Stromberg Responds to Storck and Cavanaugh

Polis, State, and the Common Good

I wrote some quick notes here on Storck and Cavanaugh, which need to be fleshed out more fully.

On Aristotelian analysis of accidental unities: the use of form and matter to analyze accidental unities (like the unity of a community) is not problematic, if that sort of unity is understood probably (i.e. not identical to substantial unity).

Otherwise, I agree with Stromberg for the most part.

Allan Carlson on Capitalism

Economic Smackdown!: ‘Porchers’ vs. ‘Austrians’

"So, what is the alternative? Here, I lay out the argument of Wilhelm Roepke, advocate of the Humane Economy."

Related:
FEE - The Arena: Capitalism

Anamnesis: William Cavanaugh's "Killing For The Telephone Company," A Critique by Thomas Storck
I will try to respond to this shortly.

Extraenvironmentalist Episode #63: Next US Revolution (hi/low)
With a media ecosystem focused almost entirely the corporate system, burgeoning elements of a new economy revolution escape the mainstream eye. As our political systems stagnate in the face of ecological, energy and social crises, can an alternative to capitalism develop over the next few decades? Do ongoing experiments in money, society and energy have the ability to coalesce into a broader cultural shift?

In Extraenvironmentalist #63 we talk about the growing network of institutions and businesses that are forming the new economic revolution in the United States with historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz. Gar describes the ideas in his new book, What Then Must We Do: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution. Then we hear from two of Italy’s leading economists Stefano and Vera Zamagni about the civil society model of a market economy.

John Médaille reviews The Myth of Religious Violence

Lethal Loyalties: Dulce et Decorum Est (Distributist Review)

Nor was the rise of the modern state the solution to the problem, it was the cause. Long before the Reformation, the state was expanding its power at the expense of the Church. The taxing of the clergy, the consolidation of ecclesial courts into civil ones, intrusion into the educational system, the replacement of the Church’s charities with the welfare state, and royal control of clerical appointments were some of the signs of the expanding power of the state. The Reformation itself was part of this process, since so many of the “reformers” were more than willing to replace the pope with the prince to enforce a confessional conformity. The Reformation depended on lay power, and gave a justification for that power. The biggest source of power is always property, and the wealth of the Church was a tempting target. In 1524, King Gustav Vasa of Seeden welcomed the Reformation because it allowed him to transfer the tithes from the Church to the crown, and three years later he appropriated all Church property, nine years before Henry VIII did the same. In France, “secularization” meant the transfer of Church property to the crown.

But this confessional conformity required that local privileges and independence to be overturned. The Catholic Monarchs desired absolutism as much as did their Protestant counterparts. Charles V made war against the Protestant princes, with the help of at least some Protestants, in an attempt to turn the Holy Roman Empire into a centralized, sovereign state. In France, the crown attempted to unite the country under un roi, une foi, une loi, which required a war against the nobility. The nationalized churches became part of a clientage system, so much so that Pope Julius III could write to the French King Henry II, “You are more than pope in your kingdoms.”

After the state caused the wars, its apologists proposed the state as a solution. Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau saw a strong state (or even a state religion) as a necessity. After all, membership in a religion was voluntary, but membership in the state was compulsory, and the state required a degree of conformity. It is not that the new state would be intolerant. On the contrary, it would enforce religious “tolerance,” but only for a “religion” shorn of any civil interests. Religion was to be a private passion—or fantasy—one which would not be allowed to serve as a source of resistance to the totalizing state. Hence, Catholics were excluded from this tolerance, not because of bigotry, but on the quite rational grounds that the Catholic Church could never confine itself to being a “religion” that could be conveniently domesticated and striped of its civil and economic concerns. This church could never fit into the truncated category of religion, and hence could not be compatible with the modern state. The actual trajectory is that first the state was “sacralized” by absorbing the powers of the Church, and then the state was “liberalized” by being tolerant of the “religions,” but only insofar as they present no genuine opposition to the power of the state.

The Myth of Religious Violence by William Cavanaugh (Jesus Radicals)



Related:
Review by Fr. Steve Grunow

Does Religion Cause Violence
Behind the common question lies a morass of unclear thinking.
by William T. Cavanaugh

Liturgy as Politics: An Interview with William Cavanaugh
The Unofficial William T. Cavanaugh Internet Archive
Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State (pdf)
Migrations of the Holy: Westphalia and the Sacralized State