I don’t claim to understand everything in this John Milbank essay that Russell discussed yesterday (I will assume, as a matter of charity, that it’s my fault and not Milbank’s), but I do have a couple of bones to pick with it.
Milbank seems to be contrasting a strawman version of “liberalism” (by which I think he means the whole tradition of Enlightenment liberalism, not just liberalism in a narrow political sense) with a kind of hyper-idealized neo-feudal economy of “the gift” and an artistocracy of virtue.
For Milbank, it seems, liberalism is not a mixture of good and bad, but an unmitigated disaster that has brought
mass poverty, inequality, erosion of freely associating bodies beneath the level of the State and ecological dereliction of the earth – and now, without the compensating threat of communism, it has abolished the rights and dignity of the worker, ensured that women are workplace as well as domestic and erotic slaves, and finally started to remove the ancient rights of the individual which long precede the creed of liberalism itself (such as habeas corpus in Anglo-Saxon law) and are grounded in the dignity of the person rather than the ‘self-ownership’ of autonomous liberal man (sic).
It’s hard to know what to say to someone who appears to think that things have only gotten worse in the last five hundred years or so! Milbank thinks that communisim “valiantly” tried to battle the awful scourge of liberalism, but, sadly, “ignored people’s need’s for an aesthetic and religious relationship to each other and to nature” (he has no other bad things to say about communism, at least here).
The key point, though, where Milbank takes issue with liberalism is that liberalism is committed, in principle, to a pluarlism of social values, whereas Milbank thinks that a just society requires an agreed upon hierarchy of values:
[T]he crucial paradox so often ignored by socialists (but not by John Ruskin) is that only where there is an agreed hierarchy of values, sustained by the constantly self-cancelling hierarchy of education, can there actually be an equal sharing (according to a continuous social judgement as to who will most benefit from such and such a gift etc) of what is agreed to be valuable. Without such an agreement, sustained through the operation of professional guilds and associations as well as co-operative credit unions and banks, there can only be market mediation of an anarchy of desires – of course ensuring the triumph of a hierarchy of sheer power and the secret commanding of people’s desires by manipulation.
Milbank objects to the realist-liberal-Niebuhrian appropriation of Augustine to justify making peace with human egotism, but here I think Milbank hasn’t taken Augustine seriously enough. Augustine would disagree, I think, that an agreed hierarchy of values is possible this side of the Kingdom. To make it the precondition of earthly politics would seem to court tyranny. The loves of the city of man’s denizens are necessarily different from and incompatible with those of the city of God. Liberalism may well be the system that best reckons with this pluralism of values, allowing a certain earthly peace to prevail (for more on this see here, and here).
Some of what Milbank says is quite good. For instance, he points out that it’s foolish to think of society as somehow founded on a contractual agreement. “Gift relations” are prior to contract relations – we give ourselves to each other (in a family bond, for instance) in ways that are more fundamental than contract. And he makes what I think are good suggestions about encouraging things like co-ops, “fair trade” arrangements, and other forms of economic exchange that aren’t based on sheer financial calculation.
And surely Milbank is right that the unchecked market tends to reduce all relationships to exchange relationships. But that is a good argument for embedding the market in strong non-market institutions (civic, religious, familial, governmental). John Paul II, Wilhelm Roepke, and certain neocalvinists, among others, have valuable things to say about this.
A Thinking Reed 
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