Between Liberalism and Positivism

TWU7HSQE2YCT Our current global situation is different, and yet is in essential continuity with the circumstances in which this book was written. Today, neo-liberalism has further extended its sway, but has now begun to mutate into a new mode of political tyranny. (For this reason, in response to the banalities of certain of my politically liberal critics, I simply offer a reading of the current daily newspapers in my defence.)


In some ways this makes the essential unity of Theology and Social Theory more apparent. For, from the beginning to the end of the book, it is constantly suggested that there is a problematic relationship between the formal openness of liberalism which is designed to mitigate conflict on the one hand, and an arbitrariness of content on the other hand a ‘positivism’ which always threatens to overwhelm even the peace of mere suspended hostility which is the best that the civitas terrena can ever manage.

This positive content can be either ‘scientific’ as in the case of eugenicism and the extermination of the supposedly weak (which happens in far more modes than we usually acknowledge) or it can be ‘religious’ as in the case of recently emergent ‘fundamentalisms’ which usually trade off, and theologically confirm, socio-economic liberalism, while also in certain strategic ways surpassing and opposing it. In many ways the first two treatises of the book on ‘liberalism’ and ‘positivism’ respectively, are in consequence the most decisive – because ‘dialectics’ is seen as but a variant on liberalism in terms of a Christian Gnosticism (a thesis now amply confirmed by the work of Cyril O’Regan) and ‘difference’ is seen as essentially a radicalization of the positivist vision. (Here the reader needs to be attentive to the fact that I treat ‘positivism’ in its historical complexity and ambiguity and never mean the term anachronistically – except where appropriate – in the mere sense of scientific or ‘logical’ positivism.)

These observations accord, I think, with the changed responses that the book is now liable to invoke. At first, there was a certain amount of outraged protest from sociologists, many of whom took it that I was objecting to a supposed ‘reduction’ of religion to the social, when I was explicitly arguing that ‘the social’ of sociology was itself an unreal, unhistorical and quasi theological category.

Today, this sort of reaction survives only amongst theologians themselves – who are still so often belated. Within secular social theory by contrast, there is a widespread recognition (only a very little indebted to the impact of my book) that ‘sociology’ is an exploded paradigm, and in part because of its inbuilt secular bias.

The less ideologically-freighted models of ethnography and histoire totale are today far more in vogue – in academic practice still more than in academic theory. There was some protest also from those still committed to the dialectical tradition.

Overwhelmingly though, most thinkers of the left have now aban doned the Marxist affirmations of a teleological progressivism or any notion that there must come a necessary ‘final’ crisis of capitalism. Much more persistent remains the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Yet this is increasingly because interpreters confirm the essence of Alexander Koje `ve’s reading of Hegel: the Hegelian metanarrative is plausible because it was already akin to a nihilist genealogy and was a kind of anti-metanarrative.

For what it traced was the work of negation and redoubled negation in the sense of the dismantling of all bounds against a radically self-grounded freedom. In this sense the story told is of the gradual unleashing of the anarchically positive – even though it took Schelling to be clearer about this, and Hegel himself commendably, but inconsistently, had aspirations to resist such a rule of both the formal and the arbitrary. It is also true that the thesis of an ‘end of history’,when there emerges a fullmutual recognition of autonomy, fails to see that the celebration primarily of freedom has no stable way of securing the value of suchmutual recognition over-against the positive affirmation of one particular freedom or set of freedoms as paramount. In consequence it has no surety against history resuming its sinister inventiveness.

Still more markedly, there was a great deal of protest from those influenced by the ‘left-Nietzscheanism’ stemming from the 1960s, an influence in which Theology and Social Theory is itself clearly steeped. This protest almost always took the form of saying that I was wrong to see this discourse as upholding nihilism and ‘ontological violence’ – rather it supported the diversity of life and held open infinite possibilities of variegated coexistence with others fully acknowledged in their otherness.

In retrospect though, one can see yet more strongly how the left-Nietzschean current constantly had to compromise a radical positivism which seeks actively to affirm the ungrounded ‘mythical’ content of difference beyond mere formal tolerance, with a continued attempt to re-inscribe some mode of stoic or Kantian formal resignation and collective agreement as to abstract procedures. This is as true in the end of Deleuze as it is more evidently true of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and even Badiou. These thinkers, therefore, were trapped in the liberal/positivist oscillation.

John Milbank. Theology and Social Theory : Beyond Secular Reason. Blackwell Publishing. Page : xi-xii

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