The Thin Line Between ‘Postliberalism’ and Theocracy (original) (raw)
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PIETAS VOLUME 3 NUMBER 2, 2024
Patrick Deneen's central assertion is that the Western world today is dominated by a ruling class committed to individual autonomy, creative destruction, cosmopolitanism, and constant change: he calls this the laptop class, and says it benefits from this order, while the working class suffers. The laptop elite, he affirms, must be replaced by one that promotes continuity and tradition, stability and security in economic, family and community life, so that ordinary people will be better able to flourish. Broadly, I agree with the assessment and the goal. What is more, Deneen is to be credited for presenting a conception of the "mixed regime" that is truer to the original, and, at least potentially, more suitable to present needs. As I have noted elsewhere, in several monographs published before the political earthquakes of the 2016-Brexit and the election of Donald Trump-American political theorists attempt to apply the insights of Machiavelli, John Adams and others for the management of the perennial conflict between the "few and the many." 1 These applications of the theory are decidedly populist. The authors focus on the cultivation of a mentality, and the construction of institutions and political strategies, that can empower the people and restrain elites. This concern with providing more protection for the oppressed many against the rapacious few is, without question, an essential component of the theory of the mixed regime, but the populist emphasis elides the overriding interest in classical formulations of the theory in the cultivation and maintenance of a virtuous elite capable of acting as patrons and guardians of the people in order to bring out their best qualities. Although Deneen is still, at his core, a populist, he engages extensively 1 See introduction to my Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times, ed.
Theocracy's Challenge (Author's pre-publication version)
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Religions , 2021
Carl Schmitt’s controversial 1922 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty initiated a long-standing, lively, and oft misunderstood discourse at the intersections of religious studies, theology, and political theory. Political theology as a discourse has seen something of a revival in recent decades, which has raised genuine problems of interpretation. These include questions of what is at stake in political theology, how political theology can be applied to economic discourses, and how it can be understood in relation to secularity and post-secularity. This study takes Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and Glory as a conceptual bridge that helps to situate contemporary political theologies of neoliberalism historically and theoretically. A survey of four recent political theologies of neoliberalism yields a methodological reflection on the limits and potential of political theology as a discourse. A distinction is made between descriptive-genealogical political theologies and normative-prescriptive political theologies. The former is privileged in its philosophical potential, insofar as it reveals both the contingency and genuine variety of normative-prescriptive political theologies.
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This paper describes neoliberalism and summarizes new works on democracy in Continental philosophy. Unlike laissez-faire or liberal economic theory—a “leave us alone” policy in which the state does not interfere with private enterprise—neoliberal governments use the resources of the state to assist the market directly and employ the market to direct or oversee the resources of the state. Alongside neoliberal government, and in its wake, is a society in which the guiding axioms for each human being are self-entrepreneurship and competition. Over the last decade, however, a new body of philosophical work has been dissociating democracy from neoliberal government, critiquing a failed system of political representation, and considering to what extent democracy must take place beyond or outside of the current state. Of equal concern to these philosophers is how to take flight from a way of life that is characterized by self-entrepreneurship and competition. For some, the start of a political future beyond neoliberalism hinges upon a recent distinction between constituent and destituent forms of power. Whereas constituent power attempts to reform one’s government through demonstrations in public space, destituent power abandons the project of reforming one’s government momentarily or even completely in order to experience another form of life entirely.