1

Geopolitical Theology

Economy, Religion and Empire after 9/11

John Milbank

Thus came enclosure ruin was her guide

But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight

Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside

And workhouse prisons raised upon the scite

Een natures dwelling far away from men

The common heath became the spoilers prey

The rabbit had not where to make his den

And labours only cow was drove away

No matter wrong was right and right was wrong

And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song

From To a Fallen Elm by John Clare (c 1812-31)

In the following essay I shall first of all argue that there is much to be learnt from the

thesis of neo-Marxists concerning the always partially economic character of

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international relations. However, I shall contend in the second place that this needs

to be qualified by an equal insistence on the religious character of these relations. In

the third place I shall attempt to build a geopolitical theology on the basis of these

reflections.

1. Conspiracy and Process

Contemporary international affairs are dominated by :

1.Globalisation.

2.An increasingly anarchic capitalism.

3. An increasingly authoritarian state.

4. The rise of neo-imperialism.

5. The apparent return of religion to public and political significance.

Only the first of these items was anticipated in the 1960s. Quibbling debates here

are of little interest: globalisation means such an intensely heightened degree of

speed of travel and communication that one can circle the globe in a day;

communicate with any point upon it in an instance by voice or writing; within a few

days take delivery of a commodity in one place from any other place. In

consequence there is a global market, a global media and a complex array of

politico-economic non-governmental institutions.

What is genuinely debatable is the unexpected emergence of the other four items

and their conjuncture, whether logical or contingent. The reason that this is

debatable is that, with the possible exception of the de-regulated economy these
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items run counter to the expectations of enlightenment, which should properly be

defined by the centrality of the discourse of political economy: an attempt to

bracket revealed religion and promote an increased this-worldly human flourishing

through and despite the avaricious or even murderous bent of human nature or else

fallen human nature (in the wake of Pierre Bayle).1 This discourse anticipated the

arrival, beyond Hobbesian anarchic realism concerning inter-state rivalry, of

something like Kants perpetual peace: bellicosity sublimated into economic

competition; a balancing out of territorial and mercantile inter-state rivalries that

would naturally engender international norms sufficient always to allow the global

community to discriminate between a just and an unjust enemy.2 International

constitutionalism without a single empowered enforcer was supposed to follow

upon national constitutionalisms that were themselves less the result of planning or

imposition than of an economic balancing out of wills and aspirations. Without the

alien intervention of revealed religions (whose proper concern, if any, should be the

private destiny of souls) nature could be allowed to correct herself, even if this

process itself manifested a providential plan in the face of our self-interested

animality or lapsed-back- into-the-bestial humanity.

One could say that by the 1960s such optimism had begun cautiously to re-assert

itself: the horrors of global warfare unleashed by the first half of the 20thC could be

attributed to the contingent irruption of atavistic and quasi-religious

totalitarianisms. Now universal history was safely back on course. Even neo-

liberalism sustained or perhaps boosted this optimism: deregulation would ensure

1
John Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge: CUP
2005)
2
Immanuel Kant, On Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch in Hans Reiss ed Kant:Political
Writings (Cambridge: CUP 1991) 93-131
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global wealth and global sublimation of inter-state rivalry into the benign form of

economic agon, with the exponentially increased potential for productivity opened

up by new technologies rendering redundant any renewed ventures of imperialistic

acquisition. The marks of the neoconservative era new empire, the return of

religion, neo-authoritarian government were rarely anticipated by the supporters

of Reagan or Thatcher.

So it is these phenomena which require explanation or at least explication. To what

degree does their arrival call into question the validity of enlightened expectations

whether in their Keynesian or neo-liberal forms?

If we take both these forms to be modes of liberalism, then one can say that the

liberal answer (even if this can lead to virtually opposite positions in terms of

current politics) strives to remain with the diagnosis made earlier in the face of

totalitarianism: the perpetual peace of the liberal end of history has only been

postponed, not shown up as illusion by the re-irruption of an evil so radical, or a sin

so original, that it escapes any hope of a Baylean or Mandevillean (politically

economic) self-correction.

Diversely but accordingly, the diagnoses run as follows: a mode of Islamic

fascism is fighting a rearguard action against modernity, which it is bound

eventually to lose; in the face of this recidivism, the corruption of third-world

political regimes and the continued backwardness of post-colonial countries, a re-

vamping of empire in various modes and degrees becomes an unfortunate

temporary necessity. (Neoconservatives and a political middle present different

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versions of this understanding.) Or else (on the more socially democratic left)

renewed empire is itself ascribed to a renewed atavism, driven by a Protestant

fundamentalism which mirrors that of Islam, and colludes with a revived

nationalism everywhere apparent, that in the name of nostalgic identity either

resists globalisation or seeks to capture and control this process in an inappropriate

and alien neo-romantic and culturally domineering idiom. What we are seeing here,

according to this outlook, is less the global extension of liberal democracy than its

subversion by a conspiracy of the rich. A new hierarchy of pure wealth has

subverted the true programme of enlightenment which has at its heart an

augmentation of sympathy, general utility and the rights of the individual to health,

happiness and genuine freedom of choice based upon equality of opportunity.

We can call this liberal-modernist diagnosis of the post 9/11 situation the do not

panic, its really business-as-usual despite appearances position. It cannot for the

moment be dismissed, but immediately one can note two possible problems with it.

First of all, it does not explain why a natural development from real religious

recidivism to quasi-religious secular atavisim (of nation and class identity) has been

apparently reversed. Just why should an actually religious mode of neo-fascism

now have emerged?

Secondly, it may ascribe neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism too much to a kind of

long-term moral conspiracy (this often seems to be the position of David Harvey)3

in a way that seems perhaps not consonant with the persistency of these tendencies,

which rather argue for some sort of deep structural or cyclical mode of accounting.

3
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: OUP 2003); A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford: OUP 2005)
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This point has some bearing upon our reading of the Bush regime: does this

represent the takeover of America democracy by an alien Straussian ideology (of

European origin), such that once again we are talking about a hopefully temporary

blip in the long-term democratic proceedings? Such a view would also possibly

encourage the notion that 9/11 itself was a conspiracy or partial conspiracy by the

American government or a faction within it, which wished to deploy mass terror in

order to sustain the suspending of democratic procedure and liberal right which it

had already commenced with the jerrymandering of a presidential election.

On the other hand this connection does not necessarily hold. Frequently, those who

suggest that there may have been a government conspiracy appeal to a tradition of

conspiracy entered into by the US government in order to drum up home support

for a foreign military endeavour: the murky commencements of past wars against

Spain are appealed to, besides the events at Pearl Harbour. But if we are talking

about a tradition, then we can scarcely be talking about a blip. Instead, we have

rather to face the Chomskian apparent paradox of long-term liberal democratic

imperialism, a paradox which he exhibits with ever-increasing evidence to our

dismay, but never really accounts for.4

If such conspiracy is an esoteric mode of government tradition, then this suggests

not merely that the unliberal truth of modern sovereignty is manifested in an

emergency (as Carl Schmitt taught)5 but also that the government positively seeks

out such emergencies, especially in the case of 9/11. At a minimum it places

4
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: Americas Quest for Global Dominance (London: Penguin,
2003); Jeremy Fox, Chomsky and Globalisation (Duxford: Icon, 2001)
5
Carl Schmitt: Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans George Schwab
(Chicago: Chicago UP 2005)
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reasons of state before the democratic will of the people, which is haughtily

dismissed as founded on ignorance; but more than this it appears to turn emergency

(whether contrived or fortuitously arriving) to advantages of domestic control. This

is explicitly envisaged in the pre 9/11 speculations about the uses of such

emergency as recorded within the Wolfowitz circle. It is also confirmed in the

longer term by habitual appeals to political or social scares (the British, the

Spanish, the Native Americans, the Blacks, the US Southerners, the Irish, Catholics,

Communists, Hispanic Americans, the Japanese, alcohol, drugs, Islam etc etc)

which are nothing other than longer-term perceived and often contrived

emergencies generally threatening the absolute private property or isolated (non-

erotic, non-ecstatic) sobriety of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As Hannah Arendt

argued, the lack of a thick binding culture and the consequently ever-rumbling

undertow of anarchy in the United States requires that new mass threats be

ceaselessly re-invoked in order to revive the one uniting ideology of negative

liberty and channel it in a direction that does not threaten internal state policing.6

But this is not to say that one is necessarily talking about pure illusion. In nearly all

these cases there was, or is in some sense a degree of threat to American cultural

hegemony and its specific modes of economic power. One needs to be able to allow

that an emergency can be both genuinely a threat and in some sense a welcome

threat. After all, if sovereign power is first established and then re-established

through the instance of the exception, then this exception cannot first of all have

been an imaginary one and it is unlikely that any officially induced panic can be

long sustained if it has no foundation whatsoever in reality. Necessarily, the

6
Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (New York: Harcourt Brace 1976) 3-37
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invocation of danger by sovereign power is a calculated risk: here indeed lies the

ultimate economy of the political as such.

And in point of fact, this risk and ambivalence still holds, even in the sphere of the

imaginary. Supposing it to be the case that 9/11 was a US government conspiracy,

then it was still an inordinate risk to run, even were we to allow (as seems to some

degree to be the case) that the idea of an organised unified network of Islamic

terrorists called al-Qaida was an official American projection. Even to conjure up

such a genie could be to invite catastrophe, because, as the authors of the uneven

Afflicted Powers rightly argue, 9/11 was a massive visual victory against capitalism:

here one of the most spectacular images of capitalist power was shown to be

vulnerable to a crudely physical assault, when blended with suicidal blood-

sacrifice.7 The will to die was shown to be capable of defeating the will to

accumulate for the sake of accumulation.

As the same authors perceptively go on to argue, one aspect (not the only one they

are at pains to stress) of the Western response to 9/11 (of which there is still no

end in sight) was the instinctual attempt to blot out the image of the crumbling

towers with a counter-image of Western victory and restored normality. The logic

here is rather like that of a secular version of evangelical atonement theology: for

an unspeakable sin, not just a redressing of the balance will do rather one must

over-compensate for an assault upon Western freedom with a new and glorious

punitive extension of this freedom into the very lands from which the outrage was

(vaguely) deemed to have emanated. But once more Afflicted Powers has it right:

7
The Retort Collective (Iain Boal et al) Afflicted Powers: Capital and Scectacle in an Age of War
(London: Verso 2005), 16-38
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the most powerful images produced by the response are rather of the mistreatment

of prisoners in Kabul and at Guantanamo Bay. Thus the Western Spectacle of a

power guaranteeing and realising freedom of choice has by no means been

restored, but rather has been forced to deny itself from within, having first been

ravaged from without. So far 9/11 has worked, quite perfectly.

Yet the necessity of risk that necessarily attends the logic of emergency means that

we still cannot tell whether this working does not also favour the

neoconservatives. In the global game of ultimate stakes, the whole point is that you

have to gamble heavily on initial losses: a further inflamed Islam and a further

destabilised Capitalism may yet ensure that the American population can be

galvanised in the face of multiple threats to American supremacy and even to the

model of extreme, unqualified capitalism. These threats are: the possible emergence

of a Eurasian power block; the apparent escaping (after the ascension to power of

Chavez, Lula and Morales) of Latin America from both the imposed grip of

monetarism and the practical sway of the Monroe doctrine; the degree of American

indebtedness which would appear to require a perpetual American economic

dominance, which perhaps its population is not large enough to sustain without the

support of a global military empire; the failure, despite neoliberalism, to reverse a

longterm fall in the rate of profit which threatens China and Europe as well as the

United States.8

8
Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: the US in the World Economy (London: Verso, 2002);
Richard Gott, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (London: Verso, 2005); Giovanni Arrighi,
The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2002) ; Tracking Global Turbulence in New Left Review
[henceforwards NLR] 20, 2003; Hegemony Unravelling in NLR 32, 2005, 23-83; Hegemony
Unravelling -2 in NLR 33, 2005, 83-118.
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In the face of these huge dangers and in thrall to a refusal to contemplate the end of

American hegemony, one can understand a willingness to take huge risks: to rig a

democratic American election; shamelessly to exploit (if not partially to contrive)

the mere large-scale terrorist attack which was 9/11; to de-stabilise the entire

Middle-East in order in part to sustain the complex guns and oil global economy

(whereby the sellers of oil are also those who can afford to buy your guns, as

Afflicted Powers points out) in the face of an oppositional cartel of oil producers led

by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela; in order also, and more decisively, to establish a

bridgehead (secure military bases not political colonies in the longterm and in

indifference to the nature of the local regime).9

With such a game, the verdict as to whether the US has won or lost must lie a

considerable way off: although historical precedents such as that of the British

might suggest that it must lose this gamble in the end, its near monopoly of big

military resources and its economic power far exceeds any historical parallels. (Nor

is it totally clear that huge debt and vast reliance on finance capital, while

unprecedented, is unsustainable or is leading to any relative American decline in

productivity, research capacity or per capita wealth.)10 Of course one suspects that

the cabal round Bush is so far disappointed; but perhaps not as much as we would

like to think. And most certainly their vision looks far beyond the next American

election and any temporary re-emergence of isolationism.

Hence given the scale of the perceived dangers to the United States and to Capital,

there may be some prima facie case for suspicion of conspiracy in the sequence of
9
Afflicted Powers, 38-78
10
For a critique of Arrighi and Harveys notion that the US is declining, see Leo Panitch and Sam
Gindin, Superintending Global Capital in NLR 35, 2005, 101-23
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events leading up to 9/11 and in the unfolding of consequences since that fateful

day. Indeed we know to some degree that a small cabal has contrived to impose its

own agenda upon the American nation. As to the precise causes of 9/11 I remain

entirely agnostic. It certainly appears that while certain strange circumstances

surrounding that event have been satisfactorily explained, certain others have not

been accounted for in any unequivocally emphatic way (and in particular the

tardiness of response to the planes initial capture). Quite definitely we can say that

on the part of someone a terroristic conspiracy was fomented and that who that

someone really was is not as yet entirely apparent. It may well be the case that no

one group of persons in this plot was fully aware of all the parties responsible for it;

that some of the deceiving were also deceived and even that this could have

occurred reciprocally. Likewise if there were any US or Israeli government

involvement it might well be that we are talking about a small faction and that even

that faction had no fully clear sense of what was actually going to transpire.

I must stress however, that there is as yet absolutely no clear evidence for such a

supposition and indeed that there is every reason for scepticism in the face of it. But

on the other hand, there remains a case to answer and the refusal of nearly all public

organs to press this point remains striking. One should of course view the tendency

to suspect deliberate conspiracy everywhere with profound suspicion. On the other

hand an out of hand dismissal of this possibility in every instance is equally a mode

of dogmatism and naivety: it would be to imagine that we live in a human world in

which such an event as the St Bartholomews Day Massacre could never really

occur. And it is important to remember that short-term conspiracy on the part of a

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powerful few lies within the realm of reality in a way that long-term perennial

conspiracy by a secret hidden Rosicrucian elite does not.

That observation can give rise to a further reflection. If, indeed, there is a tradition

of government conspiracy, then that fact itself argues against any idea that such a

tradition is itself a conspiracy of the Dan Brown, Rosicrucian variety. Rather it

suggests that a habitual resort to conspiracy is rooted in long-term structural causes

of the sort invoked by Hannah Arendt: conspiracy lies on the same continuum with

the manufacturing of witch-scares and the corruption of government by big-

money and organised crime ( a legal anarchy which is part and parcel of the fending

off of a threatening anomic chaos).

So for just this reason the presence (in whatever degree) of short-term conspiracy

on the part of a cabal counts against the idea that the four new phenomena listed in

my opening paragraph are mere blips in the continuing history of enlightenment

and liberation contrary, one suspects to what at least some of those who ascribe to

a 9/11 conspiracy theory may imagine. Likewise, the fact that the Right

Straussians (for we must allow that there is here also a centre and even a left) have

managed to start to implement their agenda cannot be seen as the mere irruption of

contingency, but is rather the outcome of the fact that their agenda came to be seen

as persuasive for a large section of the American establishment (arguably already

under Clinton) in the face of those long-term structural threats to American power

which I have already delineated. For this reason it is likely that, even if the

Democrats were returned to power, this agenda would merely get modified, rather

than be entirely abandoned.

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My point here is that just because we have witnessed at least some degree of gross

ruling-power conspiracy (and there are also suspicions here concerning the British

sovereign Crown-in-Parliament with respect to certain well-known instances of the

recent past), this points to sedimented impersonal tendencies and not to a long-term

mass plot of the powerful. Indeed, one needs to link the phenomenon of state crime

to the wider phenomenon of increased usurping of sovereign by executive power

that has been proceeding throughout the 20th C.11 If this tendency corrupts liberal

democracy then it can scarcely be counted as a temporary aberration, but is more

plausibly seen as a self-corruption endemic to liberal democracy as such an

absolute sovereign power supposedly enjoying a general democratic mandate will

just for that reason exceed that mandate in the face of ever-new circumstances

which the mandate cannot in principle anticipate.

The same sort of consideration applies to the dominance of neo-liberal economics

since the 1970s. Even though this has not succeeded in reversing a fall in the

increase in the rate of profit as compared with the post-war era, this still does not

mean (as a Marxist Social Democrat like David Harvey tends to claim for all the

clear insight of his analysis in other respects) that an elite group of the super-rich

have hijacked the capitalist process, which even in its own terms would always

have been better served by some continuing mode of Keynesianism. For one thing,

the post War boom may have been unique, linked as it was to recovery from mass

military spoliation and the belated industrial catching up of Europe and Japan. For

another, a continued crisis of over-accumulation of capital and over-production of

commodities may not have precisely the same causes now as it did in the 1970s.
11
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception trans Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago UP 2003)
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Certainly, as Robert Brenner has best described, there is the constant factor of

international competition fomenting such a crisis.12 As his own remarkable

historiography has concluded, there is no intrinsic link between capitalism on the

one hand, which rather tends to international open markets and the promotion of

global NGOs, and the nation-state on the other.13 The latter is a survival of the

early modern and romantic eras which strictly speaking (with the exception of

Britain and America) must be regarded as (possibly) modern but also as pre-

capitalist in character. Competition between states and geo-political blocks

continues today to both to ignite and to distort the capitalist market, engendering

endless trade, finance and currency cold wars in which the major players like the

United States and Japan have in recent times constantly changed currency

valuations and interest rates according to whether they think their best interests lie

in attracting foreign capital investment into their own countries, or in holding it at

bay.14 In either case what ultimately propels these oscillations is the perpetual

surplus of under-used physical and human capital resources, the social and practical

difficulties in displacing old-fashioned industrial processes and the piling-up of

excess finance capital which, if it cannot be realised in more concrete form, always

threatens to lose its value.

Yet by contrast, as Giovanni Arrighi has pointed out in criticism of Brenner, the

initial 1970s slowing down in the rate of profit was also caused by the success of

organised labour in restricting the extraction of surplus value.15 Since that time,

12
Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble
13
This is distributed in various articles. For a summary and brilliant expansion of it, see Benno
Teschke, The Myth of 1848: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Internatinal Relations (London:
Verso 2003). See also Robert Brenner, The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of neo-
Smithian Marxism in NLR 104, 1977, 25-92
14
Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble; Arrighi, Tracking Global Turbulence
15
Arrighi, Tracking Global Turbulence
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there has been a global and systematic destruction of both the power of trade unions

and the deployment of state power in favour of labour whereby a certain portion

of capitalist profit was siphoned off into welfare, pension and collective

infrastructural benefits, besides a certain measure of guaranteed job security against

the pure interests of the market. The resulting huge shift in the balance of wealth

towards the super-rich and the relatively rich clearly represents a triumph of class-

interest, but this cannot readily be separated (in Harveys mode) from the

exigencies of Capital as such. For the gains in living standards made by labour at

the expense of profit potentially threatened to reach a tipping point, at which the

defining dynamism of capitalism (its need to generate ever-more abstract wealth)

would be endangered, along with the very structural position of the wealthy, their

power as such, rather than just their relative degree of affluence. For this reason, the

switch of distributed wealth in favour of capital, material and abstract, at the

expense of physical and monetary resources owned by the mass of the population,

does not simply represent a conspiracy of the rich, but also a long-term emergency

defence strategy to preserve capitalism as such, which involves a more automatic

and impersonal dimension. The crisis of over-accumulation, is, as Marx saw, an

innate disease of capitalism (though not necessarily a fatal one as he sometimes

seemed to imagine) requiring constant adjustments. In part it is caused by the

alien factor of inter-national competition, but in part it is driven by a more

intrinsic tension which has a more cyclical character: the wealth, freedom and

power of both worker and consumer (one can add to Marx) must be severely

curtailed, because this threatens both the profit and the power of capital; on the

other hand, taken too far, this process leads to falling demand and so to underused

physical and human capital resources and to unrealisable financial ones. Here the
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crisis of over-accumulation is not autonomous, but is in a symbiotic and dialectical

relation with the social and political struggle over the extraction of profit from both

worker and consumer.

Thus, even within an overall neo-liberal strategy, one characteristic of neo-

conservatism (beyond Reaganism/Thatcherism) is that Blair, Bush and Berlusconi

have had to take certain neo-Keynesian compensating measures, although by

restricting these to welfare, health, education, policing and infrastructure rather than

workers rights or any real mode of consumer control, and in rendering welfarism

and state education newly authoritarian, they increase the power of the state rather

than the power of the community. At the same time, they try to ensure that this

power of the state will not itself be exercised in the interest of the community, by

introducing an element of market discipline even within the bureaucratically-

controlled sphere. Here one can discern a certain implicit desire to collapse the

contradictions of the capitalist cycle, and, as it were to square the circle.

It is then arguable that in the phenomenon of neo-conservatism one sees a desire to

minimise any wholesale return to Keynesian measures taken in order to stimulate

demand. Instead, these are taken in a very cautious dose, and combined with a new

regimentation of the population and augmentation of supposed internal and external

threats both of which tend to inhibit the possibility of collective organisation to

protect general economic standards and quality of life. No serious regression to

the Keynesian era is so far envisaged because, as Harvey emphasises, there are now

massively powerful economic interests that would stand to lose by this. Yet the

issue is not simply one of class-power. Even though (as Brenner, Harvey and others
 17

stress) the switch to monetarist and other neo-liberal measures has not truly secured

an increase in the rate of profit (perhaps because of the damage inflicted upon

demand) it has nonetheless arguably ensured that capitalism itself can survive.

2. Neo-Imperialism

If capitalism were simply caught in an endless oscillation between the need to

ensure that there will be buyers of commodities on the one hand, and the need to

extract surplus value on the other, then its existence would always remain

precarious. However, the theorists of imperialism from Rosa Luxembourg through

to Hannah Arendt have always realised, somewhat beyond Marx, that primitive

accumulation is not just the pre-condition for the first establishment of a capitalist

economy, but rather is something ceaselessly resorted to in order to resolve

capitalisms innate contradictions.16 Excess capital can be invested in newly gained

foreign resources; agricultural land can be appropriated for the world market;

tributary payments for military protection can be exacted; monopoly markets for

Western goods can be imposed.

Accordingly, under the neo-imperial conditions that we see today, more-readily

dragooned overseas labour forces can be obliged to undertake much of the old-

fashioned manufacturing, sometimes deploying cheaper out-of-date technology. A

regime of permanent third-world debt in effect restores the tributary payments.

There is also an implicit racist dimension which was once under old imperial

16
Harvey, The New Imperialism
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conditions explicit: some peoples are inherently backwards (superstitious, unfree,

undemocratic etc) and therefore through a feeling of relative superiority, even the

not-so-well-off in the west can be co-opted to the side of Capital. This latent racist

ideology which favours national solidarities in the west also colludes with the need

diagnosed by Luxembourg for capitalism to sustain an extra-capitalist other from

which it can continue to make new depradations. As initial pure seizures, these

involve no capitalist expenditure and so constitute a pure surplus. Indeed, the

natural order itself has now become subject to colonisation: hence it is no accident

that the patenting of crops and the experimentation with their genetic modifications

is especially imposed upon poorer countries.

Hence neo-imperialism, like the increasing authoritarianism of governments, makes

sense as an attempt to break out of the vicious circle of capitalist contradiction: it

makes double sense because the abstract interests of the capitalist system as such

and not simply the greed of the rich must always favour more the squeezing-out of

profits over the stimulation of demand.

At the same time, we must not surrender here to some sort of economism which

would understand neo-imperialism wholly in terms of the needs of the market. Both

Harvey and Brenner agree in avoiding this, and we shall return to this issue

presently.

3. Capitalism as Enclosure of the Sacred

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First of all though, one needs to describe how the market itself is concerned with

terrain and its policing. As Harvey puts it, abstract finance capital, although it now

drives the economy more than ever, becoming increasingly intertwined with

manufacturing capital, and despite the fact that its nominal wealth commands real

power and affluence since it is really believed in, still continues to demand at the

margins a spatial fix. One can endlessly speculate on futures, and up to a point the

measure of these futures is simply the speculative confidence of others, yet

precisely because all material realities and use-values have now been subordinated

to the standard of abstract value (a wholly speculative estimation), the latter must at

the margins always exhibit again its power to exploit matter and to maximise its

possible uses. In other words, matter and power may now be etherealised, but since

it is real physical human bodies who submit to the sway of this etherealisation, and

since etherealisation is itself a process that can never be complete (since

completeness would mean entire evaporation), the litmus test of the degree of

etherealisation and so of successful accumulation of abstract value remains the

capacity to re-commence this process. A dialectic is indeed at work here, which

corresponds to the continuing need of capital for an extra to capital and which

seems to ensure its continuing regress (which dismayed and perplexed Lenin in

England, listening to Joe Chamberlains imperialist propaganda) to primitive

military and police procedures (land seizure, brutalisation, torture and so forth).

Considered in terms of the pure abstraction to which it tends, capitalism is

potentially self-cancelling: maximally extracted profit = zero demand and therefore

an unrealisable, wholly nominal profit. So just for this reason it always has to re-

contaminate itself with a concrete, useful sphere that apparently lies beyond its own
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reality. The more it seeks to escape this reality, the more it will eventually have to

return to it.

Yet there is something that lies deeper than this dialectic, once one has grasped that

it is bleongs to capitalisms own process and is not more fundamentally grounded in

an ontology. This is the fact, wholly missed by Marx, that the material/abstract and

use/exchange value contrasts are entirely internal to capitalist logic as such. It is

here that postmodern thinkers like Jean Baudrillard made real advances which

neo-Marxist thinkers now ignore at their peril.17 For, as Karl Polanyi long ago

acknowledged in The Great Transformation, what capitalism initially accumulates

or encloses is not simply that which serves peoples real needs. Beyond the most

basic level of subsistence the latter is indefinable. What capitalism really encloses,

as Polanyi (here surely echoing his friend the socialist historian and Anglican High

Churchman R.H Tawney) is the sacred, taken in the very broadest sense.18 That is

to say, it seizes both land and people who previously have been considered to

occupy positions, arrangements and roles of social, political, cosmic and religious

as well as merely economic significance. These positions may have been

relatively hierarchical or relatively egalitarian: yet in either case they were

common rather than private, in the modern liberal sense of private. Property was

genuinely conditional on the performance of a certain role rather than absolute;

literally common land was set-aside for the re-production of this specific

community and the sustaining of its way of life; the land for mere subsistence

which for most of the history of the world prior to modernity(as the Catholic

17
See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
177-206; Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production trans Mark Poster (St Louis: Telos, 1975)
18
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston:
Beacon, 2002) 35-44
 21

distributists Chesterton and Belloc rightly pointed out) has been widely distributed

was usually linked to a sustaining of what is proper to the free individual.

Property permitted propriety in the sense of allowing a material basis for the

individuals implicit consent to social processes. (Today by contrast, consent is

supposedly explicit, but almost no-one holds any sanction in terms of free

subsistence that would ground the withholding of consent; and now even the

owning of ones own labour and power to withhold it has been effectively

destroyed.)

In a word, all food, land and personhood in the pre-capitalist era also had

symbolic value, and just for this reason could not be owned absolutely, since the

idea of doing what one likes with ones own is tantamount to de-sacralisation. The

tree that you may, if you like, chop down, the mansion that you may, if you like,

sell, the common land (for meeting and trysting as well as grazing) which you can

just enclose for profit are most essentially de-sacralised realities. It is not simply, as

Marxists still too readily seem to suppose, that agriculture for example was held

back by feudal (or other pre-capitalist) relations of production, it is also the case

that the very idea of an autonomous value for pure wealth as opposed to the

symbolic power of honour, display, generous ostentation and offering to the divine

had yet to be invented.

Once one realises this, then one can see, following Baudrillard, Lyotard and others,

that capitalism turns to abstraction and materialisation in the same gesture. It is not,

as for Marx, that productivity is a kind of ahistorical social transcendental,

 22

which capitalistic fetishisation merely distorts and inhibits. On the contrary,

productivism is rather the sheerly contingent invention (unknown to most of

humanity) of a purely secular and immanent goal which at once parcellises mattter

into the atomically concrete and at the same time evaporates it into thin air. In this

evaporation one gets the mystification of human willing (the construction of the

productive system Marxs reification) and the fetishisation of the commodity as

the embodiment of abstract value. This religion of capitalism is precisely the

symbolic price which the refusal of the symbolic exacts or else it is an extreme

flattened re-coding of the symbolic, if we follow Lyotard in refusing Baudrillards

naturalisation of premodern symbolic cultures.19 As Guy Debord diagnosed, the

fetish has today further evolved into the spectacle whereby the very abstract value

of the commodity seems to have become fused with its appearance and uses and

one gets the cult or iconic object, while at the same time the processes of

accumulation of abstract wealth have seamlessly merged with an endless and

seamless procession of commodified objects and images before our gaze.20 We

become entirely transfixed by the manifestation of our own human workings and

thereby rendered incapable of freely-chosen action.

One may nonetheless quarrel here with Debords still too-modern and Feuerbachian

sense of a natural and spontaneous unalienated spontaneity as desired by the

student rebels of 1968 but only much more ambivalently by their postmodernist

teachers! The quasi-religion of the spectacle is rather the displacement of an earlier

and inevitable projection of human power as image that is required to construct the

domain of the sacred other like the pictures on the walls of the paleolithic caves in

19
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy trans Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum 2004)
20
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle trans Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994)
 23

the Prigord and elsewhere.21 Human making exerts its most strenuous efforts in

exhibiting its relation to the non-human to the animal, natural and supernatural

realms. In this relation human beings are necessarily other to themselves and the

imaged products of reflecting upon this relation must perforce be doubly strange

strange with the force of a revelation since what has emerged from our action was

not initially known to that action.

However, no pernicious estrangement is necessarily involved here, since the images

of the sacred others constitute at once a portal to their realm and tributes offered to

them. In both respects they open the prospect of a return of benefit from the sacred

dimension, such that, precisely in religious terms, alienation cannot really occur:

the human gesture offered is a gesture that is already or potentially re-plenished, an

inspiration already renewed. Thus in the caves at Lascaux one sees depicted the

figure of the sorceror: unlike the animals he is shown masked and front-on: the

cultural master of ceremonies whose mastery returns such that it becomes a very

part of that alien scene which such mastery invokes. And the more the sacred is

envisaged as transcendent, then the more there grows the idea that there is no

competition for scarce resources between the sacred and the human domain; no

zero-sum game being played out between them. Hence the more that the products

of human activity are referred to the totally removed, then the more, paradoxically,

they remain perceived as such products and the more human activity is seen as in

its very exercise renewing itself rather than expending itself in its potential and

unlimited prowess.

21
Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture trans M. and S. Kendall
(New York: Zone, 2005); David Lewis-Williams The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames and Hudson,
2004).
 24

By contrast, the modern capitalist fetishised commodity is truly an alienation of

human power, just because it is like a kind of offering to an abstract (Buddhistic, as

iek says)22 void, which cannot offer to humans any return, and therefore sheerly

removes from us our true property in our persons and our characterised activity. The

measure of alienation here is the idea that we are simply subject to the capitalist

laws of the market which always secretly insist beneath superstitious obfuscations

(as the Scottish and a faction of the Neapolitian Enlightenment saw it). But beyond

Marx the measure is also the very idea that the true human goal is to maximise

productive wealth and power outside any symbolic coding.

Debords notion of the spectacle draws together the concrete thing with abstract

valuation. However, one may venture to suggest that here capitalism eventually

displays what has been its pre-dialectical inner core throughout its history. This core

resides in an initial seizure (primitive accumulation) that is most essentially a de-

sacralisation. Within the sacral, symbolic order, the material and the ideal are

somewhat blended, or cohere at least in a temporary alliance. It is not really the case

that, as for example with the images on the walls of Lascaux, it is only the ideal that

renders sacred. One has, indeed, in this case, a kind of dream-like cinematic

presentation of animals flowing into each other, their limbs seeming to ripple with

the one vital flow under the flickering torchlight. But on the other hand, the

delineation of form itself necessarily causes the individual animal to stand out in

her character which thereby defeats the losses of time, and this is accentuated by the

deployment of bas-relief which lets the body of the animal emerge from the natural

solid shape of the rock-wall.

22
Slavoj iek, Against Human Rights, in NLR 34 2005, 115-134
 25

It is rather secularisation (as accomplished by capital) which prises the ideal and the

material apart. Because such and such a portion of land is now only a portion of

matter it can be sold for a sum which is only an ideal convention. Thus in the initial

act of appropriation, capitalism characteristically divides and sub-divides, today

claiming to own not just crops and plants but even their seeds, and hence the whole

future of the vegetable kingdom as such. But another manifestation of this

materialisation would be the opposite tendency to aggregate: to create for example

bigger and bigger fields which obliterate the personal division of lands into strip-

fields, or else straighter and wider roads which show no regard for ancient sacred

landmarks or significant spiralling ways to pass through the landscape. And a

third would be the tendency to create hybrids through separation and re-

combination, thereby achieving a variety that helps constantly to stimulate the

vegetable and animal marketplace. A fourth would be the trade in species which has

ensured the exoticisation of every pre-given landscape and which, while it can

constitute a benign and beautiful exchange between environments, can often also

disturb the ecology and beauty of locales and can be undertaken for reasons of

prestige and aggrandisement.

Conversely, everything reduced to mere parcels of matter, everything divided,

aggregated, re-arranged and re-distributed, must be also subject to a single trans-

geometric mathesis which is that of capital value. And one could even go further:

the line that divides the earth, or circles it or arranges for it a path of movement,

surely both materialises and abstracts all at once. As Carl Schmitt pointed out,

citing Giambattista Vico, the first nomos was the nomos of the earth, the division of

the fields that was co-eval with the delineation of burial grounds and the securing of
 26

the continuance of the landed names of the dead through rites of legal connubium,

guaranteed by a vengeful providence.23 In the case of capitalism, the secularising

gesture means precisely that nomos loses its link both with the dead (who have no

value, save possibly as corpses) and with a providentially guarded life, since the

human future is now entrusted wholly to contract and absolute freedom of

ownership. Nomos is now a merely human measure, its transcendent dimension

reduced to the legal echoing of the division of the fields. But for such divisions to

hold, they must be (as Foucault realised) at once material and yet ideal, but now

according to a logic of representation and not one of symbolic participation. The

legal divisions simply indicate the material ones; the material ones only remain

because they are also legal ones within a reciprocal hollow echo. But matter does

not here show forth a significant ideally characterised form like a kind of landed

heraldry, and nor does the ideal law partially exemplify and develop itself in its

material laying-out.

Because the ideal is no longer essentially mediated by matter but only represents it,

it can indeed algebraically take-off from the material base in order to represent

fictional entities and finally to represent nothing whatsoever save the confidence or

gullibility of another trader in futures. Symmetrically, desacralised land falls under

an absolute property right (you may do what you like with your own so long as it

does not impinge upon the property or lives of others) whose de iure is thereby

aporetically inscribed in a rightless de facto. The initial occupier held no right to the

land; this was only later erected by custom upon seizure. Thereby an implicit

licence to theft is formally opened up within the very legal establishment of

23
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum trans
G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003), 47
 27

property itself: in fact, material theft is the equal and opposite reaction to the

growth of abstract capital.

To grasp just why these two processes fly apart and yet remain dialectically linked,

despite their joint non-dialectical grounding in the drawing of the abstract line of

mathesis upon the face of the earth, one must first consider understand how

capitalism (it would seem) does not only consist in the act of desacralising

appropriation alone: this would indeed appear to be only its condition of

possibility.

But prior even to that understanding one must initially recognise that this condition

itself involves not simply the de-sacralisation of the land but also the

desacralisation of the human person. The latter process is not necessarily involved

in slavery, since the duty of the master to care for the life of the slave may be

absolute, but it is involved in capitalism, since here one has the notion of an

economy (that process for which we depend for our material well-being) which in

principle might leave a human individual to die if his life were no longer of any

immediate economic worth under such a rubric, the humanitarianism of

welfare operations always lag behind a much more fundamental decision not to

bother about the humanitarian at all. In other words, human life has ceased to be

regarded as sacred and absolute.

Then one must see that, in the case of human life, one has a reserve of creative

potential that is now subject to the same process of representational division

between ideal and material as is the case with the body of the land. On the one hand
 28

the power of the sorceror is reduced to the material potential of the human body.

On the other hand, the potential of the human mind is no longer referred to the

sanctity of the human body nor to geomantic inscription. Instead, it is referred at

once to its capacity to measure and re-arrange the land, and at the same time to the

ever-more abstract formulae which are taken to stand-for this process. Where once

upon-a-time the sorceror (king, priest, prophet and so forth) still inducted into

various degrees of mystery his apprentices (however regrettably subordinate they

may have remained) and had himself to resume into his own extended body all their

material involvements to which he could not be indifferent, now the modern

capitalist class reserves to itself entirely the power of the mind in its

architectonically controlling aspect. Meanwhile it appropriates the labour,

intellectual as well as material, of the other classes, and measures this labour only

in terms of the production of material things as quantifiable items which can also be

accorded an abstract valuation. Here the separation between ideal and material is

realised by class division, since every human individual potentially synthesises the

dynamic power of the ideal and the dynamic power of the material. In consequence,

the schizophrenia of the representational order is here only possible on a collective

scale, arbitrarily contrived. One class is assigned a more material existence, the

other a more abstract and elevated one. It follows that, in electing a non-religious

materialism as somehow more in the interests of workers than modes of

idealism, Marxism is simply repeating a coding that is endemic to capitalism

itself. But another way of putting this would be to say that by being blind at this

point, Marx himself was simply not Marxist enough. Here again, with respect to

persons, the sundering of the material from the ideal (as well as vice-versa, to which

Marx to his credit was certainly alert and not here crudely reductionist) is the work
 29

of primitive accumulation.

However and here we start to see what perhaps must be added to primitive

accumulation the division of humanity into classes, because arbitrary, is not

stable. The apprentices remain sorcerers, as Hegel saw. For the abstract class to

appropriate their skills, it is necessary to subject the entire body of workers

themselves to a re-application to the schizophrenic logic of representation. So on

the one hand all the craft and intellectual skills of workers must be directed to

wholly material ends and any production of sacred items existing for their own

sake or even in order to be used up as offerings, must be ruled out, save with

respect to items that religious people are prepared to buy on the market. But the

latter as such is only concerned with their materiality their sheer palpability and

capacity to be divided, augmented, re-arranged and transported. At the same time,

the producers of these items must likewise be considered only as bodies, or else as

purely pragmatic minds, and need only be paid insofar as and for so long as it is

important to sustain them as part of the means of re-production or else as potential

consumers of material commodities.

Here again, it would be a mistake to imagine that capitalism only abstracts.

Certainly, within capitalism, abstract fictions have and have to have real power and

this is no ideological illusion for Marx, as iek has stressed.24 On the other hand,

also within the market capitalism continues to materialise. It strives to increase

the range of the palpable, the manipulable, the ingenious and the spectacular, even

though it acknowledges no symbolic density which could truly value anything for

its specific beauty. No, its mode of particularising is always more or less
24
iek, Against Human Rights
 30

quantifiable and hence the only aspect of the particular which interests it is the way

that the distinctive and unique paradoxically permits identical repetition: a million

mini-coopers, all of them immediately recognisable and unmistakeable.

Particularisation allows an infinite number of novel products to merge and at the

same time permits their mass production. But this is not the same sacred interest

in the particular as might be expressed say by the production of always unique and

beautiful, functional, locally-adapted and environmentally friendly vehicles in local

village garages. Rather, it is concerned with the power of the singular to mesmerise

through endless repetition and variation only for the sake of such a spectacle. Thus

once again, the secularising materialisation of the body of the earth means, within

the market, just as it means when establishing its space of operation, ever-increased

miniaturisation, ever-increased maximisation, ever-new hybrids (the phone-camera

etc) ever longer and faster transitions virtually by sound and light-wave or else

really by car and plane.

Hence while in one sense capitalism does not care from what it may make a profit,

in another sense it is forced to care, else there would be no profits at all, and also

because part of its very purpose is indeed to reduce to the material is order to

mesmerise by virtue of the spectacle of technology as well as to control through the

representational power of money. It is precisely in recognising how capitalism

materialises, just to the measure that it inversely abstracts, that one can come to

understand, beyond Marx, the way in which technologisation (seen as the social

dominance of the capacities to predict and control) is intrinsic to the logic of

capitalism and becomes wholly questionable outside that logic.

 31

Yet at the same time, in order to continue to hold at bay the symbolic sacred,

capitalism must strictly police the line between the material and the abstract. This

happens in several ways: the division between business and finance capital (if they

are today more mingled, the line between them still gets reproduced and redefined

in new ways); the induced schizophrenia whereby people disconnect themselves as

workers from themselves as consumers, and in addition themselves as workers from

themselves as sustaining and re-producing that human life which allows them to be

workers at all (the triple division of mall, office and house). Above all, any notions

of just wage and just price which would symbolise the sacred worth of roles

and items for a specific society must be abandoned, in order to ensure the extraction

of surplus labour from the worker and surplus desire from the consumer in order to

engender that surplus value which is capitalisms lifeblood. The worker must

receive a reward related only to his own and societys material reproduction; the

consumer pay a price that is acceptable merely in terms of her private material

need. In either case, a surplus is silently and cynically extracted is order to sustain,

by an alchemical shift, the realm of purely nominal accumulation: in this invisible

violence which yet deals actual death, the sundering of matter from idea is

continuously re-accomplished.

So far, I have suggested that primitive accumulation (enclosure of all kinds) and

originary appropriation (submission of the enclosed to profit-generating

structures) are only pre-conditions of capitalism, although ones which (according

to Luxembourg, Arendt and Harvey) have to be newly-resorted to from time to time

to cope with capitalisms inner contradictions. The business of surplus extraction,

on the other hand, is internal to capitalism once it is up and running, and concerns
 32

depradations from participants within the capitalist process rather than from those

who precede it in time or lie outside it in space. However, following the

terminology of Peter Hallward, this may be to think too much in terms of

singularities capital contrasted with what lies outside it -- and too little in

terms of specificities which always exist only within the dynamic interaction of

relations to other specific realities.25 Lands forced to render tribute and

appropriated labour, even if they are not immediately subject to capitalist rent and

wage-relations, have still been brought within the capitalist orbit. Furthermore, their

remaining material, concrete and still relatively politically-coerced domains might

be just one extreme mode in which capitalism materialises out of the inner

necessities of its own system. Relatively antique economies, polities and

technologies would then be sustained precisely because they are redefined in

sheerly material terms only as backward and simple (and not as socially and

aesthetically ingenious) and this backwardness saves on expenditure for certain

purposes while also ideologically functioning to sustain the poorer of the First

world in a collective sense of superiority or as potentially threatened by a recursion

of the primitive.

So may it not be the case that the required outside of capitalism lies also entirely

within it, since, as we have just seen, it is really produced and re-produced by it?

This would mean that primitive accumulation is always going on even within

capitalist societies, as indeed, David Harvey partially suggests. After all, ever-new

aspects of our lives get commodified: health, beauty, sex, personal relationships,

leisure, the environment for example. But more radically one can suggest that the

25
Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester:
Manchester UP 2001)
 33

very extraction of surplus value, class division and the division between different

capitals are all always already there from the very outset of appropriation as

both implied by it and as enabling it to occur. We have already seen just why, by

explaining how all these things follow from the original undoing of the symbolic

uniting of matter and idea, and yet inversely permit it to occur. All the time the

worker is being again originally appropriated because his sacral worth as living

human being is being negated and his creative construction of meaning is being

sundered from his creative modification of the material earth. (If, with Lyotard, one

denies that this is less natural, it still seems to depart from most human practice

and arguably involves an unusually sophisticated mode of contrivance.) Likewise,

all the time the consumer is being originally appropriated, because her desire for

material items (the ever new, the ever more cute) is being sundered from her

assent to ideal collective values. Finally, all the time the land is being originally

appropriated because more and more of matter (from the microscopic to the

macroscopic) must be at once reduced to the manipulable and the quantifiable and

at the same time given a price-tag. The privatisation of natural resources water,

gas and in effect air are only the most dramatic instances of this.

And here, at last, we can see the reason why abstraction tends to outrun its spatial

fixing in land, while inversely the ownership of land tends to revert in various

modes to criminal or military theft. At the very point where matter and value are

joined by the geometrically inscribed line, and the second is referred to the first by

representation, they are also set free from each other, because cultural matter (by

contrast with the symbolic regime) is now deemed to exist without ideal valuation,

while conversely a system of tokens already possesses a logic that is independent of

 34

what they are supposed to stand for. On the one hand, legitimate title-deed is

supposed to bind together the ideal with the real, yet if the deed represents land,

then it represent seizure which escapes legal entitlement. Hence the modern

economic, like Schmitts political, is grounded in the instance of the exception,

such that entitlement and contract, which are supposed pacifically to mediate all

conflict, are secretly a licence to re-instigate conflict if one can get away with it. On

the other hand, if ownership is referable only to a generally accepted fiction and not

in any way to ones association with a terrain, or the way a person has inscribed

himself upon it and the way it has in turn affected his person, then this already

tends to promote the ownership of more and more nominal property which, with no

heraldic trace whatsoever, will still confer upon its possessor both prestige and

power.

From the outset then, pure matter and pure abstraction part company, just because

they are at once independent and yet mutually-establishing. It is this indeed which

constitutes a dialectically contradictory process, even though it ensures no

necessary eventual collapse. The only point now of matter is to enjoy more of it,

and likewise with abstract value. However, since these two aspects are mutually

self-referring such that the circle of representation is always closed, one or other

aspect must take the initiative to ensure increase, yet matter cannot legitimately do

so and abstraction cannot sustainably do so without needing at some point to resort

back to Harveys spatial fix. So after the beginning, abstraction rather than

materiality must take the lead in order to avoid anarchy, and it can ensure an

abstract increase through the productive exploitation of the land and other material

resources, combined with appropriation of material labour. Yet the resulting decline
 35

of demand will lead, as we have seen, to a piling up of unrealisable abstraction and

this will require a switch in strategy which reduces the exploitation of labour and

resorts instead to the appropriation of consumers material desire and fascination

with the spectacle. The sheer difficulties of sustaining this balancing-act, which

never arrives at equilibrium, will always encourage new resorts to primitive

accumulation that echo the first acts of depradation which allowed capitalism to

come into being in the first place.

However, as we have now seen, one perhaps does not need to place a firm line

between original appropriation and the extraction of surplus value. This implies

that the constant assault upon the worker and the consumer and the environment is

forever, through a more or less subtle violence, physically coercing the entire

natural world (through scarcity, the moving of populations, the moving of factories,

the barrage of advertising, the sudden change in the products offered, the

undemocractic decisions taken to totally alter local ecologies) just as surely as it is

coaxing the human spirit into subordinating its bodily and emotional needs to those

of abstract worth.

If, then, capitalism is more-or-less definable by acts of primitive accumulation and

originary appropriation which simultaneously materialise and idealise, then it is

also definable as descacralisation, as almost co-terminous with the process of

secularisation as such, even though this is only achievable in the name of a certain

strange quasi-religiosity (as Marx half saw), since there is no natural coding of our

surrounding reality. This is shown by the fact that pure matter tends to be

evacuated of any form or solidity and so to converge upon its opposite, the sheerly
 36

abstract which must itself inversely always be pinned down by signs which

require material containers for their sustainability, and then buildings to house these

containers like the twin towers, which permitted a giant segment of abstract value

to be after all knocked over. The combined conjunction and yet independence of

sundered matter and spirit within the regime of representation constitutes, in fact,

the heart of the capitalist religion: in terms of the mystical worship of unreal

abstraction it is a Protestant religion of the book, and yet this very worship at the

same time (as the Scottish novel from Hogg through Stevenson to Buchan has

recognised) unleashes an undercurrent of left-handed demonically magical

religion which exalts the power of images and objects to instill happiness and win

favours: the spectacle fuses both together by cinematically exhibiting the flow of

passing images whose doom of fall from fashion reflects the passage into value

which requires ceaseless destruction as well as ceaseless construction.

The robbery of human resources by capital is therefore always an assault upon the

sacred. And since primitive accumulation is always definitory of capitalist process,

then the re-establishment of the profane is likewise germane to this process. One

should perhaps not then be surprised if it remains even today precarious. And nor

can one legitimately protest here that much arbitrary power is exercised in the name

of consecrations and mystifications. Of course this is true, but to imagine that

therefore the answer is demystify! is naively to underrate the enormity of our

human dilemma. For the problem seems to be that what may often mystify also

enshrines what most of us recognise as human value. To demystify is only to

fantasise and mystically valorise a merely geometric earth and a merely algebraic

ideality. It is a licence for terror, as a secular economy and then, later in the day,
 37

secular politics have so abundantly demonstrated during the course of the 20thC,

well in excess of any terror inflicted by religion.

4. The Market and the State

So far it has been shown that the capitalistic economic sphere has broader

dimensions than sometimes acknowledged: an intrinsic relation to violent seizure,

to the abolition of the sacred and to a technological hegemony. This, however, does

not mean that the economic is wholly determining, even within these broader terms,

and even within a capitalist era.

The issue has been well delineated by both Harvey and Brenner. Capitalism

requires a police protection of concrete and abstract private property, while it

requires a military protection for primary material seizures which helps to generate

colonialism. This does not, however, mean that the state merely operates in the

interest of capital, still less of the bourgeoisie, because the specifically post-

medieval sovereign state not only preceded the emergence of capitalism stricto

sensu, but also originated within the confines of a different mode of production

which one may describe as quasi-feudal absolutism and which had not as yet fully

separated out political from economic modes of coercion.26 This ancien regime has

left many traces which survived long into the capitalist era and which survive even

now although, contrary to most received opinion they may survive much more in

France than in Britain, because Brenner and Benno Teschke have shown how the

26
See Benno Teschke, the Myth of 1648
 38

British aristocracy has survived precisely because it drove the transition from an

absolutist to a capitalist order and by the end of the 17th C had made the Crown also

subject to the needs of this order.

Surviving traces of the ancient rgime include elements of corporatism, state

economic planning, an interplay between political and economic power via the

systematic use of bribes (Italy for example), and neo-mercantilism in international

relations. Above all though, this survival concerns the continuing protection and

promotion of national economies which, as has already been mentioned, helps to

foment over-accumulation. Capitalism itself tends to require that the state confine

itself to a political function, in the sense of guaranteeing a legal and police

framework for ensuring the operation of freedom according to liberal and

capitalistic norms. Potentially, this could suggest the withering away of the state in

favour of some sort of transnational authority which might commence as the

imperial extension of the rule of one national power. Arguably, this has been

happening for a long time in the case of the United States: it has gradually

identified itself with global capitalism as such, both in terms of cultural spectacle

and of various economically regulative NGOs like the world bank and the IMF.

Only more sporadically does it turn to military imperialisms and basically for

economic and geo-strategic reasons rather than for the sake of establishing colonies.

But all the same, the geo-strategic is in excess of the economic, as many

businessmen often bewail and this betrays the lingering impact of the pre-

capitalist state-formation.
 39

Shorn of its link to economic power through the sale of offices and the farming out

of its own political authority to local landed interests, the modern state can in a

sense be defined as a head now rent from its own organic body. Yet for this, as

Hobbes anticipated (for the frontispiece to Leviathan surely depicts a robot) it

requires a new artificial body, which is a bureaucratic system designed not merely

to protect personal, property and contractual rights, but also to maximise the utility

of its subjects. In one sense this is mercantilist: the US is US plc; the UK is UK

plc etc, but in another it the operation of a racist or else a territorial atavism. For

when the human person or else the surface of the earth has ceased to be sacred in a

universal sense that is also refracted through particularity and locality, then these

material items which capitalism already fetishes (the tall gangly white girl; the

vastness of the American landscape and so forth) become at a further extreme racial

or geographic absolutes which possess a quasi-religious status, yet are supposedly

backed by science. Here in fact, ever since Kant, as Michael Mack has shown,

enlightenment and atavism collude, because the prevalence of reason and even its

remaining within critical bounds is linked to favourable geographical position and

climate combined with a supposed strong biological legacy.27

This further extreme appears to be extra-economic, precisely because the state will

tend to defend its economic power even where market forces suggest that it should

simply accept decline. The United States is unlikely to go quietly into any

hegemonic good-night which involves the dawning of China as the new major

economic power. One might nonetheless try to argue that the nationalistic state is

itself one of the fetishised commodities produced by market forces: a re-cycled

27
Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: the Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German-
Jewish Responses (Chicago: Chicago UP 2003)
 40

heritage image of nostalgia which can still generate enormous profits. Perhaps an

element of faade here is exposed at the point where citizens are increasingly

reluctant actually to shed blood for their country: at this point they

seem to wish to exit the political theme-park of nationhood.

So while in one sense indeed, the nation-state is a survival from an earlier mode of

production which, unlike the anarchy of capitalism, was also intrinsically a mode

of politics, in another sense this anachronism is also part of capitalisms

reproduction of heritage, whose virtual spectacle, which still involves the

shedding of much real blood, is a source of profitability. Although this survival

intensifies contradiction, since it tends to engender further over-accumulation, this

doubling of contradiction is matched by an equal doubling of competitiveness

which, by adding the rivalry between national prides to the rivalry between firms,

also augments the capitalist dynamic.

This way of regarding things now points us in an interesting direction. The

advantage of Marxism, as opposed to postmodern analyses, would seem to be the

way it offers a grasp of the overall logic of societies and a single diagnosis of

oppression which thereby allows a concerted resistance to this in the name of

greater justice. But the disadvantage would appear to be the surrender to an

economic determinism which only fits the facts through an obvious forcing. It

would seem that it is better to talk about the diverse structures of potential

oppression: about the state, about ethnicity, about gender and about the relative

autonomy of the imaginary. Yet suppose that there is a third option here and that,

following Bataille (yet without his death cult), we try to fuse Marx with Mauss in
 41

order to diagnose for the various historical phases the operation of a general

economy or in other words the entire logic of both production and exchange in

every sphere economic, political, religious, reproductive, erotic, imaginary, and so

forth (although the distinction of spheres is itself a historical upshot and will only

sometime apply). This idea was also captured by Carl Schmitt when he spoke of the

way in which nomos concerns at once economic production within fields;

economic distribution as the division of fields and inseparable abstract political

law as the writing which guarantees and permits the policing of these fields.28

One should not, however, regard this logic as generically univocal, nor as readily

specificable. On the contrary, it is a somewhat elusive, analogical logic, only

sustained in its universality by its diversely specific instantiations.

So, for example, as Perry Anderson allows, within the feudal era the political is in no

sense (as it is for capitalism) superstructural, since here political power does not

merely protect property, but rather itself directly extracts economic value from

property through coercion and rent in kind or in terms of service and taxation.29 Yet

with Anderson as with Brenner and Teschke, there is still some failure not to see the

full consequences of this by talking as if this extraction of value were still primarily

economic and as if an increase in economic power were still the primarily motivating

force. But if we are talking about the economico-political, the extraction of value is

equally a mutual complicity in the rendering of prestige and tributary gift-offering,

such that not only is economic extraction brought about politically, but also this

extraction subserves the goal of accumulation of the honour of feudal ruling which
28
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 42-3
29
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974); Lineages of the
Absolutist State (London: verso, 1974); Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 46-116
 42

is to do with a flamboyant expenditure, the offering of paternalistic protection and

the sustaining of accepted norms of distributive justice in a way that capital

accumulation is not.

In this fashion, the feudal economy was not an economy in the restricted sense, but

a mode of general economy which held the material and the symbolic together. It is

rather capitalism which invents a distinct economic realm, indifferent to the

political standards of the just wage and the just price, to the content of what is

produced and to the mode of government which secures the freedom of the market.

However, one could say that capitalism is only an economy in the restricted sense to

the extent that it abstracts and sends meaning as value off on its own independent

trajectory. In another sense capitalism remains paradoxically a general economy (of

the totality of bio-cultural production and exchange, material and symbolic)

because, as we have seen, it only abstracts by simultaneously materialising and so

also releasing the realm of pure technology and also pure state power which is then

likely to take a biopolitical, racist mode. The very gesture which sunders the abstract

from the material and so seems to destroy the governance of a general economy can

itself only sustain the reality of the reduced material and the sheerly ideal by making

the two refer transcendentally and in general to each other, even though they are no

longer genuinely and unmediably united -- in the fashion of the form and matter of

an Aristotelian substance -- in any specific instance.

It then follows that what lies outside of capitalism yet is necessary to it namely

material terrain, technology and the nation-state -- nevertheless lies within

capitalism regarded as a paradoxical mode of general economy. This idea of a

 43

paradoxical general economy precisely concurs with the idea of capitalism as a

quasi-religion.

From this third perspective of general economy (beyond both Marxism and post-

structuralism) the possibility then opens out of re-capturing a general diagnosis and a

general ground for resistance, without surrendering to economic reductionism. At the

same time plural sites of struggle (economy, race, gender, species, religion,

environment) are neither singularised nor totally fused together. Ultimately they can

be logically linked in terms of the operation of an analogical general economy which

in Lacanian terms (though this is not at all necessarily to accept the way Lacan

thought these terms were related) concerns the genesis and circulation at once of the

real (the material), the symbolic (orders of coding) and the imaginary (characteristic

modes of visual picturing and aural patterning).

In this way the economic as general can be seen indeed as primarily determining,

but no longer in any foundationalist sense. Every generally economic regime rests

upon nothing except the mysterious blend of contingent human decision, changing

natural circumstances and the unforeseeable and still contingent yet retrospectively

logical process of unfolding which results from their combination. Hegel and Marx

were wrong in sometimes supposing that mere negative collapses of chronically

contradictory logics themselves tended to determine the instauration of a new logical

regime. For although there are always negative constraints operating here, there are

also always a myriad possible positive responses, and in consequence this

instauration is an act of sheerly contingent positive invention. Hence capitalism was

in no sense always on the agenda of human history and it is notable that

 44

sophisticated neo-Marxist historians like Benno Teschke break with Marx more than

they concede in not only asserting but also in brilliantly demonstrating, just how

capitalism emerged in a set of peculiar circumstances and a unique set of responses

to these circumstances not at first in Europe in general, but in the island of Great

Britain alone.

Nevertheless, one has more of an element of narratable transition here than is the

case, say, with Foucaults succeeding regimes of discourse. For while Foucault

perhaps best of all grasped the mutual implication of the abstract and the concrete

(justice, for example, means at once laws on paper and prisons on the ground), he

did not adequately explore the fact that, even within general economies of material-

ideal fusion, there will always be tendencies for these aspects to fly apart, since on

the one hand the material environment (drought, plague, soil exhaustion etc) and the

relatively material classes (peasants and lords) exert their own pressures, and on the

other hand the more abstracted dimension of the symbolic order (writing and the

classes involved in this) always exerts its own pressures also. It is just for this

reason that one can trace the shifts between economies: developments in either

material relations or dominant mentalities may place a strain upon the general

economic equilibrium, and then the respective other spheres must adjust either

partially in order to sustain an existing general economy, or drastically in order to

engender a new one. So for example, in late medieval Britain, a newly invented

category of absolute private dominium had to be deployed to deal with the peasants

loss of their freehold and common property (tied to specific expectations of use and

social role) in the wake of the Black Death. Here the material dimension took the

lead. Yet in the case of the Reformation and the accompanying rise of state ideology
 45

it was the opposite way round; here the ideological fact of the division of

Christendom required new economic and political orders in the more material

domain: the contingent responses included mercantilism, a more formalistic ius

gentium and a new tying of the clergy to functions of state bureaucracy and

propaganda.

The state function then, lies within capitalism regarded as a general economy. It is an

aspect of its tendency to materialise. On the other hand, there is nothing fixed

about capitalisms production of the nation-state as a fetishised heritage commodity,

since it is indeed an archaism. It is clear that new trans-national state functions are in

fact emerging in response to extreme material pressures to do with globalisation and

the eroding of borders. The keeping of order now seems to require some sort of

single global authority and once again, as in the Middle Ages, police and military

actions, domestic and foreign affairs, cease to be distinct. If, indeed, the specifically

modern sovereign state has to be defined, as Schmitt argued, as a local posse of

somewhat enforced friendship in the face of an actual or potential foe, then it is not

surprising that the new transnational virtual state, guaranteed by the power of one

nation, the United States, which is thereby able (falsely) to pose as an old-fashioned

Hobbesian state, requires a permanent latent enemy, the terrorist who is, for

perfectly logical reasons, neither soldier nor criminal, neither a justus hostis subject

to the laws of war, nor a criminal who still has a responsible mind and vulnerable

body to be respected, subject to the laws of peace. Instead, as Giorgio Agamben has

divulged, we have the semi-feral homo sacer who may be tortured outside all law,

international or domestic, in a no-mans land (Guantanamo Bay and other sites)

because he has been supposedly taken-over by the inhuman power of fanatical

 46

religion. Because he cannot, it is supposed, rationally have chosen this, he does not

have the perversely exercised responsibility of the criminal, nor yet the alien

responsibility of the enemy. But unlike other lunatics, he is more than a danger just

to himself or immediate others: instead, he represents a contagion of lunacy which

threatens liberal humanity as such, because it threatens the monopoly upon power of

the nation-state and the newly merging super-state. He is therefore a manifestation of

a virus to be eradicated, no longer human at all.

And this of course demonstrates that, within the capitalist general economy, no

purely natural, much less supernaturally orientated humanity, is recognised at all.

This is now for the first time fully shown up, because the outside within the

capitalist order is no longer a between or an alien on the high seas or over in

another country. Instead, once one has a seamlessly global state-market, the outside

beyond even the material extra (which is really within capitalism taken as a general

economy) is a truly absolute outside that is nowhere but also potentially everywhere.

A refusal of the system that can only be seen as the nihilistic contagion of insanity.

5. The New Resistance to Enclosure

Globalisation and the drive to a super-state or securitystate (whatever

unpredictable forms this may come to take) can be seen more radically as the

outcome of the materialising aspect of capitalism which tends to aggregation; at

the same time we see a greater and greater colonisation of the microscopic and

these are of course but two aspects of a single process. Looked at this way, one sees
 47

still more acutely the need for a new (and impossible) radical exteriority. For if the

nation-state needs an enemy, then the corporate agglomeration needs competitors

and other giant collaborators. The latent tendency toward one firm as well as

towards one state (even though this is never likely to be realised) implies that

labour cannot so easily be enticed with relative favours, but rather is once again

more directly and in a sense politicallycontrolled, since there is no longer any real

market alternative (nowhere else now to run to or to turn to) for employee or

consumer. Refusal now is likewise is liable to take on a more absolute and global

political form: as David Harvey notes, contemporary struggles are less over relative

wage and working conditions as over attempts to resist further enclosures of whole

ways of life. Hence they tend to occur in areas still on the margins of the

globalising process (South America and India: resistance to crop-patenting, ending

of Coca production, dam projects etc) but can nonetheless enlist to some degree the

solidarity of concerned consumers in the richer parts of the world thus

globalisation also permits the possibility of world-networks linking worker with

consumer co-operatives. Yet it is more than likely that these modes of resistance

will themselves get increasingly tarred with the terrorist brush by the painters of the

spectacle of opinion.

At this point we can re-invoke the notion that capitalism, considered as a general

economy, is also a quasi-religion which is primarily constituted not just by a

continuous primitive accumulation, but also by a continuous enclosure of the

sacred what it does is precisely to violate places which were seen as

communicating with the divine to the measure that they also provided humans with

material gifts. These places are divided into matter and value according to a new
 48

mystery of mutual transcendental representation. Thus today the only persisting

struggles against capital are in some measure struggles to protect sacrality and often

include specifically religious dimensions. This is true above all of many battles

fought by muslims, in Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, completely outside any

terroristic involvement, in the name of a more traditional sacral economy which

would respect social questions of what is truly good to produce and at what relative

market value, which should reflect also moral value.

So just as capitalism has not simply gone back to original appropriation, since it

never went away, so likewise the contemporary resistance to enclosure and to

desacralisation is not simply recidivist. The left tends to be ambivalent about such

opposition, worrying that it is resistant to progress. Here though, one needs to

insist that pre-capitalist modes of production were very diverse, sometimes

relatively more egalitarian, sometimes more hierarchical and in the case of the

feudal general economy a complex blend of both as medieval historians like

Susan Reynolds have increasingly pointed out.30 It can certainly be recognised that

liberalism and capitalism have achieved much negative good in sweeping away

unfair feudal privileges and (to a degree) unconfining people from allotted roles

that did not suit their talents. Ascription to abstract negative freedom has

undoubtedly to a degree helped to unleash a real creative freedom. But to see these

things as aspects of a dialectically necessary phase is a mistake: only in England, as

Brenner and Teschke have shown, did the serfs struggle against bondage

inadvertently cause them also to lose their subsistence property and so to become

the wage-labourers of tenant farmers renting in turn from gentry and aristocrats

who had now become absolute property owners. Elsewhere in Europe the same
30
Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: OUP 1994)
 49

liberation from serfdom did not lead to direct landlord appropriation of peasant

property and common land, but rather to a replacement of feudal dues in labour,

kind or money with taxes to the King who became far more than before the ultimate

eminent landlord, just as responsibilities accruing upon lordly fiefdoms were

replaced by bought offices. This process still quasi-officially linked landownership

with administration of the law and monarchic decree, for all the attempts of the

French kings, in particular, to rule more directly and politically by establishing a

proper modern bureaucracy administered by intendants (in fact many of the latter

were also landed noblesse de robe holders of bought office). As Brenner and

Teschke argue, whereas the English revolutions of the 17th C were (for their

revisionary Marxist reading, against that of Christopher Hill) indeed linked to the

triumph of a capitalism that was first of all agrarian in character, the much later

French revolution was not as yet fully capitalist, since it concerned mainly a seizure

by the tiers etat from the Crown and the aristocracy of a power that remained

economico-political in character and which confirmed the peasantry in their holding

of subsistence property. France like the rest of Europe they contend, was only later

forced to adopt a fully capitalist and industrial economy under the pressure of

British and then American success in achieving global political dominance on a

capitalist and subsequently imperialist basis. 31

Hence there are real reasons for arguing that capitalism, in the full sense of a

combination of usurious monetary practice and absolute private property with the

extraction of surplus economic value (this being the element missing in the earlier

French case) need never have happened. Royal and then bourgeois absolutism

31
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 249-71
 50

might have evolved in different directions, including the direct transition to some

form of socialism.

But if the specifically capitalist mode of original appropriation might never have

occurred ( and even to this day one can see how this impinges far less upon

continental Europe than upon Britain or the United States), it tends, once it has

occurred, to be very difficult to reverse. It is the very heart of the modern process

as a destructive process. Once the old sacred has departed, only the new quasi-

sacred is available as the logic of anarchy which can alone inhibit anarchy. For just

this reason capitalism has not in the end advanced towards socialism (especially in

the United States) and social democracy has become confined to smaller and more

marginal states whose example probably cannot be replicated elsewhere. Rather,

successful resistance to capitalism has mainly been chartist in character: in China

and Cuba and elsewhere a traditional agricultural way of life was rendered

somewhat more egalitarian and democratic but was also preserved. Even in the

USSR this non-enclosing and protecting applied for many elements of society

and culture (Ballet, music, literature and film for example) while enforced

collectivisation and industrialisation amounted on the whole not to real socialisation

but to direct exploitation of labour by the state for the augmentation of its own

power and wealth and that of its functionaries.

So in this sense the new resistance to enclosure defined by Harvey and others is

nothing new: successful socialism has always been conservative in that it has

necessarily only been able to build upon inherited sacred values, since these alone

symbolically fuse matter and the ideal, thereby posing the only possible alternative
 51

to mere exchange value, whose other phase (as Baudrillard divulged) was pure use-

value seen as production for its own sake. This means that the route to socialism

lies not only not necessarily through capitalism, but rather not at all through

capitalis. Instead it lies through the bending of inherited sacral orders in more

egalitarian directions, augmenting certain more democratic, participatory elements

which are usually already there to some degree. The whig logic of most of the left

simply does not work, precisely because capitalism, when envisaged as the

progressive dynamic of history, is by and large irreversible: one can only build

upon what it has not yet ravaged, or as with various co-operative movements and to

a degree certain valid state ownerships and collective endeavours (utilities, primary

resources, health and education) try to construct new domains of symbolic value.

It is here that one can see the ultimate logic of the anti-globalisation movement.

Capitalism, as we have seen, urges towards the global as material agglomeration. It

equally drives towards pure finance and the abstraction also of the product as

information (and then the fusing even of abstract capital and abstract product) as

part of its innate impulse towards the empty notion. Finally, in the 21st C, a single

globe is wreathed by a shadowy, also single, but infinitely labyrinthine virtual

reality where all upon the surface of the earth can meet all others in a timeless day

that is really the twilight of forever postponed actual encounter. For this reason,

Giovanni Arrighi is probably wrong to see the financialisation of the US economy

as only the latest instance of a perennial cycle of long duration, whereby the

initially landed or productive capital of a single hegemonic power increasingly

switches to finance in a way that portends decline in the face of a still larger power

able more to invest in production and to sustain military defence through force of
 52

numbers.32 For while indeed, one cannot predict the ultimate effect of China and

Indias huge economic and military potential, it would rather seem (by contrast with

the past cases of Genoa and Holland) that the United States remains dominant

precisely because it is able to combine the maximum abstract hold on the markets

with the maximum material military policing of the globe. Arrighis comparison

with late imperial Britain would appear to be more relevant, but Britains earlier

similar move towards both finance and empire deployed far smaller military

resources (even in terms of its period) with a far weaker monopoly upon power, and

used up far more energy in administering actual colonies. Most decisively, its

terminus was far from inevitable, but was brought about through the final

catastrophic collapse of its long-standing policy of sustaining a balance of powers

in mainland Europe. Only after exhaustion in two World Wars did Britains relative

backwardness in the productive sphere after the 1880s come to be for a time a

definite liability.

The anti-globalisation movement therefore identifies correctly its future targets:

militarization of the globe by a single power; continued depradation of the sacred

earth; the control of the world by finance. Resistance to this can only mean trying to

reclaim meanings and practices which are humanly graspable, and this means local

meanings and practices. If these nonetheless have necessarily, and today still more,

always been intertwined with the meanings of other localities, then this implies the

need to form a counter-global network that would be, not Hardt and Negris

spontaneous emergence of order from sheerly diverse singularities, but rather the

constant attempt to forge real relations through negotiations of shared value in the

32
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth-Century; Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 133-8
 53

just exchange of gifts which is to say, of what may be recognised as real human

benefits.33

6. Globalization, the Economic and the Religious

So far, we seem to have arrived at a fairly reasonable understanding of just why neo-

liberal economics, neo-imperialism and the drift of liberal democracy towards

authoritiarianism belong, alongside globalisation, to the processes of capitalism

(which is the heart of radical modernisation beyond absolutism) as such and cannot

be seen as mere temporary blips. On the other hand, the contemporary resurgence of

religion has not yet been fully accounted for. Indeed I have argued that capitalism

and secularisation (or the tendency to the quasi-religious) are more or less a single

phenomenon. In which case it would seem that the return of the religious is an

aspect of contemporary resistance to capitalism; but such, in many or even most

cases, would seem to be very far from the case indeed.

To assess this situation further however, we need first to stand back a bit and talk

about the general implications of globalisation for religion and the relation of the

religious to the economic. It is clear that globalisation has spawned a resurgence of

Marxist theorising for good reasons: only now perhaps do we see a fully

international movement of resistance to capital, relatively unswayed by national

goals or the overriding imperative to capture the state; both the emergence and the

failure of neoliberalism fall well within the range of Marxs diagnoses; more

33
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitudes: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 2005); Malcolm Bull, Limits of Multitude in NLR 35 2005, 19-40
 54

postmodern modes of analysis have failed to grasp the structures of global

oppression or to face up to the increasing scope of economic inequality and the

astonishing (in diverse modes in different places) brutalisation of ordinary life which

easily exceeds anything described by Dickens or Dostoyevsky and which includes

levels of increasing material squalor which no-one in the mid-20th C anticipated.

One might say that the era of globalisation and of ecological crisis is naturally the

era of material historical analysis. Confined altogether at last to one global surface,

we are forced to forget our pathetic human fantasies and to confront our shared

material animality. All this is a good thing and yet it is one-sided. I have already

suggested that neomarxism should not neglect the gains of postmodernist analysis of

the symbolic and the imaginary often undertaken by Frenchmen and women whose

outlook was far more Marxist and far less culturally postmodern than their Anglo-

Saxon epigoni imagined. In addition, I have proposed that to talk in terms of regimes

of general economy permits us to fuse the Marxist with the postmodern. But once

one has grasped that capitalism as a general economy invents the purely material

base as much as it invents fetishised abstractions, then one has to see that the

sheerly material on earth is rather constructed than discovered and that its essence

lies in brutalised poverty and aesthetic squalor, while its Marxist concretion is only

the counterpart to the equal new emergence of a seamless world of virtual images.

Here the postmodernists are right: the latter is not secondary in relation to the real

-- rather the real now and always only consists in and through its showing forth or its

rendering fictions of itself. The difference today is that capitalism produces

(materially and imagistically) both the illusion of a sheerly real without image that

can therefore be traded by the image or the token and the reality of a realm of
 55

illusion sundered from its anchoring in the real. The latter of course secretly abides,

but only to the same measure that the abiding of the real only in its showing forth

and imaginary repetition (by human and other creatures) also remains secretly the

case. Neither materialism nor idealism is a sound ontology: rather one needs

something like an ideal realism. But the ideal reality of capitalism consists in

engendering both materialistic illusions and idealistic false promises.

Thus on the one hand we have become today more than ever before (Vicos return of

the selvaggio in the heart of the city) merely animals roaming the earths surface and

on the other hand we are now already transhumans inhabiting a life and deathless

hyper-reality. These are are but two halves of the same late-capitalist global

economy. But this picture offers little clue to the renewed religious dimension. To

approach this one can note immediately that, just as the one earth confronts us with

our shared material finitude, besides our shared technologically preternatural

noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin was prophetically right if over-sanguine about

this), so also it confronts us with the shared existential enigma of our small corner of

the cosmos and the inevitable question of what pure clear light we are supposed to

shine with, in all our small corners of the globe. Within one polity, one culture

and so forth, it is obvious that we become more answerable to the question of our

shared human destiny without alibis or consolations. What is the natural law of our

humanity; to what supernatural end are we orientated, if any? Thus besides

naturalisation and virtualisation, the emergence of one globe also of itself

encourages the return of religious questioning.

 56

This truth has a startling political correlate, as Scott Thomas and Samuel Huntingdon

have variously pointed out.34 Once nation-states cease to be the primary frameworks

of cultural reference, then civilisations assume more importance for peoples

identity as well as their security symbolic and real. And clearly the religious

stands at the heart of the civilisational. Here though, I would part company with

Huntingdon: I simply do not believe that all the diverse civilisations he lists --

Chinese, Islamic, South American (a truly absurd example of North American

condescension and misapprehension here) and so forth -- genuinely remain in

existence. This is because most of the world has been so thoroughly permeated by

capitalism, which, as a general economy is not just an economic system, but an

entire system of values, a quasi-religious way of life and system of representation.

To read for example, Haruki Marukamis novel Dance Dance Dance is to realise

how almost the entirety of Japans past has been obliterated by Capital, with a break

arguably more absolute than is the case in Europe, precisely because in adopting

capitalism the Japanese have perforce come to adopt a wholly alien culture. Very

significantly, the only thing that is Japanese in the novel is a religious sense of the

porosity of the bounds between this world and a spirit world beyond death, and the

continuum between the latter and the world of dreaming. The genius of the novel is

to blend this traditional sense with a postmodern sense of hyper-reality, so that what

one gets is a kind of eclectic mix of ancient religion with capitalist quasi-religion.

Viewed through the former, the latter is strangely shown to have secret elevating and

redemptive potentialities: nevertheless one is left with the sense that the ancient can

only narrowly break through and that it then requires one to handle consumer society

34
Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International
Relations: the Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (Londond: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Free
Press, 2002)
 57

stringently and sparingly, against its fundamental inclination. (Stick to your Subaru,

foreswear the gleaming Maserati, is the novels oddly transcendental message.)35

This suggests indeed that only the religious defines a civilisation that might today be

considered as distinct over-against the Western one, and that even here the old real

religions struggle against new the new quasi-one. This seems especially true for

those countries that do not have a tradition of organised monotheism like Japan,

China and most of India. They lack a counter-globalising force and reach such as is

most certainly provided by Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This is why Samuel

Huntingdon would appear to be correct only for the case of Islam. Here, indeed, one

has a civilisation driven by a salvation religion that has a tendency to expand

imperialistically and which still aims to inform all aspects of life. It is not surprising

that with some decline in the effective sovereignty of the individual nation-state,

Islam should enjoy an increase in power and influence.

7. Religion, the Economy and International Relations

But one can go further than this, by fusing together the very diverse insights of the

Christian Scott Thomas and the Marxist Benno Teschke. The modern system of

international relations is very recent indeed and is certainly not grounded in any

realist or liberal natural law, nor even in any autonomously geopolitical

constructivism occurring between sovereign nations. For the standard IR theory of

a geopolitical anarchy pertaining on the high seas, in the air and in territorial

35
Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance trans Alfred Birnbaum (London: Vintage 1993)
 58

marches is only a modern reality, and universally but a fiction. For most of

civilised history, peoples have acknowledged an authority which extended over

most of their known world ancient China for example, or Medieval Europe. And

even between alien peoples, an unwritten law of hospitality was exercised, diverse

of course in different places, but nonetheless often found to coincide. The absolute

stranger, precisely since he was beyond all ken, was not seen as primarily a potential

enemy (he was first a stranger to be hosted before he became an enemy to be taken

hostage) but rather as a temporary sojourner. The temporariness of the welcome

was not, as Derrida had it, a sign of aporia (only the enemy need be welcomed; were

he a friend he would be at home), because the natural home of the other was

intrinsically valued (something like, but also very unlike, your own home) and

therefore his eventual return to that home was also valued and not viewed as a kind

of expulsion and return of a captive.36 Respect for the strangers character was bound

up with respect for his mysterious origin: to receive him was to receive that origin

and not to suspend it; eventually to speed him on his way was not to conquer that

domain. So in hospitality there was a balanced exchange, timed and spaced in due

measure, not a played-out contradiction between an absolute one-way receptivity on

the one hand and an abrupt termination of this gesture on the other.

As to what went on within peoples known worlds, this was nothing like a balance of

power between states. The European ius gentium was a law of peoples not of nations

and thus a full part of the natural law up until Suarez who now saw its actual

prohibitions as positive laws set up by contracting sovereign state partners: the law

of nations does not forbid things because they are evil, but makes things evil by

36
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship trans George Collins (London: Verso, 2005); with Anne
Dufourmantelle,Of Hospitality trans Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP 2000)
 59

forbidding them.37 In the European Middle Ages there existed no states, only

patrimonial rulers who in some eminent sense owned their kingdoms, while

inversely the local lords acted as petty rulers within their feudal territories. Nothing

usually guaranteed that the vassal of a vassal was also the vassal of his final

overlord, and just for this reason the lord of the various marches were semi-

independent of the political centre. In consequence, there were no wars in this period

between states; many wars were between nobles and bound up with what was seen

as the restitution of justice or the remedying of crimes; while wars between kings

had usually a dynastic aspect and generally concerned the extension of terrain rather

than the defence of boundaries. While it was not supposed at this stage that there

could be a just cause of war on either side, nevertheless Church and chivalric codes

together sustained a sense of the justis hostis as distinguished from the criminal or

the infidel.38 Against the latter there could indeed be a wholly just struggle without

quarter since he had no ius on his side whatsoever, on account of his failure to render

any justice towards the true good. The idea of a holy war here is a red herring; the

distinction being more at home within the Islamic duality of philosophy and

theology, although it is notable that Al-Farabi upheld a kind of philosophical

equivalent of jihad: namely the justice of a war undertaken to impose civilised

values on an alien culture. Ironically the very idea of a war of civilisations is

specifically Islamic.39

37
Francisco Suarez, Laws and God the Lawgiver, Book 2. 19 translated by the editors in O. and J.L.
ODonovan eds From Irenaeus to Grotius: a Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 728
38
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 50-67
39
Alfarabi, The Attainment of Happiness; Platos Laws, trans Muhsin Mahdi; Avicenna, Healing:
Metaphysics X; On the Proof of Prophecies and the Interpretation of the Prophets Symbols and
Metaphors trans Michael E. Marmura, in Medieval Political Philosophy eds R.Lerner and M.Mahdi
(Ithaca: Cornell UP 1972), 58-83, 83-95, 98-112,112-122
 60

But the just enemy only existed for Christians within the bounds of Christendom

itself, since the warring parties both ultimately owed allegiance to higher powers: the

Pope, and sometimes the Holy Roman Emperor. The latters power was as much

deliberately latent as of necessity weak: it was often re-exercised in the case of

emergency threats of extreme internal disorder or Islamic threats to Christendom

from without. As Carl Schmitt pointed out, it was taken to exercise the office of

katechon mentioned by the apostle Paul, which holds back the reign of the

Antichrist. (2 Thessalonians 2:6) Schmitts interpretation of this in Paul as referring

unambiguously to the function of the Roman Empire is unlikely to be right, because

the Roman Empire itself was surely (as Agamben argues against Schmitt) seen by

Paul as not merely the divine instrument of avenging justice but also (in accordance

with the Apocalypse) as the heir to the idolatrous Babylon, swayed by the daemonic

human forces which for Paul influence all merely human law and anticipator of the

penultimate antichristian reign.40 Nonetheless, he was right insofar as the Middle

Ages saw the purged, grace-tinged empire as, in an Augustinian and Gelasian

fashion, bending the imperial necessary evil of violent coercion deployed against

evil violence (which cannot in the end work, but can indeed only delay the triumph

of both anarchic evil and even perhaps, for the most authentically Pauline and

Augustinian view, its own nomic evil) towards the rule of the true, persuasive

ecclesial auctoritas.41

Thus, within this era, war generally fell within the sphere both of a kind of irregular

policing and of violent criminality, the issue being mediated through a sort of

informal trial by combat. It was not as yet a purely political nor strictly speaking an
40
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 59-62; Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: a Commentary
on the Letter to the Romans trans Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP 2005) 108-112
41
See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 382-443
 61

international matter. The international dimension was only invoked when need

arose to invoke the imperial or else the papal guarantor of the order and unity of

Christendom as such, either against inner disruption or against a rival civilisation.

Political and international warfare in the modern sense only emerged with the rise of

sovereign and absolute Christian states, the contested struggle by sea and land for

new-world territories, the lapse of the role of the emperor as ultimate guarantor and

finally, with the Peace of Westphalia, the lapse of the role of the Pope as

international arbitrator whereas earlier he had divided the New World and the seas

between the crowns of Spain and Portugal. Thus in this early modern era, the

Spanish neo-scholastic Francisco de Vitoria drew up new norms for the just seizure

of alien lands outside Christendom (violations of the still for him natural law of the

ius gentium concerning hospitality in terms of inhibiting legitimate trade or mission)

and for limiting the new terror of more unconstrained warfare between nations.

In this way alone was international anarchy born. And this meant that the role of

the iustus hostis was either augmented, as for Hobbesian realism (whose tradition

would pass down to Reinhold Niebuhr) or completely abolished as for liberalism,

beginning with Kant. Already with Grotius, there is some hesitation between the idea

that war can only have a iustus causis on one side and the notion that both sides can

wage war justly not only as to means but even as to instigation, if they possess real

sovereign authority and have declared hostilities following the proper procedures.

After Grotius, just cause became more and more formally reduced in this fashion.42

But with Kant on the other hand one has, following the Scots political economists,

the notion that trading nations will tend to balance out each others powers and arrive
42
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 159-62
 62

at a convenient peace, just like trading parties inside a state. And as within the state,

so internationally, Kant envisages a body of international laws which will pronounce

in effect upon property violations at the inter-state level. Yet he envisages no world

government, because he believes that the many nations constitute a sort of

international equivalent of the division of powers at the state level and a bulwark

against tyranny. Since, nonetheless, war can for Kant be adjudicated by a moral law

beyond that of sovereign states, this means that there can be no longer be any just

enemy at all: if your enemy is legitimately your enemy, then he is an international

criminal. As Carl Schmitt objected in The Nomos of the Earth, this notion of a law

not just prior to, but even independent of, any exercise of sovereignty, ignores the

fact that a law is an impotent fiction if it remains without authorisation and

interpretation in the case of its application.43 (It should be noted here that Schmitts

decisionism always oscillated between a Hobbesian formalist insistence on the need

for order whatever its content, and a much more genuinely Catholic personalist stress

indebted to friends like Erich Przywara and Eric Peterson that all actual exercise

of law happens between specific persons in specific circumstances which demands a

Pauline primacy for imprescribable equity over the written prescription. For Schmitt

only the individual conscience can really decide equitably on the exception and

hence it was to a degree his humanism which made him hesitant about the always

general and fixed rule of representative majority opinion.)

Either the realist over-dominance of the notion of the just enemy or its liberal

abolition, removes the mediaeval sense that war, while wholly regrettable, is a kind

of honourable recognition of the limits of human reason in arriving at a just

consensus. Thus the enemy may be in the wrong, may even be a violater, yet is not
43
Kant, On Perpetual Peace; Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 168-72
 63

quite in the case of the person seen by all as a common criminal. By contrast,

Baroque realism trivialises warfare and separates honour from virtue, because the

combatants are now involved in a mere game of rivalry that is but an exceptional

bloody extension of the market-place which has newly made agon normative.

Inversely, Enlightenment liberalism ironically threatens to turn war into an

unlimited action against a particularly heinous kind of criminal who is indeed

already an enemy of civilisation as such: the international war against terror is

therefore already here in sight and it turns out that Bush and Blair are Kantians not

Hobbesians after all..

Yet even in the case of the early modern and the Enlightenment periods one can

exaggerate, as Benno Teschke argues, the preponderance of strife between nations.

In the first era the really dominating factor is not the displacement of Christendom

by competing nation-states, but rather the warfare without quarter (since it could not

be between just enemies) between the two factions of Christianity, Catholic or

Protestant or if one prefers, the war between heretical rebels against Catholic order,

and this Catholic order which was the continued but threatened unity of Europe

itself. While indeed, as William Cavanaugh has argued, the religious civil wars were

also wars about securing the unity of the emerging nation-state (which could not as

yet imagine religious plurality), these wars also had an international dimension (the

operations of a threatened Protestant international stretching from Bohemia to

Scotland for example, cannot be ignored in accounting for the unfolding of national

events in the first half of the 17thC).44 And these wars surely were primarily

religious, if also suffused with dynastic and national power-politics. For the

44
William T. Cavanaugh, A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: the Wars of Religion and
the Rise of the State in Modern Theology 11:4, 1995, 397-420
 64

Catholics fought in part under the Pope and Emperor in order to preserve a united

Christendom, while the Protestants often envisaged (as with Comenius and later

Leibniz) a new sort of Erasmian peaceful international Christian community, if the

office of the Papacy could be overthrown or else modified.

In the later era, Teschke has shown that, while the Peace of Westphalia (as he does

not point out) effectively secularised the international sphere by establishing a

treaty without the blessing of the Pope, it nevertheless did not really usher in (as

nearly all IR textbooks say) an era of balance of powers between states. The treatise

itself involved nothing of the kind, but only an old-fashioned dynastic carve-up of

the body of the ancient imperial heartlands between Sweden and France against

Austria.45 Later, the wars of the 18th C continued to be in large measure inter-dynastic

feuds, rather than out and out quarrels between nations for the wealth of the earth.

For a brief interval, religious overlordship of Europe (papal and imperial ) was

displaced by shifting alliances of royal and noble families contesting, across

national boundaries, for shares in Montesquieus honour without virtue.

And even now religion had not fled the international scene for long. Its return was

ironically heralded by the peculiar event of the first full secularisation of a single

country France, during its revolution. Deism and atheism were themselves recent

inventions, and they were widely adopted by the French bourgeoisie perhaps because

of the earlier failure of the Huguenot cause which might have come eventually to

favour more middle-class modes of religion, and in part also because their execution

of the heads of a sovereign state whose structure they still substantially preserved,

but in a more regular bureaucratic form, seemed to entail also the refusal of a
45
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 215-249
 65

personal transcendent power who might directly intervene at any level within the

body of the nation. The fact that the power initially sought by the French tiers tat

was political rather than economic encouraged a sacrificial veneration of the state

and a tying of middle-class virtue to the freedom of the republic in time under the

auspices of a remote moral deity, rather than the British -- and then more

emphatically the American -- middle-class primary pursuit of economic power under

the auspices of a providential God who personally rewarded hard work and business

probity.

For this reason, I would argue that, just as capitalism was a contingent English

invention, so also radical secularisation (in distinction from the complex American

compromise) was a contingent French one, which Napoleon soon afterwards

exported over much of Europe and which the French have often continued to export

as normative for Europe as a whole ever since. This is the foundation for European

exceptionalism in the matter of religion (although I would not agree with some

sociologists that the United States is normal in this respect either).

However, after the defeat of Napoleon, the unique long peace in Europe was for

much of the 19thC in part guaranteed by the Holy Alliance in which once again, the

Pope played an important part.46 The sense of the need for a European resistance to

the threat to royal, aristocratic and sacral power was just as important for this peace

as the emergence of the practice as opposed to the theory of a balance of power

between sovereign states. And as Teschke argues, this was really only the policy of

perfidious Albion, undertaken in order to allow her to concentrate on ruling the

seas and expanding its overseas dominions. Thus the dominance of inter-national
46
Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 3-20
 66

rivalry only really became a fully-fledged fact after the bourgeois revolutions of

1848 and the consequent elective switch (albeit in the face of British capitalist-based

power) to the pursuit not just of capitalist goals but also of industrial and financial

ones: this is why, as Hannah Arendt argued, European imperialism was not just a

capitalist but also a bourgeois venture, since it concerned the seizure of resources

needed to augment industry and to appease industrial workers. 47

For these reasons, the emergence of the kind of inter-state order deemed normative

by both realism and liberalism is really the late work of the complete adoption of

a capitalist economy in its bourgeois and imperialist phase. And of course the new

balance of powers quickly broke down and then unleashed upon the globe in the

20thC the greatest military terror that it has ever known. There is therefore no

normative era of liberal-realist international relations that we can appeal back to.

Nor, still more significantly, do secular norms of international relations carry any

good record. On the contrary, if we set aside for the moment the admitted problem

of inter-civilisational and religious conflict, it would seem rather that the leaching

away of religion from the international sphere has both trivialised warfare and

increased its terror. By contrast, the only effective international rule we have ever

known has been exercised by empires, by papacies and to a lesser degree by

dynasties.

Finally, and this is the most crucial point of all, we can see that, to a large degree,

secularisation, in the sense of the removal of religion from the public arena, is by no

means an automatic teleological goal of history, but is rather the contingent upshot of

certain events whose resonance is now growing fainter. First of all, one had the
47
Arendt, Imperialism, 3-38
 67

effect of cuius regio, eius religio, which not merely removed religion from the

international arena, but also inhibited the operation of religions as transnational

phenomena. Already with the lapse of this principle, the international power of

religion started to revive, although it tended to remain external to international

politics. Then one had the birth of secularisation out of the peculiar circumstances of

the French revolution, whereas the enormous presence of Islam in France today

could lead to a disturbance of revolutionary laicit which will then possibly exert a

new European influence of a counter-secularising kind, including the need to recover

a European Catholic identity (especially at the level of the European educated elite),

since European identity can no longer be enshrined in the pure autonomy of the

secular sphere.

Today then, it may be the case that the return of religion is more a matter of the

gradual removal of the historically strange dominance of the secular nation-state.

The latter was born from a fortuitous set of circumstances: the emergence of agrarian

capitalism in England which divided the political from the economic; the exporting

of these phenomena through forcing other nations to catch up, often in a more

dirigiste fashion; the legacy of deism and freemasonry from a middle-class

revolution in a Catholic country.

Outside this dominance, across the surface of the earth, religions still exert their

transpolitical sway. This is not an archaism, but a new form of a naturally global

reality. Indeed as Scott Thomas points out, long before 9/11 a return to religion can

be glimpsed in the overwhelming role played by American Protestant (often

Niebuhrian realist) theologians in setting up the League of Nations and then the
 68

United Nations, and the equally overwhelming role played by Catholic Christian

Democrats in setting up the European Economic Community which has become the

European Union.48 They were inspired by specifically Catholic thinking which saw

the dominance of the nation-state over international humanity as idolatrous

although the whole project became gradually subverted from de Gaulle onwards, by

more liberal European conservatives who encouraged the deployment of European

institutions to impose neo-liberal economic norms upon the various member

nations.

8. Globalisation and Judaism

Today, globalisation seems to entail the return to prominence of four international

religious phenomena. First of all, there is a considerable segment of international

Jewry which supports the state of Israel in alliance with evangelical Christianity, in a

manner that appears to subvert the geopolitical imperative of US foreign policy,

which otherwise might prefer to back less ambiguously Arab client states and secure

peace in the Middle East. Secondly, there is a re-invented, largely politically

conservative evangelical and charismatic Christianity. Thirdly, there now exists a

newly militant and internationally organised Islam in various modes. Fourthly there

is the unexpected phenomenon of a renewed papacy, and an intellectually and

culturally (if not as yet numerically) revived Catholicism, following it role in the

collapse of state socialism.

48
Scott Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion, 148-72
 69

To take these phenomena in order: a large segment of Judaism (rightly regarded as

deviant by the authentic interpreters of Jewish tradition) has redefined it through an

alliance with the American Calvinist legacy that has tended to regard Gods election

of Israel as valid entirely in its own terms and not (as for Catholicism) wholly as an

educative preparation for the new universal covenant. This has always encouraged an

analogous sense of a divine election of the white races as containing the main

number of those predestined to be redeemed within the new covenant itself. The

same Calvinistic current fusing with other Baptist elements has generally held that

no human social progress can herald Christs second coming and the thousand year

reign of the saints on earth, and today this version of eschatology is overwhelmingly

dominant amongst conservative evangelicals. A sinful world is rather subject to the

providential law of free-market governance, but on the other hand the return of the

still originally elect nation to their promised land is truly a sign of the end times.

Hence religious political activism is directed away from social improvement (which

was an overwhelming priority for an earlier generation of liberal or else neo-

orthodox American Protestants) towards geopolitical military strategy.

A large segment of American Judaism (including many who should know better),

besides the majority in the State of Israel itself, has come to collude with this

perspective. This is because the holocaust industry has been a prime new vehicle for

promoting the myth of the United States as the land of escape from European horror

and misery. Meanwhile it has proved possible (and this applies also to some extent to

post-war France; thinking of the shared phenomenon of Levinasianism) for

Judaism in the United States to ally a liberal version of its own teachings to the

norms of a politico-religious culture which in classically Christian terms is perverse,

 70

because it tends to play down the centrality of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. A

consequence of the playing down of the latter is the unimportance of sacred space

and time within the American version of Christendom and a sectarianism which fails

to see the visible unity of the Church as central to the work of salvation. Religion is

here confined to the private realm and even then often further reduced to a technique

of personal therapy. Apparently orthodoxly evangelical doctrines of the atonement

are in fact subverted (remotely following Grotius) to suggest that Christs passion

was necessary for the restoration of a cosmic political and economic justice which is

the foundation of a liberal polity and free market.49 Collective religious life is equally

functionalised and deployed both to compensate for a general lack of public space

and to ensure that its quasi-public space is completely politicised and moralised:

overwhelmingly, American churches tend to inculcate a civil religion and a trite and

sentimental bourgeois moralism. When combined with the fact of the leaching of

religious space and time from American public life (much more emphatic than in the

case of France, where religious festivals and cathedrals are still far more publicly

prominent) and the decline of other sacred practices like commensality (which

survives more in Europe) this should severely qualify any notion that the United

States is free from secularisation. (And in general the notion that secularisation has

not been a dominant modern reality is just as misguided as the notion that religion

ever went away, or that it cannot return to public significance).

The non-Trinitarian and non-incarnational nature of American public space and time

(no real sacred centres, no spacing of the year by Advent, Incarnation, Lent,

49
Mark A. Noll, Americas God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: OUP 2002),
227-367
 71

Resurrection and Pentecost in keeping with the rhythm of the seasons, as still much

more effects even non-churchgoing Europeans), cannot honestly be seen as the

consequence of the separation of church from state. In reality, the latter is entirely

legitimised by a deistic, freemasonic, liberal Anglican and above all Arian mode of

monotheism. Such a monotheism is also alien to the thicker versions of Judaic

tradition (for which a sacramental religious permeation of all aspects of life and a

semi-gnostic mysticism was absolutely central) but nevertheless its ethos can be

adopted or even co-opted by both the more liberal and the more woodenly legalistic

conservative Jewry. This is why many Jews they tend to feel more at home in

America than in Europe, and not because they find the United States to be a more

genuinely neutral religious arena. Religion tends to be reduced by these thinner

variants of Judaism to the ethical command, itself reduced to a non-relational and

therefore vacuous respect for the other.50 The ethical is then seen as enshrined in

the liberal bias of American law and the US constitution, both covertly assimilated to

torah. In this way the United States can then be seen as the staging-post back to

Israel for more conservative American Jews, just as inversely Israel (which they may

hope will become more progressive and secular) can be seen as an outpost of

American freedom for more liberal ones.

One therefore has to recognise that there is a revived project of Jewish

universalism in our times, which has dubious claims to Jewish authenticity insofar

as it tends to suppress the mystical, sacramental and legally-interpretative rather

than legally-formal dimensions which were central for pre-enlightenment Judaism.

50
Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity (Oxford:Blackwell, 1993), 211-225
 72

9. Globalisation, Capitalism and Protestantism

The second new global religious phenomenon is conservative evangelical

Protestantism. Here, as with the pro-Israel segment of Judaism but still more so, one

has an example of a religious movement largely allied with the forces of Capital. Yet

I have already suggested that capitalisation and secularisation are virtually one and

the same reality. How then does this make sense? There is no space here fully to

account for this Weberian situation. But clearly it has always been the case that the

quasi-religion of capitalism has been overlaid with a Calvinistic variant of

Protestantism. The new, more rigorous, post-Brenner insistence that capitalism was

born specifically in England surely requires us (as Brenner does not consider) to re-

visit Webers famous thesis. Indeed it is even the case that Weber, because he had too

broad a definition of capitalism and located its origins too early, slightly too much

ascribed to a Christianity and capitalism thesis, rather than a Protestantism and

capitalism thesis. So it is not so much that we now need to consider a neo-

Weberian position, as rather a neo-Tawneyesque position, since Tawneys

narrower, more English story turns out to be more the real beginning of the later

universal one.51

On the other hand, there is an element of exaggeration in Brenner and Teshkes

understanding. Teshke especially seems to regard the absolutist mode of production

as still lying more on the pre-modern than the modern side of the divide. But surely

the Baroque to Classical era was, strictly speaking, transitional. If, indeed, capitalism

proper waited upon the deployment of the extraction of surplus value, it nonetheless

51
R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: a Historical Study (London: J.Murray 1926)
 73

assumes that abstract finance capital, absolute private property, the lifting of many

restrictions on usury, the idea of a self-balancing rather than a moral market, and

so the loss of a sense of equitable prices and wages, are already in place. And the

absolutist era already contained these elements although property was not as yet so

absolute in practice in France as in England, the political theories of late French

scholastics (following Ockham) and then of Jean Bodin, had already moved in that

direction. Indeed both absolute monarchy and absolute property right were derived

(as one can still see in Hobbes) from the same theological paradigm whereby de

facto human power of dominium confers an absolute subjective ius of rule/ownership

that is conferred by the wilful decree of a God whose potentia absoluta itself allows

him an unlimited right to exercise his will by potentia ordinata over his whole

domain which is the creation as such.52

It is all the same true that certain of the ideologies of French absolutism, following

the political theology of the Oratorian Pierre Brulle, veered away from this crudity

in a more Christological, cosmically and metaphysical participatory direction: the

Sun King mimetically echoed both the Incarnate Christ and the now central Sun of

the Universe, such that his rule was via participation in Christs one light, often

pictorially conveyed and not simply by administrative imposition of his will.53 This

surely tends to confirm at the ideological level Teschkes contention that in practice

absolutist political command was more materially and so economically mediated

than in the case of England where, in point of fact the absolutism of the Tudors,

following the demonic genius of Thomas Cromwell was much more extreme and

52
See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9-26
53
Stphane-Marie Morgain, La Thologie Politique de Pierre de Brulle (1598-1629) (Paris: Publisud,
2001)
 74

genuinely bureaucratic and left behind a legacy of a more absolute and purely

political sovereignty than anything found on the continent.

Nevertheless, the legacy of the nominalists and of Bodin remained a factor in France,

and often informed the more supposedly Augustinian and Jansenistic variants of

absolutist ideology, from Marin Mersenne through to Pierre Bayle. Here it is no

accident that Hobbes spent a long sojourn in France and cannot at all be regarded as

reflecting merely an English scenario. Moreover, in the case of Pierre Nicole, Blaise

Pascal and of Pierre Bayle, the advocacy of a separation between the political and

the economic evolves into the idea that both the market and political consensus

emerge from the providential balancing out of selfish impulses in a radically fallen

world, to which Bayle gave a practically Manichean inflection (Jansenism here

pointing in a direction similar to Calvinism). And once again here there was a French

stimulation upon the most modern British social thought: the Scots philosophes

learnt from Bayle as well as the Huguenot exile Bernard de Mandeville and their

advocacy of the hidden hand has to be seen also as a proto-capitalist element.54 This

needs to be recognised, even though they also, beyond anything envisaged in France,

advocated agrarian and industrial capitalistic relations of production in a country

where the theft of the smallholdings had not as yet taken hold (but was soon to do so

with the most terrible vengeance) as it had already in England. Here, clearly, they

had the English model in mind, and were in fact whig betrayers of the Gaelic/Pictish

highland as well as the Saxon/Brithonic lowland cultural legacies whose heroism

they often admired, yet sought to perpetuate only in the simulated from of

economic agonism.

54
John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment
 75

So in the case of France one can detect a thwarted will towards absolute property

ownership and purely political bureaucratic control which was in fact (as Tocqueville

discerned) one of the dynamics behind the French revolution.

Given the importance of absolute dominium and the other pre-conditions of

capitalism listed above, one must still therefore hold to elements of a Weberian

Christianity and capitalism thesis (shorn of his sociologism)55 in the sense that

nominalist and then neo-scholastic currents that veered away from the classical

Christian tradition, and practices of the Cistercians that veered away classical

monasticism, did indeed encourage the growth of absolute property, usury, the

abandonment of the common good in favour of a balance of freedoms (already in

Duns Scotus), the substituttion of paid labour for the labour of the monks

themselves, and even the notion of an abstract absolute time that could now become

the time of a pure accumulation.56 Here it is difficult to discern a priority as between

idea and practice: both encouraged the other, and a general crisis after 1300 or so in

terms of contested jurisdiction and the sustaining of economic production created a

social climate receptive to drastically new notions. Yet Teschke underrates (or does

not mention) the extent to which new modern relations of property ownership could

only emerge through the social acceptance of an entirely new conceptual space that

had to find a general acceptance and was by no means automatically forthcoming

simply on account of material exigency.

Nevertheless, the emergence of fully-fledged capitalism first in an England and then

a Scotland permeated by Calvinist influence, now appears newly significant. In

55
See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 75-101
56
See here also Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 121-67
 76

England the aristocracy and gentry and even their tenant farmers connected their

new capitalist agrarian power with the memory of the secularisation of sacred land in

the seizure of the monasteries (so setting in train the gothic haunting of the whigs

in their houses built of ecclesiastical rubble) . They were literally invested in the

ending of terrestrial sacramental mediation. Equally, they connected their power with

the seizure of property from the peasantry and smaller yeomen who were seen as

sunk in superstition, loyal to the saints and to the monks (as the Pilgrimage of Grace

manifested) and attached to the sacral power of the King for indeed even the

Tudors and the early Stuarts (like their continental counterparts) sought to maintain a

tax and landed power base independent of aristocratic control by often opposing in

the royal courts of equity new proposed measures of enclosure.57

For this reason, the landed interest in England, which became eventually the lumpen-

squirarchy, felt a more or less visceral attachment to the Protestant cause. The latter

had indeed favoured the process of materialisation brought about through enclosure

of the sacred commons and the sacred domestic means of subsistence. It is important

to see the vital role of this favouring. In a still religious era, secularisation could only

succeed because it was religiously promoted. One is indeed better advised to speak

of this secularising as rather a de-sacramentalising promoted by a less sacramental

mode of Chritianity. Here Anderson, Brenner and Teschke do not go far enough in

realising that pre-capitalist social property relations, since they concerned an entire

general economy, were not just political as well as economic, but equally religious-

imaginary in character. It is not simply the case that Protestantism ideologically

supported the de-sacramentalisation of terrain, it is also true that the emergent

capitalist economy was itself part and parcel of a new less sacramental mode of
57
See Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 37, citing Tawneys earlier researches.
 77

religious practice. Thus in the old religious economy, a material surplus was

generally converted into sacred buildings and liturgy combined with a store of public

charitable resources all managed by lay fraternities whose practice approximated to

that of the celibate clergy. But in the new religious economy the surplus was re-

cycled for the expansion of material production and the growth of profit, and the

poor were now subject to a disciplinary management in a re-definition of the very

nature of charity.58 The entire realm of material production and exchange, instead

of being seen as a participation in the divine-human commercium itself, was now

rather seen as the realm of proof of divine arbitrary benefit for the body alone, a field

of testing for the reality of inward faith and finally as one of oblique and unreliable

proof of election.

In this light, one should conclude that the English Calvinist gentry were not simply

backing a new way to get rich at the expense of the sacred, but had rather embraced

a new logic in which it was possible at once to get rich and (possibly) to get saved. It

is important then to see that the sundering of sacral symbolic unity into material and

abstract should not really be thought of primarily in terms of a general religious

phenomenology. To the contrary, this sundering first of all and somewhat uniquely

occurred within Christianity alone and thereby generated a new variant of Christian

practice. Therefore Tawney ( as further back Cobbett and Pugin etc) was after all

right: if capitalism was born only from a set of peculiar English conditions, then

these include the circumstance of the growth of English agrarian Calvinism, at the

expense of the peasants, the monks, the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages the

58
See Pickstock, After Writing, 142-6; John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford: OUP
1985); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New
Haven: Yale UP 1992) 141-54
 78

fraternities, the prayers for the dead and the charitable hospices. In fact at the

expense of all sacred festivity and hospitality.

But this means that, at least to begin with, the abstraction was religious as well as

quasi-religious: it concerned an economy of atonement and imputed righteousness;

an abstract ledger of relationship to God in place of an older mimesis of the inner

divine life. The relationship of imputation to actual status is indeed a kind of

religious equivalent of representationalist epistemology: salvific status refers to real

outcomes, while the latter only have value in terms of salvific status. Thereby one

has a totality of mutual reference yet without any intrinsic relation or participation,

such that this referring paradoxically allows the two poles to develop in

independence of each other: you can still get saved in the most materially reduced

and debauched circumstances imaginable (the strip-malls around Atlanta Georgia

shall we say) .

Why though, if the commodity is a fetish and the spectacle is an icon, does one

need this level of actual religion within capitalism? Or rather, why only sometimes?

Were it the case that this alliance of Protestantism and capitalism were only a thing

of the past, then perhaps one could imagine an economic determinism that rendered

the initial religious legitimation but a passing phase. But the return of this alliance in

our own day suggests otherwise. One can suggest, briefly (and perhaps inadequately)

three reasons.

First of all, capitalism was initially shocking, and the more extreme capitalism of

today is again shocking. It appears both cruel and anarchic. Its secular advocates
 79

tend to suggest that it is but the best we can do and not at all a moral reality.

Protestant political economy however (in the tradition of the early 19th C Scottish

theologian Thomas Chalmers) truly sees the hidden hand as the hand of providence

and as generally rewarding the provident.59

Secondly, extreme capitalism tends to invade the family sphere and to favour sexual

and cultural individualism which can appear to encourage the tipping over of

capitalist freedom into nihilistic amorality and even systematic criminality. Hence

the (incoherent) neo-conservative combination of domestic and cultural

authoritarianism with market liberal freedom. It is indeed a creed of total pathos

because the latter is so much more powerful than the former: whatever you fondly

imagine, it is bound to sweep away all the small-town values and practices to which

you are attached.60

Thirdly, one notices how the practice of evangelical religion has itself become more

capitalised: the salvation of souls can now literally mean the making of profit, and

indeed the two are becoming equated within market theologies. So here it is not

just that religion has returned as an ideological support for capital, it is also that

capital has further invaded religion in the proper and not quasi sense. But why

should it bother? That remains the question. And the answer may be that if a soul can

be produced and traded, then evangelical capitalism like thereby allows the human

subject to occupy the position of free-trading agent and of commodified subject all at

once. Normally, the capitalist subject may fall (usually in the case of different

59
Gordon Bigelow, Let there be markets: the evangelical roots of economics in Harpers Magazine
Vol 310 No 1860 May 2005 33-41
60
Thomas Frank, Whats the Matter with Kansas: How Neoconservatives Won the Heart of America
(New York: Henry Holt, 2005)
 80

persons and classes) on one side of the material/abstract divide or the other. In this

case he can straddle both sides of the divide at once. Hence the subject comes more

perfectly to embody as subject the mutual reference and yet independence of the

material and the abstract.

And so at this point one would have confirmation that the sundering of the symbolic

is not simply an instance within a general phenomenology of the religious. To the

contrary, it is a specific event within the history of Christianity, brought about and

ultimately most extremely and coherently sustained, by a perverse Christian logic. If

capitalism is a quasi-religion, it also remains a Christian heresy (and in no merely

metaphorical sense).

If this is correct, then perhaps one can much better understand why neo-mission is

a fundamental aspect of neo-empire. Almost everywhere, from Europe to South

America to China, the spread of evangelical Christianity accompanies the spread of

capitalism. Indeed where it has not, as with Japan, one is also confronted with a

drastically more corporatist, less individualistic and qualified mode of capitalist

economy.

10. Globalisation, Capitalism and Islam

The third contemporary international religious phenomenon is resurgent Islam. But

the phenomenon is not single: on the one hand one has attempts, in Iran and

elsewhere, to resist the depradations of capitalism. This is undertaken in the name

 81

of an ideology that is a fusion of traditional Islam with much that is eclectically

drawn from European Marxism and the traditions of conservative romanticism as

with the crucially influential thought of Sayyid Qutb.61 But to imagine that this mix

is an anomaly in the face of the failure of both the capitalist market and left

alternatives in certain areas, or even that one has here a mode of Islamic fascism

(the phrase is too unspecific to be meaningful) is to overlook the way that the

Iranian revolution correctly diagnosed that capitalism can only be resisted as a

refusal of the enclosure of the sacred in some sense (such an unsatisfactory

qualification is all the same crucial). Nor, from the traditional angle is the eclectic

mix a sign of inauthenticity. For sharia law really only concerns the civil realm, and

is itself largely a matter of this-worldly interpretation of precepts rooted in the

Koran. It is mostly not as religious as people imagine. And as to the ultimate

political level, this is left voluntaristically indeterminate. The shia tradition favours

practical and apocalyptic traditions concerning the office of the imam; the sunni

traidition parallel ones concerning the more political office of the caliphate. The

mystical and philosophical traditions permit more secular accounts of the rulers

role for negative or for positive reasons. But in all these cases, what government

does is left radically undetermined a point that is underscored either by the

voluntarism of orthodox kalam (the rulers will like the divine will determining the

rightfulness of law) or else by the Platonic tradition (far more alive in Islam than in

the West) of the philosopher-ruler. Thus in no sense is there a political sharia law

waiting to be applied: this is a fiction promoted by certain wahhabite factions

seeking to supply the tradition with a thicker political content than it actually

possessed in the face of an alien culture.

61
Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso 1993)
 82

In point of fact, there really seem to be few problems in principle about the

blending of civil sharia law (whose more stringent traditions, the tradition itself

certainly allows to be re-interpreted) with a modern western-inspired constitutional

regime. That this has rarely come about is much more to do with contingent

struggles and circumstances which have often involved the sense of threat from an

alien civilisation. In all cases this has to do with Islamic horror at the western

spectacle, which is not surprisingly seen as the very acme of idolatry. For a culture

which is wary of all representational mimesis as such, the west offers the abyss of

seductive doubling and dilution of the venerated invisible original, the utter betrayal

of its ineffable singularity.

But only is some cases does this mean, coherently, a refusal or at least an inhibition

of capitalism. In these instances (amongst some interpreters of Qutb for example in

Iran) one tends to find, interestingly, a radically modern approach to the

hermeneutics of the Koran, as well as a certain amount of openness to Sufism and

to philosophy.62 In the case of much of the wahhabi tradition by contrast, one has

something like a parallel to Protestantism: textual literalism, a refusal of all

sacramental mediation, a this-worldly austerity and consequently an attempt to

embrace the modern market but also refuse the modern spectacle in this sense it

remains far more puritanical than its modern protestant equivalent.

In both cases however, one is talking essentially about something defensive rather

than something necessarily expansionist. Islam may seek to convert pagans in

Africa or even Trinitarian Christians (who are seen as not true monotheists), but in

principle its global ambitions are less than those of Christianity, and like Judaism it
62
Afflicted Powers, 132-71
 83

is prepared to allow that there may be other peoples living within valid law codes

under the rule of Allah. Indeed, as the Enlightenment recognised, Islam appears in

one aspect to be far more rational a universalism than Christianity: it represents a

universalism of ethical law not of mystical image; its faith can recognise faithful

equivalents (as Christocentrism cannot); while its philosophy (though usually

abjected by the tradition itself) generally interprets religious idioms as merely

economies for the masses that are their equivalents of rational access to God. Either

faith refuses philosophy here or philosophy surpasses faith the only exception is

Sufism which not accidentally embraces far more Christian content. For the real

peculiarity of Europe is not the triumph of reason, but rather the idea that one

should proceed through reason towards a faith whose intellectual scope is even

greater.in this way it is catholicity not enlightenment that defines the

west and catholicity not enlightenment that is incommunicable to other religious

civilisations.

Likewise, Islam possesses no church: there are simply sacred sites, pilgrimages to

them (generally without the Christian mediating stress on way stations and the

journey itself) and assemblies of individual believers who pray all at once but do

not offer a liturgy nor engage in a theurgic mystery as do Catholic Christians. The

imam occupies a social and legal role within a single community, but not a priest-

like office within a sacred polity that has to be distinguished from a secular one

within which it is located. Islam does not provide such a trans-political universal

human society. And this fact is linked to its mode of ruling. Allah is impersonal; for

the most orthodox Islamic theology he enjoys no beatitude (unlike the Christian

God), much less suffers pain. And he certainly does not express himself internally
 84

in an image like the Christian Logos. Hence rule here on earth cannot reflect Allah,

but only repeat as identically as possible the One: this is why Islamic palaces make

you mesmerically swoon in the face of wrap-around stone wallpaper repeating the

same motive again and again and again.even the strict geometric

patterning of Olive trees (compare southern Italy) in modern Andalusia conserves

the Islamic imposition of rule through repetitive design. In the wider culture also, it

is a matter of the ensuring of the most regular patterns of customary behaviour, in

the fashion of a somewhat rigid reading of Platos Laws. The Oneness of Allah is in

fact conveyed within Islam in three crucial instances: the identical repetition of

custom; the wilful singularity of the ruler and finally the sometimes explicitly

antinomian singularity of the prophet.63 No doubt the idea of the suicidal terrorist

was not today born within Islam and makes sense in terms of a gesture of resistance

to capitalism, but nonetheless the logic of a single suicidal resistance to spectacle as

a prophetic sign against it makes sense in terms of this religions darker traditions.

11. Globalization and Catholicity

Fourthly and finally, there is the question of a resurgent papacy and the future of

Catholicism. As Regis Debray has pointed out, Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de

Paris argued that the power of Catholicism waned after the invention of printing.

Catholicity had existed in image and stone and living theatre, which, in the gothic

63
Christian Jambet, La grande resurrection dAlamut: les formes de la libert dans le shiisme
ismalien (Paris: Verdier, 1990)
 85

as opposed to the Romanesque age, permitted a measure of democratic participation

wherein precisely the basest and the most grotesque exhibited the transformation of

humanity by grace, as Hugos novel so astonishingly depicts. Debray argues that,

conversely, in an era of image and spectacle the power of the pope can somewhat

return.64

And indeed in the case of Debords mutation of the commodity into the spectacle

we have the question of a more catholic aspect to capitalism. In reality however,

the spectacle is but the quasi-sacramentality of conjoined materialisation and

abstraction and genealogically has little to do with the Catholic. Nevertheless, ever

since the accession of John-Paul II, the temptation has existed for Catholicism to

claim its own share of the spectacle, to claim likewise its own share of the cultural

market in education, welfare and even the arts, and otherwise to embrace the free

market calling a Tocquevillian halt to its entire hundred-year legacy of anti-

capitalist critique (in varying degrees).

This would amount to a drastic (and I would argue perverse) accommodation to

capitalism, which as we have seen, is in some fashion a Protestant heresy.

But now, in conclusion to these reflections, we come to the most crucial issue of all.

If capital and empire and so our current mode of globalisation itself are the upshots

of a deviant mode of Christianity, then to what degree are they nevertheless

mutations of a religion that from the outset had a uniquely universalising mission?

In answering this question I wish to offer a final further qualification of the

conclusions of the neo-Marxists. They have disclosed to us that international

64
Rgis Debray, A Pope for all Channels in NLR 33 2005, 54-9
 86

relations have always been to do with economic modes of production. But what

needs to be added is that they have always also been to do with religion as one

dimension of general economy. Or rather they have most of all been to do with

religion, because we must now further refine things: religion is not just to do with

the imaginary element; it is rather the point at which imagination and practice

link, since religion is buildings, journeys, liturgies, agricultural cycles,

organisations of trades and charities as much as it is ideas and symbols. Religion

taken in the broadest sense to mean binding together is in fact general economy

and general economy is religion.

Always, within the Catholic religion, there have been attempts to spiritualise it and

to see its universality as inward or other-wordly. As with the Franciscans, this is

supposed to inhibit corruption and worldly contamination and deviation. But, as

David Aers has brilliantly pointed out, William Langland, in his late Medieaval

poem Piers Plowman (written against the background of the rural depradations I

have already referred to) indicated just how this attempted spiritualisation can have

the opposite effect.65 For if the Christian ideal is supremely the condition of

poverty, then one has a kind of Pelagian election of a supposed saving state,

combined with an over-passive patient waiting upon social and divine fortune. In

failing to see that charity or the generous use of resources small or great is what

comes first, one refuses also that purposive and provident fyndynge that is a more

primary Christian attitude. Furthermore, the Franciscan assumption that the friars

will enjoy the usus of possessions held by others (whereas the Dominicans did

collectively own things for the purposes of good use) can appear as an insult to the

65
David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame:
Notre Dame UP 2004), 99-157
 87

real poor like Piers himself. It is likely to be a temptation to accrue riches and

influence in the name of another, but in fact indirectly to benefit oneself. In this

way spiritualisation becomes ideological precisely because we cannot escape our

embodiment and the need in some (individual or collective) sense to possess

something if we are not to become hopelessly insecure. Inversely, spiritualisation

implies a leaching away of sacramental value from the material sphere. If one can

have good use without property ownership, then it is likely that ownership itself

will be seen as nothing to do with good use. Hence it was not-ironically the

scholarly heirs of St Francis who developed doctrines of absolute property

ownership, association through contract and unlimited political sovereignty.66

Much more recently, over the last two centuries, there has been a rumbling debate

about whether Christianity requires Christendom. But actually it has rested on

complete philological and conceptual misunderstanding. It has been assumed that

Christendom means the domain where Christians attempt to influence both

politics and culture. Modern advocates of a new Christendom opposed the first

infuence but advocated the second as if the separation of the two could even

begin to make sense, beyond a laudable refusal of clerically-controlled political

parties.

But as the word Chrtient in French meaning Christendom -- should remind us,

the two terms were, in origin, virtually interchangeable. Inversely, in German das

Christentum is today taken to mean Christianity. In fact, we do not use any more

in English the real word for Christianity if we mean by that a religion. This word

is Christianism, the equivalent of Chritianisme in French and of Christianismus in

66
Milbank, Theology and SocialTheory, 9-26
 88

German, whose first recorded usuage according to the OED is 1576, after the

Renaissance invention of the idea that there were various religions or systems of

belief of which Christianism was one. But the English word Christianity

anglicises the Latin Christianitas and the first meaning supplied for it in the OED,

citing a 1650 usage is the whole body of Christians, CHRISTENDOM. For a

further example of this prime meaning it cites Chaucer: To walys fled the

Cristyanyte of olde Britons, dwelling in this Ile. Clearly it was not the belief that

fled, but the body of Christians as such. Meanwhile, for Christendom the OED

gives as the prime meaning CHRISTIANITY for 1681, referring this to the

meaning state or fact of being a Christian; Christian spirit or character and also to

the Christian faith for the year 1649. Only as a tertiary meaning do we have the

Christian domain, dating back to Middle English, and this stands alongside

Christians collectively and the Church. Finally we have baptism, Christening

for 1680.

A short pondering of this easy trawl makes one wonder if we any longer know what

Christianity is at all. It is clear that it is not a religion, and that there is a ready

interchange between Christian practice and attitude on the one hand and the

collective reality of Christians on the other. Both Christianity and Christendom

in fact indicate the Church, and the note of dominium in the latter term donates a

ruled body, the act of conferring divine rule or universal priesthood in baptism or

Chrism and finally indeed also the terrain that Christians occupy.

This leads to three primary conclusions. First of all Christendom is not the realm

of Christian political or cultural influence. It is rather the body of Christians as

 89

such, the ecclesia. Secondly, the notion of the body of Christ was not, even up till

the 17thC and beyond, seen as separable from decisively political notions of

dominium and even of notions of occupied territory. And this has relatively little to

do with a post-antique medieval conception, but simply perpetuates the most

original notion taken over both from the Hebrews and the Greeks, that a body of

people exists on the material surface of the earth: hence St Paul already saw the

various local Christians in terms of their attachment to civic places and the Church

soon organised itself around places and sacred sites.

In the third place, one can emphatically conclude that there can be no Christianity

without Christendom and that the debate on either side was misconceived. But this

is more than a banal point of language: for the suggestion is that historically and

even beyond the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the catholicity of

Christianity was taken to imply in some sense a rightful dominium over the whole

earth in the sense of a potential dwelling in its entirety and the exercise of a suasive

spiritual auctoritas over it, that was nonetheless supposed to influence, if not (at

least for the earlier tradition) to coerce the sphere of temporal secular affairs.

In other words, Christianity is also Christendom precisely because it is the religion

of the Incarnation. Were its universalising tendency only a spiritualising one, as is

ultimately more the case for Judaism and Islam, then it would conceive of salvation

more simply as our raising ourselves above the local and specific in response to the

call of God. (One might suggest here that whereas the return to the sacred land

seems a debatable development of Judaism, the Christocentric sacralisation of the

entire surface of the earth appears always to have been implied by Catholicism.) It
 90

would generously be able to imagine modes of this raising being able to be

conveyed in other images and other words: it would be able to be multi-cultural.

But because it is founded on the scandalous and dangerous idea that the infinite was

in some sense born from a finite womb, in fulfilment of a particular local tradition,

it is committed to the idea that the only way to the spiritually universal is through

the gradual conjoining of all times and all spaces in an open-ended continuum of

meaning. The project of individual salvation is then inseparable from the project of

the pacification of the earth announced by the angels to the shepherds in Luke,

which Paul tried to set in motion by establishing a kind of new polity, the ecclesia,

that was also an international gift-exchange network.

In a manner therefore, those who are suspicious that Christianity is inherently

imperialist are right, and one can well understand their concerns. At the very least

one has to admit that Christian terrestrial universalism is dangerous. But the idea

that there might be a Christianity apart from this tendency is surely an illusion. For

unlike Judaism and Islam, the Catholic faith was established upon equitable

exception to the law under the governance of a divine king who fulfilled the law

through unexpected interpretation of the law. In consequence, this faiths only

identity consists in its universal accomplishment through all eternity, time and

space. For a system of universal law can define itself by law and can admit that

there might be other such universal systems, but a community committed to an

achievement of harmonious peace and reconciliation beyond legal justice can only

be defined by its location, and this location must be both specific and potentially

everywhere, since it is the serial occurrence of true human relating as such. If one

claims that in the incarnate Logos one glimpses in realised example the absolute
 91

manifestation in one instance of true human relating and therefore the pattern of all

true human relating, the Christian project has to be the continuous linking of all

reality here and beyond to Christ through the non-identical repetition of his saving

instance.

It therefore seems inauthentic for radical Christians to claim that real Christianity

can be innocent of any sort of exercised dominion. That would be to renounce the

incarnational route to the universal that lies through fyndinge alone. It is rather the

case that globalisation, universal government or empire and a shared global

economy are indeed the outcomes of the Christian legacy. The radical Christian, if

she wishes to remain a Catholic Christian, would have rather to argue that what we

have at present is a perverse, heretical version of catholicity.

Let us try now briefly to trace out those more Catholic religious dimensions of the

route to globalisation which have not so far been considered.

First of all, it is clear that Christianity can never be separated from the legacy of the

Roman Empire. The New Testament itself and the Fathers regarded the empire as

part of the providential working of God towards universal peace. Although, indeed,

Augustine rejected Eusebius of Caesareas view that the empire contributed to real

salvific peace, he still subscribed to the view that the achievement of a secular

peace of mere enforced suspension of hostilities was of some importance and

helped the spread of the gospel. And while, indeed, Paul already secularised the

imperial authority, linking it simply to the securing of justice amongst the things of

the saeculum, destined to pass away, there was never before the 16thC (at the very
 92

earliest), any glimmering of the modern sense of secular government as a rule

indifferent to philosophic and religious points of view.67 For Paul and later

Christians, secular government still had to conform to natural law under God, and

the ultimate measure of this law (as still for Aquinas) was not just its consistency

with, but also its leading towards, the law of the gospel under grace -- never before

the late Middle Ages at the earliest, did anyone entertain the notion of a double

end for humanity: natural (including the political) and supernatural.68 If, indeed,

prior to the time of Gregory the Great and the later Carolingian era, the secular

government remained still somewhat outside the church, then this exteriority did

not as yet (this awaited certain readings of Aquinas) betoken the integrity of secular

autonomy (and the very vocabulary is post-Kantian) but rather the alien relative

sinfulness of the use of coercive power as compared with the suasive power of the

Church and its need for voluntary submission in order to realise the complete

justice of reconciliation through penance and absolution. Secular ruling only fell

inside the Church for Augustine to the degree that it itself approximated to a

pastoral concern with the totality of human well-being and collective solidarity.69

This tension is preserved in Pope Gelasiuss formulation concerning the two

powers, ecclesial auctoritas and secular dominium that rule this world with the

former having ultimate sway over the latter in all and every issue since nothing

concerning our passing through this world is irrelevant to our attaining the things

eternal as the Prayer Book has it.70 It was only lost in a later period in which, for

example, the Carolingian theologian Jonas of Orleans could see the two powers as

67
This seems to me to be the problem with Robert A. Markuss otherwise very illuminating study,
Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP 2006)
68
See John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the
Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005)
69
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 382-443
70
Gelasius I, Letter to Emperor Anastasius in O and J.L. ODonovan eds From Irenaeus to Grotius,
179
 93

ruling the Church, so effectively baptising coercive power, just as the Carolingian

law-code came to be more radically linked to Biblical law than the more secular

Justinian one.71

Christians may all the same feel dismayed that their fortunes have been so linked to

an imperial project. However, the route to abolition of local tyranny and prejudice

has always lain through imperialism, for the whole duration of global history. This

was why even Karl Marx gave capitalist imperialism his qualified support.

Certainly this was too whiggish of him, given the contingent and bourgeois

character of this mode of imperialism. Yet by contrast, while the Roman Empire

indeed engaged in acts of primary accumulation of slave power and military

personnel this rapine did not really extend to local land and economy, and indeed

the Empire rather tended to ensure a good circulation of foodstuffs and high-quality

ceramic goods, while Roman justice permitted new mediations to take place

between local tribal groupings.

At the same time Christianity carried out a critique of empire. One can be appalled

at Constantines recasting of the supposed nails from Christs cross into a military

horses spur, yet the gesture surely implies that even the spur must now be remotely

qualified by the ethos of loving self-sacrifice.72 From the conversion of Constantine

onwards, all ruling became infused with a new pastoral dimension which showed

a new concern with all aspects of subjects lives and involved the support for the

foundation of institutions unknown to pagan antiquity: the hospice, the orphanage,

71
Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia I, translated by R.W. Dyson as A Ninth-Century Political
Tract (Smithtown NY: Exposition Press, 1983) 10. See also Caroline Humfress, The lex Cristiana
from Diocletian to Charlemagne, forthcoming in Past and Present.
72
I am indebted to Caroline Humfresss remarks during a radio broadcast on Constantine for this point.
 94

the almshouse, the places of sanctuary and refuge, diaconates for the systematic

distribution of alms.

More drastically, Augustine pointed out that the Roman establishment of worldly

peace was really based upon a lust for conquest and proposed a reform of empire

that would entail a decentralised relational linking of many dispersed local

centres.73 To some extent this was what then came about in the West, though

admittedly in large part through force of circumstance. Nonetheless, the

increasingly compelled reliance upon ecclesial rule and ecclesial law in the

barbarian territories meant that a local face-to-face rule based upon the centrality

of an official charismatic figure imaging a remote central power in Rome became

normative and was echoed by secular kings.

And even in more centralised Byzantium, where a now secularised learned pagan

culture survived, the rule of the emperor through iconic images of himself and of

Christ and his mother was linked, as Marie-Jos Mondzain has shown (albeit with

critical hostility) to a radically new notion of economic authority that was

inseparable from the emergence of pastoral ruling already mentioned.74 Within the

general economy of antiquity, the economic in the narrower, special sense was

confined to the area of household management or its more large-scale equivalent,

such as the provisioning of troops. The economic existed ultimately to sustain the

possibility of a more elevated political life of negotiated friendship in debated

agreement amongst adult males. But as Mondzain points out, Christian theology

now spoke of a divine economy that was at the very heart of divine government
73
Milbank, loc cit
74
Marie-Jos Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: the Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary
trans Rico Franses (Stanford: Stanford UP 2005)
 95

and no subordinate aspect. This economy was at once a proportionate distribution

of being to the finite creation in various modes and degrees, and at the same time an

exceptional extra-legal kenotic and dispensatory adaptation of the theological

inner-divine Trinitarian life to the creation and especially the human creation,

through processes of provision that included the economy of salvation.

This salvific economy worked through the subsumption of Christs human flesh and

nature within the personal life of the second person of the Trinity. Such a complete

condescension then entailed that the church as the perpetuated body of Christ

could directly participate in the divine economic ruling. Thus the Greek fathers

spoke of pastoral practice also as an economy, as a new complete mode of

government concerned with every last particular of distribution, of welfare and of

the bringing about of true harmonious relationships. And imperial rule was

understood to be also an aspect of this exercise of an economy. In the case of both

episcopal and imperial economy, there was also a mediation of the divine

adaptation to the needs of fleshly understanding and this had to do especially with

the deployment of icones, not icons alone, but icons as images in every sense. The

frontal painting of the mother and child in particular itself illustrated the divine

economy, because it purported to delineate the full presence of the infinite in the

finite, and was itself the prime vehicle for the operation of the ecclesial-imperial

economy of ruling being depicted indeed on the reverse face of coins bearing the

portrait of the emperor on the other side.

In this way, as Mondzain implies, it is Christianity, and not some inexorable

materialist destiny, which has brought about not only the dominance of the
 96

economic in Europe, but also the dominance of the spectacle, before which Islam

has always recoiled in understandable horror. We have honestly to recognise here

that there is nothing about this rift that can be readily mediated by conversation

that liberal alibi for the refusal to take the responsibility to decide. But here one

must distinguish between three different meanings of the economic. There is first of

all the sense of general economy which is a term of art for the cultural code that

blends the ideal with the practical and is more or less synonymous with religion.

Secondly there is the narrower sense of the economic domain which has only

come into being with capitalism. But thirdly there is the Greek sense of oikonomia

mentioned earlier, which has mainly to do with the governing of the oikos (the

household). Already Plato and then late Hellenistic political thought tended to make

political categories also economic ones, or to see the city also as a great

household for whose entire life one should be concerned, including the place of

women, old people and children within it. But Christianity took this much further:

now the prime model for cosmic governance was an economic one and the

administration of economy here below exploded the bounds of the city and started

to make cosmopolis a practical reality in a way that the stoics had not been able to

encompass.

Economic rule then is intrinsically imperialist in a certain sense. As Mondzain

argues, iconic logic implies a containment of what cannot be contained and

therefore at once tends to consecrate a specific site and to demand the infinite

expansion of that site. Yet at the same time she overstates the apparent dangers of

this logic and fails to see that it has a radical and liberating potential also, which
 97

opens out a much more populist globalism. This is recognised, from a Marxist point

of view by Hardt and Negri in an extended aside in their book Multitudes.75

For as Hardt and Negri point out, the iconophile theologian John Damascene (and

we can add, also Nicephorus), in defending the veneration of icons, was also

insisting that the tendency to terrestrial universality (to globalisation we might

even say) is not primarily an imperial affair but rather one of ecclesial oral

tradition, linked with the primacy of image over word, or of the person of Christ

over the written testimonies concerning him. Christ is himself the supreme king

only because he is, as the divine Son, the infinite image of the Father. This means

that, if the Father only exercises his omnipotence through a sharing of himself in

the image, that monarchic authority is here re-defined. This had much earlier been

indicated by Gregory Nazianzus, as Eric Peterson pointed out against his erstwhile

friend Carl Schmitt.76 The Trinity is a monarchy Gregory averred, but only in the

sense of a supreme unified arche whose principle of order already exists as a set of

reciprocal relations or scheses.77 The divinely economic rule by image is therefore

not a deceiving bedazzlement by a reserved and manipulating paternal will, but

rather the always-already begun emergence of paternity only in filial expression,

which is then open to interpretative and loving reception by the Holy Spirit, the

third person of the Trinity.

75
Hardt and Negri, Multitudes, 324-7
76
Eric Peterson, Der Monotheismus als Politisches Problem (Leipzig: Jacob Hegner, 1935); A
Momigliano, The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State in Classical Philology 81
1986, p.153; Gyrgy Gerby, Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson on the Problem of Political Theology: a
Footnote to Kantorowicz in A. Al-Azmeh and J.M. Bak eds Monotheistic Kingship: the Medieval
Variants (Budapest: CEU MEDIEVALIA 2004)
77
Gregory Nazianzen, Orations 29:2
 98

Such a theological model of monarchy, as Peterson argued, contrasts with that of

Arianism or of semi-Arianism or indeed (one might add) with that of Islam.78

Imperial ideologies, as with Eusebius, often tended to be built upon a semi-Arian

conception which elevated the original paternal will above the imaging that is the

Son, so reducing the latter to an economic function of mediation even within the

immanent Trinity, and ensuring that human rule is thought of mainly in terms of the

administration of laws following a willing command, and that an economy is

essentially for the ensuring of order and a condescending adaptation to peoples

limited horizons. Hence the iconoclastic emperor Constantine V tried to confine the

church more to an invisible experience of Eucharistic union with the divine, thereby

de-politicising it, while he sought also to monopolise the divine sanction for

ruling, but interpreted this more in terms of pure hierarchical delegation. The rule

through images was now confined to the spread throughout the body of the empire

of images of the emperor himself, as mere reminders of his power and majesty,

mediating to us on earth the power of a Christological thumos, rather than a

Paternal nous, which was now seen as prior to imaging. Accordingly images of

living holy men and priests as well as of icons had now to be much more

supplemented by regulation and the delegation of powers to legislate and make

contracts. Hence Constantine V commenced a sub- contracing feudalisation of the

empire at its borders.

One can argue, as Hardt and Negri imply, that the iconoclastic model of

appropriating, minimising and regularising the influence of images, in conjunction

with the increased deployment of formal rule and contract, remained an important

78
Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship; Power and the sacred in Muslim, Christian and Sacred Polities
(London: IB Tauris 2001)
 99

example for later European history and was in new ways resorted to by Spanish and

French Baroque monarchs, as well as Russian czars and German Kaisers. By

contrast, the reserved, emergency-waiting authority of the Holy Roman Emperor

could only be effective, as recent research has shown, by his constant linking of

himself to complex liturgical cycles in time and liturgical circulations of space.79

It was therefore iconoclasm, like the Islamic caliphate, which proved more nakedly

imperialist in the political sense of tending both to absolutism and to economic

contractualism. One could say here that iconophilism, by comparison, is less

imperialist but more globalising, although it did in this way point more towards a

universal economy. For the point which Mondzain misses is that, because the divine

economy mediates the divine theology (the inner-Trinitarian life), the economic

deployment of images is in reality always in excess of any mere condescension and

adaptation. Icons are indeed enigmas (following St Paul) that we only need for

now, and yet they are no mere temporary instruments of the divine will, because

these enigmas reflect as in a mirror the divine infinite image which is no mere

economic adaptation, but an absolutely original and essential dispersal which

ensures that God is in himself love as reciprocal relationship. Thus Nikephorus saw

even the icon as caught up in this reciprocity by grace: the icon shows forth God

only because God has brought human flesh within the bounds of the return of the

Son to the Father: the relatives, these very same things, depend on things other

than themselves and change their relationships reciprocally..It is because

the icon is one of the relatives that it is glorified jointly with the glorified model

80
79
Nikolaus Gussone, Religion in a Crisis of Interregnum: the Role of Religion in Bridging the Gap
Between Otto III and Henry III in Azmeh and Bak eds. Monotheistic Kingship , 119-135
80
Nikephoros, Antirrehtics 277 B -280 D in Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy 236-8
 100

For this reason, rule by image on the human level here implies not the

manipulating reserve of will behind spectacle, but rather the communication of rule

as such, since it only exists through the image, through the distribution of the

purposes of justice. In this way adaptation to human needs is only possible in so

far as the passage of adaptation itself reflects an intrinsic, eternal and not merely

instrumental order. Hence the icocnophile theologians were contending for the

primacy of an ecclesial rule which surpasses the mere imposition of law and the

upholding of regulation, but rather reaches economically to peoples detailed needs

and the endeavour to reconcile all creatures to all other ones, while permitting the

people themselves to participate in this economising transmission. This is not, as

Mondzain implies, an ideological sanctification of a rule which the iconoclasts were

trying to secularize, but just the opposite: an attempt, equivalent to that of

Augustine in the west, relatively to secularize the imperial power and to insist on

the primacy of trans-political social purposes.

Here also, the insistence of the iconophile theologians that the drawn line of the

icon does not circumscribe the divine is crucial: if the uncontainable is here

econtained, then this is only because it blows apart all containing, such that if, in

the icon, we see the invisible, we also no longer see the visible, or only now see it

invisibly. Unless one realises that apophaticity also applies to Christs humanity and

its imaging, the icon is indeed politically dangerous and totalising; but if one does

realise this, it allows us the freeing of terrain from merely legal and wilful

dominion. Even what we appear to have dominion over is now something that

always exceeds us, always a gift that precedes us and resonates beyond our control.
 101

The icon turns the surface inside out. So while indeed it seems to demand that it

be shown across the entire surface of the globe, in such a way that this surface

become co-terminous with its own surface which already exceeds every finite

surface in extent, yet since it depicts the infinite, it also renders the entire surface of

the globe newly ungovernable by human beings at all. To rule by image is really

to mediate an imaging that is always already begun and which one by no means

commands. Hence the icon was a peculiar and novel mimesis of the invisible,

whose artifice now exceeded nature by grace, rendering it already, as Mondzain

says, abstract art which only shows itself as an epiphany of the beyond, which

itself is an infinite showing of the image only as itself since the Son

mysteriously copies the Father who is invisible and therefore only is in showing

himself in this copy. (As many have pointed out, Trinitarian thought is highly

postmodern at this point). Such an imitation of the invisible could only arrive

miraculously, without adequate fore-thought, and unfolds according to the non-

identical repetition of an oral tradition, not according to the control of visual

propaganda.81

Following the Libri Carolini, the Christian west theoretically embraced in a

qualified fashion aspects of economic rule through the sacral image and clearly

did so even more in practice. These books also emphatically refused any following

of the cult of the image of the ruler himself. The later route to the debasement of

this into propagandistic spectacle and the manipulation of desire for the sake of

81
See here also, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Deus per Naturam, Deus per Gratiam: Note on the Political
theology of the Middle Ages in Harvard Theological Review, 45, 1952
 102

profit arguably lay through the appropriation of the sacral image by absolutist state

rulers in the 17thC.82

Yet despite my insistence above that territorial expansion was regarded as

primarily the prerogative of the Church, which sought to make the whole surface of

the globe show forth again the divine glory in the light of redemption, it remains the

case that Catholicity, however strangely this may sound to Christians today, was

also concerned with international government of the things of the saeculum,

precisely because it insisted that the road to eternal peace had to encompass also the

attempt at the fyndinge of terrestrial peace. Otherwise, to put it quite simply, the

love of God would not have been inseparable from the love of neighbour the two

having been absolutely identified (without reduction of the one to the other in either

direction) for the first time in the gospels.

Hence the concern in both east and west for the fate of the empire and for the

borders of Christendom a concern which was the sine qua non of the extension of

mission. For there scarcely ever has been any mission without some sort of military

protection or ultimate guarantee, and where there this has been the case, as for

example with the first evangelisation of Ireland, then mission itself entailed the

establishment of some sort of new pan-tribal legality. Altogether to lament this

situation is both to fail to be honest and also too extremely to abandon fyndinge to

mere patience, by forgetting the degree to which human local injustice may distort

peoples chances of attaining a redemptive transformation of their lives. It is in

82
On the Libri Carolini see H.D. Liebeschutz, Western Christian thought from Boethius to Anselm,
in A.H. Armstrong ed The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy
(Cambridge: CUP 1967) 567-86 ; On Louis XIV see Louis Marin, The Kings Body in Food for
Thought , trans Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989) 189-243
 103

effect to deny incarnation, by underestimating the importance of the material

dimension to our ultimate human destiny. (But of course Bush and Blairs action in

Iran had nothing to do with evangelical hopes of a new mission field; nor can a

war for belief be justified, only in some circumstances wars against injustice or

defensive wars to protect an entire legitimate way of life.)

We have already seen how the emperor in the Christian west acted as a kind of

ultimate guarantor of order. He likewise acted, like later kings, as a guarantor of the

property of the free peasantry, since they constituted for him something of an

independent base for taxation and support, without the mediation of the aristocracy.

The collapse of the Carolingian empire in the west, partly under external pressure,

led to the anarchic rise of the castellans, the enchaining of the peasantry by

serfdom, and the wandering of local warlords seeking new sources of wealth (partly

in the face of the rise of single inheritance by elder sons) across the face of Europe

into Britain, Sicily and Germany.83 The matters of France, Britain and Rome

(Charlemagne, Arthur, Aeneas/Augustus) therefore conserved the memory of a real

achievement that was epochally lost. In addition, the power of the emperor

permitted the Church to confine herself more to an eminent spiritual auctoritas,

even if coercive ruling had come (partly following Byzantine theocratic models

which the west nonetheless increasingly qualified in both a Germanic and an Old

Testament constitutional fashion) too much to be seen as an ecclesial office. Even

the great lay involvement in clerical appointments during this era can perhaps only

be considered as pure abuse from a later perspective which too much identified

spiritual authority with clerical power.

83
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 76-116
 104

We have already seen how the early history of international relations in the

Christian west had theological as well as material dimensions. First of all, the very

emergence of the notion of the economic as basic (initially through an extension

of the household sense) turns out counter-intuitively to be a theological rather than

itself an economic matter. Secondly, the peculiar role of the emperor was sustained

in part through a theological imaginary.

By contrast, it would seem that the circumstances which led to the emergence of the

feudal order were brutally material in character. This is by and large the case, and

yet a reign of anarchy for a considerable period was itself the witness to the

indeterminate negativity of that circumstance. By contrast, the more feudalism

became for a long while a new established order, as lordship assumed increasingly

the banal qualities of ruling, then the more a theological imaginary again played a

considerable part. First of all, with the lapse of the role of the emperor, the papacy

had perforce, albeit not often reluctantly, to try to become the new guarantor of

international order both through a strengthening of the organisation of clerical

pastoral rule from the his sacrally territorial base, and through an attempt to control

the various local kings. Eventually, the perfectly theologically sound papal claim to

a plenitudo potestatis, an ultimate rule of auctoritas even over dominium, got

corrupted into a claim to exercise coercive dominium directly, though this took

some time fully to develop. But prior to that development, the papacy to some

degree encouraged the submission of knightly anarchy to a code of Christian

honour, with the re-working of Indo-European tripartition in terms of a threefold

sacred caste division into those who pray, those who fight and those who labour.

The knights themselves began to pay a melancholic tribute to what they had
 105

displaced by tracing their lineage from Charlemagne and Arthur, even to the extent

of developing a fully-fledged lay priesthood, involving a kind of ordination rite that

communicated a lineage at least as honourable as that of St Peter, since it traced

itself back to Joseph of Arimathea. (Recent research has shown just how seriously

all this was taken.)84

The feudal order therefore to some degree relied upon a theological code and upon

the enhanced power of the papacy. In addition one can say here that our

understanding of feudalism, as many historians have now shown, remains

distorted by both the whig and the Marxist legacy. It was hierarchical yes, but

fluidly so, and incorporated certain egalitarian moments. These were most manifest

in the guild and fraternity organisations in the towns, although the urban economies

were admittedly entirely upheld by the rural feudal economy. Yet in the latter case,

as Susan Reynolds has demonstrated, the idea of a nakedly contractual exchange of

land for service appears to be something that only emerged from Roman law

influenced judicial writings at the end of the Middle Ages. What this shows is that

the model of feudalism bequeathed to us it itself constructed in the mirror of

emerging notions of formal contractualism.85 As a consequence later writers, right

down to Marx, tended to describe feudalism both as a contrast to capitalism and yet

in terms of a distorted approximation to capitalism perhaps an approximation

which was bound not to work in the end.

Thus it was not exactly the case that a lord owned property in return for military

service. Rather, this service was owing as a kind of tributary gift to the king which

84
Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (New York OUP 1999) 45-63
85
Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 475-83
 106

expressed the lords entire position within society. Certainly his land was in some

sense a kind of gracious grant from the king, but again this had far more overtones

of gift than was later allowed. Likewise the offices of justice and administration

which went with the land to a degree mediated the kings power, but they also

simply went with the land, and were inseparable from the very notion of

landedness.

The same applies to the case of serfdom. Here Reynolds suggests that there was

great fluidity of category and that very many peasants still owned some subsistence

land and yet were also obliged to provide some bound services.86 The latter were

not so nakedly offerred in return for military protection as has been supposed. For

while they were (sometimes forcibly) offered to the Lord, they were also offered to

the Lord insofar as he represented the community in general to the more general

aspects of its upkeep, to its legal administration, to its glory as well as to its

defence. Of course this situation overwhelmingly involved oppression and often in

horrific degrees, yet Marxism is nevertheless technically inaccurate even within its

own terms in speaking simply of an inevitably coercive exaction or

appropriation here. Capitalist extraction of profits is indeed wholly coercive, since

there is no continuity between the immediate purposes sought by the worker and

those sought in the goalless and socially indifferent piling up of abstract wealth

even if the worker may partially consent to the process because he is seduced by

wealths spectacle. But in the case of feudalism there is a continuity between the

peasants labour and the purposes of the Lord, since both uphold a liturgical

rhythm of social practice and meaning to which both assent. The Lord could only

build up prestige in terms of manifestations of glory and bestowals of gifts that fall
86
Fiefs and Vassals, 17-75
 107

into socially recognised categories: he cannot do so by pursuing a pure wealth that

may become equivalent to anything whatsoever. But surely it is just this latter

quality that permits one to speak of pure alienating appropriation? This of course

is not to deny that in the course of the Middle Ages most serfs came to think that

serfdom as such was not essential to the processes of reproduction of social

meaning nor to the flow of social reciprocities.

In consequence, we can add to the conclusions about knighthood and the papacy

that feudal relations had an aspect of sacralised gift-exchange to them which did

not obey a purely economic logic in the materialist sense. Such a sense had itself

as yet to be socially produced.

Conclusions about the religious and theological dimensions to the emergence of

capitalism have already been drawn. These concern mainly the Protestant refusal of

the sacramental and destruction of the realm of charity as sacral gift-exchange

through the lay fraternities a realm indeed commemorated as a lost Merry

England in the Robin Hood stories of an exceptional legislating king of the

greenwood in charge of a forest fraternity devoted to Our Lady (as recent research

has clarified.)87

However, one should add here that that the particularly English emergence of a

purely political royal power did not occur only because central sovereignty and

merely bureaucratic rule were in the interests of the market. Again, there was also a

constitutive imaginary dimension. Ernst Kantorowicz pointed out how the notion of
87
A.J. Pollard, Imagining Robin Hood (London: Routledge, 2004)
 108

corpus mysticum got gradually transferred from a Eucharistic and ecclesial meaning

to the state itself, understood as in some sense the body of the king. But in the case

of England, as he also pointed out, the tradition of Christological kingship was

particularly extreme.88 The Norman Anonymous had said that while the papacy

represents Christs humanity, the King represents his divinity. Not only is this

hierarchy surprising, but the very notion of separate earthly reflections of the two

Christic natures suggests a kind of Nestorianism, and also an elevation of an

invisible reflection of divine power above the priestly and iconic reflection of

Christs human power, in a fashion somewhat akin to (but clearly also different

from) iconoclastic imperial ideology.89

Pope Gelasius, by contrast, had distinguished the separate reflection of Christs

priesthood (Pope) from his kingship (Emperor) in fulfillment of the type of

Melchizedek. Here the imitation is in either case of his divinely-imbued humanity,

reflecting the economic commercium. But the Nestorian separation of the two

natures to such a degree that one has something like two persons and a homo

assumptus, seems to be repeated in the English tendency so to abstract the body

politic of the king that it became both utterly cut-off from his physical body and

increasingly abstracted from the actual physical body of the realm. This meant that

in England an abstract sovereignty could increasingly be envisaged apart from the

monarchs physical presence. Hence whereas in France, when the king died, one

required the temporary modelling of an effigy in order to fill this gap, in England in

a much more real sense the king never died at all.90 Thus, as Kantorowicz pointed
88
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton:
Princeton UP 1997) esp 42-61 and 194-273
89
See the selections from the Norman Anonymous in O. and J.L. ODonovan, From Irenaeus to
Grotius, 250-59
90
Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 419-437 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Soveriegn Power
and Bare Life, trans Daniel Heller-Roatzen (Stanford: Stanford UP 1998); State of Exception trans
 109

out, the English eventually executed the king on the orders of the crown and

having done so were shortly afterwards able to restore the monarchy, since it had

never really ended. In France by contrast, once the king had been executed, that

was literally the end of the line the restored monarchy there was a much more

contrived affair.91

In this way, the most practically extreme instance of purely political sovereign

power, enabling the emergence of capitalism, was partly the product of a

Nestorian political theology (perhaps encouraged by currents in English

scholasticism, especially Scotist ones). In the English version of sacral kingship it

was a relatively de-sacramentalised affair, providing a Christological route for the

invention of abstract sovereignty as a deathless power.

12. Conclusions

From the instances just traced and from the other historical scenarios briefly

rehearsed in this essay, it can be seen that, while in a sense social property relations

have been determinative in the history of the west, in a deeper sense what is

determinative is the general economy, the total distribution of practice intertwined

with the symbolic-imaginary. This distribution is itself the religious or the quasi-

religious.

Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago UP 2003)

91
Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 7-41
 110

Therefore, since capitalism as a general economy is the imaginary production of the

sheerly material as well as the purely abstract, its emergence cannot be explained in

terms of any historical materialism. On the contrary, it can only be traced by

following the contours of shifts in general economies, which are also shifts in

religious arrangements.

Capitalism can then be best understood as an intra and post Christian outcome. The

drive to unify the surface of the earth remains a catholic drive. The urge to unify

the whole body of humanity in love and reciprocal giving remains the desire of the

body of Christ. The emergence of purely political absolute sovereignty is a

permutation upon an heretical Arian or Nestorian model of human ruling, which at

once appropriates the iconic to the merely terrestrial and at the same time

abstractedly withdraws from this spectacular instrument of manipulation. The arrival

of a predominantly economic era is a reductive transformation of the Christian sense

of a mediation of the divine economy here on earth. And finally age of the spectacle

is the futile attempt still to locate the infinite in the finite image, once the

sacramental mediation of a transcendent infinite has been denied.

The conclusions then to be drawn from this essay are therefore the following:

1. The Christian project because it is a catholic project is a globalising, imaging

and economising one.

2. The mode that globalisation now takes is the upshot of the triumph of a perverse

mode of Christianity which has engendered capitalism.

 111

3. It is likely that (whether this is good or bad) Christianity, because of its inner

catholic logic, will prove to be the only truly world religion, the only one that

will encompass the globe. Perhaps the pathos of current Islam is that its inner logic

as well as global positioning will not really allow it to match these ambitions.

4. A truly orthodox Catholic position would demand radical resistance to the

American empire, capitalism and conservative evangelicalism.

5. Yet the only hope for the future substantive peace of global inter-related

harmonious consensus lies in re-inventing in some fashion a Catholic mode of

terrestrial occupation, both sacramental and political, since, as Alain Badiou has

argued, the Christian event was the birth of the notion of a universal truth project as

such and therefore remains the site of a meta-truth project, binding all truth-projects

together (though he would not draw this conclusion).92 Secular authorities should

remain independently occupied with the things of time, but the ultimate measure of

justice here is the degree to which this occupation opens already the way to human

deification under grace. To sustain this measure, the Church should now encourage

the social growth of a far more egalitarian mode of economic gift-exchange,

beyond anything so far known in Christendom, yet in consistency with its even as

yet still unenclosed sacral commonalities.

92
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La Fondation de luniversalisme ( Paris: PUF 1999)
112
113