘captains of industry’, even in democratic
countries, would ever allow such an agenda to be
voted into effect. Protest, struggle, and suffering – as
on the model of Gandhi’s ‘nonviolent resistance’,
strikes (even if officially ‘illegal’), boycotts, etc.
would thus be the order for the day for Christians if,
accepting their bit of the cross, they choose to be
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true to the prophetic strand in their faith and respond
to the ‘kairos’ or ‘season’, as the needs and opportunities of the time are disclosed to them. In this they
vastly underestimated the capacity of capitalism to
respond to the socialist agenda; not under that name
in America, the home of ‘rugged individualism’, but
in effect in such measures as civil rights, equal educational opportunities, minimum wage, progressive
income tax, unemployment compensation, pensions,
medical care, etc., that gradually transformed America in the post-World War II era.
What impresses a Catholic reader is the pessimism
of these two thinkers about human nature, their effectively Marxist indictment of liberalism’s ‘optimism’
and ‘naivete’ about individual egoism and corporate
venality. This bespeaks a deeper difference in the
kind of ‘spirituality’ they claim Christianity calls one
to. For these thinkers it is impossible to appropriate
the traditional neo-Platonic model of individual
growth towards holiness, moving through conversion,
penance, then purification and contemplation, culminating in union (to some extent) with the divine.
Having imbibed instead the secular ‘masters of suspicion’, these two effectively hold that such ‘purification’ (and consequent ‘union’) can never take place,
at least not until universal justice is achieved – which
incidentally never arrives. To move towards personal
holiness ‘prematurely’ is to escape into ‘false consciousness’ and to shirk or evade one’s obligation to
participate instead in the social struggle. Human
nature is so infected with sinfulness that all ideas are
polluted from their source with self-interest, and all
institutions are inherently distorted by a desire for
increased power. No amount of ‘conversion’ can
remove this.
481
A Catholic could of course participate in the
same struggles for social equality and economic
justice as ‘spinoffs’ from having moved towards
greater union with the deity, but not as a guiltobsessed, embarrassed long-term preparation for
such, nor as a compensatory substitute for having
failed to achieve – or even having failed to try for
– such union. One could cynically suggest that
these thinkers excuse their lack of personal conversion on the grounds that it’s impossible anyway –
so why make the effort? The amazing cornucopia
of the post-WWII industrial output challenges their
blanket discounting of the capacity of capitalist
entrepreneurship to supply the material means for
a fulfilling life to the entire world’s population.
More seriously, given Protestantism’s claim to
return to a pristine, pre-institutional ‘authentic’
Christian position, both St. Paul and St. Augustine
(and all the early Church Fathers) lived in a world
where slavery was an accepted social institution,
whose eventual overthrow they did not envisage.
Paul advises slaves to obey their masters; more
importantly he does not consider their condition
an impediment to their becoming good Christians,
nor does he see their embrace of Christianity as a
‘flight into false consciousness’ or an ‘opiate of
the proletariat’ as Marx would later brand it.
These two Protestant thinkers make justice a precondition for turning to the agenda of personal
holiness – which conveniently never arrives –
rather than a consequence and practical offshoot
of such - which should, and to some extent must,
come first.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
The Protestant Ethic or The Spirit of Capitalism: Christians, Freedom, and Free Markets. By Kathryn D.
Blanchard. Pp.xxi, 239. Eugene, Oregon, Cascade Books, 2010, $29.00.
Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. By Paul Mattick. Pp. 126. London,
Reaktion Books, 2011, £12.95.
One of the keystones of Kathryn Blanchard’s argument is that there is no inevitable antagonism
between capitalism and Christianity. To be sure,
capitalism can take noxious forms against which
Christians should protest but, Blanchard opines, it
also comes in more humane varieties which Christians can embrace. The trick is to develop economic theories with a robust moral content. This,
Blanchard suggests, is what Calvin did by placing
his musings on freedom and law and a commitment
to ‘neighbour love’ at the heart of his analysis of
work, consumption, and exchange. And it is apparently what Adam Smith did, too. Smith was all for
a free market but he held that it could ‘flourish
only within his ideal community — one guided by
honesty, self-limitation, and [that phrase again]
neighbour love’ (xv). ‘Sympathetic self-interest’
may look like a contradiction in terms but we’re
told that it was the lodestone of Smith’s theories.
The crucial point is that someone like Smith
insisted on the moral bearings of economic theorising but many of his successors failed to follow his
example and this, on Blanchard’s account, is when
the rot began to set in. The so-called ‘Chicago
School’ is top of her list of targets and figures
such as George Stigler, Gary Becker and Milton
Friedman are accused, with considerable justification, of allowing ethics to drop out of economic
482
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analysis. The capitalism that ensued is precisely
the kind with which Christians are bound to have
problems but other theorists have seen the sense in
returning ethical considerations to their rightful
status. Blanchard tackles, among others, Deirdre
McCloskey, Julie Nelson, and Muhammad Yunus,
and suggests that Christians can enter into fruitful
dialogue with their ideas. Blanchard’s book is
unapologetically anachronistic and it imposes a
false unity on five centuries of economic thought
but it is passionately written and opens up some
intriguing avenues of enquiry.
Those who take a bleaker view of capitalism and
believe that it is beyond moral redemption will be
more sympathetic to Paul Mattick’s angry volume,
in which Marx looms much larger than Christ.
Inspired by the recent economic downturn, Mattick
argues that most analysts are looking for excuses
when they should be admitting to capitalism’s fundamental flaws. It is not enough, he argues, to blame
our present woes on a series of strategic mistakes
and irresponsible practices. Trying to ‘fix’ the system is a pointless exercise, because this assumes that
the system can be repaired, and it is ’hard to imagine
a more stunning demonstration of the theoretical
bankruptcy of economics as a putative science’ (67).
This is an old tune, but whistling it again is at least
timely and Mattick does a decent job of exposing the
historical cycle of boom and bust and some of his
predictions will presumably come true: when the oil
runs out and when the consequences of climate
change hit home capitalism will find itself in quite a
pickle. Unfortunately, for all the rousing rhetoric, no
concrete solutions are supplied. All we really get is
an invitation to establish new forms of organised
activity and a new social system and a rehashing of
the old imperative to abolish the distinction between
those who control and those who perform the work
of production. Fabulous ideas, no doubt, but how
exactly are they to be achieved? Reading these
books in tandem obliges us to confront the question
that shows no sign of going away: is capitalism one
of the worst ideas that humanity ever came up with
or, with a lot of tinkering, could it prove to be a
workable and sustainable system that doesn’t obliterate human dignity? Time, one imagines, will tell.
University of Durham
Jonathan Wright
The Subject, Capitalism, and Religion. By Jung Mo Sung. Pp. 171, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, £55.00.
Pentecostalism and Prosperity. Edited by Katherine Attanasi and Amos Yong. Pp. xii, 261, London, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012, £55.00.
The first book is part of a series on New
Approaches to Religion and Power with a preface
by the series editor Joerg Rieger. The book is
based around six papers given around 2001.
Jung Mo Sung’s first chapter helpfully gives
some memories that shape his theology. His family
arrived in Brazil from South Korea in 1965. When
he was 15 he began to participate in a young people’s group with the Catholic Church doing aid
work to protect rural migrants in Sao Paolo.
Though his group did not have a social or political
conscience, but simply played with poor children,
the face-to-face encounter was an experience of
grace which was the only thing that got him up in
the morning without complaining. Later, however,
as the eldest child of an immigrant family himself,
he had to take on responsibilities in the family
business. He quickly learned that ‘good words do
not solve concrete problems.’ These cold, hard
practical lessons complemented and contradicted
what he was learning about the mystery of gratitude. However, it was not only good words that
were incapable of solving problems. Sung relates
his encounter with the ‘science’ of economics, and
the day to day concrete reality of business. He
found the former theoretical and unreal. In fact, as
he discovered, there is something ‘spiritual’ about
marketing in particular. The most important aspects
of a product are what the consumer things about it,
and what others come to think of him or her for
consuming it. Moreover, he found that unless you
are a consumer (not ‘excluded’) you do not exist.
Leaving business school for seminary he was
first thrilled by new arguments, then unsettled by a
crisis of faith. What survived for Sung was not
doctrinal belief assimilated by the catechetical process but a foundation in a spiritual experience of
grace, especially that grace that comes when we
are indignant at the suffering of the innocent, a
foundation, however, which must be reasonable.
With Gramsci he discovered that history was not
so much the unfolding of God’s will but the conflict of social classes. Realising that one need not
be a priest to do theology he left and then passionately pursued the new theology of liberation and
the option for the poor.
From Dussel he learned of the intrinsic relations
between the economy (production and exchange)
and the Eucharist; and from Hinkelammert, of the
fetishism and idolatry, not only of capitalism, but
of a utopianism unable to recognise limits. With
Julio de Santa Ana he began to realise that
liberation theology had a theme missing – the
economy – and argued this in his doctoral
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research. A further critique of the idolatry of the
market is found in Assmann, but Sung points out
that this does not mean doing away with markets,
or leaving the Left uncritiqued. With Segundo he
leaned of God’s revelation as a pedagogical process and with Girard the theme of mimetic desire
in consumption.
Sung is torn between the urgent need to respond
now to the cry of the poor and the far off goal of
thinking painstakingly through the many theoretical
issues, which are never resolved to his own satisfaction. I shall pass over his complex chapter on
the Subject, Transcendentality within Real Life,
and simply suggest that, for Sung, the Subject
might almost be defined as ‘an exigence for indignation’ and attend to an issue that is related to the
complex notion of structural sin, namely that of
self-organisation.
Sung considers the accounts of self-organising
systems with the market in mind. Apologists such
as Samuelson record how the market ‘just
evolved,’ without being designed. This is Adam
Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’ Biological evolution, too,
has been invoked in support of neoliberalism. Sung
is bound, now, to concede with Assmann, (once so
critical of the market in the 1970s) that there is
some (partial) self-regulation. But this problematizes the moral subject: the market does not need
morality to be efficient– indeed, family values writ
large may positively hinder efficiency and he
makes the point with Sen that without anyone’s
property rights being infringed, the most extreme
famines can still occur. This leads him to a distinction taken from George Soros between rule-making
and playing by the rules. Hence the need: ‘to place
the economic system itself with its institutions and
rules as the object of analysis’ (108). The agent
must understand structures so that she can change
them.
Sung, then, is a second generation liberation theologian, clinging without certainty to his dreams,
living in hope, but honestly and anxiously seeking
to respond with solidarity to the human condition.
Some very different responses to the cry of the
poor are on display in the second book.
In recent decades there has been increasing
awareness of the phenomenon of ‘World Christianity,’ prompting the publishers to commission a
series of monographs on Christianities of the
World. Thirteen contributors to a conference on
‘Pentecostalism and Prosperity,’ held at Regent
University in 2011 present their research. Representing diverse disciplines and perspectives and
presenting case studies from around the globe, a
striking series of portraits is given of the ‘renewal’
movement which can trace its roots to the Azusa
Street Revival of 1906 and which now accounts for
483
a quarter of the world’s two billion Christians. The
theme of the volume is the prosperity gospel. God
has promised not only the salvation of souls but
divine healing and material prosperity. Christ’s
ministry is to the whole person, and such a message engenders hope in impoverished situations, a
fact that has economic consequences, especially for
the poor who are typically the ‘consumers’ of such
good news.
This, of course, is not the only understanding of
the biblical message, and in introductory sections
various typologies are discussed and respondents
conclude with calls for discernment. Some insight
into the pluralism and tensions involved can
gleaned from the seven case studies that form the
heart of the book.
One contrast is that of South Africa and Eastern
Europe. The contributors to a South African think
tank (CDE), with the assistance of Peter Berger,
strike an optimistic note of the possibilities of energising civil society by the entrepreneurial spirit of
the Pentecostal movement which has tended to slip
underneath the secular radar screen. Max Weber’s
thesis that Protestantism has given spiritual sanction to the rational pursuit of economic gain now
has added force. On the other hand, Daniela C.
Augustine, after discussing the way that the prosperity gospel can be viewed as a spiritual platform
for neoliberal capitalist values, charts the ways that
the transition to a market economy after 1989 has
been worse than even many Communist leaders
had predicted. Accordingly, in a region marked by
communitarian values (whether from Orthodoxy or
Marxism) the prosperity gospel has not taken root.
Secular Europe, however, is an exception.
Eloy H. Nolivos examines the neoliberal transitions
in Latin America and discusses the Weberian thesis. Is Pentecostalism a resource for development?
In one respect it helps as an anchor for the dislodged masses of the globalised continent.
The dislodged of Los Angeles can be found in
the Oasis Christian Center, a converted cinema
located blocks away from Hollywood’s Walk of
Fame. Gerardo Marti interviews those seeking
uncertain success in the entertainment industry. He
explores the tremendous role religion has for those
navigating their ‘life plan’ in a labour market
requiring individualisation and the acquisition of a
variety of work skills.
The anxieties of the financial crisis are in the
minds of those attending the Southwest Believers’
Conference in Texas. Five evangelists in rotation
urge the believers to stop worrying and start sowing. ‘This is not our crisis’ affirms Creflo Dollar to
great applause. The appeal is simple, have faith,
tithe and you will reap sevenfold. The luxury car
must be ‘named and claimed.’ Jonathan L. Walton
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asks Earl whether this is his recession. He is 57,
laid off from his construction job and broke.
‘Shoot, if I didn’t know Jesus, I would have shot
myself in the head.’ Despite the obvious lack of
prosperity (the plush hotels are empty) the pious
devotion to authoritative, simple, Biblical truths is
found compelling and convincing.
Wenzhou is on the East coast of China, about
three hundred miles North of Taiwan, and three hundred miles South of Shanghai. As China has opened
up, trade has brought sudden wealth. Wenzhou
Christians regard their city as the Jerusalem of China
and Nanlai Cao gives an illuminating insight into
the significance of the purchase of real estate for the
sake of erecting church buildings by ‘boss Christians.’ The desire for large emotion-filled spaces has
led to the funding of widespread church building by
wealthy entrepreneurs. Property acquisition is vital
for the revival, and donors are often highly regarded
and their testimonies circulated widely. The display
of wealth and celebration of success is often as
important as evangelism (and once built the
churches are soon filled). The contrast is with the
rural Christians who attained their charisma and
authority by suffering under Mao.
El Shaddai is one of many Catholic Charismatic
groups in the Philippines. It began as a radio station in 1984 and within fifteen years accumulated a
followership of millions. Founded by a businessman turned preacher, Brother Mike Velarde, whose
entertaining and evocative style is pitched at poor,
aspiring classes, it is famous for its open air Saturday night ‘prayer and healing’ rallies in Manila
attracting up to a million and broadcast throughout
the country. Miraculous healing is stressed, as is
the ‘positive confession’ whereby what is articu-
lated in public prayer is expected to happen. Members are encouraged to open bank accounts and
advised to tithe at 10%, save at 10%, and so on,
with suggestions for how to spend the remainder.
They are not cast as victims but rather sing, Let
the weak say, ‘I am strong,’ let the poor say, ‘I am
rich.’
Katharine L. Wiegele contextualises El Shaddai
in the post-Marcos People Power movement with
its ultimate disappointment at ineffective leadership
as regards corruption, human rights abuses, poverty
and land reform. El Shaddai helps self-reliance,
whilst at times is criticised for its capitalist morality and materialistic motivations. Its mass appeal
caters for private rather than collective concerns.
In the light of such diversity Amos Yong, a
Malaysian minister of the Assemblies of God seeks
a range of typologies. Asking whether it is possible
to develop a balanced argument for prosperity, one
that is not a stumbling block to others, but which
emphasises responsible stewardship, he turns to
Economy of Communion. The group argues that
the modern economy’s preoccupation with selfinterest is an aberration, and engages with the poor
through a loosely organised network of business
communities embedded in the market economy
deeply informed by a form of solidarity in which
profits are reinvested into the community for the
common good. It was founded in 1991 by the
Catholic activist Chiara Lubich in Sao Paolo.
Both books will interest those imbued with
sociological imagination and concerned with how
the Church responds to the poor in the context of a
modern market economy.
Maryvale Institute
Christopher Friel
The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World (The Church and Modern Culture
Series). By Daniel M. Bell Jr. Pp. 224, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Academic, 2012, $19.99.
The Wound and the Blessing: Economics, Relationships and Happiness. By Luigino Bruni (trans. by N. Michael
Brennen). Pp. xxiv, 123, Hyde Park, NY, New City Press, 2012, £12.50.
The 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath laid
bare the shortcomings of market capitalism which
most governments and economists have considered
the best, if not the only, credible economic system.
Now that their previously unquestioned faith in this
system has been shaken, they may attend to the
critics whom they had previously dismissed on
both ideological and pragmatic grounds. Religion is
an important source of these critiques, and the two
books reviewed here, one by a theologian and the
other by an economist, exemplify this faith-based
approach to the subject.
Daniel Bell’s principal criticism of market capitalism is its dependence on and encouragement of
consumerism. In theological language, consumerism ‘deforms human desire and so warps relations
with oneself, others and God’ (p. 29). Following
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, he considers
capitalism to be a discipline or economy of desire.
Deleuze describes how capitalism’s ‘liberation and
disciplining of the fundamental dynamic creative
power that is desire’ (p. 67) gradually pervaded the
entire world. Foucault shows how desire ‘is
enslaved to the axiomatic of production for the
market not merely by the disciplinary capacity of
the state but also through the pastoral power operative in all dimensions of life, from the social and
civil to the personal and familial’ (p. 78).
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Despite the current economic crisis, Bell does
not argue that capitalism does not work. Instead,
he asks what work does capitalism do? Or, in theological language, ‘With our economic lives ordered
by capitalism, are we able to worship God truly?
Are we able to desire God and the gifts of God as
we ought?’ (p. 89). His answer to both these questions is a firm no: ‘Christianity [is[ an economy of
desire that does not discipline desire so that it is
distracted and distorted from its true end but rather
heals desire of its capitalist corruption, aiding
desire in finding its true home in God, where it
enjoys communion with all’ (p. 93). Bell justifies
this assertion by exposing the anthropology of
capitalism, according to which human beings are
autonomous and isolated individuals who value
choice above all else, for whom self-interest is
paramount, whose desires are unlimited, who compete with others for limited resources and for
whom justice is personal, not social, and its theology, with its conflation of divine providence and
the hidden hand of the market, its denial of sanctification and quest for holiness, its assertion of
resource scarcity and the salvific role it assigns to
the corporation.
In exploring whether there can be a Christian
alternative to capitalism, Bell takes issue with theologians like Michael Novak who argue that, despite
its faults, capitalism is the best available economic
system. They consider that the system is so
entrenched that no human efforts can make any
significant changes to it. For Bell this is heresy:
‘the alternative to capitalism is not something that
we construct; rather, it is something we confess
that God is doing here and now’ (p. 127). Christians need not be prisoners of consumerism and the
desire for market ‘goods’ that it inculcates. Nor do
they have to renounce all desire. Rather, they can
and should reorder their desires towards God and
the things of God. Bell cites medieval monasticism
as an example of how desires can be so reordered.
Unfortunately, the Christian churches, which Adam
Smith criticized as an obstacle to the emergence of
a capitalist economic order, eventually succumbed
to its allure.
Bell’s alternative to the capitalist economy is
what he calls an economy of salvation. Christ’s
atoning work is ‘a movement of the divine economy of plenitude, ceaseless generosity, and superabundance. As such it runs counter to every
economy that operates on the basis of scarcity,
debt, desert, and a strict accounting of what is due’
(p. 152). The divine economy does not condemn
private property, contracts or profits but these must
be employed for the common good, with special
consideration for the needs of the downtrodden and
oppressed. Whereas the driving force of capitalism
485
is greed, the insatiable desire for more than
enough, the divine economy privileges voluntary
poverty, charity and the works of mercy, both corporeal and spiritual. Examples of the divine economy include the Jubilee campaign, Catholic
Worker Movement, L’Arche and the Mondragon
Co-operative Organization.
The title of Luigino Bruni’s book comes from
the Genesis account of Jacob’s struggle with the
angel, which reveals ‘the unbreakable link between
“wound” and “blessing” in every authentic human
relationship’ (p. xx). Like Bell, he is not opposed
to markets and contracts, but a society that regulates human relations only through markets and
contracts is intolerable.
The radical individualism of modern capitalism
developed, at least in part, as a means of avoiding
the wounds that can result from social intimacy:
‘Market relationships allow us to satisfy our needs
without having to depend on others’ love; by all
depending impersonally and anonymously on the
“Invisible Hand” of the Market (with a capital
“M”), we do not personally depend on anyone else,
nor do we have to encounter anyone personally
(and potentially painfully)’ (p. 15). What seemed
to Adam Smith and his followers as a great step
forward for humankind has turned out to be at best
a mixed blessing: an increase of personal freedom
on the one hand and a loss of community and the
happiness it brings on the other. Moreover, personal freedom has always been constrained in both
industry and governments and is increasingly
restricted for everybody in the name of efficiency
and security.
Bruni discusses some recent attempts to mitigate
the self-interested and anti-social behaviour of corporations, such as the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Italian cooperative movements. The
former is tenuous because the sole goal of the corporation is profit and corporate philanthropy generally reduces profits. The cooperative movement is
superior in this respect because of its communitarian basis.
Taking his cue from Pope Benedict XVI, Bruni
calls for an economics based on love in all its
forms, eros, philia and agape. Capitalism priorizes
eros and includes philia to a limited extent but
has no place for agape, i.e., gratuitousness, and is
thus joyless. Although economists and other social
scientists have rediscovered happiness as an
important measure for economics, he criticizes
their definition of happiness because of its subjectivity and identification with pleasure. Adopting
another set of terms, he argues that capitalism has
promoted (not very successfully) liberty and
equality but has completely ignored fraternity.
Without that, there can be no true happiness. But
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fraternity involves risk of hurt and rejection (the
wound) as well as the prospect of happiness
(blessing). He concludes, ‘Only in “hand-to-hand”
relationship with the other in flesh and blood, and
accepting the wound that we may receive in this
struggle, can we re-establish a new social bond, a
new fraternity, which we do not yet know how to
foresee’ (pp. 112-3).
Although these two books are similar in many
respects, they will attract different readerships.
Bell writes for Christians with an interest in theology. However, he says little about the unquestioned acceptance of capitalism by most churches
and their adherents. Nor is there any reference to
Max Weber’s thesis on the relationship of Protestantism and capitalism, however disputed that
might be. Bruni’s readers will be his fellow social
scientists although his eclectic use of Biblical
terminology concepts will likely puzzle, if not
alienate, them. Moreover, his book reads like a
collection of loosely related articles rather than a
unified whole. Despite these shortcomings, the
two authors will hopefully achieve their common
goal of contributing to the emergence of an alternative economic system based on the common
good.
University of Ottawa
John R. Williams
Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? By Zygmunt Bauman. Pp. viii, 101, Cambridge, Polity Press,
2013, £40.00/£9.99/£6.99 (E-book).
The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. By Gary A. Haugen and Victor
Boutros. Pp. xxii, 346, Oxford University Press, 2014, £18.99.
‘You have the poor among you always (Mt.
26:11). That may be true but poverty is widely
considered an evil from both religious and secular
perspectives. These two books analyse the causes
of global poverty and discuss whether there are
solutions.
Zygmunt Bauman has published extensively on
globalization, modernity and postmodernity, consumerism and morality. In this extended essay he
attacks the growing disparity in wealth between the
very rich and everybody else. This has been justified on many grounds, including natural law
(human nature), predestination and the superiority
of capitalism in producing wealth. Apologists for
capitalism claim, as per the title of this book, that
inequality is not a problem because everybody benefits from the increased wealth for which rich people are largely responsible. As producers of wealth,
the rich feel entitled to most of it. Moreover, they
have been successful at convincing national governments and international financial institutions that
restrictions on their ability to generate wealth
would hurt ordinary people who depend on economic growth for their livelihood.
According to Bauman, none of these justifications is valid. The rewards of economic growth
accrue almost exclusively to those who are already
very rich, leaving everybody else no better or even
worse off. Why do the vast majority accept this
injustice? Either because they realise they are
powerless to change the situation or they are too
caught up in consumerism to take action to
improve their lot. The pernicious effects of consumerism are largely invisible but nonetheless
powerful; they include defining happiness as hav-
ing rather than being, priorizing the acquisition of
things over inter-personal relationships and encouraging envy and rivalry rather than cooperation.
Bauman offers no solutions to the problems he
describes. His conclusion is pessimistic: ‘It seems
that one needs catastrophes in order to recognize
and admit (retrospectively, alas, only retrospectively. . .) their coming. A chilling thought, if
ever there was one’ (p. 96).
Haugen and Boutros contend that both academics and policy makers have overlooked the most
important obstacle to reducing poverty, which is
violence. For example, the 15 U.N. Millennium
Development Goals make no mention of violence
against poor people. All of the programs aimed at
improving the lot of the poor – foreign aid, land
reform, education, etc. – are useless in situations
where there is no rule of law to protect individuals
and communities from violent attacks on their persons and property. The authors provide numerous
examples of such failings, which can be as destructive as a swarm of locusts. They include sexual
attacks on girls and women, forced prostitution,
slavery and bonded labour, abusive police and arbitrary detention.
Unlike in the developed world, poor people in
the developing world have very little protection
against violence because of dysfunctional justice
systems. When colonized countries achieved their
independence, they inherited systems that were
designed to protect the colonizers from the common people. The systems have never been changed
and in most of these countries the role of the police
is to protect the elites from the ordinary people.
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Moreover, the systems are seriously underfunded,
resulting in police forces that resort to extortion
and corruption to compensate for low pay, overcrowding of prisons and a drastic shortage of
judges and lawyers. As a result, laws designed to
protect the poor are rarely enforced. Those who
can afford it obtain protection from violence by
private, not public, means. This compounds the
problem of lawlessness: ‘Business, commerce, and
the wealthy in the developing world would know
that the public justice systems don’t work – and so
they don’t use therm. As a result. . . elites have little or no incentive to build public criminal justice
institutions that work’ (p. 190).
The obstacles to creating effective justice systems in developing countries appear overwhelming.
Neither the World Bank nor the U.S. Agency for
International Development provides funding for
this purpose and most international aid for law
enforcement is targeted at terrorism and drug trafficking. However, the authors note that barely a
487
century ago criminal justice systems in most countries were similar to those in developing countries
today. In a short period of time massive changes
occurred, thanks to local leadership and popular
support of reforms. International Justice Mission,
the faith-based N.G.O. of which Haugen is founder
and president, has achieved similar successes,
though on a smaller scale, since it began in
1997, on issues such as child sex trafficking in the
Philippines, slavery in Brazil, police corruption in
Brazil and impunity for rapists in Peru.
The authors make specific recommendations for
addressing the problem of violence in developing
countries: all discussions of poverty reduction must
recognize the role of violence; economic development
agencies must have recourse to law enforcement and
criminal justice expertise; and pilot projects such as
those undertaken by International Justice Mission
should receive high priority for funding.
University of Ottawa
John Williams
God’s Reign & the End of Empires. By Antonio Gonzalez; translated by Joseph V. Owens SJ. Pp. 378, London,
Convivium, 2012, £19.54.
Gonzalez draws on social theorists from the Marxist tradition for a diagnosis of modern globalization
but offers a bold remedy that is unashamedly
biblical. Speaking from the Mennonite tradition
he recommends a radical, non-violent alternative
emerging from the grassroots and based on the
communities portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles.
Social theory is necessary to highlight problems
and give diagnosis. The globalized empire now
presents us with crises of tax-avoidance, debt, poverty,
inequality, prostitution, migration, ecological disaster,
criminality and an absence of global democracy. G.
notes how the exercise of power requires violence: the
hidden hand of capitalism is enforced by a hidden fist.
Drawing on Mandel, the Marxist theory of value is
assumed: capitalists do not have to pay the workers
the full value of their labour so that the system (and
not simply the greed of politicians or bankers) exploits
and impoverishes. Keynesian and socialist solutions
are rejected: ‘we must turn, perhaps to the surprise of
some, to the testimony of the Bible.’
Beginning with Genesis, the roots of evil extend
further and deeper than Marxian exploitation. G.
refers to the ‘Adamic logic.’ In essence this
involves self-justification. We seek to ‘eat the
fruit,’ that is, appropriate the consequences of our
actions. As a result we are fearful: humankind has
never been as afraid of God as we are today. This
is despite atheism – in fact, atheism is a symptom
of such fear. Like Cain we have more guilt than
we can bear. Adamic logic leads to the logic of
Babylon. The victim is to blame, and in many
ways there is a profoundly unhappy state of domination that all empires bring.
Genesis too, sees the call of Abraham, and a
new history is created in the midst of human history, but G. will refute the notion that only the Old
Testament has social relevance. There are many
interesting openings on familiar texts in a chapter
on the strategy of the Messiah to reverse the Adamic logic. The Roman soldier who is legally permitted force you to go one mile is put in an
awkward position when forced to choose between
violating his own norm and beseeching the
oppressed people not to help if you go the extra
mile; the whip Jesus made was used only to drive
out animals about to be sacrificed (not people),
thus undermining the centre of economic power
based on sacrificial logic. When asked whether to
pay tax Jesus, after inspecting the coin, did not say
‘give’ but ‘return’ to Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s. That is to say, we return not simply the
few denarii that are ‘owed’ in tax, but all denarii –
a wholesale rejection of the system to the consternation of those who benefited from it. We are to
escape from Egypt once more.
The reign of God announced by Jesus arrives in
the Messianic communities. G. examines the social
class of the early church. It is not, as was first
thought, that the churches were made up of the
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lowest classes. There is some truth in the later view
that better off Christians (centred on the household,
the economic unit that became the basis of local
churches) were among the faithful (though these
were not from the ruling class). But G. accepts the
view that in fact the churches were predominantly
poor with a minority of wealthy Christians sharing
goods so that absolute poverty was eliminated. Thus
the reign of God is not spiritualised but results in a
voluntary communism. The key is faith in Christ,
who though divine, is truly human.
Constantinianism, however, saw a Christian empire in which Christians could assume power and use
force, which of course they did when put to the test
by Islam. (Gandhi pointed out that the only people
who didn’t realise that Christ taught non-violence
were Christians). Although that time has passed,
Christians hanker after the good old days by influencing the consciences of those in power, and lose
much sympathy as a result. To discern the signs of
the times and make his own distinctive contribution
G. turns to social theory and the idea of the ‘network
society.’ Manuel Castells writes of our postindustrial, information society. Society is structured,
so to speak, the way a PC is structured in computer
network, with flows of capital and information (and
hence domineering power) forming a global net
which individuals feel the need to resist in the affirmation of their identity. Identity, then, becomes crucially relevant in such a society. Having a special
identity that it is not universally shared is no longer a
barrier to relevance. With this context set, the section
on Latin American Pentecostalism (pp. 292-9) is at
the heart of what the book advocates.
Distinguishing sharply from Neo-Pentecostalism (a
middle class movement that regards its influence as a
sign of millennial rule according to Rev 20:4 that has
been ‘quite worrisome’ in Guatemala) G. retains the
insights of liberation theology to the effect that the
poor are in a privileged position to hear the word of
God. Pentecostals believe that Christian salvation is
not purely spiritual, but brings health and wealth.
When the poor believer is asked for money, by risking
the little he has, the believer is no longer subjectively
poor.
G. does not discuss whether the ‘prosperity Gospel’ of ‘name it and claim it’ is a species of Adamic logic; or whether the requests for donations in
order to be blessed is akin to capitalist logic; or
whether wealthy preachers who flaunt their wealth
(as a sign of God’s blessing) are true to the Gospel.
He does not explore the extent that Pentecostalism,
being in the ‘business of the self,’ imbues entrepreneurs with the skills to live in a capitalist economy
(as neo-Weberians might argue) – for he wants to
read the movement as a protest against the global
empire. G. would concede, I think, that the movement he valorises does not quite share his social
concern: after all, this must be why he thinks that
the social theology he presents needs to be written.
He continues to draw on Castells (a sociologist in
the Marxist tradition who is scathing on fundamentalism as a negative reaction to the global network)
and the need to move from ‘resistance identity to
project identity.’ For example, feminism has moved
from the trenches of resistance to transforming
social structures in challenging patriarchism.
The project recommended is the emerging reality
of the ‘new popular economy.’ Economic relations
of reciprocity and cooperation operating within the
economic system are deemed viable and efficient –
G. draws on Razeto and also Schweickart. Interestingly, G. affirms both pluralism and what, in effect,
is the doctrine of ‘anonymous Christianity.’ There
is no discussion of Adamic logic, however.
I find three faults in this book. It seems to me
that the severity of the Adamic logic is exaggerated
here and downplayed there when it suits the
author’s purposes; in several places he overstates
cases that are ‘clearly proven’ without further argument, when in fact, further argument is desired; it
lacks an index. God’s Reign is a manifesto. But
there are many acute insights, no Biblicism, much
generosity with alternative views, great nobility (on
non-violence) and the translation is very readable.
It recommends itself to those who rage prayerfully
against the machine.
Maryvale Institute
Christopher Friel
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect. By Matthew D. Lieberman. Pp. x, 374. Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2013, £18.99.
Matthew Lieberman’s new book can be viewed in
two ways. First, it is a work of popular science; an
expert in social neuroscience shares some of his
most interesting findings with the general public.
Secondly, it can be viewed as a contribution to
broader philosophical debates about human nature,
and the implications of scientific work for public
policy.
As a work of popular science, the book is
undoubtedly a success. There can be no doubt
about Lieberman’s credentials and his book, which
is a pleasure to read, should find a large audience.
Lieberman is careful to present scientific research
as a series of on-going debates rather than a set of
settled conclusions. For example, he describes how
whereas once it was thought that autistic people
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were insensitive to the social world, it now appears
that the root cause of autism may be oversensitivity leading to withdrawal (pp. 161-177). He
discusses a range of opinions about the importance
of mirror neurons, admitting that some scientists
may have attached too much significance to their
discovery, while allowing that they do play an
important but subtle role in our understanding of
others (p. 134). Naturally, he is able to present us
with new and interesting facts about the brain, for
example, he points out that there is evidence that
the phrase ‘I feel your pain’ need not be a metaphor. Some people’s brains respond to the sight of
a loved one receiving an electric shock just as if
they themselves were the ones receiving the shock
(p. 155). Social pain should be taken just as seriously as physical pain – and, surprisingly, both can
be treated with Tylenol (p. 65).
Considered as a contribution to debates about
human nature and public policy, the book is somewhat flawed. Lieberman seems to think that, until
now, the fact that we are social creatures has been
neglected. He notes that Jeremy Bentham asserted
that pain and pleasure govern our lives, and, taking
for granted that Bentham meant physical pain and
pleasure, chastises him for overlooking social pains
and pleasures (p. ix). In fact, Bentham’s list of
pleasures includes the pleasures of amity and a
good name, which are clearly social pleasures (An
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter V). He states that according to
most accounts of human nature we are special not
489
because we are social, but because we have language or reason (p. 9). For Aristotle, language matters because it enables us to be political animals,
by which he means that we are the most social animals (Politics,1, 1253a). It is true that, in recent
years, economists, who have had more influence
over public policy than philosophers, have had to
be taught that we are natural co-operators, rather
than egoists rationally pursuing our own interests.
Lieberman is making an important and worthwhile
point, but he writes as though he is taking on the
whole philosophical tradition.
His practical suggestions can be somewhat trite.
He suggests that teachers of English could better
motivate their students by emphasizing that good
grammar enables communication (p. 288), and that
history teachers should discuss why events happened, treating history as a great soap opera, rather
than asking students to memorize dry and tedious
facts (p. 287). Will he also tell pilots that they
should avoid crashing their aeroplanes? Lieberman
has Aristotle and common sense on his side; he
need not write like a lone voice in the wilderness.
On balance though, the book’s virtues outweigh
its flaws. There is no trace of arrogance in
Lieberman’s writing, he is content to be one voice
participating in a conversation about what it means
to be human. After all, not only is he a scientist,
he is above all a social animal.
Florida State
University, Panama
Benjamin Murphy
Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings. By Victor Lee Austin. Pp.172,
London, T&T Clark, 2010, $23.29.
It seems appropriate that Victor Lee Austin’s Up
With Authority is dedicated to ‘the Reverend
Andrew C. Mead and the People of St. Thomas
Church’. Austin is an Episcopal priest and describes himself as a ‘philosophically-minded theologian’ (19), rather than a professional philosopher.
The style of the book is earnest and preacherly.
Austin calls our attention to a certain slackness in
social life: ‘It seems to me that people in our
time are trying to live without authority. There
used to be authority but (we think) we have outgrown it; so that our world is after (i.e. ‘post’)
authority.’ (19)
The principal motivation behind Up With Authority is accordingly to bring the concept of authority
back into the general discussion of ethics and social
theory. Austin takes real pleasure in adumbrating
the different facets of concept, which vindicate its
role in secular and religious life. The design of the
book is thematic: the first chapter, an introduction, is
followed by chapters on ‘Social Authority’, ‘Epistemic Authority’, ‘Political Authority’ and ‘Ecclesial
Authority’. These chapters are followed by a chapter
on the ‘fallibility’ of authority and a chapter on
‘Authority in Paradise’.
Austin has gone through a large literature and
reviews the position set out by authors like Yves
Simon, who wrote A General Theory of Authority
(Notre Dame: 1962), Michael Polanyi, and Oliver
O’Donnell. Simon argued that authority determines
the ‘form’ of the common good and carries it into
our personal lives, where it is willed, individually
and materially. Austin accepts Simon’s argument
that authority accordingly ‘exists in order that
human persons may flourish as self-governed members of society who somehow contain their society
(societies) in themselves.’ (29)
Knowledge requires authority. Austin follows
Polyani, in Personal Knowledge: Towards a PostCritical Philosophy (University of Chicago, 1958),
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who argues that epistemological skills are learnt
from a master, which requires submission to an
authority. It is only because a judge has epistemic
authority that the judge can discover the truth in a
particular case. Outsiders, who lack the judge’s
authority, are not able to find the truth, and are
thus more easily tempted to bypass the epistemological question and replace it with assertions of
will or self-interest or raw power.’ (44)
Austin’s discussion of political authority in the
book is far less searching. One of the reasons for
this is that Austin seems more interested in the
place of Christ in such a discussion. ‘There is no
person whom the Gospel does not address,’ he
writes. ‘This includes persons who have political
authority.’ (90) Those who are believers will
‘acknowledge the higher political rule of Christ’.
(90f)
Austin turns to music to illustrate the authority
of the church. Although Johannes Sebastian Bach
and the conductor of the Saint Matthew Passion
exercise authority in the production of such music,
the Passion is a representation ‘that holds before
us the church together—the church assembled’.
(95) A soloist therefore sings an aria with authority
‘only because the church provides ‘the communal
identity and structure’ (99) that makes such a representation possible.
The ‘fallibility’ of those who exercise authority
does not diminish the need for authority in human
society. There is no following the common good,
without authority: ‘. . . let us not back away from
the truth. At times, the human good requires that
we submit to social authority that we believe is
wrong.’ (145) Austin tries to place limits on such a
prescription by asserting that authority cannot be
separated from obedience; and obedience is rational
and voluntary. It follows that authority does not
extend to coercion and blind obedience. This takes
Austin into a rather summary discussion of civil
disobedience.
Austin follows the example of Aquinas in taking
philosophical positions, which are followed by
objections, and replies to the objections. This suits
the homilectic style of the book. tone is lively and
colloquial: Austin writes about the “moronic part
of my sophomore essay” (13); ‘My way or the
highway’ (145), he interjects, in discussing pride.
One of the confusing elements is that Austin
switches unpredictably from the masculine to the
feminine form of the third person. The book has a
religious and rather eccentric bibliography, but
offers leads for anyone interested in its subject
matter. There is also a list of scriptural citations, a
brief subject index, and ten blank pages, presumably for one’s own meditations on the subject.
The book contains a brief conclusion, really a
crescendo of sorts, in which Austin takes up the
subject of authority in heaven. Austin sees authority as something integral to what we are, and
rejects the lapsarian idea that authority has become
necessary because of sin. It follows that authority
‘perdures among human beings’ (159), even in paradise. ‘Heaven is a state of activity of people who
are undiminished by sin, whose activities will have
to be decided upon, which decisions entail the
ongoing provision of authority.’ This authority is
social and epistemic, rather than political, and is
‘exercised by redeemed persons over redeemed
persons and under redeemed persons, for the joy of
all.’ (160)
St. Francis Xavier University,
Nova Scotia, Canada
Paul Groarke
A World Without Why. By Raymond Geuss. Pp. xvi, 264, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2014,
$27.95.
Geuss cultivates a graceful style that combines
intrigue with charm. This is a tour de force that,
through disparate essays, presents a deeply thoughtout and coherent naturalistic position that grounds a
subversive liberation ethic of exposing the lack of
foundation behind most of the basic concepts, notably for institutions, on which our culture rests, in the
interests of dismantling unnecessary authoritarian
repression and manipulation through psychological
pressure that leads to alienation, passivity, and
anomie, to allow us to respond positively to the ‘invitation’ that is the lightest of social intrusions and the
only legitimate pressure, the exposure to great art
and excellent activity in general, to which we may
respond through imitation, expressing our gratitude
by excelling and ‘playing the game’ even better.
Our excellent cultural activities continue very well
although gutted of their mistaken substantive foundations (invoked to give others a ‘club’ to beat us with
to command obedience or conformity, which measure their own insecurity) because they were never
more than a ‘constellation’ of practices that have at
best a Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’, that
resist a common definition because they have no
common essence, that survive in each case through a
paradigmatic instance of excellence that provides a
context-dependent criterion for evaluation, which is
all we ever needed and is what we are doing now.
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There is nothing beyond matter and energy which
evolve into complicated forms with more specialized
and sophisticated techniques for survival. Some
needs are healthy, but others are faulted on two
grounds: some involve unhealthy reactions to social
pressure (Rousseau is the father of this suspicion,
and Geuss should have done more with him), and
some involve projections of an independent substantive reality, typically daunting and intimidating,
behind the loose constellation of practices that is the
only social reality, to enforce obedience and conformity. The latter are unnecessary bogeymen that
should now be dismantled, and Geuss spends the
majority of his text exposing the empty pretensions
behind such proper nouns. Here Nietzsche is his
champion, but also such contemporary thinkers as
Richard Rorty and especially Bernard Williams. Philosophy reduces to practical philosophy: politics and
ethics, which properly consist in identifying and
resisting the temptation to construct the discredited
branch of speculative philosophy or metaphysics,
which is a ‘Who’s Who’ of fraudulent and criminal
concepts used to scare and stampede people to someone else’s benefit. Even the last two could be
replaced by ‘law’ and ‘administration’, so that ‘philosophy’ as a whole joins the rogue’s gallery of
unwarranted impostors that should be eliminated in
the interests of slimmed-down cultural baggage promoting liberation and empowerment. Almost, but not
491
quite. For critical activity or dialectic, revealed at the
start of philosophy as the profoundly disturbing and
enjoyable, wildly unpredictable and ‘out of control’,
distinctly human activity, the intellectual catnip,
ambrosia or ‘narcotic of the intellectuals’ which the
West at least decided it could not do without
(its attempted confinement, curtailment, or elimination was the reason for the collapse of the otherwise
well-functioning and sustainable Marxist economies
of eastern Europe) cannot be eliminated; indeed,
Geuss is a past master at it and means to take it to its
conclusion. He allows his own wildly-slicing critical
machine to reduce our world to a fideistic universe
where we really know very little, primarily because
there is very little to be known. Most of reality is in
flux and uncertain. We would have it otherwise, but
in our mature moments we must learn the discipline
of doing without such false consolations - not only
because they are false but because they too easily
become tools of repression. Geuss himself keeps
open the possibility, however, that he has allowed his
machine to slice away too much and that like the
regimes of eastern Europe our civilization will consequently collapse – or retrieve at least part of metaphysics. Perhaps that was always the ‘ambrosia
behind the ambrosia’.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority. By Jean Porter. Pp. xvi, 368. Emory University
Studies in Law and Religion, Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK, Eerdmans, 2010, £21.00.
Porter’s Ministers of the Law quickly runs aground.
The first chapter sets out the ‘paradox’ of legal
authority, which apparently holds that the reliance
on authority in the natural law and legal tradition
precludes the use of personal judgement in making
ethical decisions. I say ‘apparently’ for good reason, since the paradox remains remarkably unclear.
Philosophically, it seems simpler to say that the
book is a response to the suggestion in so much of
the contemporary moral, social and political literature that authority must be justified.
The purpose of the book is also unclear. Porter
describes her book as ‘an essay in systematic theological jurisprudence.’ (7) She set out to provide ‘a
theological analysis of the authority of law, according to which legal authority is construed as a natural relation of authority, resting ultimately in God’s
wisdom as expressed in the free act constituting us
as creatures of a specific kind.’ (5) The book reads
more like a philosophical exercise, however, and
sets out Porter’s position on a series of issues in
philosophy of law and social theory. Although
Porter’s account of legal authority is based on
‘early scholastic theological and legal thought’, it
is ‘responsive to contemporary exigencies of legislation and judicial interpretation, particularly as
these are experienced in the Anglophone societies
with which I am most familiar.’ (5)
The underlying argument in the book is that
political power must be subject to legal constraints.
The work of the ‘scholastic jurists’ is significant
because they ‘developed a workable account of the
legislative and executive power of the prince’ (47)
based on the natural law. Porter relies heavily on
Kenneth Pennington (The Prince and the Law; University of California, 1993), who argues that the
scholastics developed a natural law jurisprudence
that provides ‘an account of natural rights and relations that the lawgiver is bound to respect.’ (48) She
singles out Gratian’s Harmony of Discordant Canons, or the Decretum, which appeared ‘sometime
around 1140’ (71), as a pivotal text, since it unified
the divergent sources of the canon law into a single,
coherent system of law based on the natural law.
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The scholastics recognized the constitutional
character of the natural law, which set out the
limits in which the legislative and executive
power could be exercised. The natural law also
had a procedural side, and governed the trial process, like the modern doctrines of natural justice
and due process in our own law. The scholastics,
like the Roman jurists and the canon lawyers,
believed that political power was legally limited.
The natural law gave the courts their own sources
of authority and guaranteed the independence of
the judiciary. A judge’s ultimate responsibility
was to the law, and the standards of reason and
justice inherent in the law, rather than to the
political order. It follows that the judge was a
‘minister of the law’.
Porter does not seem to appreciate that the historical sources which interest her lie in the civil
tradition, rather than the common law, and were
based on a much older legal view. The primary virtue of Ministers of the Law is nevertheless that it
recognizes the jurisprudence of the past has a great
deal to offer us, in thinking our way past the problems posed by the regulation of political power.
The major problem with the book is that Porter
does not confine herself to such a project, and her
narrative is full of theoretical digressions and
understated arguments, which professional philosophers will find frustrating.
Porter is determined to show that the natural law
is compatible with the current round of theories in
ethics, philosophy of law, and political theory. There
are traces of H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin, and
even the social contract, in Porter’s rendition of
the natural law. This is part of a relatively recent
Christian tradition, in authors like John Finnis, who
has worked so hard to convince us that the natural
law can be formulated in a manner that accommodates contemporary moral tastes.
Porter limits the reach of the natural law by
arguing that justice is largely a matter of social
norms. Although the natural law gives rise to certain normative principles, which inhere within the
law, that is not enough to establish norms, which
are an expression of a community’s authority over
its members. This is a nod towards political authority. The common good, Porter writes, ‘looks a
great deal like the political morality endorsed in
broad terms by Dworkin and others, qualified in
such a way as to give greater weight to economic
and other positive rights.’ (203) Thus, she says,
‘there are many, to some extent incommensurable
ideals of the common good, just as there is a plurality of natural moralities.’
Porter is constantly temporizing. She seems to be
determined to save the theory of the natural law by
demonstrating that it produces the same ethical and
social choices as the liberal and procedural views in
the mainstream of philosophy. She accordingly borrows many of the terms and concepts in the conventional literature: the common good within a particular
community is ‘a thick ideal’ (203). Human laws are,
in ‘Andrei Marmor’s illuminating analysis’, ‘constitutive conventions’ (80). Although Porter gives us her
position on a number of ethical controversies, she confesses that her account of human rights may look like
‘a baptized version of secular liberalism’ (337), and
indeed it does.
The critical question in a legal context is more
functional. From a practical perspective, it is hard
to believe that Porter’s version of the natural law
has enough grist to resolve contentious legal and
ethical issues. Anyone, she writes, ‘can appreciate
that life, health, sexual pleasure and intimacy
with one another, children and immersion in
one’s family and community life are legitimate
aims for action and salient concerns for assessing
social policies’. (181) If we agree with this, it is
‘precisely because these are among the natural
objects of the will, goods towards which each
human being is naturally and properly oriented.’
(182) It is not evident that this says very much.
The nagging question is why we need the natural
law, if it is simply going to reproduce the conventional liberal position, particularly when other theories take us there, poste haste? There is very
little in Porter’s book that is going to convince
philosophers outside her camp to adopt such an
approach.
The book suffers from a number of inaccuracies,
but the most troubling is plainly that it assumes the
concepts of law and positive law are philosophically fungible. This problem resides in the English
use of the word “law”, which was essentially
expropriated by the legal positivists. As a result,
there is a tendency among many Anglo-American
theorists to assume that the law obtains its authority from the fact that it is a product of the exercise
of political power. Porter falls into the usual error,
without realizing it, and the narrative weaves in
and out of legal positivism during the course of her
arguments.
There are theological and religious reasons
behind Porter’s position, since she bases her view
of the law on the Christian idea of community,
which gives society authority over the individual.
There is no doubt, moreover, that the authority of
the law has its provenance in the community at
large. The problem lies in thinking that there is no
need to trace the authority of the law any further
back than the political process and the machinery
of government. Although this probably explains
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Porter’s interest in the civil jurisprudence, it
ignores the customary sources of the law, which
have ethical and social roots. All one can say is
that her omission seems surprising in a book that is
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supposed to be reasserting the authority of the natural law in the legal order.
St. Francis Xavier University
Paul Groarke
The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law. By S. Adam
Seagrave. Pp. ix, 174, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, $29.82.
When Jacques Maritain helped to compose the
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in the immediate post-war period, he pointed
to the classical natural law tradition as the only
foundation for such a doctrine that would rescue
humanity from subjectivity by anchoring such principles more deeply and securely than in a shallow
source of wilful and arbitrary pronouncement, and
that could distinguish between essential and valid
claims on the one hand versus extravagant, arbitrary,
and frivolous claims on the other. Leo Strauss
responded that the modern ‘natural rights’ tradition,
a la Rousseau who wrote an earlier version of the
same document, constituted a sharp rejection,
indeed, a departure and rebellion against classical
natural law; whether one likes it or hates it, the
modern natural rights tradition begins in a different
place, the atomistic individual and his claims against
an encircling society he views with suspicion as a
threat to his survival and well-being, rather than the
unique space where his personal limitations may be
overcome and his completion and fulfilment secured.
To use language that Seagrave deploys, Maritain
maintained that the modern theory was historically
continuous with classical natural law tradition and is
therefore compatible with it, whereas Strauss counters that the modern theory of natural rights is psychologically a completely different ‘beast’ that
comes to us from and presupposes a contradictory
metaphysical universe - specifically an opposed relation between the individual and the state, so that
ultimately it is neither continuous nor compatible
with the earlier social discourse. Seagrave splits the
difference or tries to go between the horns of the
dilemma by conceding to Strauss that the modern
theory of natural rights is historically discontinuous
with the inspiration and outlook of classical natural
law, while retrieving for Maritain and his followers
like Finnis, Sandel, MacIntyre and Tierney the thesis
that it nevertheless it is compatible with the latter.
The two can cohabit, we can have it both ways, we
need not choose between them, and the ship of state
will stay afloat. The basis for this unexpected and
fortuitous reconciliation is the novel and intriguing
theory of personal identity proposed by that pivotal,
Janus-faced thinker, John Locke.
Rather than getting hung up on ontological
issues coming through the substance-based metaphysics of Aristotle, Locke retreated to an
epistemologically-based theory that leaves contentious philosophical issues in the shade for individuals to ponder at their leisure. Locke comes at the
notion of personal identity through the Biblical
question of how legitimate it is for God to punish
our resurrected body at the final judgment for sins
committed while alive – and in a different body.
Aren’t we two different people? What is essential
to secure personal identity between them? Locke
decides it is self-consciousness and memories that
secure personal identity, which God can attach to
any body, so that it is fair for God to punish our resurrected version. More broadly, self-consciousness
gives rise to a sense of self-ownership which in
turn, Seagrave points out, provides the foundation
of our claim to natural rights. Our unique selfconsciousness also makes us aware, however, of a
common human nature, which thereafter serves as an
unavoidable constraining frame for these claims - and
an adequate foundation for classical natural law principles. Through this common source in the Lockean
psychology, the two, law and rights, although independent, achieve congruence and compatibility although it is a dialectical relationship. Seagrave
shows how this genealogical theory sheds a dialogic
light and may contribute today to the discussion on
controversial issues such as universal health care,
same-sex marriage, and the death penalty. This is an
innovative and powerful theoretical contribution that
merits serious examination and study.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode. By R.J. Snell. Pp. xii, 207, Eugene, OR, Pickwick
Publications, 2014, $24.00.
R.J. Snell defends natural law against ‘the Protestant Prejudice’ against it, a critique that objects to
natural law theories on the grounds that they (1)
wrongly posit the autonomy of an order of pure
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nature and reason, (2) are not sufficiently Christocentric, and (3) overlook the noetic effects of sin.
(190) While Snell is in agreement with the concerns that motivate these criticisms, he does not
think they apply to natural law theory at its best,
which is worked out on the basis of ‘interiority.’
This ‘mode of meaning’ differs from the mode of
‘common sense,’ in which things are described
according to how they ‘relate to us,’ as well as
from the mode of ‘theory,’ which ‘explains things
in relation to other things.’ (10) Snell thinks the
typical objection to natural law is directed against
natural law theory performed in the theoretical
mode, which conceives nature in terms of ‘theoretical anthropology and its concomitant metaphysics of the person.’ (11) While Snell thinks the
Protestant Prejudice may or may not successfully
refute such third-person, often abstract accounts of
natural law, it does not rule out a natural law performed in the mode of interiority, which makes a
first-person account of the human person in all its
concreteness the site of a reflection on human nature. Despite disagreements, ‘particularly in application,’ among John Paul II, Martin Rhonheimer,
the ‘new natural law’ theorists, and Bernard
Lonergan, all understand natural law in this mode,
which ‘is quite able to include the effects of sin
on intellect and will, the role of grace, the importance of community, history (including salvation
history), and the centrality of the gospel.’ (12) Thus,
after discussing natural law in a theoretical mode—
exemplified by interpreters of Aristotle and Thomas
such as Maritain—and the Protestant critique of this
account in Part 1, and treating the new mode of natural law according to interiority in Part 2, Snell provides his own proposal for a natural law theory
from ‘the perspective of love’ in Part 3, which is
heavily influenced by Lonergan.
The starting point for Snell’s understanding
of natural law is what Lonergan calls ‘selfappropriation,’ which involves reflexively experiencing, understanding, knowing, valuing, and
deciding for myself as an experiencer, understander, knower, valuer, and decider. Natural law
can be found in the dynamism of my own questioning, the desire to know that leads me to
attend carefully to my experience in an effort to
understand the world, and to examine my understanding in order to figure out whether that
understanding is correct, and to further examine
whether what I come to know is good, and to
decide what I must do in response. Very simply,
I discover that ‘I am the natural law and its first
principles,’ which are not propositions but the
dynamic structure of the consciousness. (147)
The norm of this structure is the desire to know,
value, and love, and it is the presence or absence
of further questions regarding truth and value
that indicates the successful operation of this
structure.
However, Snell thinks investigation of oneself in
the concrete also reveals the ways in which this
drive to know and love is derailed by selfishness,
bias, and sin. Still, to make the argument ‘that the
noetic effects of sin either damage or render nonfunctional the capacity of reason to know the truth
confirms the power of reason to know the truth and
the self-evident goodness of truth, for there could
be no other reason to make the argument than a
commitment to the goodness of truth.’ (148)
Thus natural law is not only concretely affected
by sin, but also by grace. While sin competes with
our natural orientation towards being attentive,
intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving, the
gift of ‘total being in love’ transforms our valuing,
deciding, believing, knowing, understanding, and
experiencing for the better. (158-162) From the
Christian perspective, this love is named ‘the missions of the Son and Spirit, as the Word made flesh
who sends both his disciples and Spirit into the
world to remake loves and allow for progress and
authentic humanity once again.’ (195-196) In other
words, Snell’s account of natural law in the mode
of interiority becomes natural law in the mode of
transcendence, since attention to the data of consciousness reveals the way in which God’s love in
Christ enables us to live out the orientation to truth
and goodness that we are. Snell’s approach,
because of its refusal to abstract from human life
as concretely lived, meets the Protestant demand to
emphasize the noetic effects of sin on human
nature and the role of Christ and the gift of the
Spirit in redeeming human nature, all the while
insisting on the ‘integral structure of the human
spirit’ that can only be denied by enacting that
very same spirit. (197)
Boston College
Brian Traska
Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion. Edited by Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew
Klaassen, & Ronnie Shuker. Pp. xi, 349, Montreal & Kingstron, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014,
$100.00.
The proceedings of an interdisciplinary, international
Conference held in Toronto in August 2010, this vol-
ume presents a variety of positions on truth and the
practical consequences of these differences in the
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academic and public spheres. While it does not
attempt to argue for a unified conception of truth, or
promote either analytic or continental thought, the
volume as a whole argues that truth has a ‘more-thanpropositional character’ that is ‘crucial for understanding why truth matters, not simply in the academy, but
throughout culture and society’ (x). The work contains
four sections that touch on different topics related to
truth. The first, entitled ‘Truth and Knowledge,’
focuses on theoretical questions related to truth and
our knowledge; the most interesting is by Lambert
Zuidervaart, ‘How not to be an Anti-Realist:
Habermas, Truth, and Justification’ in which he
attempts to move beyond the realist/anti-realist
debates by discussing truth as ‘life-giving disclosure’.
Zuidervaart emphasizes the interdependence and
intersubjectivity between human agents and the events
and entities they encounter. It is a thought-provoking
essay which serves as the foundation for the volume’s
other articles to develop in various ways. The first section also contains essays by Clarence Jodersma, Matthew Walhout, and Olaf Ellefson. Jodersma develops
Zuidervaart’s concept of truth as life-giving disclosure
in an attempt to move beyond an impasse in educational
theory, Walhout searches for an account of truth along
analytic Hegelianism lines that respects findings in
quantum physics, and Ellefson seeks to defend Donald
David’s intuitive or primitive account of truth from the
attacks of Stephen Stich. The rest of the work focuses
on practical issues.
The second section, ‘Truth and Politics,’ examines the importance of truth for public discourse
and political life. Drawing on Gadamer, Ricoeur,
and Habermas, the essays in this section argue that
truth is something reached through mutual dialogue
and is vital for the survival of democracy. Darren
Walhof uses Gadamar’s thought to argue that
democracy can survive only when one dares to
engage in open and honest dialogue with those
who differ with you; Adam Smith examines
Habermas’s discursive theory and encourages an
appeal to the experience of discourse, rather than
assuming its legitimacy when addressing opponents
495
of pluralism; Amy Richards looks at the role that
suffering can play in authenticating the claims of
journalists; and drawing on Ricoeur, Jon Van Rys
studies how historical fiction often implicitly
explores the nature of truth through narrative.
Part three is entitled ‘Truth and Ethics’ and contains
essays by Gerrit Glas, Jay Gupta, John Park and
Doug Blomberg. Glas draws on Zuidervaart and
Kierkegard’s account of truth to examine the existential importance of truthfulness; Gupta argues that
Kierkegaard’s ‘subjectivism’ can be an ally in affirming truth’s existential significance; Park criticizes noncognitivist and subjectivist views of moral reasoning
using recent findings in moral psychology, to argue
that at least some moral concepts must be based on
objective truths; finally, Bloomburg exposes the implications of truthfulness and other virtues for higher education’s arguing that curriculum and pedagogy should
be focused on promoting justice for all creation.
The fourth and final section deals with ‘Truth and
Religion.’ In this section, Gill Goulding examines
Balthasar’s account of truth as God’s act of disclosure and the role of mystery and relationality in his
Trinitarian thought; Pamela Reeve compares the
thought of Aquinas with that of Charles Laughlin,
coming up with a new verb, ‘trueing,’ to describe the
ontological relationship between the cosmos and the
human experience; Using the account of demonic
possession in Scripture, Jeffrey Dudiak advocates a
‘representational’ account of truth that subordinates it
to human flourishing as lived in different historical
contexts; and finally, Calvin Seerveld studies the concept of ‘artistic truth’ found in Biblical Wisdom
Literature.
Due to the nature of the topic and the variety of
positions taken, no one will agree with every essay.
However, all can agree that the aim is noble, and
the practical issues are important, making this volume a worthwhile read, especially for those interested in politics and the peaceful flourishing of
democracy.
Ave Maria University
Luke Murray
The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its Consequences. By Matthew H.
Kramer. Pp. xii, 353, Oxford University Press, 2014,
This is a fascinating book in that Kramer, professor
of legal and political philosophy at Cambridge, is
able to generate a counter-cultural justification for
the death penalty as the uniquely appropriate penalty for flamboyantly wicked crimes (Hannibal
Lecter type crimes of abduction, torture, and murder, as well as crimes against humanity) from
purely secular premises; that is, against the liberal
sweep of the past fifty years in most developed
first-world countries which has banished the death
penalty as a last indulgence in barbaric revenge in
favour of life-long incarceration without possibility
of parole for the worst cases as an ‘advance’ in
civilization, humanity, disinterested imposition of
justice, and compassion, and agreeing with the
‘least intrusion principle’ that holds that a court
should always impose the ‘least severe’ measure
that will achieve a desired result or satisfy the
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demands of justice, Kramer nonetheless argues that
there are certain crimes which show a contempt,
not only for the victim(s) of the offense but for
humanity as a whole (Hitler, Goebbels), such that
the imposition of anything less than the death
penalty would seriously tarnish the standing and
respect of that particular community with the rest
of the world by in effect ‘backing into’ a collective
responsibility and complicity with the criminal by
default, thereby rendering it deserving of protest,
sanction, and exclusion. In other words, not only
do communities have the permission, they have the
obligation to execute perpetrators of such crimes.
Our gut-wrenching revulsion in the face of such
extreme acts of wickedness is accurate, and the
best liberal principles and most determinedly secular reasoning demand the maximum penalty. Ironically or consistently, however how you look at it,
only societies which are themselves based on liberal democratic principles have this dual permission and obligation.
Kramer first scrutinizes the standard justifications
for capital punishment – the deterrence-oriented,
incapacitative, and denunciatory rationales – and
finds them all defective. These are consequentialist,
and fall foul of the standard objections that follow
from the principle that ‘the end justifies the
means’. The retributivistic argument is closer to
Kramer’s own; it seeks to restore the ‘balance’ or
equity of justice, and specifically to reassert the
moral dignity of those who have been harmed by
serious crimes. But Kramer’s novel ‘purgative’
way goes beyond this: it defends the death penalty
as a uniquely appropriate penalty because it brings
to an end the ‘defilingly evil existence’ of someone
who has committed outrageously offensive crimes.
His theory thus combines a shocking return to our
most primitive intuitions concerning the nature of
justice, argued on the basis of the most modern,
liberal, and secular platform. Specifically, we are
not thereby removing from the community someone who has broken a divine taboo, and thereby
brought down God’s anger and punishment upon
the community as a whole. Civilized, liberal society, with respect for equality and the dignity of the
individual, now substitutes for God. Through
modern media and communication, the world has
truly become a ‘global village’; crimes launched
half-way around the globe can have an immediate
and direct impact upon us. We no longer have the
luxury of being indifferent to each other’s observation and respect for justice.
Liberal society has paradoxically produced
previously-unheard of acts of extreme wickedness
that display a gratuitous contempt for the principles
of a free and secure society that are so personally
‘defiling’ that the persons committing them must
be executed by their societies on pain of that particular society otherwise falling into collective
responsibility and complicity with the criminal in
his crime with regard to the rest of the world,
which makes it deserving of a similar response by
other states. Kramer’s ‘purgative’ justification for
the death penalty is a novel, unsparing, and courageous attempt to do ‘justice’ to the outrageous
blights against humanity that modern society,
through an improper use of its expanded freedom
and with its desperate, exaggerated emphasis on
the unique worth of individual achievement and
originality, not only produces but has rendered
defiantly distinctive of our era.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
The Moral Dynamics of Economic Life: An Extension and Critique of Caritas in Veritate. Edited by Daniel K.
Finn. Pp. 166, Oxford University Press, 2012, £18.99.
A year after Pope Benedict had published his social
encyclical, a symposium, ‘Caritas in veritate and the
United States’ met in 2010 to critique and extend its
themes. Emerging from the symposium, this slim
volume contains 48 short contributions from 23 contributors in 11 chapters on topics such as markets and
government, economic relations, reciprocity, development and implications, for example, on welfare
policies. Most write from the American horizon,
which as John L. Allen points out, is severely polarised. Liberal commentators hail what Benedict had
to say about trade unions, redistribution of wealth,
and a planetary form of governance, but largely gloss
over the life issues. ‘Theo-cons’ such as George
Weigel divide the work into the truly Benedictine
golden passages, and the red passages from the
‘social justice crowd’ that do not merit what canon
law describes as a ‘religious submission of mind.’
On the right Michael Novak, writing on sin, finds
refreshing the fact that ‘long neglected lessons from
Augustine are being included in social teaching.’
Greed is always there, but less so with capitalism,
and capitalism redistributes more than any other
system. What are the most practical forms of defeating sin? Here, ‘wise Pope Benedict’ puts too much
stress on caritas, virtue, justice and good intentions
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and needs to learn from the Reformers. The solution
is that checks and balances must be written into the
institutions. (Novak never actually references the
encyclical, but he is correct that the word ‘sin’ is
indeed mentioned: on both occasions with regard to
social and economic conditions (CV,34)).
Amelia J. Uelmen, a consultant for Focolare’s
Economy of Communion project, wonders whether
Americans, who define freedom as self-definition will
hear what Benedict has to offer about interpersonal
relations as a ‘source of the self.’ Matthew J.
Slaughter takes a look at the economic situation and
finds the data sobering. The top 1% get 21% of the
wealth and the gap is rising. He explains his deep concern at the hardship that families face and has built
ethics and social responsibility courses into his Business School curriculum, and looks to the ‘logic of
gift’ to understand business as a community of persons. Katherine Marshall, has spent a long career with
the world bank with a focus on issues facing the poorest countries. She calls for a robust commitment akin
to a (what else?) Marshall Plan. John H. Coleman
thinks that Benedict lack imagination in calling for
world government. More to the point is governance
by a variety of networks (such as the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines). Daniel K. Finn notes
the unfortunate resonance for Americans of Benedict’s
appeal to fraternity – putting him in mind of
‘stereotypically immature males on college campus.’
Mary L. Hirschfeld points to some lacks in contemporary economic thought. The market is the
institution in which the logic of exchange (we give
to acquire) is governed by commutative justice.
But sometimes markets fail, and in order to attain
distributive justice we must decide how and when
governments should intervene. Such intervention is
merely technical; policy reduces to control. A better way is to influence culture (the place where we
pose questions about true human flourishing) and
foster trust (if bankers had been concerned with
making sound loans rather than trying to squeeze
out cash from customers the financial crisis would
not have been possible) and so encourage the
497
hybrid commercial entities that embody virtues of
gratuitousness. Hirschfeld seeks authentic development (do our literacy programs help people in the
pursuit of truth? Do we feed the poor so as to
befriend them at supper?) and criticises mainstream
thought on its own terms (although economic logic
suggests that firms who do not maximise profit go
out of business, there is no comparison with households, who will not be driven out of business if
they fail to maximise utility).
Benedict is defended by an Italian economist
Stefano Zamagni, presumably an influence on the
encyclical. Several ideas are explained. The principal of reciprocity can be compared with the principal of exchange. In the latter A gives to B. But B
then has to give something back, which in a market
economy is determined by the price. This price
logically precedes the transfer of value from A to
B, and after receiving, B will be compelled by law
to fulfil the agreement. But with reciprocity, neither
of these conditions apply. There is no agreement as
to the price, and no compulsion to return – though
when we hold the door open for someone, usually
we expect these favours will be returned someday.
In stressing reciprocity Benedict hopes to overcome
the dichotomy of the economic and the social:
entrepreneurs are not required simply to maximise
profit; they can act for prosocial reasons. Indeed,
capitalism is simply one form that the market economy can take. Benedict endorses the ‘civil economy,’ whereby one can live the live the experience
of human sociality (and be influenced by solidarity,
subsidiarity, and values that affirm the centrality of
the person and the common good) within the economy. This is an alternative to the tradition that
stems from Adam Smith: markets must not ignore
the disadvantaged. The aim is to go beyond the liberationist who sees the market as the locus of
exploitation, and the libertarian who thinks that the
market is the place where all the problems of society can be solved.
Maryvale Institute
Chris Friel
Political Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed. By Elizabeth Phillips. Pp. vi, 200, London/NY, T. & T. Clark,
2012, $15.00.
The author is to be congratulated on providing a
useful and readable survey of this extremely important and ever-pressing topic.
The Subject Index has long entries on ‘pacifism’ and ‘oppression’, just as it should. I suppose
that every Christian who is not a pacifist must
frequently and seriously ask herself whether she
ought not to be one. Pacifism is a noble stance;
but it will not do, for all that it is often done, to
make its consequences appear easier than they are
by dint of shoddy arguments and blindness to
facts. Ought Neville Chamberlain really to have
continued with his policy of appeasement when
Hitler invaded Poland in 1939? (‘The situation
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ought never have been allowed to reach that
point’, a pacifist told me. But we have to act in
the situation that actually obtains, not the one we
would prefer to be in; no doubt it would be nice
if Adam had never eaten the apple, but the fact is
that he has, and we have to live with the consequences.) It would be convenient if diplomatic
initiatives were always successful by themselves,
but they are not. And when it comes to those
bent on genocide --- are they really to be persuaded to cease and desist without the use of
force, and lethal force at that? No doubt some of
their representatives will be glad to talk to you,
while others get on with business as usual. Peace,
as Aquinas says, is more than the mere absence
of war, and the question may occasionally arise
of whether a state of so-called ‘peace’ is so flagrantly unjust, due typically to oppression of
some people by others, that resort to war is the
lesser evil. Of course, it must always be stressed
that war for the Christian is at best the very last
resort.
Augustine is presented by the author as emphasizing the role of government in ‘holding the lid
on human destructiveness.’ He will have it that,
give or take a little, human beings since the Fall
are thoroughly selfish, and have to be prevented
by a more or less officious state from destroying
one another and ultimately themselves. Aquinas,
however, was enough influenced by Aristotle to
maintain that, in spite of the ravages of sin, we
retain some natural disposition to cooperate with
one another; this leaves room for a state which is
somewhat more benign and less intrusive. While
it does not do, as the author rightly reminds us,
to exaggerate either the pessimism of Augustine
or the optimism of Aquinas (34), their overall
views do provide ideal types, benchmarks between
which to place viable Christian accounts of the
nature of the state, and of the proper scope and
limits of its coercive power. There are equal and
opposite dangers in exaggerating and underestimating the effects of sin; and it has been well
said that there is no more embittered reactionary
than a disappointed liberal.
I found particularly helpful the author’s summary of Reinhold Niebuhr’s somewhat Augustinian position, as he himself acknowledged it to be.
He wrote, ‘A simple Christian moralism counsels
people to be unselfish. A profounder Christian
faith must encourage men (sic) to create systems
of justice which will save society and themselves
from their own selfishness.’ Dr. Phillips describes
Niebuhr’s ‘scathing critiques of pacifists and
advocates of non-involvement in the years leading
up to World War II’ (84). But as John Howard
Yoder sees the matter, Niebuhr’s cynicism sells
the Christian witness lamentably short. The
Church ought to display ‘a counter-politics of the
gathered, believing community of God’s people
which is marked by visible faithfulness to God’s
sovereignty instead of grasping for political
power’; and to practise ‘non-violent servant leadership in response to the life and teachings of
Jesus and in anticipation of his coming kingdom ‘
(18).
I was also impressed by Dr. Phillips’s account
of the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain, who is influenced by both Augustine and Niebuhr. Elshtain
told an aquaintance, in the immediate aftermath
of 9/11, ‘Now we are reminded of what governments are for’ (99). Her reasoned defence of the
war in Afghanistan may be mistaken, but it is
certainly not despicable. She has also given us the
brilliant epigram, ‘Muhammad was his own
Constantine.’ She remarks that the distinction
drawn by Jesus between the realm of Caesar and
the realm of God has sometimes appeared to justify quietism. But that would be to abdicate
responsibility. At the other extreme Islam has
earned itself the reputation, whether justly or not,
of being the religion of the sword. ‘Not that
Christianity has no knowledge of the sword. But
within Christianity the sword always has to justify
itself’ (100). Yet there ought to be no question but
that it has often ‘justified’ itself too easily. Cardinal
Ottaviani doubted whether any armed conflict in
modern times really met the criteria of justice in
war.
‘Is the church ordained to be an instrument of
peace, living in the already of the kingdom, while
the state is ordained to be an instrument of violence within the realities of the not yet? How do
we respond to the nearly opposite theory that secular states are the protectors of peace while religion is particularly prone to cause violence?’
(156) These are good questions indeed. As the
lives of Christians are hid with Christ in God
(Colossians 3.3) they can fearlessly seek out and
proclaim the truth on such awkward questions as
these, however unpopular or unpalatable it may
be. Indeed, if we are to believe the prophet
(Ezekiel 33.6), it will be the worse for them if
they do not do so.
Calgary, Canada
Hugo Meynell
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499
The Future of Political Theology: Religious and Theological Perspectives. Edited by P. Losonczi, M. LuomaAho and A. Singh. Pp. xiv, 210, Ashgate, 2011, £58.30.
There is a spectrum of thinking from different conceptions of the political and the theological and
depending of where one lands depends of how
political theology proceeds. This book subscribes
to Cavanagh and Scott’s definition, given in the
Blackwell Companion Political Theology of a ‘discipline’ (their quotation marks) that considers political arrangements from the perspective of different
interpretations of God’s way with the world.
Authors in this book think that the above does not
exclude what political theology can say about the
political as a realm of human beings under God
(their itals) but want to distance themselves from any
fundamentalism. They accept what Jean-Luc Nancy
proposes as the preference of the democratic process
as where power is exercised and where justice is
incommensurable. Political theology can make this
latter more obvious and so criticize the political and
seek correction but not domination of the political.
More than domination, however, is the relative
autonomy of politics and its concern with the media
and the rise, as George Walden has stated, of a
political-media elite who serve one another’s interests.
The essays here propose new cultural imaginaries that are theologically permeated but resist
attempts at domination. The book is in three parts:
the past with its concepts and challenges; new
theological trends and the final part on contexts
and future prospects for the subject. The editors are
aware that some approaches can mitigate against
theology and religion becoming an interruptive
force on politics and especially the Nancy version
of direct power by theology, which they see as prohibitive on representations of the infinite and ask
why it should be excluded. Indeed they go further
is asking how such a prohibition can be made
meaningful without theology being able to function
since it involves an understanding of humans and
sets limits which are somewhere between theology
and politics. The authors also see this book as giving alternative ways of doing theology in a broad
and pluralistic way to inform humans about the
political as a realm of humans subsumed to God
(or some other form of higher or alter reality).
(This last bracketed phrase is their own).
Although the book is about the future it begins
with the past and three essays which about it.
Riedl considers the secular in Western theology
from a historical viewpoint beginning with the origins of (North) African Christianity and he delineates certain periods of conflict and cooperation in
that long history. He attempts to construct an
understanding of an underlying spiritual dimension
to the formation of modern European culture so as
to root its diverse phenomena in that domain thus
providing a more comprehensive discourse for PT
now and in the future. Hoelzl is on the particular
episode of the Jewish Holocaust under the
National Socialists in Germany up to and during
the Second World War and the issues raised about
the function of politics and religion, especially
Christianity, seems to him and enormous problem
for humanism as a political idea and for the identity
of Europe. He states that this episode has been forgotten and yet it was a central event which requires
reflection on how we understand ourselves and the
identities, personal or national, that we prefer to
construct without its inclusion. Lanczi wants to distinguish between political knowledge and wisdom
and to ascertain the gap between them, preferring
the latter as the preferred way of proceeding.
The second Part of the book looks at the subject
through the lens of new trends in theology in the
hope of a reorientation of the subject. Karl
Rahner’s pupil, JB Metz, and his idea of theology
being interruptive to current discourses and practices is given ample consideration by Lieven Boeve
since this is less a conventional systematic theology and more a constant critique of attempts at
excluding suffering. Boeve illuminates and expands
Metz’s approach by contrasting it with superficial
understandings of how to speak about development,
even in the case of the documents of the Second
Vatican Council, where naive optimism and a prediliction for the success of a project can override
and exclude the pervasive experience of suffering
at all its levels. He argues persuasively that this
interruptive theology is a necessary feature of the
epistemological primacy of any and all narratives,
political, theological and religious but doesn’t say
where the interruption comes from, that is, the
basis of its thinking. The Radical Orthodoxy movement is well articulated by Catherine Pickstock
with particular emphasis placed on participation in
politics and religion and thus restating the essentially social dimension of a creative personal faith.
Levinas and the exclusion of the Holocaust already
referred to is examined by Losonczi. The last essay
in this Part by William Desmond looks at terms
such as ‘cosmopolis’, ‘ghetto’, ‘intimate’ and ‘universal’, ‘singularity’ and suchlike to provide a new
vocabulary for political theology by trying to, if
not eliminate, then at least spatially partnering
words which at first glance appear poles apart.
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Whether or not this attempt can be actually effective
remains to be seen but he does at least draw attention
to the limitations of conventional and unreflective
uses of words as devices for reinforcing distance in
theory and practice and for the need to rethink their
usage as ignored or forgotten references.
The final part of the book deals with contexts
and future prospects. The context in Europe, considered by Kornel Zathureczky, considers Pope
Benedict’s Rosenberg Lecture which she thinks
offers an attempt at a PT for Europe in Christian
terms as opposed to a competing version by Islam
which sees itself as having a universal reach in an
insistent way based upon its own legal reasoning.
Andras Csepregi looks at the work of the Hungarian thinker, Istvan Bibo, and his use of sociological
and socio-psychological elements. The chapter on
Iranian marriage and family law considers that
Islam discriminates against women and their rights
because of a particular interpretation of the Quire’s
which needs now to be set in a different context
for the future since this is the scope of its political
theology. The essay on Buddhism deals with
‘Navayana’ which is the version adopted by the
untouchables or dalit and which can be seen as a
kind of liberation theology but which is generally
absent from academic consideration. Aakash Singh
thinks that this version is very political and given
that it comes from the poorest has a distinctive and
urgent contribution to make. Mika Luoma-aho considers the political theology of the UN and of the
2000 Millennium Declaration which underpins the
UN’s approach until 2015. He regards this as
important because, he argues, these approaches
have their basis in Christian covenant theology
although of a secular nature.
This is a good range of essays which goes into
certain themes in considerable detail whilst calling
into question the existence of political theology
itself as having a future at all.
Sacred Heart Parish, Wimbledon
James Campbell
Language Use in the Public Sphere: Methodological Perspectives and Empirical Applications. Edited by Ines
Olza, Oscar
Loureda, and Manuel Casado-Velarde. Pp. 564, Bern/Oxford, Peter Lang
Since the turn of the new millennium religion has
entered fully into identity politics. Debates and controversies surrounding religion abound all over the
world. Ongoing geopolitical circumstances mean that
this is sure to continue. The questions of how religions are treated, and how they should be treated, in
media, education, and public life are therefore of
great significance that merit thorough consideration
by scholars, professionals, and the general public.
This edited volume provides fascinating insights
into the mechanisms of communication and how they
are related to the issues surrounding religion and public life in several national contexts. From astute analyses of media portrayal of religions in Britain, to the
issue of the European Court’s ruling on the crucifix
in Italian classrooms, and the reporting of debates
over public wearing of the Islamic veil in Spain and
Quebec, the essays in this book inform, entertain,
and examine judiciously pressing problems concerning communication and religion in today’s world.
In an area of study that is often partisan and sensationalist, this tome is methodologically rigorous.
It would serve as an excellent introduction to the
general reader interested in understanding further
the relatively new field of discourse studies. Part
One consists of nine scholarly articles that together
give an overview of the main methods used in this
field. This makes the book invaluable to researchers and graduate students in the social sciences.
The variety of approaches suggested and the dis-
cussion offered by different authors linking innovative ideas with other scholarly traditions, such as
Philosophy, also make this handy edition readable,
relevant and accessible to the non-specialist.
The volume is the result of the collaboration of
an international group of scholars from Spain,
Britain, Belgium, Italy, Canada and Germany who
are interested in the study of religion in public
discourse. Consequently it offers pioneering research and methodological reflection that are otherwise unavailable in English-language publications.
The ten articles in Part Two will be of particular
interest to the general reader wanting to understand
media reporting on religions, and the contribution
discourse analysis can bring to understanding these
issues. For example, in a fascinating chapter, Ruth
Breeze problematises the treatment of religion in
British media by presenting a fine-grained analysis
of the reporting of religious controversies in four
national daily newspapers: The Guardian, The
Telegraph, The Sun, and The Daily Mirror. Her
analysis reveals the complexities of reporting about
the wearing of religious symbols, suggesting that
some newspapers can at times ‘frame’ minority
religions more favourably than when reporting
Christianity. In three separate essays utilising different methodological approaches, Ines Olza, Sira
Hernandez Corchete, Beatriz Gomez-Baceiredo,
Ramon Gonzalez and Damaso Izquierdo Alegrıa
consider similar issues in Spain. They too suggest
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the ideologies of national newspapers can affect
their treatment of religions and give a detailed
account of how narratives and texts are subtly
manipulated and produced in order to reinforce
political positions.
This is a timely, scholarly edition that will have
an impact beyond the academic community. As
everyone has a vested interest in the fairness and
sincerity of debates about religion in the public
501
sphere, this volume is to be welcomed as a thorough, detailed scientific examination of what can
be often emotive issues. Its dispassionate and rigorous style serves as a prompt to remind us that we
ignore truth at our peril in an age when religious
controversies will persist.
University of Navarra,
Pamplona, Spain
Daniel Moulin
Justice: The Biblical Challenge (Biblical Challenges in the Contemporary World). By Walter J. Houston.
Pp 150, London, Equinox, 2010, £15.99.
In the present volume, Walter Houston unfolds a
biblical conception of justice as fairness. He does
so by weaving together contemporary theories of
justice from notable political theorists, such as
John Rawls and Amartya Sen, with contextual
research on both the present day and biblical times.
Houston uses this approach as a foundation to write
about three modes of justice that can be discerned
in the biblical texts, which he feels hold special
significance for not only Christians, and in the case
of Hebrew scriptures, Jews, but also for people of
other faiths and even concerned secular readers.
The first of these modes is ‘justice as cosmic
order’, which centres on Houston’s analysis of the
created order as depicted in the bible and invoked by
the prophets. In a chapter devoted to that mode,
Houston includes a stimulating discussion on the
merits of reading certain biblical texts as departing
from images of God’s justice based upon kingship to
one of God’s justice centred on patronage, notably in
favour of the people of Israel. According to Houston,
those images can even be mixed in the same stories,
so that, for example, YHWH’s kingly justice is felt
by Pharaoh in the Exodus narrative even while the
Hebrew people benefit from God’s patronage.
The second mode of biblical justice identified by
Houston is ‘justice as faithfulness’. In his ensuing
discussion, the theme of patronage, with reference
to the Exodus narrative, is further developed. This
idea of patronage, for Houston, encourages the
proper and just treatment of those for whom one
has a special responsibility as per the law codes in
the book of Leviticus that address actually existing
inequality. An an example in this regard he cites
the law codes provisions addressing the proper
treatment of slaves held by the Israelites.
A third mode of justice delineated by Houston is
‘justice as a community of equals.’ Here, Houston
notably references the economic and social equality
amongst the community of Israel as evidenced in
jubilee provisions in Leviticus. Further, he makes use
of Pauline images of equality that transcend blood
relationships and prohibit people in power positions
benefiting from the suffering of others. In this regard,
he rather awkwardly argues for the conclusion that
brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ along the former lines ‘must surely apply to everybody’ (p. 91).
After his discussion of these three modes of biblical justice, Houston then offers a chapter which
asserts that the biblical images of justice are put into
practice by Jesus, including, in a somewhat of a
departure from the prophetic tradition, in ways that
separates the fates of oppressor and oppressed in
favour of the former. Next, Houston’s penultimate
chapter consists of a ‘justice audit,’ which names
several worldly injustices and comments on them in
light of the afore-mentioned three modes of biblical
justice. A specific example mentioned is the failure
of more economically developed countries to meet
their portion of the funding for the United Nations
Millennium Development Goals, which is discussed
under the rubric of (lack) of justice as ‘right order.’
In a similar manner, Houston makes the assertion
that ‘political equality is largely illusionary when
economic equality does not exist’ (p. 108) made in a
section titled ‘a community of equals?’. His overall
conclusion in this chapter is that an audit exposes a
general lack of justice in the world today, which can
be sourced to imbalances in resources and power.
Building on such analysis, in his concluding
chapter, Houston offers specific recommendations
for Christians to respond to biblical imperatives for
justice, with a particular focus on the UK context.
Here, for example, he cites the faith-based mobilization for the Jubilee 2000 debt-reduction campaign and fair-trade activism as important instances
of Christian concern for justice in the world that
serve counter a tendency to retreat into overly
internal church matters. Houston suggests that a
similar campaign ought to be undertaken to address
the maltreatment of asylum seekers in the UK. He
also builds on earlier materials to suggest that the
Green Party has the policies that best reflect biblical values of justice for a concerned UK voter.
Alternatively, Houston posits that the Labour party
might be (justly) galvanized by influx of members
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committed to its foundational principles of equity
and fairness. He further upholds the value of intentional communities striving to live in solidarity
with the poor, naming the Iona Community as an
example of a group committed to peace, justice
and the integrity of creation.
As may be already evident, this monograph’s
author does not hide his normative commitment to
a more equitable world. The result is certainly
some stimulating reading but there are also instances of overly sweeping statements and the resultant
arguments are sometimes muddled. For instance,
Houston places the World Health Organization
(WHO) on a list international bodies that ‘most of
the time..[work] against the interests of the poorest
people in the less developed part of the world’
(p. 122). While the WHO is far from perfect, this
seems a rather unfair characterization of the organization and its activities, which do strive to better the
health of people who are marginalized in the global
community. Further, the ‘justice audit’ chapter does
little to explicitly link the preceding material and
foreshadow the conclusion. Yet, despite such tensions, Houston’s work does succeed in its goal of
raising a series of challenges to status quo lifestyles
in the UK and the USA, often from a biblical perspective centred on justice. As such, although not
always logically rigorous, Justice – The Biblical
Challenge, nonetheless serves to raise significant
questions about Western Christian complicity in
both unjust structures and oppressive ways of being.
Saint Thomas More College,
University of Saskatchewan Christopher Hrynkow
Reason, Tradition, and the Good. By Jeffrey L. Nicholas. Pp. 250, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre
Dame Press, 2012, $38.00.
The sleep of reason produces monsters. This
famous etching by Francisco de Goya is covering
Nicholas’ thought-provoking book. The readers get
aware how well this picture is chosen by familiarizing themselves with the two main theses of this
work: The first, developed in chapters 1 and 2,
claims that reason in modernity is asleep and that
it has produced an ugly monster: a capitalist or
rather a market society, as Michael Sandel has formulated it recently. In such a society it is impossible to evaluate ends. Chapters 3 to 5 demonstrate
that the fight against this monster can be won once
reason has been woken up.
The upshot of the first two chapters is that the
Frankfurt School Critique of Reason with its prominent figures Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas
gave the correct diagnosis of the problems of
modern-capitalist society but were unable to offer
the effective cure. Adorno and Horkheimer were
right in identifying ‘subjective rationality’ as the
main cause that made a reification of human beings
possible and which led to domination and oppression (p. 19). According to the analysis of the early
Frankfurt School, a ‘substantive’ conception of reason is missing. Only with such a new conception
of reason, it is possible to formulate a critical
theory of society, a society which is just and free
of oppression (p. 221). To rely on substantive reason means to accept that reason is constituted by
and constitutive of tradition (p. x). The social practices of giving and asking for reasons, the evaluation of these reasons and consequently the
evaluation of the ends is only possible within a tradition and on the background of the set of evalua-
tive standards and beliefs which it provides. The
basic failure of the Enlightenment was therefore its
belief in the possibility of a tradition-independent
form of reasoning, its illusion that it is possible to
establish a ‘neutral’ standpoint which enables a
critical evaluation of society and an ongoing emancipation of human beings from oppressive and
manipulating forces. Chapter 2 shows that the work
of Habermas and his notion of ‘communicative
rationality’ represents an important development
of the Frankfurt School. According to Nicholas,
Habermas moved in the right direction dissociating
himself from the underlying philosophy of consciousness of Horkheimer and Adorno and advocating a conception of reason which is aware of its
rootedness in historic forms of social interaction.
Although representing a considerable improvement,
this step is not sufficient. Nicholas demonstrates
convincingly that Habermas’ conception of communicative reason is still too formal. With its claim
to be able to derive substantive values or evaluative standards for judging ends from a purely
procedural form of communicative action, it still
tries to establish a ‘neutral’, tradition-independent
standpoint of reasoning and is therefore not capable
to propose a substantive conception of reason
which could serve as a basis for a critical theory of
society either (p. 12).
In chapter 3 Nicholas turns to MacIntyre’s work
with the intention to demonstrate two things: Firstly,
he wants to illustrate that there is much common
ground between MacIntyre and the Frankfurt School
with respect to their analysis of the problems of
modern society. Secondly, vital resources to
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formulate a critical theory of society can be found
by relying on MacIntyre’s arguments for a traditionconstituted and tradition-constitutive conception of
reason. Of course, such a conception of reason is
charged frequently of leading to relativism. Although
much ink has been spoiled on that issue, Nicholas is
able to confront and debunk some of the more recent
arguments that a commitment to MacIntyre’s traditionconstituted and tradition-constitutive conception of
reason implies necessarily a commitment to relativism.
The most creative and thrilling part of the book is
chapter 4 which argues that the concepts ‘reason’,
‘tradition’ and ‘good’ are interrelated and that a
reflexion on how they depend on each other leads to a
substantive conception of reason which is able to
provide a critical theory of society. Especially this
chapter does not just display the stunning familiarity of
Nicholas with MacIntyre’s, but additionally it proves
that a ‘MacIntyrean tradition of enquiry’ has the
capacity to clarify and solve some of its inherent
tensions and problems.
Although Nicholas presents in sum a convincing
defence of his thesis, I would like to mention a
critical point which concerns the insufficient social
and cultural contextualization of the tradition of
moral enquiry which is called ‘Frankfurt School’.
At least a German reader of this book is astonished
that Nicholas tries to interpret the thinking of
Adorno and Horkheimer without considering their
Jewish background and the traumatic German
experience of the Third Reich. Nicholas’ presentation conveys the impression that the Frankfurt
School is just an intellectual reaction to the frustrated promise of Enlightenment. However, such a
presentation is biased. Adorno and Horkheimer
were searching for an explanation how the rise of
Hitler and the Nazis and how the horrific reification
of human beings in the concentration camps were
possible despite the long philosophical German tradition with its emphasis on reason. In this context,
they speak of the ‘Verblendungszusammenhang’
(context of delusion) as one of the necessary conditions of the rise of the Nazi regime. Their criticism
503
of the Enlightenment conception of reason is a
philosophical explanation and answer to the question which historic and social process enabled such
a collective delusion. It can be said that the Nazi
ideology is ‘Nietzsche put to practice’ and in this
sense it revealed the final social and political consequences of a philosophical error which is rooted
in an Enlightenment conception of reason. In
accordance with MacIntyre one could argue that
the sociological impact of this wrong turn in philosophy lead to the erosion of an ‘educated public’
which made a collective delusion possible and consequently enabled the rise of the Nazi regime.
This missing or insufficient historicisation of the
Frankfurt School, is, at least in my opinion,
responsible for the fact that Nicholas has not
detected even more common ground between these
two traditions of thought. For example, the two do
not just present a similar critical diagnosis of
modernity, but both argue to provide a philosophical standpoint which is superior to competing philosophical traditions. Like MacIntyre in After
Virtue, the protagonists of the Frankfurt School
claim that they are able to provide a standpoint
which allows to recast the historic narrative in
such a way that it can be understood how the
catastrophe of Nietzscheanism at the political and
social level became possible.
Despite this particular criticism, the merit of this
book is beyond any doubt. It represents an important constructive proposal how the contributions of
MacIntyre’s work in moral philosophy can also
make a difference in the field of political philosophy. This is much needed because MacIntyre’s
own proposal of ‘politics of local communities’ has
proven up so far to be insufficient to formulate a
full scale political philosophy and critical theory of
society. Therefore, we should hope that Nicholas
will soon fulfil his promise to further elucidate his
Thomistic-Aristotelian critical theory of society
which he sketches briefly at the end of his book.
University of Bonn
Patrick Zoll
Christian Faith and Social Justice: Five Views. Edited by Vic McCracken. Pp. x, 207, London, Bloomsbury,
2014, £17.99.
There is a great idea behind this book. The idea
was to bring representatives of various ethical stances together to engage in conversation. The five
ethical positions are labelled libertarianism, political liberalism, liberation theology, feminism, and
virtue ethics. The structure of the book reflects the
idea of conversation: each spokesperson presents a
short summary of her or his position and the other
four reply from their respective stances. These
encounters provide the core five chapters of the
book, to which along with an introduction a concluding chapter is added, allowing each participant
to provide a summing up from her or his
standpoint.
Given the difficulties faced by students and practitioners in coming to terms with the great variety
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of ethical theories and practical stances on important issues, this project is crucial and timely. However, the present volume represents only a first step
in realization of the idea, and that should not be
surprising, given that each of the stances can
adduce a considerable literature devoted to the
articulation and defence of its position. The idea
remains a great one, and what is learned from this
attempt may help to guide further steps in the realization of the project. The comments offered here
in review, while giving a flavour of the book’s contents, are intended also to help develop the project.
They are shaped around three questions. Assuming
this a conversation, what is the conversation about?
Who are the participants in the conversation? And
are they agreed on the rules of the game?
Already in the introduction the editor notes the
selectivity involved in the choice of five positions
and the exclusion of possible other candidates, such
as the natural law tradition, or utilitarianism. Since
the topic is social justice from the perspective of
Christian Faith, one might also list Catholic Social
Thought (not to be identified completely with natural
law) and the Social Gospel tradition among possible
participants. This inevitable limitation is not as such
a problem, except in one regard, and that is in the
specification of the topic of conversation: what are
they talking about? The title suggests that ‘social justice’ is the focus of attention. The introduction opens
the discussion by identifying three practical issues:
the criminalization of homosexual acts by a Texan
law, the exclusion of non-insured patients from
health care, and the French ban on Muslim girls
wearing headscarves in class. Are these intended to
illustrate the concept of social justice? If so, there is
a serious gap in the specification of the topic. In the
tradition of Catholic Social Thought it has become
commonplace to say that ‘work is the key to the
social question’. The absence of fundamental economic issues from the perspective of social justice
means that the conversation is distorted from the
beginning. Of course, given the importance of the
issues around the production and distribution of what
is needed for human existence, the relevant concerns
cannot be ignored in practice. They arise in Miguel
A. De La Torre’s defence of liberationist stances, in
Daniel A. Dombrowski’s presentation of Rawls on
inequality, in Laura Stivers’ noting of the relative
impoverishment of women, and in Jason Jewell’s
endorsement of property rights from a libertarian
perspective. Another related question provoked by
this opening listing of concrete issues is whether the
conversation is about the five stances which might be
taken on such concrete issues, or whether the conversation is about the defence of those stances in general? The book follows the latter path, but the former
might have been more productive.
On the second question, who are the participants
in the conversation, there is the obvious answer in
terms of names. Along with the four listed above,
Elizabeth Phillips represents virtue ethics. Each is a
protagonist on behalf of her or his chosen stance, so
it is more the positions rather than the persons which
are brought into dialogue with one another. This is a
difficult trick to pull off for a number of reasons. One
reason is that they are not all the same kind of thing.
For instance, political liberalism is a theoretical construct on the basis of several presuppositions, as was
its earlier and related theory of justice. Liberation
theology, on the other hand, is a practical stance,
which, while it must address some theoretical issues,
for example in relation to hermeneutical method, is
pre-eminently an engaged advocacy stance. To bring
theory in a strict sense into conversation with an
engaged practical standpoint is difficult and requires
careful reconstruction so that positions encounter
each other on the same basis. As is reflected in some
of the contributions to the book, it is not unknown
for a position to create a positive profile for itself by
caricaturing the alternatives. As for instance, as ideological, or as concealing class interest, or as reflecting patriarchy, or as remote and abstract theory. In
further development of the project it is to be hoped
that this tendency will be completely overcome and
the engagement can be fair as well as honest.
In the present chapters and conclusion there are
many signs of willingness to cooperate. Feminism
and virtue ethics find many points of similarity, libertarianism does not understand itself as excluding
virtue ethics, and in being opposed to all uses of
aggression is in harmony with the concerns of feminism. The tentative indications of agreement have
to be explored further in order to discover if they
are fruitful. Here is a point at which a focus on
concrete issues rather than theoretical clarification
might have been more productive. The discovery
that on certain real cases the practical conclusions
supported by divergent positions actually converge
in endorsing the same recommendations might
encourage acceptance of the complementarity of
positions which to date have profiled themselves
by contrast with each other.
And this is the third question provoked by the
book: what is or might be the shared theoretical
foundation on the basis of which complementarity
might be acknowledged and the tolerance of divergence accepted? This question alone deserves a
monograph. Of the positions on the table, perhaps
it is political liberalism following Rawls which has
most directly faced this question and provided an
articulation of the reality of a plurality of comprehensive doctrines along with the desirability of
finding an overlapping consensus between them to
sustain a public and political common life. The
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concrete issues listed in the opening of the conversation all had to do with matters of policy,
whether of legislation or social practices. They
belong, therefore, in that public realm in which
solutions might be supported by representatives of
divergent comprehensive doctrines. It should not
be forgotten that no overlapping consensus is possible without persons and communities who hold
505
with conviction the content of their own comprehensive doctrines. This conversation begun in this
book will also be useful to those attempting to
refine their own commitments and convictions,
since it presents arguments for and against the various stances.
Heythrop College
Patrick Riordan
Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology. By Jason A. Springs.
Pp. x, 234, Oxford University Press, 2010, $74.00.
During the last few decades of the twentieth century,
postliberal thinkers dramatically reshaped the theological landscape, developing their own carefully
nuanced perspectives, eliciting critical responses
from both liberals and conservatives, while also (at
least in some respects) setting the stage for the
emergence of Radical Orthodoxy. Now in the second decade of the twenty first century, serious
questions might be raised about the present status
and future of the postliberal movement. Jason
Springs’ book poses and attempts to answer some
of those questions, focusing attention most specifically on the work of the Yale theologian Hans
Frei, whose major writings were published in the
1970s and who died in 1988.
This is the most important commentary on Frei’s
theology, among numerous article-length and several book-length treatments, produced to date. The
book has three primary objectives. In the first
place, Springs executes a close reading and analysis of Frei’s work, ranging from his Yale dissertation to several important collections of essays
published posthumously. His announced intention
here is to demonstrate the continuity of Frei’s
thought, to undermine standard accounts that distinguish between an ‘early’ and a ‘later’ Frei. In the
middle sections of the book, Springs struggles to
distinguish between Frei’s theology and that of his
Yale colleague George Lindbeck, with whom he is
often closely linked as a founding father of the
postliberal movement. Finally, the twenty first century ‘prospects’ for a postliberal theology are
explored in the book’s closing chapters, with some
of Frei’s central claims being re-evaluated in the
light of contemporary philosophical developments.
Springs succeeds admirably in achieving his first
objective here, carefully linking Frei’s early meditations on the ‘realistic narrative’ embedded in
Scripture with his later attentiveness to that narrative’s ‘cultural linguistic context.’ The difference
in emphasis, Springs argues convincingly, does not
signal a fundamental shift in theological perspective, since a Barthian refusal to articulate the meaning of basic Christian beliefs in anything other than
explicitly Christian terms guided Frei’s deliberations throughout his career. (Wittgenstein’s continuing influence was crucial for Frei as well, but
always in a way, Springs insists, that is logically
parasitic on his Barthian theological commitments.)
Springs seems somewhat less successful in his
attempt to show that the similarities between Frei
and Lindbeck ‘have tended to get overemphasized’
(83). The result is not so much a problematic
interpretation of Frei’s theology, but rather, the
risk of caricature in summarizing Lindbeck’s position. Springs’ observation that Lindbeck’s bold talk
about scripture ‘absorbing’ the world ‘has proven
to be rhetorically unfortunate’ is balanced by his
admission that Lindbeck later made attempts to
clarify such talk (64). But the force of this admission is blunted by his strategy of identifying the
‘absorption’ trope as one of the salient features
distinguishing Lindbeck’s from (what he regards
as) Frei’s slightly more palatable perspective (82).
I think that Springs is also unnecessarily rigid in
the extent to which he portrays Lindbeck’s argument as entailing the absolute incommensurability
or untranslatability of different religious perspectives
on the one hand (68ff.), and as precluding the possibility of articulating propositional truth claims on the
other (118). Interreligious dialogue is certainly a far
more challenging task for someone defending the
cultural linguistic theory of religion that Lindbeck
proposed than it might be for some liberals, but it is
hardly an impossible one. (Indeed, many of the
insights recorded in The Nature of Doctrine were the
precipitate of Lindbeck’s own decades-long engagement in such dialogue.) Moroever, to say that doctrinal utterances as doctrine should be conceived as
rules rather than as propositional truths does not
mean for Lindbeck that religious persons never make
truth claims; it does mean that their making of such
claims, much like their liturgical practices, is a form
of religious behavior that ought to be ‘ruled’ by specific doctrines, one that should conform to a certain
‘grammar.’
Early in the book, Springs contends that ‘Frei’s
semantics presupposes a pragmatics’ (13). His
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exploration in the book’s later chapters of the pragmatic dimension of Frei’s postliberal theology—as
well well as of its future prospects and possibilites
when contemplated from a pragmatic point of
view— give firm substance to that contention.
The argument in these chapters deserves careful
consideration from readers as well as further
development by Springs. Frei’s gradually increasing attentiveness to the ecclesial practices that
shape Christian discourse is evaluated by Springs
against the background of a philosophical pragmatism first articulated by Wilfrid Sellars and
then refined in Robert Brandom’s more recent
work. The result is consistently iluminating as
Springs avoids the distortive simplicity of any
hermeneutic that emphasizes the significance of a
given text’s contents while de-emphasizing its
context, or vice versa.
Now Peter Ochs has for several decades, and in
numerous publications, carefuly delineated the affinities between postliberal theology and Charles
Peirce’s pragmaticism. Moreover, Richard Bernstein
has clearly traced the origin of important claims
made by Sellars and others to their roots in several essays published by Peirce in the 1860s in
the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Intriguingly, Springs book suggests that, despite the
canonical status of Barth, Wittgenstein, Geertz
and others in the any narrative that describes the
genesis of postliberalism, the future of such a
theological perspective may emerge in this blossoming conversation with the philosophical pragmatists, not only contemporary but also classical
ones.
Lehigh University
Michael L. Raposa
The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology. By John Milbank. Pp. xxii, 382, London, SCM, 2009, £25.00.
This collection brings together a wide range of
essays, eighteen in total, written after the last twentyfive years. Many of them are rewritten, at least in
part, to reflect developments in Milbank’s thought
and so it provides a valuable contribution to the study
of his ideas. It is common place to note the vast erudition and tremendous intellect that characterizes all
of Milbank’s work, and the range and scope of these
essays give ample opportunity for the appreciation of
both aspects of this. Moreover, for people with some
general familiarity with his thought this is an excellent place to gain a wider overview. Indeed, as someone who has come to Milbank primarily through his
more theological writings, and engaged with him on
this level, I found it very useful to see his more politically inclined writings and understand why, in this
field, he is often accorded great respect. Indeed, I
found much that was appealing and inspiring within
this; nevertheless, I still find Milbank’s work deeply
troubling.
It is almost impossible to offer an overview in
the space of a review for the essays here. In six
sections he develops themes on: Theology and
English Culture; Theology and British Politics;
responses to responses on Theology and Social
Theory; Political Theology Today; Theology and
Pluralism; and, Theopolitical agendas. Many of the
themes overlap, and there is often no clear division,
which is not a criticism in itself because Milbank’s
work seeks to provide a grand theory, a theological
holism, that encompasses all realms of thought.
Indeed, before turning to particulars in this review,
it would be useful to address this grand metanarrative that runs throughout the essays and which
finds explication at various points. I would suggest
this is necessary because a piecemeal approach
would not do justice to the discourse that holds all
this together. This great explanatory thesis which
centralizes theology is something many find inspiring, however, it is one area where I find great
problems with his work for at least four reasons
which I will detail below.
First, Milbank has a vision of a certain form of
Platonic Augustinianism as providing not only the
best but the only satisfying solution to the world’s
problems, and the only adequate form of theology.
However, his reasoning is often circular, given his
presuppositions he sets out what must be, as he
interprets it, the answer, and then shows his starting point gives us that answer. Certainly, given the
sophistication of Milbank’s thought it is presented
in a far more nuanced way, nevertheless it is inescapable. This results in his degrading comments on
other religious traditions, and while at times he is
quite generous in allowing that Judaism and Islam
may have much in common with his own preferred
tradition, he is often at pains to point out that they
fail to provide an adequate explanation of the
world, at least as he sees it.
This brings us to a second point, which is that
Milbank’s master discourse leads him to insist that
everything is at root theological in explanation. Continuing with the notion of the Abrahamic religions,
Milbank, for instance, claims that while the ‘Christian genius’ allowed it to blend reason and faith (i.e.
the revelatory narrative and Greek philosophy),
Islam by contrast tried and failed to achieve this.
Leaving aside Milbank’s tunnel vision that only
Greek philosophy is the world’s true intellectual heritage (a typical postliberal theological aporia that
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seems to think that ignoring India, China and other
cultures is quite legitimate because Christianity must
think within its own petite narrative – based on an
appallingly limited understanding of world Christianity!), for someone who claims to deal with political theology it is remarkably na€ıve that he does not
recognize that many factors beyond simply ‘theological’, narrowly understand, led to this. Certain groups
of thinkers had support from the reigning powers,
trends in intellectual thought and social formation
benefitted various expressions of thought, etc. As
such, Milbank’s thesis that everything else in world
history is formed by (Christian) theological presuppositions, while cleverly argued by himself and
others in the Radical Orthodox camp is patently
nonsense.
Thirdly, Milbank’s meta-narrative means that his
thought remains, essentially, enwrapped within an
imaginative bubble. At places he makes reference
to Tolkien and others who, he says, by using imagination and literature were far more able to engage
and actively spread an orthodox Christian worldview than those who used more prosaic theological
and philosophical methods. Leaving aside the correctness of his assumptions, it has been noted by
critics that he does engage in a very rhetorical style
where stylistics take centre stage. In this regard I
can see a parallel between Tolkien and Milbank,
both are tremendous intellectuals who through their
sheer power of imagination have created selfcontained worlds with their own internal coherence
and logic (commentators on the fantasy novel
genre often suggest Tolkien stands supreme in this
regard for creating an entire universe with a history, languages, races, etc.), but, as I have suggested above, we have reason to doubt the viability
of Milbank’s schema. If one wishes to buy into it,
as his Radical Orthodoxy acolytes have done, you
can create a theological vision of a world with its
heroes and villains, a compelling central narrative
that relates the way to a fall and return to grace;
however, I suggest we do not need to buy into it
(one reason for this would simply be that there are
better ways of doing theology and better theologies
than that he provides).
Finally, my last assessment is that what Milbank
gives us is, in various ways, bad theology, even
within his own terms. Despite Milbank’s reference to
‘an entire Christian logic’ there is simply no such
thing, and his work is throughout riven by a tension.
On the one hand he wants to see everything as subservient to theology, yet one the other he wants to
acknowledge the value of human endeavour and reason – and he sees incarnation and a universal divine
presence, or indwelling, as grounding this. However,
given this, and here I think he has good theological
sense, it becomes increasingly untenable to suggest
507
that only one interpretation which in his system continues a quasi-Barthian dialectic of truth and error,
spiritual right vs. secular error, becomes difficult to
maintain. Other systems of thought besides his own
can maintain such a synthesis (of valorising a divine
inspired ideal yet accepting human reason and experience as worthwhile), and can do it without the
polemical rhetoric he continually displays which
seeks to divide the world between truth and error.
To turn to some particular issues, Milbank’s
political theology, for which I have noted he
receives high praise, includes some very sound and
praiseworthy aspects. His social vision is often
strong and contains a clear insistence on justice
and equality. In particular, he provides a sound
explication of what can be found of use within
Marx’s work, but also offering insightful critique.
However, throughout his political essays while I
often found myself endorsing his analysis he
returned, repeatedly, to the meta-narrative which
we have discussed above insisting that only one
particular theological worldview could provide a
sound basis for this. While he cogently showed,
within his imaginative framework, why his own
theology could ground his social vision, it is far
from clear that it is the only vision that could do
this. Moreover, his dismissal of liberation theology
as inadequate seems to be based on a particular
reading and analysis of it as essentially Marxist
inspired, which is certainly not true of all liberation
theology, and neglects the biblical sources it draws
upon. Again, within his own theological viewpoint,
it is unclear why he must reject that grounded in
human reason or secular sources (Marxism) if this
draws its inspiration (or may potentially do so)
from a divine indwelling; an issue further compounded when he himself is willing to see Marxism as the best analysis of social issues. I would
also note that while I find much of Milbank’s
social analysis as very good it seems inadequate,
both in theological and practical terms, certainly
compared to recent liberation theological critique
found in such figures as Jung Mo Sung.
Continuing to focus on his political theology,
it seems, at times, that Milbank’s theological
imagination leaves him lost in the realms of fantasy with no coherent or realistic vision to offer.
For instance he advocates ‘the gradual end of
human self-government, a kind of ordered anarchy’ which he seems to think will come about if
people devout themselves to his particular theological vision. While we may deem the pursuit
of a high-minded idealism admirable, and certainly as an ultimate vision or idealistic utopia
we may endorse what he wishes, yet it leaves us
with no practical suggestions to counter the problems of the world. There seems to be a certain
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naivety at work, similar to that of some very
conservative social commentators, that if we all
went back to church, sent children to Sunday
School and advocated a theological leadership,
etc. then the world would be a better place; however, it is clearly the case that this did not instil
in society a greater moral fibre in the past, and
leaves us wondering, if Milbank is right, why
institutions like the Catholic Church (which he
sees as a great focus of his theological vision)
have not been above scandal, abuse and exploitation – I would suggest that Milbank’s idea that a
correct metaphysical vision/ theology as grounding a certain social view is no bar to a great
many actual abuses of people that could equally
well be grounded in such a vision. Despite his
pretensions to write political theology his thought
seems often ungrounded in reality.
Other issues of agreement or contention could be
picked out from these essays, however, due to
space I will devout myself briefly to just two more.
One of these is Milbank’s very clever deconstruction of evangelical piety arguing that it offers a
commoditisation of souls akin to the workings of a
market based capitalism. While sympathetic to his
critique, and I can see myself employing it, I
nevertheless feel that he wants it to do too much.
The entire evangelical movement cannot be written
off as an ideology that has developed from employing a single approach linked to the rise of capitalism. As ever, ignoring historical, political and
social factors Milbank seems to think that all
comes eventually down to ideology, or, more correctly, theology; nothing else can impinge upon his
all encompassing narrative. As such, his critique
loses some of its force by being too doctrinaire in
its assessment.
The second point is his focus on the English context, or ‘Englishness’. This clearly looms large in his
writings, and much of the first section has essays
looking to figures he sees as precursors to his worldview like Coleridge. Leaving aside that Coleridge’s
immediate successors and interpreters were often of
a liberal theological disposition far from Milbank’s
own tastes, his employment of these figures becomes
part of a very suspect pseudo-Hegelian narrative.
Making vast generalizations about the Anglo-Saxon
character and disposition (for such a sophisticated
thinker Milbank seems entirely unaware that any
characterization of the English as Anglo-Saxon is
deeply suspect), he seeks to show that in some fundamental ways the English way of approaching the
world, which balances he suggests in a perfect
match, metaphysics and empiricism, is the finest and
truest epitome of all that he holds most worthy.
While not quite employing a fully Hegelian sense of
evolution, the cultural chauvinism that ensues in his
view is clear: in his country, in the thinkers he
admires, in the way of doing things and thinking of
his native homeland, the highest pinnacle of Christian civilization (which, as he constantly tries to
show, and as we have discussed above, is supreme
beyond all others) has been reached. Moreover, his
eulogies of the English way of life become, at times,
almost absurd, where he extols the village church
and its parish as what all truly aspire to and the true
essence of Church as embodiment of Christ – a cursory glance through history would show that what
this entailed is far from what ecclesiology should
mean with the practical outworking of it where the
local priest was effectively in the service of the local
landowner; this presumably would betray a political
power structure utterly at odds with Milbank’s own
Marxist inspired thought. This leaves us really wondering what we can learn here. As stated at the beginning, Milbank’s erudition and brilliance are clear,
but almost as if blinded by this he can at times present ideas which seem totally out of touch with reality
and lacking any credibility. His Tolkienesque masterpiece of a total narrative theology that encompasses everything begins to unravel as it is made to
do too much, and especially as it has to grapple with
the actuality of the world, history, politics and society. I have no doubt that the ideology Milbank sets
out will be studied and employed by theologians for
many years to come, and certainly at its best it has
depth, a mystery, an insight which few can match,
however, to take Milbank’s work as one of the great
works of theology would, I suggest, be mistaken.
What we have is one man’s dream, but to take too
much of it would entail a nightmare.
The University of Winchester
Paul Hedges
Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction. By Nicholas Healy. Pp xii, 142, Eerdmans, 2014, £16.99.
Healy subjects Hauerwas’s though to a careful
systematic Theological appraisal. Focusing on his
arguments rather than his personality, Healy produces a brilliant critique. Beginning with an uncontroversial outline of Hauerwas’s thought in which,
drawing on social theory, the church should perform
Christ’s narrative in a social ethic over and against
the world, he then criticises his method, social
theory and theology. Offering a compelling interpretation of Hauerwas as paralleling Schleiermacher,
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Healy claims both understand Christianity as an
ecclesiology ordered on social-philosophical lines in
which any doctrines of God take a back seat. Unlike
traditional theologians such as Aquinas, whose
understanding of the Church and Christian ethics
was by an understanding of God’s provenience and
independence, both Schleiermacher and Hauerwas,
in different ways, understand God essentially along
functionalist and utilitarian lines. Citing Kelsey,
Healy claims that his attempt to ground Christianity
in community practices reduces it to those practices
at the expense of the Divine reality that is immanent
yet also transcendent of them. Apologetics and ethics
are conflated with God. Moreover, Hauerwas’s
emphasis of ecclesial authority over the individual
undercuts his own authority to challenge the church,
as he is hardly an ecclesial authority as such. What
right has he to demand that Scripture be solely read
from within the Church, yet insist as an individual
layman that most of the Church has misread Scripture, as with Pacifism? If he is to assume a prophetic authority against most church authorities then
he needs to develop a Theology more accepting of
the Holy Spirit working outside and to some against
most of the Church. He needs to properly acknowledge that Scripture may be misread communally as
well as individually and develop clear safeguards
against the abuse of ecclesial authority.
Turning to Social theory, Healy shows how
ethnographic studies suggest that individuals are
formed less passively by their communities than
Hauerwas argues. People choose to be part of a
community and influence it, as when homosexuals choose a parish tolerant of their practices,
leaving less hospitable communities rather than
simply being moulded by them as clay. Furthermore even individuals in traditionalist Catholic
communities do not monolithically adhere to the
beliefs embodied in their practices, a significant
minority regarding such doctrines as the Real
Presence as inessential to Catholicism. Hauerwas
repeatedly extols “peasant Catholicism” but this
is rooted in a misunderstanding of “peasant Catholics”. Healy appreciates Hauerwas’s concern
that Christianity be seen as socially embodied,
but fears that its reductionism leaves no room for
the individual and the intellect in religion. Chris-
509
tians rarely behave in a manner sharply distinguishable from others. It is in fact debatable
whether the Christian tradition should be so distinguished, Macintyre’s exclusivist understanding
of tradition which influenced Hauerwas being
considered too clear cut.
Finally Hauerwas’s thought is criticised as
theologically lacking. His stress on community
practices leaves little place for the Grace of
God. Christianity cannot be considered along
Macintyrean lines as a community operating on
certain tradition-specific lines of human excellence because it has excellence is at all primarily
through God’s grace rather than by anything of
our own. There is little sense in Hauerwas of
God’s strength made perfect in the Church’s
weakness, of the prevenience of Christ’s person
and works on the Cross and by the Resurrection
triumphing against even the wickedness of his
closest disciples. Nor is the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church and in the world in general,
sufficiently explored. Hauerwas is so busy telling
Christians how to live that he pays little attention to the God revealed in Christ through the
Spirit who makes life worth living in the first
place. There is no Theology of failure, little consolation for those who, perhaps not though their
entire fault may be too weak for the rigorist
ethical communities Hauerwas envisions. How,
if at all, these people may hope for salvation is
not explained by him. Even when he wrote a
commentary on the Gospel according to
St Matthew, it is as a series of sermons on
applied ethics rather than any concession that
Christianity might involve contemplating God
and what God has done even more than doing
things in his name. Healy does not dismiss
Hauerwas’s Theology entirely; he simply
believes that it must be made more Theological.
Kelsey is again invoked; the church is conceived as a worshipful response to the Triune
God, with ethics grounded in Christ rather than
the reverse. Healy is perceptive and provoking,
those interested in Hauerwas must read it – as
should Hauerwas himself.
Braunton, UK
Christopher Villiers
Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice. Edited by Anthony F. Lang Jr., Cian O’Driscoll, and John
Williams. Pp. viii, 328, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 2013, $26.50.
This collection of 16 papers plus an introduction
and conclusion is the outcome of a workshop held
in August 2010 in Washington, DC hosted by the
US Institute of Peace. As the title suggests, the
central theme is authority – both the contested
authority of the just war doctrine for contemporary
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nation states and non-state warriors and, for those
who accept the doctrine, the authority to declare
war and to determine how war should be
conducted.
In addressing the second meaning of authority,
James Turner Johnson notes that following the
Peace of Westphalia treaties (1648) nation states
were acknowledged as the only legitimate wagers
of war. In recent years, however, this position has
been challenged by non-state armed forces fighting
against repressive governments and by the emergence of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, both of
which limit the immunity of sovereign states from
outside interference in domestic affairs. Nevertheless, Johnson concludes that ‘Classic just war
thinking was right to hold that the use of arms is
just only when authorized by a ruler responsible
for the common good’ (p. 33).
Chris Brown argues that neither sovereign states
nor the U.N. Security Council possess the moral
authority to declare war; rather such authority
resides in ‘some notion of international public
opinion, amorphous though this notion may be’
(p. 41). However, his main point is that just war
theorizing, with its emphasis on legalistic rules,
should give way to prudential consideration of the
questions (not the answers) that just war doctrine
raises. In his specifically Christian account of just
war thinking, Nigel Biggar agrees with Brown that
it ‘requires the prudential consideration of circumstances. . ., albeit within the terms set by moral
norms of conduct’ (p. 57). These include right
motive and intention as well as a favourable ratio
of benefits to costs.
John Williams (not this reviewer) discusses the
popular opposition in Britain to the impending
decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Although he
would not allow such protests to be the determining factor in government decision making about
war, ‘just war needs to engage with the challenge
posed by the claim that war is “Not in my name”’
(p. 76). For Laura Sjoberg, the just war doctrine
had done more to legitimate wars than to prevent
them. One of the principal justifications for waging war has been ‘to protect “our” way of life,
“life back home,” “innocent women and children,”
and other proxies for the beautiful soul’ (p. 85),
but the logical corollary of this motivation has
been to target the enemy’s women and children,
both to punish the enemy and because of the difficulty distinguishing between innocent noncombatants and those offering material support to
enemy fighters. She concludes that ‘the just war
tradition is itself a net cause of public harm that
ought to be discarded and replaced not only in
scholarly circles but also in policymaking circles’
(p. 92).
Among the many non-state warrior groups operating today, Al-Qaeda is probably the best known and
arguably the most effective. Nahed Artoul Zehr
describes its model of war, as formulated by Abu
Mas’ab al-Suri in his treatise on jihad, The Global
Islamic Resistance Call. al-Suri distinguishes offensive jihad, which requires authorization by the political head of the community, and defensive jihad, for
which the individual Muslim is the legitimate authority as regards both when and how (including terrorist
tactics) to wage war. Tarik Kochi criticizes James
Turner Johnson’s defence of the traditional just war
position on legitimate authority, and just war theory in
general, because of its use to justify colonialism and
neo-colonialism and its neglect of the origin of sovereign authority: ‘When a theory does not, or cannot,
explain how the bearer of the sword got the sword,
and whether it got the sword by use of the sword, then
it is not in a strong position to dictate to others the
moral conditions under which a particular act of violence should or should not take place’ (p. 130).
Against the contributors who would jettison just
war doctrine altogether, Anthony F. Lang Jr. defends
it as the best means for deliberating about war in democratic states, but like Chris Brown and Nigel Biggar,
he rejects its legalistic use. Instead, he proposes a narrative approach and suggests that religious institutions
are places where narratives about war can be effective.
However, his reasons why this might not work are
more persuasive than those in favour of his approach.
Gregory M. Reichberg explores the place of punishment in classical theories of just war but does not deal
with the question of authority. Joseph Boyle addresses
authority only indirectly in focussing on right intention as a moral condition for making war. He notes
that this condition has virtually disappeared from contemporary discourse but in his view it is essential for a
just war.
Brent J. Steele defends the role of revenge in pursuing war with specific reference to the murder of
Osama bin Laden: ‘authority in global politics, when
it is challenged, leads to not only a motive of revenge
but also an expectation that such revenge must occur
in a public setting. . .. The squaring of the circle
between the two – revenge and just war principles –
occurs because revenge gets transformed into
“authoritative punishment” or “justice” when it is
linked to rules’ (p. 199). Michael L. Gross contends
that some non-state groups can claim legitimate
authority to conduct guerrilla warfare against states
under certain conditions, especially just cause. The
basis of such authority is twofold: ‘a modicum of
representation and the capability to improve the lot
of their people’ (p. 223).
Neta C. Crawford reveals that in the U.S.A. the
authority to determine how to wage war rests
almost entirely with the military and that ‘military
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necessity’ outweighs ‘noncombattant immunity’,
resulting in widespread civilian causalities. Martin
L. Cook argues that international law must evolve
both to prevent states from oppressing their citizens
and harbouring terrorists and to discourage powerful
states from unilaterally intervening in other countries
for their own self-interest. John Kelsey notes the differences between traditional just war theory and
Muslim teachings on jihad and identifies the characteristics of what he calls ‘good’ just war thinking,
including careful attention to the facts of particular
conflicts and to the dynamic nature of conflicts: ‘one
might judge an initiative as just at the outset, unjust
at some point in the course of fighting, and just at the
end’ (p. 277). For Nicholas Rengger, contemporary
511
just war doctrine priorizes the elimination of perceived injustices over the restraint of force, the result
being the militarization of states and easy recourse to
war: ‘Where injustice is everywhere, the reasons to
use force to oppose it are not hard to find’ (p. 289).
In a collection such as this, it is good to see that
the contributors interact with one another, resulting
either in agreement or disagreement. Of disagreements there are plenty, but each position is well
argued. Whether and in what form just war theory
should be preserved remains an open question. Further thinking about this will be enriched by careful
attention to this book.
University of Ottawa, Canada
John R. Williams
After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post War Justice. By Mark J. Allman and Tobias L.
Winright. Pp. xii, 220, Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books, 2010, $20.00.
There are many books that concentrate on the
rationale for going to war and on the conduct of
war. After the Smoke Clears, as its title suggests,
examines the period after the conflict and asks
the question, ‘What must be done to restore
justice?’
Allman and Winright, both associate professors
of ethics at the time of writing (Allman at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts,
Winright at St Louis University) and both writers
on just war theory, offer their readers a balanced
and informed piece on the issue of moral duties in
a post war situation.
After a brief yet useful introduction, which
focuses on the hard lessons learnt from Afghanistan
and Iraq, the book falls into two parts. In the first
the writers examine the just war theory and the jus
post bellum, which, until recently, has largely been
ignored by ethicists. They first look at historical
developments from Ancient Greek and Roman
times, through Ambrose, Augustine, Gratian and
Aquinas to Vitoria, Suarez, and Grotius and beyond
the World Wars, and then present an overview of
the traditional categories of jus ad bellum and jus
in bello. They explore the jus post bellum as an
emerging category in the ancient world, the Christian tradition and Kant and end the first part by
summarising the elements of philosophy, political
science, international law and military science as
discussed by Brian Orend, Gary J. Bass, Doug
McCready and Mark Evans.
Building on the writing of Adrian Pabst (University of Kent), Allman and Winright conclude that
although the just war tradition has developed in
Christian circles, ‘theologians and church leaders
have for the most part, but not altogether, ignore
post bellum ethics’ (81).
With this in mind they go on to propose ‘four
main criteria, each consisting of a number of considerations and practices, to promote justice in the
post war period .. [believing] that the right intent
of restoring a just and lasting peace requires serious and systematic attention to jus post bellum by
Christian theologians and the church’ (81).
The second part begins by considering the Just
Cause Principle, posing the question, ‘Can you get
good fruit from a bad tree?’ and presents a critique of
Orend’s position on Just Cause and jus post bellum.
We then move to the reconciliation phase, which
reflects on the immediate post conflict period,
acknowledgment, apologies, punishment, forgiveness and amnesty. A chapter on punishment follows,
focusing on compensation and war crimes trials. The
fourth main criterion is the restoration phase, which I
found the most compelling (probably because this
was not written from an ‘ivory tower’ perspective
but came to grips with the grittiness of war), not
a return to the pre war status quo but addressing
security and policing, political reform, economic
recovery, social rehabilitation, environmental
cleanup, depleted uranium, and cluster bombs and
land mines (a development of Winright’s ‘Community Policing as a Paradigm for International
Relations,’ in Just Policing, Not War: An Alternative Response to World Violence, ed. Gerald W.
Schlabach, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
2007, 130-52).
The writers conclude by stating that although they
expect a general consensus on what they have written, they acknowledge that ‘there exists legitimate
512
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room for differences of opinion with regard to their
concrete applications on the ground’ (174-75).
I was impressed by the fact that although Allman
and Winright write from their Catholic backgrounds
and pay special attention to the moral methodology
of the U.S. Catholic bishops in their statements on
socio-ethical issues, this book is not written primarily
for a Catholic – or even Christian – audience.
Monastère Sainte Presence
Luke Penkett
The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism And Why Philosophers Can’t Solve It. By Thaddeus J. Kozinski.
Pp. xxvi, 268. Lanham, Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010, £44.95.
Kozinski is an assistant professor of philosophy
and humanities at Wyoming Catholic College. He
is on the Board of Advisors for the International
Etienne Gilson Society. This is his first book.
Here he takes three philosophers, John Rawls,
Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre, all theorists of religious pluralism and offers critiques on
each. His argument is that ‘the only philosophically
defensible end of any overlapping consensus political order must be the eradication of the ideological
pluralism that makes it necessary.’ Put another
way, ‘a pluralistic society should have as its primary political aim the creation of political conditions for the communal discovery and political
establishment of that unifying tradition within
which political justice can most effectively be
obtained.’
It is a delightfully astute and provocative book.
In Part 1 Kozinski analyzes the central idea of
Rawls’s Political Liberalism. He begins by looking
at Michael Sandel’s anti-Kantian and communitarian and Richard Rorty and Thomas Bridges’s postmodern and antifoundationalist critiques of Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice, which Rawls completely
revised. Kozinski then points out the flaws in his
Political Liberalism.
Part 2 opens with a contextualisation of Maritain’s
‘democratic charter’ (which differs radically from
Rawls in its ‘absence of moral and political restrictions and pressure on both the mode of and motivation for public political discourse’ and its ‘historical
and philosophical explanation of why an overlapping
political consensus is possible and desirable in the
present day’ (xxiii)). Chapter 4 then examines Robert
Kraynak, Aurel Kolnai, and William Cavanaugh’s
criticisms of Mauritain’s at times incoherent, at times
na€ıve, thought, most notably when he attempts a
hybridization of Catholic and non-Catholic, Thomistic
and non-Thomistic philosophical and theological
principles.
The third part explores MacIntyre’s theory of
‘tradition-constituted rationality’, starting with his
early thinking, then tracing his treatment through
four of his main works, After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of
Moral Inquiry and Dependent Rational Animals.
Kozinski critiques MacIntyre’s thought, contrasting
him with Jeffrey Stout and Gary Gutting, pointing
out the absence in MacIntyre’s thought of political
theology. Kozinski then adumbrates a theologically informed MacIntyrean model for political
community.
Kozinski concludes that the political problem of
religious pluralism cannot be solved by philosophy
alone. It must be theologically informed, the result
of a co-operation between political philosophy and
political theology.
The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism is
a fine first book. Originating as a dissertation, its
analyses are comprehensive yet readable and
engaging. Interdisciplinary by nature, it will attract
readers well-versed in the writings of Rawls,
Maritain, and MacIntyre, as well as those for
whom these names are little more than encyclopaedia entries.
There is a foreword by James V. Schall SJ, until
recently Professor of Political Philosophy in the
Department of Government at Georgetown University. The bibliography and index serve Kozinski
well.
Monastère Sainte Presence
Luke Penkett
Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation. Edited by Steve Clarke, Russell
Powell, and Julian Savulescu. Pp. cclxxxii, 282, Oxford University Press, 2013, £30.00.
In May 2010 Steve Clarke, Russell Powell, and
Julian Savulescu organized a conference at the
Old Indian Institute in Oxford on the general
theme of the relationship between religion and
tolerance. This book contains thirteen essays that
engage this theme from a diversity of perspec-
tives. While ten of the essays are revised versions of papers presented at the conference, three
of them (chapters 1, 8, & 13) were added during
the publication process. The book is exemplary
in that it successfully brings together a variety of
diverse intellectual positions regarding a rather
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difficult and extremely relevant question, namely,
whether religion is a force for the promotion of
tolerance or intolerance. The book’s success in
coherently engaging with such a complex and
contested question from such different perspectives owes a good deal of debt to the preface that
clearly lays out the question, indicates the general methodology, and provides a preview of the
book’s contents. As regards methodology and
content, the essays investigate the question
empirically from the disciplines of evolutionary
anthropology (chapters 2 to 4), experimental psychology (chapters 5 to 7), and analytic philosophy (chapters 8 to 13). One of the results of such
a variety of approaches is that most readers will
probably be drawn to one particular section of
the book. In addition to their empirical approach,
the contributions are descriptive and sometimes
prescriptive. One of the most noteworthy prescriptions is the recommendation by Persson and
Savulescu (chapt. 13) that children should only
be allowed to go to schools that teach religious
doctrines if they are also exposed to at least an
equal amount of science.
The conspicuous absence of theological insights
certainly says something about the editor’s views
towards theology’s ability to participate in
“rigorous empirical investigation” and its relationship, or lack thereof, to science. This view comes
into clear relief in Chapter 13 when Persson and
Savulescu affirm that the ubiquity of religion
affirms nothing about the truth or the credibility
of religion. The lack of theological reflection certainly does not mean that the book is not of interest to theologians. On the contrary, it contains
some valuable research material, perhaps most
especially for those who question the nature and
role of religious traditions in contemporary culture. For example, theologians dealing with issues
of interreligious dialogue and theology of religions
are likely to find some of the essays extremely
worthwhile. In this regard, Chapter 11 by Owen
Flanagan stands out. Flanagan examines the
intriguing question of whether belief in the Abrahamic God of the monotheistic traditions makes a
difference in terms of tolerance. He concludes his
essay with some helpful suggestions for further
investigations, including the importance of teach-
513
ing children the positive value of different ways
of being human in terms of different religious traditions and their diverse understandings of ways
of being human.
The general theme of religion and tolerance is
certainly highly problematic and creates some serious challenges that the book more-or-less confronts
successfully. One of the persistent problems that
plagues this theme is the semantic confusion
surrounding the meaning of the terms involved.
To the book’s credit, this problem is squarely
acknowledged (thought not resolved) in Chapter 1
with Powell and Clarke’s reflection on the meanings of religion and tolerance. In regard to the ‘tolerance’, they propose that it is manifest when (i)
one considers an action or practice to be objectionable, (ii) possesses the ability to put a stop to it,
but (iii) due to overriding reasons, decides to allow
the action or practice to take place. As regards
‘religion’, the task seems to be decidedly more difficult and it is taken up in one way or another in
Chapters 8 through 10. The difficulty of arriving at
a clear understanding of ‘religion’ is acknowledged
in the concluding ‘Commentary A’ by Perry and
Biggar who point out the difficulty of defining religion. Perhaps a theological reflection on the nature
of religion from the perspective of a particular tradition could have been helpful in filling-out the
meaning of this central concept.
In addition to ‘Commentary A’, the book also
has a ‘Commentary B’ in which the editors masterfully synthesize the different contributions. This is
not to say that they simplify the complexity of the
discussion by reducing their inherent differences.
They do, however, arrive at the general conclusion
that a basic awareness of the tendency of religions
to generate intolerance, under certain conditions
and towards certain people, is of vital importance
if conflict is to be assuaged and possibly even
avoided altogether. In the current climate in which
hostilities among different people and communities
run high, this edited volume provides a valuable
resource that can help us to understand the nature
of the conflict and in this way, deal with it more
effectively.
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
John Friday
Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. By Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and
Saba Mahmood, with a new preface by the authors. Pp. xxii, 154, New York, Fordham University Press,
2013, £12.99.
This book was first published in 2009. This new
edition, sparkedby the Danish cartoon controversy
of 2005, is an answer to the question posed in the
title. A dozen editorial cartoons, most of which
514
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satirised the Islamic prophet Muhammad, were
published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten
on 30 September 2005, and re-published by several
European and North American newspapers in 2008.
Jyllands-Posten stated that this publication had
been an attempt to contribute to the debate on criticism of Islam and self-censorship. Muslim groups
in Denmark complained and the issue led to protests and riots around the world, including violent
demonstrations in some Muslim countries. The
question set by the authors here is whether a secular worldview is radically different from a religious
one; if so, does each have its own epistemology, so
that one is irreconcilable with the other? The title
was also intended to challenge the presumption
that critique is inherently secular. The reader is
invited to reflect on whether secularism is, by definition, the condition of critique and self-criticism,
unlike religious orthodoxy, which is considered
to be dogmatic. During the autumn of 2007 a
symposium ‘Is Critique Secular?’ was held at the
University of California, Berkeley; it is from this
symposium that the papers published here are
taken.
Any current discussion of secularism has a
number of significant epistemological and political
consequences, some of which are examined here.
First, the writers ‘explore the way a particular
conception of secularism is central to the identity
of the West (liberal, democratic, tolerant, critical),
juxtaposed against its imagined other, which in
this historical moment has become coextensive
with Islam’ (viii).
Second, the writers ‘call into question the
standard normative account of secularism as a
principle of state neutrality toward religion,
including a resolute separation of church and
state, religion and law, ecclesiastical and political
authority’ (ix).
After an Introduction contextualising the symposium by Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of
California, Berkeley, Talal Asad, Professor of
Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center,
shows in his wide-ranging and erudite ‘Free
Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism’, how
‘different conceptualizations of belief, freedom,
and truth produce different possibilities for
action in the world’ (9). He asks two basic questions, ‘Does the modern liberal aversion to the
category of blasphemy derive from a suspicion
of political religion?’ and, ‘Why is it that
aggression in the name of God shocks secular
liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing in
the name of the secular nation, or of democracy,
does not?’ (9-10).
Saba Mahmood, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley,
addresses in her ‘Religious Reason and Secular
Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?’ the significant differences in what she calls ‘reading practices ‘flowing from Islamic piety (a tradition of
interpretation that is challenged by many Muslims) and secular Protestantism’ (10) before
moving on to regard different semiotics of iconography and representation, in particular those
pertinent to religious deities and prophets. Judith
Butler, Maxine Elliott Professor of Rhetoric at
Berkeley, then provides a ‘Response’ to these
two papers. Focusing on the question of ‘why
outrage against the cartoons by Muslim populations across the globe was of a certain kind,
and of what specific meaning that injury had
and has’(95), drawing out their writers’ conclusions, affirming their challenges to Western representations of blasphemy, injury, and freedom
by emphasising the fact that there will always
be a normative framework regulating the semantic areas in which such terms work. Further, she
concludes, these frameworks stimulate our own
critical perspectives.
Asad and Mahmood then reply, briefly, to
Butler, Asad considering the distinction between
critique and criticism, critique as ‘the indispensable
foundation of knowledge’ (138), and the interface
between power and critique, Butler ends with a
question that points to a possible way forward,
‘What [are] the cultural, ethical and sensible means
by which ... relations [are] affected and transformed?’ (147).
A challenging and thought provoking book that
moves beyond questions of whether the Dutch
cartoons constituted a substantial injury, whether
the cartoonists were exercising their freedom of
speech, or whether the offence of religious sensibilities ought to be prohibited, this work offers
much on the nature of blasphemy, on how injury
such as that incurred by the Islamic protesters as
a result of the Dutch cartoons ought to be
addressed - and on the price paid for an antiintellectualism brought about by legal proscriptions of speech.
Dorset
Luke Penkett
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515
The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy. By Chris Turner. Pp. vii, 360, Toronto,
Random House Canada, 2011, £3.25.
This extraordinary book could hardly be more
timely. It begins with a parable. Two trains are
running on adjacent tracks, one running towards
an abyss of incalculable depth, the other, which
has far fewer travelers on it, towards a fairly
commodious destination. Up to now, far more
people are on the first train than on the second. It
is still possible, with some resolution and at the
cost of some immediate inconvenience, to make a
leap from the first train to the second. Some passengers in the first train are standing and gesticulating, earnestly telling the rest how important and
urgent it is to make the leap; others are trying to
shout these down or shut them up. Others still are
remaining impassive and imperturbable in their
seats. It is not difficult to interpret the parable in
terms of present-day humanity at large, particularly those fortunate enough to enjoy the standard
of living which prevails in North America and
Europe.
We should perhaps be somewhat concerned at
the prospect of every fish in the Great Lakes
being rendered unfit for human consumption, due
to the belching of mercury into the atmosphere by
installations for the extraction and refinement of
coal for our electrical grids; by the 34,000 or so
American lives significantly shortened by direct
involvement in the coal business; or by the apparently inevitable periodic devastations of marine
life by accidents to tankers and oil rigs. We have
acidifying oceans and consequently disappearing
coral reefs; and small islands, till recently inhabited, inundated by oceans rising due to melting
ice caps. (How safe is London, by the way?) We,
or at least the more fortunate among us, can simply turn our eyes in another direction. Others
among us are committed, whether financially or
by sheer force of habit, to the unrestricted exploitation of conventional but dwindling sources of
energy, and will lobby to prevent governments
from undertaking radical change. But a Swedish
climatologist has compared our predicament to
persons about to fall a considerable distance; they
may either construct a cushion at some inconvenience to themselves, or do nothing and suffer the
full and fatal consequences. (In defense of the
status quo, I believe that I have heard worse
arguments than I ever have on any other subject,
especially from Albertans; but there is no pace to
go into them here.)
Germany, perhaps not always the best model for
national behaviour over the past century or so, has
proved exemplary in its commitment to renewable
energy as provided by such devices as solar panels
and wind turbines. Many thousand family residences actually contribute electricity to the grid, due
to encouragement by far-sighted legislation.
(Unfortunately similar attempts in Britain have
largely failed, due to let-outs which were deemed
to make them more palatable to the electorate.)
The success of the new German technologies has
spectacularly exceeded all forecasts, and has been
achieved in the teeth of vigorous opposition,
accompanied by dire prognostications, on the part
of their political opponents, who often have strong
financial interest in supporting the status quo. Extra
coal-based installations, which were deemed necessary by the government to make up for the largescale abandonment of nuclear-based energy, have
largely proved unnecessary. Manufacture and servicing of the new technology has incidentally turned
out to be a boon in meeting the problems of unemployment in the formerly communist East Germany. Fortunately, many American jurisdictions
provide heartening examples of towns and firms
which have resorted to renewable energy, for all
the busy and vociferous political opposition that
they encounter.
Evidently, this book does not fall under the concept of either philosophy or theology. But I urge
that it is of significance to the practitioners of both
disciplines, as indeed to all educated citizens of a
democracy. It is still, in spite of widespread trivialization of the subject, not absurd to maintain that a
principal concern of philosophy, and in particular
of moral philosophy, is how a person ought to live.
This book argues from a mountain of evidence,
and as cogently as any which I have come across,
that, if we care a jot about our (great-) grandchildren and subsequent generations, we most of us
have to make radical changes in the way we live,
and encourage others to do so. The theologian may
add that this is the most central and pressing consequence of the command of God as it bears on the
more fortunate people living at present in the
West; and that we will be answerable to the divine
Judge if we do not heed it (cf. Ezekiel 33.6 ). Since
our lives as Christians are hid with Christ in God
(Colossians 3.3), we may fearlessly proclaim and
strive to implement what appears on the best evidence to be the truth, however inconvenient or
unpalatable it may be.
Calgary, Canada
Hugo Meynell
516
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Walter Lippmann: Public Economist. By Craufurd D. Goodwin. Pp. ix, 414, Cambridge/London, Harvard
University Press, 2014, £25.95.
Walter Lippmann was the most respected political
journalist in the United States from 1931 until
1967. He wrote columns for the New York Herald
Tribune and then the Washington Post, initially
four days per week, then three, and finally two.
Ultimately the column was syndicated in more than
two hundred papers across the country and abroad.
At his peak Lippmann wrote for an audience that
approached eight million in a standard format of
approximately a thousand words. He also produced
ten books, some of which have become classics: A
Preface to Politics (1913), Public Opinion (1922),
A Preface to Morals (1929), and The Good Society
(1937). Goodwin, for forty years the ‘dean of economic thought in America’, has written a superb
intellectual biography; in the final quotation from
the book, Alastair Buchan, for many years correspondent for the London Observer in Washington,
links Lippmann with Reinhold Niebuhr as part of
‘the great tradition of Christian pessimism.’ But
Lippmann was Jewish, and he brought to the job of
defending the secular gospel of western intellectual, political, and economic liberties a fierce intelligence, personal discipline and restraint, avoidance
of rancor, and unfailing courtesy; he also brought a
prophetic sense of realism, an even proleptic or
anticipatory caution and warning, alert to any
danger signal, against easy complacency and in
particular the inveterate, and even encouraged contraction of concentration within capitalist society
away from the common good towards individual
self-interest. Guiding America through the Great
Depression, he tried every ingenious device that
could be invented for damage control and social
engineering to preserve a liberal system that paradoxically poisoned itself and plotted its own
demise by encouraging as dominant motivations
greed and the subsequent panic at the prospect of
loss and catastrophe; at the end Lippmann admitted
it was an open question whether he could save the
system from itself.
Lippmann took as his life vocation what he
thought everybody – but especially the educated
elite – should be doing: studying the complex
problems that strangely bedevil the free enterprise
system and which keep the free flow of goods,
labor, and credit from bringing prosperity to everyone. Self-interest at every stage may clog the
system, and – short of rule by an ‘elite’ that would
be isolated from the temptations the system
encourages and thus beyond corruption, which is
impossible – proper education of the voters and
public at large could provide a clear view of what
was happening and widen their vision and sympathy to do what should be done for the common
good. This requires ever more precise and updated
information about an ever-evolving problematic
economic situation. Lippmann was repeatedly disappointed, however, at the failure of every sector
of the society to rise to embrace this enlarged
concern he was advocating; the ‘gambling instinct’
at the core of capitalism, especially the banking,
stock market, and financial sector of investments
in general, and the self-protection behind stereotypes of a demonized ‘other’, prohibited the
development of the common concern and breadth
of interest he was conspicuously demonstrating.
Eventually he realized the irreplaceable need for a
change of character in economic man if the system
is to survive; but the system did not encourage
this – to the contrary. Build in as many checks
and balances as you will, the devil you have left
at the center of the system will always outwit
them. The gospel Lippmann was defending was
the only, or the best one he knew, but it was not
good enough.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
Why Marx Was Right. By Terry Eagleton. Pp. xiv, 258. New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2011,
£28.91.
Someone ought to conduct a university course on
‘The Great Half-Rights.’ Marx would unquestionably be a main attraction; Freud and Hobbes, with
their views of human nature and human prospects
in many ways antithetical to his, would probably
feature as well.
It was high time for a counterblast in favour of
Marx in defiance of contemporary fashion, and Dr.
Eagleton is just the person to supply it. For one
thing, he writes with a combined elegance and
panache which are such as to drive at least one
rival author to the verge of despair. What was it
that happened in the crucial decade between about
1976 and 1986, he asks, at the start of which Marx
was all the rage, and at the end of which he was
almost universally decried? (It was towards the
beginning of that decade that a certain rash person
gave a visiting lecture at an English university, at
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which he praised Marx for many aspects of his
thought, but ventured to suggest that some oversights might be attributed to him as well. He was
promptly, publicly and insultingly denounced for
presuming to say that Marx was wrong on any
matter whatever; though two people told him afterwards in the pub that they largely agreed with him,
but did not dare say so openly.) Eagleton wonders
ironically whether it was that those young hotheads
who had espoused Marxism became submerged
under heaps of toddlers; or that a manuscript in
Marx’s hand had turned up in a Highgate attic to
the effect that it was all a joke; or that some genius
had published a tome refuting all Marx’s principal
arguments.
On the widely-circulated cliche to the effect that
Marxism is out-of-date, Eagleton adroitly comments that to make it out-of-date ought to be the
main ambition of every Marxist worth her salt. But
who could deny that contemporary conditions in
the slums of Lima or Nairobi are frighteningly
reminiscent of what Engels reported of Manchester
in the early 1840s? (To differentiate Engels’s contribution from what is properly original to Marx is
not, as the author says, his concern in the present
work.) He points out that one can legitimately call
oneself a Marxist while admitting that the great
man was wrong about this and that; as he says,
confessed enthusiasts for the films of Alfred
Hitchcock may with consistency concede that their
hero occasionally nodded. His strategy, an excellent one, is to take ten fundamental contentious
issues on which he provides firm grounds for
believing that Marx was substantially right. On
each issue, the author follows the admirable practice, inherited from medieval Scholastic writers, of
first setting out what his opponents would say, in
terms that would so far as possible be acceptable
to themselves.
According to the presently fashionable opinion,
writes Eagleton, Marxism may be all very well in
theory; but in practice it leads to terror, tyranny
and mass murder, as history has by now abundantly
shown. It may look well enough to comfortable
Western academics who take for granted freedom
and democracy; but, given the clear evidence, one
must be ‘obtuse, self-deceived or morally contemptible’ to be a Marxist today. What is more,
failure to accept the dictates of the market finally
results in a lack even of material goods. Well,
replies Eagleton, capitalism isn’t all roses either.
‘Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history
of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation
every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s
Soviet Union.’ In the nineteenth century, millions
died as the result of easily-preventable famine or
517
disease, often as the result of free-market dogma
which put staple foods beyond the means of ordinary people. Even today, ‘(o)ne in three children in
Britain . . . lives below the breadline, while bankers
sulk if their annual bonus falls to a paltry million
pounds.’ It is not to be denied, as Marx readily
admitted, that capitalism has bequeathed to us
some precious goods along with its abominations
--- the heritage of democracy, civil rights, and feminism, in spite of its ‘history of slumps, sweatshops, fascism, imperial wars and Mel Gibson.’
And it should not be forgotten that ‘so-called
socialist’ states have their positive achievements
too; ‘cheap housing, fuel, transport and culture, full
employment and impressive social services for half
the citizen of Europe’ (12-14). Marx himself hoped
for a future of diversity, not uniformity; he envisaged socialism as a deepening of democracy, not
an abrogation of it; ‘(h)is model of the good life
was based on the idea of artistic self expression.’
In spite of his notorious endorsement of violent
revolution - who would expect those in power willingly to relinquish their unjust privileges? - he
admitted that some proletarian revolutions might
well take place without violence. Was ever a
thinker so misrepresented? (238-9)
The reviewer, for his part, finds immensely
impressive Marx’s depiction of what non-alienated
labour might be in the society of the future, with
head and hand working together, and human beings
in enthusiastic cooperation one with another. Given
our evolutionary inheritance of instinct (underestimated in my opinion by Marx and Marxists with
their extreme ‘environmentalism’), it is perhaps too
much to hope that, with post-industrial society
properly organized, we would entirely be able to
dispense with such coercive instruments of the
State as army and police, as prophesied by Marx
and Engels in The Holy Family. But is it not a reasonable and commendable aim for people of good
will, to try to achieve a socio-political set-up where
such human predispositions as may remain to
engage in destructive and anti-social behaviour are
encouraged as little as possible? Marx’s famous
account of religion, as offering a comforting illusion to render bearable for the oppressed classes a
life which was otherwise unbearable, may have
been exaggerated; but can one really lay one’s
hand on one’s heart and say there is absolutely
nothing in it, and never was anything? Nicholas
Berdyaev stated roundly that the only thing wrong
with Marxist socialism was its atheism. He added
that those who thought capitalism the more Christian option needed their heads looking into.
Calgary, Canada
Hugo Meynell
518
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Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Zizek: A Conspiracy of Hope. By Ola Sigurdson. Pp. x, 243,
Basingstoke/NY, Palgrave Macmillan 2012, £58.00.
This useful and exciting book compares two
favourable assessments of Marxism from Christian
perspectives, one Catholic, one Protestant. Among
the most surprising intellectual developments of
recent years has been the revival of interest in religion among those who think seriously about politics, especially from a Marxist point of view.
Eagleton’s Catholic background, enhanced by the
profound influence upon him of the work of the
late Dominican scholar Herbert McCabe, leads him
to think in terms of Thomas Aquinas; while Zizek’s
Protestant origins make him reflect rather the influence of Hegel. Both are unashamedly unreconstructed Marxists, and both preoccupied with
‘ideology’, which they think of in a pejorative sense
as essentially ways of thinking which hinder human
emancipation. In this sense the Hebrew prophets and
Jesus may well be thought to have been opposed to
‘ideology’ (20), for all that they did not envisage it
quite in the manner which has become usual since
Marx. The kind of ‘religion’ whose main function is
to sanctify and so to stabilize the more or less unjust
and oppressive socio-political situation which happens to prevail at present (I like Robert Musil’s
expression, ‘the utopianism of the status quo’) is
certainly ‘ideological’ in this sense; but it is possible
to regard it as still an open question whether this is
of the essence of religion.
While most of Marx’s followers have been at one
with him in hostility to Christianity and to religion in
general, as obscurantist and reactionary forces, it is
obvious to anyone with eyes in her head that the two
worldviews have a great deal in common, both in
their active revolutionary fervour, and in their hopefulness for a better future for humankind. Whatever
their differences, they are at one in having a great
deal to say about human hopefulness and emancipation, and what we are to do about the human situation. It does not strain credulity to suggest that what
Marx called ‘the classless society’ is close to one
aspect of what Christians have proclaimed as ‘the
Kingdom of God’. And surely Nicolas Berdyaev had
a point, when he suggested that those who really
thought capitalism closer to Christian ideals than
Marxism needed their heads looking into.
Zizek makes much of the contrast between
‘faith’ and ‘belief’; in his view, what was significant about the Hebrew prophets was rather ‘trust
in the Lord’ than ‘conviction there exists only one
instead of a number of gods’ (98). He is surely
right to rail against those who would make objectivity a pretext for lack of moral and political
commitment. But I am uneasy with his polemic
against supposedly ‘objective’ discourse which does
not directly involve such commitment. Admittedly,
appeal to objectivity can be a sham, a cloak for
evasion of the search for greater social justice or
emancipation. But it has a place, and an important
place, all the same. Its neglect leads straight to the
re-writing of history in deference to the party line,
rather than in accordance with the evidence, to
Lysenkoism and the repeated wholesale revisions of
the Soviet Encyclopedia. The main task facing us
may be, in deference to the eleventh of Marx’s
Theses on Feuerbach, changing the world rather
than merely describing or explaining it; but to
change the world for the better rather than for the
worse, you have to have as accurate as possible an
account of the facts as they are. One would have
thought that the actual history of State-sponsored
Marxism during the twentieth century provided
abundant corroboration of this point.
As Eagleton sees it, following McCabe, it is
helpful to see God rather as ‘being itself’ than a
being among beings; as they see it, this may draw
much of the sting from the atheist critique. For my
part, I am inclined to sympathize with those who
maintain that modern Thomists are better advised
to interpret ‘being’ in terms of ‘understanding’
(with ‘being’ in the last analysis as what is to be
understood) rather than vice versa. On this account,
our limited and fallacy-prone human understandings advance slowly and haltingly, through our
morality and our science, towards the ‘unrestricted
act of understanding’ that is God - whose understanding explains the intelligibility of the world,
and whose will explains the actual kind of intelligibility that it is progressively found by scientists to
have. I fear that to envisage God primarily as
‘being’ is too apt to lead to excessive abstraction,
and, as modern analytical philosophers have
pointed out to us ad nauseam, nonsensical abstraction at that. Perhaps, in spite of a tendency in the
thought of Aquinas, contemporary Christian theorists have to stress positive analogies between the
divine and the human --- if one is to face properly
the criticisms of Hume and his multitude of
twentieth-century followers. Certainly, it is idolatry
or ideology - that the one is apt to be identical
with the other is often pointed out in this book and
by our two authors - to treat God as one among
God’s creatures; but, for all my great admiration
for McCabe, I do not think that, among the many
competing interpretations of Aquinas, the one that
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makes him appear as a kind of proto-Tillich is the
most enlightening or convincing. Eagleton will have
it that God creates ‘for the hell of it’ (115). I like
that, but don’t take it quite au pied de la lettre. Can’t
God have created Eagleton for the sake of Eagleton,
and for the rest of us? I for my part am glad of his
existence and activities as an extraordinarily entertaining, invigorating and instructive author.
Both Eagleton and Zizek, at least as presented
by Sigurdson, seem to me to lack, and very much
to need, an epistemology adequate to provide a
convincing account of just what ‘ideology’ is, at
least in its common pejorative sense, and of what
genuine ‘emancipation’ would amount to. A comprehensively critical epistemology would reveal
the best of Freudianism and Marxism as partial
viewpoints (Zizek is right to regard them as complementary); both our socio-economic position
519
and our personal psychic history are liable to
impose limitations on the evidence to which we
are apt to attend, the possibilities which we are
easily able to envisage, the judgments which we
are willing to affirm, and the decisions that we
are prepared to make. Such a theory does exist,
but it takes one beyond the limits of anything
that can usefully be called ‘Marxism’. Eagleton is
quite correct in insisting that a thoroughgoing
postmodernist relativism renders all serious
and non-arbitrary political criticism impossible
(31-32).
The author’s (or translator’s) frequent lapses in
English grammar and syntax are a pity, but do not
make this fine book less worthy of reading and,
indeed, of careful study.
Calgary, Canada
Hugo Meynell
The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World. By Daniel M. Bell, Jr. Pp. 224.
Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Academic, 2012, £9.40.
This is a very silly book. Its object, certainly a
worthy one in itself, is to determine what of positive value is to be learned by Christians from
postmodernism (‘What has Paris to do with Jerusalem?’ (15)). With this in mind, it concentrates
particularly on two subjects as treated by two wellknown authors, Michel Foucault on ‘power’ and
Gilles Deleuze on ‘desire’. The author rightly says
that members of the Churches should not be
deterred by the fact that both writers were declared
Marxists, as Marxism comes in any number of
shapes and forms. I for my part am sure that there
is a great deal of worth to be learned from Foucault (are not common assumptions about sexuality,
prisons and punishment too largely determined by
the power some people are trying to exert over
others?); if it is not taken to the self-destructive
extreme apparently implied by Foucault himself
(Foucault’s convictions, on his own showing,
appear invalidated by the very motive of power
which he attributes to his adversaries). I am prepared to be persuaded that there is also something
useful to be got from Deleuze, an author with
whom I am less familiar.
The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ farrago began as a
serious political protest against the grossly unjust
state of affairs, where CEOs and popular entertainers ‘earn’ by noon on January 3rd what the
average shop-floor worker gets for the whole year.
But it soon degenerated, as did its offshoots elsewhere, into a mass orgy of narcissism and selfindulgence, where most participants had apparently
forgotten the original object of the whole exercise.
There is a time and place for carnivals, and a time
and place for serious socio-political protest; but
they are not the same. I cannot agree with the
author’s apparent view, though this is never clearly
expressed, that that this development was an
improvement, characteristically ‘postmodern’ as no
doubt it was. The quasi-lyrical language in which
he describes such goings-on (cf. 31-5 and elsewhere) evidently impresses him himself more than
it does his reviewer.
It seems quite sensible for Christians to take
‘desire’ as a starting-point for assessment of the
human condition. At least since Augustine, theologians have been inclined to the view that the main
practical business of Christian living is to redirect
desire from ‘concupiscence’ (love of self and indulgence of the senses) to charity (love of God and of
one’s neighbour). It would be fruitful to follow this
up; but the author does not do so. He makes surprising
reference to Duns Scotus’s recondite but profound
doctrine of that the concept of ‘being’ is univocal as
between God and creatures; if it is admitted to be
‘equivocal’, as between ‘bow’ as a weapon for shooting arrows and a knot for securing a lady’s scarf,
surely the reality of God is rendered deeply problematic. Aquinas’s ‘analogy of being’ between God and
creatures struck Scotus as dangerously agnostic.
Scotus’ doctrine of the univocity of being is here referred to in quite a different context, as exerting an
influence on Deleuze. Postmodernists are wont to
emphasize ‘difference’ and to extol it; ‘(i)f being is
univocal, then what could the difference between
beings be?’ Deleuze will have it, we are told, that ‘difference is a matter of degrees of power, or, rather,
degrees of desire . . . Univocal being, desire, is
520
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differentiated by degrees of intensity’ (43). This, so
far as the reviewer can judge, is sheer sententious
verbiage; and there is a lot more where that came
from.
There are so many urgent problems facing
humanity, which the Church should take the lead
in addressing. What restrictions on our habits of
consumption, how much of a fall in our standard
of living, must we accept if our grandchildren, and
all subsequent generations (assuming there are
any), are to inherit a habitable planet? The ‘capitalism’ identified and deplored by the author is, as
Deleuze argues, the situation where ‘not only is the
market central to everything, but everything is also
subject to the rule of the market’ (23). So far as
such a state of affairs obtains, it is certainly proper
for Christians to denounce it. But the fact remains
that, to survive and flourish in industrial or postindustrial society, we have to respect the laws of
the market; and the question to be asked here is,
how is a proper deference to them to be reconciled with elementary justice, not only between
first and third worlds, but between groups and
classes within both? How much should be
expected of the State, and what should rather be
demanded of the enterprise of individuals and
small groups? (The book does point out, it is fair
to say, that much desirable change is better
brought about on a small scale, than by trying to
exert influence over the State apparatus; but this
is hardly news.) One might have expected the
author and his authorities to shed light on questions like these, but they do not, and they have
confirmed me in my conviction that the same
applies to postmodernism in general. Modernism
had coherent standards, which may have been
deficient, of what counted as improvement of the
human condition; postmodernism is essentially
subversive of all such standards. I do not always
see eye to eye with Sir Richard Dawkins; but his
expression ‘fancophonyism’ would seem to be apt
as applied to such material as this.
Calgary, Canada
Hugo Meynell
Nozick’s Libertarian Project: An Elaboration and Defense. By Mark D. Friedman. Pp. x, 212, London/NY,
Continuum, 2011, $120.00.
Friedman sets out to provide a detailed, rigorous,
up-to-date defence of Robert Nozick’s famous
argument in favour of libertarianism as presented
in his classic text Anarchy, State and Utopia
(1974). He reconstructs what he takes to be the
most plausible rendition of Nozick’s original position and presents it in the form of a deductive
‘proof,’ composed of five premises that lead to a
conclusion that is intended to be robustly (not
mathematically) persuasive. He moves on to
defend Nozick’s general thesis from common
objections and then teases out and extends the
general implications of his theory on a wide range
of issues.
We might distinguish between two schools of
libertarianism. On the one hand, there are the ‘consequentialist’ libertarians who argue that absolute
protections of individual liberty will produce the
greatest happiness or ‘preference-satisfaction’ for
the greatest number. On the other hand, there are
‘deontological’ or ‘natural rights’ libertarians who
argue that absolute protections of individual liberty
have a moral basis in a Kantian conception of
human beings as ends-in-themselves. Friedman
champions the second alternative. Even if one
could uncover empirical evidence that indicates
that serious restrictions on liberty could somehow
benefit the common good, these findings could not
undermine a basic right to freedom of choice,
which is based on a primary moral principle that
derives from the deep nature of human beings.
Friedman’s version of libertarianism translates
into a moral interpretation of John Stuart Mill’s noharm principle. He explains: ‘the use of force or
coercion against persons who are not violating or
unreasonably threatening to violate others is wrong,
full stop’ (p. 5). Autonomy, our freedom to choose
for ourselves, is, on this account, of paramount
importance. At one point, Friedman approvingly
cites Shelly Kagan’s paraphrase of Nozick: ‘Interference with another’s autonomy is the form of harm
that is most fundamental from the moral point of
view’ (p. 129). A very strong claim, indeed!
In the light of this primary moral injunction not
to interfere with others, Friedman (unsurprisingly)
defends F. A. Hayek’s lassez-faire economics,
Nozick’s ‘entitlement theory’ of property (illustrated by his original Wilt Chamberlain example)
and the hotly contested analogy libertarians draw
between taxation and forced labour. He also argues
for a minimal state, for negative (liberty) rights
instead of positive (welfare) rights, for an understanding of private property based on a Lockean
account of original acquisition, and so on.
Readers who wish to ‘get inside’ the mind-set
of contemporary liberalism will find this offering
an informative read. At the same time, the book
really does not amount to a defence of
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libertarianism. There are several problems. To
begin with, Friedman’s informative and artful
marshalling of arguments seems to beg the question. The author writes, ‘I am going to ignore the
unfortunate fact that the best minds in academic
philosophy have been unable to resolve in any
convincing way our most basic ethical concerns,
such as the objectivity/subjectivity of moral values, the existence of free will in a deterministic
universe, the possibility of moral knowledge and
related matters’ (p. 6). Friedman, rather too
quickly, takes this as a licence to ignore any
need for a more in-depth consideration of our
most fundamental moral ideas. But the arguments
that fill the book seem to hinge on libertarian
moral intuitions. Arriving at libertarian principles
by relying on libertarian intuitions ably illustrates
where the position comes from but it does not
provide an adequate defence against critics who
will dispute, at the very least, libertarian interpretations of our moral intuitions.
A second problem has to do with public assistance to innocent needy. Friedman does not shy
away from the obvious moral conclusion that we
should be able to force unwilling others, at the
risk of some very small sacrifice, to help those
‘facing imminent death by starvation or from an
easily curable disease’ (p. 143). But this does not
easily square with the libertarian conviction that
individual autonomy, freedom of choice, is the
first value. The distinction he draws between per-
521
fect and imperfect duties in a Kantian sense
(which is itself questionable) does not get to the
root of the problem. Starving people or the fatally
ill do not need negative (non-interference) rights
but the urgent active intervention of other people.
If anything, they need positive rights, the very
existence of which, libertarians do their best to
contest.
A third problem involves externalities, inevitable negative effects on third-party bystanders to
agreements. Friedman insists that we can use
‘Cost Benefit Analysis’ (CBA), ‘to quantify, in
terms of monetary value, all costs and benefits
associated with a particular decision or policy’
(p. 152). On this basis, we can determine the
acceptability of imposed risks on the public (say
from a neighbouring nuclear power plant or from
the fluoridation of water). But this strategy
seems to substitute a utilitarian calculus based
on what we think agents ought to choose for a
libertarian model based on what individual
agents actually choose. Reconciling the libertarian emphasis on the priority of individual liberty
with pressing demands about the welfare of the
disadvantaged and the common good would
requires a more in-depth consideration of moral
first principles.
St. Francis Xavier University
Nova Scotia, Canada
Louis Groarke
Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science. By Paul Clements. Pp. 248,
Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2012, £26.93.
In this interesting and very informative book,
Clements aims to establish that both rational
choice theory and neoclassical economics are
incomplete as models of social and political analysis, and need to be incorporated into a broader
Rawlsian paradigm. Clements understands the
‘Rawlsian paradigm’ to be a cluster of central
ideas that go back to Kant’s notion of the
uniqueness of human beings as rational agents –
uniqueness that is determined by our ability to
choose, and to make choice itself the object of
further reflection and consideration. Rawls stands
in this tradition, and gives it a boost by providing it with new methodological and analytical
tools by reconceptualising Kant’s insight regarding the categorical imperative in terms of the
veil of ignorance, thereby making it relevant and
useful for social theory and political economy.
Rawls also recasts the essential Kantian distinction between the hypothetical imperative and the
categorical imperative in terms of the rational
and the reasonable, thereby providing the grounds
for clearly distinguishing the Kantian tradition
from rational choice theory, but also demonstrating how the two traditions are linked. The point
of agreement is the rational – cast as primary
goods in Rawls; the reasonable is the point of
difference, thus giving rise to the contentions
between the two traditions. Clements adds a third
element to this conceptual mix, by searching for
the foundations of Kantian and Rawlsian insights
into both the natural sciences and human evolution. Here, he finds two phenomena that give
credence to the Kantian tradition and its claims.
The first is that, although language is a natural
phenomenon, it differentiates human beings from
other animals; it also provides the arena for
claims and counter claims, which have more than
passing affinity with the reasonable. The second
is that modern neurology also points towards –
even though it does not decisively establish – an
understanding of morality which is more in tune
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with the Kantian tradition. For example, some
investigations seem to suggest that our conception of right is grounded in neurons that are distinct from those that govern our sense of natural
desires, and trigger different parts of the brain.
The different locations of activity in the brain
suggest a difference in nature between the two.
Thus Clements’ Rawlsian paradigm emphasizes
the sense of human agency; the ability to revise
choices; feelings of sympathy and disgust; and
our sense of right, not just the consequences of
action. Rational choice theory and neoclassical
economics, on the other hand, represent for
Clements means-end rationality, where it is not
the choices themselves, but only the best ways to
realize them, which are in view. Rational choice
theory does not have any conceptual repertoire to
judge or to appraise choices or ends.
What Clements aims for is a unified moral theory
in which the insights of the Kantian and the Rawlsian
traditions are combined, together with insights from
rational choice theory. In other words, for Clements,
pursuit of material goods – Rawls’ primary goods –
and not simply their just distribution, has moral relevance. This should be combined with the Rawlsian
and Kantian insights regarding human agency and
our sense of right and justice. In a nutshell, interests
and principles are an integral part of any moral
theory, and any social analysis that does not invoke
them in a unified manner falls short of the desired
standards.
In pursuit of this goal, Clements has written a
wide-ranging book. One can find here not only useful summaries of the main approaches, but also
very readable summaries of some important case
studies by rational-choice theorists in political
economy and related fields. Also, one can learn a
great deal about the application of these theories to
economic, political, and environmental issues.
Moreover, the reader can gain an informative introduction to the famous Grameen bank; the history
of its formation and its operations; the history of
the conflict in one of the largest states in India,
Bihar; the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya; the
conflicting attitudes of French and English populations of Canada towards volunteering and the draft
during the two world wars; and the current global
environmental crisis. This is no small feat for a
book of moderate length.
Despite all those worthwhile elements of the
book, there are some things I have some misgivings about. At the outset, Clements arbitrarily
excludes sophisticated versions of classical utilitarianism, on the pretext that the model of choice
in rational choice theory and the neoclassical economic model is much narrower than that in classical utilitarianism, and that it’s the latter which
has currency in policy analysis in its established
forms, and not classical utilitarianism. It seems to
me that throughout the book, and especially at the
crucial juncture in his argument, he treats rational
choice theory as a straw man, and attributes
things to it that more sophisticated rational choice
practitioners would certainly deny. The second,
and more important, point is that he does not
present any unified theory, nor does he specify
any mode of unification between Kantian Rawlsian theory and rational choice theory. Crucially,
since he is developing an alternative paradigm for
policy analysis, he should have – even if briefly –
stated a general modus operandi for such unification. Furthermore, Clements does not seem to be
very specific about the relation between interests
and principles, and at times is very vague about
the whole matter. On occasion, he says that the
senses of right and the good are ‘somewhat’ independent of each other. He needs to be more
specific about what this ‘somewhat’ exactly means
– or amounts to – given his own standards of precision. He is clear that one function of principles
is to exclude certain interests which are not compatible with certain principles. However, he also
has a positive conception of principles, in which
case principles lead directly to certain choices –
without reference to interests – and this, he
thinks, is foreign to rational choice theory. Nevertheless, Clements offers no specification of a
procedure for how to discern the exact relation
between – and the precise weight of – principles
and interests. Given that he rejects certain welldeveloped rational choice models on the grounds
that no ‘unified’ account of principles and interests is found in them, the lack of specification
also speaks against his own model.
The final point is quantification. Clements is
rightly impressed by rational choice theory’s
developed quantification methods and its ability to
quantify policy imperatives. He thinks that he has
developed a quantification method for his own
Rawlsian model that should impress the skeptical
crowd on the other side. As far as I can see,
however, he has done no such thing, and perhaps,
here, he has ignored his own insight. Policy analysis is an explanation of reality, as well as a construction of a new reality: the creation of new
institutions, etc. The latter cannot be scientific; it
is an art, and in trying to make this art into a science he makes the same mistake that he accuses
rational choice theory of making. In fact, his criticism of the rational choice theorists who have
developed social analysis by combining rational
choice theory with historical narratives and
principle-based approaches might have ignored his
own point. It would seem that some rational
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choice methods might be better examples of what
Clements preaches in his book.
To finish, I must reiterate that, although I have
used more space for criticism than for praise, I do
not want to give the misleading impression that the
book isn’t worthwhile; and I do think it is well
523
worth reading. It is a superb introduction to the
ongoing debate between the Kantian/Rawlsian
model and rational choice/neoclassical economics
model, without being the final word on the issue.
La Trobe University, Melbourne
Ali Rizvi
Freedom after the Critique of Foundations: Marx, Liberalism, Castoriadis and Agonistic Autonomy. By
Alexandros Kioupkiolis. Pp. vi, 276, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, £60.00.
This book recommends agonistic autonomy, according
to Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis was a left-leaning
opponent of Stalinism and an influence on the May
1968 student protests. He opposed Sartre, who once
claimed that C. had been right, but at the wrong
time – Sartre, came the retort, had the honour of
being wrong at the right time! As a first approximation to the central idea of the book we can recall
Sartre’s existentialist account of freedom. There is
no God and no luminous realm of values. To the
young man in a quandary about whether to support
his mother or fight for the resistance Sartre considers
only to dismiss Christian, Kantian and romantic
counsel: you are free, choose; that is to say, invent.
Alexandros Kioupkiolis would certainly distance C.
from the Sartrean ideal of the free floating chooser
who fashions his life from scratch – the subject
must pass through the agony of psychoanalytic soulsearching and engage in a care of the self. However,
the atheistic denial of all objective values – save the
value of freedom itself – makes the comparison with
Sartre pertinent to any reader new to Castoriadis. In
reality, there is never any time in which we are ever
right or wrong.
The original sin, then, is essentialism. The first two
chapters (which despite the complexity of the theme
are at times models of lucidity) detect the sin in Marx
and Kant. For both thinkers liberty had been positive –
it involves the idea that freedom is for something.
Marxian essentialism sees freedom as the development
of all potentialities and is traced to Aristotle. Kantian
self-mastery by reason results in unchanging principles
that are ultimately arbitrary.
A third chapter argues for relativism: knowledge
and practice are in trouble. Here, the reader may
be in trouble, for on nearly every page value judgements and judgements that there actually is objective knowledge abound. For example, we are
warned against the possibility of objective grounding in science but two chapters later the causal
mechanisms of nature are recognised. So, in the
introduction K. tackles the criticisms of another
opponent of C., Habermas. Scepticism commits the
fallacy of performative contradiction. The critique
of objective and universal reason makes much of
the plurality of standards and ways of reasoning,
but it presupposes the general validity of its arguments and assumes that indefinite others will
be able to see their logical force. K. has two
responses. Firstly, he will concede just so much
scope for universal reason so long as particular
options are not specified. Thus, I think, it is clearly
only a ‘strong’ essentialism he rejects. It’s clear, I
think, that the third chapter must be seen as winnowing away the Marxian and Kantian chaff of
the first two chapters. Secondly, the Habermasian
response is found guilty of begging the question:
it upholds universal reason against sceptics by
postulating the existence of universal reason.
Here, an admirer of Lonergan will be quick to
note that K. gives himself an easy time of it. He
never considers that we might find foundations in
the normativity of our intelligence (we ask intelligent questions, seek to judge critically, pose the
question for deliberation: is this truly worthwhile?) rather than in the products of our intelligence. Trying not to be stupid is hardly begging
the question! We can arrive at foundations by
explicating what is implicit in such performances.
The assumption present in the title that the critique of foundations has met with success can be
contested. The result, however, is this: K. gives
himself permission to flout the censure of performative contradiction liberally. For example, the
whole book argues that the truth that he presents
is a truth that will set us free; that we are to
question everything; that such questioning will
emancipate us from narrow paths. But the truth
(which the author will reason for, and so propose
to our decision) is that freedom is not for truth –
or for any good thing. And the broad path on
offer is one that is open to all possibilities save
only those that really matter, such as asking: what
is really worthwhile, what is freedom for?
Having rejected positive liberty, K. takes issue with
Berlin and Mill. Negative liberty is doing what we
please. The problem is that our desires may be preprogrammed by all sorts of unconscious motivations
(seeds sown by our exploiters, perhaps) and what is
needed is a struggle with our depths – the care of the
self that will be our salvation. The fifth chapter draws
on C. to explore agonistic subjectivity. We are to
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plunge into the psyche with Freud, and K. cites The
Essay on Freud to the effect that in such affective
struggle previously unnoticed mental contents can
become available to deliberation and choice. Psychoanalysis can free us from self-deception. Here, an
admirer of Paul Ricoeur, the author of the essay, will
be quick to note that besides the archaeology that
discovers traces of the past in the present, the therapeutic situation also reveals a teleology that moves from
the present to the future: accordingly, Ricoeur, in these
dialectical sections in the third part of the essay upon
which K. draws, did not conclude that God was dead.
The nature of the acting subject – our essence, in the
weak sense – is enlighteningly portrayed. Aware of the
criticism that the subject is the plaything of unconscious forces a nuanced account of freedom is offered
that steers a middle course between determinism and
voluntarism. A section on initiating the new draws on
intuitions from creative practice: it is unlikely that an
algorithm could codify inspiration. We are a combination of passivity and activity. An admirer of St Thomas
might be pleasantly surprised, for Thomas had held the
will to be a mixture of nature and freedom. I am not
quite certain, however, whether all issues are resolved.
At times freedom is equated with sovereignty, but
elsewhere such sovereignty is denied.
I must pass over the sixth chapter which explains a
key term of art, the social imaginary. The upshot is
that agents need not be determined by structures. The
seventh chapter continues illuminatingly with the
theme at the heart of the book, the autonomy of
the subject and the care of the self. By self-reflection
we are to adopt a new attitude to the unconscious. We
are to get in touch with the inner drives and rework
them, for in the struggle for autonomy we must be
liberated from being the plaything of heteronomous
forces. I am not sure how K. holds this to be possible
given his preference for a balanced position rather
than voluntarism. Indefinite deliberation must come to
an end, and so eventually we will be at the mercy of
external forces. Of course, for Thomas, this limitation
on our liberty is one of the ways in which operative
grace is reconciled with freedom; under the influence
of grace the will wills a new end, (voluntarily, but not
strictly speaking, freely) and so freely chooses the
means to the end (so that grace then becomes cooperative). Such an idea must be anathema, though, to K.
To recognise the divine initiative must be to acquiesce
to hegemony. Subsequent chapters grapple with the
vexing question of whether the account of freedom so
outlined is egotistical.
The context of the book is always secular. The
diktats of God are demeaned, but infinity is frequently
valorised. In fact, K. often rails against idolatry. Now,
for the Thomist, it is because we are free that we can
criticise any finite good. Only an infinite good, a good
that is incapable of being criticised from any point of
view can draw the will infallibly. So, if the will is
attached to a finite good as if it were divine, idolatry
results. For the Thomist, then, K. appears to draw on
valid intuitions. It is almost as if he adopts a Christian
anthropology whilst denying the theology. In particular, it is as if he valorises the dark night of the soul in
an agonistic care of the self, whilst denying any possibility of mystical union. As a result, of course, the
reader is free to reject his proposal. Everywhere the
bleakness of an atheistic horizon rules out possibilities.
For example, despite 53 pages on liberty, and 41 pages
on equality, there are precisely zero pages on fraternity. Again, the care of the self is centre stage, but
nowhere, save in political struggle, is there any care of
the other. There is no possibility that freedom might
be the freedom to make a gift of oneself – and so love,
joy, peace, compassion, hope, sacrifice and gratitude
are never on the radar screen.
Nevertheless, I have no choice but to be grateful
to the author who has shed much light on his hero
who, he tells us, changed the trajectory of his
thought as a teenager during a hot, Greek summer
when he happened upon The Imaginary Institution
of Society. Kioupkiolis’ filial piety is another (very
welcome) performative contradiction.
Maryvale Institute
Christopher Friel
Redeeming History: Social Concern in Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran. By Gerard Whelan, SJ. Pp. 253,
Rome, Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2013, e27.00.
The most exciting chapter of this book is the last
one before the concluding chapter, chapter 11, in
which the author applies the analysis presented
in the earlier chapters to two real-life situations. In
the first Whelan narrates how the Lonergan-Doran
approach to theology animated his pastoral strategy
while working as pastor in a parish in Kangemi, on
the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. The complexities
of pastoral engagement in such a situation required
working on several levels, including the personal
faith development of volunteer parish workers, and
social analysis of the difficult and sometimes
conflicted social and political environment. Where
more simplistic conflict models had tended to
exacerbate the problems, a considered approach
guided by theory proved fruitful in various
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development strategies which were also ecumenically attractive to partners from other faith communities. Summarizing the approach in terms of
the familiar ‘see, judge, act’ pioneered by Young
Christian Workers in Belgium, Whelan outlines his
inductive theological approach as he has learned it
from Lonergan and Doran. So vibrant and rooted is
the narrative in this section that I really wanted to
know more. Perhaps Whelan will write more direct
inductive theology in the future, but at least this
application will be a headline for his students who
may be encouraged to write their own stories of
their attempts to do inductive theology.
The second application which strikes a heart
chord is the comment on the style of teaching
adopted by Pope Francis. In particular the orientation to the evangelization of cultures and social
structures is noted as potentially benefiting from
Doran’s theory.
The first eight chapters trace the steps of Bernard
Lonergan’s intellectual biography. While drawing
on important work done by other Lonergan scholars such as Fred Crowe and William Mathews
Whelan contributes a new aspect by drawing
attention to the persistence of social concern as a
key motivator for Lonergan’s philosophy and theology. Observing the devastation caused by the
1929 crash and great depression of the 1930s
Lonergan wanted his work in philosophy and theology to be relevant to analysis and solution of
the great social problems of the day. This social
concern persisted through his life, and Whelan
points out the peaks along the way. The early
essay on circulation analysis, the common sense
chapters in Insight, and the return to economics
and to the examination of progress and decline
in history in the late essays signal this persisting
concern which also animated Lonergan’s mainstream work in theology.
The scope of Method in Theology is such that it
is not only theology as a science which is under
review as regards its methods, but also the other
sciences of human affairs to the extent that they
deal with meaning. In particular, Lonergan’s exploration of the importance of dialectic enables Robert
Doran to develop and expand this theme, making it
more useful for application to social and political
situations. Chapters nine and ten are devoted to
this topic, and Whelan maintains that Doran’s work
notably in Theology and the Dialectics of History
(Toronto, 1990) completes Lonergan’s project.
Among Doran’s contributions is the addition of
525
psychic conversion to the levels of conversion
already examined by Lonergan, namely, intellectual, moral and religious conversions. This idea
came from Doran’s doctoral work on Jung and was
developed in his book Psychic Conversion and
Theological Foundations (1981). Whelan suggests
that it was the absence of such a level of conversion in Lonergan’s own biography which explains
why he was not able to deliver the full impact of
his social concern. Without an effective option for
the poor in his own life, coupled with illness in
later life, the social concern which was a constant
motivation in his life’s work did not fully deliver
on its promise (246).
Doran’s main contribution to the culmination of
Lonergan’s method is the expansion of dialectic to
explore its functioning at the various levels of both
the subject, and history. Whelan documents the
refinements offered by Doran in adding the distinction between contraries and contradictories. This
enables a further distinction between healthy and
unhealthy dialectics. The former as for instance
where there is a tension between the unconscious
psyche and the conscious spirit allows for possible
healing and progress. Unhealthy dialectic is where
contradictions are so entrenched that all resolution
is blocked.
Method is best exemplified in its application, in
practice, and its usefulness is best demonstrated by
results. Nevertheless, primers are needed for the
instruction of neophytes who have to be trained in
the mastery of methods, and this book adds to the
literature available for that purpose. It does so in a
significantly integrated way, from the focus on
social concern, and presents the challenge to students and practitioners who wish to follow Pope
Francis’s example of contextual theology. They are
challenged not just to talk about ‘option for the
poor’ but to engage in the subjective dialectic of
confronting the resistances in themselves. Then
they will be equipped to engage in the praxis in
the pursuit of solutions which presupposes change
and development – conversion – in the theologians.
This very welcome study of social concern in the
thought of Lonergan and Doran reaffirms the promise of fruits to be gained by the adoption of their
approach. Those fruits are exemplified in the chapter on the application of Doran’s method. They too
are a promise of valuable work in future from this
author.
Heythrop College
Patrick Riordan
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An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age. By J€urgen Habermas et al. Pp. 87,
Polity Press, $14.95.
In his recent writings Habermas has focused his
attention on the role of religion in the public
sphere, as is evident in his 2001 essay entitled
‘Faith and Knowledge’ in The Future of Human
Nature, his debate with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
in Munich in 2004, and most recently in a series
of essays on the relationship between religion and
the public sphere in Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity 2008). This collection consists of a
series of essays initially presented at the Jesuit
School of Philosophy in Munich in 2007 and
represents an important contribution to ongoing
reflections on religion in a post-secular context.
This volume opens with a helpful introduction by
M. Reder and J. Schmidt, S.J. that contextualizes
Habermas’s approach to religion in relation to
his own philosophical development and broader
currents in modern philosophy and theology.
Habermas’s primary contribution is a nine-page
chapter entitled, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing,’ which rehearses his basic ideas about the
role of religion in a post-secular context. This
essay is followed by a series of critical engagements with Habermas’s reflections by four scholars from the Jesuit School of Philosophy in
Munich (N. Brieskorn, M. Reder, F. Ricken, and
J. Schmidt) and concludes with a 12-page epilogue
in which Habermas responds to his critics. The four
essays by the scholars from the Jesuit School of
Philosophy in Munich raise critical questions about
the significance of religion for secular reason
(Brieskorn), the role of translation in Habermas’s
philosophy of religion (Ricken), and the difficulty of
negotiating the proper relationship between faith and
reason (Reden and Schmidt).
In his opening essay Habermas argues that the
relationship between reason and religion needs to
be reconceived in view of the rise of religious fundamentalism, the postmodern intensification of the
dialectic of Enlightenment, and the hegemony of
capitalist principles of exchange in a globalized
world. Habermas suggests that it is necessary to
rethink the genealogy of postmetaphysical reason
and to draw from religious resources in order to
respond to these challenges. For Habermas, the
explicit contribution of religion to secular reason is
that it cultivates ‘an awareness of what is missing.’
As Reder, Schmidt, and Brieskorn suggest the
genealogy of this phrase can be traced to various
thinkers in the Frankfurt School (Bloch, Adorno,
and Brecht), but Habermas himself points to Johann
Baptist Metz’s Memoria Passionis (2006) as the
source for his own use of the phrase. Habermas
argues that secular reason is deficient because of its
diminished capacity to cultivate a sense of what is
missing and to engender resistance to the violations
of basic human rights in the contemporary world.
Religion constitutes a resource that possesses the
capacity to counteract this deficit by articulating a
vision of the moral whole (the kingdom of God)
that serves to sensitize individuals to the experience
of loss, failure, and catastrophe in history.
In this sense, Habermas views religion as an
important moral supplement to secular reason. But
the critical question in a context of cultural and religious pluralism is the most effective means for bringing the moral resources of religion into the public
realm. In Awareness of What is Missing Habermas
gives broad guidelines for the interaction between
secular reason and religion among believers and nonbelievers. Habermas argues that secular persons must
recognize that religion possesses a cognitive content
that cannot be dismissed as irrational. Religious persons also must accept the legitimacy of scientific reason and the egalitarian principles of modern law and
morality. Furthermore, it is necessary for both
religious and secular persons to engage in the work
of translation in order to redescribe the semantic
content of religion in a rational language accessible
to non-believers. Habermas’s proposal, therefore,
involves a critical rejection of strands of modern secularism as well as a call for believers and theologians
to engage in constructive dialogue with postmetaphysical thinking.
It is in relation to this dialogue between theology and postmetaphysical thinking that Habermas
offers a series of sharp criticisms of Benedict
XVI’s Regensburg Address. While the exchange
between Habermas and Benedict XVI (then
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) in Munich in 2004
was largely conciliatory, in An Awareness of
What is Missing Habermas takes issue with
Benedict XVI’s ‘unexpectedly critical’ analysis of
modernity in the Regensburg Address in 2006.
Against what he interprets to be Benedict XVI’s
totalizing criticism of modernity as a period of
decline that shattered the medieval synthesis
between faith and reason, Habermas defends the
emergence of modern reason as creating the conditions for the possibility of both the natural sciences and the modern understanding of law and
democracy. Independent of whether one thinks
that Habermas or Benedict XVI has the better
side of the argument, in these essays Habermas
voices serious reservations about the suitability of
Benedict XVI’s theological approach to the task
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of post-secular dialogue between believers and
non-believers. By way of contrast, Habermas’s
affirmative statements about the prioritization of
praxis and responsibility over belief and metaphysics in Metz’s political theology point to the
style of theology that Habermas views as most
adequate to the task of post-secular dialogue.
Overall, this volume offers not only a succinct,
readable presentation of Habermas’s reflections on
the role of religion in post-secular society, but also
527
contains a series of important analyses of the relationship between Habermas’s postmetaphysical philosophy and contemporary theology. As such, it
represents essential reading for those interested in
the ongoing debate about the proper relationship
between religion and politics in this increasingly
post-secular moment.
College of the
Holy Cross, USA
Matthew Eggemeier
Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia. Edited by Ranjan Ghosh. Pp. viii, 226,
New York: Routledge, 2013, $140.00.
This edited collection by Ranjan Ghosh removes
the secular/sacred straight jacket imposed by
much Western thinking through expanding the discussion beyond North America and Western
Europe. What this entails is the softening of any
definitive, agreed-upon understanding of the secular
as it manifests itself differently in the often overlooked locales included here; namely: Pakistan, Sri
Lanka, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan and Indonesia;
in addition to essays on India, China, Turkey, Belgium, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and more
broadly, Eastern Europe. It is a refreshing and
needed salve to a discussion that is often disapprovingly myopic and Eurocentric or one that merely gestures at Asia (perhaps with a nod to Turkey and
India). If any critique could be levelled at the book’s
clear structure and aims, it may be why the work was
not also expanded to Africa as well, but constraints
and other issues may have prevented such a move.
Regardless, works on the secular and sacred need to
become ever more globalized and far reaching to
begin to do those terms justice if seeking to move
through and beyond the provincial and local.
Ghosh’s edited collection is important in this
regard, especially as the majority of the essays are
lively and lucid, with one main disappointment
noted below. The work is also deeply interdisciplinary with contributors based in fields like
international relations, history, political science,
sociology, human geography, anthropology, Islamic
studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies.
Ghosh teaches English in the University of North
Bengal.
Strikingly, Ghosh’s introductory essay begins with
a quote from Raimundo Panikkar that sets the tone,
flexibility, and balance of the work: ‘Only worship
can prevent secularization from becoming inhuman,
and only secularization can save worship from being
meaningless’ (1). Thus, readers can anticipate a collection of essays that will seek to overcome the socalled secular/sacred divide to contend how those
spheres interlap and interpenetrate while remaining
distinctive at certain levels. Ghosh’s introductory
essay is a stand-alone text seeking to define what he
means by making sense of the secular: and in his
conception the secular is deeply formed by India’s
pluralist culture in which famous historical iterations of the secular were expounded by religious
believers (the Buddhist Ashoka, the Muslim
Akbar, and the Hindu Gandhi). The essay is
replete with provocative phrases: ‘So religion has
to move forward without religion’ (7) and interesting arguments revolving around a new ‘secular’
city (new because it will be rich in religious possibilities and realities). Ghosh also manages to
cram in nearly every cultural studies catch-phrase
or thinker coupled by clunky words (superintendency, equilateralty, traducement) that can throttle
his otherwise absorbing, dialectical positions.
Nevertheless, the essay rightly manages to make
less sense of the secular while trying to do otherwise: and so greatly succeeds in articulating how
the secular depends upon the sacred as much as
the sacred depends upon the secular, especially as
each comes to see the other in themselves. It
goes without saying that Ghosh’s sketched ideas
need a wider palette for him to try to bring them
to more cohesive life.
As noted above, the varied case studies are all recommended, with the exception of Shaoming Zhao’s
“When Will China Become More Religious?” At
first glance, the title seems both perplexing and evocative as the resurgence of religion in China has
become a stated commonplace. Zhao presents a
case study evaluating the attitudes of villagers in
Shagou in Eastern China as they assess the practice of funeral rituals. The essay is too apologetic
towards China or overly subtle in any possible
critique. Comments like: ‘The villagers said that,
in Shagou’s history, only the Communist Party
has taken on all the villager’s affairs as its official
responsibility, and whatever the party says or does,
it is always to support local interests’ (159) speak
for itself. Zhao also refers to cremation never
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being forced on the Chinese people though claiming that attitudes changed in 1949 but ‘not necessarily a direct result of the Communist Party’s
policy on funeral reforms’ (164). In addition to
the writings of Harry Wu, I cannot recommend
enough the recent collections of Liao Yiwu. See
especially his interview with the mortician in The
Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the
Bottom Up and the real reason why cremation
was urged, as State-orchestrated policies led to
famines with devastating effects. These omissions
are grave matters (genocidal claims should never
be minimized or whitewashed; thus historical context should have been added to the villagers’
remarks). Of course, examination of the secular in
China is a particularly heated matter that deserves
deeper and wider engagement, and this essay is
one type of approach, though hopefully far from
representative.
Mater Dei Institute,
Dublin City University
Peter Admirand
Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion. By Matthew Scherer. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, $90.00.
When much of one’s argument rests on a neologism or an extended metaphor—here the notion of
conversion as ‘crystalline’ (32)—a lack of immediate precision in the phrase and gaps remaining after
subsequent explanation threaten to shatter the viability of the entire project. Borrowing the application in part from Henri Bergson, Matthew Scherer,
in his Beyond Church and State, writes: ‘A crystal
produces difference (strata) within a homogenous
substance (sodium chloride, or table salt, for example), within an ongoing process of (trans)formation’
(105). One can also add that crystals are (basically)
all individually unique, like zebra stripes and finger
prints, and so the metaphor may have limits if trying to extrapolate wider points and applications,
though it might be useful in an argument advocating pluralism and multireligious belonging.
While there are some interesting moments of
political acumen in Beyond Church and State, it is
surprising that so much time and space was
devoted to proving the tenability of a seemingly
uncontroversial notion and applying the (at times,
forced) above metaphor. Do substantial numbers of
people maintain that conversion is always a onceoff event for everyone, in all contexts? Thus, if
one converts from Christianity to Judaism, is it
always true that no vestiges of that original faith
remain or are built upon or transformed (but still
present) in one’s new faith? Moreover, in the secularizing of society, is it always a zero sum game so
that the rise in one area leads to the diminishing of
another?
Recalling some of Charles Taylor’s argument
in A Secular Age, one can concede that many
theorists, particularly sociologists of religion like
Steve Bruce, have painted such an extreme picture. We are also all well informed of the various
‘deaths’—and ‘rebirths’—of religion. In this
regard, the notion of conversion as multilayered
and multifaceted like a crystal could be useful. It
points to the tenacity of earlier notions and their
ongoing viability in a process that overlaps,
builds upon, and transforms the other. To
develop this metaphor, Scherer first turns to
Augustine’s Confessions as a classic narrative of
conversion but emphasizes that ‘there is no conversion experience without a conversion narrative’ (61), thus highlighting the space between
experience and writing and the possibilities of
refashioning and reformulating. As the Confessions ‘suggests that the new man retains the old,
and that the old man is constituted in part
through striving towards the new’ (68), Scherer
argues that it is relevant to challenge those who
advocate any abrupt separation from some supposedly unreflective and na€ıve religious past to
our contemporary, secular (and so unreligious)
culture (a notion he surprisingly links with
Charles Taylor, 68). More surprisingly, however,
the chapter only references one text of Augustine
(a fitting one in the Confessions) but no reference
or citation to A City of God or The Retractions,
among other seminal texts. In this regard, one is
struck by the limited theological analysis and
references in the book, although conversion is so
central in the text (168).
The next major thinker Scherer examines is
John Locke, turning to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. Scherer aims to highlight this
process of crystalline conversion through examining how Locke negotiated the overlapping boundaries of religion and the secular to show that
there is no definitive separation. In this chapter
Scherer also rightly adds: ‘negotiating the parameters of secularism today demands, it would
seem, a renewed engagement with ethical, theological, pragmatic, and political investments
placed within the concept of separation’. This
may be the most important line in the entire
work (especially coming from a Professor of
Government and Politics) but such interdisciplinary engagement with theology and ethics needed
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to be more on display in the work. To ignore the
relevant fact that John Locke was a slave holder
and international slave trader when discussing
Locke and ethics—see Tink Tinker’s essay on
‘Locke and Property’ in Beyond the Pale: Reading
Ethics from the Margins—is the kind of omission
that unfortunately undermines such good intentions.
Thus, one is instead reminded that Locke as a
Christian and Locke as a political theorist could
each have no qualm with justifying slavery, and so
while the boundary of the religions and secular
may have been malleable and the process of adjudicating that boundary crystalline, the ethical was
silenced and absent in both.
While biography is absent in the examination of
Locke, it is at the forefront of Scherer’s interesting
examination of John Rawls as he weaves relevant
biographical details to examine a contemporary figure, who while immersed in the secular, in some
circles (apparently) inspires religious feeling of
sainthood and ‘faith in Rawlsian secularism’ (134).
Scherer even refers to the ‘miraculous appearance
of [Rawls’] work’ (136) —another example of try-
529
ing to show the overlap and borrowings of the secular and sacred—but here again, which seem more
like co-opting when little sustained analysis is
made of those terms’ theological and religious
foundations.
Chapters on Henri Bergson and Stanley Cavell
obfuscate more than illuminate and threaten the
cohesion of the book on the whole. Thinkers like
Jeffrey Stout, David Hollenbach, or even Gustavo
Gutierrez or Irving Greenberg would have been
more useful. Despite an interesting title and a
worthy thesis—that ‘secularism is not a matter of
separating “church & state” but rather of transforming the interrelated fields of religion and politics, and it suggests that this transformation should
be understood as a process of conversion’ (219,
italics in original); the end result in this work evinces the need for a deeper and more theological
analysis of conversion to render Scherer’s aims
more crystalline.
Mater Dei Institute,
Dublin City University
Peter Admirand
Shaping Public Theology: Selections from the Writings of Max L. Stackhouse. Edited by Scott R. Paeth,
E. Harold Breitenberg Jr., and Hak Joon Lee. Pp. xxxiii, 358, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2014, $40.00.
This volume offers a good introduction to Stackhouse’s corpus since it includes his shorter, more
succinct essays that exhibit his influence in the
field of Public Theology. The work shows that
Stackhouse’s career can be characterized as a comprehensive Public Theology project since he always
sought to bring his Christian moral insight,
informed by its faith, teaching and practice, to bear
on questions of the public good in its various facets
(xv-xviii).
The volume contains three sections of Stackhouse’s writings, one essay evaluating his significance by the editors, and a concluding response
by Stackhouse himself. The first section presents
six essays that discuss the place of Public Theology in the larger Christian theological tradition.
The essays cover a number of topics including a
general overview of Public Theology (3-20), the
life and work of Walter Rauschenbusch (21-27),
the impact of Martin Luther King Jr. (28-46), the
influence of Paul Tillich (47-53), Ernst Troeltsch
(71-77), and Jonathan Edwards (78-81), an overview and evaluation of Alasdair MacIntyre (5470), and a critique of Stanley Hauerwas (82-92).
One highlight from this section is when he relates
the social gospel to contemporary issues, namely,
debates over the “death of God,” “contextualist”
verses “principlist” theology, and the “Christ and
culture” debate (cf. 5-11). Furthermore, his discus-
sion of Rauschenbusch is helpful in identifying
the similarities and differences Stackhouse sees
between public theology in the US and liberation
theology in Latin America (cf. 25-27). The second
part of the volume presents eight of Stackhouse’s
essays that discuss the methodology of Public
Theology. The topics addressed by Stackhouse
include an introduction to Christian social ethics
(93-103), the ability of Christian theology to save
the arts from subjectivism (104-115), the distinction and connection between Public Theology and
Christian theology as a whole (116-132), the role
of deontology, teleology, and ethology in Christian ethics (133-153), the foundation of morality
in universal principles but not in natural law
(154-167), the necessity to “de-provincialize
[the social gospel] from its Americanist roots”
(168-185), the differences between Civil Religion,
Political Theology and Public Theology (186-203),
and finally, the what God’s Covenant with humanity means for justice in a global society (204-220).
The first and last essays in this sections best illuminate Stackhouse’s thought since they summarize his
two favorite themes, the primacy of social ethics
for the Christian life (cf. 94-95) and the importance
of a religious and ethical analysis of globalization
(cf. 215-218). The third and final section of essays
more fully develop the role of Public Theology by
addressing particular aspects or challenges of
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globalization. The seven essays examine topics
such as Public Theology in a post-Communist
world (221-229), the ethical foundation of a global
economy (230-242), the role of Christian churches
in promoting moral corporate management (243258), the challenge of theological education in a
global setting (259-270), a Christian perspective on
human rights (271-282), a reflection on the family
and the issue of divorce (283-285), and finally, the
role of Christian pastors as public theologians (286304). The work ends with the editors encouraging
Stackhouse’s work as a model for future scholars
interested in Public Theology (305-316) and a
reflection by Stackhouse himself, in which he discusses his intellectual journey and the areas of his
thought that need further development (317-320).
Disciples of Stackhouse, Christians with a heart
for social justice, and those concerned about the
effects of globalization will surely find this volume
a valuable resource. It is an effective introduction
to his work and succeeds in showing the exigency
of addressing the new challenges of an intercon-
nected, global world. However, those from a more
confessional tradition, and especially those of a
Catholic background, may find certain elements of
Stackhouse’s thought uncomfortable. For example,
while all Christians likely consider social justice a
crucial component of Christianity, many would
not make it the supreme judge over speculative
and religious truth, something which Stackhouse
seems to imply (cf.xx-xxi). In addition, while
Stackhouse rightly seeks a common ground for
evaluating different religions and nobly seeks to
articulate a moral foundation for a modern, pluralist society, one wonders whether he has
adequately understood the thought of MacIntyre
and the Catholic distinction between nature and
grace. Despite this potential misunderstanding,
the work is worthy of a large audience since it
raises critical questions that all responsible Christians, regardless of their background, should
address.
Ave Maria University
Luke Murray
Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis. By Fred Dallmayr, Pp. xiv, 272, University Press of Kentucky,
2013, $50.00.
Any work with ‘Cosmopolis’ in its title has to
endeavour to be interdisciplinary; wide-ranging in
themes, topics, and thinkers; global; and characterised by openness, expansiveness, and tolerance.
Fortunately, such a book is in the very capable
hands of Fred Dallmayr, who by turns engaging,
erudite, searching, and optimistic, takes the reader
across topics ranging from the link of the humanities and democracy; ethics and international politics; the Arab Spring; and the possibility of
Cosmopolitan Confucianism; to the words and
thoughts of thinkers like Aristotle, John Dewey,
Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, Habermas, Bhikhu Parekh,
Charles Taylor, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Nasr
Abu Zayd. The collection of mostly previously
published essays is the fruit of decades of
scholarly, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and interreligious work. It is within a word of the main title
– ‘Being’ and its Heideggerian foundation with little or no critique of the ethical flaws (some might
add ‘fatal’) of that philosopher – which somewhat
jars. But more of that further below.
Being in the World is a deeply personal, passionate book (‘written from anguish’, xii) and one can
see the care and thought given in arranging, updating, and presenting the material, so that though
diverse, still manages to coalesce, outlining a
‘quest for a good and just life in our contemporary
world’ (xii). While eclecticism can be disparaged
in some circles, it is essential for any work in
‘Search of Cosmos’, as Dallmayr subtitles one
chapter. As an aside, every scholarly work, no matter its claim for objectivity and neutrality, and even
if clothed in cold, direct, unadorned (perhaps
mechanic) prose, is still, ultimately, eclectic (even
in what is not chosen or undertaken); but works
consciously so succeed all the better.
In a work aiming to cultivate public ethics and
civic responsibility through intercultural, interfaith,
and interdisciplinary study and dialogue, one
responds ‘Amen’, but needs to pause at the prominence of Heidegger in the opening chapters. Biographical contexts are essential whenever raising a
person or one of his or her ethical themes of
concerns as a universal foundation or building
block. That Locke was invested in slavery (and so
influenced his treaty on land ownership;) that
Rousseau could write words of wisdom on educating children but abandon his own; that Plato could
inspire many with his notion of the Good and
Beautiful while advocating a type of totalitarian
State none of us would want to live in; cannot be
ignored or downplayed by philosophers. For every
reference of Heidegger and ethics, there should be
an echo and reminder of his Nazi past. A book like
Hitler’s Philosophers hopefully paves the way for
deeper philosophical discussions of the portraits of
the thinkers presented in that work. That Dallmayr
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included little to no critique of Heidegger’s hypocrisy (or mentioning of Carl Schmitt’s Nazi links) is
surprising. In short, there is something jarring
about reading the merits of Gandhi and Heidegger
without clear moral distinction. So, too is Dallmayr’s
overly deferential view of China in a talk given at
the ‘Nishan Forum on World Civilizations’ where
he even remarks that China ‘has historically not
been drawn to political or military imperialism’
(206), which even if technically true, must be
countered with acknowledgement of its concentration camp system (the laogai); its heavy-handed
tactics in Tibet; its role in the Vietnam war; and
the atrocities orchestrated by Mao Tse-tung and his
successors.
Nevertheless, the work succeeds in spite of these
faults. Highlights include Dallmayr’s fair critique
of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (especially in
his tendency to imply a ‘one-dimensional’ division
(124) between immanence and transcendence and
the secular and the religious, without probing further on how their interrelatedness can lead ‘to profound transformations on both (or all) sides’ (124).
To sharpen these ideas, he turns to the ‘cosmotheandric conceptions’ of Raimon Panikkar (126)
who spent his life showing us the links and bridges
between various religious systems and the oneness
and symbiosis of the cosmos. Like any good
thinker, Dallmayr hones in on key quotes of the
thinkers he studies, and the ones presenting
531
Panikkar are wonderfully chosen: ‘Only worship
can prevent secularization from becoming inhuman,
and only secularization can save worship from
being meaningless’ (126) This quote, along with
Panikkar’s idea of the ‘sacred quality of secularism’ (126) should be epigraphs above any studies
examining the secular and the sacred. Dallmayr’s
promotion of the humanities as indispensable to
democracy and civic responsibility is one all-too
often forgotten during times of budget crisis and
cuts when subjects like music, poetry, or philosophy (and especially religious studies or theology)
seem only a financial drain and of little practical
value. The opposite, of course, is the case.
His essay on Gandhian self-rule (swarj) is a
jewel of interdisciplinary and intercultural engagement and dialogue, bringing together key concepts
of Gandhi and applying them to recent political
philosophy. In this regard he turns to Arendt,
Taylor, and Dewey and quite rightly joins together
the need to cultivate self-rule with a ‘practice of
self-restraint and self-transformation capable of instilling the habit of nonviolence (amimsa) and generous openness towards others’ (161). Dallmayr’s
book may have been written in anguish, but it
fosters hope and inspires interconnectedness and
possibility.
Mater Dei Institute,
Dublin City University
Peter Admirand
The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. By Giorgio Agamben;
Trans. L. Chiesa with M. Mandarini. Pp. 303, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 2012, $24.95.
This is the translation of Agamben’ s 2007 book,
Il Regno e la Gloria, continuing the genealogy of
power in the West that Agamben began with
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The
text is divided into eight chapters, plus an appendix. Each chapter concludes with a section marked
“Threshold” that summarizes the findings, reflects
upon them and prepares for the next chapter. The
chapters themselves are written in numbered sections (e.g., 1.1, 1.2 and so on). Typically these
sections are followed by subsections, printed in
italics, which expand on a point made in the preceding numbered section or follow up on clues,
and the like. The book has no index.
Agamben begins with Carl Schmidt’s claim all
political concepts are derived from theological
ones, such that one must discover the theological
predecessors to modern political concepts if they
are to be correctly understood. Building of this dictum, Agamben claims that management of persons
is central to modern politics, and that this is in fact
derived from the early Christian interpretation of
the Holy Trinity in terms of oikonomia. Agamben’s
discussion ranges over the history of Trinitarian
theology, the liturgy, philosophy and politics from
the patristic period to the present. This profusion of
texts orbits around the work of Erik Peterson and
Carl Schmidt. The narrative is interesting, and
makes some interesting observations, but is fundamentally unsatisfying: despite the numerous texts
he cites, he leaves out a number of key texts,
events and figures. I will give seven examples.
First, his discussion of gloria inexplicably pays
little heed to Cicero’s discussion in de Officiis; but
this was one of the most widely circulated philosophical texts in the middle ages and decisively
entered into Christian theology when St. Ambrose
imitated it in his book of the same name. Second,
major discussions of the Trinity, i.e., Augustine’s
de Trinitate, the school of St. Victor, or the relevant passages of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, are
unaddressed or alluded to only in passing. Third,
he dodges the entire Filioque controversy, writing – in move that can only be described as
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baffling – that the debate about the procession of
the Holy Spirit is essential for his argument, but
will not be treated in the book (p. 44). Fourth,
important medieval discussions of the relationship between theology and government, e.g.,
John of Salisbury’s Policraticus or Marsilius of
Padua’s Defensor Pacis, are not treated at all.
Fifth, one finds no sustained discussion of the
major continental reformers, Luther, Calvin, and
Zwingli. Since the reformation provoked a radical
rethinking of politics, theology and liturgy in the
reformed churches and less radical, but still important revisions, in the Catholic Church, Agamben’s
argument requires that it be addressed. Sixth,
Agamben completely ignores the Anglican tradition although the Anglican liturgy, the Caroline
divines, and the role of the sovereign in the Anglican Church are all relevant to his argument. The
fifth and sixth are particular problematic since
there are good reasons for supposing that the
reformed and Anglican churches are more influential in modern Western politics than medieval
and baroque Catholicism. Seventh and finally,
Agamben shows no interest in recent historical
research that is challenging early and mid-20th
liturgical scholarship – witness the fate of the
Anaphora of Hippolytus – choosing to rely mainly
on Peterson and Schmitt’s work from the 1920’s
or Kantorowicz’ 1946 work, Regina Laudes.
While these were groundbreaking works, the
scholarly consensus regarding the history of the
liturgy has undergone important modifications in
the nearly 100 years since Schmidt and Peterson’s
work was published.
When reading Agamben it is hard to notice these
lacunae because of the vivacious prose and interesting observations found in what he does discuss
– readers without some training in patristic or
medieval philosophy and theology might overlook
the gaps entirely. Of course, Agamben can always
excuse these lacunae by arguing that he is not writing a history, but a genealogy focusing on the
unthought-of ‘signature’ of events. Those willing to
accept this excuse will find this book useful insofar
as it expands considerably on the narrative offered
in previous volumes, but those who do not accept
the excuse will be unmoved and wonder about the
value of that narrative. Heidegger is reported to
have once joked that his Kantbuch was ‘bad Kant,
but excellent Heidegger’ and the same might be
said of The Kingdom and the Glory, it is bad history, but excellent Agamben.
Texas Woman’s University
Brian Harding
Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context. By
Paul S. Fiddes. Pp. vii, 423, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, $34.85.
How is wisdom to be sought in this late modern
world in which we live? Would it even be something that people would want in their lives? Would
it be only the religious who would seek after it? Or
would it be applicable to all of humanity? Though
there is much to suggest in response to such questions, and though the incompleteness of our
answers might often stun us into silence, it is the
explicit task of Paul Fiddes in his new book to
tackle such questions. I believe, moreover, that his
response, to be fair, presents us with a balanced
theological viewpoint from which to incorporate
the most ancient of wisdom into the contemporary
world in which we live.
To begin with, part one involves ‘setting the
scene’ of the late modern world and introducing
Fiddes’ general response to the above questions,
mainly, that, indeed, a society increasingly disappointed by a ‘thinking subject’ centered understanding of the self has great need of biblical
wisdom, and that we should pay attention to what
it has to say to us. Fiddes presents us with the reality that the selves that we actually are are in fact
ones ‘always exceeding [the] faculties’ of reason
and knowledge (p. 4). He therefore calls for a
‘relational’ approach to knowledge, or what he has
also termed in his work a ‘connectional’ theology.
In his words, ‘The relation between self and world
is at the heart of wisdom, and this makes it, I
suggest, an appropriate conversation-partner with
thinkers of our late-modern period’ (p. 15). His
will be then a ‘practical wisdom’ that draws deeply
off the Hebrew tradition of wisdom writings, and
that which he brings to bear on the discussion with
great erudition and relevance, pointing us toward
both a relationship to ‘nature’ and the fullness of
the human being which are often lacking in modern
constructions of the self.
With every inch of this great book, Fiddes is trying to develop a ‘wisdom theology’ for the modern
age in which we live, one that emphasizes how
humanity, by nature, ‘reaches out towards mystery’
(p. 25). He considers a variety of self-world relations (e.g. world-object as detached from, expressing or as threat to subject) before rehearsing a
number of standard readings of the subject-object
relationship via Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Lyotard and
Derrida, to name only a few who participate in this
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welcomed ‘conversation of many voices’ (p. 59)
that characterizes our late modern era. In short, and
as it will only expand from this point on into the
entire volume, wisdom, like late modern thought, is
concerned with alterity, a sublime disturbance of our
selves and difference—all words more than appropriate when contemplating our situatedness before
that which will remain forever mysterious to us.
The chapter that follows immediately takes up
challenges presented in the form of the ‘death of the
self’ in much of contemporary continental thought,
this time including Deleuze and Lacan, though still
keeping Derrida’s observations within sight. It also
involves extended discussion of Levinas and Ricoeur
on the book of Job and how such readings seek to
dispel any ‘pretensions of the self to master or dominate the world and others’ (pp. 82-3). He lauds
Ricoeur’s efforts to find dialogue between the self
and the divine Other as that which moves us beyond
Levinas’ deadlock between them. As he will suggest
the incorporation of Ricoeur’s work involves for theological thought, ‘I aim to show that participation in
the divine Other, which is inseparable from responsibility for human others, occurs when the self is mediated through the Christian symbol of the Trinity, and
through the personal reality it expresses’ (p. 83).
Part two attempts to describe wisdom as both
‘observation’ and as ‘participation’, though the
stress is upon making the movement from the
former to the latter—a suggestion which will ultimately be the subtitle of the final chapter. To
underscore this, he follows Hannah Arendt in discussing the forms of alienation that modern humanity feels as it tries to ‘control and dominate the
earth’ (p. 96). Wisdom literature, he feels, can
alternatively demonstrate what both Arendt and
Heidegger saw as the antidote to such forms of
alienation, a potent mixture of ‘self-revealing’ and
‘self-concealing’, and what Fiddes considers as
states of being both ‘open’ and ‘inexhaustible’
(p. 98). The overall response given by Fiddes to the
situation consists then in multiple, detailed readings
of specific passages from wisdom literature that illuminate an alternative option for humanity—that is,
by meeting very human needs that transcend any
particular context and speak directly to our late
modern era. There is, in his words, a certain ‘boundlessness’ within human existence wherein the
transcendence of God is entirely ‘at home’ (p. 110),
one where we might likewise at times see a divine
telos at work beyond our conventional ability to recognize it. To stress this point, he addresses the
classic division in wisdom writings between the
‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’, and in such a way as
to illustrate a definitive telos in the world that
signals beyond Arendt’s form of political action
(a la Iris Murdoch’s notion of the ‘Good’), but
533
which also steers clear of simply reinvesting humanity with its own ‘domineering human subjectivity
over against the world’ (p. 129).
The next chapter tries to conceive of the scientific context of complexity in which we live, urging
his readers to see the fundamental connection
between the conclusions of wisdom literature and
our elusive conditions, uncertainty, indeterminism,
holistic interactions and yet the possibilities of
complexity that take center stage in our world
today. To make such a connection more palpable,
Fiddes draws our attention to Derrida and the complexity of signs—diff
erance and undecidability, to
name a couple choice terms of his—as these offer
us a chance to hear the deep resonance between
postmodern thought, wisdom literature and even
Trinitarian thought, which he begins to take up in
this chapter and which will be present to each section until the end. His use of the Trinity is fitting,
however, and certainly in keeping with his thesis
‘[. . .] that the most adequate, or least inadequate,
symbol for God is that of personal relations’
(p. 159).
The following chapter continues to pursue Derrida
(and Levinas as well) in assessing the limitations
and potential of sight, or seeing, here brought into
alignment with both divine and human wisdom as a
form of observation, as Fiddes puts it. This chapter,
as with those that comprise the whole section,
explores a wide range of examples all demonstrating
that ‘[. . .] Yahweh’s powers of observation expose
the limited vision of humanity’ (p. 183). Accordingly, he suggests that they share in the same
capacity for vision, differing only (though radically) in the degree to which they are able to
observe. Fiddes offers us here, as beforehand, a
refashioned form of natural theology through a
shared wisdom that eschews distinctions such as
those between immanence and transcendence,
favoring rather the ‘emanation’ of God’s spirit
throughout the world. Hence, by suggesting such a
connection, Fiddes is trying to demonstrate how,
through the eyes of wisdom writings, ‘seeing the
world is knowing God’ (p. 188), a conclusion
driven home by the ample readings of ‘Lady Wisdom’ that he takes up in a number of texts. Beyond
this, he also demonstrates the diversity and creativity of wisdom, which leads him to conceive that
‘[. . .] the one who observes all in the world is the
same one who offers communion and everlasting
friendship. This surely symbolizes a discovery
made by the wise, that there is something participatory about wisdom’ (p. 203). It is also the deep
font from which so much mystical theology has
drawn throughout the centuries, I would add. The
reader is perhaps not surprised at this point, then,
when such considerations push him to go beyond
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Aquinas’ rather static view of the divine and into a
participatory account that draws deeply from
Hebrew wisdom and Christian Trinitarian sources,
which he also takes up here in more specific detail
than I can here summarize.
The final chapter of section two unveils in a rich
tenor the human quests for both presence and place
that contemporary philosophers, here represented
by Heidegger, Levinas Derrida and Kristeva, challenge us to rethink anew, as they gesture toward
the place of ‘no place’, or khora, that symbolizes
this barren, primordial and seemingly inaccessible
space. It takes Fiddes’ reading of wisdom texts
such as Job and Ben Sira to bring the accessible
God back into the picture and to stress his suggestive
conclusion that ‘[. . .] there is no single place where
wisdom is located and no path that can be followed
to find it. Wisdom can only be found in exercising it’
(pp. 233-4). It is the sheer vastness of wisdom that
makes it seem hidden to us—hidden, but not absent.
It is, as such, a maze of complexity that we can yet
access at certain points where it is open to everyone.
Once again, and in a way that will actually serve to
unite the various essays that make up the second half
of the book, Fiddes will utilize the triune God as a
model for comprehending how we can dwell within
this ‘place of no place’ that is wisdom, or, in his
words, ‘The least inadequate analogy for God is that
of relationships, forming a space that is strictly a
“no-place”’ (p. 262).
Part three looks at ‘wisdom in the world’, and
continues to flush out the implications for our consideration brought about through the in-depth textual analysis of wisdom literature engaged with
contemporary society. Because these themes have
already appeared in previous chapters, though they
are here refined within the following contexts, I
will be brief in summarizing their contents.
The first chapter tackles ‘metaphor and mystery in
the interpretation of wisdom’, converging upon
Derrida and Ricoeur’s textual hermeneutics in light
of the ‘unfathomable text of the world’ (p. 275), the
disruption and giving of the self associated with
both God (again as Trinity) and humanity itself. The
second chapter explores late modern reticence to
embrace the ‘whole’ in favor of partial viewpoints,
which Fiddes addresses and alters by suggesting that
wisdom—here in the figure of Koheleth, and juxtaposed mainly with Wolfhart Pannenberg—focuses
more on the whole ‘as a sum’ of what is rather than
as an exercise in totalization (and, hence, oppression). Again, the relational nature of the Trinity is
invoked as that which points toward a model of
accumulating what wisdom, love and relations we
are able to gain, while never seeing the entirely of
what actually lies before us. The third chapter on
‘the text of the world and the comprehensiveness of
wisdom’ would seem to theoretically synthesize the
previous two chapters, yet in the context of considering another model of comprehending the vastness
and expansion of wisdom: as Torah, but also, by
extension within a Christian context, as Christ. The
final chapter of the third section, quite intriguingly
follows Foucault’s analysis of power and the formation (and care) of the self as situated within the context of learning (or rejecting) wisdom (much as
Jesus could be said to be the rejected wisdom) as a
form of ‘creative activity’. A final, refreshingly
speculative ‘Coda’ at the end of the volume turns to
musical metaphors in an attempt to find the proper
‘attunement to wisdom’ that is needed in our age,
one that searches for its embodiment in the body of
God and the body of Christ. Fittingly in accord with
what has come before it, this conclusion places its
stress upon making the movement toward other
bodies, a relational movement that seeks attunement
and one that must be done in harmony with the wisdom that has come before it and shaped it.
I must admit that have done almost no justice to
the depth and significance of biblical scholarship
that Fiddes addresses in this vast work, and I have
only gestured toward the wonderful connections
that he makes between contemporary society, both
its faults and its hopeful possibilities, and the
ancient writings of wisdom that have been passed
on to us as part of a determinate religious tradition.
Indeed, as I neared the end of the volume, I had
the sneaking suspicion that I would be returning to
the volume again and again in order to find more
use for the valuable insights which his latest book
presents us with. I have few doubts, moreover, that
this impression will be anything less than accurate.
Loyola University Chicago
Colby Dickinson
Nationhood, Providence, and Witness: Israel in Modern Theology and Social Theory. By Carys Moseley.
Pp. xxxiii, 267, Cambridge, James Clark & Co., 2013, $21.18.
Contrary to myriad theoretically sophisticated predictions from various quarters, offered under ostensibly analytical but often polemical rubrics such as
‘modernity’ and, now ‘globalization’, nations con-
tinue to exist. What to make of this fact? That theology ought rigorously to take up anew this pressing
and significant fact is the merit of Moseley’s welcome book. She understandably wants theologians
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to ‘take seriously the existence of nations as part of
the divine plan for world history’ (ix) by arguing
‘the need for a theological theory of recognition of
nations’ (196). Moseley’s plea is well and good, if
one takes one’s head out of the sand and allows oneself to be open to the facts of history; but where
does this leave the theologian for whom history is
the theatre of God? Can there be, as R. Tudur Jones
put it in ‘Christian Nationalism’, ‘[nationality] on
the basis of specifically Christian presuppositions’?
The problem, as Moseley rightly observes, is that
‘the topic of nationhood has proven difficult for theologians’ (xv). Clarifying and then dealing with the
reasons why it has been difficult further complicates
the ability of theology to take up productively
nationality (as distinct from ‘nationalism’: the ideological elevation of the nation above all other attachments and attendant loyalties—a modern-day form
of pagan idolatry).
For the development of a theory of the theological
recognition of nations, attention must be paid to the
Bible, given the importance of the concepts of g^
oy
(‘nation’) and ‘am (‘people’), the description of a
carefully delineated, bounded territory (Numbers 34
and elsewhere), the theological (exilic?) extrapolations of those concepts and that description as the
‘chosen people/nation’ and ‘promised land’, and the
allegorical (for example, Galatians 4:24-25) and metaphorical (for example, Revelations 3:12, 21:2) reinterpretations of these symbols in the New Testament
and subsequent Christian exegesis and apologetic for example, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho
and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies. One may avoid the
problem of nationality by implicitly agreeing with
Marcion, and therefore ignore as much as possible
the Hebrew Bible as the old—even primitive—Old
Testament. In this case, the ‘particularism’ of the Old
Testament is something of the past, at best a residue.
One may keep the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament, remaining content with replacement theology
and supersessionism, thereby minimizing the problem
of (biblical) nationality through the aid of that uncritical exegesis and strained apologetic which has been
called into question since the Reformation. One need
only recall the Lutheran accusation against Calvin for
being a ‘Judaizer’, and the proper focus on the ‘plain
meaning’ of words and verse.
Since Moseley is no modern-day Marcionite and
since she rejects replacement theology and supersessionism (202), her conclusion is that the theologian
must acknowledge not only the legitimacy of Israel
as a nation in both the Hebrew Bible and the New
Testament but also the modern ‘nation[al] state of
Israel under God, alongside other nations’ (205).
Moseley does not shy away from the implications of
her argument, understanding that the basis for the
‘profound resentment and demonization of the
535
[modern] state of Israel’ (68) is hostility to nationality. As she puts the matter, ‘anti-nationalism is
intrinsically anti-Zionist’ (205). The Jews have had
the audacity to take seriously both the liberal, democratic principle of self-determination and the biblical
description of Israel’s covenant with God as eternal.
Nevertheless, the problem remains: how should
Christian theology view this freedom of national
self-determination and God’s eternal covenant with
Israel as a nation, obedient to God’s word (law)?
Long-standing difficulties re-emerge - the relation
between the Old and New Testaments, and various
responses such as ‘two covenant theology’ or ‘subsidiarity’, that allow some opening for nationality.
To tackle this problem Moseley discusses the
resurgence of religion (Chapter One) and then subjects the topics of Israel and nationality in the works
of Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank and Rowan
Williams to critical examination in Chapters Two,
Four and Five, interrupted by an analysis of ‘Wales
as a Stateless Nation’ (Chapter 3), which includes an
overview of current theories of nationality, for example, by Anthony Smith. The book concludes with the
stimulating Chapter Six, ‘Israel and Jesus: Recognition, Election, and Redemption’. Despite a good discussion of Israel and nationality in Niebuhr’s work,
the attention paid to the works of Niebuhr and especially Milbank and Williams is unfortunate; the
profound theological problems in dealing with
nationality tend to get lost in, certainly overwhelmed
by, criticism after criticism, however justified, of
Milbank’s and Williams’ positions. Better would it
have been to isolate and then move front and center
these problems, discussing the complications surrounding them for theology. For example, are nations
to be understood as products of nature, or results of
human activity; to reformulate the question: how is
the relation between nature and history to be understood? Is this activity to be regarded as sinful, or as
indicating a partnership with God in the (unfinished)
creation of the world? Is the existence of nations an
expression of the fallen state of brokenness and sin,
or are nations a perennial way humans have organized themselves as witnesses to the freedom that God
makes possible? Above all, is this freedom for Christianity, the freedom of the individual or the freedom
of the individual as a member of a nation? Even
if one adopts a ‘soft supersessionism’ of Pauline
‘Israel’ to image the incorporation of Gentiles into (a
reinterpreted) ‘Israel’ (perhaps Romans 11) rather
than an ecclesial replacement as the latter has come
to be understood, it is the individual who is incorporated, in contrast to a plurality of nations, each in
their own way enriching humanity, looking to Zion,
as in Isaiah 2. These and the previously mentioned
problems are well known; the merit of Moseley’s
book is not that answers are provided, but a call has
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been given for nationality to assume ‘its due regard
as a topic in theology’ (232). The facts of history
demand no less.
It is not clear how far Christian theology can put
aside supersessionism, and thereby provide a theology for the recognition of the nation of Israel and
of nationality in general; in any event, to do so
clearly requires a richer and more extensive formulation than appears in this book. There are suggestive hints, however, as to what direction Moseley
thinks such a theology might take. She believes a
re-evaluation and appreciation of ‘the historical
dimensions of human life’ (55) are necessary. I
gather that this is implied by her referencing
‘Niebuhr’s Hebraic turn to the Old Testament’
(50). This is an interesting characterization, but not
developed. What is meant precisely by ‘Hebraic
turn’ or ‘the more Hebraic strand in Christianity’
(133)? What is the theological justification for
so-called ‘Christian Hebraism’, and what theologically is at stake? Here Moseley might have called
attention to the recognition and incorporation of
the (rabbinic) Noahide code in Hugo Grotius’ On
the Laws of War and Peace and especially in John
Selden’s De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum, as a concrete way of providing
‘real theological contours’ (95) to an understanding
of nationality.
A study of how these latter Christian Hebraists
understood the Noahide code should find a place
within Moseley’s proposal to read ‘the rise of Calvinist orthodoxy and Puritanism as part of the his-
tory of the Western understanding of nations’
(xxii). If so, however, another theological problem
arises, for Grotius and, in complicated and conceptually richer ways, Selden understood the Noahide
laws to be natural. Here, of course, other difficulties for a theology of nationality should be
critically examined: not only the legitimacy of a
national—or, in England, ‘common’—law but
also in what ways this law is or is not related to
the ius gentium, divine law, and eternal law, as,
for example, is discussed in Aquinas’ Summa. Is
‘exitus and reditus’ to be acknowledged, or, in
contrast, an associational and attendant legal pluralism? Are nations and national states persona
ficta, or do they have ‘corporate personality’?
We must make up our minds about whether
nations are natural consequences (spontaneous
orders) of the limitations of human existence, or
lapsarian constructs. An approximate reformulation of these alternatives would be: granted that
we recognize the ideology of nationalism to be a
sinful idolatry, and recognizing the distinction
between nationalism and nationality, how is the
latter to be understood theologically? Moseley’s
provocative suggestion that we read the rise of
Calvinist orthodoxy and Puritanism as part of the
history of the Western understanding of nations,
remains to be undertaken. If this can be persuasively accomplished, it would be an important
contribution.
Clemson University
Steven Grosby
Leon Trotsky: a Revolutionary Life. By Joshua Rubenstein. Pp. x, 225, New Haven/London, Yale University
Press, 2013, £10.99.
This is a sad but cautionary tale that plays out
slowly over the 61 years of Trotsky’s life as a
classic, patient pedagogy of how an individual
who is enormously gifted but insecure in his initial family situation, reinvents himself successively
in an opportunistic program of upward social
mobility, finally allows himself to develop the
blind spot or commit the hypocrisy of attaching
himself to a system that allows for violence and
persecution in its demand for a monopoly on doctrinal questions, all in the praiseworthy goal of
seeking the ‘liberation of the proletariat’; eventually falls into the net he has allowed to be spread
for others, loses his elevated position in the party
to a more thuggish and crafty rival, loses his
entire family, plus his many followers and disciples in the persecutions that follow, and finally
loses his own life to assassination so that in the
end it is as if he never existed. His unchecked
egotism led him to a lapse that cost him and his
friends everything. To win the chess game, he
played a king-sacrifice.
Rubenstein goes beyond Isaac Deutscher in not
writing as an admirer or follower, and beyond
Robert Service in not trying to damn Trotsky for
his personal failings. Trotsky’s error was systematic, not personal, and wilful and deliberate rather
than based on weakness. Born Lev Bronstein in
1879 to a Jewish family in the southern Ukraine,
Trotsky was sent for a better education to the cosmopolitan city of Odessa where he blossomed, but
also associated his personal situation with the
plight of the serfs and other persecuted minorities
in Russia. In an uncanny repetition of the French
Revolution (which he frequently invoked), Trotsky
joined the struggle to transform Russia from a feudal, agricultural, and incipiently capitalist country
to a modern industrial communist state in one generation. As the French revolutionaries also justified
their urgency, this had to be done violently and
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quickly, because the neighboring capitalistic countries would not tolerate this change and do everything they could to stop or reverse it. Shunning the
isolated terrorist acts of ‘liberals’ who thereby
hoped to propel the Tsarist regime into serious
reforms, Trotsky allowed himself to be backed into
the ‘unsentimental’ science of revolution of Karl
Marx, as recently rebottled and updated by Lenin
to show how Russia could leap over the need for a
‘bourgeois’ revolution, allowing the proletariat to
advance immediately to ownership of the means of
production. Trotsky laid his intellectual, oratorical,
journalistic, and diplomatic gifts on the altar of the
revolution and was unquestionably the propagandistic and inspirational leader that led it to its surprising success. Early on, however, he displayed an
almost autistic fascination with and devotion to the
‘system’, associated with a simultaneous denial of
reality. This trait appeared in small things and
large. In 1917 Trotsky spent 10 weeks in New
York and enjoyed socializing with the waiters in
a restaurant who were mostly Russian Jewish
emigres like himself; he refused, however, to tip
them for their service because he was in principle
537
against tipping - and they came to avoid him as a
customer. (p. 77) After the Russian civil war (in
which Trotsky’s position was intuitively closer to
the more humane Mensheviks who lost), when he
came to address economic issues, Trotsky argued
against granting labor unions any degree of
autonomy, convinced that under communism workers would not need to improve their conditions or
defend their rights. As Angela Balabanoff, a longtime friend, observed this transformation: he ‘was a
neophyte who wanted to outdo in zeal and ardor the
Bolsheviks themselves, the neophyte who wanted to
be forgiven the many crimes against Bolshevism he
had committed in the past – by becoming more
intransigent, more revolutionary, more Bolshevik
than any of them’ (p. 118). A means is to be
assessed by its end, he would say, and the most
important end that cannot be achieved without violence automatically justifies that means. Trotsky
accepted this ambiguity in Lenin’s thinking, and
thus ultimately had no defense before Stalin’s practices, against the workers or against himself.
Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan
How China Became Capitalist. By Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. Pp. 256, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan,
2012, £60.00.
Ronald Coase was born in 1910. As a boy he
read Marco Polo and as a student became interested in economics when he heard about the
invisible hand. He made a fundamental contribution to the Nature of the Firm in an ‘undergraduate paper’ of 1937 and was a founder of the Law
and Economics school. In 1991 he won the Nobel
Prize. He has teamed up with Ning Wang to tell
the extraordinary tale of how China became
capitalist.
After Mao died in 1976, and the Gang of Four
were arrested, the class hatred of the decade-long
Cultural Revolution was brought to a close. Order
was restored, Deng Xiaoping returned to assume
paramount leadership in 1978, and China opened
up: welcoming capital and new technology, growing in trade, and most important of all, learning.
Painfully aware of the consequences of isolation
(visiting a Nissan factory Deng announced, Now I
know what modernisation means) China embraced
a new Long March. Lip service was paid to Mao –
especially stressing the dictum of seeking truth
from facts: Deng’s deft political footwork was brilliant. But he had no blueprint for economic reform
– and was frank about his lack of experience. A
Communique of 1978, usually associated with the
birth of economic reform, made no mention of
markets. In fact, Chinese bureaucrats were quite
na€ıve. During a week-long intensive course given
by Milton Friedman on price theory a minister
asked, Who in the US is responsible for the distribution of materials? So, it was not that the reform
was planned; rather that it took place on the margins in ways no one could expect. As the proverb
has it, Flowers planted on purpose do not blossom;
the willows no one cared for have grown into big
trees offering ample shade.
For example, in one of the poorest villages,
Nine Dragon Hill, a ‘village of beggars,’ the
experiment of private farming yielded a harvest
three times that of the collectives, and the experiment was extended. Or, again: the ‘returned
youth.’ Socialist China boasted that it had no
unemployment - Mao had sent millions of city
youths to learn from the peasants. But after his
death they came back. Under pressure, selfemployment was permitted and twenty million set
up their own businesses with the result that noodle sellers could earn more than nuclear scientists.
The market provides.
The market is necessary because we do not possess omniscience. It is not so much an efficient
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allocator of resources as the channel of information. Nor was its progress automatic: an inflation
rate of 8% in 1988, a student uprising in 1989, an
‘incident’ (with Deng’s approval) in Tiananmen
Square leading to a fall in foreign investment all
put reform in jeopardy. But Deng’s political skill
in his Southern Tour, and his building up of legal
institutions played its part. As one would expect
from the authors, the role of institutions is not
ignored. But a central theme of the book is
epistemology:
Discover the truth through practice, and again
through practice verify and develop the truth. Start
from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it
into rational knowledge; then start from rational
knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and objective
world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and
again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of
practice and knowledge rises to a higher level
(121).
Thus Mao in 1937, who learned of the need to
respect subsidiarity in the Long March and in his
guerrilla warfare. He attributes the method to
Marx, but the authors trace it to Confucius. Dubiously they refer to the market of ideas, illustrating
the concept by the ways that local authorities (in
networks ironically set up by Mao) competed for
investment by trying out different plans to attract
businesses, unintentionally conducting an experiment to reveal good practice. The market of ideas
is urged for the sake of creativity: Chinese
researchers produce plenty of Ph. D.’s but win few
Nobel prizes.
The problems of the market are alluded to, and
in the context of social justice the authors conclude
with one of Premier Wen Jiaobao’s favourite
books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (of which
there are more than a dozen Chinese editions).
Unless the fruits of development are shared by all
it is morally unsound. Adam Smith, in fact,
actually emphasised two invisible hands, one being
the market, the other being morality (185). Smith’s
tone and message is compared with Confucius,
Isn’t it a joy to study and regularly practice?
What’s more, isn’t it a joy to receive friends from
afar? At this point the authors are not simply relating China’s story, but envisioning what ours might
be.
This excellently written book has great merit,
not least in pointing us towards a new political
economy.
Maryvale Institute
Birmingham, UK
Christopher Friel
Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel. By John Randolph LeBlanc. Pp. x, 195,
Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013, £55.00.
Literary theorist Edward Said was a central figure
in the emergence of post-colonial theory, as well as
an internationally renowned advocate for the
human rights of Palestinians, working tirelessly to
counter the popular presentation of Arab peoples in
the American media. Said was more than simply
an academic—he was a public intellectual whose
work was debated in the mass media and whose
influence went beyond the realm of literary theory.
In his latest book, political scientist John Randolph LeBlanc makes a strong case for examining
the political nature of Said’s work, arguing that
Said’s writings suggest ‘the need for a pre-political
theory. As a voice of a people dispossessed, Said’s
work pushes our political thinking back beyond our
present optic where politics involves controlling
what one can and managing what one cannot’ (8).
LeBlanc uncovers this pre-political theory in five
concise chapters, the first focusing upon democratic
aspirations and ambiguities in the Middle East. Of
course, phrases such as ‘democratic’ and ‘liberal
freedoms’ come with baggage enough, especially
when promoted as universal values by the West,
for ‘[t]he liberal is universal only when the moral/
political universe is narrowed to those who fit the
mold’ (30). Instead, Said promotes a democratic
criticism in which one constantly engages one’s
preconceptions, grasping complexities and resisting
‘final solutions’ of all kinds. Such a view, applied
to Palestine/Israel, to the reality that settling people
somewhere depends always upon first unsettling
another people, reveals the difficulty, if not the
impossibility, of distinguishing ‘between settling
and unsettling without recognizing that one narrative claim has been artificially and forcibly prioritized over the other’ (53). Rather than the
imposition of mutually exclusive truth claims,
LeBlanc’s reading of Said offers the recognition of
hybridity, or the fact that places always house multiple cultures, multiple narratives: ‘human presence,
place, and culture are real; the truth of antecedent
justifications, claims of exclusivity, and purity are
not’ (64).
Building upon this theme of hybridity, and recognizing the experience of exile that underlies both
Israeli and Palestinian history, Said advocates the
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embrace of exile as a cognitive stance, the ‘exile
as traveler,’ always interrogating her experience,
rather than the exile as potentate, who fetishizes
the recovery of the homeland and the purity of
group identity. Hybridity undermines the logic of
separation, which produces such policies as the
Israeli separation barrier being constructed around
the West Bank since the start of the Second
Intifada: ‘[R]ather than positing one safely beyond
the reach of the other, what results is a double
enclosure; first, each community is close off in the
delusion or fantasy that it is, can or should be separate from the other; second, in this delusion driven
by suffering, the two communities are closed off
together, locked in a mortal struggle to make their
part of the delusion a physical reality’ (93). Peace
processes fail because the do not recognize the
shared reality of the space. LeBlanc goes beyond
Said’s ‘exile as traveler’ motif to adopt the image
of exodus, in which an entire community lives in
exile and endures a time of testing. LeBlanc’s reading of Said offers a secular, or worldly, view of
human existence that prioritizes not identity, which
easily fosters exclusivism, but rather ‘presence,’ or
the reality of people’s lives in a particular place,
both present-day and down through the past, for,
‘with presence there is memory; with memory
539
there are claims of justice and injustice; with those
claims come the challenges of reconciliation and
then and only then with creating and living a
mature political community’ (146).
What LeBlanc offers here is more than simply a
reading of Edward Said’s literary corpus. Rather,
he incorporates into his analysis the theoretical
work of many other noteworthy scholars—such as
Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler—to complement and, sometimes, to offer a counterpoint to
Said’s writings, occasionally illuminating some of
his blind spots. This cross-fertilization of political
and literary theory makes this LeBlanc’s own
major contribution to the pursuit of peace in the
Middle East, a meditation upon democracy,
national identity, and ethnic conflict that calls to
mind the work so many who have labored in this
field. Indeed, this book should be read alongside
Marc Howard Ross’s Cultural Contestations in
Ethnic Conflict (2007) and Jeff Spinner-Halev’s
Enduring Injustices (2012) as an exemplar of political theory that is sincerely concerned with realworld suffering and that offers a possible route
away from the constraints of violence.
Encyclopedia
of Arkansas History & Culture
Guy Lancaster
The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics. Edited by Michael P. Federici, Richard M. Gamble,
and Mark T. Mitchell. Pp. vi, 228. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013, £55.00.
The idea that America constitutes an empire is not
a new one, though it typically finds expression
among the political Left, with a focus upon the
military and economic domination of the larger
part of the world. However, the contributors to The
Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics
argue that both the American Right and Left
exhibit a worldview that ‘has few reservations
about using power to transform society and the
world,’ that ‘places faith in the ability of rulers to
fashion a world much better both morally and
materially than the one we were born into’ (1–2).
In contrast to this worldview, the contributors to
this volume hearken back to the sort of ‘modest’
republic envisioned by the founders of the United
States, one that emphasizes the virtue of restraint
on several levels.
The book is divided into three sections: 1)
America in the World, 2) Political and Economic
Immodesty, and 3) Immodesty in American Culture. Noteworthy in the first section, Richard M.
Gamble argues that American has bought into a
messianic hoax, especially in moving ‘the conflict
between good and evil from the individual human
breast to a realm “out there,”’ as typified by the
American ‘War on Terror,’ which conflates the
sacred and the secular in a war for righteousness’s
sake (24). In the second, a chapter which stands
out is Brian Patrick Mitchell’s survey of the evolution of banking, with particular attention to its role
in the rise of mercantilist republics more likely to
wage war for economic advantage rather than
dynastic or religious goals, the result of which is
the emergence of a cartel of super banks more
powerful than nations: ‘[T]oday, Goldman Sachs is
too bit to fail, but Greece is not’ (106). A particularly enlightening piece in the third section is
Darryl Hart’s analysis of the ‘immodest faith’ of
modern America, which tracks specifically the
influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, who, Hart insists,
failed ‘to distinguish between the religious and the
secular spheres,’ adopting instead ‘the idea that all
of life is religious’ (206)—an idea which reduces
the Church to a political entity, with a position on
all issues.
Not all the chapters are so insightful as these, however. Many contributors expend their precious
pages in railing against ‘entitlements,’ especially
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legislation expanding government-provided healthcare, equating the rise of the welfare state and federal
regulations with imperial immodesty, in so far as
they represent government intrusion into private life.
In so doing, they fail to realize the various manifestations modesty can take. Though Scandinavian
nations, for example, are well nigh socialist, the socalled ‘Law of Jante’ remains a cultural touchstone;
welfare state Swedes are particularly renowned for
their modesty. Too, many contributors equate secularism with immodesty, most notably Mark T.
Mitchell, who writes, ‘The idea of God. . . created a
horizon within which people could grasp the meaning of human existence,’ believing their actions
limited by divine command (128). But is that true?
One could just as easily argue that a theistic worldview might well reinforce megalomania, as people
equate their personal desires with God’s, while a
non-theistic outlook fosters modesty and humility by
contextualizing modern life within the vastness
of time and space, the evolution of the universe
and of mankind. Finally, while the call for a
renewal of local control will garner some support
from across the political spectrum, including ecosocialists, the various authors fail to square the
circle of local control and human rights; after all,
‘local control’ was, in the American South, a
term regularly employed to justify Jim Crow laws
and lynching.
That said, what The Culture of Immodesty in
American Life and Politics does well is 1) expose,
from a traditionalist angle, the fundamental unity
underlying America’s two (ostensibly polar opposite) political parties, and 2) offer a critique of
capitalism and imperialism from the point of that
body of tradition. American political and cultural
life is, at present, based more upon the idea of
team membership than it is truly substantive differences in policies or tastes—Democrats cheer,
or at least hold their tongues, when their president
pursues the same policies they cursed under his
Republican predecessor. This book is not a perfect
one, but it has something for people of all ideological stripes, and it constitutes a sincere and
learned attempt to reinvigorate debate with a perspective beyond that of team membership, beyond
the imperialistic tropes that are the common currency of the American political and economic
establishment.
Encyclopedia of Arkansas
History & Culture
Guy Lancaster
The Political Economy of Environmental Justice. Edited by H. Spencer Banzhaf. Pp. xvi, 280, Stanford/London,
Stanford University Press, 2012, £42.00.
While it is well-known that poorer people and
minorities tend to live in more polluted neighbourhoods, the reasons for these findings have hitherto
received little attention in the literature on environmental justice. This book, which explores the
mechanisms behind this phenomenon, seeks to fill
this lacuna. Written from the perspective of economics, it is the fruit of a meeting in 2008 in Big
Sky, Montana, where a number of economists
concerned with environmental questions came
together.
Even if the book is based on findings about
North American communities, much of the economic statistical analysis provides explanations that
can be generalised and serve to understand the
socioeconomic forces behind the link between poverty and neighbourhood pollution in other parts of
the world as well.
With a focus on property prices and the demographic and socio-economic effects of cleaning up
environmental pollution, the first part of the book
is about household behaviour and land markets.
First examined is the observation that wellintended clean-up efforts might actually harm poor
residents by resulting in what the authors call ‘gen-
trification’—that is, rising property prices, construction and renovation, and influx of residents
with a higher socio-economic status. The reasons
for gentrification and for migration of poorer residents in the wake of it, needs to be understood, it
is argued, in order to design environmental policies
without negative effects on poorer communities.
Quantitative economic analysis is used to show
that while poorer residents choose to live in more
polluted but low-cost areas for various reasons,
they do so largely because, of necessity, they prioritise inexpensive housing. This, one may assume,
might be true in many other parts of the world.
In the United States, however, environmental
injustice is not only associated with poverty, it is
also linked to race. In chapter four the editor and
his co-authors, Joshua Sidon and Randall Walsh,
show that ‘that not only can richer whites outbid
poorer minorities for cleaner, healthier communities, driving up the cost for accessing these communities, but these communities are even more
expensive simply because they are whiter, further
driving away minorities’ (p. 22).
Proof that race remains a factor to reckon with
in the context of American environmental justice is
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also given in the second part of the book, where
Brook Depro and Christopher Timmins have an
interesting chapter on empirical findings of studies
in San Francisco. It is shown that blacks and Hispanics are at a disadvantage, compared with the
white population when ‘trading up’ to bigger
homes. Hence, they tend to move into neighbourhoods with more ozone pollution than do whites.
The explanation given for this is that compared
with whites, minorities face higher costs for similar
sized properties. This in turn, it is shown, might be
explained by discrimination or simply because
minorities prioritize other public goods over low
ozone levels
The third part of the book is about industrial
development and the behaviour of polluting firms.
The question is whether polluting firms tend to
locate in communities with greater concentrations
of poor and minority groups and whether this is a
direct result of discrimination. The overall finding
is that industrial choice of site is driven more by
profits than by discrimination. The most important
factors are production costs such as price of land
and cost and availability of labour, as well as
transportation costs such as freight costs and distance to markets. At the same time it is noted
that the more populated an area is, the less likely
541
is it that a polluting firm locates there. This is
explained by the fact that such communities tend
to be more vocal.
That more vocal and politically active communities are at an environmental advantage is further
borne out in the final section of the book on the
behaviour of governments, both state and federal.
No support is found for the hypothesis that pollution policies of governments are discriminatory and
favour white middle-class communities over poor
or black and Hispanic communities. But more
vocal and active communities are less likely to
have hazardous waste sites constructed in their
vicinity. This is another finding that would probably be confirmed in many other parts of the
world.
It would indeed be interesting to explore
whether the proffered explanations for the environmental injustices related to poverty, political activity and lobbying are applicable to other parts of
the industrialized world besides the United States.
In other words, this book implicitly calls for further studies of the phenomena for which is seeks
explanations.
Heythrop College,
University of London
Agneta Sutton
Environmental Justice and Climate Change: Assessing Pope Benedict XVI’s Ecological Vision for the Catholic
Church in the United States. Edited by Jame Schaefer and Tobias Wainwright. Pp. xxxiii, 279. Lanham,
MD, Lexington Books, 2013, $100.00.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and two
Catholic environmental organizations sponsored a
Catholic Consultation on Environmental Justice
and Climate Change in November 2012 to coincide
with the semi-annual meeting of the USCCB in
Baltimore. Organizers were inspired by Pope
Benedict XVI’s teachings on climate change and
care for the environment, as expressed in his Message on the 2010 World Day of Peace and other
writings.
Unfortunately, Benedict never made ecological
concerns and climate justice a central focus of
his pontificate, so scholars have to sift through
many papal pronouncements to find environmental nuggets of wisdom. Like those official documents, most of these essays are true but
uninspiring. They neither convey a sense of
urgency nor provide much motivation for action.
For the most part, they are as exciting as encyclopedia articles.
There are exceptions.
Christina Peppard’s essay, ‘Commodifying Creation?’ deftly summarizes the warning signs of
impending global catastrophe and cites both John
Paul II and Benedict XVI in pointing to the
world’s market economy as once source of the
problem. Elizabeth Groppe admits, ‘The climate
crisis is one of the many indicators that our current
form of human civilization is walking a path of
folly’ and that Benedict XVI ‘calls us to a radical
conversion’ in the way we look at nature (146).
Jeremiah Vallery deplores how ‘Catholics are indifferent to the environmental crisis’ (176) and sees
shortcomings in the Church’s catechetical documents as partly to blame. David Cloutier in ‘American Lifestyles and Structures of Sin’ comes closest
to speaking uncomfortable truth when he denounces the suburban pursuit of luxury as a driver of
overconsumption, overproduction, the depletion of
resources and the degradation of the environment.
Louisville, Kentucky, USA
Joseph Martos
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Spectre of the Stranger: Towards a Phenomenology of Hospitality. By Manu Bazzano. Pp. xii, 164. Brighton/
Portland/Toronto, Sussex Academic Press, 2012, £16.95.
Manu Bazzano is a Zen Buddhist monk, a psychotherapist who lectures in philosophy and psychology, and author of Buddha is Dead: Nietzsche and
the Dawn of European Zen (2006) and The Speed
of Angels (2009).
Spectre of the Stranger is in three parts with an
introduction and an epilogue (and a model index).
Each of its parts draws on a wealth of thought,
both Eastern and Western, which illuminate most
when unexpected associations are discovered
In Part I, headed ‘A place in the sun’, Bazzano
offers 40 wide-ranging notions of identity and
otherness, revealing the self’s ‘fluidity’ and ‘multiplicity’ (128), 40 apparently independent sections
that do, in fact, oscillate between two hypotheses,
one inspired by the Zen Buddhist tradition, the
other motivated by the philosophy of otherness as
discussed by some prominent late twentieth-century
thinkers. Perhaps interdependent would be a more
apposite, if challenging, description. The first
hypothesis, deconstructing the self, maintains that
there is no such thing as interiority. ‘When we
look closely,’ Bazzano writes, ‘we do not find a
thing we can call the self . . . I simply cannot
know myself as a solid and separate entity’ (5).
The second hypothesis is that ‘only through hospitality [is] true identity . . . born’ (5). ‘Summoned
by another, called to respond, the response creates me’ (5.) This creation of a seemingly separate entity also calls into being the recognition of
the gap that separates self from other, which is
‘the call of responsibility’ (128). As such,
Bazzano contends, the Christian love of one’s
neighbour is challenged and wisdom is seen as
the encounter with otherness. In reconstructing
the self its peculiarities are recognised and there
is, Bazzano argues, a desire to become intimate
with it and so the approach to the inner life is a
mixture of ‘curiosity and love, inquiry and compassion’ (128).
In Part II Bazzano goes in search of cultural
matrixes that justified hostility towards otherness,
xenophobia. This part is headed ‘A human revolution’, a title used by Marx in the 1840’s when
discussing a political, but also ethical and aesthetic, revolution. Here, in 18 sections, Bazzano,
using insights from philosophy and psychology,
posits that if individuality comes into being
through openness to the other, in the wider, social
sphere the citizen becomes a citizen by opening
up to the non-citizen (and, by extension, the person becomes a person by opening up to the nonperson, and so on), xenophobia is transformed
into xenophilia, ostracism is transformed into welcome. ‘Only thus he becomes a true citizen, for it
is only a full recognition of vulnerability which
defines human goodness and the meaning of
justice itself’ (6). Hospitality, then, is nothing less
than a revolution, a human revolution in which
‘the ethical response marries political activism
and renews the tradition of anarchism, substituting
the classic notion of individual emancipation of
the anarchist tradition with responsibility towards
otherness and revolutionary violence with a combative pacifism, civil disobedience and direct
action’ (7).
Inspired by H}olderlin’s ‘dwelling poetically on
this Earth’, the 16 sections of Part III (which
uses this phrase as its title) reassert hospitality
first and foremost as the poetical action of a
person who never forgets their status as a ‘passenger’ or ‘guest’ on this Earth, ‘circumventing
the now predictable turn of most notions of
freedom into new modes of oppression . . . by
preventing us [from] taking a too literal assumption of responsibility which would become
co-opted by the universal guilt of established
religions’ (129). As such, an aesthetic and symbolic dimension is introduced, demonstrating
how hospitality can lead to a heightened sense
of well-being.
Bazzano concludes ‘If we can remember our
essential condition as guests on this earth we stand
a chance of becoming good hosts and true citizens’
(129).
Monastère de la
Sainte-Presence, Brittany
Luke Penkett
The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation. By Mark Hathaway and Leonardo Boff.
Pp xxvi, 419. Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books [Ecology and Justice Series], 2009, $35.00.
This book is the result of a collaborative
undertaking between Mark Hathaway, a Cana-
dian eco-justice advocate and adult educator
who is presently pursuing doctoral studies and
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Leonardo Boff, the well-known liberation theologian from Brazil, whose writings on ecology and
liberation have been influential in connecting the
suffering of the Earth with the suffering of the
poor. Their collaboration has its origins in
Hathaway’s Master’s thesis, which he wrote and
shared with Boff in Toronto during 1996. The
two men formed a partnership with the explicit
goal of bringing together diverse perspectives
emanating from their respective situations as
authors committed to a cosmology of liberation.
Building upon the advantage of both individuals
having spent time in the other’s home region,
their content-specific aspiration for this project
was to represent views from both the Global
South and North.
The end result of this collaboration is a passionate argument about the need to orient religions, spiritualities, worldviews and modes of
socio-political being in a direction that supports a
praxis-driven transformation of what Hathaway
and Boff understand as currently ascendant pathological practices of domination. The goal of this
transformation is to support a (Thomas) Berryite
dream of mutually enhancing and substantively
just human-earth, human-divine and intra-human
relationships. Key to this argument is a sense of
deep connection linking all relationships within
the universe on both of the intertwined cosmological and ecological levels. To give a sense of this
multi-level connectivity, Hathaway and Boff
draw on diverse imagery from cosmological
reflection, green thought, religious wisdom, theology, the natural sciences, feminism and spiritual
practice (amongst other areas). Their vision of
the future is of one that is substantively egalitarian,
sustainable, dynamic and peaceful, as ‘power-over’
and systems of domination are transformed into
‘power-with’ and systems that foster artful and
creative collaboration, marked by multi-layered
diversity.
The discussion in this volume on how Christian
theology needs to be shifted to contribute to such
a transformation may be particularly noteworthy
for readers of the Heythrop Journal. Perhaps what
is most intriguing in that regard is Hathaway and
Boff’s treatment of the Trinity, Pneumatology and
Christology. Briefly, they argue that the Trinity is
a prime example of an integral connection from a
Christian point of view; one Hathaway and Boff
consider difficult to match in other green thinking
due the depths of its relational content. Here,
moving beyond orthodox categories, they cite the
complete unity and yet irreducible diversity and
co-eternity of the Mother/Father, Son/Child and
Holy Spirit. Within a similar vein, in terms of
Pneumatology, Hathaway and Boff reference the
543
Pauline idea of a diversity of talents emanating
from the same Spirit. They further expand upon
the creative aspect of the Holy Spirit and, in that
light, emphasize the indwelling of the spirit as
absolute Energy across the cosmos. When focussing on the person of Christ, Hathaway and Boff
note how the incarnation was dependent on the
pre-existence of the universe, that it was a ‘truly
cosmic event...that Jesus’ roots are found in the
Milky Way, his cradle is the solar system, and his
house our planet Earth‘ (p. 329). Thus, they view
the Cosmic Christ as engendering a ‘panChristicism,’ joining together every human and all
of creation.
There are some issues with The Tao of Liberation in terms of its flow of ideas. For instance,
the authors will often criticize or advocate for a
specific position and then at another point in the
book present another criticism or normative
statement that is in tension with the first portion
of analysis or statement. As an example,
Hathaway and Boff write in a contrastive, analytical and normative style about the value of
ecologically and social just economic system
and then emphasize the importance of not thinking in dichotomies. On one occasion, they even
acknowledge this tension by explicitly asking
the reader to not understand such a contrast as
dichotomous. Another similar feature that may
be owing to the book’s initial genesis as a Master’s thesis is that illustrative examples and very
specific data are often repeated in the text. Also,
the same thinkers are sometimes introduced in an
extended format several times. These latter tensions’ potential to be irritable is amplified by the
shear length of the text. On the positive side,
this length provides space for an impressive
number of perspectives within the pages of The
Tao of Liberation. However, it also means the
relevance of these viewpoints is not always
wholly evident in the concluding quarter of the
book. Furthermore, negating the value of ad
fontes work, on a number of occasions authors
are cited with their ideas presented through secondary sources rather than with reference to their
original works. Additionally, entire scientific
schools of thought that do not accord with
Hathaway and Boff’s favoured quantum and system theories are painted with broad and sometimes
unfair brush strokes, even though acknowledgments
are later given to relation-oriented pioneers in other
scientific fields. Perhaps worse is that an arguably
undue number of lines in text are given over to
controversial theories, such as Rupert Sheldrake
and his interlockers’ ideas on morphic fields. Such
extended treatments, while adding relatively little to
the arguments for the pressing need for and
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potential of a Tao of liberation, may serve to alienate critical readers with a background in the subject
matter during the first three-quarters of the book
before the more original material is presented in
the final chapters.
Those tensions, while worth noting in the context of a review, may be of little consequence for
the authors whose intent appears to have been
not to write a logically consistent academic treatise. Rather, Hathaway and Boff undertook this
survey of diverse perspectives to suggest that
there are many paths to help reinvent the human
and society in order so that they support a substantively just and ecologically sustainable future.
Those looking for nourishment in that regard are
sure to find fruit in reading through the pages of
The Tao of Liberation. Ultimately, this potentially
nourishing character is what one might legitimately expect to emerge from a collaborative
work between a North American educator-activist
and a Latin American liberation theologian who
do not hide their commitments. In this light, the
book succeeds by offering a fairly nuanced,
wide-ranging and accessible discussion of theory
and practice, geared toward enabling its motivated readers to reflectively ground and more
fully form their own transformative ecological
praxis.
Saint Thomas More College,
University of Saskatchewan Christopher Hrynkow
Canon Law: A Comparative Study with Anglo-American Legal Theory. By John J. Coughlin. Pp. xix, 226
Oxford University Press, 2011, £47.50.
Law, Person and Community: Philosophical, Theological and Comparative Perspectives on Canon Law. By John
J. Coughlin. Pp. xviii, 291, Oxford University Press, 2012, £55.00.
John Coughlin is a Professor of Law at NotreDame University and a Franciscan priest and
these are his two recent books on comparative
Catholic canon law. The first book is selfexplanatory inasmuch as it seeks to re-establish
canon law as a proper system of law as this is
understood in secular Anglo-American legal
thought. I say re-establish because nowadays
canon law is regarded as a private and trivial
matter either by States or by members of the
faithful, including church authorities, who should
know better. That a concern for natural rights,
due process, fairness, the right of defense, and
other legal maxims in canon law has gone by the
board in some ecclesial circles - and the conduct
of the U.S. Bishops during the abuse allegations
being an example which he analyses - is a retrograde development where the promotion of justice
has been reduced to an antinomian idea, and law
and a substantive legal spirit in the Church has
been replaced or abrogated by another distortion,
that of legalism. Hence the welcome arrival of
these timely tomes which employ the impressive
tools of history, philosophy, theology, comparative
law and conceptual analysis to redress this deficiency. The author presents an overview of the
formation of canon law as law and to illustrate
his points he looks at three examples of recent
Church life: the abuse crisis in the U.S., Church
ownership of property, and the refusal of Holy
Communion to U.S. Catholic public officials
under the auspices of canon 915 and the uncertainty this causes because of interpretations by
different bishops in the U.S.
Using these examples, the author presents the
way the Code has been used and abused in the
Church and then how that compares with the
demands of jurisprudence in secular positive law.
In the first book he summarizes the thinking of
important secular theorists such as Hart, Fuller,
Raz, Dworkin and Habermas, amongst others, as
foils to canon law theory which, he argues, both
borrows from and contributes, or, at least has contributed, to secular legal thought. Chapters on specific issues such as Legislative, Executive and
Judicial Power, Universal and Particular Law,
International Law, the Canonization of Civil Law,
and so on, are considered in the light of Dispensation, Exception and Privilege which he sees are
integral features enabling canonical equity and
which also fulfill the secular demand for the law
to be flexible and adaptable in particular circumstances, and. most of all, to be effective. Having
considered Austin’s desire for the law’s effectiveness through coercion backed by sanctions being
an essential aspect of its success, and of Hart’s
and Dworkin’s ripostes to this, the author argues
for what he calls the personal reason or intellectus
of canon law which brings together natural, theological, and historical truths. This intellectus
reflects canon law’s universal and transcendent
principles; expresses theological truths from revelation, and includes a historical awareness of custom and tradition. It is a critical factor, he
contends, in canon law’s power to bind. The intellectus relies on an understanding of a universal
human nature affected and redeemed by Christ,
and is not static but dynamic in particular
BOOK REVIEWS
circumstances. It binds because it provides the
basis for personal obedience since failure to obey
can damage one’s membership in the Church and
the salvation of the soul; in short, it gives insight,
as Habermas points out, which the person, by free
use of the intellect and will, chooses to act in
accordance with canon law’s demands. Coughlin
argues that canon law therefore meets the criterion for a system of law and the rule of law, at
least in the terms set by Anglo-American legal
theory. Canon law’s authority is not primarily
derived from coercion by means of sanctions,
since it contains only a few penal sanctions, but
from the intention of the legislator. Since it has
the backdrop of a theological understanding of
sacred power, it is this which enhances the duty
of obedience owed to it. However, he states that
this duty goes beyond a simple command theory
since canon law’s authority lies on the insight or
intellectus of the believing subject to voluntarily
obey its norms because it functions as a rule of
law which advances personal, social and ecclesial
natural and supernatural ends.
As regards canon law being a substantive system
of law, he examines Hart’s criterion for a developed system of law containing both primary and
secondary rules, the latter concerning recognition,
change and adjudication, and argues that canon law
satisfies these. However, he notes that the three
examples of clergy sexual abuse, the ownership of
Church property and the (mis)application of canon
915 to suggest that antinomian or legalism can
reduce the adherence to abide by primary rules and
that the secondary rules are susceptible to these
extremes of legal thought. The result is serious
damage to persons, the common good and the reputation of the Church and he thinks that the intellectus of canon law, which is based on natural and
supernatural truths, gives a metaphysical grounding
for the rule of law. The rule of law is central to
any legal system and so it is essential that the
Church adhere to it. In addition, aspects of history,
philosophy, theology and, I would add, legal culture, must be borne in mind when seeking to
understand and interpret canon law. Coughlin
argues cogently for the necessity of the rule of law
being adhered to in the Church, which it was not
in the three examples he considers, because of the
need for a legal system to exist precisely for the
good of persons, the Church, and the common
good, all of which are compromised by failures in
this regard. Coughlin presents his case with some
force and is able to situate the case for canon law
being a system of law, as compared with another
legal system, well. He considers secular legal positivism and is keen to bring that to bear on canonical thinking. This theme of the importance of a
545
substantive and effective system of law is very
important for the Church and society. It is clear
that no legal system lives up to its expectations
and that all have defects difficult to correct and he
notes that secular law is often subject to political
pressures. Coughlin observes that antinomianism
and legalism must be balanced by the rule of law
as understood in Anglo-American legal theory so
that canon law does not fall into further disrepute.
His second book picks up some of these themes
and develops them more, particularly as regards the
writings of Blessed John Paul II on the theology of
the body. This anthropological focus is explored,
again with great clarity, and leads to a consideration of the constituent features of personal identity
such as the soul, reason, affect, conscience, free
will, memory and the salus animarum. Chapters on
canon law in relation to natural law, equity and its
development, as well as his chapter on marriage
have, as he says, been published elsewhere. Where
this second tome breaks new ground is in the area
of Church-State relations and in particular in the
field of the U.S. First Amendment and case law on
Catholic schools and the U.S. Supreme Court’s
rules as regards churches with a hierarchical, as
distinct from a congregationalist, structure. He considers the basis upon which both Church and State
law emerge and subjects this to a critique which is
profound inasmuch as it considers the issue of the
authority of law to bind: an issue causing much
debate in the secular legal systems not only in the
U.S., but also, I would point out, of emerging
supranational European law and English common
law, and one where canon law has a contribution
to make in terms of renewed lines of thought on
the nature of law, person and community. Indeed,
canon law’s incorporation of the Church’s teaching
on the intrinsic dignity of the human person,
human rights, the common good and the final end
of the human person provide tried and tested categories of reference for legally developed nationstates and which, in the highly legally specialized
and litigious country from which the author writes,
may now be rediscovered as substantive jurisprudential thought. Since modern Western secular law
emerged from canon law, perhaps it is time for
what has been forgotten in secular legal positivism
to be recalled from its Catholic legal sources, especially because of the foundation it provides via its
thinking on God, divine law, natural law and subsequent positive law for basic human rights, a feature which was not lost on Martin-Luther King
who appealed to St Thomas Aquinas’s account of
natural law against unjust racial laws from his
prison cell. Catholic thinking generally has a far
more substantial, realistic and inclusive notion of
law, person and community in contrast to modern
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social and political thought, particularly that of
Hobbes and Rawls. Coughlin concludes on this
triad in canon law not being a human invention but
a reflection and analogy to God and warns of the
danger of re-entering a humanly pointless pagan
age after centuries of Catholic humanist thinking
on these matters. These two books, with their comprehensive bibliographies, are a timely and an
excellent consideration on these themes and should
be required reading for all jurists.
Wimbledon, London
James Campbell
The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury. By Morris B. Hoffman. Pp. xi, 359. Cambridge/NY,
Cambridge University Press, 2014, £21.99/$30.00.
Hoffman is a judge in Colorado. Despite its title,
this book is not primarily a study in neuroscience,
nor a contribution to evolutionary history. It is
informed by deep research in both these areas, as
well as by the author’s professional experience;
Hoffman’s goal, however, is to offer practical suggestions to improve legal systems: he is interested
in the origins of humanity insofar as this may help
build a better future. He is particularly concerned
with problems within the American legal system; a
consideration of the origins of these problems
requires reflection on English law as well; it is no
surprise to find frequent references to William
Blackstone. Although the problems Hoffman discusses arise within the Anglo-American tradition,
the general philosophy he advances is relevant to
any nation that uses some form of trial by jury. For
such a system to work, laws must be such that the
ordinary members of the public who make up the
jury are capable of understanding them, and do not
find them completely repugnant. Juries are reluctant to find criminals guilty if the punishment prescribed by law seems excessive for the crime.
The good news is that it turns out that juries
understand the law better than Hoffman thought
they did. He had long worried that, despite being
given definitions, juries were incapable of understanding the differences between acts that are purposeful, knowing, reckless and negligent. Tests
showed that, contrary to his expectations, jurors do
understand most of these differences (although the
distinction between knowing acts and reckless acts
seems hard to grasp), and they do blame purposeful
actions more than knowing ones (p. 292). It is not
so much a question of having clear definitions, as
framing laws that are in keeping with our intuitions
to begin with. This does not mean that legislation
should never be framed so as to override our natural intuitions. For example, laws prohibiting juries
from knowing a defendant’s prior convictions deny
us the information that we instinctively seek when
assessing someone’s trustworthiness, but this is no
reason to alter such laws, which exist precisely to
overcome our natural prejudices, ensuring that
reformed criminals are not kicked back into prison
by a knee-jerk reaction (p. 256). The message is
not that we should always trust our feelings, which
will, in any case, often be conflicting, but that
since there is a price to be paid when legislation
goes against our intuitions, such laws should be
introduced only where necessary (p. 308).
In the final chapter, Hoffman considers the four
main justifications that have been proposed for punishment: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and
incapacitation. He argues that an emphasis on rehabilitation has led to excessive prison sentences for
certain crimes in the USA, leading to a problem of
overcrowding in jails, while at the same time criminals have been put on probation when a short prison
sentence may have been more appropriate (p. 346).
Hoffman argues that our natural urge for retribution
evolved as a short-cut to achieving deterrence, and
that an effective legal system should build on and
refine our retributive instincts (pp. 344-345).
He states that trial judges like to see themselves
as practical people (p. 337), and the value of this
book is, above all, its contribution to practical
debates about punishment. It is important not to
overlook the fact, however, that, as the title
implies, Hoffman’s suggestions are rigorously
grounded in the scientific study of human nature.
Saint Paul said that God’s law is written on the
human heart, and now scientists are taking it upon
themselves to decipher that writing. Hoffman
shows himself to be a wise reader.
Florida State University,
Panama
Benjamin Murphy
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