Adventures
in Polity
by
Sean Fagan
What
exactly is political theology and how does it affect me?
I’ve been trying to answer this question for a good number of years,
and frankly, I haven’t a got clue about how do so.
However, I can elaborate on the political theology of William T.
Cavanaugh. My argument, which will be both an appropriation and
expansion of Cavanaugh’s own work, will be built upon two premises:
the state is eschatological and universal in nature.
The state, in other words, is a ‘secular parody” of the church.[i]
But since I believe Cavanaugh’s conception of the state to
inadequate (as I will explain later), I will add the “world-system”
arguments of Immanuel Wallerstein to expand Cavanaugh’s argument to include
certain aspects of Western culture.
In
his essay collection, Theopolitical
Imagination, Cavanaugh’s writings center around three themes:
the modern state as a soteriological counterpoint, created during the 16th/17th
century religious wars; the failure of public theologies to create a valid space
for the church within “civil society”, and lastly, globalization as another
form of the state’s universalism.[ii]
First of all, the philosophical underpinnings of the modern state are a
reversal of the Christian idea of participation; “this mythos
establishes human government non on the basis of a primal unity, but on an
assumption of the essential individuality of the human race.”[iii]
How so? Through an analysis
of Locke and Hobbes, in particular their views on property and the interaction
of humans over such an issue, Cavanaugh finds that at root, their views are a
differing form of soteriology. It
is a soteriology that says that “salvation is essentially a matter of making
peace between competing individuals.”[iv]
And it is through social bodies that this peace comes about.
But
how does this fit in with the modern state?
Through the European religious wars, the traditional structure has become
inverted: instead of the Church, as
during the Middle Ages, being the highest power, states have taken over the
highest levels of jurisdiction.[v]
The net effect is two-fold: political
rulers used this as a justification to assert total control over their regions,
and the church losing all her political power, in effect, having undergone a
transformation in nature. How so?
Luther’s argument of the two kingdoms, of the church having spiritual
authority and the state temporal, helped to create two distinct social bodies,
whereas there should be only one. For
Cavanaugh, “Christ has not two bodies, one temporal and one spiritual, but
only one.”[vi]
In time, princes, invoking the rule of “cuius
regio, eius religio” began to assert authority over the church; “in
other words, wherever concordats limited the jurisdiction of the Church within
national boundaries, there the princes saw no need to throw off the yoke of
Catholicism, precisely because Catholicism had already been reduced…to a
merely suasive body under the heel of the secular power.”[vii]
The
effect of these conflicts was a redefinition of religion “as a set of beliefs
which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from
one’s public loyalty to the state.”[viii]
But this occurrence was itself part of a long intellectual process.
Cavanaugh notes that in St. Thomas, the word religio
is used in context with virtue, especially within an ecclesial context; in the
15th century, there begins a shift towards an interior, universal
setting: “Insofar as it becomes a
universal impulse, religion is thus interiorized and removed from its particular
ecclesial context.”[ix]
Cavanaugh
argues that religion, in the hands of political theorists, again changes in
meaning, a meaning that involves religion moving from praxis (virtue) to
intellect (proposition).[x]
As time went on, two things happened.
Religion is relegated to the sphere of the soul and becomes a tool for
the state. (Through an exposition
of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, Cavanaugh finds the common thread in their
thought: the lowering of the Church
is necessary in order for peace and unity to occur in the state.[xi])
In
his third essay, “The Myth of Globalization as Catholicity”, Cavanaugh
argues the point that globalization is “a hyperextension of the
nation-state’s project of subsuming the local under the universal.”[xii]
What is meant by this? As
the state grew in power, it began to exercise authority over local elements, in
which “the universalization of law and rights would liberate the individual
from the whims of local custom, thereby creating a direct relationship…between
the sovereign and the individual”[xiii]
What this had the effect of doing was two-fold.
The individual was now in simple relationship to only the state, and
second, other institutions became redefined, dedicated to mediating this
relationship.[xiv]
As this relates to globalization, Cavanaugh sees this triumph of the
universal (over the local) as having changed the idea of how nation-states
operate and conduct power:
If the state project is characterized by the subsumption of the local
under the universal, then globalization hyperextends this project.
Just as the nation-state freed the market from the ‘interventions’ of
local custom, and feed the individual to relate to other individuals on the
basis of standardized legal and monetary systems, so globalization frees
commerce from the nation-state…now seen as one more localization impeding the
universal flow of capital.[xv]
In a
paradoxical twist, the competition that occurs for capital creates a drive for
uniqueness which at the same time creates standardization in taste.[xvi]
In other words, the drive for what is “new and different” creates
novelty, which in turn becomes standard, thus becoming passé.
The point that Cavanaugh is trying to bring home (over a rather long and
repetitious essay) is that the catholicity that commerce promises to bring is a
disposable nothingness: nothing
permanent, nothing remains, nothing enduring, nothing, period.[xvii]
It is merely the universalism of commerce that remains and abides.
Up to
this point, Cavanaugh has argued for the theological roots of the modern
European state and of modern capitalism, but is his argument merely to be
applied to just nation-states or can it be applied to the entirety of Western
culture? I argue that Cavanaugh is
a good stating off point for examining the roots of modern Europe through the
work of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein’s
multi-disciplinary approach of “world-systems analysis” will provide some
greater insight into the theological roots of modern Europe.
When
we talk of “world-system,” we are dealing with the political, economic,
social, etc forces that went into shaping modern society, having their roots in
16th century Western Europe. Wallerstein
singles out three primary things that went into the formation of the current
world-system: the development of
the capitalist-world economy, the rise of nation-states, and the creation of a
“geoculture.” The important
feature of the world-system’s development is the simultaneous influences of a
number of different factors, namely those cited above.
In this next section, while assuming the theological basis of
Cavanaugh’s argument, we will look at different sections of the world-system
and their developments.
A
world-economy (an economy within a world-system) and a capitalist economy are
distinct from each other, but in the case of the current world-system, they are
necessarily linked. Any economy which exists in a world-system is a
world-economy but not necessarily capitalist; economies do not need to be
capitalist in order to allow for the exchange of goods.
What defines a capitalist economy is the “priority to the endless
accumulation of capital.”[xviii]
If, as Wallerstein points out, that a capitalist economy requires more
and more capital to sustain itself, how does Cavanaugh fit in?
As Wallerstein says, a capitalist economy requires a multiplicity of
states (an interstate system) in order to function; balance between competing
forces is required to overcome differences in power and opinion.[xix]
Now as Cavanaugh points out in his discussion of Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau: all agreed that “individuals come together on the
basis of a social contract, each individual entering society in order to protect
person and property.”[xx]
With
the advent of the nation-state, Wallerstein points out a fundamental point in
their relations with each other: recognition
and reciprocal recognition of borders.
“Sovereignty was a claim of authority not only internally but
externally—that is, vis-à-vis other states.
It was first of all a claim of fixed boundaries within which a given
state was sovereign, and therefore within which no other state had the right to
assert any kind of authority—executive, legislative, judicial, or military.”[xxi]
In other words, this recognition and the reciprocal acknowledgement of
other nations is an extension of ideas of the social contract.
(The politico-economic basis of states, one where states are recognized
in the form of sovereign individuals, is missing from Cavanaugh’s argument.) Even more so, when Cavanaugh discusses the self-sacrifice of
states (in regards to lower trade barriers required by globalization treaties),
he again is talking of individuals that deal with others in forms of the social
contract.
[i] This phrase originates with
Cavanaugh, but I am unaware as to exactly where.
[ii] William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical
Imagination (New York: T
& T Clark LTD, 2002), 9-10; 53; 91.
[vii] Cavanaugh, 26-27.
Cavanaugh goes on to provide a historical narrative of the Religious
Wars, showing that both Catholic and Protestant rulers played a fair share
in the disturbances and benefits that the wars provided.
[xiv] Cavanaugh, 100-101.
[xvi] Cavanaugh, 108-109.
In an example, Cavanaugh mentions how the emphasis on local,
traditional Mexican cuisine, when used in comparison to Taco Bell, is itself
a copy of something else.
[xvii] One should read David
Hart’s article “Christ and Nothing” in the October 2003 issue of First
Things for detailed treatments on the issue of “nothing” in Western
culture.
[xviii] Immanuel Wallerstein, World-systems
analysis: An Introduction,
(Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002), 24.
[xix] Wallerstein, 24-25.
