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Socialism of the Gift, Socialism by Grace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

John Milbank
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I want to discuss in this essay the possible interrelations between socialism, Christianity and community.

For one strange moment in the summer of 1994, it seemed as if the people of this country had become a community, united, like so many communities, perhaps all communities, around a death. The death of a Scottish Christian socialist, John Smith. But they became a community it seemed, perhaps again like every community, around a mourning for lost community, lost solidarity, lost hope of a religiously-tinged socialist ideal (which many more sympathise with than believe in).

And we are still just about within the echo of this moment, which determines that the new public visibility of Christian Socialism, concentrated around the Elisha figure of Tony Blair, has an elegiac, melancholy feel to it. There is nothing here for anyone to triumph in; least of all Christian Socialists. For if a surprising number of still remaining socialists are Christians, or indeed Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, then this may be precisely because socialism, like religion, now assumes a merely spectral reality in the modern secularised world. It has ceased to appear either plausible or rational, and has instead been consigned to the realm of faith. Yet, as with Christianity in the west, we remain haunted by its excellence, because nothing has emerged to replace it; we sense that just as the story of a compassionate God who became man was the ‘final religion’, so also, the hope of a universal fraternity based on sharing was ‘the final politics’. With its demise, we are delivered over to something somehow more secular than politics—to a future of infinite utilitarian calculation by individuals, states and transnational companies, of the possible gains and losses, the greater and the lesser risks.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 77 , Issue 910 , December 1996 , pp. 532 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

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3 See Bhaskar, Roy, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (Verso, London, 1986)Google Scholar. The mistakes of Bhaskar and his followers are 1) to imagine that there are identifiable ‘laws’ more ultimate than the contingency of flux and event. 2) to project laws' which are no more than the fictions of human instrumental reason and its encountered limits onto an imagined ‘reality’. 3) to fail to see that the social is in no sense a ‘reality’ over‐against us, since it is us, and therefore entirely coterminous with our endlessly revisable interpretations: the social world both is an act of interpretation, and also endlessly subject to re‐interpretations which really alter how it ‘is’ or how it occurs in time. ‘Realism’ spatialises the real, in such a way that the reality of occurrence (time, history) is obliterated. 4) still to lust after a false marriage of socialism and scientific objectifying reason.

4 See Giddens, Anthony, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, (Polity, Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar.

5 I recall this polemic around July 1994, but cannot trace the exact reference.

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21 I am here indebted to discussions with Paul Heelas of the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, around this point.

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28 See Pickstock, The Sacred Polis: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Chapters four and five.

29 J‐L. Lacoste, Expériénce et Absolu, (P.U.F., Paris, 1994), 28–49. But for an elaboration and critique of Lacoste, see Pickstock, The Sacred Polis: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Chapter five.

30 See John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, 140‐52 and passim‥

31 Mauss, The Gift.

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37 On ‘double excess’ see Milbank, John, On Complex Space', Chapter 12 of The Word Made Strange, (Blackwell, Oxford, forthcoming November, 1996)Google Scholar.