“There Is Another Kingdom”: On The Politics of Virtue

Abstract

“There Is Another Kingdom”:On The Politics of Virtue Tracey Rowland John Milbank’s and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue could be described as the theo-political analogue to Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, Blake’s Jerusalem, and Sir Cecil Spring Rice’s I Vow to Thee my Country all rolled into one. It pulls no punches and is unashamedly in favor of aristocratic and monarchical forms of government, as well as the establishment of the Church of England. God, Queen, and Country Anglicans who read it are likely to recall the words of Simeon’s prayer upon the presentation of the Christ-child: Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace: Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum; Quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum: Lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel. Another way to describe it would be a twenty-first-century Tory manifesto or “Blue Labor” handbook. (The difference between the British political classifications “Red Tory” and “Blue Labor” seems to be more a matter of class identity than substantive policy preference). Whether one is an aristocrat with a strong sense of noblesse oblige—that is, a Red or Turquoise Tory (turquoise is red combined with green ecological interests)—or a person from a lowlier social position who appreciates the value of an aristocratic element within the social order—a Blue Labor type—the same substantive political positions can be arrived at assuming a common Christian intellectual foundation. The Politics of Virtue is therefore in the genre of works that offer a critique of liberal political theory from a Christian perspective. It [End Page 1337] shares something of the flavor of Alasdair MacIntyre’s many publications on the subject, especially the need to reclaim virtue and unmask the confidence tricks and coercive character of liberal ideology. However, where MacIntyre and others have been criticized for offering no alternative to the present liberal political order other than building more monasteries, home schooling children, out-breeding liberals, and praying for another St. Benedict or Joseph Ratzinger (all reasonable strategies in my judgment), Milbank and Pabst have dared to offer some concrete proposals about the structure of political institutions, as well as offering a robust defense of a Christian commonwealth where both politics and economics are rooted in virtuous practices. While a wave of communitarian and specifically Catholic criticisms of liberalism began to be published in the 1980s, often in response to John Rawls’s liberal classic A Theory of Justice (1971), at a time when it seemed as though the end-of-history theorists and a chorus of neoconservative Catholics might be right about the triumph of liberalism, and hence the enthusiasm (especially among American Catholics) to quickly baptise it, Milbank’s and Pabst’s book comes after the outbreak of Islamic terrorism in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008. They note that both of these events “exposed the limitations of the two liberalisms that have dominated Western politics for the last half-century: the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the 1960s and the economic-political liberalism of the right since the 1980s.”1 The social-cultural liberalism of the left and the economic-political liberalism of the right share the same starting position of a merely negative conception of liberty. A negative conception of liberty is about “freedom from” something, rather than “freedom for” something. This negative liberty rests on two pillars: “a procedural, formalistic conception of justice and an instrumental notion of reason.”2 The combined result is that “individuals are proclaimed ‘autonomous’ when all the while they are subjected to the instrumental logic of bureaucratic control and commercial exchange.”3 Worse yet, “the scale of self-worth that the individual is encouraged to adopt is the [End Page 1338] very same scale by which she is subjected to mass manipulation.”4 The “double paradox at the heart of liberalism” is therefore the “relentless privatisation of the public sphere and yet the ever-greater invasion of the private sphere, coupled with an oppressive moralism masquerading as liberal impartiality and procedural fairness.”5 Milbank and Pabst strongly affirm the judgment of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek...