Abstract
In the Preface to this valuable book, the distinguished political philosopher and historian of political ideas Ronald Beiner candidly states that his approach to political philosophy is “deliberately old-fashioned.” He recognizes a “canon of great thinkers” and proposes that we insert ourselves into the dialogue between them.
Beiner acknowledges that by opting for the dialogical approach to political philosophy, he is already taking sides in an important methodological controversy about how to read canonical texts. Are the canonical writers to be read in a way that takes the historical context in which they produced their works to be central and decisive? This “contextualist” view is not to be lightly dismissed. As Jesse Jackson once said, “text without context is pretext.” And attention to the historical context in which major figures reflected and wrote is necessary, not only to avoid the temptation of manipulating their writings for one’s own political purposes but also for understanding them accurately.
Yet a strict contextualism would deprive us of what is certainly to be gained precisely by bringing history’s great thinkers into dialogue with each other and with us. Moreover, as Beiner points out, the writers themselves, though often enough concerned with the political problems of their own time, very often saw themselves as engaged in a conversation with political philosophers of other times and places: Machiavelli with Livy, Hobbes with Aristotle, Spinoza with Maimonides, Rousseau with Machiavelli, and Nietzsche with Plato, to cite Beiner’s own examples.
Dialogue is central to Beiner’s project in a second way. Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy is conceived as a grand “three-way dialogue within the tradition of political philosophy—between religion [or what he sometimes calls ‘theocracy,’ though religion is clearly the better term], civil religion, and liberalism.”
Beiner evinces little interest in religion for its own sake. His serious interests are in politics. But he (rightly) asserts that this makes engagement with religion unavoidable, for religion always and everywhere, so far as we are aware, bears on and helps to shape politics. Religion is, Benier says, “an inescapable problem of politics, and therefore it is perennial question for political philosophy” (p. 2). Why should that be the case? According to Beiner, it is because “when religion asserts its own purposes, which are not those of politics, it poses an absolutely fundamental challenge to political authority, and politics cannot take lightly such a radical challenge to its authority” (p. 1).
So, how is politics to handle the question of religion?
Sometimes a religion captures the mechanisms of power in a society and religious leaders and institutions become direct wielders of political authority who aim or purport to govern on the basis of the teachings of the faith. That, strictly speaking, is theocracy. It is the situation of Biblical Israel or contemporary Iran.
Another possibility is the one Beiner refers to as “liberalism.” This represents the effort to depoliticize religion by privatizing or otherwise marginalizing it. This seems to be the preferred option of secular liberals today, whether they are “Church-haters” to use a term Beiner borrows from Leszek Kolakowski, or people who don’t mind religion (or even like or admire it) so long as it stays out of politics.
The other possibility is “civil religion,” which Beiner defines as “the empowerment of religion, not for the sake of religion, but for the sake of enhanced citizenship—of making members of the political community better citizens, in accordance with whatever conception one holds of what constitutes being a good citizen” (p. 2; emphasis in original).
Beiner acknowledges that the great champion of contemporary liberalism is the late John Rawls. He is the most recent of the great thinkers in a tradition of thought about politics and religion that emerged as a response to the crisis occasioned by the European wars of religion in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. In this way, he is an heir to Locke and, in a sense, even to Hobbes, who, though not a liberal in his political prescriptions, was, Beiner argues, a liberal in his philosophical assumptions. Describing his own project, Beiner says that the motivating idea of his book is to “situate” Rawls’s account of religion in his later work (especially Political Liberalism) in the long dialogue within the history of political philosophy.
Yet Rawls does not get a formal treatment until chapter 23. It is, however, worth the wait. All the “situating” that has been going on in the first 22 chapters is more than a little helpful in enabling Beiner to analyze and assess Rawls’s achievement and also the shortcomings of his work. Beiner’s own judgment of Rawls’s efforts is respectfully, yet strongly, critical. He sees deep problems—even incoherences—in Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy,” doctrine of “public reason,” and concepts of “comprehensive views” and a merely “political,” as opposed to “comprehensive,” liberalism. Beiner certainly understands and appreciates (as I do) Rawls’s reasons for attempting to construct a liberalism that will not compete with and seek to displace other reasonable comprehensive doctrines (religious or secular), but will merely govern the civic sphere in a way that ensures fairness and freedom from unwarranted impositions in the name of comprehensive doctrines of any type—including liberalism considered as a comprehensive view. “But,” as Beiner remarks, “it raises a very large question of whether one can be, for civic purposes, agnostic about the ends of life while decidedly privileging the needs of citizenship over the demands of faith” (p. 294).
Beiner is keen to understand why Rawls would make things more difficult for himself by eschewing the strategy of arguing for liberal conclusions on the basis of a comprehensive view. Wouldn’t it be better (or at least simpler), he in effect asks, to engage philosophical critics of liberalism at the level of full-blown ethical argument—argument about good and bad, right and wrong? The answer, Beiner concludes, is that Rawls fears that the battle of comprehensive views, including the contest between liberalism considered as a comprehensive doctrine and comprehensive views that reject some or many of the tenets of comprehensive liberalism, creates a risk of civil strife of the sort that, in the case of the wars of religion, generated modern liberalism in the first place.
Are Rawls’s fears reasonable? Beiner thinks not. Indeed, he argues that Rawls has cooked up a phantom solution—“political” liberalism—to a phantom problem, the concern about civil strife on a par with the wars of religion. He dismisses Rawls’s own formal account of the wars of religion and their role in the genesis of liberalism as “potted history” (p. 286) and declares “political liberalism” to be something that does not, and cannot, actually exist: “it is a phantom of the Rawlsian imagination” (p. 297). According to Beiner, “a liberal regime always reflects and embodies a liberal view of life” (p. 297), so the task of the liberal political philosopher is to argue that the liberal view of life is the best view of life, a view that is superior to its secular and religious competitors.
Some of the works of political philosophy Beiner explores and most admires were, he says, “written on the basis of the knowledge that religion is not innocent, that Christianity and the other world religions had centuries of blood on their hands—and, we can add, this culpability extends right up to our own day” (p. 411). He views figures such as Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume as people who “were determined to do something about this” (p. 411). Although their strategies differed, they all sought to change the relationship between religion and politics. Despite his belief that Rawls’s concerns with the potential for civil strife are overblown, Beiner declares that it is the “first duty of intellectuals . . . to honor that struggle and to affirm moral and intellectual solidarity with those great enlighteners in our own thinking about religion and politics” (p. 411). But how truly “enlightened” were those “great enlighteners”? Such a question could be answered only on the basis of extensive reflection and sober, impartial judgment about the various consequences for modern societies of the adoption (especially by cultural and political elites) of various tenets of the philosophies of Hobbes, for example, or Spinoza or Hume. My suspicion is that we would find the record mixed. Christianity and the other world religions have some blood on their hands (though they also deserve credit for much that is good). But who is prepared to say that the traditions of secularism that grew out of, or were at least partially shaped by, certain Enlightenment philosophies have unbloodstained hands?
Well, that is a debate for another day. For now, I will say only that those of us who have been in debt to Ronald Beiner for previous works that have enriched our understanding of the “master thinkers” of political theory find our debt to him deepened by Civil Religion.