Law, Politics, and Liberal Hope: A Literary and Anthropological Analysis of Secular Society

Abstract

Abstract This essay argues that efforts to accommodate religion within the contemporary liberal-democratic and secular state give rise to difficulties that liberals struggle to understand. It also argues that practical impulses that exhibit intensity of the sort present in religion threaten to destabilize the operations of the contemporary liberal-democratic state. This essay develops these arguments by reference to Hilary Mantel’s novel A Place of Greater Safety (a fictionalized account of the French Revolution). In this novel, Mantel explores Maximilien Robespierre’s ambiguous relationship with the Christian faith. As well as drawing on Mantel, this essay also makes use of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera’s account of the ‘Grand March’ of the political left provides a basis on which to explore practical impulses that are reminiscent of religion in their intensity and that threaten to destabilize the liberal-democratic state. The two literary reference points that feature in this essay also provide resources with which to probe the contributions to contemporary liberal political philosophy made by Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. The result is an analysis that supports the conclusion that contemporary liberal-democratic states may be destabilized by practical impulses that, in their intensity, have affinities with religion. This essay also finds support for this conclusion in the writings of Stanley Fish and Carl Schmitt. Fish and Schmitt each argue in terms that give expression to a pessimistic political anthropology. This pessimistic political anthropology throws light on the difficulties that those who wield power within the liberal-democratic state face when they seek justly to accommodate religion. These difficulties lend plausibility to an observation made by John Adams (one of the founders of the USA): ‘[t]here is a germ of religion in human nature’ and it is ‘strong’.