Thesis: the two most decisive things in modernity are distorted Augustine: 1. Political Economy is genealogically Jansenist. 2. Legitimation by coordinated individual rights is genealogically Malebranchian. The hidden hand instead of ethics. Occasionalism instead of relationality
Therefore one could say that the main God of modernity was not a deistic God, nor a no-God, but a heterodox Christian ‘God of the gaps’. Secularisation has left us either just with the gaps or with sinister immanent substitutes for an idolised deity.
Recent research would seem to suggest a certain French revolutionary oscillation between Jansenist ideas of the total emergent providential consensus of individual wills that could favour direct democracy and Malebranchian ones of representatives laying down reliable general laws
There’s much more sense here of the infallibility of representatives (crucially in the Abbé Sieyes) and the separation of the general from the specific than in English constitutional tradition. Malebranche’s legacy is the key.
But things get more complicated insofar as Rousseau’s secularised rendering of Malebranche’s general will was less ‘ecclesiological’ (National Assembly as ‘the Church’) than Sieyes. He read general will still more ‘occasionally’ as implying direct democracy.
But all these theories are semi-secularised (their authors were still theists) versions of a perverted Augustine such that the divine will interacts with and overrules ours and links individuals in lieu of real relations in terms of a zero-sum contest of merely ontic realities.
It’s in other words onto-theological with a vengeance.
For far too long everyone seems to have assumed that all those Abbe’s that helped make the French Revolution were just cynical deists. But no: they were real Christians, if poor theologians. Often in a Gallican tradition linked to specific theological currents.
Thus a delayed backlash against both the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (ending tolerance of Huguenots) and Unigenitus (Papal bull vs Jansenism and Gallicanism, asked for by Louis XIV) is a factor in the French Revolution.
It goes without saying that the bastardised Augustinian origins of modernity imply that liberalism is a pessimistic not optimistic doctrine. Far from ignoring original sin as usually said by ‘conservatives’ it overdoses on human degeneracy. (See Milbank and Pabst Pol. of Virtue)
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Despite his dissent from Agamben’s apparent endorsement of conspiracy theories, Zizek here also warns us against Bill Gates etc in general and by implication against how they will exploit Covid. He is right. There is a rational and tempered reason to fear ‘the great re-set’.
Zizek would seem to agree with Agamben that humanitarian aid is inherently dubious because it presumes and upholds ‘sheerly natural’ (‘barely living’) human beings whose removal from civic belonging is largely contrived by humanitarian benefactors in their main economic roles.
Much about contemporary populism seems Schmittian to me: politics before economy, democracy as direct, involving total identity of ruler and ruled, referenda and purgation of internal enemies (Jews, Muslims, Roma, Poles etc).
This looks like early Schmitt but actually later ‘global and imperial’ Schmitt is smuggled in by his American and Chinese admirers.
Catholics need to realise that Schmitt was a horrendously modern thinker. Like the Catholic ‘traditionalists’ he worshipped the idol of national sovereignty but unlike them rejected the role of ‘aristocracy’ by denying the need for representatives in modern democracy.
Oxford Movement not an English eccentricity. There were parallel Romantic movements towards a greater Catholic stress amongst Protestants in the Netherlands and Scandinavia and France at least. Often all these people had a better grasp of the Catholic core than some contemp RC’s.
Marx was not a socialist but a ‘communist individualist’. ‘his goal is not equity of exchange but the effectiveness of individual and collective freedom’. (Lacroix and Planchere)
Whereas one goal of socialism, as with Aristotle or Aquinas is indeed equity of exchange.
Neither Marx nor the French Revolution foregrounded justice. It was the socialist Proudhon who began to do so. De Lubac and the Lyons Jesuits realised this.
Macintyre’s critique of ‘emotivism’ is excessive. Misses the point that ends are discerned in part via feeling for Plato and perhaps even for Aristotle. Linked to his residual Marxism. Phronesis assumes ends given by ‘narratives’ of epochs. They shift via negative dialectics.
Thus if one tried to rescue Macintyre from Marx and Hegel one would also have to eject his lingering neo-scholastic rationalism which fails to see the crucial place of purged and elevated feeling. He may even be unfair to G.E. Moore’s Platonism however truncated this was.
It’s also curious for a Scottish thinker if the heart of that tradition was sympathy/common-sense and reason as refined feeling. The relation to Hume might also have to be looked at again. Are we so sure Hume does not see a communion of shared moral feeling as a genuine telos?
In his influential Polity Exchange paper Noel Malcolm contrasts ‘political’ approaches to human rights with ‘moral and philosophical’ approaches. I see this as a singular example of English ‘metaphysical illiteracy’ of which the Celtic nations are rarely so guilty.
Given this metaphysical illiteracy it’s quite hard to explain the many exceptions: Cudworth, Coleridge, Bradley, Whitehead etc, besides the metaphysical bent of so much English literature. But there’s a dominant strand at both elite and popular levels wishing to suppress this.
When Malcolm suggests that English declarations of civil rights from Magna Carta to 1689 implies no universal claims he is quite wrong. Church support in first case linked to invocations of natural law, in second British imperialism often assumed British universal exemplarity.