Search

Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The Covid-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment.\ud \ud Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative – post-liberalism – that is centred around trust, dignity, and human relationships. Instead of reverting to the mutual suspicion and destabilising inhumanity of ‘just-in-time’ free-market globalisation, we could build a politics upon the sense of localism and community spirit, the valuing of family, place and belonging, which was a real theme of lockdown. We are not obliged to put up with the restoration of a broken status quo that erodes trust, undermines institutions and trashes our precious natural environment. We could build a pluralist democracy, decentralise the state, and promote mutualist markets embedded in the everyday economy.\ud \ud This bold book shows that only a politics which fuses economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance can overcome our deep divisions and save us from authoritarian backlash.

Paul Keating once remarked, “We at least in the Labor Party know that we are part of a big story, which is also the story of our country”. \ud Story of Our Country unpacks that big story and Labor’s place in Australia’s narrative. It explains why the ALP’s purpose and character make it unique among centre-left parties in America, Britain, and Europe. \ud \ud Central to Labor’s purpose is its promise to offer people a “share in those things that make life worth living” – the common good. \ud Labor’s vision of the good life is anchored in the everyday experience of working people. This gives Labor its distinctive strength – a paradoxical character that is at once progressive and conservative.\ud \ud Adrian Pabst argues that to gain and retain power, Labor needs to build coalitions between its traditional working-class base and middle-class voters. Labor can achieve this by deploying its distinctive strength to tackle the most critical issues facing Australia: inequality, precarious jobs, the care crisis, climate change, and emerging foreign powers.

Liberals blame the retreat of the liberal world order on populists at home and authoritarian leaders abroad. Only liberalism, so they claim, can defend the rules-based international system against demagogy, corruption and nationalism. This provocative book contends that the liberal world order is illiberal and undemocratic – intolerant about the cultural values of ordinary people in the West and elsewhere while concentrating power in the hands of unaccountable Western elites and Western-dominated institutions.\ud Under the influence of contemporary liberalism, the international system is fuelling economic injustice, social fragmentation and a worldwide ‘culture war’ between globalists and nativists. Liberals, far from defending rules, have broken international law and imposed their version of market fundamentalism and democracy promotion by military means. Liberal ‘civilisation’ has fuelled resentment across the world by imposing a narrow worldview that pits cultures against one another. To avoid a descent into a violent culture clash, this book proposes radical ideas for international order that take the form of cultural commonwealths – social bonds and cross-border cultural ties on which international trust and cooperation depend. The book’s defence of an older order against both liberals and nationalists will speak to all readers trying to understand our age of anger.

Dans notre époque troublée, un sentiment de colère et d'abandon se répand parmi de nombreux citoyens qui se sentent humiliés, incapables de mener la vie qu'ils espèrent et impuissants à agir sur les forces impersonnelles qui les dominent. Ces forces sont le capitalisme effréné, l'étatisme, la mondialisation marchande et l'idéologie libérale qui les sous-tend. La gauche et la droite ont convergé autour d'un libéralisme socioculturel et d'un libéralisme économique. Ces libéralismes ne sont que deux moitiés d'un même credo ultra-moderne qui oscille entre l'individualisme du marché et le collectivisme d'État.\ud \ud Dans ce livre, John Milbank et Adrian Pabst proposent, comme alternative au libéralisme totalisant, une politique de la vertu que l'Occident a héritée de la synthèse chrétienne du logos gréco-romain avec la foi biblique. Inspirée par le sens de réciprocité fraternelle, une telle politique vise à promouvoir la justice économique, la solidarité sociale, l'appartenance culturelle et l'internationalisme personnaliste. L'Europe ne pourra se maintenir et influencer le cours du monde que si elle renouvelle son héritage antique et chrétien, et parvient à inculquer la pratique de la vertu dans la recherche du bien commun.

The movement of people and capital is fundamental to economic\ud development worldwide. However, particularly in global and regional contexts,\ud it has also engendered widespread feelings of economic and cultural insecurity.\ud Attempts to address this often rely on assumptions about freedom of choice\ud for the individual or economic utility (i.e. the benefits or costs for the majority).\ud By contrast, applying the perspective of the common good involves holding\ud personal fulfilment and community flourishing in balance. This essay seeks to\ud advance an alternative approach to the free movement of people and capital\ud based on the perspective of personal virtue and the common good – one\ud that can help to address existing anxieties and provide a source of fresh policy\ud ideas, adding to the ongoing work being carried on in faith communities and\ud other groups that exist in the space between the individual and the state.

The Eurozone crisis has been variously described in financial or in fiscal terms, caused either by an over-leveraged banking system or by unsustainable budget deficits and national debt – or indeed both at once. But perhaps with the exception of Greece, neither holds true for individual euro-members or for the common currency area as a whole. The combined banking and sovereign debt crisis is symptomatic of a more fundamental set of structural problems such as trade imbalances, productivity differentials and the disconnection between financial flows and investment in productive activities that require a systemic analysis. By contrast with much of modern economics and political science that rest on rational choice and methodological individualism, this chapter seeks to develop an alternative political economy that can conceptualise the constitution of Europe’s polity – the complex economic, political and social space in which the Eurozone is inscribed. \ud \ud From this political economy perspective, I argue that the euro-area is characterised by the primacy of harmonisation over mutualisation – a legacy of the neo-functional model of integration and the ordo-liberal model of coordination, which privilege joint procedures and common rules rather than the sharing of risks, rewards and resources. Mutualisation – the search for cooperative arrangements based on a balance of interests – offers an as yet unrealised potential to transform the Eurozone in line with the constitution of Europe’s polity. The chapter charts a path beyond the current debate that portrays the European Monetary Union (EMU) either as a misconceived experiment which should be abandoned in favour of national currencies (e.g. Pissarides 2013; Flassbeck and Lapavitsas 2015a and 2015b), or as a project beset by design failures which require centralisation (e.g. Marsh 2013; Sinn 2014), or as an arrangement which can work better with a different policy mix (e.g. Sandbu 2015).\ud \ud My chapter runs as follows. First of all, the current crisis of the Eurozone can only be understood as part of a particular economic, political and social domain in which EMU is embedded. The domain in question is not limited to a set of institutions and rules within which markets, states and individuals interact (Buchanan 1990) but extends to political and social structures that embed both cooperation and conflict at – as well as across – different levels (Ornaghi 1990; Pabst and Scazzieri 2012). As an analytical framework, the approach to the political economy of constitution followed in this essay explores the multi-level dependencies that characterise economic integration within and between national states and transnational markets (Pabst 2014; Pabst and Scazzieri 2016; cf. Polanyi 2001).\ud \ud Second, ordo-liberalism shares with the proposed ‘political economy of constitution’ the idea that the economic field is not self-standing but rather part of the overarching social field, which encompasses society and the state. However, ordo-liberal thinkers view the social domain as grounded in the constitutional-legal order that subordinates social ties to state laws and market contract. By bracketing social relationships out of the picture, the effect of ordo-liberal policies – creating the ‘framework conditions’ (Rahmenbedingungen) for perfect competition – is to disembed the economy from society and to re-embed political and social ties in predominantly contractual relations, which ignores the Eurozone’s structural problems.\ud \ud Third, the dominant logic of European integration since the 1957 Rome Treaties has been neo-functionalism, which posits spill-over effects from economic interdependence to political unity (e.g. Haas 1961; Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1997). Analogous to the concept of path dependency, neo-functionalism explains why European integration has privileged monetary integration over both a fiscal and a political union. Coupled with the influence of ordo-liberalism, this has constrained EMU crisis management and official proposals for reform.\ud \ud Fourth, the European polity within which EMU is inscribed is neither a federal super-state nor a free-trade area but rather a political system sui generis (e.g. Hix 2005; Zielonka 2006 and 2008). This system consists in hybrid institutions, overlapping jurisdictions, multiple membership, polycentric authority and multi-level governance. As a unique polity, Europe contains a certain set of opportunities and constraints for political and economic cooperation. These opportunities and constrains provide the resources for a different exit from the Eurozone crisis and they can embed EMU in the political and social relations which provide the trust and cooperation on which a viable common currency depends.\ud \ud Section 2 provides a brief outline of the wider causes of the Eurozone crisis. Section 3 develops a political economy of constitution as an analytical architecture to describe and explain the wider domain in which the Eurozone is inscribed. Section 4 examines ordo-liberal principles and policy prescriptions that underpin the creation of EMU and the Eurozone crisis management/resolution since early 2010. Section 5 provides an account of the (neo-)functional logic that has shaped the process of integration and the building of the European polity. Section 6 suggests a number of alternative pathways for the Eurozone. The final section provides some concluding reflections.

Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. This creed undergirds positions on both the right and the left – free-market capitalism, state bureaucracy and individualism in social life. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing based on shared goals that have more substantive content than the formal abstractions of liberal law and contract, and yet are also adaptable to different cultural and local traditions. The book apply this analysis to the economy, politics, culture, and international affairs. In each case, having diagnosed the crisis of liberalism, it proposes post-liberal alternatives, notably new concepts and fresh policy ideas. The book demonstrates that, amid the current crisis, post-liberalism is a programme that could define a new politics of virtue and the common good.

The thesis that the secular system of modern international relations has medieval, religious roots is not new. Various accounts have documented how the Protestant Reformation and its late medieval antecedents represented a ‘revolution in ideas’ that broke away from the hierarchical arrangement of fragmented feudal polities, which was apparently characteristic of the Middle Ages, to the egalitarian society of sovereign states, which is seemingly synonymous with modernity. Linked to this is the standard story in International Relations that views the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Discovery of the New World as a radical rupture, which replaced the ‘Dark Ages’ with a new era of enlightenment progress. Such a supercessionist structuring of historical narrative reinforces the secularist bias that has dominated the discipline since the late 1950s and 1960s. As a result of the secularisation of international relations, the role of religion in international affairs has not so much been neglected and overlooked, as misrepresented and under-theorised.\ud \ud Most contemporary international relations scholarship lacks an account of both the historical influence and the contemporary relevance of rival theological approaches in relation to the modern international order. Recent scholarship in political thought and in the history of ideas has highlighted some of the profound continuities between the medieval and the modern period. Building on these and other accounts, this essay explores the role of theological concepts in the genesis of modern international relations. The focus is on the contrast between the Franciscan legacy and the Dominican heritage. My argument is that the modern states system and transnational markets rest on late medieval ideas, notably Franciscan conceptions of inalienable individual rights, centrally vested sovereign power, and a natural state of anarchy that requires an artificial social contract. Against secular hegemony, which, paradoxically, can be traced to late medieval Franciscan theology, I contend that the Dominican tradition offers conceptual resources to chart an alternative modernity.\ud \ud To suggest that we live in the (late) modern age assumes a particular meaning to modernity. But the modern project was never monolithic in the West, or elsewhere. On the contrary, from a global historical perspective, there was no single modernity but rather multiple and even rival modernities that were variously more secular or more religious. Moreover, ‘we have never been modern’, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour has argued. For modernity rests on an irresolvable aporia between the notion of human artifice (the social contract) and unalterable nature (the violent ‘state of nature’). Crucially, there are no absolute breaks in history that inaugurate new eras which supersede preceding traditions and ideas, including the notion that Westphalia ushered in modern international affairs. If this is so, then perhaps it is also true that (late or post-)modernity is best described as the ‘modern’ Middle Ages — the intensification and extension of certain late medieval ideas rather than a wholly new phase of history. In turn, this helps explain why the shape of contemporary international relations really is neo-medieval but in ways that have not been conceptualised by theorists of international relations.\ud \ud The first section examines the historicist narrative of International Relations and traces it back to both Protestant and Catholic theology. The second section shows how the modern notion of secular imperium as an autonomous, neutral space on which the idea of the sovereign state rests, was invented and instituted by late medieval Franciscan theology, in particular the work of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The third section argues that the conception of subjective, individual rights guaranteed by the sovereign state, independently of the Church, is similarly rooted in the nominalist theology of the Franciscans. This conception of rights can be contrasted with the notion of objective right (ius), and thus reciprocal rights and associative links between national states as contemplated by the (metaphysical) realist theology of Dominicans such as Thomas Aquinas. The fourth section focuses on the Franciscan invention of modern markets, based on sundering the immanent order of nature from the transcendent order of the supernatural Good in God, and on separating gift from contract. The conclusion suggests that the conceptual resources of the Dominican tradition can transform Franciscan modernity in the direction of a neomedieval international order wherein human beings are seen as naturally ‘social animals’ (not self-proprietors of subjective rights) and both states and markets help to promote the pursuit of the common good.

Faced with the ‘economy of exclusion’ that brackets fraternity out of the picture, the only genuine alternative is to bind higher purposes such as individual virtue and public honour to institutions and practices that can provide prosperity and flourishing for the many. In this essay, I argue that solidarity is key to an economy that is both more ethical and more productive. Both solidarity and fraternity rest on the idea of social reciprocity: for example, balancing individual rights with mutual obligations; brokering collaboration out of conflicts of interest by appealing to the common good that serves both personal interest and social benefit. In this manner, fraternity and solidarity can foster the interpersonal trust and cooperation on which a vibrant economy and flourishing society depend.\ud \ud The prevailing system is based upon a double impersonalism of commercial contract between strangers, and individual entitlement in relation to the bureaucratic machine. By making social reciprocity the ultimate principle that governs both the economic and the political realm, solidarity can avoid the two extremes characterising contemporary capitalism: contract without gift, plus the unilateral and poisoned gift from nowhere that is rationalised state welfare. The alternative, which this essay defends, seeks to fuse contract with gift. In theory and practice, binding contract to gift means mutualising the market, pluralising the state and re-embedding both in the relations that constitute society. Far from being utopian, solidarity so defined is indispensable to an economy that promotes greater innovation, higher productivity and more stable growth, which in turn can sustain rising employment and superior pay.\ud \ud Section one explores how the meaning of solidarity and fraternity has evolved since the French Revolution elevated ‘fraternity’ alongside ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ into a foundational value of modern politics. Section two focuses on Catholic social teaching and the ways in which it renews and extends the ancient and Christian tradition of ‘solidarism’. Section three turns to the application of solidarity to the market, while section four examines how it can transform the state. Both sections 3 and 4 try to combine concepts with novel policy ideas. The conclusion briefly summarises my argument and the key policy recommendations.

Depuis l’Antiquité greco-romaine, la démocratie a été souvent considérée comme le régime politique le plus juste parce qu’elle conjugue l’égalité devant la loi avec la liberté de conscience et d’expression. Grâce à ce double principe les citoyens participent à la gouvernance de la cité et, en tant que gouvernés, ils ont la possibilité de critiquer les gouvernants. En revanche, la participation civique et la critique permettent au système démocratique de fonctionner et de s’améliorer en corrigeant ses propres dérives, notamment la tendance de dégénérer en oligarchie, en démagogie, en anarchie ou en tyrannie en raison de l’indifférence à la vérité et au bien transcendant.\ud \ud La démocratie libérale contemporaine n’est plus en mesure d’offrir une synthèse de l’égalité et de la liberté. Le libéralisme politique subordonne la participation à la représentation, ce qui renforce le pouvoir des gouvernants aux dépens des gouvernés et limite la possibilité de critique. Le libéralisme socio-culturel des années 60 et le libéralisme économique des années 80 promeuvent la liberté sans mesure et l’égalité niveleuse. Par conséquent, la double révolution libérale (voire libertine) conduit à une quadruple dérive démocratique : une convergence peut-être sans précédent entre (a) le pouvoir de la ploutocratie (dérive oligarchique), (b) le despotisme de l’opinion de masse (dérive démagogique), (c) la logique de conflits entre individus et nations (dérive anarchique) et (d) la dictature du relativisme (dérive tyrannique).\ud \ud Dans cette perspective il faut reconnaître que la démocratie libérale contemporaine est en train de se transformer en post-démocratie illibérale. Étant donné que les principes pérennes de liberté, d’égalité et de justice nous proviennent de l’Antiquité et du christianisme, le libéralisme ne détient aucun monopole que ce soit sur les principes de libéralité, y compris l’idée de souveraineté populaire et le droit des nations à l’auto-détermination. Par contre, la tradition chrétienne dispose de ressources indispensables à une analyse critique du libéralisme et à une vision alternative en rupture avec la logique séculière qui régit le relativisme éthique et l’absolutisme économique au cœur de la démocratie libérale.

The Byzantine Empire is commonly associated with political absolutism, economic feudalism, and a State Church that simultaneously sacralised power and secularised religion. This, coupled with influence of Islam and oriental cultures, appears to explain how Europe’s East has been backward and reactionary, lacking Western virtues such as the distinction of religion from political authority, constitutionalism, the rule of law, a vibrant market economy and civil society – a free space between the people and the ruler. That is why Byzantium is synonymous with decadence, repression, and the arcane arrangements of an opaque bureaucracy. As such, the Byzantine legacy is thought to be singularly responsible for Eastern authoritarianism and autocracy that contrasts sharply with Western freedom and democracy. In modern times, so this narrative goes, the East was caught in the constricting shackles of imperial and clerical domination, while the West became the harbinger of Enlightenment emancipation. \ud \ud This essay contends that Byzantium is key to understanding the history of pan-Europe and to chart an alternative European project for the future. Far from being simply a decadent empire whose demise heralded the rise of progressive sovereign nation-states, I shall argue that the Byzantine Commonwealth preserved the heritage of Antiquity and represented an association of nations and peoples around a shared polity, culture, and faith. This legacy offers as yet unrealised resources to build a pan-European community that the post-Cold War project of liberal market democracy purported to provide but failed to deliver.\ud \ud Section 1 links the neglect of the Byzantine legacy to the myth of secular Europe and contends that the rise to power of secularism was neither necessary nor normative but instead historically contingent and arbitrary. Section 2 seeks briefly to re-tell the history of Europe in a manner that restores Byzantium to its rightful place, with a particular emphasis on the some of the religious and political aspects of the Byzantine settlement and on ways in which it shaped the countries that emerged from the Eastern empire. Section 3 argues that Europe remains a vestigially Christian polity and that Byzantium is key to this unique heritage. Section 4 turns to the contemporary situation and suggests that the model of the commonwealth – a voluntary association of nations and peoples – offers a better future than either a centralised super-state under the guise of modern federalism or a loose network of sovereign states which merely trade with one another.

The word ‘fraternity’ derives from the Latin word ‘frater’ or brother. Broadly speaking, ‘fraternity’ refers to some group or association that is constituted by a sense of brotherhood, governed by the ties of friendship and bound together by the mutual aid among its members. In contrast with solidarity which is impersonal and refers to an abstract community based on identity, fraternity is inter-personal and emphasises the diversity between equals based on differentiation (Bruni and Zamagni 2004). As such, it depends on the principle of reciprocity linked to mutual obligations. Fraternity so configured is like an ‘artificial family’ that differentiates itself from other social or civic arrangements on account of a distinct ethos that is binding upon its members (Le Bras 1940–41; Michaud-Quantin 1970; Black 2003).\ud \ud Far from being confined to the fellowship of small groups, fraternities are part of a wider set of reciprocal relationships in the realm of civil society that are marked by a shared sense of mutual assistance (Bruni and Sugden 2008). Fraternity – as a communal intentionality and also as set of institutions and practices – can embed the economic and the political in the social. Thus, the practice of fraternity can give rise to a genuine commonwealth whose bonds of reciprocity are not based on blood ties or professional links (e.g. Le Roy Ladurie 1982).\ud \ud Linked to this the Christian idea of a universal body of believers and of charity for all in need, an idea that translates into parishes and guilds organised as ‘confraternities’. In short, the idea and reality of a fraternity blends the civic with the religious, a fusion wherein the secular is not a separate, discrete space that is synonymous with the fallen world of ‘pure nature’, sinfulness, evil and violence. Much rather, the saeculum is a temporality that for catholic orthodox Christianity is ultimately structured by the liturgical cycle of praise and thanksgiving: it mediates the supernatural Good in God, offering intimations of peace and human perfectibility first fully revealed in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. \ud \ud By contrast, the dominant traditions of modernity instituted the secular as the primary locus of society that restricts the remit of the sacred and redefines religion in terms of abstract belief to which people give asset based on their private consciousness – rather than the communal practice of a shared, embodied faith. As such, the notion of fraternity has roots in Greco-Roman Antiquity whose models of association were transformed by patristic and medieval Christianity that sought to overcome the opposition between the secular and the religious on which much of modernity rests.

Until the global economic crisis struck in 2008, liberalism was the dominant ideology of our time and undoubtedly the most influential political philosophy of the last 300 years or so. Its origins, evolution and meaning are deeply contested by liberal and non-liberal thinkers alike. Many contemporary historians and political philosophers claim that liberal thought first emerged in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and evolved into a distinct philosophical tradition during the Age of Enlightenment (e.g. Mesnard 1969; Kelly 2005, Paul et al 2007). Thus, key liberal figures such as John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) opposed what they viewed as the unholy alliance between the Church, absolutist monarchs and the feudal capitalism of the landed gentry. They defended alternative ideas such as freedom of religion, tolerance, constitutional rule, individual property and free trade. \ud \ud These antecedents were important, but – so the dominant narrative goes – liberalism’s evolution as an ideology and political movement only took off following the impact of the American and the French Revolution. Thereafter the liberal tradition was instrumental in the ‘three waves of democratization’ (Huntington 1991). The first wave saw liberal governments triumph in much of Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The second wave after 1945 rolled back some of the authoritarian regimes of the interwar period and also coincided with de-colonisation, while the third wave after 1974 overthrew the military dictatorships of Southern Europe and Latin America and later the Communist regimes of the eastern bloc. Based on the fundamental principles of liberty and the equal rights of all, most advocates of liberalism defend political freedom, economic opportunity, social emancipation and equality before the law (e.g. Gray 1995, 2004).\ud \ud However, recent genealogical accounts suggest that the roots of liberalism go back to the late Middle Ages and the early modern age (Manent 1987; Dupré 1993). As a variety of theologians, philosophers and political theorists have argued (e.g. Milbank 1990; de Muralt 2002; Coleman 1999), notions such as individual subjective rights, popular sovereignty and national autonomy can be traced to shifts within theology, politics and law that were pioneered by key figures like John Duns Scotus (c1265/66–1308), William of Ockham (c1248/49–1349) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). Thus, core liberal principles are unintelligible without reference to late medieval and modern theological debates and ecclesial-political transformations. Similarly, modern categories such as the rule of the ‘one’ or the ‘many’ (associated with the political ‘right’ and ‘left’ since the French Revolution) and ideas like individual self-determination or the general will ultimately rest on nominalist and voluntarist theories that originated in the late Middle Ages (Pabst, 2010a). Even the values of liberality (e.g. fair detention and trial, presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, etc.) that liberalism purports to uphold were in reality the product of infusing Roman and Germanic law with Christian notions of justice and charity that liberals took over but did not invent (Milbank 2006). As such, the liberal claim to universal validity seems to be a secularised version of religious claims to universal truth.\ud \ud These two rival accounts of the origins and meaning of liberalism show just how contested the liberal tradition is. This chapter discusses both liberal and non-liberal perspectives on liberalism. It begins by suggesting that there is no single essence that defines all visions of liberalism. Rather, one can identify four ‘family resemblances’ that characterise seemingly incompatible variants of liberal thinking. The second section outlines the main ideas of key early modern liberal thinkers, including Locke, Rousseau, Kant and J.S. Mill. The third section turns to alternative genealogies that trace the roots to the late Middle Ages and highlight profound continuities between Scotus, Ockham, Suárez, Machiavelli and Hobbes and contemporary liberal thinking (e.g. John Rawls). The final section explores recent debates, notably on social and economic liberalism as well as the much disputed notion of neo-liberalism.

According to Luciano Pellicani, the US culture wars are grounded in a perpetual struggle between the enlightening forces of reason and democracy, on the one hand, and the dark forces of faith and theocracy, on the other hand. Accordingly, he claims that the Puritans sought to establish a medieval collectivist theocracy, not a modern market democracy, and that the US ‘culture war’ between enlightened secular liberalism and reactionary religious conservatism ultimately rests on the perpetual battle between Athenian reason and the faith of Jerusalem.\ud \ud In this essay I contest Pellicani’s assertion that faith is diametrically opposed to reason and that America needs to abandon its Christian legacy in favor of Enlightenment secularism. My argument is that the modern separation of belief from rationality underpins both the secular rationalism and fanatical fideism which confront each other in the United States and across the West today.\ud \ud The only genuine alternative to these two extremes is not an attempt to repair the wreck that is the Enlightenment project but rather a proper synthesis of faith and reason that distinguishes political from religious authority without divorcing religion from politics. It is true that mainstream Protestantism in the USA is characterized by a vague ‘civil religion’ that is post-Christian, neo-pagan and Gnostic in outlook. But it is equally the case that the rapprochement of Evangelicals and Catholics around shared notions of the common good has the potential to transform the American polity, economy and society in the direction of a more Christian settlement.

This book seeks to retrieve metaphysics and reveals its theological nature. \ud It shows how ancient and modern conceptions of being in terms of individual substance fail to account for the irreducible, ontological relations that characterize all things. Those relations bind immanent, finite beings to each other and also to their transcendent, infinite source in God.\ud \ud As such, there is no abstract individuality that is somehow more primary than being in relation. Rather, the ‘individuality’ of a thing is both existentially and essentially its metaphysical positioning in relation to other things. In turn, the relational ordering of all things suggests a priority of relation over substance. That priority intimates a first principle and final end that is itself relational – the triune God of the Christian faith.\ud \ud To develop this argument, the book provides a close reading of the Neo-Platonist theology that we find in the works the Church Fathers and Doctors. The main figures are St. Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Thomas Aquinas. Common to them is the idea that the creative relationality of the three divine persons brings everything out of nothing into existence. God gives all beings a share of Trinitarian being in which the created order participates. Thus, the argument is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity provide a better account of individuation than purely philosophical theories.\ud \ud In short, the book combines the theological ‘turn’ of contemporary philosophy with the re-hellenization of theology that Pope Benedict XVI and other theologians have defended. Based on a genealogical account from Plato to ‘postmodernism,’ the essay argues that the Christian Neo-Platonic fusion of biblical revelation with Greco-Roman philosophy produced a theological metaphysic that surpasses ancient and modern ontology.

The dominant mode of globalization has mostly reinforced the disembedding of states and markets from the social practices and civic virtues of civil society writ large. In this process, abstract economic values linked to instrumental reason and procedural fairness have supplanted civic virtues of courage, reasonableness and substantive justice. As such, the global ‘market-state’ reflects the centralization of power and the concentration of wealth that is undermining democratic politics and genuinely competitive economies.\ud \ud However, the growing economic interdependence around the world also offers new opportunities for reciprocity, mutuality and fraternity among communities and nations. To promote an ethos of responsible and virtuous action, what is required is the full breadth of political and economic reason. Christian social teaching offers conceptual and practical resources that are indispensable to the search for broader notions of rationality. Among these resources are non-instrumental conceptions of justice and the common good in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and cognate traditions in Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy.\ud \ud Closely connected to this is the idea of ‘civil economy’. As Pope Benedict XVI has suggested in his encyclical Caritas in veritate, ‘civil economy’ embeds state-guaranteed rights and market contracts in the social bonds and civic virtues that bind together the intermediary institutions of civil society. In this manner, it binds the ‘logic of contract’ to the ‘logic of gratuitous gift exchange’. The spirit of gift exchange translates into concrete practices of reciprocal trust and mutual assistance that underpin virtues such as reciprocal fraternity and the pursuit of the universal common good in which all can share. As such, ‘civil economy’ reconnects activities that are primarily for state-administrative or economic-commercial purposes to practices that pursue social purposes.

This paper argues that the transatlantic secularisation debate lacks certain philosophical and theological concepts to make sense of politics and faith in the United States and Europe. The first part suggests that secularisation and de-secularisation theories are wedded to a secular perspective that essentialises religion. The second section links US religiosity to a post-Christian Gnostic spirituality that perpetuates the myth of American exceptionalism. The third section concedes that Europe is the most secularised continent but contends that it remains a vestigially Christian polity. What emerges is a paradox: the United States is more religious but less Christian than Europe.

Does modernisation thrive in conditions of democracy or autocracy? What is the relationship between economic and political liberalisation? How do different types of democratic rule affect the economy and the well-being of citizens and societies? Following the partially failed transformation from state totalitarianism to market democracy and the ‘end of the transition paradigm’, which alternative models of development are available to Russia, other BRIC countries and rising powers such as South Africa or Indonesia? Twenty years after the collapse of Soviet communism, the current crisis of liberal ‘free-market’ capitalism and authoritarian state capitalism provides a unique opportunity for both advanced economies and emerging markets to chart an alternative path – the civil state.\ud \ud This chapter argues that both state-centric and market-driven models of modernisation, which have been dominant since the late nineteenth century, have neither delivered vibrant democracies nor produced prosperous economies. Instead, both models have tended to favour a centralisation of power at the expense of autonomous, self-organising communities, localities or associations and a concentration of wealth in the hands of ‘old elites’ or ‘new classes’ (or both at once). In turn, these developments have led to the progressive ‘disembedding’ (Karl Polanyi) of the economy and politics from the social relations and civic bonds that ultimately bind society together. Linked to this is a growing subordination of civil society and its intermediary institutions to the convergence of states and markets, a constellation that applies in different ways to liberal ‘market monopoly’ and authoritarian ‘state capitalism’.\ud \ud These and other paradoxical notions suggest that the conventional categories of state versus market, left versus right or democratic versus authoritarian no longer provide an adequate analytical framework that can describe and explain the complex interaction of democracy and modernisation. Instead of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and a global convergence towards Western-style liberal market democracy, what we are seeing in reality are post-democratic ‘market-states’ in the global North (including Japan and Oceania) and authoritarian ‘state-markets’ in the global South (including the BRIC countries and other emerging economies). While there is no equivalence between rival regimes and their ideologies, it is nevertheless the case that both state collectivism and market individualism have in different ways brought about economic inefficiency, social dislocation and political polarisation.\ud \ud By favouring the collusion of big business and big government, both systems have undermined the associative ties binding together citizens and communities within and across localities, regions and nations. As such, the alternative to post-democratic ‘market-states’ and authoritarian ‘state-markets’ is a moral economy and a civil state. This alternative, which the chapter begins to outline, consists in pluralising the central state, mutualising the ‘free market’ and building a civil covenant that blends political representation with greater civic participation.\ud \ud The first section discusses different strands of modernisation theory, arguing that the current debate between state-centric and market-driven models of development neglects the importance of groups, associations and communities in building an economy that is embedded in social relations and serves the interests of both individual citizens and society as a whole. The second section suggests authoritarian state capitalism and post-democratic market capitalism are paradoxical political economies that do not fit the conventional categories of standard modernisation theory. The third section draws on the traditions of pluralism, associative democracy and civil economy to develop the idea of a civil state that is based on the principles of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity. The final section presents some concluding remarks.

In this chapter, I argue that the standard models of “secularization” and “desecularization” are theoretically problematic and empirically questionable. By essentializing religion, both theories adopt a secular perspective. This perspective ignores key sociological, anthropological, and philosophical features that can account for the specificities of different religious traditions (section 1). Moreover, modernity is not a linear process that progressively replaces the religious past with a secular future. Rather, it is a dialectical process oscillating between a dominant secularism (and a variety of denominational subcultures that are positively linked to modernization), on the one hand, and an increasingly visible revival of traditional faiths which resist and seek to transform the secular outlook of global modernity, on the other hand (section 2). Instead of the rather sterile debate in terms of secularization and desecularization, the future will probably consist of a contest of ideas and practices between those traditions that either embrace or challenge secular modernity. This is seen in how religious ideas on reciprocity, mutuality, and relationality are coming to the fore in public discussions on ethics, political economy, and science (section 3).

This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation-state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between “the one” and “the many”. Modernity fuses juridical-constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, “biopolitical” account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual are the object of politics and are subject to state control (section 1).\ud \ud The origins of this dialectic go back to changes within Christian theology in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, these changes can be traced to Ockham's denial of the universal Good in things, Suárez's priority of the political community over the ecclesial body and Hobbes's “biopolitical” definition of power as state dominion over life (section 2).\ud \ud At the practical level, modern sovereignty has involved both the national state and the transnational market. The “revolutions in sovereignty” that gave rise to the modern state and the modern market were to some considerable extent shaped by theological concepts and changes in religious institutions and practices: first, the supremacy of the modern national state over the transnational papacy and national churches; second, the increasing priority of individuality over collectivity; third, a growing focus on contractual proprietary relations at the expense of covenantal ties and communal bonds (section 3).\ud \ud By subjecting both people and property to uniform standards of formal natural rights and abstract monetary value, financial capitalism and liberal secular democracy are part of the “biopolitical” logic that subordinates the sanctity of life and land to the secular sacrality of the state and the market. In Pope Benedict's theology, we can find the contours of a post-secular political economy that challenges the monopoly of modern sovereignty (sections 4–5).

The distinction between constitution, as the set of fundamental normative premises ensuring the cohesion of any given polity, and contract, as the formal covenant agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders in that polity, is central to political economy. This paper outlines a conceptual framework for the political economy of constitution based on the above distinction. Our argument is that constitution in the material sense, that is, as a relatively stable configuration of interests prior to formal arrangements, determines the way in which formal rules and procedures operate within a specific historical context. The paper develops the constitutionalist tradition towards a ‘constitutional heuristic’ that helps to detect feasible organisations of political-economic interests in society. Stratified social systems are rooted in multi-layered connectivity and provide a structure for organising partially overlapping interests beyond purely contractual covenants. This conception of constitution has far-reaching implications for economic policy because it charts a course beyond the dichotomy between consensus and conflict. The political economy of constitution focuses on the multiple interdependencies within the social domain, which give rise to substantive arrangements among stakeholders. This approach enables the identification of policy domains, thresholds and measures congruent with the material constitution of any given society. La distinction entre constitution – en tant que série de présuppositions normatives qui visent à garantir la cohésion d’un corps politique – et contrat – en tant qu’accord formel entre les parties prenantes de ce même corps politique – est fondamentale pour l’économie politique. Cet essai développe un cadre conceptuel en vue d’une économie politique de constitution qui repose sur cette distinction. Notre propos consiste à dire que la constitution au sens matériel – c’est-à-dire une configuration relativement stable d’intérêts qui précèdent les structures formelles – détermine la façon selon laquelle les règles et procédures formelles fonctionnent dans un contexte particulier de l’histoire. L’essai tente de faire avancer la tradition de pensée constitutionaliste vers une «heuristique constitutionnelle» qui permet d’identifier les différentes manières d’organiser les intérêts politico-économiques d’un corps social. Des systèmes sociaux stratifiés sont enracinés dans une sphère de connectivité complexe et offrent une structure afin d’organiser des intérêts partiellement chevauchés au-delà des relations purement contractuelles. Cette conception de la constitution a d’importantes conséquences pour la conduite de la politique économique en raison de proposer une voie au-delà de l’opposition entre consensus et conflit. L’économie politique de constitution se focalise sur les nombreuses interdépendances au sein du corps social qui donnent lieu à des accords substantiels entre les différentes parties prenantes. Notre approche permet d’identifier des domaines de politique économique, des seuils et des mesures qui sont conformes à la constitution matérielle d’une société.

This interdisciplinary dissertation seeks a more holistic and broader understanding of political identity formation processes in post-USSR Eastern Europe. It seeks to develop a theoretical approach for assessing the non-rationalistic factors, which influence domestic and foreign policy, political attitudes and identities in the region – including associative symbolism, human experience, political images and historical narratives.\ud The research is based on the main case of Lithuania, which is analysed in the first three chapters of the dissertation from three perspectives: the historical/political, the intellectual/narrative and the experiential/symbolic. Along the way, a theory is being inductively elaborated, offering new insights into the process of Lithuanian political identity formation. In the next two chapters, other cases are also explored in order to examine the theory’s applicability and broaden its spectrum of inquiry. These include Russia, Poland, Estonia and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.\ud Qualitative methods are used in this dissertation, including textual and visual analysis (of primary and secondary literary sources, photographs, film, etc.), unstructured interviews, historical analysis, as well as political, philosophical and anthropological theoretical approaches by Roland Barthes, Raoul Girardet, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Victor Turner, Arpad Szakolczai, and others.\ud The dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of political identity formation, periods of political transition and the importance of human experience to politics. It also aims at developing a theory capable of accounting for the often unrecognised factors of historical narrative, political symbolism and emotional associative charge. As a result it makes a contribution towards a better understanding of post-USSR Eastern European politics and thus to more effective policy towards the region, which is gaining increasing importance in global political arena.