n Late (Post?) Liberalism: a Catholic Politics of Abundance, Generosity, Peace

Medievalist Andrew Willard Jones ("The End of Sovereignty: an Essay in Postliberalism" Communio, Fall/Winter 2018) helpfully compares our late {post?) liberal order to the high middle ages to suggest our path forward. The "liberal order" here indicates the ever-increasing (towards absolute) sovereignty of the nation state as the only guarantee of peace in a metaphysical order that assumes the primacy of the autonomous, isolated individual and therefore the unending war of "all against all." The purpose of the liberal order is to protect the rights and powers of the competent individual: to define happiness, to property and economic initiative, to "choice", to sexual preferences, and ad infinitum. As this order develops, it progressively erodes all communal bonds: family, marriage, Church, community, nation, and all the mediating institutions. Increasingly, the absolute state (in partnership we might add, with the global corporation) assumes complete control to protect but also enslave the isolated individual. 

By contrast, the medieval monarch and government had nothing remotely approaching such sovereignty. The King and his knights, in a given area, may have monopolized the weapons of destruction, but their powers were circumscribed by a complex network of countervailing communities and institutions: the Church and clergy, monasteries, schools, guilds, townships, and other. These competing centers of power were in constant, dynamic competition. The person was never an isolated unit, but always embedded in a number of communities: extended family, craft,parish,  and social order of some sort. The Catholic vision of life permeated society so there was always an awareness that all of us, together, are pilgrims on a journey to another kingdom, heaven. The social order opened itself up to a transcendent horizon so total sovereignty was granted to no one: not the state or the king, certainly not the individual.

Jones proposes that rather than understanding the Church and religious freedom within the liberal order, we re-contextualize the liberal order itself within the larger Catholic vision of communal life as already a participation and anticipation of heaven. The liberal, legal, regulative order deals with rights, procedures, duties; but it knows nothing about the boundless exuberance of actual human life: the love shared quietly between spouses, parents and children, friends, pastor and flock and so forth. The inexorable logic of the liberal order is to shrink actual human life to the boundaries of law, regulation and bureaucracy; but the spontaneity and fecundity of life cannot finally be so controlled. 

Jones leaves the reader with a sense of the ambiguity, fragility and smallness of the liberal order. It is ambiguous: it is far superior to its competitors such as communism or sharia law. It grew out of Christendom and retains rich residues of that legacy. But it cannot help from elevating the individual and the mega-state as it systematically destroys all the rich, diverse forms of community which image the eternal Trinity.

Jones joins Dineen, Vermulle, Douthat, Dreher and others as we consider our path forward in a liberal order that is systematically destroying itself. 

His thought is liberating. He acknowledges the totalitarian propensities of liberalism (of the right and the left) but he has a sense of its impotence and fragility. On the other hand, he intuits the dynamism, promise and fecundity of an evangelical civilization in all its dimensions, however hidden and modest. He leaves us with a sense that every happy family, every gathering to worship, every act of mercy and generosity, every moment of quiet prayer...is already a humble political event