The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics and Cultural Studies) by John Milbank

The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics and Cultural Studies) Reviews

• 
  Scriptor Ignotus

  Perhaps the most radical and subversive conviction one can have under the current regime of liberal absolutism is that there can be a shared teleology of human flourishing—a largely agreed-upon sense that some ways of living are inherently better than others and can be judged according to an objective standard—and that the whole edifice of our modern political culture should be thought of—as Plato and Aristotle thought of it—as a means to this end. Largely because of the amoralist assumptions of liberal ideology which we today so instinctually and unthinkingly imbibe, any holistic picture of human flourishing and a common good towards which our political and economic institutions might be directed is greeted with suspicion, as if the promoters of any form of public morality must effectively be arguing for fascism or theocracy by the back door.
  
  That it has become impossible for so many, on the left and the right, to imagine any alternative to the ever-expanding liberal regime of negatively-defined individual rights and unfettered economic activity facilitated by a centralized and interventionist state—except for the totalitarian nightmares of the twentieth century—is a testament to the fact that liberalism is itself a totalizing, arbitrary, and moralistic ideology that has increasingly proven itself unable to brook dissent. Liberalism is hollowing out the social fabric, undermining the organic web of “thick” associative institutions in which human achievement, satisfaction, and social participation have traditionally been embedded, and replacing them with an agonistic binary of individual and state, both conceived of only as abstractly egoistic and self-aggrandizing subjectivities. It bases itself on a fictional account of human nature—that of an individuated and violent “original” humanity that can only be brought into some degree of harmony by an equally-arbitrary but overwhelmingly powerful centralized state—and then it brings about, in real life, the imaginary situation it initially claimed to be correcting for.
  
  Despite its claims to secularity and neutrality, liberalism, in both its political and economic dimensions, has a theological heritage. It emerged from the Calvinist and Jansenist doctrine of total human depravity: the notion that humanity is so hopelessly separated from God by sin that it is impossible for us to even recognize or cooperate with divine grace. God’s grace is such that He works invisibly to bring goodness out of our ceaselessly rapacious and narcissistic lives. It is a short distance from here to the “Invisible Hand” of post-Smithian political economy, under which the pursuit of our individual acquisitive desires brings about collective benefits.
  
  This shift entailed a complete denial of the capacity of human societies to bring about any substantive, collective human goods; the values that most animate people and give them a shared sense of purpose and solidarity were simply bracketed out of the public conversation. Any positive value, when applied to the public sphere, was now effectively an act of idolatry. The foreignness of God to His creation in this picture also fed into the deism of the eighteenth century, according to which God withdrew from the world after an initial act of creation and perhaps intervenes periodically in a heavy-handed and seemingly arbitrary way. The God of deism is the Sovereign of the liberal state: a superordinate being who can only invade the material world guns blazing like a SWAT team in a Detroit housing project.
  
  In contrast to this ontological pessimism about human nature, the Christian and Greco-Roman understanding that Milbank and Pabst want to rehabilitate assumes a more profound and multidimensional human condition. There is certainly an innate human capacity for violence, greed, and selfishness, but as fundamentally social and political beings our more original condition is one of trust, reciprocity, gift-giving, and fulfillment in the achievement of shared goals. If one were able to travel back in time and interview one of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors, she would likely not articulate her values in negative, proto-liberal terms. She would instead refer to positive desires with real substantive content. She would express a desire to have a large, healthy, and harmonious family, to have comfort and safety, to honor the gods and spirits infused in nature, to be a good mother, wife, worker, lover, artist, and teacher, and to achieve social recognition for the “surplus” of real human value that she had contributed to her community. There would be no talk of abstract rights or abstract wealth, of ownership or debt, but rather of one’s unique contributions to a shared, substantive vision of the good life.
  
  In fact, you don’t have to go back in time to see how disconnected our prevailing elite ideology is from the more natural, “given”, and substantive priorities of ordinary people. The single most important development in our current political situation is the increasingly apparent divergence of liberalism and democracy. For decades the two terms were used interchangeably, belying an assumption that given the choice, democratic electorates would always deliver outcomes that would reinforce and legitimate the liberal orthodoxy of political and intellectual elites. Because the liberal state was thought to have “liberated” the people—who were thought of primarily as individual consumers of state benefits and contributors of tax revenue—from the supposedly arbitrary constraints of mediating institutions like families, trade unions, religious communities, guilds, cultural imperatives, and the like, liberals assumed that democratic outcomes would always support the liberal values of negative liberty, free choice, toleration, laissez faire economics, and the promotion and articulation of expanding realms of individual subjectivity.
  
  In recent years, democratic electorates have elevated Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary, and Duda in Poland; and there appears to be genuine popular support for Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, and the Chinese Communist Party, despite the lack of free and transparent elections in these countries. Britons have approved a referendum for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union which their government has not been able to implement three years later, France’s independent technocrat president has faced populist uprisings from the country’s neglected rural periphery, a popular government in Hungary has created laws to facilitate greater religious observance, including a law that will eventually ban businesses from operating on Sundays, and the parliament of Poland has officially named Jesus Christ as the nation’s king.
  
  These can all be read as popular efforts to reclaim a sense of national, cultural, and religious solidarity, and as an insistence, on the part of voters, that instead of focusing on creating space for ethnic, religious, national, or sexual minorities, democratic majorities are now intent on advancing a normative vision of their own. Yet the press organs of Western Europe and North America have peppered us with grave prognostications about a “death of democracy” supposedly foretold by these democratic outcomes; a “death” that’s being brought about for no other apparent reason than that voters are making the “wrong” choices. Many in the liberal establishment now see it as their duty to undermine the implementation of these democratic outcomes in the interest of preserving some higher, more ethereal form of democracy that only they can understand.
  
  Without a set of positive values, as Milbank and Pabst contend, there actually isn’t much reason to have a democracy. If we want to restore a more genuine and substantive climate of democratic participation, to curb inequality while maintaining the dignity of vocational differences, to transcend political gridlock and tribalism, and to resolve the crises of meaning that are tearing at the fabric of our societies, we will have to recover a language of virtue ethics which is deeply embedded in our tradition, but today is largely unarticulated by our power elites and only preserved in the practices of ordinary people who still stubbornly insist on believing in things.
  
• 
  Terese

  
  I read this under a time-crunch which made the book seem like it would never end , I was basically tearing my hair out at certain points.
  
  That said. It's not a bad, incomprehensible, or intolerant book (as I'm assuming many might assume it would be)
  
  It is ambitious and it is bold, it is sometimes too rosy and loving of the Middle Ages, but overall it has some really good points to make and a couple of messages that would serve many well to take to heart.
  
  The Byzantine term "symphonia" serves it well, as does an intermingling of CST, most of all it is social reciprocity and human association that I'm taking away from it. They don't deny the good of liberalism, but diagnose it's contradictory nature and current problems by providing an alternative (which in a time when everyone still seems hell bent on doing nothing but deconstruct the flaws of other ideas, is very refreshing)
  
  Though it has a clear theological bent, it is not an exclusionary vision, nor an intolerant one. Rather based in agape, and a positive human ontology, it is the very opposite. Though, yes, the matter of *shared* values will demand a certain transcendence and objective grounding. Constructivists, beware.
  
  Anyone intent on abolishing any kind of social class may not have many warm feelings for the concept of an organic hierarchy, yet, their points in regards to the meritocratic aristocracy of today who are above the rules of law and ever more distant from the vast majority of "regular" people, are fairly spot on and certainly aren't helping fight any inequality so to speak. We just have an amoral inherited aristocracy now, lacking responsibility, as opposed to an old one which was at least tied to the semblance of duties. Not saying I'm completely on board, but I think they argue their case well.
  
  Basically we have populations that are now empty, displaced, narcissistic, consumeristic and easily manipulated. Liberal democracy unraveling itself and turning illiberal. We have no shared ground to stand on anymore, therefore no shared vision, leading to more fracture and discontent. While negative liberty leads us to an ever more invasive state, and the economic system to ever more inequality if anything helped by using welfare as a band-aid.
  
  The post-liberal vision with its grounding in reciprocity, generosity, human association and trust may seem like a pipe dream in a sense, but it is nonetheless a refreshing alternative that doesn't present the life of individuals or nations as zero-sum games in a Hobbesian "bellum omnium contra omnes", but rather focus on the ability of co-operation and reciprocity as a fundamental basis for human society.
  
  There were portions of the book, heavily focused on UK politics, which were slightly less interesting to me, but overall I'm glad I read it and I will probably return to it and consider its content further.
  
  But boy, oh boy, do they dislike Protestants. (Or rather, Protestant theology).
• 
  William Bies

  Millbank and Pabst is an altogether different animal from Deneen. One notices at once their deeper immersion in the philosophical tradition, ancient and modern, which they apply circumstantially to illustrate both the roots of the present crisis and the potential avenues out of it. They wield an impressive command of history, from recent decades to distant centuries, and sometimes go into such detail on aspects of some periods not known, or not very well known to me, including the contending political parties, prevailing social classes and their respective interests and agendas, that it can be difficult to follow. The focus is not so much on the mechanics of liberalism’s dysfunction, which they regard as sufficiently evident to an observer who has been following the political scene long enough, but on policy proposals to remedy the situation and their justification.
  
  All this notwithstanding, in the end the book is a little disappointing. It seems to be less about political theory as such, although the authors drop plenty of hints to imply that they could do political theory if they wanted to, than about its application in the present environment and climate, especially within the European Union. Familiar concepts from the social teaching of the magisterium, say Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum and subsidarity and so on, are appealed to and worked up in terms of how they could be implemented in the near term with legislatively and institutionally realistic proposals (apart from the question of achieving a societal consensus to move along a path such as this). Someone more a policy wonk than I might enjoy this, but I would prefer more systematic treatment of theoretical issues in political philosophy and political economy. Millbank and Pabst do not have much to say here that would add to or correct Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy or John Rawls’ theory of justice and so on. Although deeper than Deneen’s analysis, Millbank and Pabst’s account of the present crisis does not go profoundly enough into just why liberalism took over as the dominant force, fell into its downward and irreversible course and had ended in standoff between left and right, seen as competing versions of the true liberal faith. A greater emphasis on virtue ethics, cooperation, modest and limited objectives and the like would indeed be ingredients in a workable solution, as Millbank and Pabst suggest, but, in my view, it is too little to go only this far without a more compelling picture of what freedom consists in and what life is really supposed to be about. Absent these last things, all of their policy proposals are bound to be moot, incapable of securing allegiance among thoroughly secularized society.
  
  Let us attempt a synopsis. Millbank and Pabst identify a series of coinciding metacrises that spell the imminent collapse of the liberal order in the twenty-first century, such as it is: the metacrisis of liberalism as the reigning political theory; metacrises of the economy and polity in the era of globalization; the metacrisis of culture brought about by the dominance of liberalism; and the metacrisis of the international political order.
  
  Millbank and Pabst’s presentation of the first metacrisis largely recapitulates Deneen’s. They, too, recognize the tyranny of negative liberty, the mere absence of constraint, over a positive liberty that would schematize some coherent notion of human flourishing. Under the catchphrase ‘liberalism as pessimism’, Millbank and Pabst, like Deneen, rue the dismissal of antique pagan and Christian ideals of virtue on the part of the early liberal theorists Hobbes, Locke and Grotius. They are careful to point out that, by pessimism is meant not an apparently optimistic secular humanism but the emphasis on the corruption of human nature introduced by the Protestant reformers, and they trace both the theological antecedents of this aspect of liberal theory in Calvinism and Jansenism and how, in modern left liberalism of the New York Times variety, distrust is transferred from the individual to society at large, enabling one to maintain a superficial apparent optimism. Thirdly, Millbank and Pabst echo Deneen’s account of how ‘liberalism swallows itself’. Where they stand apart from Deneen, however, is in their willingness to delineate a post-liberal alternative to a foundering liberalism. ‘The only genuine alternative is a post-liberal politics of virtue that seeks to fuse greater economic justice with social reciprocity’ (p. 3). By a politics of virtue is understood a shared teleological purposiveness together with the pursuit of positive liberty. This all sounds good in theory, but one must bear in mind that, due to the concurrent metacrisis of culture, there will be no possible consensus as to what the wanted teleology ought to be. It is well to appeal to the common good (p. 69) and to the positive values of virtue, gift exchange and community (p. 76), but, absent a solution to the metacrisis of culture, how could there be any real community to undergird a political movement? Clearly, as Millbank and Pabst recognize (pp. 80-88), we need to overcome the atomism incorrigibly inherent in the liberalism of Hobbes and Locke, with an organic pluralism that does justice to the notion of the person and its corporate embodiments; ‘In addition to support for the integrity of social groups, post-liberals seek to uphold the inalienable dignity of the person in extra-legalistic ways. Persons, unlike liberal atomic “subjects” who are supposedly primary yet in both theory and reality interchangeable, are at once “more” and at the same time “less” than the social whole. Less, because persons only exist in relation and only acquire defined personal roles in relation to the totality of these relations, which is the social whole. More, because it is the very position of the person in a relational series that helps to grant her a unique identity of character’ (p. 83). After several pages of historical discussion of personalist and corporatist thought, however, the authors conclude on a rather weak note: ‘In the wake of the manifest failure of the liberal consensus adhered to on all sides, it is clear that we should search for an alternative politics and a different social ethos. This would be not just about linking rights to responsibilities, but also about solidarity and subsidarity’ (p. 88). While they appear to have a sounder grasp of the intellectual milieu than Deneen, Millbank and Pabst do not really advance very far beyond him as far as constructive proposals go.
  
  The next part of the argument in Politics of virtue concerns the twin metacrises of economy and polity. By economy, understand capitalism, which, in its late phase is subject to the problems of globalization, rampant inequality and unchecked financial speculation. By polity, understand democracy as we now know it in Europe or in north America. In outlining the post-liberal response to these metacrises, Millbank and Pabst aim at greater detail than does Deneen with his somewhat sketchy adumbrations. Pleasingly, they settle into a treatment of the issues at a profound anthropological level (pp. 114-123), that of gift exchange, symbol, matter and abstraction. The heart of their critique of liberal capitalism surrounds its threefold ‘division of cultural symbolic reality into pure abstraction and pure materiality; the assumption that the well-being of any corporation, even an economic one, takes second place to the self-interest of the individuals who compose it; the view that human beings are basically self-seeking animals whose greedy competition for scarce resources can only be coordinated by fusing the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of the state’ (p. 114). What to do about this predicament? Millbank and Pabst suggest that what we need is to ‘restore the primacy of the social’ (p. 121). Roughly speaking, this means a conscious rejection of the pessimism about human nature one finds in Adam Smith et al. (Bernard de Mandeville, Thomas Malthus), in favor of an ethical market on a civil economy model that advocates a reliance on ethical conduct, rather than the liberal reliance on a cunningly contrived invisible hand that will succeed with or without, or in spite of, private vice. For support, Millbank and Pabst have recourse to the civil economy tradition of the Italian economist Antonio Genovesi, near contemporary of Adam Smith, and the tradition of Catholic social thought inaugurated by Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century. This historical interlude culminates in a series of concrete proposals for what would be a civil economy in the twenty-first century (pp. 148-166). An apt summary of the tenor of the discussion can be found at the close of this chapter: ‘The civil economy model can be summarised as follows. Overwhelmingly, it ties economic profit to ethical and social purpose, and seeks to ethicise exchange. In the same spirit, it replaces the separation of risk from reward with risk- and profit-sharing models. In both respects, it publicly requires an economic pursuit of honourable practice and genuine benefit rather than just abstract wealth and power. It assumes that the seemingly ‘other-wordly; and soul-regarding pursuit of the truly good is, in fact, in natural alignment with the various goods of concrete flourishing (work, housing, food, health) and higher fulfillment (work satisfaction, subtle cuisine, beautiful environment, educational development) that human beings everywhere naturally seek. For this reason, it believes that the real economic task is the shared coordination of all these pursuits in terms of a “common good”’ (p. 171).
  
  As for the metacrisis of polity, we find a fairly detailed narrative of how liberalism undermines democracy by perverting the mixed constitution, inherited from of old, in the name of rational streamlining. The authors pack a lot into a one-paragraph critique: ‘Today liberalism poses a triple threat to democracy. First of all, liberal forces favour the rise of a new oligarchy composed both of old elites and “new classes” who have abandoned any code of honour and consider themselves beyond the rules, on account of shallow claims to meritocratic superiority. Second, the same forces, with seeming contradiction, exacerbate the resurgence of populism that is connected with the liberal indifference to truth and goodness, as well as the triumph of a global capitalist “spectacle” that drains everything of its particular meaning. Given this double drift, it is the rights of mass manipulated feeling that incrementally and inevitably acquire universal legitimacy, however much the elite liberals may tremble at its predilections Third, in counterpoint to this massification, liberalism, with its cult of aleatory preference, reinforces the spread of a new anarchy in terms of social atomisation and exacerbates the increasing inability of the modern sovereign state to command the loyalty of its citizens’ (pp. 186-187). Would that Deneen could achieve such compression! As in the case of the metacrisis of the economy preceding, Millbank and Pabst outline a series of proposals for a post-liberal response, aiming at a renewal of mixed government and a new, more subsidarist federalism. There is no need to go into great detail, as much of the discussion is specific to the context of Great Britain (as with the question of the proper role of the established church).
  
  No doubt, much of what Millbank and Pabst bring forward under the umbrella term of a politics of virtue is common-sensical. Many of their proposals are modest in scope, or at least would admit of partway measures that could be implemented in a twenty-first century program comparable to that of the Progressive movement early in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, for such a political program to get seriously underway would presuppose a thorough-going reconceptualization of western civilization itself, as it has become in the past four hundred years under the aegis of liberalism. Is this a realistic prospect? In order to treat this question, we must turn to the metacrisis of culture. Evidently, here is where the meat must be found, if Millbank and Pabst’s politics of virtue is to have any staying power.
  
  The authors’ critique of liberalism, as far as culture goes, centers on its alleged impersonalism and indifference to the good (pp. 251-260). Here we find them at their best, dishing out intellectual fireworks that altogether surpass the ken of a scholar of the caliber of a Deneen. A sampling: ‘If liberalism is indifferent to the Good, in a way that unravels into human self-domination by its own productions, then it is also indifferent to truth – defined as any mode of disclosure of the eternally valid and, as such, the “real” counterpart of the good as the “ideal”. In this respect, liberalism can be regarded as a mode of sophistry….Like the sophists and the nominalists, but in contrast to almost the whole of the rest of humanity throughout history, liberals tend to assume that nature and culture have nothing to do with each other, because nature, for them, is inexorable and meaningless, inciting blind passions, while culture, shaped by law, is entirely willful, conventional and artificial. This ensures that individual expressions of soul in artifice are just conscious manifestations of a blind will to power, vagaries of nature as it were, rather than revelations of an order cosmos’ (pp. 255-256). It should hardly come as a surprise that, under the influence of liberalism, mass education as administered by the state has become destructive of culture. In like measure, the authors’ charge that liberal culture issues in a post-humanism, in which inter alia sex is separated from procreation and gender difference is abolished (pp. 270-271), seems to be but a logical consequence of its premises. One can hardly miss how much more deeply Millbank and Pabst peer into what Deneen calls the anti-culture and anti-liberal (servile) education fostered by liberalism. Deneen merely registers the surface phenomena.
  
  The eighth chapter is devoted to the theme of culture as formative, an education into virtue. Clearly, one must reach back to an ideal like this if one is to counter liberal formlessness. Out of the thicket of historical observations and policy proposals that crop up in the chapters on the metacrisis of culture, let us select two passages that reveal the original bases of Millbank and Pabst critique. The first is on why liberalism denies the reality of the soul (pp. 275-276). Their observations in this section are incisive. Positive and negative liberty collide only because liberal theory, by eliding the transcendent, divorces culture from nature and fails to see in that human beings are ‘supposed to be cultural’, that ‘nature most fully reveals herself in the human experience of love for nature, for other humans and for the divine’ (p. 275). Lacking substantive notions originating in the transcendent, liberalism can only shuttle hysterically between multiple voluntaristically self-asserted poles among which there is no coherence. The realm of the psychic comprehends the political, as human beings are embodied and live together in cities. But, then, liberalism ensures that the rights of one conflict with those of another, and that while ‘everything is to be negatively tolerated’, ‘nothing is to be positively allowed’ (p. 276), leading to chronic dissatisfaction. The second concerns the barbarism into which secular education under the influence of liberal stewards has descended (pp. 306-308). This dismal failure was inevitable, for ‘it is, rather, the “disenchanted immanence” of an eventually secularised liberalism that has now captured our culture. In consequence, sheerly impersonal and devitalised social forces have started to undermine the interpersonal relationships and mutual flourishing on which vibrant cultures depend. Behind the functionalist formation that serves utilitarian purposes of utility maximisation lurks a nihilism that believes in nothing except the power of an impersonal natural flux that somehow (it is never really explained) combines randomness with efficient mechanism. We, accordingly, require a new and dynamic re-induction into virtue in order to save humanity from the post-humanist nightmare of bio-robotic rule and help to restore the cultural primacy of the living, yet always technically supplemented and, thereby, rational human person’ (p, 308). The archaic idiom displaced by liberalism’s cosmic imaginary is now to be recovered, ‘instead, [in] a more democratised version of “enchanted transcendence” [that] sees all worldly realities, including cultural ones, as symbolising something higher and hidden’ (p. 307).
  
  Thus, Millbank and Pabst have the right idea here, to be sure, but one may have reservations about its execution. All of their practical considerations, however sensible and well-intended, suffer from a lack of sufficient support in theory. A reform of the magnitude envisioned could scarcely be carried out unless propelled by an enthusiasm that can only derive from an arresting theoretical framework. Nothing of the kind is to be found in this response to the metacrisis of culture by Millbank and Papst. They are erudite, to be sure, and capable of sparkling wit and flashes of insight here and there, but their theoretical points fail to cohere into a systematic whole. Hence, my judgment: the politics of virtue is insufficient to counter the bleak mechanist world-view of modern empirical science. How could it, lacking as it is in a properly scientific and metaphysical foundation? Millbank and Pabst are social theorists and cultural commentators, not enterprising originators of the hard-core intellectual work that will be required overcome liberal atomism and materialism, and their shortcomings in this regard are only too evident in this chapter. What we are looking for would be an intellectual figure who would be as positive in promoting a twenty-first-century reintegration as William of Ockham was negative in underwriting the fourteenth-century disintegration brought about by the victory of nominalist voluntarism over realism and the analogy of being.
• 
  Nick Spencer

  400 pages of intellectual willy-waving