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Beyond Secularism: Radical Orthodoxy in Conversation With BEYOND SECULARISM: RADICAL ORTHODOXY IN CONVERSATION WITH RADICAL DEMOCRACY by MATTHEW RAYMOND BRADNEY B.A., Purdue University, 2010 M.A., University of Colorado Boulder, 2012 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science 2017 ii This thesis entitled: Beyond Secularism: Radical Orthodoxy in Conversation with Radical Democracy written by Matthew Raymond Bradney has been approved for the Department of Political Science Steve Vanderheiden Michaele Ferguson Elias Sacks Tim Fuller Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii ABSTRACT Bradney, Matthew Raymond (Ph.D., Department of Political Science) Beyond Secularism: Radical Orthodoxy in Conversation with Radical Democracy Thesis Directed by Associate Professors Horst Mewes and Steve Vanderheiden In my dissertation, I set for myself three basic tasks. First, I try to show that much radical democratic theory results in nihilism. Second, I draw out the consequences of nihilism. Put briefly, the major consequence of nihilism is the unreasonable character of almost all of our deeply held moral and political beliefs, such as the dignity of human beings, the value of democracy, the importance of rights, and so forth. The nihilistic conclusion, then, is that the West cannot justify its own values. Third, and most importantly, I examine how the conclusion of nihilism might be avoided. Is there an alternative, better account we can provide that is not nihilistic? I find such an account in the contemporary school of Christian theology known as Radical Orthodoxy, represented by such theorists and theologians as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and others. Radical Orthodoxy endeavors to recover and renew insights from the orthodox Christian tradition in order to avoid the conclusion of nihilism and to rethink ontology, secularism, ethics, and politics. Dedicated to Laura Jean Marholz v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish first to thank the late Horst Mewes, my longtime advisor, who passed away suddenly in May 2017, before this dissertation could be submitted. Next I wish to thank Steve Vanderheiden, who graciously guided me through the process of revising this work for submission to the graduate school. Additionally, thanks to Michaele Ferguson, Elias Sacks, and Tim Fuller, the other members of my doctoral defense committee. Finally, I wish to thank also David Mapel and Anand Sokhey, faculty who, while not on the doctoral defense committee, helped me along my graduate career. Additionally, thanks are owed to Seth Bishop, Matt Heller, Craig White, Harry Archer, and, above all, Martin DeNicolo, my fellow graduate students who provided me with vibrant discussion, collegiality, and friendship during my tenure at the University of Colorado. Finally, thanks most of all to my wife, Laura Marholz, who provided me invaluable support every step of the way. vi CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION..................................................................1 II. ONTOLOGY………………………………………………..36 III. SECULARISM……………………………………………...75 IV. JUDGMENT………………………………………………...110 V. POLITICS…………………………………………………...133 VI. CONCLUSION……………………………………………...171 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………...175 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The popular socialist magazine Jacobin recently celebrated the late UK Labour MP Tony Benn by posting the following quotation on social media: “We tried to make capitalism work with good and humane Labour governments and we didn't succeed - because it can't work. It rests on injustice, lives on inequality and if you try to modify them it turns on you, cuts back your gains and throws you back to where you started.” To begin this study I wish to focus specifically on this claim about “injustice.” The claim that capitalism rests on injustice is made often, even as a matter of course, on the radical left today. The problem that is at the heart of my dissertation, with which I am most occupied and which opens up all other questions, is what it means to make this claim, and whether it is possible to supply a philosophical defense of this claim, or whether instead it is always an arbitrary claim, of which it cannot be said that it is true or false. Although of course I discuss other matters in this work, it is this problem that is at its heart. In the rest of this introduction I shall briefly explain what my project is about, explain why I take it to be significant, and also orient it with respect to bodies of literature to which it relates but upon which I do not focus in the four following chapters. Here I want to describe the project of course but also to contextualize it as much as I can. I hope that this will help render the project as a whole clearer. First I shall describe my dissertation project, and next I shall attempt to explain briefly why I find this project significant, the larger universe of problems into which my project fits, and finally the politics of this project as I see them. I shall then discuss my view of the meaning of political philosophy and how my project relates to this conception – I see this task as worthwhile, if not necessary, in a political philosophy dissertation. Finally, I shall more generally discuss the 2 philosophical background to my dissertation, especially noting the relation of my project to Marxism. Throughout I am in part simply attempting to explain what I am doing in this work. Without this statement of context, the choice of this project might seem somewhat arbitrary. Overview of the Project I think of my dissertation as a sustained dialogue between two theoretical orientations. On one side stand those I call radical democratic theorists, among them Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly, Linda Zerilli, and a whole host of theorists influenced by the French thinkers, especially Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. Like the broader political Left, it is fair to say that what divides these thinkers is as important as anything that unites them. After all, Laclau and Mouffe seem to be primarily influenced by Gramsci, Connolly by Deleuze and Nietzsche, and Zerilli by Kant, Wittgenstein, and Arendt. This strange collection of thinkers does not constitute a neat whole, yet I argue that radical democrats share a number of important beliefs. First and foremost, radical democrats are of the Left, yet they are not traditional Marxists or traditional socialists. In politics, radical democrats tend to be fonder of the new social movements, of identity politics, of postmodern forms of race and gender politics, than either Marxists or Christian socialists. Second, these thinkers tend to favor an ontology in which things are, at bottom, mobile, shifting, different, and so forth, rather than stable, frozen, fixed, or whatever. Third, these thinkers tend at least to be accused of relativism or nihilism or something of this sort, such that much ink is devoted to sophisticated arguments intending to show they are not, in fact, relativists. Fourth, these thinkers tend to be, in some sense, secular, at least insofar as few, if any, are firmly committed to any particular religious tradition. Doubtless, one could press 3 against any of these descriptions, one could show that this or that self-styled radical democrat doesn’t meet these criteria, one could problematize this whole interpretation, but none of that worries me much, because I think that, as a broad sketch, this picture makes sense (it makes sense to me, in any case). In the academy, individuation is necessary in order to advance one’s career as a researcher, so any sketch of a purported school to which many thinkers belong will always be fraught with peril, but the effort to speak of commonalities among thinkers still strikes me as a worthy endeavor, not least because it allows one to make more general and perhaps more important claims. The other half of the sustained dialogue, for which I shall argue in favor throughout the dissertation, is Radical Orthodoxy (RO), and those thinkers associated with it, among them John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, Daniel Bell Jr., and William T. Cavanaugh, among others. In this work I spend by far the most time discussing Milbank because he is the founder of RO. In broad terms, the central aim of RO is to advance critiques of all aspects of modern society from an orthodox Christian perspective. RO “visits sites in which secularism has invested heavily—aesthetics, politics, sex, the body, personhood, visibility, space—and resituates them from a Christian standpoint; that is, in terms of the Trinity, Christology, the Church and the Eucharist.”1 This move is not made out of nostalgia for a bygone age, namely Christendom. Instead, it is undertaken from the belief that the West has become nihilistic, from the belief that nihilism is the spiritless spirit of the age, and, furthermore, that much recent philosophy is itself nihilistic. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, nihilism is today “the gas you breathe.” Nihilism is a complex concept, and I’ll elaborate on what I mean by it below. For now, the following quotation 1 John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, “Suspending the Material: The Turn of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Radical Othodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1. 4 from Milbank’s opus should suffice: “nihilism is the conclusion of ‘pure reason’ (reason in the mood of cold regard), not just to the void or to ontological violence, but also to the ontological reign of non-sense or unreason. This indeed was Nietzsche’s central tragic crux: fully honest Western reason realizes that reason itself is but a pathetic human projection.”2 The project of RO, then, is not only to propose an antithesis to nihilism, but also to save reason from reason’s own self-destructive tendencies—and more generally, the project of RO is to attempt to forge a way to rescue Western modernity, Western Enlightenment, from itself.
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