POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND

THE CONFLICTS OF DEMOCRACY

Nicholas Norman-Krause argues, in this authoritative and

sophisticated new treatment of conflict, that contestation is a
basic – potentially regenerative – aspect of any flourishing demo-
cratic politics. In developing a distinctive “agonistic theology,” and
relating the political theory of agonism to social and democratic
life, the author demonstrates that the conflicts of democracy may
have a beneficial significance and depend at least in part on faith
traditions and communities for their successful negotiation. In mak-
ing his case, he deftly examines a rich range of religious and secular
literatures, whether from the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and
Stanley Cavell or from less familiar voices such as early modern
jurist and political thinker Johannes Althusius and twentieth-
century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Liberationists
including Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr. are simi-
larly recruited for a theological account of conflict read not just as
concomitant to, but also as constitutive of, democratic living.

Nicholas Norman-Krause is Assistant Professor of Christian

Ethics at Belmont University.
“This book draws on historical and contemporary scholarship in
political theology, Christian ethics, critical theory, and agonism
to present a clear and compelling argument that democratic
political theology needs a theory that accounts for conflict
as a basic and even salutary aspect of anthropology, society,
and agonistic political communities. Through engagement
with a wide range of primary and secondary literature, as
well as contemporary interlocutors, Nicholas Norman-Krause
addresses a number of key areas and debates in moral and
political theology. Both original and creative, it is a wonderful
piece of work.”
—Emily J. Dumler-Winckler, Associate Professor of Constructive Theology,
Saint Louis University, author of Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft
and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2022)

“Nicholas Norman-Krause accomplishes something that I

previously thought unlikely: placing agonistic political theory
and political theology into mutually productive conversation.
Norman-Krause ushers in an assembly of characters –
Augustine and Arendt, O’Donovan and Cavell, MacIntyre and
Mouffe, Althusius and Isasi-Díaz – that rarely occupy the same
intellectual stage. The introduction of so many theological and
social-theoretical strands could have led to a general incoherence
of the project, but here the reverse is true. This book is both
impressively coherent and copious in its inclusion of so many
(seemingly) rival traditions. Political Augustinians will benefit
greatly from the frisson that the agonists provide. And I also
think that more secular agonist strands of political theory
will benefit from Norman-Krause’s charitable reading of the
theological tradition as well. Considering that one of his main
goals is to show how good conflict and good disagreement can
be politically beneficial, this is an exemplary accomplishment.”
—David Henreckson, Director, Weyerhaeuser Center for Christian
Faith and Learning, Whitworth University, author of The Immortal
Commonwealth: Covenant, Community, and Political Resistance in
Early Reformed Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
“New Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought” combines
philosophical clarity, historical scholarship, and ethical inquiry into
the study of religion, considering such questions as: What does a
properly critical approach to “religion” or to particular religious
traditions, practices, and ideas involve? What concepts might such
an approach employ and how should these be understood? What are
the political implications of taking such an approach – for religious
studies and for the people studied therein? How should attention to
race, class, gender, sexuality, capital, empire, and domination inform
our assessment of religious traditions, institutions, and practices?
The answers offered, while diverse in their methodologies, topics,
and conclusions, are intended alike to be clear, precise, and historically
attuned investigations of important subjects or figures in the study of
religion and critical thought.

Series editors
STEPHEN BUSH Brown University
MOLLY FARNETH Haverford College
Political Theology and the
Conflicts of Democracy

Nicholas Norman-Krause
Belmont University
 Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
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We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009603843
DOI: 10.1017/9781009603829
© Nicholas Norman-Krause 2025
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any
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When citing this work, please include a reference to the
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First published 2025
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ISBN 978-1-009-60384-3 Hardback
Epigraph from
Love’s Work by Gillian Rose
Published by New York Review Books, 2011
Copyright © 1995 by Gillian Rose
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for
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Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived
of its agon.
—Gillian Rose
 Contents

Acknowledgments page x

Introduction: Democracy in Conflict 1

1 Augustinianisms and Liberalisms: Political Theology
and the Problem of Difference 35
2 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology 95
3 Being in Conflict: A Political-Theological Anthropology 144
4 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community 206
5 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics 280
Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times 327

Bibliography 335
Index 356

ix
 Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without the support of count-

less teachers, colleagues, friends, and family who provided
support, encouragement, insight, and intellectual com-
panionship during its writing. I began to think about the
relationship between religion, pluralism, and democratic
politics during my time at Duke Divinity School, and the
seeds of this book were sown in graduate seminars there. I
am especially thankful to Luke Bretherton, David Marshall,
Stanley Hauerwas, Kavin Rowe, and the late Allen Verhey
for their teaching and mentorship. During my doctoral
studies at Baylor University, I was pushed to engage
with a wide range of intellectual discourses, from patris-
tic and medieval theology to continental philosophy, from
Marxian theory to ordinary language philosophy, all of
which enriched, stretched, and deepened my thinking. I am
deeply indebted to the extraordinary teaching of Natalie
Carnes, Paul Martens, and Robert Miner. The generosity,
creativity, integrity, and capaciousness of their work has
long inspired my own, and I hope this book reflects what
I have received from them. Along with Steve Long, they
served as careful readers of my dissertation, which provided
much of the material for this book. I am especially thank-
ful to Steve for his support and encouragement, which gave
me the confidence to see this project through. Finally, I can
hardly express the extent of my gratitude to Jonathan Tran

x
 Acknowledgments

for his mentorship, guidance, intellectual companionship,

and friendship. Jonathan helped me find my voice, which,
for Cavellians like us, means everything.
Aristotle said that, without friends, no one would choose
to live. Certainly, no one would choose to write. I cannot
possibly separate my intellectual work from my friend-
ships, nor should I want to. Friends make thought possible.
Joseph Carnes Ananias, Christina Carnes Ananias, and Peter
Fraser-Morris never tire of conversation, and I have been
profoundly shaped by their companionship over the years.
I could not have asked for better colleagues during my time
at Baylor. Thomas Breedlove, Tyler Davis, Alex Fogleman,
Malcolm Foley, Paul Gutacker, Tom Millay, Cody Strecker,
Rachel Toombs, Matthew Whelan, and Sam Young made
Waco a rich and inspiring place to study, think, and write.
I am also grateful to New Wine, New Wineskins and to the
many people who have made our annual gatherings possible.
The collegiality and conviviality of this community of schol-
ars continually inspires my work.
Many thanks are due to the editors and staff at Cambridge
University Press, especially Alex Wright, for helping bring
this work into its final form. Molly Farneth has been a tre-
mendous supporter of and advisor on this project, and I am
humbled that she, Keri Day, and Stephen Bush have wel-
comed it for the New Cambridge Studies in Religion and
Critical Thought series. The book benefited tremendously
from two anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript
carefully and offered insightful and valuable comments.
Brittany McComb worked with great care and attention to
develop the index.
I owe to my parents, Scott and Teresa, a tremendous debt
for their decades of unwavering support, love, sacrifice,
prayers, and encouragement. Their lives display a wisdom,
sincerity, and truthfulness I seek to imitate in my writing.

xi
 Acknowledgments

Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife Hannah. She

is an unfailing source of support, encouragement, humor,
intellectual friendship, and care. It is an extraordinary gift
to share life with her and our daughter Julian. Hannah
bears life’s agonisms with enduring grace. This book is ded-
icated to her.

xii
 Introduction
Democracy in Conflict

On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the United States

Capitol building. It aimed to disrupt a joint-congressional
session formalizing Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 US pres-
idential election and demand the overturning of those elec-
tion results. Following on the heels of a “Save America” rally
where thousands had gathered to hear the recently defeated
incumbent Donald Trump announce, “We will never con-
cede” the loss of that election, and call on his supporters
to “demonstrate strength,” “fight like hell,” and march to
the Capitol building,1 men and women in Kevlar vests and
military garb, draped in flags, pushed through metal barri-
cades and Capitol police, breaking into the Capitol Rotunda,
House and Senate chambers, and congressional offices.
Rioters fought with security and police, broke windows and
doors, trashed the premises, and vandalized and looted the
building for several hours. Five people died during the events;
140 more were injured.2 As the nation looked on, many were
shocked at the eruption of post-election violence. Others
were less surprised, arguing that this was the near-inevitable
outcome of four years of lies, disinformation, conspiracy,

1
Justin Vallejo, “Trump ‘Save America Rally’ Speech Transcript from 6 January:
The Words That Got the President Impeached,” Independent, January 13, 2021,
https://tinyurl.com/yyks8j2e.
2
Tom Jackman, “Police Union Says 140 Officers Injured in Capitol Riot,” The
Washington Post, January 27, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y5fz5scj.

1
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

and demagoguery, a representation of the civil division and

antagonism saturating American political life.3
Two weeks after the insurrection, in his inaugural address
on the steps of the same Capitol that rioters had besieged,
President Biden sought to address the conflicts riving the
nation. His call was for oneness in the face of democra-
cy’s fragility, instability, and polarizations. “So now,” he
declared, “on this hallowed ground where just days ago vio-
lence sought to shake this Capitol’s very foundation, we come
together as one nation, under God, indivisible.”4 American
democracy was facing a precarious moment, he acknowl-
edged: “To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul
and to secure the future of America – requires more than
words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:
Unity. Unity.” Recurring throughout the speech some eight
times, “unity” was proposed as a healing balm for national
wounds inflicted by pandemic, economic crisis, and partisan
strife. Biden even sought to imbue this appeal to unity with
a theological valence. “Many centuries ago,” he said, “Saint
Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a
multitude defined by the common objects of their love.” So
American unity, Biden declared, must be grounded in those
“common objects we love that define us as Americans,” loves
of “Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor.
And, yes, the truth.”5 Michael Lamb, an Augustinian polit-
ical theorist, applauded Biden’s “Augustinian call for con-
cord,” especially his invitation to consider what kinds of
“objects of love will bring us into harmony” as a nation,

3
David A. Graham, “Trump’s Coup Attempt Didn’t Start on January 6,”
The Atlantic, January 26, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4f96djse.
4
President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “Inaugural Address,” The White House, January
21, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/45fanfhd. All further quotes are taken from this
transcript.
5
I return to this Augustinian insight in Chapter 5.

2
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

securing “unity amid plurality.”6 For Augustine, Lamb sug-

gested, the achievement of “concord” or “harmony” amidst
difference was among the central goals of politics. Those
concerned with the present state of American democracy and
the promises and perils of democratic pluralism, he urged,
would do well to consider religious thinkers like Augustine.
We learn from Augustine, Lamb argued, that politics “should
not seek a totalizing uniformity that dominates those who
are different, but a humble harmony that gives justice to all,
welcomes others into community, and forges unity in plu-
rality.”7 Fostering a peaceful and harmonious unity amidst
difference, Lamb suggested, is the key challenge for politics
today, as it was in Augustine’s time.
Biden’s appeal to Augustinian love amidst the backdrop
of social conflict and Lamb’s further allusions to harmony,
community, and unity-in-plurality each echo a central prob-
lematic of contemporary political theology and political the-
ory more generally: how to construe the relationship between
community and difference. How should political communi-
ties think about the complex patterns of unity and diversity,
agreement and disagreement, sharing and separateness that
compose democratic society? How should they respond to
conflicts amidst difference within the political community?
Do events like those of January 6, which surfaced deep divi-
sions brewing in the American citizenry for years, pose a
challenge to democracy’s capacity to deal with difference,
even threaten a liberal consensus regarding the possibilities
of democratic pluralism? What role does and should religion
play, if any, in democratic politics? These questions touch
upon some of the central paradoxes of political theory and

6
Michael Lamb, “Biden’s Augustinian Call for Concord,” Breaking Ground,
January 27, 2021, breakingground.us/bidens-augustinian-call-for-concord.
7
Lamb, “Biden’s Augustinian Call for Concord.”

3
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

political theology. But Biden’s address also raises important

questions for ordinary democratic citizens, especially persons
of faith: Should harmony or concord be a goal of politics?
Will our pursuit of “common objects of love” result in social
unity? Should we desire unity at all?
Especially since the beginning of the 2016 US presidential
campaign, the subject of civic unity and political polarization
has become a staple fixation of the political commentariat.
“Polarization is killing our country,” concluded one analyst
after summarizing numerous studies and surveys conducted
in the years following 2016. “Hyper-partisanship is poison-
ing our politics, making our democracy seem increasingly
dysfunctional. A fixation on our differences is fracturing us
into warring tribes … This is not the American way. It is
the opposite of the secret of our success, summed up by our
national motto, e pluribus unum – ‘out of many, one’.”8 The
Pew Research Center has consistently charted the intensifi-
cation of partisan political identity in recent years and its
resulting hostility toward perceived political opponents.9 In
one sense, recent journalistic obsession with political polar-
ization and related issues of adversarial political rhetoric,
“fake news” disinformation, die-hard party loyalty, and
social fragmentation has been a response to genuinely new
developments in American political life. Increasing moral,
cultural, and religious diversity, the rise of a massive cable
news industry, and the dominance of social media networks
all pose genuinely novel challenges for a democracy whose
institutions and norms were developed by framers who could

8
John Avlon, “Polarization Is Poisoning America. Here’s an Antidote,” CNN,
November 1, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/58hu5fcb.
9
See, for instance, Pew Research Center, “In a Politically Polarized Era, Sharp
Divides in Both Partisan Coalitions,” December 17, 2019, www.pewresearch​
.org/politics/2019/12/17/in-a-politically-polarized-era-sharp-divides-in-both-
partisan-coalitions/.

4
 Democracy in Conflict

have never anticipated them or their effects. In another sense,

however, preoccupation with political polarization is hardly
new. American political theorists, leaders, and commentators
have almost always, but especially in the twentieth century,
been concerned with the so-called problem of pluralism.10
How much difference can a society endure and still function
as a democratic polity? Will too much difference plunge a
society into irresolvable and acrimonious conflict?

Democracy in Conflict
This is a book about conflict – how it is basic to our human-
ity and how we nonetheless perpetually evade and avoid it.
It is about how certain forms of conflict can undermine and
destroy social relationships while others seem to contribute to
their vitality, resiliency, and health. More specifically, this is a
book about democratic conflict, the conflict that arises when
people attempt to build a common political life amidst their
differences, and how democratic communities can embrace,
tend, and practice conflict in ways that lead to their flourishing.
Conflict amidst difference figures as a kind of specter haunt-
ing liberal political theory. In the introduction to his monu-
mentally important book, Political Liberalism, for instance,
John Rawls recalls memories of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century “wars of religion” as paradigmatic of the tragic con-
flicts from which political liberalism offers deliverance.11

10
Most famously, James Madison wrote of “factions” and republican governance
in Federalist 10. See James Madison, “No. 10,” in Alexander Hamilton, John
Jay, and James Madison (eds.), The Federalist Papers (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund, 2001), 42–49.
11
For a comprehensive account of the way memory of the so-called wars of
religion shaped the emergence and development of the liberal state, see William
T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots
of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

5
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

The wars, according to Rawls, represent a latent instability

just beneath the surface of liberal societies, always threaten-
ing to reemerge, a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive
doctrines with “transcendent elements not admitting of com-
promise.”12 “Political liberalism,” he argues, “starts by tak-
ing to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent
conflict.”13 For Rawls, as one writer puts it, the aim of lib-
eral theory and politics is the achievement of a “stable, well-
ordered, and peaceful society,” the conditions of which are
the “preemption, containment, or resolution of conflict.”14
In short, liberalism affirms the goodness of pluralism and dif-
ference but fears the conflicts they may occasion. Like Biden
and Lamb, Rawls sees conflict amidst difference as democ-
racy’s great threat, that which liberal governance must stave
off, preclude, and forestall in order for democratic pluralism
to flourish. Political liberalism is thus framed as an antidote
to democratic conflict.
Much of the discussion in contemporary democratic the-
ory around pluralism evinces this same aversion to conflict.
Consider two of its most prominent strands: the tradition
of liberal theory emerging from Rawls and Habermasian
deliberative democracy.15 In the former, democratic theory

12
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
xxviii, quoted in Romand Coles, Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the
Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), 8. Coles insightfully demonstrates the profound extent to which Rawls’s
liberalism is determined by an anxiety about conflict.
13
Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxviii, quoted in Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 8.
14
Jason A. Springs, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From
Enemy to Adversary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 242.
15
I have in mind, with regard to the former, Rawls’s famous Political Liberalism,
but also the work of Gerald Gaus, one of the most important inheritors of
Rawls’s thought. See Gerald Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a
Diverse Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Gerald Gaus,
The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse
and Bounded World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and

6
 Democracy in Conflict

begins with the “fact of pluralism” – that is, the existence of

“a plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive
doctrines” in a political society.16 That these doctrines are
both reasonable (that is, internally coherent and consistent
with deeply held moral, religious, or metaphysical commit-
ments) and incompatible (unable to be reconciled by appeal
to some shared moral, religious, or metaphysical basis) pro-
vokes a dilemma regarding political legitimacy. How can
democratic constitutions, judgments, policies, laws, and so
on be justified in the face of incommensurable difference?
The task of liberal theory, for Rawls and his followers, is
to develop a “political” theory of justice, as opposed to
one grounded in any metaphysically based comprehensive
doctrine, that is able to stand above disagreement and dif-
ference, securing legitimacy by establishing a form of “pub-
lic reason” which determines the boundaries of legitimate
political reasoning and justification amidst difference.17
Public reason, says Rawls, defines “what kinds of reasons”
citizens “may reasonably give one another when fundamen-
tal political questions are at stake.”18 In other words, ­public

Gerald Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political

Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The key texts of the latter
approach are Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms:
Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William
Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); and Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of
Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002).
16
Rawls, Political Liberalism, xviii.
17
Rawls, Political Liberalism, xv, distinguishes between “a moral doctrine
of justice general in scope” and “a strictly political conception of justice,”
grounded in a shared “overlapping consensus” between comprehensive
doctrines.
18
John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago
Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): 766.

7
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

reason marks the rational and discursive space within which

citizens can convert privately held reasons into a liberal cur-
rency that all participants can recognize as rational. By bar-
ring comprehensive doctrines from the realm of democratic
reason-giving, Rawlsians believe they are able to preclude
conflicts amidst difference in the sphere of political reason-
ing, thus achieving consensus and democratic legitimacy.
Jürgen Habermas and contemporary advocates of “delib-
erative democracy,” such as Seyla Benhabib, advocate a dif-
ferent version of public reason, but one similarly aimed at
securing consensus amidst difference, and thus also legiti-
macy. Rather than elucidate the contours of a form of reason
(secular, liberal, etc.), they attend to institutions, practices,
and norms of reasoning wherein citizens deliberate across
differences. By theorizing ideal discursive conditions of inter-
subjective reasoning and argumentation, Habermas pro-
poses, one can discern principles for organizing deliberative
procedures in a way that they will generate full consensus
among members. Put differently, one can deduce pragmatic
or “procedural” rules from the presuppositions of argu-
mentation and communication, and thus establish norma-
tive principles for democratic deliberation.19 The key point
here regarding conflict and difference, then, is that consen-
sus is something achieved in democratic practice rather than
something democracy presupposes. Nevertheless, the goal of
deliberative democracy is the same as Rawlsian liberalism:
the securing of democratic legitimacy by overcoming conflict
and transcending difference.
The discourse of political theology, as Carl Schmitt
famously proposed it in his seminal 1922 essay, Politische

19
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 86–94; Seyla
Benhabib, “The Utopian Dimension in Communicative Ethics,” New German
Critique 35 (1985): 83–96.

8
 Democracy in Conflict

Theologie, is likewise defined by the question of legiti-

macy.20 Classically, political theology concerned the legiti-
mation of sovereignty, and thus involved the use of religious
ideas revolving around divine transcendence, authority,
and power to authorize political rule. For theorists like
Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and others, political theology
is a discourse regarding the justificatory practices around
sovereign power, wherein sovereignty is best understood in
terms of the “state of exception.”21 Because political theol-
ogy was tied to the question of sovereignty in this way, it
seemed to position democracy as a decidedly anti-political
theological project. Indeed, this was exactly the argument
of Erik Peterson, whose rejection of political theology was
an attempt to save both Christianity and democracy from
the corruption of sovereignty.22 In the second half of the
twentieth century, however, as Miguel Vatter has argued, a
number of theorists made efforts to uncouple political the-
ology and sovereignty by pursuing a democratic form of
political theology.23 These thinkers remained committed to

20
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M.
Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).
21
Key works in this regard are Schmitt, Political Theology; Carl Schmitt, The
Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval
Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Giorgio
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, State
of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
22
Erik Peterson, “Monotheism as a Political Problem: A Contribution to the
History of Political Theology in the Roman Empire,” in Theological Tractates,
ed. Michael J. Hollerich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 68–105.
23
Miguel Vatter, Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Vatter argues that figures like Eric Voegelin,
Jacques Maritain, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Jürgen Habermas all made self-
conscious efforts to save political theology from Schmitt’s dangerous sovranism.

9
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

the project of political theology, understood as a discourse

of legitimation. As Vatter writes, “Ruling is legitimate as far
as it meets with the approval and support of those subject
to it. Legitimacy therefore depends at some basic level on
the possibility of unifying a group of individuals into a peo-
ple.”24 However, their democratic political theology, what
Vatter calls a “political theology without sovereignty,”
diverged from previous political theological projects in its
belief that this unifying of a people to confer legitimacy is
not only compatible with democracy, but best expressed in
democracy. “Christian political theology after Schmitt,”
says Vatter, “displaces sovereignty by pivoting on the idea
that legitimacy is a function of the political unity of a peo-
ple achieved through its political representation, as befits its
Christological doctrinal structure.”25 Democratic political
theology, according to Vatter, attends to the ways politi-
cal unity is forged, and legitimacy thus conferred, through
democratic conventions and institutions like constitutions,
human rights, public reason, and liberal governance.
Given this importance of political unity and representation
in configuring political legitimacy, it is unsurprising that a
centrally important subject matter for political theology in the
last half-century has been that of pluralism.26 The political-
theological problem of pluralism might be framed as such:
How can legitimacy be conferred by a unified political body

24
Vatter, Divine Democracy, 2. 25 Vatter, Divine Democracy, 3.
26
See, for instance, From Political Theory to Political Theology: Religious
Challenges and the Prospects of Democracy, ed. Péter Losonczi and Aakash
Singh (New York: Continuum, 2010); Political Theology for a Plural Age,
ed. Michael Jon Kessler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Timothy
P. Jackson, Political Agape: Prophetic Christianity and Liberal Democracy
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2015); Luke Bretherton,
Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (New York:
Routledge, 2016); Joseph Rivera, Political Theology and Pluralism: Renewing
Public Dialogue (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2018).

10
 Democracy in Conflict

when it is constituted by disagreement and deep difference?

Or, put differently, how are unity and plurality related to one
another? One strategy of configuring the relationship between
unity and difference in recent Christian political theology
has been to consider the relevance of Trinitarian theology
to social and political theory. As I will discuss in Chapter 1,
two influential schools of contemporary political theology,
both inspired by the thought of Augustine, have seen in the
Trinity a paradigm for thinking about pluralism and differ-
ence and a template for forms of communion and commu-
nity amidst diversity. As one of these thinkers puts it, the
Trinity is a “sociality of harmonious difference,” a commu-
nion wherein difference relates to difference in peace, with-
out being reduced to substantial unity.27 Democratic unity
and difference, for these thinkers, is analogically related to
divine sociality, its peaceful order participating in the com-
munion of divine plurality. Configuring unity and difference
in harmonic terms, these thinkers believe, political theology
can challenge claims, like those of Schmitt, that democracy
is incapable of the representation necessary to secure legiti-
macy. Democratic unity amidst diversity is achievable, they
claim, without sacrificing the goods of pluralism or the integ-
rity of difference.
Both liberal political theory and democratic political the-
ology, then, are concerned with the possibilities for consen-
sus, legitimacy, and commonness in the face of pluralism.
Each proposes a set of strategies to achieve political unity
while protecting difference. But what both liberal theory
and democratic political theology obscure in so doing is the
ineliminable and irreducible place of conflict in democratic
politics. In recent years, however, a body of political theory

27
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed.
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 5.

11
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

has emerged which attempts to center democratic thinking

not on the goals of consensus and harmony, but on the vir-
tues of democratic contestation and conflictual engagements
amidst difference. Theorists of “agonistic pluralism” and
“radical democracy,” like Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig,
Sheldon Wolin, and William Connolly, argue that the eva-
sion of conflict is a serious error that undermines the vitality
of democratic life. They instead celebrate contestation and
adversarial struggle, showing how conflict can be productive
for the ends of greater democratization, pluralization, and
justice. As Mouffe puts it, “In a democratic polity, conflicts
and confrontations, far from being a sign of imperfection,
indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by plural-
ism.”28 Seeing in certain forms of conflict (though not all) a
productive and generative capacity to achieve greater democ-
ratization and inclusion, agonists argue that consensus-based
theories of democracy, like those of Rawls and Habermas,
foreclose pluralism’s radical possibilities in their aim to tran-
scend, resolve, or preempt conflict. Agonistic theory, then,
seeks to re-center struggle, or agon, as a critical democratic
activity and thus reconceptualize political society in terms of
nonviolent, adversarial contestation rather than social har-
mony. Democracy, in other words, is a practice of conflict.
With its reappraisal of conflict in this way, agonistic theory
opens new ways of conceptualizing the nature of democratic
legitimacy, the meaning of pluralism, and the possibilities for
common life amidst disagreement and difference. Agonism
enables, that is, an approach to pluralism and its conflicts not
as a “problem” to be solved, but rather as the dynamic heart
of an emancipatory democratic politics.

28
Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy, Power, and the Political,” in Democracy and
Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 255.

12
 Agonistic Political Theology

Agonistic Political Theology

The contention of this book is that democratic political the-
ology needs a theory of conflict, and it is for this reason that
I put agonism and political theology into critical dialogue
with one another. Doing so, I believe, can enrich both dis-
courses, even as it challenges some of their essential commit-
ments. Agonism’s claims about the irreducibility of conflict
put pressure on some of the central metaphysical, theolog-
ical, and moral intuitions of religious traditions for whom
concepts like harmony, stability, peace, and unity have sig-
nificant theological weight. As I detail in the chapters that
follow, agonism’s critique of liberal theory and its avoidance
of conflict can be extended to much contemporary politi-
cal theology as well. However, heeding agonism’s critical
challenge to political theology can occasion a revisitation of
aspects of religious thought and practice hitherto underap-
preciated for their political theological significance. Indeed,
religious thought, I’ll suggest, offers crucial concepts, lan-
guage, and theoretical resources for sustaining agonism’s
social and political vision precisely where it appears most
vulnerable to the ravaging logics of neoliberal capitalism.
In this book, I probe a number of discourses within just one
religious tradition, Christianity, but my intuition is that sim-
ilar riches could be mined from any number of others. My
proposal, again, is that staging a critical dialogue between
agonistic theory and political theology, one not unlike the
kinds of contestational political encounters I deal with in
this book, can generate new insights for each. In this case,
agonism’s critique of unity, and all attempts to render plu-
ralism and difference in harmonious terms, leads me to
re-examine the history of Christian thought in search of
resources for conceptualizing the meaning of conflict and
difference in democratic life.

13
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

This book develops what I term an “agonistic political

theology.” It weaves together resources culled from theo-
logical and philosophical anthropology, Thomistic meta-
physics and moral theory, ordinary language philosophy,
Augustinian political thought, liberation theologies, and
more to sketch a democratic political theology in which con-
flict is the driving theme. In proposing this agonistic politi-
cal theology, I defend three principal claims. First, conflict
has fundamentally positive, creative, and generative poten-
tialities. In a moment when many are suggesting democracy
is imperiled by conflict, the latter understood in essentially
negative and pernicious terms, I insist we need more and
better conflict. I do so confident in the generative and pro-
ductive capacities of conflict negotiation for democratic
community. The chapters that follow attempt an interven-
tion in political theology similar to the kind agonistic the-
ory makes in contemporary democratic theory. Against the
tendency to see conflict as a danger or threat to be managed,
resolved, preempted, or transcended, I defend an essentially
conflictual account of democratic politics, identifying what
Alasdair MacIntyre calls “the goods of conflict” therein.29
My argument shares much in common with recent work in
peace and conflict studies that proposes models and prac-
tices of “transformative conflict.” Rather than viewing con-
flict as a departure – a kind of “fall” – from stable, peaceful
social existence, and so a problem to be solved, transfor-
mative conflict perspectives, as Jason Springs puts it, see
“violence, rather than conflict, as the converse of peace.”30
“Violence,” Springs notes, “is not simply the intensifica-

29
Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” in The Politics of
Toleration in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1999), 133–155.
30
Springs, Healthy Conflict, 244.

14
 Agonistic Political Theology

tion of conflict.”31 Conflict certainly can take the form of

violence, but it need not. Conflict is not inherently violent,
in other words. It can be a healthy feature of a just and
equitable social life, a sign that a political community pos-
sesses a vibrant and participatory citizenry intent on forg-
ing a common life amidst its differences. Indeed, as agonists
show, conflict is often a sign of greater democratization and
emancipation. The first claim of my agonistic political the-
ology, then, is that conflict must be appreciated for this cre-
ative and generative potential.
The second major claim of the book is that conflict
and difference are constitutive of political community. It
is one thing to ascribe to conflict a fundamental status in
social and political life, as the agonists I converse with
do. It is another – and, I believe, more ambitious – kind
of claim to locate conflict amidst difference as an inher-
ent feature of political community. To be sure, the term
“community” is as contested a notion in political theory
and theology as it is in moral philosophy, ethnography,
and social theory. Many, especially those who consider
the achievement of democratic pluralism to be a genuine
good of modern life, eschew notions of political commu-
nity as reactionary, nostalgic, totalitarian, and opposed to
difference. They argue it presumes a uniform set of shared
values, narratives, identities, and beliefs neither available
to nor desirable for persons living in a globalized, inte-
grated, and pluralist world. Indeed, even the agonists from
whom I draw so much mostly repudiate notions of political
community, maintaining that the aspiration to substantial
forms of political community risks marginalizing and sub-
jugating difference. My agonistic political theology defends

31
Springs, Healthy Conflict, 244, quoting Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses
(Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1990), 182–183.

15
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

an account of political community – what I call “agonis-

tic community” – while acknowledging these anxieties and
potential hazards. Agonism’s allergy to community, I argue,
undermines its ability to sustain practices of conflict and
contestation amidst the pressures of neoliberal fragmenta-
tion. Political theology, however, offers subtle and nuanced
ways of reimagining political community in pluralist and
liberative terms. Agonistic community, as I articulate it, is
a dynamic and fluid collectivity, constituted by conflictual
negotiations amidst difference and the capacity for shared
judgment and action.32 Agonistic community rests on no
foundations of shared identity, consensus, or moral col-
loquy, but is produced and sustained through practices of
conflict negotiation and the acknowledgment of dissent.
These two principal claims – that conflict possesses funda-
mentally generative capacities and that conflict and difference
are constitutive of political community – are substantiated
by and grounded in a third central claim of the book, per-
haps its most important and certainly its most philosophi-
cal and theological. The claim is that conflict inheres in,

32
For the most part, I speak of political community in what follows in a formal
sense, without specifying its exact scope, boundaries, relationship to the state,
etc. This is intentional, as I take the question of scale to be an open one. Can
a modern nation-state, for instance, ever be considered a political community?
A municipality? A neighborhood? In Chapter 4, I consider broad-based
community organizations as forms of agonistic community, but for the most
part I remain agnostic about how such collectivities can “scale up.” Instead, I
imagine agonistic political communities, following Keri Day, as collectivities
of resistance rather than majority social formations. See Keri Day, Religious
Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). However, I am also sympathetic to Eugene
TeSelle’s minimalist account of political community as “shared turf.” As he
puts it, “political community is…simply a sharing of the same turf, common
ground, the space where my needs and interests and anxieties are shared with
others and are likely to lead to common solutions.” Eugene TeSelle, Living
in Two Cities: Augustinian Trajectories in Political Thought (Scranton, PA:
University of Scranton Press, 1998), 136.

16
 Agonistic Political Theology

and is ontologically basic to, human beings as such. Such a

claim takes me into the realm of theological and philosoph-
ical anthropology, a discourse not often addressed by polit-
ical theology. Nevertheless, I maintain, a political theology
attentive to conflict must begin with the nature of human
creaturehood. It’s here, in developing a “political-theological
anthropology,” that I seek to ground the important social
theoretical insights of agonism and conflict studies in a robust
philosophical and theological basis. Conflict, I will argue,
necessarily arises from the conditions of creatureliness, spe-
cifically the finitude, contingency, and embodiment of human
creaturely life. Conflict inevitably surfaces when temporal,
embodied creatures pursue diverse and common goods in
a shared world of contingency. In religious or theological
terms, this is to say that conflict belongs to the goodness of
creation rather than its distortion, corruption, or disordering
by sin, moral error, or injustice. Conflict can be exasperated
by these and even devolve into violence and injustice; but it
need not. Conflict is, rather, a corollary of human difference,
inherent to the human creature’s natural sociality.33 A politics
that takes seriously this aspect of creaturely sociality, I sug-
gest, will prioritize not ideals of consensus and harmony, but
social practices of conflict and conciliation that yield provi-
sional and contingent shared judgments and action.
The agonistic political theology developed in this book
aims to show how flourishing democratic community
depends not on the preemption, containment, or foreclosure

33
In what follows, I use terms like “capacity” and “potential” to describe
conflict’s generative and creative nature, in order to make clear that conflict, as
such, possesses a kind of morally neutral status. On one hand, I argue conflict
belongs to created human nature, and so possesses a kind of natural goodness.
On the other hand, similar to the ways human virtue is latent in natural human
capacities but must be actualized, conflict’s generative goodness depends upon
just and loving practices of conflict negotiation.

17
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

of conflict but on its cultivation, tending, and patient endur-

ance. Political theology’s failure to acknowledge conflict’s
inexorability and necessity is perhaps only profoundly
human. But the avoidance of conflict can have profoundly
devastating consequences, legitimating either totalizing polit-
ical formations far more ambitious than what finite creatures
can bear, or excessively minimalist ones far less substantial
than what finite creatures deserve. What is needed, I argue,
is an account of political community indexed to the possi-
bilities, limits, and fragility of creaturely life. Attending to
conflict, an indelible feature of creaturely existence, is key to
such a creaturely politics.

Democracy, Religion, and Pluralism

My aim in bringing together agonistic theory and political
theology in the ways I’ve just described is to make interven-
tions in two sets of discourses regarding democracy and dif-
ference. The first is a conversation in contemporary political
theory regarding democracy and the so-called problem of
pluralism, a discourse that often centers on the meaning of
religious pluralism for democratic politics. Since Rawls’s first
efforts to resolve the tension between democratic legitimacy
and value pluralism, numerous others have made significant
contributions to addressing this problematic, often in explicit
dialogue with Rawls. Theorists like William Galston, Stephen
Macedo, Richard Rorty, Robert Audi, Amy Gutmann, and
Kent Greenawalt all published important treatments of the
subject throughout the 1990s. In the two decades since, oth-
ers like Jeffrey Stout, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brian Leiter,
Ronald Dworkin, and Cécile Laborde have developed this
conversation around liberal democracy and pluralism with
specific concern for the place of religion in public life. The
latter has issued in renewed attention to the public and

18
 Democracy, Religion, and Pluralism

political significance of religion among political theorists,

philosophers, and scholars of religion.
Whether affirmative or critical of Rawls’s original fram-
ing of the issue in Political Liberalism, those writing in the
wake of Rawls’s defining work have generally shared his
presumption that the goal of democratic authority, and so
also democratic theory, is to secure legitimacy amidst moral
and religious diversity by resolving, preempting, or adjudi-
cating conflicts, both potential and actual, amidst disagree-
ment and difference. In other words, democratic theory since
Rawls, and especially that which centers on the question of
religious pluralism, has focused chiefly on resolving the prob-
lem of pluralism by diffusing conflict. It is this presumption
and strategy that I wish to challenge. As noted earlier, ago-
nistic theory has already issued a devastating critique of all
attempts to achieve full consensus, colloquy, and harmony
amidst difference, arguing that conflict is precisely the cata-
lyst of democratic vitality rather than a threat to it. Agonism
has not, however, sufficiently addressed the place and mean-
ing of religion in such a pluralist vision. At best, it has treated
religion as simply another species of difference amidst the
varieties of identity and value in a pluralist democracy. The
contention of this book, however, is that religious commu-
nities, traditions of thought, institutions, and ritual practices
are a critical source of sustaining agonism’s pluralist vision
and essential to its survival in a neoliberal age.
Centering religion in a vision of agonistic democracy, I
propose, opens new possibilities for thinking about the
place of religion in contemporary democratic life, the mean-
ing of religious pluralism, and the possibilities for religion
in renewing democratic practice in an age of polarization.
As I’ll argue throughout the book, religion offers ways of
thinking about practices of conflict and contestation in mor-
ally and theologically significant terms, and so can assist

19
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

contemporary democratic theory in moving beyond versions

of public reason and deliberative proceduralism aimed at the
resolution of conflict. These, as agonism has shown, can only
secure harmonious consensus by excluding the very voices
and reasons that push democracy in evermore emancipatory
directions. By showing religion’s capacity to frame conflict in
generative ways, I suggest democratic theory revisit the mat-
ter of religious pluralism not as a problem to be solved but as
a source of democracy’s conflictual vitality.

Sovereignty and the Politics of Creaturehood

The second conversation in which this book intervenes
regards the possibilities for a political theology beyond sov-
ereignty. I noted earlier Miguel Vatter’s tracing of one trajec-
tory of political theology after Carl Schmitt which attempted
to displace the category of sovereignty and take up a decid-
edly democratic agenda. In recent years, a number of other
political theologians and religious ethicists have attempted
to move away from political theology’s historic obsession
with sovereign power and its source in the transcendent,
absolute unity of God, attending instead to the fundamen-
tally relational and differential character of Trinitarian
sociality. Several theologians and ethicists have proposed
a vision of the social Trinity as the basis for an ethics of
mutuality, an egalitarian and liberationist political vision,
and an embrace of pluralism and difference.34 Others have

34
Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Community, trans. Phillip Berryman
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000); Miroslav Volf, “‘The Trinity Is
Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social
Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (1998): 403–423; Catherine
Mowry Lacugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991); David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The
Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998).

20
 Sovereignty and the Politics of Creaturehood

developed “Trinitarian ontologies” within which social rela-

tions and political order can be reconfigured in terms of dif-
ferential unity and charitable pluralism, rather than static
hierarchy and totalizing unity.35 Still others have pursued a
post-sovereign, radically democratic politics by challenging
classically theist doctrines of God and offering revisionary
accounts of divine multiplicity, immanence, and weakness
in their place.36 Each of these, I submit, operates within an
analogical framing of divine and creaturely sociality, viewing
divinity as a kind of normative template for social flourish-
ing and liberatory politics. In so doing, however, political
theology neglects the critically important disanalogies and
discontinuities between divine and creaturely relation, and
so obscures those aspects of human creaturehood that define
the limits and possibilities for social and political collectivity
amidst difference.
The key argument of this book is that a democratic polit-
ical theology must be one grounded in an account of the
creature. While I do not doubt that important analogies
exist between divine and human sociality, rule, solidarity,
action, and so on, I am acutely aware of the limits and haz-
ards of employing Trinitarian theology, or any theology of
divine nature for that matter, for normative social theory.

35
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory; David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and
the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.
B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017); Klaus Hemmerle, Theses Towards a
Trinitarian Ontology (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020); Peter Scott, A
Political Theology of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
36
John B. Cobb, Jr., Process Theology as Political Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf
& Stock, 2016); Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology
and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014);
Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after
Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Jeffrey W. Robbins,
Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011); Michael S. Hogue, American Immanence: Democracy for an
Uncertain World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

21
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

Thus, heeding the critiques of feminist theologians like Linn

Tonstad, Kathryn Tanner, and Karen Kilby, I ground my
political theology in an account of the creature and the con-
ditions of creaturehood.37 Attending to the ways creaturely
difference and relation are shaped by finitude, contingency,
and embodiment, I develop a “creaturely politics” of ago-
nism, indexed to the limits of creaturehood.
By beginning with the creaturely rather than the divine,
the ordinary rather than the transcendent, my argument
poses questions about the place and significance of theologi-
cal anthropology and theologies of creation for political the-
ology. In its concern with sovereignty, either affirmatively or
critically, political theology has mostly centered on concep-
tions of divinity – the “force of God,”38 to use Carl Raschke’s
term – and attendant themes like providence, Christology,
and salvation. With good reason, political theology has been
anxious about the doctrine of creation. Natural law, “orders
of creation,” classical teaching about the Imago Dei, and
other aspects of theological reflection on creation have often
been put in service of reactionary, hierarchical, and oppres-
sive political formations and hegemonies.39 Creation is not

37
Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the
Transformation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2016); Kathryn Tanner,
“The Trinity,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology,
2nd ed., ed. William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 363–375; Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection:
Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 956
(2000): 432–445.
38
Carl A. Raschke, Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal
Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
39
Willie Jennings, for instance, has consistently argued that the doctrine of
creation is central to understanding the history of colonial Christianity, and
that “reframing the world” through renewed attention to creation stands at
the heart of resistance to it. See Willie James Jennings, “Reframing the World:
Toward an Actual Doctrine of Creation,” International Journal of Systematic
Theology 21, no. 4 (2019): 388–407.

22
 A Note on Terms: Conflict and Political Theology

frequently appealed to in radical political thought, nor is it

thought to have serious democratic potential. To be sure,
theologians and ethicists have, at different times, turned
to creation as a source of ethical normativity and reached
quite radical conclusions. One thinks of nineteenth-century
Chartists, twentieth-century civil rights leaders and black
radicals, and contemporary ecotheologians as instances in
which a theological vision of nature has funded a radical and
transformative political vision.40 But creation, and theologi-
cal anthropology along with it, has not been a major theme
of political theology in the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries. The agonistic political theology developed in this book,
centered on an account of the creature and the conditions of
creaturely life, attempts to draw out the radical and eman-
cipatory possibilities of religious thinking about creation. In
so doing, it suggests democratic political theology would do
well to revisit similar themes and theological loci.

A Note on Terms: Conflict and Political Theology

A brief word is in order regarding two important terms in
this book, both of which figure in its title: “conflict” and
“political theology.” By addressing them here, I hope to clar-
ify the nature of my argument regarding the place of conflict
in creaturely life and democratic community.
I’ve noted already the uneasiness both liberal political the-
ory and political theology have with conflict. For liberals like
John Rawls, conflict is a prelude to violence and the obverse

40
Though, it should be noted, as Lisa Sideris has shown with respect to
contemporary ecotheology and environmental ethics, appeals to nature for
ethical normativity can often be highly selective in the empirical and scientific
data they consult, resulting in romantic and unrealistic accounts of the natural
world. See Lisa Sideris, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and
Natural Selection (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

23
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

of social stability and peace. For religious thinkers, conflict is

usually rendered in terms of sin – the distortion of charitable
and harmonic human relations, the product of moral error
or wrongdoing, evidence of injustice or violence. Conflict,
they believe, belongs not to the goodness of creaturely life
but to its fallenness, its disordering and corruption. Peace,
not conflict, is ontologically basic. My contention is that this
both romanticizes and misconstrues the nature of creaturely
life. While I do not ascribe to violence, injustice, or domina-
tion of any sort of ontological primacy, I argue throughout
this book that conflict is distinct from these and belongs to
the fundamental integrity of creaturely life. Conflict can be
occasioned by moral error, be characteristic of a situation of
injustice, or rise to the level of violence, but it is not essen-
tially correlated to these, nor does it necessarily entail them.
Conflict simply arises from the ordinary life of finite crea-
tures who pursue various and multiple goods, desires, and
courses of action in a shared world of contingency.
I speak of conflict in what follows in two senses. First,
conflict refers to a circumstance in which two or more goods,
desires, or courses of action cannot simultaneously be pur-
sued without one or both of those goods, desires, or courses
of action undergoing some transformation or change. I wish
to cultivate a garden in a space shared between our houses.
You wish to build a small playground. Neither of these
goods, our desires for them, or our modes of achieving them
are misguided, immoral, or wrong. But in the common world
we inhabit we find ourselves in conflict and in need of some
kind of negotiation. You might decide to join me in garden-
ing, resolving to take your kids to the neighborhood park’s
playground instead. Or I might decide to join the local com-
munity garden rather than planting my own. Perhaps we dis-
cover a way to integrate our desired goods in some kind of
garden–playground compromise. However we proceed, the

24
 A Note on Terms: Conflict and Political Theology

negotiation of our conflicting goods, desires, and courses of

action will result in change, transformation, and revision. For
finite, embodied creatures living in a shared world of contin-
gency, negotiating conflicts like these is entirely ordinary, the
substance of a common life shared amidst of difference.
Drawing on a somewhat neglected tradition of social
conflict theory, Rochelle DuFord makes an important dis-
tinction between substantive, or “realistic,” conflict and
non-substantive, “unrealistic” conflict.41 The former refers
to conflicts that are about something, “either of substantive
ends or of formative values,” while the latter are conflicts
over personality, manifestations of hatred, or expressions of
dislike, all of which lack any particular goal, save for the psy-
chosocial benefits of antagonizing enemies or alleviating ten-
sion.42 Unrealistic conflicts like these can only be destructive
in nature, for they terminate in the satisfaction of expressed
hostility and the release of tension, and are often ordered
to domination and exclusion. In contrast, substantive con-
flicts can be creative and generative, for, insofar as they are
about real incompatibilities and disagreements over what is
to be done, they possess the capacity to generate action, even
shared action. My interest in this book is in this second type
of conflict, substantive conflict.
Substantive conflict is not a lamentable feature of crea-
turely life, even if it may sometimes entail experiences of
loss, frustration, friction, struggle, disagreement, tension, or
opposition. This leads me to the second sense in which I use
the term conflict: Conflict is a social reality, an interpersonal

41
Rochelle DuFord, Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2022), 140–142. Duford takes this distinction from
Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations (New York: The
Free Press, 1955), and Lewis Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict
(New York: The Free Press, 1967).
42
DuFord, Solidarity in Conflict, 140–141.

25
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

phenomenon, that arises between persons who find their

goods, desires, and courses of action to be incompatible. I
will usually refer to this sense of conflict in terms of “ago-
nism” or “agonistics.” Agonistic relations and conflictual
interactions need not be malevolent, unjust, or violent. They
need not manifest in resentment, harm, hostility, or unchar-
itable behavior. Agonism is simply a kind of social friction
born of conflicts in the first sense, spoken of earlier. As Jason
Springs puts it, drawing on peace and conflict studies and
transformative conflict practices, conflict of this sort is simply
“intrinsic to human relationships, social processes, and insti-
tutions.”43 Put simply, Springs writes, “where there is rela-
tionship, there will be conflict.”44 The question is not how
to prevent conflict but how to shape its negotiation, how to
order it to the ends of just and flourishing community, and
how to cultivate practices for using conflict to further demo-
cratic ends. This is the task, I will argue, of agonistic politics.
My claim, then, isn’t that conflict never arises to the level
of harm, injustice, or violence. Conflict often does become
violent, promote injustice, and entail immoral action. My
claim is simply that it need not, that it comes to these only
when divorced from charity and justice. As Martin Luther
King, Jr. so importantly saw, love and conflict are not
opposed, and engaging in conflictual activity is sometimes
necessary to realize justice.45 Indeed, I’ll argue in Chapter
5 that conflict must be shaped by love and justice if it is
to be productive and generative of flourishing democratic
community. Conflict, in other words, like most things, can
be ordered to either justice and goodness or injustice and

43
Springs, Healthy Conflict, 255. 44 Springs, Healthy Conflict, 255.
45
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?” in A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed.
James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 247.

26
 A Note on Terms: Conflict and Political Theology

moral wrong. This cuts against a common sentiment that

social conflict must be a sign of moral error, of one party’s
refusal to acknowledge truth, moral right, or what is just. In
a conflict, it is sometimes assumed that one claim, person,
proposal, or action is “right” in absolute moral terms, and
another is wrong. Democratic conflict is then perceived as a
kind of Manichaean struggle between fundamentally com-
peting moral visions and ultimate values, a zero-sum game of
winners and losers. Most of the time, however, democratic
conflict is not of this kind. It is far less apocalyptic, clear cut,
and absolute, and usually contains much ambiguity, shared
commitments, and even profound agreements. The conflicts
of democracy are, I suggest, best understood as conflicts in
practical reasoning about goods and how best to organize
and pursue them. This is not to say that conflicts are not sub-
stantial, filled with intensity, and often having much at stake.
Instead, it is to deflate democratic conflict of the absolutist
moral rhetoric we are prone to invest in it, recognizing that
most of our conflicts are far more ordinary, practical, and
contingent than we might like to admit. Democracy is simply
the name we give to that set of institutions and social prac-
tices we depend on to help negotiate these conflicts.
The second key term I wish to clarify is one I’ve already
invoked repeatedly: “political theology.” This book is an
exercise in political theology, a discipline whose boundaries
and aims are highly disputed and contested. On the one hand,
political theology is a critical discipline which interrogates,
as Adam Kotsko puts it, “the homologies between theologi-
cal and political systems.”46 Political theology in this techni-
cal sense uses the tools of religious studies, history, cultural
theory, philosophy, economics, and critical theory to trace

46
Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late
Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 9.

27
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

genealogies of religious and political concepts, practices,

institutions, and symbols. This critical genealogical project
takes its cue from Schmitt’s famous assertion:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
secularized theological concepts, not only because of their his-
torical development – in which they were transferred from
theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the
omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also
because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which
is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.47

Political theology interrogates, Kotsko says, “systems of

legitimacy,” the ways in which “political, social, economic,
and religious orders maintain their explanatory power and
justify the loyalty of their adherents.”48 While political the-
ology has most often focused its quest on the first half of
Schmitt’s formulation, delineating the historical transference
of theological concepts to the political, Kotsko has suggested
a more expansive view of political theology centered on what
Schmitt identifies in the latter half of the formulation as a
“sociology of the concept.” More than simply critical gene-
alogy of theology’s justification and legitimation of politi-
cal order, which can sometimes tend toward reductionism,
this approach seeks to understand theological and political
thought as located in a complex web of mutually informing
beliefs and attitudes. Political theology in this sense, Kotsko
shows, takes religious and political beliefs to “express the
deep convictions of a particular community at a particular
time and place about how the world is and ought to be.”49
Study of the “sociology of the concept” seeks a “nonre-
ductionist analysis of the homologies between political and

47
Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 48 Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 8.
49
Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 30.

28
 A Note on Terms: Conflict and Political Theology

theological or metaphysical systems” and the ways religious

and political thought are always intertwined.50
This more expansive view of political theology opens to a
second task, one decidedly constructive, alongside political
theology’s critical task. As Kotsko puts it, political theology
in this sense:
… seeks not to document the past, but to make it available as a
tool to think with. It does not aim merely to interpret the pres-
ent moment, but to defamiliarize it by exposing its contingency.
In other words, political-theological genealogies are creative
attempts to reorder our relationship with the past and present in
order to reveal fresh possibilities for the future.51

While Kotsko himself has little interest in pursuing politi-

cal theology as a normative discourse, I take this recogni-
tion to allow the possibility of connecting this first sense of
political theology as a critical discourse to a second kind of
political theology, namely, the constructive work of theo-
logical reflection on the political, what is sometimes called
“theological politics.”52 This form of “theological political
theology” seeks,53 in addition to critical reflection on the
political, to propose normative accounts of political engage-
ment, organization, and action in light of various traditions
of religious thought and practice. Political theology in this
sense is a species of theology generally and conceptualizes

50
Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 31.
51
Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 9.
52
See, for instance, William T. Cavanaugh, “The Mystical and the Real: Putting
Theology Back into Political Theology,” in Field Hospital: The Church’s
Engagement with a Wounded World (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 2017), 99–120; Stanley Hauerwas, “How to (Not) Be a
Political Theologian,” in The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2015), 170–190.
53
William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott, “Introduction to the Second
Edition,” in Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, 3.

29
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

political life and action within the categories of traditional

religious belief.54 What distinguishes political theology from
other forms of theological reflection and political theorizing,
as William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott put it, is its “explicit
attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of
bodies in time and space.”55 Political theology in this sense,
in other words, desires to speak about the political in theo-
logically normative ways.
I distinguish between these two forms of political theology
only to note finally that this book engages in both. On the
one hand, it offers a critical analysis of the ways theological
beliefs about God, creation, humanity, and so on shape polit-
ical thinking about conflict and difference. Interrogating the
ways religion, and specifically Christian theology, has shaped
modern democratic approaches to pluralism, I intend to trou-
ble the hold that certain visions of God and the metaphysics
of creation have on the contemporary democratic imagina-
tion. On the other hand, I aspire to far more than simply
documenting the mutually imbricating relations between
theology and democratic theory. I propose a constructive
political theology of democratic conflict with ethical dimen-
sions and normative implications. The arguments developed
throughout this book are broadly ecumenical and not depen-
dent on any particular confessional tradition. Many of the
sources I draw from are fixtures of the Christian theologi-
cal tradition, though I expect similar ones could be found in
other religious traditions, as well. But the agonistic political
theology proposed depends – as does, I believe, democracy
itself – on the conceptual power and illuminative value of

54
Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips, “Preface,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Christian Political Theology, ed. Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), xi–xii.
55
Cavanaugh and Scott, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” 4.

30
 The Argument at a Glance

theology. For this reason, I venture deep into the world of

Christian theological reflection, confident in its capacities to
speak to our present democratic moment.

The Argument at a Glance

The chapters that follow sketch a political theology of agonis-
tic democracy, arguing that conflict has generative and crea-
tive capacities, that it is constitutive of political community,
and that it is intrinsic to the goodness of creaturely social exis-
tence. Chapters 1 and 2 are primarily descriptive in nature,
critically examining the ways conflict and difference are con-
ceptualized in contemporary political theology and dem-
ocratic theory. Chapters 3–5 are constructive, drawing on
resources from several disciplinary fields to propose a theory
of conflict and the meaning of religion for agonistic politics.
In Chapter 1, “Augustinianisms and Liberalisms:
Political Theology and the Problem of Difference,” I offer
critical appraisals of two influential schools of contempo-
rary political theology which have specifically taken up
themes of democracy, pluralism, and difference: postliberal
Augustinianism and Augustinian civic liberalism. While
they offer contrasting readings of the Augustinian tradition
and divergent views on the viability of political liberalism,
both postliberals and civic liberals, I show, share a common
strategy when it comes to conceptualizing the meaning of
pluralism and difference. Both analogize political commu-
nity in view of the Trinity, patterning pluralist democratic
life on the Trinity’s sociality of harmonious difference. But
perceiving creaturely sociality in terms of its divine ana-
logue, I argue, obscures those features unique to finite crea-
turehood and relation. More specifically, such analogical
thinking cannot appreciate the important role of conflict in
creaturely social life because it views conflict as a distortion

31
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

of creation’s ontological peace, reflective of the Trinity’s

charitable unity-in-difference.
Chapter 2, “Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology,”
turns from political theology to democratic theory in order
to consider agonism’s contributions to reflection on plural-
ism and the politics of difference. Unlike the tendency in
both liberal theory and political theology to view conflict
in purely negative terms, agonists center their visions of
democracy on the activity of contestation and the virtues
of conflict. Engaging the work of William Connolly and
Chantal Mouffe in particular, I laud agonism’s recognition
of the generative and emancipatory possibilities of demo-
cratic conflict, even as I worry its rejection of robust forms
of political community in the name of difference ultimately
undermines its ability to contest neoliberal capitalism and
sustain a truly democratic future. Nevertheless, my appre-
ciation of agonistic theory is considerable, and agonism’s
chief insights inform the constructive moves of the rest of
the book. Before developing my own agonistic political the-
ology, however, I conclude this chapter by assessing another
school of contemporary political theology that expressly
engages with agonism: radical political theology. While I
praise these thinkers’ creative embrace of multiplicity, plu-
ralism, and contingency as critical political theological cat-
egories, I suggest they nevertheless remain captive to an
analogical picture of divine and creaturely sociality. Whereas
the Augustinians of Chapter 1 view the divine Trinity as
a normative pattern for political community amidst differ-
ence, radical political theologians embrace a divinity imma-
nent to democratic multiplicity and contingency, the death
of God as the birth of radical democracy. Both, I argue, fail
to apprehend the political in distinctly creaturely terms.
Chapter 3, “Being in Conflict: A Political-Theological
Anthropology,” begins the constructive work of the rest of the

32
 The Argument at a Glance

book, which aims to reframe conflict and difference in crea-

turely terms. Drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas,
theological and philosophical anthropology, and the ordinary
language philosophy of Stanley Cavell, I sketch a “political-
theological anthropology,” wherein creaturely difference is
lived through the modalities of finitude, contingency, and
embodiment. These conditions of creaturehood, I argue,
structure human sociality such that difference eventuates in
conflict, and inescapably so. However, the negotiation of con-
flict is itself a means by which human creatures develop and
perfect their creaturely capacities and so realize selfhood, per-
sonal identity, and moral responsibility. Conflict is an inevita-
ble and abiding feature of creaturely life, I argue, but it is also
inherent to the goodness of finite creation and the embodied
contingency of human social development. Ultimately, this
chapter defends a larger and more general claim that political
theology should take seriously religious anthropologies as a
critical locus of political reflection and imagination.
In Chapter 4, “Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political
Community,” I develop an account of democratic politics
in light of these convictions about the enduring presence
and generative potentiality of conflict. I propose a version
of democratic community centered not on ideals of consen-
sus or social unity, nor presuming forms of shared identity,
history, or moral agreement. Rather, drawing on the work
of Johannes Althusius, an early modern German jurist,
and Yves Simon, a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher,
I argue that political community consists in the capacity
to share judgment and action. Judgment thus becomes the
key theme of the chapter, as I engage the work of Hannah
Arendt, Linda Zerilli, and others on the philosophy of judg-
ment. In the account of “agonistic political community”
I defend, practices of conflict and contestation play a critical
role in arriving at shared judgment amidst disagreement and

33
 Introduction: Democracy in Conflict

difference. By tending and cultivating agonistic democratic

practices, communities render judgments that are provisional
and contestable, answerable to dissent, and open to revision.
The chapter concludes with an analysis of how grassroots
democratic collectivities like the Industrial Areas Foundation
utilize practices of conflict in order to generate such shared
judgment and action.
Chapter 5, “Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics,”
returns to the legacy of Augustine with which the book
began. Offering a reading of Augustine on love, I show how
traditions of theological reflection can aid religious persons
and communities in appreciating conflict as theologically
and ethically meaningful, even potentially transformative.
Moreover, Augustine’s rich moral psychology and theolog-
ical anthropology, both of which pivot on love and desire,
illuminate the experience of agonistic politics in ways theo-
rists of agonistic democracy do not fully probe. By examin-
ing Augustine’s multifaceted theology of love – loves which
constitute us as persons, loves which establish and define
a “people,” love shared between friends, and love shown
toward enemies – I offer a theological reading of agonistics
as a social practice of love. Drawing on some modern inher-
itors of Augustine’s vision, namely, Gustavo Gutiérrez and
Martin Luther King, Jr., who extend classical Augustinian
themes in a distinctly liberationist key, I show that agonistic
democracy is really a politics of love, a struggle over one’s
own loves and those of others. Within my vision of “theolog-
ical agonistics,” democratic conflict can be seen as a way of
contesting, converting, sharing, and ordering loves in pursuit
of solidarity and democratic community. Shared pursuit of
the common objects of our love will not, I submit, resolve
our conflicts or induce social harmony. Quite possibly the
opposite, in fact. But imbuing conflict with love may give us
hope for a democratic future.

34
 1
Augustinianisms and Liberalisms
Political Theology and the
Problem of Difference

A central problematic for contemporary political theology

concerns the relationship of political community and differ-
ence. In practical terms, this is often conceptualized as the
problem of pluralism. How can public deliberation pro-
ceed amidst deep difference, ideological conflict, and moral
disagreement? On what basis can political authority, pol-
icy, and actions be justified, given the pluralist character of
democratic societies? How can a political community make
shared judgments regarding its common life in the face of
widespread disagreement concerning the ends and goals of
that life? In more theoretical terms, configuring the relation-
ship of community and difference lies at the heart of debates
around the place of religion in public life, the viability of
liberal, democratic, and socialist political philosophies, and
metaphysical questions concerning the nature of human per-
sons and their communities. As will become clear in what
follows, how one construes the relationship between political
community and difference, subordinating one to the other or
reconciling them in some way, often determines the shape of
one’s political vision and the kinds of political order one sees
as most conducive to human flourishing.
My aim in this chapter is primarily descriptive in nature:
to delineate two predominant patterns of reflection on polit-
ical community, difference, and conflict in contemporary

35
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

political theology. My purpose in mapping these trajectories,

and the chief goal of this chapter, is twofold. First, I aim to
disclose and delineate a common propensity in contempo-
rary political theology to conceptualize political community
and difference in oppositional terms. Second, I show how
doing so leads to a decidedly negative assessment of the role
and value of conflict in democratic politics. By reconstruing
the relationship between political community and difference
in non-oppositional terms, I suggest, conflict can be appreci-
ated for its positive, dynamic, and generative qualities. The
descriptive work in this chapter, then, situates the argument
developed in the following chapters as a response to cer-
tain limitations and contradictions in contemporary polit-
ical theological thinking about difference. The constructive
political theology of democratic conflict I develop in sub-
sequent chapters is both appreciative of the insights of the
political theologians I examine here and intent on overcom-
ing their deficiencies.
The two approaches to political community, difference,
and conflict I detail here are both indebted to Augustine for
their formulations, even as they reach vastly d ­ ifferent conclu-
sions about the meaning of Augustine’s legacy for contempo-
rary politics. On the one hand, “postliberal Augustinianism,”
as I call it, sees difference as constitutive of a harmonic sociality
ordered to the common good. For postliberal Augustinians,
flourishing political community exhibits difference ordered
in charity, reflecting the unity-in-distinction of the Triune
life. Practically, this means democratic difference must, in
the end, be managed or governed by certain non-democratic
entities so as to ensure its alignment to the common good.
Postliberal Augustinianism, I show, envisions a hierarchi-
cal political community of ordered difference and proposes
a certain policing of pluralism in order to prevent conflicts
amidst difference that might threaten social harmony and

36
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

the common good. On the other hand, “Augustinian civic

liberalism” approaches difference as properly constitutive
of the pluralist saeculum, something to be embraced and
endured rather than managed. These Augustinians, unlike
their postliberal counterparts, see political liberalism as con-
ducive to such an account of difference, insofar as it eschews
thick notions of political community and the common good
in favor of greater pluralism. For Augustinian civic liberals,
difference is not to be transcended but affirmed, its sacra-
mental character acknowledged. If postliberal Augustinians
subordinate difference to a unified political community,
Augustinian civic liberalism advances a more modest and
minimal vision of political community in order to protect
and promote pluralism and difference.
Both postliberal Augustinians and Augustinian civic lib-
erals share two important characteristics. First, they develop
accounts of political community and difference that trade
in oppositional logics. Their Trinitarian social ontologies,
which I consider later, afford them much more nuanced
ways of construing the relation between community and dif-
ference than the liberal–communitarian debates of previous
generations. Nevertheless, the ways they relate divine soci-
ality to political society still end up prioritizing one or the
other, reinforcing the sense that political community and dif-
ference are fundamentally opposed. I suggest this is due to
a second key shared feature of postliberal and civic liberal
Augustinianism: an analogical framing of divine and human
sociality that obscures the important place of conflict in crea-
turely life. Both sets of Augustinians perceive conflict amidst
difference in fundamentally negative terms, indexed to sin
rather than the goodness of creation, and thus threatening to
either political community or difference. A non-oppositional
account of political community and difference, such as the
one I develop in successive chapters, will need to break the

37
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

hold such analogical thinking has on political theological

thinking. In doing so, and in appreciating the distinct fea-
tures of creaturely sociality, conflict can be appreciated for
its capacity to contribute to, rather than undermine, flourish-
ing democratic community. In what follows, I take up each
Augustinian political theology in turn, showing its virtues,
limits, and contradictions, and then conclude by raising the
question of the viability of Augustine himself for thinking
about political community, difference, and conflict.1

1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism and the

Aesthetics of Difference
In the 1980s, academic theology in the English-speaking
world saw the rise of an immensely important movement
often called “postliberalism.” Associated in the United
States with the work of Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and
Stanley Hauerwas, postliberal theology sought to recover
the narrative character of Christian belief and practice and
the social and linguistic nature of religion in general. In the
UK, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, postliberal thought
was pursued in slightly different directions by thinkers often
identified or self-identified with the program of Radical
Orthodoxy: Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and, most

1
No doubt other thinkers, traditions, and movements in contemporary political
theology could be considered here. My reason for choosing these two is, first,
that Augustine has exercised a profound influence on modern political thought,
especially in the West. By considering two self-consciously Augustinian political
theologies, I intend to show how certain Augustinian metaphysical concerns
have shaped contemporary discussions of democracy and pluralism. Second, I
take these approaches to represent two general tendencies in political theological
thinking about community and difference: one broadly communitarian, the
other broadly liberal. Insofar as many contemporary political theologians can
be mapped on this axis, my postliberal vs. civic liberal typology stands as an
illustrative example of these trajectories in contemporary political theology.

38
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

importantly, John Milbank. Postliberal thinkers in both

contexts produced a body of literature spanning the fields of
biblical studies, theology, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and
political theory, sharing a common aspiration to embolden
the voice of theology to speak to, and often against, the
aspirations of secular modernity. Most significantly for my
purposes, postliberal theology also produced a number of
political theological visions.2 While disparate in their pre-
scriptive and theoretical commitments, postliberal political
theologies share a common assessment of the deficiencies of
political liberalism and seek to advance political theology
beyond its attachment to the liberal tradition.
One way of viewing the rise of postliberal political theol-
ogy is as an attempt to resolve certain tensions and contra-
dictions in the relationship between political community and
difference, particularly as they concern the possibility of vir-
tue. In this endeavor, postliberals have drawn on some of the
central arguments of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book After
Virtue. According to MacIntyre, liberal society and theory
lack the moral coherence necessary for virtue. Liberal plural-
ism’s conflicts and disagreements over the nature of the good
life, the ends of politics, and the means of moral deliberation,
he argues, undermine the forms of agreement and shared cul-
ture necessary to sustain virtue. “What liberalism promotes,”
he asserts, “is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to
the construction and sustaining of the types of communal rela-
tionship required for the best kind of human life.”3 MacIntyre

2
For an account of both American postliberal thought and English Radical
Orthodoxy as distinct yet related political theologies, see Daniel M. Bell, Jr.,
“Postliberalism and Radical Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Christian Political Theology, ed. Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 110–132.
3
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), xv.

39
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

goes on to delineate these types of communal relationships

necessary for virtue as “traditions” – forms of life founded
on shared agreements about the human good and commit-
ted to social practices aimed at the cultivation of virtue. In
short, for MacIntyre and his postliberal theological heirs,
virtue demands communities of agreement aimed at a sub-
stantive common good. Liberal societies, they argue, lack this
coherence and agreement about ultimate ends, devolving into
moral decadence, and so must be countered with a postliberal
politics of virtue. In the case of MacIntyre and American post-
liberals like Hauerwas, this means turning to communities of
virtue apart from liberal democratic political society.4 For
Milbank and other Radically Orthodox inclined Anglicans,
the overcoming of liberalism entails a much grander vision – a
new Christendom, a postliberal socialism, and a neomedieval
reimaging of political community. What both American post-
liberals and Radical Orthodox thinkers share, however, is a
definite anxiety about pluralism and the conflicts that arise in
societies characterized by profound difference. They propose
a vision of political community predicated on the resolution
of these conflicts and the enfolding of difference into a more
fundamental unity. Postliberal political theology, then, can be
summarized as a politics of virtue, wherein virtue depends on
thick communities of tradition that share fundamental agree-
ments and judgments about the ends of moral and political
life. Because of this, it is haunted by a fear that unchecked
difference and disagreement will undermine the conditions of
virtue, and that conflict will threaten the coherence necessary
to sustain communal moral life.

4
Or, perhaps better put, for Hauerwas, the church is the primary political
community of virtue. For a detailed treatment of MacIntyre, Hauerwas,
and others who make this “turn to community,” see David Fergusson,
Community, Liberalism, and Christian Ethics (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).

40
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

With this background in mind, I turn now to assess a par-

ticular dimension of postliberal political theology: its theo-
rization of the relationship between difference and political
community. I do so by examining what is, in my view, its
strongest, most philosophically articulate, and most com-
prehensive version – the one put forward by John Milbank.
Milbank is the exemplar postliberal political theologian
not simply because he is widely considered the founder of
Radical Orthodoxy, but also because he offers the most
consistent and detailed application of postliberal theological
commitments to political theory. I treat Milbank in detail
here because he directly takes up questions of political com-
munity and difference with remarkable philosophical depth.
I approach Milbank’s political theology in two parts: First,
I sketch the speculative work of his political ontology; and
second, I examine the practical task of applying this ontol-
ogy to a theory of politics. In doing so, I affirm Milbank’s
desire to hold political community and difference together,
not sacrificing one for the other, as well as his sense that phi-
losophies of “pure difference” have become compliant with
the discipline of neoliberalism, unable to generate the forms
of collectivity necessary for a socialist transition beyond
capitalism. However, I object to the ways difference is con-
figured and conflict is erased in Milbank’s vision. Because
Milbank’s social ontology proceeds in terms of analogical
likeness to divine sociality, it obscures the unique features
of creaturely difference, including the place of conflict in the
goodness of creaturely life.

1.1.1 The Speculative Task: Difference and

an “Ontology of Peace”
The chief aim of Milbank’s 1990 book Theology and Social
Theory, amidst its many digressions and side-arguments, is

41
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

to trace a genealogy of modern social theory by tracking its

ontological commitments. The book is, like Milbank’s more
recent Beyond Secular Order, primarily a work of politi-
cal ontology, concerned with excavating and theorizing the
relation between conceptions of being and political organi-
zation, how “ideas about being coincide with ideas about
human action.”5 Theology and Social Theory’s genealogi-
cal critique of modern social theory, then, is not simply an
exercise in philosophical criticism. It is, more importantly, a
political theological critique, intended to show the poverty
of secular theory as a basis for overcoming the contradic-
tions and failures of political liberalism and neoliberal cap-
italism. It then seeks to articulate the metaphysical basis for
an alternative political vision: a postliberal Christian social-
ism and politics of virtue.
The chief antagonist in the story Milbank tells in Theology
and Social Theory – the zenith of modern social theory and
its most formidable contemporary option – is a conglom-
erate of theories he terms “ontologies of difference” or
“ontologies of violence.” Milbank sees these social theories
as inspired by Nietzsche and proliferating in various schools
of postmodern thought and critical theory that share an
interest in recovering difference, long subjugated within the
totalizing discourse of Western metaphysical philosophy.
Against a metaphysics of presence and identity, postmodern
differential ontologies posit difference, flux, multiplicity,
and becoming as metaphysically basic. Identity, stability,
unity, and being are viewed as impositions on the former
through means of power, governmentality, and subjection.
However, Milbank argues, these philosophical strategies
simply flip the script of Western metaphysics, presuming the

5
John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the
Representation of the People (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 3.

42
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

same binaries of identity/difference, being/becoming, unity/

multiplicity, and so on that they oppose. The result is, to
use Deleuze’s term, a “pure affirmation” of difference, irre-
spective of relation.6 But to make difference fundamental
without an attendant account of relation, Milbank asserts,
naturalizes conflict amidst difference as necessary and essen-
tial. Lacking a means of configuring difference in terms of
mutuality, differential ontologies thereby ontologize force,
power, struggle, and violence – all of which Milbank uses
interchangeably, leading him to use the simple designation
“ontologies of violence.”7 These social theories propose, in
other words, “a reading of the world which assumes the pri-
ority of force and tells how this force is best managed and
confined by counter force.”8 Milbank channels Augustine’s
critique of Roman virtue and political order at exactly this
juncture. Just as for Rome there “can only be virtue where
there is something to be defeated,” and so virtue consists in
“a ‘conquest’ of less desirable forces,” so ontologies of vio-
lence entail that peace, flourishing, and identity come only
by way of suppression and subjugation of difference.9
Nietzsche is the paradigmatic figure of this ontologizing of
difference, initiating a tradition of genealogical deconstruc-
tion of Western metaphysics and its privileging of the “one”
to the “many.” Nietzsche grants priority to multiplicity and

6
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 188. See also Christopher Ben Simpson,
Deleuze and Theology (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 12–14.
7
The claim that ontologizing difference commits one also to an ontologizing of
violence is, of course, disputable. For one of the best interpretations of Nietzsche
and Derrida in this vein, explicitly in dialogue with Milbank, see Romand Coles,
“Storied Others and the Possibility of Caritas: Milbank and Neo-Nietzschean
Ethics,” Modern Theology 8, no. 4 (1992): 331–351.
8
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed.
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 4.
9
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 393.

43
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

contingency without resorting to notions of unity, stabil-

ity, and coherence. The problem, in Milbank’s view, with
the Nietzschean genealogical tradition as it is taken up by
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and others is that it fails to be
sufficiently historicist and genealogical, confusing contin-
gent and historical realities like violence and conflict with
metaphysical principles of the world as such. As Milbank
puts it, they raise “the specter of a human world inevita-
bly dominated by violence, without being able to make this
fearful ghost more solid in historicist terms alone.” Thus,
“to supplement this deficiency,” they “ground violence in
a new transcendental philosophy, or fundamental ontol-
ogy.”10 For this reason, ontologies of difference or violence
resemble theological claims about the world, and Milbank
treats them as such. They cannot be demonstrably proven
by evidential display, only shown to be true by aesthetic per-
suasion and narrative power. Insistence on the ontological
primacy of power, struggle, and conflict is simply another
mythos, Milbank contends, against which Christianity offers
a counter-story. The necessary response to postmodernity’s
ontologizing of difference and its nihilistic essentializing of
struggle, conflict, and violence, Milbank asserts, is “to put
forward an alternative mythos, equally unfounded, but none-
theless embodying an ‘ontology of peace’, which conceives
differences as analogically related, rather than equivocally at
variance.”11 Christian theology’s alternative to ontologies of
difference, in other words, is a preservation of difference, but
one that relocates it within the order of charity. To explicate
this, Milbank turns to the doctrines of Trinity and analogy.
Classical doctrines of the Trinity, Milbank believes, model
a theological account of difference in peaceful, charitable

10
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 278.
11
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 279.

44
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

relation.12 Christianity must assert peace as the fundamen-

tal structure of creation, according to Milbank, for two rea-
sons. First, sin, as privation of original goodness, entails
the disordering of original harmony, which is being itself.
Second, this harmonic quality of being is ensured by the
fact that, contrary to the many “pagan” creation myths of
antiquity, Christianity’s doctrine of creation ex nihilo “rec-
ognizes no original violence” in being, but instead identifies
creation as sourced in the gratuity and freedom of God.13 As
Milbank puts it, Christianity “construes the infinite not as
chaos, but as a harmonic peace … Peace no longer depends
upon the reduction to the self-identical, but is the social-
ity of harmonious difference.”14 Milbank’s ontologizing of
peace, then, is not simply a return to premodern metaphys-
ical notions of transcendental unity and oneness. Rather,
he proposes an ontology wherein difference is fundamental
and not reducible to some primordial unity, but neverthe-
less mediated in peaceful relation, rather than existing in
antagonism and conflict.15 Creaturely difference is peaceful
because it is sourced in the Triune life which is “transcen-
dental peace through differential relation.”16 Milbank’s
ontology of peace, then, is part and parcel of a Trinitarian
metaphysics of creation which discerns a relationship of

12
On the distinctly Augustinian aspects of this ontology, see Geoffrey Holsclaw,
Transcending Subjects: Augustine, Hegel, and Theology (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2016), 133–144; and D. Stephen Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial
Christian Ethics: On Loving Enemies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress
Academic, 2018), 72–78.
13
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 5.
14
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 5.
15
As Milbank puts it, “It is Christianity which exposes the non-necessity
of supposing, like the Nietzscheans, that difference, non-totalization and
indeterminacy of meaning necessarily imply arbitrariness and violence”
(Theology and Social Theory, 6).
16
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 6.

45
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

analogy between divine and creaturely sociality. Gratuity,

charity, and participation fundamentally characterize the
latter insofar as they are intrinsic to the former.
The final sections of Theology and Social Theory are
devoted to unpacking the dynamics of Trinitarian difference
in order to thematize difference first in terms of the doctrine
of God before moving to an account of creaturely difference.
For Milbank, difference is first a Trinitarian description before
it is an anthropological one, and so the nature of difference
must be rethought and rearticulated first as an explication
of the Trinity. Pseudo-Dionysius provides the template for
Milbank’s delineation of the Trinity in terms of differential
relation. For Dionysius, according to Milbank, the relations
of the divine Trinity exhibit a movement “from unity to dif-
ference, constituting a relation in which unity is through its
power of generating difference, and difference is through its
comprehension by unity.”17 This is not to collapse unity and
difference into one another, but rather to redefine unity itself
in dynamic and relational terms. Two aspects of this account
of Trinitarian difference are important here: first, Milbank’s
conceptualization of the Holy Spirit as “the second differ-
ence,” and second, his use of the aesthetics of the Baroque.
The Trinity, Milbank argues, exhibits both a “first” and
“second” difference – the first corresponding to the Son,
the second to the Spirit.18 The Father–Son relation is rather
easy to conceptualize in the usual identity/difference terms:

17
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 430. See also Pseudo-Dionysius,
“The Divine Names,” 649B, 649C, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works,
The Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1987).
18
John Milbank, “The Second Difference,” in The Word Made Strange:
Theology, Language, Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 171–194;
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 430–431. See also John Milbank, The
Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico 1558–1774: Part I
The Early Metaphysics (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 116–149.

46
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

The Father and Son are unified in sharing all things of the
Godhead identically, and their difference consists in the
Father being not-Son and the Son being not-Father. Personal
identity here is constituted in relation to an opposite, and
unity consists in charity across this difference. However, the
Holy Spirit, the second difference, introduces a third into this
binary relation, opening the relations of the Godhead to a
“more than” unity, an excess erupting any simple and static
relation between two poles alone. The Spirit is an “equally
pure relation to the Father,” says Milbank, “but ‘through’
the Son.”19 In other words, the Spirit is the difference that
“interprets” the difference of the Son and Father as the “ratio
of charity.”20 The second difference, then, is a movement of
response to the first difference, a movement that generates
an excess of love. As Milbank puts it, “difference, after first
constituting unity (the Son causing ‘backwards’ the Father)
becomes a response to unity that is more than unity, which
unity itself cannot predict – since mediation exceeds unity
just as it exceeds difference.”21 The mediation of the Spirit is
“a further difference that always escapes,”22 an excess that
breaks open the charity of the Trinity to a dynamic unity
that is always unfolding in infinite difference, and a hospi-
tality that receives creation to participate in divine love.23
The complex unity that characterizes Trinitarian relations of
difference, then, is not a static, finished totality but a contin-
uous, infinitely differentiating unfolding of charity.

19
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 430.
20
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 430.
21
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 431.
22
John Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-
two Responses to Unasked Questions,” in The Postmodern God, ed. Graham
Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 274.
23
Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory and Pluralism: Beyond
Tolerance and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191.

47
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

Trinitarian unity is so dynamic, in fact, that Milbank

appeals to aesthetic and musical images to delineate it – in
particular, the Baroque. He writes that Trinitarian unity
“ceases to be anything hypostatically real in contrast to dif-
ference, and becomes instead only the ‘subjective’ apprehen-
sion of a harmony displayed in the order of the differences,
a desire at work in their midst.”24 Against both Hegelian
dialectical and premodern metaphysical renderings of differ-
ence, in which difference is sublated back into substantial
unity,25 Milbank appeals to the Baroque, its architecture and
music. In Baroque aesthetics, he says, unity is a harmonic
ordering of difference. This, no doubt, “entirely reinvents the
idea of order,” for order now refers to a “purely aesthetic
relation of the different, and no longer primarily self-identity
or resemblance.”26 Moreover, it is an order of infinite
unfolding and ecstatic fecundity. In the Baroque, “ornamen-
tation overtakes what it embellishes,” and a design exists
in a “continuous unfolding, which reaches out ecstatically
beyond its frame towards its supporting structure.”27 It is the
elaborate architecture of the Baroque cathedral that Milbank
has in mind here, wherein the essential structural features
of its design are overrun by their details and excessive fea-
tures. Yet it is Baroque music that even better captures this
complex harmonic display of difference, wherein harmony is
“stretched to its limits,” incorporating maximum dissonance
within an unfolding horizontal melody, and thus displaying
an “openness to musical grace” in which it is always pos-
sible to reincorporate unexpected difference, unanticipated

24
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 435–436.
25
As will become clear in the following chapters, I follow a reading of Hegel
forged by Gillian Rose, Rowan Williams, and others that contests this reading
and argues for a version of dialectical sublation much more open to difference.
26
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 436.
27
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 436.

48
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

beauty, into its musical structure.28 This redefinition of

Trinitarian difference-in-unity through the aesthetics of the
Baroque leads Milbank to even provocatively suggest that
“the infinity of God, his never exhausted ‘surplus’, means
that the context for development is always open to revision
by the development.”29 The unity, harmony, and beauty of
the emanation of difference cannot, in consequence, be antic-
ipated in advance, even for God himself. Such affirmations of
the freedom and creativity of divine difference show just how
insistent Milbank is on preserving the integrity of difference
within the Godhead.
Once Milbank has delineated the structure of difference in
the Trinity, it is possible for him to begin to move toward a
redefinition and reconstruction of creaturely difference. The
principal concept at work here is analogy. Theology and
Social Theory’s now infamous onslaught against late medi-
eval nominalism and its repudiation of analogy in favor of
univocity of being is not simply a philosophical critique, but
rather a fundamentally political-theological one. Milbank’s
recovery of Scholastic analogia against univocity is integral
to his development of an ontology of difference-in-charity.
As he sees it, contemporary forms of nominalism, say, the
univocity championed by Deleuze and Guatarri, threaten an
erasure of difference exactly where they intend to uphold
its pure affirmation.30 Milbank thinks such univocal ontol-
ogies lack the resources to offer a conception of difference
that does not ultimately render it anarchic or collapse it into

28
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 437.
29
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 436.
30
For Deleuze and Guatarri’s writing on univocity and difference, see especially
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Continuum, 2001), 35–42; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 3–28.

49
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

sameness. Without a transcendental horizon against which

difference might be construed in mutual relation, difference
tends toward chaos. Without a means to distinguish talk
about being and beings, difference will be flattened. The
question, then, is how differences can relate to one another
and on what grounds. The principle of analogy, Milbank
proposes, enables a configuration of difference not based
upon some “common essence or genus” they might share,
but rather on the basis of a “common measure” between
differences, a relation of analogy between them, which is a
“likeness that only maintains itself through the differences,
and not despite nor in addition to them.”31 This is the crit-
ical move of Milbank’s analogical account of differential
relation: a refusal to order difference to something external
to it, identifying instead a mutuality between differences, an
order of charity.
For Milbank, difference is analogical in two senses. First,
analogy names the way differences are related to each other
in compatible, harmonic patterns, insofar as difference is
a feature of the goodness of creation, an expression of the
beauty of creaturely multiplicity. Second, analogy names
how the structure of creaturely difference is analogically
related to God, wherein Triune sociality exemplifies the pat-
tern of difference-in-charity in its eminent form. I will return
to this second use of analogy later in considering Milbank’s
practical political philosophy, as I will want to demonstrate
some of the limits of moving from Trinity to social life in
this analogical way. Milbank’s use of analogy, I will show,
obscures some of the important ways creaturely difference is
non-analogous to divine difference. For now, I wish simply
to note two problems related to analogy in the first sense.
According to Milbank, in order for differences to be related

31
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 290, emphasis mine.

50
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

analogically in charity, they must ultimately be “referred” to

God, the source of charity. Difference can only be ordered in
charity, for Milbank, insofar as it exists in God. Following
Augustine, Milbank understands evil to consist in a privation
of order. As he puts it, “To ‘refer’ things to the infinite is to
arrange them in their proper place in a sequence, and hence
‘privation’ implies not just inhibition of the flow, but also a
false, ugly, misdirection of the flow. Although evil is nega-
tive, it can be ‘seen’ in an ugly misarrangement.”32 Sin, in
other words, is difference resisting its final ordering to God.
Moreover, this privation is, inherently, a violence – “the
denial of Being both as infinite plenitude and as harmonious
ordering of difference, or as peace.”33 When Milbank con-
flates postmodern social theorists’ ontologizing of difference
with an ontologizing of violence, it is because he sees them
as repudiating a divine ordering that sustains difference in
peace. Sin, evil, and violence are, for Milbank, a kind of “bad
difference” – that is, difference which resists reconciliation.
As he puts it, evil is “the denial of hope for, and the present
reality of, community.”34
It is here that Romand Coles, a sympathetic but criti-
cal reader of Milbank, centers his critique of Milbank’s
Trinitarian metaphysics of difference. Coles wonders how
other, how truly different, something can remain if it ulti-
mately must be “storied” back into a Christian vision of rec-
onciliation.35 In other words, for Coles, Milbank’s Theology

32
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 439.
33
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 440.
34
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 440.
35
Romand Coles, “Storied Others,” 338. Milbank, Coles says, is in line with
a long tradition of Christian affirmations of difference which “seeks to place
all differences self-consciously within Christianity and excludes radical
externality insofar as the radical other – that which does not understand
itself as the Spirit nor the Church – is sin and (in its aspect of self-conscious
externality) ‘nothing that is.’”

51
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

is precisely what delimits him from a truly radical account

of difference, for it ultimately cannot escape a kind of
providentialism and sovereignty which refuse to acknowl-
edge legitimate difference external to Christian reconcilia-
tion. Difference can be loved, certainly, and Coles affirms
Milbank’s desire to preserve a certain account of charity
toward difference. But the question remains as to whether
the other is loved in her difference or despite it.36 This is
to say, does Milbank affirm difference only insofar as it
can be eventually converted, reconciled back into a tamed,
Christianized version?37 Is the promise of conversion a con-
dition for charity? Coles reads Milbank’s description of sin –
the refusal of peaceful ordering of difference – as another
instantiation of colonial Christianity’s problematic approach
to difference, wherein difference is indexed either to sin or
eventual conversion.38 In a gesture of the kind of charitable
engagement with difference Coles exhorts Milbank toward,
Coles proposes a decolonized revision of Milbank’s thesis,
one in which charity entails a movement of dispossession and
affirmation of difference without regard for conversion. The

36
Similar concerns are evident in critical discourses on liberal multiculturalism
and accommodationism. Jason Springs points to former French president
Nicholas Sarkozy’s commendation of the development of a distinctly “French
Islam,” to exist harmoniously alongside forms of French Catholicism and
French Judaism, as a strategy for incorporating religious difference in the public
sphere. Springs refers to this approach as an instance of the “domesticating
effect of reasonable accommodation” of difference. See Jason A. Springs,
Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to
Adversary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 206. See also John
R. Bowen, Can Islam Be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secular State
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
37
As Coles asks, “Can there be either the strength or the generosity required for
a difference-affirming charitable practice when one’s other appears a priori
only in a privative light in which conversion is imperative?” Coles, “Storied
Others,” 338.
38
Coles, “Storied Others,” 344–345.

52
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

proposal, to be sure, asks Milbank to embrace a substantially

revised form of Christian belief, one which entails a repudi-
ation of conversion, and thus “the death of [Christianity’s]
ideological reassurance of its missionary totalism.”39 Coles
also, it seems, exhorts an abandonment of traditional notions
of sin and reconciliation. It is unlikely that Milbank, or oth-
ers committed to traditional forms of Christian belief, would
accept such a revisionist position. But, more importantly,
one wishes to ask why Coles so fears notions of conversion,
convinced, as he is, that all forms of conversion are mere
impositions of power and domination? Is the conversion of
difference necessarily opposed to a radically pluralist democ-
racy, or is it possible, even necessary, to imagine forms of
conversion as essential to democratic praxis? I’ll revisit these
questions in Chapter 5, offering an account of democratic
conversion that, while sensitive to Coles’s worries about the
erasure of difference in reconciliation, nevertheless maintains
that conversion is something required of all parties in a dem-
ocratic community if they are to share judgment and action.
My point here is simply to register a problem in Milbank’s
vision – namely, that charity amidst difference seems to entail
a kind of coerced conversion.40
A second point of critique important for my purposes here
is raised by the Marxist theorist Kenneth Surin. Surin wor-
ries that Milbank’s analogical account of ordered difference
retains, and even deepens, pre-modern commitments to hier-
archy and subjugation.41 According to Surin, the t­radition

39
Coles, “Storied Others,” 350, quoting Michel de Certeau, “How Is Christianity
Thinkable Today?” Theology Digest 19, no. 4 (1971): 341.
40
On the possible coercive and domineering qualities of the kind of charity
Milbank advocates, see Roman Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory
and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–23.
41
Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 226–231. See also Kenneth Surin,

53
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

of analogical thinking Milbank resources “­ necessarily

­acknowledges a hierarchy among beings, specified in terms
of a being’s proximity in principle to the Godhead,” and
so entails an “ineluctable weddedness to the great chain of
being, without which it cannot operate.”42 Analogy neces-
sarily entails hierarchy, Surin argues, because analogy always
presumes a primary and secondary analogate, wherein one
subject (the primary) “produces” the other (the secondary),
even if only conceptually, and thus instantiates a relation of
derivation and dependence. This ordering occasions “the
inevitable possibility of the sad or reactive passions arising
when a being is lower down on the ontological hierarchy,”
and Christianity’s positing of a preestablished ontological
peace in the world, Surin argues, attempts to preemptively
resolve this antagonism by divinely sanctioning this hierar-
chical order as a harmonious one.43 As my examination of
Milbank’s practical politics later will show, Milbank him-
self does not shy away from, but embraces, such hierarchi-
cal notions, developing them in terms of civic hierarchies of
virtue and authority. Contra Surin, however, analogy itself is
not destined to reify hierarchy, and it is possible to imagine a
version of the rather elegant account of analogical difference
Milbank begins to develop in the final chapter of Theology
and Social Theory in reciprocal, non-hierarchical ways.
A number of “grammatical Thomists,” for instance, have
noted that Aquinas, perhaps the most sophisticated writer
on the doctrine of analogy, refused to identify the hierarchy
of beings in the world, which he doubtless affirmed, with the

“Rewriting the Ontological Script of Liberation: On the Question of Finding

a New Kind of Political Subject,” in Theology and the Political: The New
Debate, ed. Creston David, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 240–266.
42
Surin, Freedom Not Yet, 230. 43 Surin, Freedom Not Yet, 230.

54
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

analogia of being.44 That Thomas holds the concepts of hier-

archy and analogy at some distance, then, at least opens the
possibility of developing an account of analogical relation in
non-hierarchical terms. Surin, nevertheless, is right to discern
a problematic trajectory in Milbank’s political ontology, one
he will cash out in terms of anti-democratic governance and
a certain policing of difference.
I raise these two points of criticism not because I necessar-
ily take them to be defeaters of the kind of vision Milbank
develops. As will be shown, my own concerns have less to
do with these aspects of analogy and more with the project
of analogically moving from a consideration of divine social-
ity to a mapping of creaturely difference in such a way as to
eclipse important dimensions of creatureliness. Rather, I raise
these two points of criticism because they identify impor-
tant features of difference that my own account will need
to address: first, whether or not theological notions of rec-
onciliation entail the complete expulsion of conflicts amidst
difference; and second, whether an account of difference-in-
charity, rendered through concepts of analogy or otherwise,
depends on forms of hierarchy to order difference. As I will
show, Milbank himself seems to answer both of these ques-
tions in the affirmative, and so develops a non-democratic,
hierarchical account of polity in order to preclude conflicts
amidst difference. The political theology of agonistic plural-
ism I develop in the following chapters, however, contends
that democracy need not despise conflict nor resort to hier-
archy in order to flourish. Difference, I will argue, can be
negotiated horizontally through practices of democratic
judgment-making that encompass conflict.

44
See Alan Philip Darley, “Predication or Participation? What Is the Nature
of Aquinas’ Doctrine of Analogy?” The Heythrop Journal 57, no. 2 (2016):
312–324.

55
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

1.1.2 The Practical Task: Postliberal Socialism and

the Management of Difference
Milbank’s postliberal politics of virtue, to which I now turn,
rests upon his political ontology and its metaphysics of dif-
ference. Indeed, part of what makes his a postliberal polit-
ical theology is that politics is grounded not in an account
of natural law, a proceduralist theory of justice, or a secular
theory of rights, but in a fundamental ontology. With that
political ontology in full view, particularly as it concerns
the nature of difference, we may now proceed to an anal-
ysis of Milbank’s practical politics. I will suggest here that
Milbank’s political vision and his anxiety about democracy
and conflict confirm the worries I set out earlier concerning
the political instantiation of Milbank’s Trinitarian account
of difference. Recall, these were (1) that Milbank’s account
of difference necessitates forms of hierarchy to order and
manage difference, and (2) that his ontology of peace
expunges conflict from human sociality. In what follows,
I’ll first give a summary and critical appraisal of Milbank’s
practical political philosophy, and then move to consider
a larger question about how Milbank moves from funda-
mental ontology to normative political theory. More spe-
cifically, this movement from Trinity to social order, I’ll
suggest, risks running roughshod over important features of
human creaturehood, including conflict.
I argued earlier that Milbank’s critique of differential
ontologies is fundamentally a political one. Ontologies of
difference, according to Milbank, cannot sustain a poli-
tics able to overcome the problems and contradictions of
political liberalism and neoliberal capitalism. As he sees
it, far from contesting neoliberalism’s logics of scarcity,
competition, and egoism, these ontologies actually mirror
the competition, individualization, and atomization that

56
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

neoliberalism presumes. It is no coincidence, in his view,

that differential ontologies gained so much traction amidst
the birth and rise of neoliberalism and are now falling out
of favor amidst the crises of neoliberal order. Postmodern
ontologies of difference reproduce the logics of neoliber-
alism: their insistence on infinite multiplicity, singularity,
and difference “grounds only a social agon and therefore
is complicit with capitalism.”45 As political theories, they
fail to offer any serious contestation of neoliberal capital-
ism insofar as they lack resources to develop a substan-
tial account of mutuality, solidarity, and commonness
that might contest capitalist exploitation. Their prioriti-
zation of the singularity of difference and jettisoning of
all notions of universality might authorize a micropolitics
of care, an ethics of alterity and affirmation, or a praxis
of hospitality and tolerance. But lacking a basis for sub-
stantial forms of solidarity, these philosophies of differ-
ence prove insufficiently political, let alone anticapitalist.46
As Milbank says, they “can undergird a liberal politics of
self-satisfied gesture, but not one that attempts to build a
new form of just community around an accepted common
good: such an enterprise requires instead, as Peter Hallward
says, an ontology of relation and mediation, of metaxu …
‘between’ the one and the many.”47 In other words, lack-
ing something like an account of analogy within which
one may contextualize the peaceful relation of differences,
the possibility of political life beyond neoliberalism is a
fantasy. In these criticisms, Milbank echoes a dominant

45
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, xxi.
46
For a similar critique of Derrida on these grounds, see Rowan Williams, “Hegel
and the Gods of Postmodernity,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in
Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 2007), 25–34.
47
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, xxi.

57
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

strand within contemporary left and Marxist theory which

has identified the political limitations of poststructural-
ism and postmodern thought more generally. Difference
alone, these critics argue, cannot ground the kind of col-
lectivity needed to contest capital. Ellen Meiksins Wood,
for instance, criticizes theories of pure difference on these
grounds and calls for a recovery of historical-materialist
and class-based analysis wherein difference is reconsid-
ered inside the matrix of class struggle.48 Doing so, she and
others argue, does not erase difference, but locates vari-
ous oppressions and identity concerns within an account of
the material social conditions of capitalism and a strategy
of class struggle to overcome them. In somewhat paral-
lel terms, Milbank situates his opposition to differential
ontologies within an attempt to “defend Christianity and
thereby supply again a new ontological and eschatological
basis for socialist hope.”49 Theology and Social Theory,
in my view, provides the ontological ground-clearing for
Milbank’s articulation of a Christian socialism and poli-
tics of the common good.50 This politics is detailed most
comprehensively in his 2016 book The Politics of Virtue,51
co-authored with Adrian Pabst, to which I now turn.
According to Milbank, the primary political instantia-
tion of the Trinity’s harmonic sociality of difference is the

48
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical
Materialism (New York: Verso, 2016), 256–263.
49
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, xiv.
50
Milbank delineates his Christian socialism in, among other places, John
Milbank, “The Body by Love Possessed: Christianity and Late Capitalism
in Britain,” Modern Theology 3, no. 1 (1986): 36–65; John Milbank, “The
Politics of Time: Community, Gift and Liturgy,” Telos 113 (1998): 41–69; and
John Milbank, “Letters to the Editor: A Socialist Economic Order,” Theology
91 (1988): 412–415.
51
John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and
the Human Future (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

58
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

ecclesia. Catholicity names the way creaturely life partici-

pates in divine life by ordering difference in communion. But
unlike some postliberal political theologies that advocate an
ecclesial-based politics in opposition to the liberal state,52
Milbank moves in the opposite direction. Reclaiming the
legacy of Christendom and fusing the ecclesial and the sec-
ular in order to overcome the latter, he advocates a form
of Christian governance best described as “postliberal
Christian socialism.” As he puts it in Theology and Social
Theory, “The Church, in order to be the Church, must seek
to extend the sphere of socially aesthetic harmony – ‘within’
the State where this is possible.”53 To be sure, the political
extension of the ecclesia’s social harmony seeks not Christian
uniformity which erases all difference. As I argued earlier,
Milbank believes Christianity is the best shot difference has
in this world. Christendom, in Milbank’s rearticulation, can
affirm difference, even while seeking its harmonic reconcil-
iation within a fundamental social harmony made possible
by Christian governance. He and Pabst write elsewhere that
“you actually need Christianity in order to uphold a gen-
uine form of pluralism.”54 For many, this will sound like
no allowance for real difference at all, only another colo-
nial Christian enterprise. But, as Milbank sees it, a renewed
Christendom can achieve a political order in which differ-
ence is both respected and rightly ordered in charity, pre-
serving a certain pluralism but within a more substantive
politics ordered to the common good. Delineating this ambi-
tious political vision is the task of The Politics of Virtue.

52
See Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics, 101–156.
53
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 428.
54
John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, “Society and Church Beyond Liberalism: The
Question of Europe,” Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 3,
no. 2 (2017): 33.

59
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

At the heart of The Politics of Virtue is an argument

about democracy, how it can be saved from liberalism and
the moral conflicts that threaten to plunge modern socie-
ties into decadence. Liberal foundations for democracy are
shaky and weak, Milbank and Pabst believe, relying as they
do on thin accounts of negative liberty and procedural jus-
tice. They seek, alternatively, to articulate the moral founda-
tions of democracy in terms of the common good. As Oliver
O’Donovan puts it, they are interested in “those moral con-
ditions for practicing democracy which democracy alone
cannot ensure.”55 That the moral conditions for democratic
flourishing are extra-democratic, according to Milbank and
Pabst, means that democracy and popular political partici-
pation must be complemented, supported, and indeed sub-
ordinated to political institutions capable of practicing and
teaching virtue. Democracy alone, in other words, is insuffi-
cient for a politics of virtue. Milbank and Pabst thus return
to a more classical conception of the ideal political regime,
one found in Aristotle. A polity of “mixed governance” con-
sists in (1) a democratic populace morally apprenticed by (2)
an aristocracy of virtuous elites charged with training, teach-
ing, and forming citizens’ moral capacities and sensibilities,
and (3) a constitutional monarch tasked with embodying and
carrying on the political community’s traditions of memory,
culture, and institutional knowledge.56 Well-ordered polities,
Milbank and Pabst maintain, exhibit a balance of the “one,”
the “few,” and the “many,” who share and receive gifts,

55
Oliver O’Donovan, “The Politics of Virtue (book review),” Modern Theology
33, no. 3 (2017): 484–488.
56
For Milbank’s delineations of this mixed polity, see John Milbank, “Liberality
versus Liberalism,” in The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 245–249; Milbank and Pabst, The Politics
of Virtue, 205–244. On monarchical rule and “Christic kingship,” see Milbank,
Beyond Secular Order, 249.

60
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

skills, and wisdom for the flourishing of all.57 This mutuality

and reciprocity of a mixed regime is construed in terms of
civic apprenticeship: Virtuous elites educate the populace in
civic virtue, thus assuring that democratic action is ordered
to the common good.58 In return, this moral aristocracy is
held accountable by the citizenry, thus assuring republican
hierarchy does not devolve into oligarchy, but is responsible
for the well-being of the whole political community. With
the passions of the democratic multitude being mediated by
the virtuous “few,” it can become not just a “people,” say
Milbank and Pabst, but a political community, a unity of dif-
ference ordered to the common good.59
It is no surprise, then, that education lies at the center of
Milbank and Pabst’s postliberal vision.60 Education – both
political and moral, for indeed, these cannot be separated
in a politics of virtue – extends far beyond classrooms and
includes the many civic bodies and associations of civil soci-
ety: guilds, unions, religious communities, intermediary gov-
erning bodies, and so on. Economy, like politics, is likewise
embedded in this tapestry of morally formative civic institu-
tions, hence the designation Milbank and Pabst ascribe to it:
“civil economy socialism.”61 In this market-socialism and

57
Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 83.
58
“A relatively well educated – morally trained and informed – populace will be
better able to sift and refine proposals as to what is ‘best’ for them by genuinely
‘aristocratic’ thinkers and innovators at every level.” Milbank and Pabst, The
Politics of Virtue, 191.
59
On the constitution of a democratic “people,” and the limitation of political
representation, see Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 140–143.
60
See Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 260–266, 286–294. See also
Milbank, “Liberality versus Liberalism,” 249.
61
Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 137–171; John Milbank, “The
Real Third Way: For a New Metanarrative of Capital and the Associationist
Alternative,” in The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVI’s Social
Encyclical and the Future of Political Economy, ed. Adrian Pabst (Eugene, OR:
Wipf & Stock, 2011), 27–70.

61
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

“gift economy,” the “family, guild, fraternity, commune,

corporation” provide the relational networks necessary
for the cultivation of virtue and education in the common
good.62 The dissolving of these intermediary institutions
under capitalism, and the rise of modern liberalism, both
political and economic, wherein persons relate only to the
market-state as consumers, workers, and passive citizens,
eviscerates the material social conditions for political and
economic virtue. Education under capitalism becomes the
acquisition of technical, rather than moral, knowledge and
is divorced from the cultivation of political virtue. Milbank
and Pabst’s postliberal political and economic vision seeks
instead to restore these intermediary institutions, seeing
them as the primary sites of moral formation and essential
to a politics of the common good.
Another way of describing this process of the educa-
tion, transmission, and formation of political virtue that
makes democracy possible, in Milbank and Pabst’s view,
is the hierarchical ordering of difference. As described ear-
lier, for Milbank, if difference is to exist in peace rather
than antagonism, it must be rightly ordered and configured.
The earlier sketch of Milbank’s politics of virtue shows
how, practically speaking, this occurs – namely, through
education and apprenticeship directed by moral “elites.”
Put differently, republican hierarchies of virtue structure
and order democratic difference. On their own, Milbank
believes, pluralism and difference threaten to undermine the
agreement, unity, and social cohesion necessary for social-
ist community and virtue. Conflicts amidst difference must
be reconciled in order for the political community to bear
the weight of forming citizens in virtue. Thus, education

62
Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 165; Milbank, “Liberality versus Liberalism,”
250–253.

62
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

names how difference undergoes conversion to the common

good. Education enables the pluralities of the democratic
community to be ordered by the virtuous few and directed
to the common good. If such a hierarchical politics seems
paternalist and ultimately undemocratic, it is because it is.
Milbank excoriates forms of direct, and even representative,
democracy as lacking the necessary hierarchies to transcend
the conflicts of the demos and enable a virtuous politics.63
Democracy, according to him, can only survive when sub-
ordinated to undemocratic governance. The real rationale
for democratic pluralism, then, is extra-democratic. The
legitimacy of democratic difference lies in its eventual con-
version, through education and moral formation, to the
common good.64 It is clear, then, that Milbank’s aversion
to conflict exists at both a metaphysical and political level –
indeed, the latter precisely because of the former. For if
politics seeks the concrete instantiation of metaphysical
commitments, as Milbank believes it must, then political
rule must aspire to rightly order pluralist society, to purge
conflict, and to manage difference.
We see, then, in Milbank’s postliberal Christian social-
ism both a pessimism about democracy’s capacity to negoti-
ate difference and a non-democratic program for managing
conflict and difference through hierarchical forms of gov-
ernance and education. In Milbank’s view, conflict and
difference threaten the moral conditions for democracy,

63
Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 142–152, 215–216; Milbank and Pabst,
The Politics of Virtue, 199.
64
It is important to note, however, that Milbank sees these non-democratic
hierarchies as enabling more, not less, democracy. Elsewhere, speaking of the
church, he writes, “Contrary to all the assumptions of secular sovereignty, it
is all the more democratic the more it is genuinely hierarchical. Moreover …
this is the only possible real democracy, and the most extremely democratic.”
John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 108.

63
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

conditions he believes are secured by the virtuous few who

discern the metaphysically true and implement it in practical
politics. For Milbank, democracy, if it is to succeed, must be
tethered to the metaphysically true, and thus the judgments
of the demos must ultimately be subservient to the philo-
sophical and moral rule of those who know the good, the
true, and the beautiful.
The important point here is that Milbank insists dem-
ocratic difference must be ordered non-democratically.
Democracy must have foundations, for him, in order to
preclude the conflicts that threaten social unity or resolve
them when they arise. My contention in the chapters to fol-
low is not that difference and its conflicts are in no need of
charitable ordering – with this much I agree with Milbank.
Difference, absent forms of mutuality and shared judgment,
cannot achieve the collective emancipatory politics I am
interested in. Nevertheless, I argue that the ordering of dif-
ference can be democratically achieved without resorting to
the kind of hierarchical politics Milbank prescribes. Indeed,
I will suggest that ordering difference in charity through the
negotiation of conflict is precisely what democratic politics,
at its best, is. Here, I simply wish to note why Milbank is led
to such non-democratic, hierarchical governance to ensure
the stability and coherence of political community. It is
because he remains captive to a framing of political commu-
nity and difference in oppositional terms. Even as his account
of difference-in-charity attempts to overcome this opposi-
tion, Milbank ultimately privileges community to difference,
allowing only as much of the latter as will leave the former
stable and secure.
It should be clear, then, that Milbank cashes out his
political ontology in such a way as to confirm exactly the
worries Surin and Coles have regarding hierarchy and his
colonial impulses. And this is to say nothing of Milbank’s

64
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

brash provocations defending European colonial expansion

and British imperialism, or his exhortations to a renewed
European-led global political order, all of which reveal a
fundamentally chauvinistic attitude toward difference.65 At
the end of the day, for Milbank, difference must be managed
to secure social harmony, and social harmony comes by way
of hegemony. Yet this problematic orientation to difference
is only the first aspect of Milbank’s political theology I wish
to interrogate. The second concerns his specific approach to
conflict, to which I now turn in order to show how it reveals
a limitation of his entire mode of theorizing political life
analogically from Trinitarian sociality.

1.1.3 Sociality, Creaturely and Divine

We can sum up the basic logic of Milbank’s postliberal
Augustinianism as follows: Creation possesses a funda-
mental ontology of harmonic sociality, which is difference
ordered in charity; creation possesses this in virtue of its
analogical or participatory relationship to the Trinitarian
God who is “transcendental peace through differential rela-
tion”;66 politics entails the practical ordering of difference
so as to instantiate the social harmony and flourishing nat-
ural to humans as social animals created in the image of
the socially harmonious Trinity. Methodologically, this is
a movement from political ontology to practical politics.
Considered theologically, it is also a move from the social
Trinity to normative social theory, a pattern of thought
Milbank shares with a number of other contemporary

65
See, for instance, John Milbank, “The Blue Labor Dream,” in Blue Labour:
Forging a New Politics, ed. Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst (London: I.B. Tauris,
2015), 43–46; Milbank and Pabst, The Politics of Virtue, 347–378.
66
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 6.

65
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

political theologians.67 Insofar as this Trinitarian vision

seeks to challenge liberal and neoliberal capitalist reduc-
tions of humans to atomized, acquisitive, and fundamen-
tally competitive individuals with a counter-anthropology
of solidarity and mutuality, I endorse the endeavor, at
least its political intentions. Nevertheless, my exposition
of Milbank’s Trinitarian politics has revealed serious rea-
sons to worry about such analogical thinking. For one, it
tends to obscure certain unique aspects of human creature-
liness by over-emphasizing human sociality’s likeness to the
divine. Theorizing social life analogically from Trinitarian
sociality neglects the ways difference and mutuality operate
differently for creatures, given their finitude, temporality,
and embodiment, among other things. Milbank’s political
vision, to put it simply, is insufficiently creaturely.
Recognizing the dissimilarities between divine and
creaturely sociality, we should also question whether, as
Milbank suggests, conflict is really so alien to social flour-
ishing. For Milbank, conflict is thoroughly negative in
character. Metaphysically speaking, it signifies disorder, a
privation of original harmony. Politically speaking, it dis-
rupts the peace of the political community and undermines
a virtuous politics. In short, for Milbank, conflict is sin.

67
See, for instance, Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology
of the Multitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 66–71;
Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Community, trans. Phillip Berryman
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000); Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the
Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981). A similar argument is made by Ian A.
McFarland, Difference & Identity: A Theological Anthropology (Cleveland,
OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001), not in terms of the relation of Trinity to politics,
but rather in order to use Trinitarian logics to construe an account of human
difference and unity and a corresponding ethical vision. For a critical analysis
of these works and others, see Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection:
Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 956
(2000): 432–445.

66
 1.1 Postliberal Augustinianism

His constant interchange of the terms “conflict” and “vio-

lence” in Theology and Social Theory suggests as much –
the former always being reduced to the latter.68 Thus, in his
social theory, every conflict must be reconciled in peaceful
relation, every clashing of difference ultimately resolved,
every dissonance incorporated into harmony. Because
Trinitarian sociality exhibits infinite harmony amidst dif-
ference without conflict or discord, so, he suggests, should
human creatures and their political communities.
But is this true? If creaturely sociality, and the operations
of difference therein, differs from divine unity-in-difference,
might it not be possible to imagine that conflict also belongs
to creatures by virtue of their natures? Might there, in fact,
be positive dimensions to conflict, as regards human com-
munity? Indeed, could conflict even be a constitutive part of
what it means for human creatures to live in society with
one another, given their differences? Is it possible, in other
words, that conflict is entirely natural? I raise these questions
now, waiting to address them fully at a later juncture. Doing
so, and reimagining the religious and political significance of
conflict, will be the task of the following chapters. For now, I
wish only to anticipate that discussion by suggesting that the
movement from the divine to the creaturely, from Trinity to
politics, risks obscuring the ways creaturely sociality is con-
stituted by conflicts amidst difference.
To sum up, I have thus far shown the strengths and
weaknesses of postliberal Augustinianism’s accounting for

68
On this point, see Peter C. Blum, “Two Cheers for an Ontology of Violence:
Reflections on Im/possibility,” in The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy,
Radical Reformation, ed. Chris K. Huebner and Tripp York (Eugene, OR: Wipf
& Stock, 2010), 7–26; Debra Dean Murphy, “Power, Politics, and Difference:
A Feminist Response to John Milbank,” Modern Theology 10, no. 2 (1994):
135–136; Nicholas Lash, “Not Exactly Politics or Power?” Modern Theology
8, no. 4 (1992): 358.

67
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

the theological meaning of difference in Trinitarian terms.

Milbank’s configuration of the relationship between political
community and difference in terms of analogical relations of
charity successfully recovers the way mutuality and sociality
are ontologically basic to human creatures and their natu-
ral capacities. Recognition of this is important for contesting
neoliberalism and developing a truly emancipatory, anti-
capitalist politics. The latter depends on imagining forms of
political community wherein difference is affirmed while yet
being ordered to mutuality and collectivity. On these mat-
ters, I agree with Milbank and seek to extend his essential
insights. Yet, as the following chapters will demonstrate, I
move away from Milbank’s construal of political community
and difference in several key ways. First, I reject its hierarchi-
cal and anti-democratic entailments. Whereas Milbank sees
hierarchy as essential to the ordering of difference in char-
ity, I defend an account of democratic organizing capable of
yielding shared judgments and collectivity without resorting
to undemocratic means. Second, I move beyond Milbank’s
analogical framing of politics as directed by Trinitarian com-
mitments. Doubtless, Christian theological anthropology
will be shaped by the belief that human sociality reflects and
participates in its divine analogue in certain ways. This is
entailed by the notion of humanity’s creation in the Imago
Dei. What I am interested in, however, are the differences
between creaturely and divine sociality, the places where
analogy breaks down and the unique aspects of creature-
hood come to the fore. In place of Milbank’s divine politics,
I seek a more creaturely one indexed to human finitude, con-
tingency, and embodiment. Third, as I turn from Trinitarian
analogy to the politics of creaturehood, I wish to re-center
the place of conflict in creaturely life and its potential for
generating political community. While heeding the insights
of postliberal Augustinianism, I nevertheless move beyond its

68
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

limits. Before doing so, however, I need to consider another

form of Augustinianism which seeks to reimagine political
theology’s troubling relationship to difference.

1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism and the

Ascetics of Difference
If Milbank’s postliberal Augustinianism represents one prom-
inent strategy of construing the relationship of political com-
munity and difference, one that directly challenges liberalism,
a second approach is represented by theologians who seek to
enliven the tradition of liberal political theorizing, even while
making important immanent critiques of it. This strategy, of
which Eric Gregory and Charles Mathewes are the best rep-
resentatives, also sees Augustine as central to its political
vision, but it employs Augustine’s thought in such a way as
to theologically reimagine, rather than reject, liberal dem-
ocratic citizenship. Like my earlier treatment of postliberal
Augustinianism, I consider Augustinian civic liberalism here
in two main parts: first, its political ontology and reimagining
of pluralism in sacramental, participatory terms; and second,
its practical politics – what it calls a theology or ethics of cit-
izenship – considered in terms of civic virtue, ascesis, and the
order of love. These two major sections are bookended by a
brief introduction to the project of Augustinian civic liberalism
and a concluding critical evaluation of its construal of political
community and difference and the place of conflict therein.

1.2.1 The New Augustinians: Civic Liberalism

and Republican Citizenship
In the wake of postliberalism’s ascendency, a number of
critiques of its presuppositions and viability have surfaced.

69
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

One especially important response has been a set of theolog-

ical re-engagements with liberal theory inspired by Jeffrey
Stout’s influential 2004 book Democracy and Tradition.69
Stout’s arguments regarding democracy, religion, and virtue
opened up space for religious theorists to reimagine demo-
cratic citizenship in theological terms while engaging recent
work in liberal political theory that has sought a recovery
of civic republican ideas.70 Stout’s invitation to theologians
and religious ethicists to re-engage liberal theory has been
taken up in a number of important works in the years fol-
lowing the publication of Democracy and Tradition. Among
them are two explicitly Augustinian thinkers: Eric Gregory
and Charles Mathewes. Gregory and Mathewes, along with
others, have developed a renewed theological approach to
liberal politics that can broadly be called “Augustinian civic
liberalism.” This term is specifically employed by Gregory
in his important 2008 book, Politics and the Order of Love:
An Augustinian Ethics of Democratic Citizenship,71 and it
captures three important elements of this developing school
of thought: the central role of Augustine and the Augustinian
tradition, the inheritance of traditions of liberal political
thought, and the felt need to revise liberal theory along civic
republican lines in order to develop an account of civic virtue.
These “new Augustinians” have a complex relationship
to both liberal political theory and the efforts of earlier gen-
erations of Augustinian thinkers to engage liberal theory.72

69
Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004).
70
On the relationship of Stout’s book to these new movements in Augustinian
political theology, see Jonathan Tran, “Assessing the Augustinian Democrats,”
Journal of Religious Ethics 46, no. 3 (2018): 521–547.
71
Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethics of
Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
72
I use the term “new Augustinians” to distinguish the kind of political
Augustinianism represented by Gregory and Mathewes from earlier

70
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

The latter generated a body of work in the twentieth century

often referred to as “Augustinian liberalism.” This school
would include realist appropriations of Augustine’s theol-
ogy of sin and eschatology by figures like Reinhold Niebuhr
and R. A. Markus, as well as attempts by figures such as
Paul Weithman and Edmund Santurri to join Augustinian
moral psychology and epistemology to Rawlsian notions of
procedural justice. All saw in Augustine’s theology a set of
resources useful for conceptualizing liberal politics in reli-
gious terms.73 Gregory and Mathewes build on this school
of thought but seek to expand its imaginative horizons.
Doubtless, they maintain, there exists an important rela-
tionship between Augustine and liberalism: Augustine was
himself no liberal, and yet his theological legacy has been
critical to the development of liberal thought. For Mathewes,
the compatibility between Augustine and liberalism lies not
so much in their respective “realist” orientations, as earlier
Augustinian liberals maintained, nor in the resemblance of
Augustine’s saeculum to Rawls’s neutral public sphere.74
Rather, for them, Augustine helpfully offers a deflationary
account of the political which sees earthly citizenship as
ordered to and tempered by eschatological citizenship in the
civitas Dei. This deflationary political vision, in which the
goods and ends of temporal politics are, for the Christian
pilgrim, of secondary importance to the ultimate good and

Augustinian liberal strategies, which I’ll consider later. The differences between
Gregory and Mathewes notwithstanding, I take them to be advocating quite
similar approaches to Christian political engagement in liberal politics.
73
For a helpful typology of Augustinian liberalism, see Gregory, Politics and the
Order of Love, 75–148.
74
See Edmund Santurri, “Rawlsian Liberalism, Moral Truth, and Augustinian
Politics,” Journal of Peace and Justice Studies 8, no. 2 (1997): 1–36; and
Paul J. Weithman, “Toward an Augustinian Liberalism,” in The Augustinian
Tradition, ed. Gareth Matthews (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1999), 304–322.

71
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

end of divine society, shares a certain likeness to liberal the-

ories of the state which claim to aspire not to transcendental
ends or the instantiation of a particular vision of the good,
but rather to the provision of basic, minimalist conditions
of peace and stability for individual liberty.75 The liberal
state, in other words, desires not the moral perfection of its
citizens but non-interference with their exercise of liberty.
Like Augustine, “the liberal state wisely shuns,” Mathewes
writes, a “reduction of the human to the citizen. Liberal citi-
zenship is more a negative reality than a positive one, as lib-
erals see politics as a necessity, not an intrinsic good.”76 In
this view, religion, by claiming citizens’ ultimate allegiances,
actually helps foster a liberal “politics of limits” and ironic
distance to the political community that curbs absolutist
or utopian tendencies to invest the political with ultimate
meaning.77 Augustinian civic liberals, like their Augustinian
liberal predecessors, laud liberalism’s suspicion of collectiv-
ism, substantial forms of political community, and the sub-
suming of civil society to the state.78 Put differently, they
oppose subjugating difference to monolithic formations of

75
Charles Mathewes, “Augustinian Christian Republican Citizenship,” in
Political Theology for a Plural Age, ed. Michael Jon Kessler (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 232–233.
76
Mathewes, “Republican Citizenship,” 234.
77
As Mathewes argues, Christians “have another community to which they
ascribe real (indeed, ultimate) political import, one that also claims their
allegiance, and that does so in a higher and more total way than the liberal
state … In civic terms, we can say that by splitting Christian citizens’ loyalties,
refusing to allow them to slothfully resettle on one worldly axis of value and
privileging a radically different end over patriotism, Christian faith constantly
disrupts the polity’s tendencies toward absolutism.” Mathewes, “Republican
Citizenship,” 236.
78
“Totalitarianism is what liberalism fears and sets itself up to oppose.”
Mathewes, “Republican Citizenship,” 229. According to Mathewes, at the
heart of the liberal tradition is a concept of privacy, “the idea that each
person has at their core the right not to be controlled by another.” Mathewes,
“Republican Citizenship,” 228.

72
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

political community, and this they see as an important con-

vergence between Augustine’s “politics of limits” and liber-
alism’s minimalist aspirations.79
Augustinian civic liberalism, then, is committed to the lib-
eral tradition insofar as it maintains that one of the chief
duties of the state is to respect and protect difference. Indeed,
it is precisely because of its commitment to difference that
Augustinian civic liberals wish to defend liberalism from
postliberal critics like Milbank whose politics of the com-
mon good, in their view, threatens an erasure of difference.
Nevertheless, Augustinian civic liberals also wish to revise
liberal theory in important ways to develop an account of
civic virtue and challenge liberalism’s individualism and cyn-
ical orientation toward community. They envision liberal
politics in terms both more civic republican and more theo-
logical than their Augustinian liberal forebears. With respect
to the former, Gregory and Mathewes appropriate insights
from the civic republican turn in recent liberal theory in order
to propose an “ethics of citizenship” and civic virtue. Civic
republicanism, for them, provides a compelling alternative
to both communitarianism and liberalism, which dominated
twentieth-century political theology. Communitarians like
Milbank, Mathewes argues, “believe there is some sort of
finality to the political process … with some final telos being
a unified nation” or moral community.80 Such p ­ ostliberal

79
Of course, this presumes the liberal state actually works in this way. For
a critique of this conception of the liberal state, and an argument that
liberalism itself has totalitarian dimensions and aspirations, namely, capitalist
imperialism, see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed
Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2008). On Augustine’s “politics of limits,” see
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
80
Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 174–175.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

options imagine political community in too unified terms,

while liberals conceive of the political in too minimalist and
contractualist ones. The ends of politics for civic republi-
cans are instead more “positive, individualistic, and imma-
nent” than either liberals or communitarians acknowledge:
“authentic self-rule,” which consists in “positive” liberty
and the cultivation and exercise of civic virtue.81 In other
words, civic republicanism imagines political community in
more minimalist terms than postliberals and more expansive
ones than traditional liberals. The political community is not
an end in itself, it maintains, but the arena wherein individ-
uals participate in self-rule and seek their moral perfection.82
Political community is a penultimate good, then, subordi-
nated to the primary goods of political agency, democratic
virtue, and the exercise of citizenship.
This invocation of virtue brings us to the second way
Augustinian civic liberals seek to move beyond their
Augustinian liberal predecessors. Whereas the latter saw
the political as essentially a concession to human sinfulness,
Augustinian civic liberals consider it a space of divine action
and moral development. In this way, their Augustinianism
is much more theological than previous generations of
Augustinian liberals. As Gregory puts it, Augustine offers
“more than a counsel against idolatry” when it comes to
politics; Augustinianism must risk “saying something about
the mysterious and hidden ways of God, even in political
action.”83 Bringing together republican theories of virtue

81
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 176.
82
“Far from being the furnace in which a national identity is fused, politics
ensures no civic consensus gains a stultifying grip on the body politic. Political
engagement does not make the nation; it makes citizens.” Mathewes, Theology
of Public Life, 177.
83
Eric Gregory, “Strange Fruit: Augustine, Liberalism, and the Good Samaritan,”
in Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine, ed. George E.

74
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

and Augustine’s sacramental ontology, moral psychology,

and incarnational theology, they challenge caricatures of
Augustinianism as a dour realism which views politics as a
corruption of virtue. Augustine, they suggest, gestures toward
a vision of political activity as a moral formation and partic-
ipation in God. To further delineate this, I turn first to detail
Augustinian civic liberalism’s political ontology, and second
its practical politics of ascesis.

1.2.2 Political Ontology: Saeculum

and Sacramental Pluralism
“Modernity’s quarrel with Augustine,” Mathewes claims, is
“fundamentally about ontology, about the nature of crea-
tion itself.”84 Like Milbank, Augustinian civic liberals are
interested in a vision of politics rooted in a theologically
informed political ontology. Like Milbank, they also turn
to Augustine to construe this fundamental ontology as it
relates to questions of pluralism, otherness, difference, and
sociality. But, unlike Milbank, Augustinian civic liberals see
in Augustine a vision of the political as essentially pluralis-
tic, one wherein the encounter with difference is a domain
of grace. In contrast to postliberal Augustinianism, differ-
ence is not to be ordered through politics, but patiently
endured as an occasion for encountering the divine Other
in the human other. Underlying the political philosophy of

Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (New York: Fordham University

Press, 2017), 108. Gregory goes on, “Some still need to be reminded of
Augustinian limits and the enigmas of temporal life. But in a world that
has largely abandoned any hopes for redemption (in this life or the next),
articulating the possibility of redemptive agency in the world strikes me as
urgent. Such a political theology might offer more than critique, even for those
who long for another city after time.”
84
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 78.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

Augustinian civic liberalism, then, is a fundamental ontol-

ogy that regards otherness and plurality as conditions of
creatureliness and participation in God. Liberal pluralism,
for these Augustinians, is sacramental.
Contesting commonplace assumptions about Augustine’s
theology as otherworldly, individualist, and interiorly ori-
ented, Mathewes and Gregory uncover in Augustine an
affirmation of the world and public life as filled with divine
presence. For Gregory, Christ’s incarnation is the center-
piece of Augustine’s understanding of creation’s participa-
tion in God, wherein proper love of one entails love of the
other. “Augustine’s God is a worldly God,” he writes, and
is “to be recognized in the intersubjectivity accomplished
through the revelation of Christ as the divine neighbor.”85
For Augustine, “To love God is to love the whole of creation
existing in God. The love for God is expressed in an ordered
love that loves God in loving God’s world, a world that
bears ‘His footprints’ (CD II.28).”86 Augustine’s incarna-
tional theology, Gregory contends, is precisely what pushes
him beyond the Platonist otherworldliness he is so often
accused of harboring: The incarnation “issues a challenge
to any form of deistic or Neoplatonic ontology that per-
petuates a competitive tournament of loves between God
and the world.”87 In Christ, divinity is joined to human-
ity such that the two love commands can never be sepa-
rated. To love God entails the love of the human neighbor,
for Christ is both the divine and human neighbor in his
incarnation.88 Christ binds himself to “the least of these”

85
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 323.
86
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 323, emphasis original. Quotation is
from Augustine’s City of God.
87
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 330.
88
Gregory is deeply influenced by Karl Barth’s interpretation of the Good
Samaritan parable and his identification of Christ as the “divine neighbor.”

76
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

(Matt. 25:31–46) such that in loving them one truly loves

Christ.89 In Gregory’s adept hands, Augustine’s uti/frui
distinction is properly interpreted in its Christological con-
text to identify “use” of earthly loves as the participatory
manner of partaking in divine “enjoyment.”
Mathewes likewise seeks a recovery of Augustinian
“worldliness” by retrieving Augustine’s sacramental vision
of creation.90 For Augustine, he argues, creation is semioti-
cally sacramental, a world of material “signs” that convey
and gesture toward their divine signified. “Creation itself,
properly understood,” according to Augustine, “speaks of
God.”91 Through interpretation, response, engagement,
and interaction with these diverse signs, one comes to par-
ticipate in the Creator who speaks them into existence and
the Logos in whom all logoi share. In this way, according
to Mathewes, Augustine enables “a theological interpreta-
tion of the world as a form of participation, through Christ,
in the church, in the divine perichoresis.”92 In Mathewes’s
view, Augustine’s politics is, far from the pessimism ascribed
to him by Christian realists, an extension of this sacramen-
tal ontology and “part of a wider appreciation of the good-
ness of God’s creation and a recognition of our obligations

See Eric Gregory, “The Double Love Command and the Ethics of Religious
Pluralism,” in Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society, ed.
Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrells (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2016), 342; and Eric Gregory, “‘The Gospel within the
Commandment’: Karl Barth on the Parable of the Good Samaritan,” in
Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth, ed. Daniel Migliore (Grand Rapids, MI:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017), 34–55.
89
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 348–350.
90
Charles Mathewes, “A Worldly Augustinianism: Augustine’s Sacramental
Vision of Creation,” Augustinian Studies 41, no. 1 (2010): 333–348.
91
Mathewes, “Worldly Augustinianism,” 341, emphasis mine. See also
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 100–104.
92
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 26.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

for its sustenance.”93 Politics is an instance of the goodness

and sacramental quality of creation.
The theological piece that ties Augustine’s sacramental
ontology to an account of politics is his notion of the saec-
ulum. Importantly, while some readers of Augustine have
wrongly interpreted him to mean by this some kind of secu-
lar and neutral space wherein earthly politics occurs, Gregory
and Mathewes recover the fundamentally theological and
temporal character of the saeculum. The saeculum is the
time between Christ’s first and second advents, the temporal
domain of political life, governed by divine providence and
thus filled with divine presence. The saeculum, in Gregory’s
words, is “that mixed time when no single religious vision
can presume to command comprehensive, confessional, and
visible authority.”94 In other words, for Augustinian civic
liberals, saeculum is the theological designation of political
pluralism. In the saeculum, “diversity has been made a gift
to the church through divine providence,”95 and difference
becomes a means by which Christians respond to God and
“reshape our existence and redirect our desires in response to
grace.”96 In the hands of Augustinian civic liberals, the saecu-
lum is not a capitulation to sin nor devoid of divine grace but
is the designation of what might be called a “sacramental plu-
ralism.” The reason pluralism is sacramental, and the reason
the saeculum is filled with divine presence, is that the human
other bears the grace of divine Otherness. Divine presence is
not confined to the eternal City of God, nor to the church, but
is dispersed in the world,97 and particularly in one’s engage-
ment in public life and the encounter with otherness.

93
Mathewes, “Republican Citizenship,” 226.
94
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 79.
95
Gregory, “Ethics of Religious Pluralism,” 339.
96
Gregory, “Ethics of Religious Pluralism,” 340.
97
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 129.

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 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

Negotiating otherness, in fact, is the heart of Augustinian

civic liberalism’s account of pluralist politics. As Mathewes
puts it, “What modernity calls pluralism we should see, in
theological terms, as the challenge of otherness, a challenge
demanding a rich theological response.”98 In the human
other one discovers “the otherness present most fundamen-
tally in the otherness of the divine Trinity.”99 The human
other, that is, manifests “that most basic otherness, that of
God.”100 This is not so much to sacralize difference as it is
to posit the way in which difference challenges, questions,
and demands one’s response and change, parabolically mir-
roring the operations of divine grace, which confronts one
from without to provoke one’s conversion to God. In other
words, a theological account of otherness, such as the one
Mathewes and Gregory offer, sees difference as inviting dia-
logical encounter, a moment of witness but also of disposses-
sion, making oneself vulnerable to the grace of self-revision,
conversion, and receptivity to newness. The dialogical
encounter with difference that pluralist politics occasions
demands not “vapid amiability where one is wholly content
to be part of a directionless exchange of viewpoints,”101
but rather genuine argument and contestation in pursuit
of wisdom. As Gregory puts it, “Improvisation, argument,
and discovery are endemic to the confession of grace and

98
Charles Mathewes, “Pluralism, Otherness, and the Augustinian Tradition,”
Modern Theology 14, no. 1 (1998): 84. Put differently, “In pluralism, what
initially seems a contingent political question is revealed to be a deep and
inescapable metaphysical issue.” Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 115.
99
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 109.
100
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 115.
101
Gregory, “Ethics of Religious Pluralism,” 335, quoting Gene Outka,
“Theocentric Love and the Augustinian Legacy: Honoring Differences and
Likenesses between God and Ourselves,” Journal of the Society of Christian
Ethics 22 (2002): 98–99.

79
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

ongoing recognition of the Spirit.”102 In encountering the

other, that is, one just might meet God. If this seems to ren-
der the political other as a kind of “sacrament” – political
pluralism as the visible sign of an invisible grace – Gregory
confirms this is exactly what Augustinian civic liberalism
intends: “the event of mutual encounter is itself a transfig-
uring sacrament of grace.”103
For Augustinian civic liberals, it is Augustine’s vibrant
ontology, rather than abstract notions of sin or eschatol-
ogy, that is the centerpiece of his political theology. Joining
that ontology to Augustine’s account of the saeculum,
Augustinian civic liberals perceive liberal pluralism to be
sacramental – the domain of divine self-disclosure. Politics
is filled with divine presence such that, as Mathewes puts it,
“Augustinians can affirm that public life can be a way for
humans to come to participate in God.”104 That politics is,
in the end, about divine participation means that Augustine’s
political theology can be thematized also in ascetic terms,
construing civic virtue theologically as an ordering of love.
Thus, I turn now from Augustinian civic liberalism’s politi-
cal ontology to its practical politics.

1.2.3 Pilgrim Politics: Ascesis and the Order of Love

Recall that, in John Milbank’s postliberal vision, politics
entails the ordering of difference within a political commu-
nity to a substantive vision of the common good. Far from
the Augustinianism of liberals like Niebuhr and his followers,

102
Gregory, “Ethics of Religious Pluralism,” 339.
103
Gregory, “Ethics of Religious Pluralism,” 342. Gregory goes on, “The
neighbor is actually the bearer of the mercy of God in the drama of salvation.
In and through wounded humanity, we are opened to the goodness of God in
the sacred presence of the neighbor.”
104
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 21.

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 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

Milbank’s Augustinianism saw the vocation of the Ecclesia

militans to be one of instantiating the peace of Christ through
a kind of Christian governance. Augustinian civic liberals
eschew this kind of politics of the common good in favor of
more minimalist liberal goals, even as they supplement this
minimalist orientation to the political with an account of civic
virtue.105 For them, Augustine offers not so much a theory
of political rule but an ethics of political participation, one
that centers on the image of pilgrimage. As a pilgrim activity,
politics is not concerned with instantiating a particular vision
of the good or realizing a perfectly just society. The pilgrim
has “no abiding city” in the world, and so approaches pol-
itics as an opportunity to cultivate virtue on the way to the
eternal “city which is to come” (Heb. 13:14). Consequently,
Augustinian civic liberals approach difference not as a threat
to political flourishing, nor as something to be converted or
ordered, but rather as a mystery to be patiently endured in for-
bearance. Encountering difference is integral to moral devel-
opment, for one is trained in charity by bearing difference in
love, made ready to embrace the divine Other by receiving the
human other. Liberal politics, in this Augustinian vision, is
concerned therefore with respect for difference and the flour-
ishing of a diverse, pluralist public sphere. Like Augustine
himself, Augustinian civic liberals are suspicious of attempts
to Christianize the saeculum. Doing so both fails to recognize
the saeculum as the time wherein earthly politics is properly
mixed and plural and invests too much in the realization of
perfect justice in a temporal political order that cannot bear it.
The Christian pilgrim thus forges a common life with others

105
As Gregory puts it, he wishes to “reconstruct a kind of Augustinian civic virtue
that might in turn encourage a more ambitious political practice. By more
‘ambitious’ political practice, I mean the promotion of an actual society that
is more just, more egalitarian, and more charitable.” Gregory, Politics and the
Order of Love, 8.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

in the civitas terrena, but with a proper Augustinian detach-

ment from the claims of earthly polities. Augustinian civic
liberalism aims not for the realization of a vision of politi-
cal society but for the cultivation of civic virtue. Mathewes
delineates this pilgrim politics in terms of what he calls an
ascetics of citizenship, Gregory through an ethics of citizen-
ship centered on the order of love. I consider each in turn.
If public life is indeed the domain of divine presence, one
may approach politics, Mathewes believes, expecting to
undergo the operations of divine grace: conversion, reor-
dering, sanctification, and transformation. In short, politics
for Mathewes, and ultimately for Augustine himself, is about
ascesis, the transformation of the soul in preparation for
eternal life with God. Public life, he writes, “can be under-
stood ascetically, as a means of purifying the soul for God:
the ascesis of citizenship … as part of the ascesis of disci-
pleship.”106 Moreover, because everlasting communion with
God is, for Augustine, also a social reality – communion with
others in the civitas Dei – earthly politics is a proleptic par-
ticipation in, and preparation for, the politics of beatitude.107
As Mathewes says, “Engagement in the earthly city helps fit
us for the heavenly city to come.”108 Specifically, it is the
encounter and negotiation with diverse others that asceti-
cally cultivates one’s capacities for eternal communion with
the divine Other and the citizens of the heavenly city.
Mathewes envisions public engagement through two
dominant Augustinian themes: confession and conversion.
Confession names something more than a spiritual practice;
it is, broadly speaking, an “orientation” toward public life,

106
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 21.
107
See also Eric Gregory, “Politics and Beatitude,” Studies in Christian Ethics 30,
no. 2 (2017): 199–206.
108
Mathewes, “Republican Citizenship,” 234.

82
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

“an openness to transforming, and being transformed by,

the other.”109 Insofar as asceticism is fundamentally about
vulnerability, Mathewes argues, the ascetics of citizenship
is about “learning to suffer in the right way.”110 Suffering
otherness – being acted upon by another – is an activity of
patience and receptivity. And such suffering is part and par-
cel of confession, wherein one stakes oneself and one’s claims
in public, expecting to be interrogated, challenged, and scru-
tinized by others.111 This is the nature of Augustinian con-
fessio, Mathewes maintains, having in the mind the cycles of
declaration, questioning, and divine interrogation that drive
the narrative of Augustine’s Confessions. “Christian faith
exhibits,” he writes, “the soul’s ascetical struggle to resist its
own sinful desires for closure, cessation, and death in favor
of participating in God’s infinite, endless, ecstatic love of
the world; it reveals the endlessness of our inquiry into God
and God’s love.”112 Politically speaking, confession signi-
fies a posture of openness, receptivity, and vulnerability to
the other within a pluralist political practice of negotiation,
disputation, argument, and exchange. Therein, one suffers
difference anticipating the work of grace in the reordering of
one’s desires, loves, knowledge, and commitments.
Mathewes’s account of confession already anticipates the
second major Augustinian theme that drives his account of
the politics of difference: conversion. Recall that conversion
was a subject Milbank’s critics found particularly dangerous,
worrying that it implied the erasure of difference. Here, the
matter is flipped on its head, for Mathewes advocates not

109
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 87.
110
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 11.
111
Mathewes develops this, with reference to H. Richard Niebuhr, in terms of
“non-defensive confessionalism.” See Mathewes, Theology of Public Life,
210–212.
112
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 199.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

the converting of difference – “storying” otherness, as Coles

put it – but being converted by difference. Read theologi-
cally, the encounter with difference, and the various struggles
and negotiations with others that pluralist politics involves,
is a “struggle over peoples’ loves.”113 In such struggle, per-
sons’ loves and desires can be reordered, redirected, and con-
verted to God and neighbor. Conversion, in other words, is
prompted by confronting difference. As Mathewes puts it:
This Augustinian account sees conversion as partly a matter of
growing into a new knowledge of difference – a new knowl-
edge of what separates humans from one another. In becom-
ing something new, one understands one’s previous beliefs
differently, and may (and indeed ought to) thereby come to a
deeper awareness of and sensitivity to the differences separat-
ing persons from one another.114

Conversion, for Mathewes, is the process by which one

undergoes transformation of one’s loves and desires in prep-
aration for eternal life with God. Political engagement in the
pluralist saeculum occasions this ascesis, where one’s conver-
sion is accomplished “not by shunning other humans, but by
engaging them.”115
Gregory pursues a similar line of thought concerning the
moral and spiritual work of political engagement but with
attention to Augustine’s ordo amoris, the “order of love,”
a term Augustine believed was a “brief and true definition

113
Charles Mathewes, “Faith, Hope, and Agony: Christian Political
Participation Beyond Liberalism,” The Annual of the Society of Christian
Ethics 21 (2001): 127.
114
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 122. Mathewes goes on, “The return to
right relation with God, and the elimination of untoward differences between
God and humans (and among humans as well), are thus accomplished not by
shunning other humans, but by engaging them; not by turning away, but by
turning toward. Conversion does not draw humans out of the world; rather it
puts them more fully, and more properly, into it” (123).
115
Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 122.

84
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

of virtue.”116 Following Augustine, Gregory sees human

persons and societies as characterized most fundamentally
by their loves.117 Under the conditions of sin, human loves,
both personal and social, are “disordered, misdirected,
and disproportionate.”118 Grace entails the reordering and
healing of disordered loves, and politics participates in this
work. As Gregory puts it, “True virtue is a matter of lov-
ing well and loving freely. Justice is about getting our loves
arranged in the appropriate manner, giving and receiving
love in the right sorts of ways.”119 Civic virtue, thematized
in terms of the order of loves, thus refers to the ways polit-
ical engagement facilitates the right ordering of human love
for God and neighbor. Whereas both critics of Augustine
like Hannah Arendt and followers of Augustine like Niebuhr
believed love to undermine genuine political action, Gregory
is intent to reinsert love into thinking about politics, making
it a central civic virtue. For him, the field of politics is exactly
where love finds a home. “Political action, which promotes
just relations among persons,” he writes, “becomes a means
by which one loves God and neighbor.”120
Gregory believes his Augustinian ethics of citizenship
find common cause with secular theorists proposing ver-
sions of civic liberalism, “a virtue-oriented liberalism that
aims to avoid individualistic and rationalistic assumptions
about human nature as well as romantic or totalitarian con-
ceptions of political community.”121 Like them, he sees the

116
Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry
Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), XV.22.
117
“A self always stands in relation to the world, including the political world, in
terms of her loves.” Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 21.
118
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 21.
119
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 22.
120
Gregory, “Strange Fruit,” 104.
121
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 10.

85
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

proper aim of politics to be more than simply adjudicating

the rival interests of a diverse citizenry (à la liberalism) but
less than the construction of a political community directed
to a shared conception of the common good (à la communi-
tarianism). Politics, rather, is concerned with persons’ moral
perfection – their participation in political self-rule, culti-
vation of civic virtue, and forging of civic friendships. This
kind of civic liberalism sees pluralism as a gift rather than
a burden, for difference occasions the possibility of friend-
ship and shared life across difference. Augustine, Gregory
writes, “always encourages the view of ‘others’ as potential
friends rather than as threats to one’s self or private commu-
nity.”122 In terms of the relationship between difference and
political community, then, Gregory’s Augustinian civic liber-
alism advocates a minimalist, pluralist conception of repub-
lican national community that does not seek to reconcile or
transcend difference but preserve it. Indeed, to transcend plu-
ralism would mean eviscerating the very conditions of civic
virtue and moral perfection, for perfection in charity comes
by receiving diverse neighbors as sacramental means of divine
grace in the ordering of love.123 In the end, then, for both
Gregory and Mathewes, liberal politics is theologically mean-
ingful as it embodies a “sacramental pluralism,” wherein one
is transformed in grace by the ascetics of difference.

1.2.4 Conflict and the Limits of Liberalism

Augustinian civic liberalism, in my view, offers a significant
advance in Christian political theological thinking about
difference. Through its sacramental political ontology and
ethics of citizenship, it rightly sees pluralism and difference

122
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 350.
123
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 349.

86
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

as constitutive of flourishing democratic life and integral to

the pursuit of virtue. Rather than transcending difference in
order to politically realize a particular vision of the good, it
approaches difference with patient endurance, suffering its
otherness in the hope of moral perfection. Nevertheless, it is
exactly because of the way Augustinian civic liberalism the-
matizes pluralism and difference in sacramental terms that
two critical questions still linger within its political theo-
logical vision. First, does its commitment to rehabilitating
the liberal project inhibit Augustinian civic liberalism from
endorsing forms of political collectivity necessary for resisting
the fragmenting pressures of neoliberalism, which threaten to
undermine the very vision of civic life it champions? In other
words, can Augustinian civic liberals afford to continue priz-
ing the freedom and playfulness of plurality over the collec-
tive work of a political community’s pursuit of substantive,
rather than merely formal, justice? Second, can Augustinian
civic liberalism’s vibrant sacramental ontology acknowledge
the legitimate place of conflict amidst difference, or must it
regard conflict only in terms of sin?
The first question concerns the limitations of political the-
ologies still committed to political liberalism. Gregory and
Mathewes’s liberal sensibilities are clear. They emphasize the
open-ended and flexible nature of politics over against sub-
stantive accounts of the political common good. They value
epistemic humility, suspicious of the ways utopian ambition
for transcendent political ends can embody sinful pride and
domination. They identify the meaningfulness of political
engagement not so much in whether specific political ends are
achieved in society, but in how individual persons are trans-
formed by such engagement – their loves rightly ordered and
character formed in virtue. Because of these liberal commit-
ments, Gregory and Mathewes develop their accounts of dem-
ocratic action in primarily formal terms, generally abstaining

87
 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

from prescribing specific policies and theorizing about the

normative dimensions of political life, save securing a stable
and free society. Christopher Insole, who has offered the most
sophisticated theological defense of political liberalism to
date, defines liberalism in just this way: “The conviction that
politics is ordered towards peaceful coexistence (the absence
of conflict), and the preservation of the liberties of the individ-
ual within a pluralistic and tolerant framework, rather than
by a search for truth (religious or otherwise), perfection, and
unity.”124 According to Insole, liberal politics is, by definition,
concerned with the formal aspects of political society rather
than its pursuit of normative ends. The human good, in liberal
theory, is a matter of individual determination, not the aim
of a political community, and so conflicts over values, ends,
and moral goods should belong to the private, rather than the
public, sphere. As Insole says, liberal politics is ordered to “the
absence of conflict,” and it does this especially by remaining
neutral toward questions of value that generate conflict.
Augustinian civic liberals are right to question traditional
Augustinian liberalism’s commitments to the proceduralism
and liberal neutrality Insole prizes, developing their own
kind of “politics of virtue” in civic republican terms instead.
Nevertheless, Gregory and Mathewes exhibit a clear anxiety
regarding the substantive, rather than merely formal, dimen-
sions of politics, and they register their aversion to notions of
political community committed to substantive political ends.
But, as I argued in my consideration of Milbank’s postliberal
Augustinian socialism, it is not clear that such a liberalism
can endure the ravaging effects of neoliberal capitalism: its
evisceration of the political, its dissolving of traditional forms

124
Christopher J. Insole, The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense
of Political Liberalism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2004), 5.

88
 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

of association and solidarity, and its concentration of power

in transnational corporate and financial bodies. Aggregating
individual interests, urging consumers to exercise agency
through their purchasing power, advancing reformist regu-
latory policy through electoral and legislative action – tra-
ditional forms of liberal political action like these have
repeatedly failed to realize meaningful social transformation.
The only way to challenge a neoliberal regime is to wield
collective power, and this depends on imagining, organiz-
ing, and enacting forms of political community committed to
clear, articulated visions of substantive justice. Augustinian
civic liberals’ fear of collectivism, its domination and era-
sure of difference, while warranted, inhibits their imagining
of social transformation through collective action. It leads
them to conceive of political community and difference in
oppositional terms, privileging the latter in order to safe-
guard the eclipse of difference by what Peter Dula calls the
“rush to community.”125 Again, this is a legitimate concern,
as my criticism of Milbank has shown. But we are neverthe-
less right to wonder, in light of their resistance to political
community and its proper agency, whether Augustinian civic
liberals fall prey to the same fate of the differential ontolo-
gies examined earlier. That is, does their sacramental plu-
ralism exhibit a similar unqualified affirmation of difference
and resistance to commonness that threatens to devolve into
mere social fragmentation? As long as political community
and difference are approached in oppositional terms, the ten-
dency to resort to defending one or the other remains.
The second major question facing Augustinian civic lib-
eralism is whether it can acknowledge the place of conflict
in its sacramental pluralism. Does the Augustinian vision of

125
See Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 33–56.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

harmonic civic life obscure the essentially conflictual nature

of a politics of difference? Or does it in fact recognize conflict,
but only as a manifestation of sin? It is not surprising, given
the way Augustinian civic liberals ground their practical poli-
tics in a vibrant, graced sacramental ontology, that a primary
metaphor Mathewes employs to speak about engagement in
pluralist politics is “play.”126 Because public engagement is,
for him, governed by fundamentally eschatological commit-
ments, issuing in a form of republican citizenship with only
“ambivalent” fidelity to the political community,127 politics
can be playful, since for the Christian pilgrim, nothing of eter-
nal significance is at stake in the fate of the earthly city. Once
one thus escapes the illusion that politics is a zero-sum compe-
tition of struggle in which ultimate matters are at stake, poli-
tics can be pursued seriously but not desperately, committed
more to the gift of playful exchange amidst difference and the
transformative experience of engaging otherness than to secur-
ing the ends of a particular political program. In Augustinian
fashion, political engagement, for Mathewes, is ordered less to
social transformation than to self-transformation, and this by
way of the ascetics of patient endurance of difference.
While Mathewes’s politics of playfulness is right to chal-
lenge the absolutist claims polities often make on their con-
stituents, it faces two dangers, both of which have to do
with conflict. First, a politics of play can render politics in
too idealist terms, evacuating politics of struggle, power,
and antagonism. Play pictures political action in terms of
civic dialogues and council meetings, the exchanging of ideas
and perspectives in low-stakes arenas of public deliberation.
But politics encompasses much more than simply dialogi-
cal exchanges like these. Often it entails passionate struggle,

126
See, for instance, Mathewes, Theology of Public Life, 192, 285–299, 305–306.
127
Mathewes, “Republican Citizenship,” 243.

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 1.2 Augustinian Civic Liberalism

protest, opposition, pressure, and the use of power, and all

because the outcomes of political action are often matters
on which lives depend. Politics may sometimes involve play-
fulness, but is play really the best way to frame the agonistic
nature of political action? Might the metaphor of “play”
actually preclude Augustinian civic liberalism from seeing
the ways politics often entails real struggle? Recognizing
this would mean seriously thematizing the nature of con-
flict, something Augustinian liberals seem to identify with an
over-attachment to the politics of saeculum.128 If a proper
eschatological orientation to the political encourages a pos-
ture of playful ambivalence, then it would seem conflict is
indicative of a kind of worldliness, at best, and a manifesta-
tion of the libido dominandi, at worst.
Second, and relatedly, Augustinian civic liberalism’s sac-
ramental pluralism emphasizes flexibility, receptivity, and
openness in political engagement to the neglect of correlative
virtues and skills of agitation, persuasion, denunciation, and
assertion. Its political orientation is one of confessio, empha-
sizing themes of witness, humility, and tolerance.129 But this
is only part of what constitutes virtuous democratic citizen-
ship. Equally important are practices of challenge, contesta-
tion, and confrontation, actions initiated rather than passions
suffered, and the seeking of opponents’ transformation and

128
On this, see Tran, “Assessing the Augustinian Democrats,” 534–538.
129
For instance, Mathewes writes of the goals of public discourse, rendered in
terms of confession: “Faith, expressed publicly and nondefensively, tries as
best as possible to be honest about its origins, confessing the contingent and
fragile path whereby we got to where we are. This honesty may, one hopes,
provoke others to recognize the contingent and hence fragile character of
their own beliefs and lead to a more civilized dialogue. But such political
consequences are not to be counted on; we should do this rather for the way
it makes us more humble about our own situation. Honest assessment of
one’s beliefs can make one aware of the deep precariousness of some of those
beliefs.” Mathewes, “Republican Citizenship,” 238–239.

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

change. Conversion is a central theme for Mathewes and

Gregory, but they focus almost exclusively on the ascetical
conversions of the self in political action, neglecting how one
should seek the conversion of others. Given the ugly history
of conversion in Christian history, the tendency to wed pros-
elytization to domination, they are surely right to be anxious
about the dangers and abuses of conversion. Nevertheless, a
truly vibrant democratic politics of genuine contention and
debate must make room for such conversion-seeking. To con-
sider democratic politics as a struggle of conversion, in which
one both seeks to transform the opponent and make oneself
vulnerable to transformation by the opponent, would mean
attending to the nature and uses of conflict. Thematizing
negotiation with difference in terms of receptivity to divine
grace, without an attendant account of conflict, risks depriv-
ing politics of the necessary tensions and antagonisms inte-
gral to vibrant democratic life. Augustinian civic liberalism,
I contend, needs a more fully developed account of agonism
if it is to realize the truly liberatory possibilities of a politics
of conversion. I shall return to these themes of conflict and
conversion in Augustinian thought later on in order to press
them in exactly this direction.

1.3 Conclusion: Politics and Difference

Beyond Augustine?
My treatment of both postliberal Augustinianism and
Augustinian civic liberalism has concluded in roughly the same
place. Both share an oppositional account of the relationship
between political community and difference, wherein bolster-
ing one necessarily comes by way of diminishing the other.
Both share also a view of conflict as fundamentally negative
and threatening to either genuine community or the integ-
rity of difference. The paradox of contemporary democratic

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 1.3 Conclusion

politics consists in the felt need to develop forms of political

community and collectivity while acknowledging increasing
pluralization and growing polarization and disagreement.
Conflict, in other words, has now become an inevitable real-
ity of securing a common political life amidst pluralism and
difference. Yet political theologians still view democratic con-
flict in primarily negative terms, seeking to alleviate the pres-
sures of conflictual pluralist politics by appealing either to
postliberal conceptions of political community wherein dif-
ference is managed and ordered, or to liberal notions of civic
virtue and friendship wherein difference is patiently endured
and protected from the totality of collectivity. What is needed
is a more positive account of democratic conflict, something
that will require reconstruing the relationship between politi-
cal community and difference in non-oppositional terms, such
that conflict can be appreciated as constitutive of flourishing
community rather than threatening to it. Such is the task of
the remaining chapters of this book.
Both forms of Augustinianism analyzed in this chapter
come to this negative view of conflict because of their partic-
ular ways of envisioning the relationship between God and
creation: postliberalism’s analogical framing of divine and
creaturely sociality and civic liberalism’s sacramental under-
standing of creaturely diversity as manifesting divine grace.
In both, conflict is seen as a disordering of creaturely good-
ness and thus indexed to sin. For both, the goodness of cre-
ation consists in harmonic relations amidst difference, and
conflict appears as alien to and parasitic upon a more funda-
mental peace. Yet it is far from clear that conflict, or at least
all forms of conflict, should be seen in this way. Indeed, as I
argue in what follows, there are significant reasons to view
conflict in positive terms, even theologically so.
It is possible that, in the end, Augustine’s greatest
influence on contemporary political theology is his strong

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 Political Theology and the Problem of Difference

theological aversion to conflict. It was Augustine, after all,

whose theological aesthetics of harmony so profoundly cap-
tured the Western Christian imagination. The effects of his
figuring difference and unity in terms of harmonic complex-
ity are seen in both Milbank’s metaphysics of difference
and Gregory and Mathewes’s ascetics of difference. Yet,
Augustine’s Neoplatonic articulation of beauty as governed
by the criteria of unity, proportion, and order has also gen-
erated a fundamental anxiety about conflict, discord, and
dissonance, one that finds correlates in political theory and
theology.130 Conflict, in Augustine’s vision, is an intrusion,
disordering, and disruption of creation’s ontological peace.
In order to develop a more positive account of the political
and religious dimensions of conflict, will we need to leave
Augustine behind?
My hunch is that Augustine’s aesthetics of harmony and
his displacement of conflict are attributable more to his
Neoplatonic inclinations than his theological inheritance.
Thus, in the following chapters, I retrieve numerous aspects
of Augustine’s thought and the tradition of religious think-
ing he inspired in order to make an argument that conflict
is constitutive of human creatureliness itself. As an intrin-
sic feature of creaturely difference, lived in the modalities
of finitude, contingency, and embodiment, conflict can be
either productive or destructive of creaturely sociality and
community. I’ll make an argument for how it can do the
former. But first, I turn to a movement in contemporary
political theory that has also sought a more positive account
of conflict: agonistic theory.

130
See Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present:
A Short History (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1966),
93–94. For the best treatment of Augustine’s aesthetics, see Carol
Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

94
 2
Radical Democracy and
Agonistic Theology

In Chapter 1, I examined two ways contemporary political

theology conceptualizes the political and religious meaning of
difference. Postliberal Augustinianism and Augustinian civic
liberalism represent two paradigms of thinking about plu-
ralism and difference in political communities. The former
prioritizes the reconciliation of difference within a unified
polity ordered to the common good; the latter prefers a more
minimalist account of political community in order to safe-
guard the goods of pluralism and respect the integrity of dif-
ference. Both, I argued, still imagine political community and
difference in oppositional terms and thus share a decidedly
negative view of conflict. Conflict either threatens the sta-
bility and coherence of a political community or endangers
its peaceful tolerance of difference. Moreover, because both
Augustinian visions interpret pluralism by appealing analog-
ically to the harmonious unity-in-difference of the Trinity, in
whom conflict has no place, conflict is seen as a negation of
creatures’ social flourishing.
What is needed, I propose, is an account of political com-
munity and difference that operates in non-oppositional
terms. Developing such an account is the task of the rest of
this book. In so doing, I argue not only that pluralism and
difference are constitutive of political community, but that
conflict amidst difference is actually intrinsic to its flourish-
ing. Democracy, as I theorize it, is fundamentally a practice
of negotiating conflict in order to judge and act together to

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

forge a common life amidst difference. Conflict is not, then,

first and foremost a sign of moral error, injustice, violence,
or wrongdoing, even though it can be exasperated by all of
these. Rather, conflict is simply basic to the kind of social-
ity proper to finite human creatures. Consequently, politics
should not seek to preempt or extinguish conflict, but rather
to cultivate practices of rightly using conflict to nurture a
vibrant and participatory democratic life. In Chapter 3, I’ll
argue this by drawing on a number of themes and concepts
from the Christian theological tradition. There, I’ll show
how certain resources in Christian reflection on creation
and theological anthropology can yield an understanding
of conflict as emerging from conditions of creaturely exis-
tence – namely, finitude, contingency, and embodiment. In
the present chapter, however, I approach conflict and differ-
ence first from the standpoint of political theory. Through
an engagement with agonistic democratic theory, I show the
ineliminable role of conflict in democratic politics and the
irreducibly pluralist character of democratic community.
Agonism, this chapter contends, helps us see how it is that
conflict amidst difference is constitutive of participatory and
radically democratic political community. Theology, as the
following chapter argues, can help us see why.
The present chapter proceeds in two parts. In the first, I
detail and analyze the important insights of agonistic the-
ory, as put forward by two of its chief expositors: William
Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. My concern in this sec-
tion has less to do with differences between Connolly and
Mouffe, of which there are several important ones, and more
with the central insights they share: that antagonism is fun-
damental to social life; that conflict is an ineliminable fea-
ture of democracy and a fundamental source of its vitality;
and that the aim of democratic politics is not to transcend
conflict in agreement or consensus but to nurture pluralism

96
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

and tend agonistic relations amidst difference. A central

concern of this chapter, along with demonstrating the gen-
erative possibilities of democratic conflict, will be to raise
the question of “political community” in agonistic theory, a
notion both Connolly and Mouffe tend to dismiss or avoid.
I suggest their doing so reveals the extent to which they, like
the Augustinians considered in the previous chapter, remain
captive to a picture of political community and difference
that trades in oppositional terms. Reacting to the totalizing
accounts of political community developed by communitar-
ian theorists of the 1970s and 1980s, agonists have under-
standably pursued more modest political formations of
fugitive collectivity and ad hoc assemblage. Nevertheless, I
suggest their abandonment of the notion of community as
such undermines their aspirations for radical political trans-
formation and a truly conflictual democracy. I thus propose
the possibility of something like “agonistic community,”
which I develop more fully in Chapter 4.
In the second part of the chapter, I consider a strand
of contemporary political theology that has appropriated
the insights of agonistic theory – namely, the radical polit-
ical theology of Jeffrey Robbins, Clayton Crockett, and
Catherine Keller. While these thinkers are right to see in
agonistic theory valuable resources for thinking about reli-
gion, pluralism, and the politics of difference, I question
their strategies of deploying agonistic theory for political
theology. Radical political theology argues that to embrace
agonistic conceptions of the political and a commitment to
radically democratic multiplicity, religion must renounce
traditional ideas of divine transcendence, sovereignty, and
monotheism. One cannot theorize the political as suffi-
ciently agonistic, it contends, unless one repudiates the
sovereign One who stands over creation as its monarchical
source of unity and order. In place of traditional theism and

97
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

its associated politics of sovereignty, Robbins, Crockett,

and Keller conceptualize the agonistic political within a the-
ology of pure immanence, embracing the death of God as
the birth of radical democracy. I argue, however, that such
theorizing falls prey to the same pitfalls as the political the-
ologies of sovereignty it denounces. Radical political theol-
ogy, like postliberal Augustinianism and Augustinian civic
liberalism, remains committed to an analogical conception
of divine and creaturely sociality that does not sufficiently
attend to the conditions of creaturehood. While the politi-
cal theologians examined in Chapter 1 move from reflection
on the divine Trinity to normative theorizing about political
life, the radical theologians I consider in this chapter simply
reverse the script, revising conceptions of divinity in light of
the exigencies of democracy. I conclude the chapter, then,
by gesturing toward the need for a politics of creatureliness
that more adequately accounts for the disanalogies between
God and creatures.

2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

Agonistic theory emerged within what Stephen K. White has
called the “ontological turn” in recent political thought.1
“Ontopolitics,” as it is sometimes called, seeks to uncover
the ways all political theorizing, even the most secular and
procedural, rests upon and presumes certain ontological
commitments.2 As William Connolly puts it, “Every political
interpretation invokes a set of fundamentals about necessity

1
Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in
Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–17.
2
On the notion of the “ontopolitical,” see William E. Connolly, “Foreword: The
Left and Ontopolitics,” in A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity
Politics, ed. Carsten Strathausen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009), ix–xvii.

98
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

and possibilities of human being, about, for instance, the

forms into which humans may be composed and the pos-
sible relations humans can establish with nature.”3 In light
of this inescapably ontological character of political the-
orizing, agonistic theory seeks to articulate visions of the
political in light of fundamental features of human being
and action. But whereas traditional Western political phi-
losophy grounded normative political frameworks in static,
hierarchical accounts of human nature, agonists turn to fig-
ures like Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze to fore-
ground the vicissitudes, vitalities, and antagonisms basic to
human life and action, thus construing the political as a
field of multiplicity, conflict, and flux. In short, agonistic
theory develops an ontology of difference as the basis for a
radically pluralist politics. In the following sections, I chart
the movement of agonistic theory’s political analysis – from
a social ontology of antagonism to a politics of agonism to
a consideration of the possibility of political community –
in order to identify the generative potential of conflict for
democratic flourishing.

2.1.1 Antagonism: Conflict and Social Ontology

Agonistic theory’s turn to the ontopolitical comes as a direct
challenge to liberal political theory, both its professed tran-
scendence of ontological concerns (for instance, in John
Rawls’s “political, not metaphysical” account of justice,4
or Richard Rorty’s postmetaphysical liberalism5), as well as

3
William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1.
4
John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy &
Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 223–251.
5
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).

99
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

its implicit asocial ontology of the rational, self-constituted

individual who contracts into social relation and political
authority. While agonists accept the genuine gains of lib-
eral political order – constitutionalism, civil rights, religious
toleration, and so on – they nevertheless fault liberal the-
ory, particularly its neo-Kantian articulation in figures like
Rawls, for presuming an account of the self and identity as
constituted prior to and independently of social relations.6
Selfhood and identity, agonists maintain, are produced and
defined within social matrices and relations of power. Yet
agonism diverges also from similar communitarian critiques
of liberalism in that it additionally rejects notions of uni-
fied communal identity, coherence, and order, as well as the
substantial conceptions of the common good which define
and maintain them. Agonistic theory asserts its vision of the
political as a way beyond liberalism and communitarian-
ism, reconfiguring notions of both self and society in more
dynamic and conflictual ways.
Agonism’s account of the political is grounded in a
social ontology that centers antagonism and conflict as
basic, fundamental features of being. For Connolly, who
weaves together a fundamental ontology with resources
culled from Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, Whitehead, and
others, being itself is multiplicitous and plural.7 Analogous
to William James’s “pluralist universe,” Connolly’s world
of becoming is marked by difference and flux at its most
basic level, composed as it is by “diverse beings and forces
following trajectories of their own” which exceed form,

6
Chantal Mouffe, “American Liberalism and Its Communitarian Critics,” trans.
William Falcetano, in The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 2005), 29,
33. On agonism’s continuities and discontinuities with liberalism, see White,
Sustaining Affirmation, 151–152.
7
For Connolly’s ontology of becoming, see William E. Connolly, A World of
Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

100
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

order, and fixed identity.8 The world, for Connolly, pos-

sesses no inherent static order or meaning but is instead
always unfolding and generating newness, inviting and
resisting interpretations of its structure and normative
dimensions, yet always exceeding definition.9 Importantly,
for Connolly, like Nietzsche, existence’s fundamentally
conflictual and pluralist nature comes from an abundance
and excess of being and vitality, not a lack or distortion.
Connolly’s is not, then, an “ontology of violence” but an
ontology of extravagance.10 For this reason he describes
his vision as “post-Nietzschean,” for it “draws sustenance
from an almost always operative attachment to life as a
protean set of energies and possibilities exceeding the terms
of any identity or cultural horizon into which it is set.”11
Being is characterized most fundamentally by proliferation
of difference, exceeding any claims to stable identity.
Yet even alongside this celebration of fundamental insta-
bility and disorder, Connolly acknowledges the inevitable
necessity of identity. Agonistic theory, he asserts, “affirms
the indispensability of identity to life,” even as it also seeks to
disturb and interrogate what he calls the “dogmatization of
identity.”12 Identity and difference are, in fact, mutually con-
stitutive: “Difference requires identity and identity requires

8
William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and
the Politics of Swarming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 6.
Connolly’s reading of the book of Job in the book’s prelude articulates this
ontology in wonderfully poetic and mythical terms.
9
See chapter 3, “Pluralism and the Universe,” in William E. Connolly, Pluralism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 68–92.
10
For an agonistic reading of Nietzsche along these lines, see Romand Coles,
“Liberty, Equality, Receptive Generosity: Neo-Nietzschean Reflections on the
Ethics and Politics of Coalition,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 2
(1996): 375–388.
11
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 28.
12
William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political
Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), x.

101
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

difference.”13 The “consolidation of identity” comes by way

of the “constitution of difference,”14 a paradox which makes
impossible both the affirmation of difference’s total alterity
and the construction of sovereign identity. For Connolly, the
problem of identity and difference is not that identity needs
difference as its constitutive other, but rather the dogmatic
unwillingness to acknowledge identity’s contingency, thus
rendering difference in terms of moral deviance. The history
of Western political philosophy, especially since Augustine,
reveals this troubling orientation toward difference, he
argues. Identities, when proximate to power, become estab-
lished as reflecting a necessary and intrinsic moral order.
Difference is then interpreted as a deviation from this moral
order and thus perceived as threatening, transgressive, and
perverse. Once otherness is rendered in moral terms as evil,
violence is a near necessary consequence. Connolly refers
to this sequence of stabilizing identity through the moral
scapegoating, policing, subjection, and governance of dif-
ference as the “Augustinian Imperative.”15 Once rendered
morally deviant, difference can be punished and coerced,
like Augustine’s Donatists; paternalistically endured, like
minority recipients of liberal tolerance; or marginalized and
excluded, like those who fail to meet the criteria of secular
public reason. In each instance, political authority is aligned
with hegemonic identity and difference is depoliticized and
pushed outside the boundaries of the political.
Connolly’s response to this problematic is to encour-
age the recognition of identity’s contingency, flux, depen-
dence, and conflictual embeddedness in other identity forms.

13
Connolly, Identity\Difference, ix. 14 Connolly, Identity\Difference, 9.
15
William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics
of Morality (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1993). See also Kristen
Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance
and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102–104.

102
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

If identity always entails a negotiation with difference – a

micropolitics at the most elemental level – then it must be
recognized that every configuration of identity could have
been otherwise. This contingency, Connolly believes, should
generate an appreciation of difference as the very condition
of identity at all, its constitutive other. But not only is every
identity and subjectivity constituted by its others, Connolly
maintains these constitutive relations are also fundamentally
conflictual ones. As he says, “To establish an identity is to
create social and conceptual space for it to be in ways that
impinge on the spaces available to other possibilities.”16
Conflict is thus inscribed into the fabric of being itself. The
modality in which identities are construed is imbued with
power, and the public manifestation of identity and its ren-
dering of difference involves a negotiation of, and contesta-
tion over, social and political space. If it is the case that no
identities are “natural,” reflective of inherent meanings in
the world, Connolly says, then every claim to identity and
attempt to establish it involves power.17 Collective identities
especially, whether of nations, religious communities, social
groups, and so on, are achieved and maintained through
consolidations of individual identities and exclusions of dif-
ference. Connolly does not lament power itself, however.
Power is an ineliminable feature of social life. Rather, his
point is to expose power’s operations, subject it to scrutiny,
and criticize its uses to subjugate, police, and harm difference
rather than assist its flourishing. Power, rather than being
deployed to stabilize unruly collectivities, must be directed
toward the proliferation of plurality. This “pluralization
of pluralism,”18 as Connolly terms it, is a conflictual enter-
prise, involving networks of identities in confrontation and

16
Connolly, Identity\Difference, 160. 17 Connolly, Identity\Difference, 66.
18
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xix–xxiv.

103
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

contestation with each other, negotiating the same symbolic,

cultural, social, and political space. But such a conflictual
political sphere is simply a manifestation of the antagonistic
negotiations of identity and difference basic to being itself.
Chantal Mouffe develops a similar political ontology
of conflict, though by different conceptual means. While
Connolly accounts for the world’s fundamental antagonisms
with resources from post-structuralism, process philosophies,
and continental philosophies of difference, Mouffe privileges
Marxian and post-Marxian theory, Gramscian analysis, and
the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein. Her ontopolitical
vision begins with an invocation of Carl Schmitt’s distinction
between “politics” and “the political.”19 The latter, for Schmitt
and Mouffe, is that sphere of social life marked by antagonism
and conflict which precedes the activities of “politics” (estab-
lishing order, organizing society, negotiating rival claims, and
so on). Schmitt infamously developed the “friend–enemy” dis-
tinction to characterize the political as a field of antagonism
between a pre-politically defined “people” and its outside.20
This relation, inherent to any political formation, is marked
by a necessary enmity and opposition, according to Schmitt,
and the task of politics is to defend the interests and identity
of a people. For Mouffe, however, the idea of a unified pre-
political “people” is myth. Rather, the political is characterized
by antagonisms of plurality and multiplicity, the constitution
of identity through acts of differentiation, which “determines
our very ontological condition.”21 Mouffe turns Schmitt’s

19
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2009), 49–57.
See also The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York:
Verso, 1999). On this distinction in recent political theory, see James Wiley,
Politics and the Concept of the Political: The Political Imagination (New York:
Routledge, 2016).
20
See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007).
21
Mouffe, Return of the Political, 2–3.

104
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

friend–enemy distinction on its head. Rather than designating

a clearly defined pre-political entity which the activity of pol-
itics seeks to maintain and defend, the friend–enemy distinc-
tion names the activity of politics itself, especially democratic
politics, which involves the determination and construction of
a demos, or people, a “we” to deliberate, judge, and act.22 In
other words, for Mouffe, while “the political” is characterized
by an irreducible antagonism and multiplicity, the activity of
“politics” entails the formation of a political entity capable of
collective action. But because every formation of a political col-
lective also necessarily involves the determination of who does
not belong to the demos, the activity of politics is an inherently
conflictual one.23 For Mouffe, conflict in democratic politics is
ineliminable because conflict is written into the nature of social
existence itself, which is a multiplicitous pluralism.24

2.1.2 Agonism: Radical Democracy

and Pluralist Politics
Though ontology does not determine politics for agonists,
their social ontology of conflict and antagonism frames their

22
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 38–42. For a critique of agonism’s tendency to
“fetishize conflict,” valuing it as a good in and of itself, thus making of enemies
where there are none and generating antagonism for its own sake, see Rochelle
DuFord, Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2022), 152–158.
23
Recently, Mouffe has pursued this conflictual construction of the people
as a form of “left populism,” which she sees as a “discursive strategy of
construction of the political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’,”
in an effort to revive participatory democracy from neoliberal domestication.
See Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (New York: Verso, 2018). For a
similar, though more detailed, delineation of the differences between left,
democratic populisms and right, authoritarian ones, see Laura Grattan,
Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016).
24
Mouffe, Return of the Political, 8.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

understanding of the goals of politics, even as the experi-

ence and activity of politics also reshapes theorization about
ontology. As Connolly points out, the relationship between
ontology and politics is interactive and mutually dependent
rather than unidirectionally causal.25 What are the aims of
politics? For Mouffe, it is the conversion of those antago-
nisms that characterize the political into relations of “ago-
nism.” Antagonism, she says, is conflict that occurs “between
enemies, that is persons who have no common symbolic
space,” while agonism “involves a relation not between ene-
mies but between adversaries,” those who share a common
symbolic space but disagree about how to organize it.26 To
see an enemy as an adversary means to perceive them not as
an existential threat, someone to be obliterated or destroyed
at all costs, but as an opponent, someone to contest and
struggle with and against.
It is important to appreciate the extent to which these
agonistic relations preserve a tremendous degree of conflict,
dispute, and discord, even as they seek to move beyond the
zero-sum antagonisms which can so easily terminate in vio-
lence. Agonistic adversaries are not naïve about the extent of
their differences, imagining the other can simply be tolerated
in a harmonious social coexistence or eventually converted
to one’s own position. While these are not impossibilities in
democratic encounters, neither are they the chief ends that
democratic politics seek. Agonists are both suspicious of lib-
eral tolerance and skeptical of the possibility of achieving full
consensus and agreement amidst difference. They are gener-
ally wary of notions of civic friendship and liberal virtues of
toleration and forbearance which, they believe, eclipse the
extent to which various constituents in pluralist democracies

25
Connolly, “The Left and Ontopolitics,” x.
26
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 13.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

desire radically divergent political ends and seek to realize

them concretely. A fundamental tenet of agonistic politics,
then, is the ability to recognize enemies, even as it conceives
of enemies not as threats but as fellow democratic contend-
ers. In this, agonism resembles New Testament teachings
about enemy-love and the radical demands of charity in the
face of opposition more than it does Schmitt, for whom the
enemy deserves only one’s hostility. For agonists, recogni-
tion of another as an enemy is actually a form of respect.
It is to acknowledge and appreciate the real difference of
another, especially when their differing desires, values, and
commitments are directly opposite to one’s own, resulting in
conflict which cannot easily be resolved.
Agonistic adversaries are, then, democratic enemies. They
pursue and aspire toward substantially different social and
political visions and ends that cannot be harmonized with-
out serious compromise or change. Nevertheless, an adver-
sary is, Mouffe says, “a legitimate enemy, one with whom we
have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of
liberal democracy: liberty and equality. But we disagree con-
cerning the meaning and implementation of those principles,
and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved
through deliberation and rational discussion.”27 This tension
between a common life based on shared political principles
and the rupture of this common life by conflict about the
meaning of those principles is a fundamental insight of ago-
nistic theory, which I will take up and expand in the chap-
ters that follow. The point of democratic politics, agonists
contend, is not necessarily to resolve disagreements nor to
find compromise solutions to them. To be sure, a certain
amount of consensus on fundamental democratic and con-
stitutional principles is necessary for democracy to exist at

27
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 102.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

all. But neither consensus nor compromise should be seen as

ultimate goals of democratic politics or signs that its funda-
mental agonisms have been resolved or transcended. Rather,
they should be seen as “temporary respites in an ongoing
confrontation.”28 The real substance of agonistic democracy
is not the resolution of adversarial conflict but conflict itself.
We are now in a position to see a key feature of agonistic
theory that distinguishes it from other traditions of political
theory. Whereas much political theory, especially its liberal
varieties, views the chief aim of political authority to be the
achievement of social stability, order, and cohesion, agonistic
theory understands the primary role of politics to be the pro-
liferation and nurturing of conflict through democratic prac-
tices of disputation and contestation. Put differently, agonism
does not accept a principal assumption of liberal theory –
namely, that order and stability are preferable to disorder and
unrest.29 Because contention and conflict are signs of flourish-
ing democratic life, and unity and consensus signs of its clo-
sure, agonists believe politics should be aimed at sustaining
and nurturing these conflicts rather than transcending them.
Liberalism, according to Mouffe, views conflict as fundamen-
tally destructive rather than productive. Radical democratic
politics instead seeks to perpetually stimulate and sustain
conflict because of its productive and generative possibilities.
What are these possibilities? For agonists, the essen-
tial goodness of conflict is its capacity to expand the politi-
cal – to pluralize pluralism and democratize democracy – a
goal it understands to be a good in itself. Democracy, in
other words, is not an instrumental good, the most effective

28
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 102.
29
A similar argument is made by Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political
Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North
Carolina Press, 2016).

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

political form to realize certain policy goals or representative

structures. Rather, democracy is an ever-expanding field of
political activity, the space wherein persons contribute to the
life of the demos, always reshaping and reforming it in more
participatory directions. In this, agonism resembles a classical
understanding of politics as a practice constitutive of human
flourishing and so a good in and of itself. It simply seeks to
expand access to the political to those historically and pres-
ently denied membership in it. Conflict is both a sign of this
expansion of the democratic field to include difference (e.g.,
agreements and beliefs previously taken for granted are now
interrogated and challenged) and a mechanism of facilitating
this expansion (e.g., the civil rights movement, labor struggles
to challenge corporate power). Because political regimes tend
to reify and reinforce their structural forms and relations of
power, resisting further democratization and reconfiguration,
conflict is a critical means of contesting these configurations
and reconstructing them to embrace difference.
Conflict, then, in agonistic perspective, is not a marginal
issue for political theory, a problem of modern pluralist
societies to be solved. Too much modern political theory,
and especially contemporary political theology, conceives of
conflict in this way. Rather, conflict is a basic reality of social
and political life to be embraced. The eclipsing of conflict in
political theory, argues Bonnie Honig, is an evasion of the
heart of political activity itself, which involves the clashing
and contestation of a plurality of actors, aspirations, and
identities. Modern political theory, according to Honig,
too often aims to settle conflicts, confine their expression,
or preemptively resolve them.30 This is the great paradox

30
Similarly, Sheldon Wolin speaks of “managed democracy.” See Sheldon Wolin,
Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

of modern political theory, she argues: Its preeminent theo-

rists seek to elucidate the necessary conditions for political
regimes to overcome the need for real politics, resulting in a
“displacement of politics” itself.31 She says:
They confine politics (conceptually and territorially) to the
juridical, administrative, or regulative tasks of stabilizing
moral and political subjects, building consensus, maintaining
agreements, or consolidating communities and identities. They
assume that the task of political theory is to resolve institu-
tional questions, to get politics right, over, and done with, to
free modern subjects and their sets of arrangements of political
conflict and instability.32

The success of a political regime, in this view, “lies in the elim-

ination … of dissonance, resistance, conflict, or struggle.”33
The point of agonistic theory, conversely, is to reestab-
lish the legitimate place of politics in the political order, to
reclaim politics as a vital, contentious, and undomesticated
set of activities aimed at rupturing stabilizations of power or
identity and reconstituting the boundaries and composition
of the demos. This vision of politics, exemplified by figures
like Nietzsche and Arendt, Honig calls “virtù theory,” to
be contrasted with “virtue theories” of politics. The latter,
exemplified by figures like Kant, Rawls, and Michael Sandel,
“assume that the world and the self are not resistant to, but
only enabled and completed by, their favored conceptions
of order and subjectivity.”34 Virtue theories presume a har-
monic relationship between political communities and the
subjects that constitute them, devising principles, insti-
tutions, and forms of regime they believe able to fully

31
Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1993).
32
Honig, Displacement of Politics, 2. 33 Honig, Displacement of Politics, 2.
34
Honig, Displacement of Politics, 3.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

accommodate all possible conflicts and difference, reconcil-

ing them within political society. But, Honig argues, in doing
so and attempting “to stabilize themselves as the systematic
expressions of virtue, justice, or the telos of community,”
they are driven “to conceal, deny, or subdue resistances to
their regimes.”35 These “remainders” are, for virtù theorists,
the source of politics’ possibilities and promises. Following
Arendt, Honig sees that “the inner multiplicity of the self”
and “the plurality of the republic” exceed what every polit-
ical formation can account for. “Both evidence space and
belie, indeed, resist, systematization,” she writes.36 And
while virtue theories seek control and domestication of these
excesses, virtù theories advocate for their legitimate place in
contesting political order. “It is for the sake of those perpet-
ually generated remainders of politics,” Honig writes, “that
virtù theorists seek to secure the perpetuity of political con-
test.”37 Remainders signal the possibility that political order
can be challenged, contested, and reconfigured, that it is not
permanent. They are the outside to every stabilization of
power and identity that threaten to undo them. Every judg-
ment, determination, and action, even the most apparently
consensual, produces and rests upon certain exclusions of
difference, remainders which cannot be incorporated. This
is not necessarily to be lamented as a shortcoming or failure
of democratic politics, however. For it is exactly because of
these exclusions that every democratic judgment, determina-
tion, and action remains open to contestation and revision.
The remainders continually produced in democratic politics
are the condition for democracy’s vitality and dynamism.
This brings us to a crucial distinguishing feature of
agonistic democracy from the liberalism against which it

35 36
Honig, Displacement of Politics, 3. Honig, Displacement of Politics, 117.
37
Honig, Displacement of Politics, 3.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

contends, a feature most directly expounded by Mouffe.

Whereas political liberalism is premised on the possibility
of full rational consensus, both as an ideal and a marker of
democratic legitimacy, agonists embrace a form of decision-
ism. As Mouffe argues, rational consensus is the key notion
shared by the two major schools of contemporary liberal
theory, represented by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.38
For Rawls, liberal democracy and the “public reason” that
sustains and legitimates it are grounded in an “overlapping
consensus,” shared by disparate members of a pluralist polit-
ical society.39 While metaphysically anti-foundationalist,
Rawls’s liberalism nevertheless posits the notion of consen-
sus as a pragmatic condition for the possibility of demo-
cratic legitimacy.40 In other words, full rational consensus
between reasonable persons concerning principles of justice
and fairness is, for Rawls, that which gets democratic poli-
tics off the ground.
Habermas’s proceduralist deliberative democracy instead
conceives of rational consensus as something achieved
through deliberation rather than a condition for demo-
cratic discourse.41 For Habermas, it is not a set of shared,
fundamental commitments that secures the consensus
needed for democratic legitimacy. Rather, his attention is
directed toward the institutions and procedural mechan-
isms within which deliberation occurs. Deliberation itself,

38
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 83–90.
39
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993),
133–172.
40
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 1–38.
41
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1993). See also
Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,”
in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed.
Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–94.

112
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

according to Habermas, needs no foundation or shared

basis of public rationality. Rather, when deliberative pro-
cedures are ordered according to “ideal speech” patterns,
democratic deliberation can yield full consensus on a
shared basis.42 Thus, while he rejects Rawls’s pragmatic
foundationalism, Habermas yet retains a commitment to
the ideal of consensus and an optimism about the possibil-
ity of deliberative action in reaching it. For both Rawls and
Habermas, consensus is the necessary condition of a demo-
cratic polity’s legitimacy.
For Mouffe, these notions of consensus are not only
impossibilities but also dangerous for democratic politics,
even if held only as aspirations. “The belief that a final
resolution of conflicts is eventually possible,” she argues,
“is something that puts [democracy] at risk.”43 Consensus-
oriented accounts of democracy obscure the conflicts and
remainders that endure in every political act, and thereby
conceal the radical contingency of political action. Every
deliberation, even the most consensual, writes Mouffe,
finally terminates in a “decision which excludes other pos-
sibilities.”44 “Every consensus,” she says, “exists as a tem-
porary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization
of power,” and thus “always entails some form of exclu-
sion.”45 Hegemony, as opposed to consensus, is the oper-
ative notion here. Already in her 1985 work Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, Mouffe and her co-author Ernesto

42
Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on Philosophical Justification,” in
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhart and
Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 43–115.
43
Mouffe, Return of the Political, 8. 44 Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 105.
45
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 104. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 104,
likewise argues that the only kind of consensus available to democratic
politics is an “ironic consensus” which acknowledges its contingency and
contestability, making room for challenges to and reconfigurations of its
formulations.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

Laclau fronted this concept in their proposal for a plural-

ist, coalitional, and radically democratic left politics.46
Inheriting the notion from Gramsci, Mouffe and Laclau
understand hegemony to be the “articulation” and “polit-
ical construction” of an acting subject amidst dissimilarity
and difference.47 The condition for this articulation is mul-
tiplicity, contingency, and undecidability, wherein “a par-
ticular social force assumes the representation of a totality
that is radically incommensurable with it.”48 Hegemony,
then, is a part standing for the whole, even as it is unable
to fully represent it. Some theorists view hegemony of this
kind as a failure of politics to be truly representative, ille-
gitimate insofar as it does not achieve full universality and
comprehensiveness. But Mouffe and Laclau see hegemony
as simply inevitable, given the realities of democratic mul-
tiplicity and difference, alongside the necessity to act on
behalf of the whole. The precarities of political life demand
decision, even as the conditions of pluralism problematize
the possibility for the decision to be universal and fully
consensual. For this reason, Mouffe and Laclau refer to
hegemony as “a theory of the decision taken in an unde-
cidable terrain.”49
It is Mouffe’s embrace of this notion of hegemony and
her dismissal of the possibility of rational consensus that
lead critics to accuse her of a kind of groundless decision-
ism, resembling Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of the sovereign as

46
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 2014).
47
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 75. See also Chantal
Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,” in Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony,
Radical Democracy, and the Political, ed. James Martin (New York: Routledge,
2013), 15–44.
48
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, x.
49
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, xi.

114
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

“the one who decides,” unaccountable to anything or any-

one outside of himself.50 To be sure, Mouffe’s decisionism
is one of the more controversial aspects of her thought. But
critics are mistaken to see this as endorsing unaccountable,
capricious, and irrational rule. While the decisionism of
Schmitt’s sovereign indeed manifests in arbitrary, author-
itarian rule, Mouffe’s is instead embedded in a vision of
democratic accountability and responsibility. It is wrong,
then, to equate her rejection of deliberative consensus and
attention to the dimensions of undecidability involved in
democratic politics with Schmitt’s absolutism. While she
doubtless retrieves and revises aspects of Schmitt’s think-
ing, it is the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Stanley Cavell that primarily shapes Mouffe’s deci-
sionism and contextualizes it within an ethical frame. For
Wittgenstein and Cavell, responsibility, rather than cer-
tainty, is the determinative factor regarding the veracity
of speech and action.51 Since one can never speak or act
on certain knowledge, safely appealing to universal princi-
ples and criteria for justification, one must assume personal
responsibility for every act or claim. Similarly, for Mouffe,
because consensus cannot secure absolute legitimization
for judgment and action, those who bring deliberation to a
decisive act must be responsible for that decision and, fur-
ther, responsive to those the decision excludes. “Bringing
a conversation to a close,” she contends, “is always a per-
sonal choice, a decision which cannot be simply presented

50
On this accusation and the difference between deliberative and decisionist
democrats, see Bonnie Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political
Paradox in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 1
(2007): 1–17. See also Andrew Norris, “Cynicism, Skepticism, and the Politics
of Truth,” in Truth and Democracy, ed. A. Norris and J. Elkins (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 2012), 97–113.
51
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 76.

115
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

as mere application of procedures and justified as the only

move that we could make in those circumstances.”52 Again,
for Mouffe, the danger of consensus-based or proceduralist
democracy is the obscuring of the contingency, and thus
also contestability, of political decisions and acts. Focusing
on “decision and responsibility enables us,” she writes, “to
envisage democratic politics in a different way because it
subverts the ever-present temptation in democratic socie-
ties to disguise existing forms of exclusion under the veil of
rationality or of morality.”53 Indeed, Mouffe accuses delib-
erative democrats, in their reliance on procedure, rules, and
principles to secure democratic legitimacy, of evading the
demands of responsibility and accountability in decision-
making.54 By privileging the latter, Mouffe embeds her
decisionism in an ongoing process of contestation, respon-
siveness, and revision. “By warning us against the illusion
that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated,”
she writes, agonistic democracy “forces us to keep the dem-
ocratic contestation alive. To make room for dissent and
to foster institutions in which it can be manifested is vital
for a pluralist democracy.”55 Correlative to Mouffe’s deci-
sionism, in other words, is an ethos of democratic respon-
siveness and accountability which sees every hegemony as
provisional and contestable, open to reconstitution.
To further delineate this ethical component of agonism,
which, I maintain, is the necessary correlative to its deci-
sionism, I return to Connolly. In his writings on plural-
ism, Connolly devotes significant space to identifying and
describing the virtues and practices necessary to sustain rad-
ical, conflictual democratic practice. Two key virtues come

52 53
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 75. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 76.
54
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 105.
55
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 105.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

to the fore: “agonistic respect” and “critical responsive-

ness.”56 These agonistic virtues frame and structure dem-
ocratic conflict so as to preserve the integrity of difference,
as well as protect and amplify minority voices. They also
push conflict in generative and creative directions, expand-
ing the field of the political, encouraging interrogation and
contestation of decisions and policies, and enabling appreci-
ation for political action’s contingent and revisable charac-
ter. Note that Connolly turns not to procedural mechanisms
to ensure agonism’s emancipatory and inclusive, rather than
reactionary or destructive, trajectories. Agonism, for him,
depends on the capacities of citizens themselves. Exactly at
the place where many democratic theorists resort to proce-
dural or technocratic safeguards, Connolly leans in to the
ordinary capacities of citizens.
By “agonistic respect,” Connolly refers to one’s relation-
ship to the various others with whom one shares a political
world. It involves a recognition of the constitutive role of those
others in one’s identity, acknowledging the contingency and
contestability of one’s identity and commitments.57 Rather
than seeing otherness as a threat, agonistic respect appreci-
ates difference as the condition of possibility for one’s own
identity and action. Nevertheless, this affirmative posture
toward difference is always accompanied by a certain kind of
agitation and friction. Agonistic respect entails not distance
from the other but direct engagement; it is a relation of activ-
ity, contestation, and strife. As Connolly writes, “Partisans

56
For a fuller, more detailed, and practical elaboration of radical democratic
virtues, sensibilities, and practices, see Romand Coles, Beyond Gated Politics:
Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism:
Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016).
57
Connolly, Identity\Difference, 166–167.

117
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

may test, challenge, and contest pertinent elements in the

fundaments of the others. But each also appreciates the com-
parative contestability of its own fundaments to others.”58
Agonism and respect, in other words, inform and inflect one
another. Without a commitment to respect of difference and
its constitutive role in one’s self-identity, agonism can tend
toward resentment, scapegoating, or violence. But without an
agonistic spirit, respect for difference can devolve into senti-
mentalism and distant paternalism. The key, as Connolly sees
it, is for agonism and respect to mutually coinhere.
In this way, Connolly sees agonistic respect as crucially
different from liberal tolerance, exactly because of its incor-
poration of contention and conflict. Tolerance, he suggests,
is always practiced from a distance. Continuing the spatial
analogy, he writes that tolerance “is bestowed upon private
minorities by a putative majority occupying the authorita-
tive, public center,” but agonistic respect envisages a con-
flictual, pluralist center where constituents vie for space,
even as no one constituency can claim authoritative control
over that space.59 Unlike tolerance and its bowing before
alterity, agonistic respect entails a kind of vulnerability in
which one actually enters into a negotiation with differ-
ence. In doing so, one acknowledges the contestability of
one’s identity and commitments, while nevertheless engag-
ing in contestation, dispute, and challenge with those of
others. As a virtue, agonistic respect displays both confi-
dence and humility, conviction and irony, hope and risk. It
names a disposition of openness and contingency wherein
one acknowledges the contestability of one’s claims in order
to truly enter into a dialogical negotiation with another. In
other words, the privilege of engaging in conflict comes at a
cost: the willingness to submit one’s self and commitments

58 59
Connolly, Pluralism, 123. Connolly, Pluralism, 123.

118
 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

to interrogation, challenge, and revision by others.60 As

Connolly puts it, “You absorb the agony of having elem-
ents of your own faith called into question by others, and
you fold agonistic contestation of others into the respect
that you convey toward them.”61
If agonistic respect concerns relations between con-
tending identities that have a relative amount of recognition
and power in society, critical responsiveness is the “ethical
relation a privileged constituency establishes with culturally
devalued constituencies striving to enact new identities.”62
Critical responsiveness involves those more dominant iden-
tities practicing “careful listening and presumptive generos-
ity” to oppressed, marginal, or incipient identities emerging
on the boundaries of the political or beneath the threshold
of recognition.63 As a democratic virtue, it is “anticipatory”
of new identities, creating space for them and promoting
their self-cultivation and expression. Importantly, respon-
siveness to difference is not a blind gesture; it is marked by
a critical orientation. “It does not always accede to every-
thing that a new constituency or movement demands,”
Connolly reminds.64 To lack this critical orientation would
be to deprive democratic pluralism of its conflictual vitality.
Critical responsiveness commits one to scrutinizing, criticiz-
ing, and, if necessary, rejecting new identities or movements
which claim a kind of exclusive universality that demonizes

60
Indeed, Connolly imagines agonistic respect to entail more than simply
allowing for criticism and contestation of oneself, but also actively invoking a
sense of contingency in one’s claims. “You might,” he suggests, “adopt a stance
in which your very assertions are compromised by gestures that call them into
question, even for yourself. Or pursue genealogical investigations of the social
and historical processes by which the ideal you prize has come into being.”
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 92.
61
Connolly, Pluralism, 213–214.
62
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 235 n.40. 63 Connolly, Pluralism, 126.
64
Connolly, Pluralism, 127.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

and punishes others for their difference. It is for this rea-

son that Connolly, so insistent on the affirmation of differ-
ence and suspicious of claims to exclusivity, is nevertheless
unyielding in his criticism of fundamentalisms.65
Finally, in addition to its receptive openness and criti-
cal scrutiny, critical responsiveness is also self-revisionary.
Insofar as “hegemonic identities depend on existing defin-
itions of difference to be,” writes Connolly, the recognition
of difference entails a revision of “your own terms of self-
recognition as well.”66 The emergence of new constituencies
and identities within the political sphere entails moving
“the self-recognition and relational standards of judgment
endorsed by other constituencies” connected to them.67 As the
political is continually expanded and pluralized, incorporat-
ing new constituencies, it is also always being reshaped and
refashioned in its character and modes of recognizing and
responding to difference. Connolly’s term for this is the “plu-
ralization of pluralism,” something he takes to be a chief good
of democratic politics. As Kristen Deede Johnson puts it, crit-
ical responsiveness is “the ethic that makes such pluralization
possible.”68 As critical responsiveness engenders receptivity
toward emerging forms of difference, the success of demo-
cratic politics is evaluated not so much by its ability to yield
consensus in spite of this pluralization, but rather its capacity
to allow this pluralization to disturb and challenge consensus.
Agonism thus posits its account of radical and pluralist
democracy against both democracy’s liberal and communitar-
ian articulations. The former demands consensus as the basis
of democratic legitimacy; the latter prioritizes forms of moral,

65
For Connolly’s argument for why fundamentalisms are incompatible with
agonistic politics, see Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 105–133.
66
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xvi.
67
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xvi.
68
Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism, 106.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

cultural, and civic unity which make the search for consen-
sus more or less unnecessary. Agonistic democracy is aimed
at very different ends. Rather than consensus, unity, or sta-
bility, it aims at sustaining democracy’s conflicts, challenging
foreclosures of contestation and insisting on the contingent
and infinitely revisable character of political decision and the
political itself. All political decision and action, it argues, must
be open to reformulation, responsive to dissent, and account-
able to those it excludes. And yet, decision, responsibility, and
accountability all assume some kind of subject who acts, a col-
lective “we” that decides and bears responsibility for decision.
And this raises the question of political community.

2.1.3 Community: Fugitivity, Assemblage, Societas

It is clear enough, then, that agonists strive to articulate a
vision of democracy beyond both its liberal and communitar-
ian versions. Liberalism, they argue, endeavors to evacuate
democracy of the conflicts that drive its vitality. It does this
in an effort to secure the basic conditions of justice and sta-
bility amidst value pluralism and widespread disagreement
about the ends of politics. Yet, agonists argue, this agnos-
ticism regarding values and ends, things that bind citizens
and generate social solidarity, encourages an individualism
and social atomization that undermines capacities for col-
lective political action. However, agonists are also reluctant
to embrace substantive accounts of political community
as an alternative, such as those proposed by communitar-
ian critics of liberalism like Charles Taylor and Michael
Sandel.69 While communitarianism is right to challenge the
contractualism and individualism of liberal theory, agonists

69
See, for instance, Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences:
Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

fear communitarians ignore the legitimate advances of mod-

ern democratic pluralism and its embrace of difference. In its
elevation of solidarity, community, and civic identity, com-
munitarianism flattens difference. Thus, as Connolly writes,
neither liberalism nor communitarianism “is good at char-
acterizing how action in concert can be mobilized among a
populace crisscrossed by multifarious lines of identity, differ-
ence, connection, indifference, and opposition.”70 In short,
neither body of theory is particularly adept at thinking about
how collective action – “action in concert” – can be achieved
amidst pluralism and its conflicts. Call this the problem of
collectivity in pluralist democratic politics. How, amidst their
deep differences, can people act together? Who is the “we”
who acts in politics, and what is the identity of this collective
subject founded upon? Agreement in moral values? Shared
history? Common legal status? What defines the nature of
this collectivity, and what language is most appropriate for
expressing its configuration?
The importance of articulating an account of collectivity,
whether through notions of community or some other set of
concepts, is that it names how political judgment and action
can be shared. Absent some account of commonness across
difference, persons and constituencies cannot act together.
But agonists disagree about how collectivity is shaped and
of what commonness consists. Here, I wish to dwell on the
various ways agonists conceive of democratic collectivity.
Insofar as they develop creative strategies for conceiving
collectivity beyond liberal contractualism and communi-
tarian social unity, agonists offer a way beyond the liberal
and postliberal debates in political theology examined in

and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1982).
70
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xx.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

Chapter 1. Liberal and postliberal political theologies, I

argued there, struggle to imagine conflict as a constitutive
feature of political community. While agonists themselves
tend to eschew the language of community, nonetheless
I argue they can help reimagine the relationship between
political community and difference, and the place of con-
flict therein, in fresh and creative ways. Still, I maintain
that agonism’s refusal of notions of community ultimately
deprives it of resources necessary to articulate a vision of
collectivity capable of sustaining conflict over time. Thus,
at the end of this section, I gesture toward a conception of
“agonistic community,” to be fully developed in Chapter 4,
which conceives of conflict as integral to and productive of
political community.
One approach to the problem of collectivity is to envi-
sion something like “democratic community” – inclu-
sive, egalitarian, and participatory collective self-rule – as
a real but fleeting possibility for democratic politics. Such
is Sheldon Wolin’s concept of “fugitive democracy.”71 For
Wolin, fugitivity names the momentary and episodic erup-
tion of authentic democratic self-rule, as well as its suc-
cessive compromise and devolution as it is structured into
governing forms and institutional arrangements. Democracy
is a tumultuous, wild practice, resisting domestication and
institutionalization. It needs, Wolin writes, to be “recon-
ceived as something other than a form of government: as
a mode of being conditioned by bitter experience, doomed
to succeed only temporarily, but a recurrent possibility as
long as the memory of the political survives.”72 Fugitivity

71
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Sheldon S. Wolin, Fugitive
Democracy and Other Essays, ed. Nicholas Xenos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016), 100–113.
72
Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 111.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

is Wolin’s way of conceptualizing democratic community

as a revolutionary event rather than a political formation
with continuity, stability, and permanence. As a moment of
rupture, fugitive democracy is realized in shared, common
action that incorporates difference. But this “commonality
is,” Wolin writes, “fugitive and impermanent. It is differ-
ence that is stable.”73 Rather than resting upon a shared set
of experiences, values, histories, or identities, fugitive dem-
ocratic community is spontaneous and ephemeral, produced
through negotiation and exchange rather than resting upon
any pre-political reality. Because of this it is also temporary
and fleeting, nearly impossible to sustain.
While it captures something important about the dif-
ficulty of preserving vibrant, participatory democracy,
Wolin’s understanding of democratic collectivity as fugitive
can be criticized on two fronts. First, it is unclear that such
a definition of democratic community, with its emphasis
on impermanence and transience, identifies anything truly
collective or shared. Fugitive democracy, as episodic and
spontaneous, cannot produce shared judgments and action
over time, only ad hoc and occasional coalitions of action
that are coincidental and provisional. But, as I will argue
in Chapter 4, for conflict to be truly generative in agonistic
politics, it must be sustained and cultivated by a community
over time. Conflict’s productivity depends upon networks
and relations of trust, practices of deliberation, and modes
of passing on history, memory, wisdom, and experience.
Fugitivity is fortuitous, unable to be anticipated. As such, it
is unclear that fugitive democratic community can truly be
shared, for shared judgment and action rely on the common
life of a people carried through time.

73
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition,” in Wolin,
Fugitive Democracy, 412.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

Second, Wolin’s fugitive democracy appears to imagine the

cessation of conflict and the stabilization of difference as still
an ideal or horizon of possibility – the impossible possibility
which appears in moments of rupture. Such an ideal has the
effect of casting as deficient or inferior the ordinary and neces-
sary political practices, provisional judgments, and common
actions of democratic communities. Drafting municipal bud-
gets, planning public transit projects, and crafting affordable
housing policy are rarely done in the “rebellious moment”
of revolutionary rupture.74 But these are nevertheless cru-
cial matters of democratic politics, upon which many lives
depend. Overemphasis on a future, fugitive moment of eman-
cipatory possibility degrades these everyday negotiations of
democracy. I take this to be the meaning of Mouffe’s remark
that a “belief that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually
possible … is something that puts [democracy] at risk.”75
Wolin’s characterization of “real” democracy as an ideal
always out of reach actually disincentivizes ordinary collec-
tive action and the “everyday politics” of democratic life.76
If Wolin thematizes democratic collectivity as the momen-
tary realization of a fugitive possibility, Connolly represents
an even more modest aim for collectivity, one he speaks of in
terms of “assemblage.” Keenly aware of the dangers of com-
munity as a political concept, Connolly relentlessly criticizes
political philosophies, both ancient and modern, that aspire
to forms of community characterized by social unity and
shared identity. “The stronger the drive to the unified nation,
the integrated community, and/or the normal individual,”

74
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,”
in Wolin, Fugitive Democracy, 97.
75
Mouffe, Return of the Political, 8.
76
On these ordinary practices of democratic life, see Harry C. Boyte, Everyday
Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

he writes, “the more powerful becomes the drive to convert

differences into modes of otherness.”77 Connolly, more than
most agonistic theorists, thus praises liberalism for its safe-
guarding of difference, opposition to substantial notions of
the common good, and anti-collectivist sensibilities. Political
community, as he sees it, always tends toward totalitari-
anism. Even the nuanced, pluralist conceptualizations of
political community offered by civic liberalism fall under
Connolly’s censure. Though they espouse a communality of
“harmonious difference,” Connolly believes every harmo-
nization necessitates forms of policing and coercion of dif-
ference to secure such harmonization.78 Civic liberalism
presupposes a baseline civic identity beneath and more fun-
damental than the various particularities of political con-
stituents, unifying them despite their differences. Connolly,
instead, defends an account of collectivity not founded on
shared identity, but assembled through multiple overlapping
patterns of relation across difference.
The distinction between political community and assem-
blage is best seen in Connolly’s contrast of “arboreal” and
“rhizomatic” forms of pluralism, a set of images he draws
from Deleuze and Guattari. The former “appreciate(s) diver-
sity as limbs branching out from a common trunk,” whether
that be “Christianity or Kantian morality or the history of
a unified nation or secular reason,” or any other source of
shared identity.79 Connolly shares Deleuze and Guattari’s
stance toward this way of imagining the structure of plurality:
“We’re tired of trees … They’ve made us suffer too much.”80

77
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xxi.
78
Connolly, Identity\Difference, 87–92.
79
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 93.
80
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15, quoted in
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 94.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

Rhizomatic pluralism, on the other hand, is a multiplicity

with no center, no lowest common denominator source of
shared identity, and no fundamental “root” grounding cohe-
sion. Rhizomatic pluralism is an endlessly unfolding network
of connections between differences, sustained by “a general
ethos of generosity and forbearance,” which is itself sourced
from multiple traditions.81 In a rhizomatic pluralism, majority
assemblages form around particular issues in order to enable
shared action. But, unlike collective actions founded upon a
“general consensus” or “coalition of interests,” these major-
ity assemblages are provisional, “mobile constellation[s]” of
actors who converge in a shared action, and do so for many
diverse reasons, motivations, self-interests, and ultimate
goals.82 The assemblage, in other words, is constituted by a
plurality unified in action, provisionally, temporarily, and on
no other basis than the action itself. The advantage of such
assemblages, over against substantive notions of political
community, is that “they enable action in concert through the
locality, the regional assembly, and the state without intensi-
fying monistic pressures for the perversification of diversity
built into the pursuit of the normal individual, the realized
community, or the unified nation.”83
The politics of community, Connolly argues, demands
a political “we” that is dangerously exclusive and hege-
monic. “You do not need a wide universal ‘we’ (a nation, a
community, a singular practice of rationality, a particular
monotheism),” he writes, “to foster democratic governance
of a population,” but rather “intersection and collaboration
between multiple, interdependent constituencies infused
by a general ethos of critical responsiveness drawn from

81
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 94.
82
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 95.
83
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 96.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

several sources.”84 Unlike Mouffe, who sees the constitu-

tion and definition of a collective “we” to be a necessary
and inevitable part of any democratic politics, Connolly
aspires toward a more dispersed, fragmented, and ad hoc
set of provisional governing alliances. The rhizomatic
assemblage enables collective action without crystallizing
collective identity.
However, as with Wolin’s fugitive democracy, questions
emerge regarding the viability of Connolly’s assemblage for
a radically democratic politics. We might wonder whether
democratic action without some kind of defined subject – a
“we,” a people – is possible or even desirable. Democratic
action, if it is to be genuinely collective action, depends on
a process of coming to judgment together, and shared judg-
ment binds persons to one another in a kind of shared polit-
ical agency and subjectivity. Moreover, if shared judgment
and action are to be extended across time, as indeed they must
if colossal problems like neoliberal exploitation and ecologi-
cal catastrophe are to be confronted, then communities of
judgment and action must find ways to sustain their collec-
tive agency and subjectivity over time. The provisionality
and contingency of Connolly’s assemblages avoid reifying
hegemony, but they also appear incapable of sustaining
the social solidarity, mutuality, and common life necessary
for large-scale political action and organization over time.
Radical politics of this kind, with its ambitions of substan-
tially transforming economy and society, requires more than
a single collective action, however revolutionary. It demands
creating and maintaining a democratic community capable
of generating many shared judgments and actions over time,
some small and quotidian, others of significant and lasting
consequence. Connolly’s anxieties about collective political

84
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xx.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

subjectivity, however, limit the forms of organization and

collectivity he is able to imagine, and so also constrain imag-
inable forms of social and political transformation.
Among advocates of agonism, it is Mouffe who goes the
furthest in defending substantial forms of collectivity. While
still eschewing the language of political community, con-
tending that its commitment to a singular conception of a
substantive common good undermines the vital pluralism
that fuels democracy, she nevertheless acknowledges the need
for robust forms of political identification and collective sub-
jectivity.85 As she puts it, what is needed is “to conceive of
a mode of political association, which, although it does not
postulate the existence of a substantive common good, nev-
ertheless implies the idea of commonality.”86 Commonality,
rather than community, names the possibility of constructing
collectivity amidst pluralism through praxis.87 Mouffe delin-
eates this difference by appealing to Michael Oakeshott’s
distinction between universitas and societas. Whereas the
former is founded upon the shared pursuit of a common pur-
pose or substantive good, and thus more closely resembles
communitarian notions of political community, the latter is
a kind of association constituted by “formal relationship[s]
in terms of rules.”88 Mouffe thematizes Oakeshott’s con-
cept of association in non-essentialist terms by appealing
to Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy. What is shared in
a societas is not anything substantive but “a ‘grammar’ of
political conduct,” a set of rules regarding speech, use of

85
On Mouffe and the notion of political community, see Alessandra Tanesini, “In
Search of Community: Mouffe, Wittgenstein, and Cavell,” Radical Philosophy
110 (2001): 12–19.
86
Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in
Martin (ed.), Chantal Mouffe, 108.
87
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 55.
88
Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship,” 108.

129
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

concepts, and identifications that informs political judgment

and action.89 This construal of association in terms of shared
grammar, rather than, say, shared tradition, culture, con-
cept of the good, allows a plurality of particular understand-
ings and uses of concepts and values, even conflict over the
deployment of these concepts and values, while yet binding
constituents together in a shared mode of speech. Recall that
a shared grammar is precisely what differentiates, in Mouffe’s
view, relations of agonism from antagonisms. Whereas the
latter share “no common symbolic space,” the former share
a linguistic world but disagree about how to organize it.90
What constituents in a societas share is not a substantive
identity or vision of the common good but a “common rec-
ognition of a set of ethico-political values,” such as liberty
and equality, even as they disagree about their exact content
and contours.91 These values, Mouffe claims, configure citi-
zens as members of a shared project of radical democracy,
creating “chains of equivalence” among various democratic
movements and struggles, and thus forms of commonness
and solidarity between them. A radical democratic societas
or association of this kind is a political community in the
weak sense of the term, “without a definite shape or a defi-
nite identity and in continuous re-enactment.”92
There is much to commend in Mouffe’s careful articula-
tion of agonistic democratic collectivity. Much more sub-
stantive than either Wolin’s and Connolly’s, her vision of
collectivity nevertheless retains a deep appreciation for
the conflicts and tensions that characterize and energize
such collectivity. And yet, it is not clear that even Mouffe’s

89
Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship,” 108.
90
Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 13.
91
Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship,” 111.
92
Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship,” 109.

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

theorization of democratic collectivity is substantive enough.

Are shared commitments to abstract and formal principles
like liberty and equality, even articulated in radically demo-
cratic directions, really adequate to ground relationships of
solidarity and mutuality capable of transformative action?
Sharing a common grammar and set of political concepts
is important for generating common judgment and action.
But this tends to conceive of democratic action in still too
rationalist terms. As I will argue in Chapter 4, democratic
collectivities depend not just on rational argument in their
deliberations and formulations of shared judgment and
action. Rather, coming to judgment and action involves
equally affective practices of generating mutual attunement,
shared moral sensibilities and imagination, common stories,
and even, as I will argue in Chapter 5, love. One is hard
pressed to find a place for these affective modes of sharing
and relating in Mouffe’s more formalistic and rules-based
account of agonistic collectivity. And yet, I maintain, these
are necessary if agonistic democracy wishes to be sustained
by democratic communities over time. What is needed, then,
is an account of genuine political community, which is to
say, an account of a people and its practices, nurtured and
cultivated over time, capable of generating and sustaining
common judgments and action.
Agonism’s articulations of collectivity are highly provi-
sional, occasional, and episodic. As such, it is not clear that
they can be means for achieving radical and transformative
political change. Momentary political configurations and
insurgent contestations of hegemony, without capacities to
sustain common judgment and action over time, cannot issue
in large-scale social transformation. Agonism’s articulations
of collectivity thus tend, ironically, toward a kind of conser-
vative acquiescence to status quo politics. Moreover, absent
a more substantial account of political community, agonism

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

lacks the resources to contextualize the conflicts it prizes

within an ongoing common life that can sustain them. Put
differently, conflict, if it is to be truly generative and emanci-
patory, not just social friction between competing interests,
must be a good cultivated and tended by a democratic com-
munity. Political communities characterized by solidarity and
mutuality, inspired by the religious, moral, and cultural tra-
ditions embedded within them, can nourish conflict and dif-
ference as elements constitutive of their flourishing, not just
abstract goods to be respected out of benevolence or duty.
Such communities, when successfully sustained by prac-
tices, institutions, and traditions of negotiating conflict and
tending difference, are able to consistently channel conflict
in productive directions. When a community can sustain this
negotiation of conflict and respect for difference over time,
it builds social trust, reciprocity, and solidarity, all of which
in turn support the community’s ability to nurture and nego-
tiate conflict and difference in new and unexpected ways. In
short, far from inhibiting conflict and suppressing difference,
as in much post-pluralist communitarianism, political com-
munity can be an indispensable source of sustaining the con-
flict, pluralism, and difference agonism champions.
My contention is that agonists are mistaken in jettisoning
the concept of political community altogether. As I’ll argue
in Chapter 5, a reconstruction of political community conso-
nant with agonism’s basic insights – what I will call “agonis-
tic community” – is both possible and necessary. Doing so
will involve rearticulating the notion of political community
not in terms of unity around a substantive vision of the good,
à la communitarianism, but instead in terms of shared judg-
ment and action about common goods. I mean “common”
here in two senses. First, goods are common insofar as they
are ordinary, penultimate goods, not transcendent or ultimate
ones. Second, goods are common insofar as they are shared,

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 2.1 Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Difference

indivisible entities, the right and just use of which involves

participants in a shared life around them. My account of ago-
nistic community, centered on these common goods and the
conflictual common life around them, finds much resonance
in Augustine’s understanding of temporal political life, and
I will draw much from him. In addition to his attention to
the importance of shared, penultimate goods of life in this
world – things like peace, security, food and water, among
others – Augustine offers an important way of conceiving
how persons relate to these goods and what kinds of social
relations revolve around and are mediated by them. The term
he uses over and over again to describe this political phenom-
enon is love, a term not often used in contemporary politi-
cal theory, indeed often held in suspicion by it. Nevertheless,
I will argue that Augustine’s political theology of love pro-
foundly illuminates the possibilities for political community
amidst conflict and difference. Augustine thematizes the com-
mon goods at the heart of agonistic community as common
objects of love, and the society cultivated around shared love
of these goods as a res publica founded on and sustained by
love – a “republic of love.”93
Reconceiving political community in terms of shared
loves will also help us see and appreciate the critical place
of conflict and contestation therein. As Charles Mathewes
points out, there is actually a profound congruence between
Augustine and agonism on this point.94 For if the objects of
persons’ and communities’ loves are multiple, divergent, and
opposed, their ways of loving them and pursuing them over-
lapping, intersecting, and even competing, then the practice

93
Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry
Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), XIX.24.
94
Charles T. Mathewes, “Faith, Hope, and Agony: Christian Political
Participation Beyond Liberalism,” The Annual of the Society of Christian
Ethics 21 (2001): 125–150.

133
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

of politics will necessarily be one of negotiating conflicts

between clashing loves. As Mathewes puts it, by centering
love and desire in our analysis, we “can re-imagine poli-
tics as a conflict about loves, and the movement for ‘ago-
nistic democracy’ can be seen as clarifying the possibility of
re-interpreting politics as a struggle over peoples’ loves.”95
In Chapters 4 and 5, I’ll delineate this account of agonistic
community in more detailed terms. Here, I simply wish to
register a concern with agonism’s dismissal of the notion of
political community and propose that it can be reimagined
in more pluralist and agonistic ways. Indeed, I am suggesting
that doing so, and retrieving a theory of political community
for agonistic democracy, will be necessary if conflict is to
be sustained over time and to yield transformative political
change. Reconfiguring political community in terms of love
and conflict can both supply agonism with a more substan-
tial account of collectivity and show how conflict can be gen-
erative and productive when made part of a common life of
mutuality and solidarity.96

2.2 Agonistic Politics and Radical Political Theology

My earlier analysis of agonistic theory intended to show the
ways in which its conceptualization of conflict and difference

95
Mathewes, “Faith, Hope, and Agony,” 126.
96
The notion of agonistic community I am proposing here has resemblances to
some theorists’ return to the notion of community in contemporary continental
philosophy. Roberto Esposito, for example, has argued quite persuasively on
both etymological and philosophical grounds for an account of communitas not
in terms of territory, property, identity, or “wider subjectivity,” but gift, debt,
and obligation. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny
of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009). See also Roberto Esposito, “The Law of Community,” in Terms
of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, trans. Rhiannon Noel
Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 14–26.

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 2.2 Agonistic Politics and Radical Political Theology

provides an alternative to the postliberal and civic liberal

political theologies examined in Chapter 1. Rather than con-
ceptualizing difference by appealing to notions of harmony,
as those political theologies do, agonism views discord, con-
testation, and conflict as markers of flourishing democratic
life. My proposal is that political theology should take heed
of this insight and that, in fact, there are important resources
and intellectual trajectories in religious traditions to aid doing
so. In Chapter 3, for instance, I turn to concepts and texts
in Christian theological anthropology, Thomas Aquinas’s
metaphysics of creation, and ordinary language philosophy
to show how agonism can inspire greater attention to and
appreciation of the religious meaning of conflict.97
Political theology on the whole has been reluctant to
embrace a conflictual account of the political. Yet one group
of theorists has, in fact, already taken up agonistic theory as
a principal interlocutor for political theology. Various advo-
cates of “radical political theology”98 – sometimes referred
to also as theologies of immanence, process theologies, or
theologies after the death of God – have made use of agonistic

97
I wish to note at this point that my own interpretation of agonism will
diverge from the thinkers considered earlier in several important ways, while
nevertheless embracing their chief goals. One important difference regards
the sources of conflict. Connolly and Mouffe ground agonism in the nature
of identity and difference, relying on post-structuralist accounts of language,
culture, subjectivity, etc. I view this as insufficiently materialist, lacking
critical attention to the political, economic, and class dimensions of conflict.
My turn to religious thought about human being and the world – theological
anthropology and creation – intends to theorize conflict as arising from the
embodied lives of creatures and their social relations in the material world
of finitude and contingency. Understanding conflict as arising from these
creatures’ material pursuits, courses of action, handling of finite goods, and
contestations over shared goods provides, in my view, a much more compelling
account of the sources of agonism.
98
I take this term from Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion
and Politics after Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

135
 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

theory in order to push political theology beyond classical

theological notions of transcendence, sovereignty, and one-
ness. I conclude this chapter by offering a critical appraisal
of this political theological reception of agonism, showing
how it differs from the one I will chart in the remainder of
the book.
The radical political theologians I have in mind represent
various theological and philosophical backgrounds, inter-
ests, and constructive visions. Nevertheless, they converge
in a shared aspiration to move political theology beyond
those concepts traditionally used to justify political hier-
archy, proposing instead, as Jeffrey Robbins terms it, a
radically “democratic political theology.”99 Thinkers like
Robbins, Catherine Keller, and Clayton Crockett, among
others, see oppressive and hierarchical social, political, and
economic orders as rooted in, and legitimized by, classical
notions of divinity: transcendence, sovereignty, and one-
ness. Following a mode of analysis set forth first by Carl
Schmitt, they agree that the most significant concepts that
have shaped modern political life are secularized theologi-
cal ones. For instance, just as the transcendent God stands
above and outside creation and its laws, so the political sov-
ereign is imagined as standing above political society and
outside law, being the source and foundation of both.100
Such a view of transcendence is directly opposed, radical
political theologians argue, to a democratic politics that
finds its justification not in transcendent authority but in
the immanent power of the multitude. Tocqueville wrote
of this paradox of democracy and transcendence with
extraordinary prescience when he observed, “The people

99
Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011), 6.
100
Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 108.

136
 2.2 Agonistic Politics and Radical Political Theology

reign over the American political world like God over the
universe.”101 For Tocqueville, democracy replaces God as
the transcendent source of authority with the sovereign will
of the people. Robbins takes Tocqueville’s observation to
its radical conclusion, arguing that it is only with the death
of a transcendent God that the birth of true democracy is
possible. “So long as our political theology is reliant on the
element of transcendence,” he writes, “we are not yet, nor
can we ever be said to be, living in a democratic age.”102
Thus, instead of a political theology of transcendence that
identifies the political sovereign with divinity, Robbins pro-
poses an “immanent form of political theology predicated
on the constituent power of the multitude.”103
Moreover, the death of the transcendent God is also,
for radical political theologians, the death of the sover-
eign God. As Crockett puts it, “One way to understand the
death of God is as the need to think God as other than
sovereign.”104 Indeed, sovereignty, even more than tran-
scendence and oneness, has been the cornerstone of modern
political thought and political theology. The political sov-
ereign, source of law and legitimacy, instantiates the rule
of the divine Sovereign on earth. Whether identified with
the unitary general will of the people (Rousseau and Locke)
or the representative person of the monarch (Hobbes),

101
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New
York: Penguin, 2003), 71, quoted in Robbins, Radical Democracy and
Political Theology, 24.
102
Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 176.
103
Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 84. For a slightly
different articulation of a political theology beyond transcendence, see Mark
Lewis Taylor’s discussion of “transimmanence,” which attempts to go beyond
the binary logic of transcendence and immanence, in Mark Lewis Taylor, The
Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 2011), 115–158.
104
Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 49.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

sovereignty is the means of overcoming the vicissitudes,

multiplicities, and contingencies of nature by assimilating
political power and authority in a single source. As Hobbes
writes, the only way to preserve persons from the uncertain-
ties and perils of the world and others is for them to “con-
ferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon
one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by
plurality of voices, unto one Will.”105 Similarly, Rousseau
writes of the unified body politic, constituted by the indi-
visible sovereignty of the volonté générale: “Each of us puts
his person and his full power in common under the supreme
direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each
member as an indivisible part of the whole.”106 In these var-
ious traditions of modern political thought, the indivisibil-
ity of sovereign power, however formulated and exercised,
is taken to be the necessary foundation for political life. But
in so making indivisible sovereignty the basis of political
legitimacy, radical political theologians argue, they eviscer-
ate the democratic multitude as a political possibility, ren-
dering it impotent. Whereas radical democracy is premised
on the diffusion of power amidst the complex constituent
relations of the multitude, sovereign power reflects the
sovereign deity: a single source of uncontestable authority
which stands beyond the field of politics and so orders its
life. Radical political theology, instead, as Crockett writes,
is “the freedom to think God without God, liberated from

105
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 120, quoted in Crockett, Radical Political
Theology, 146.
106
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political
Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 50. See the discussion of sovereignty and political theology in Luke
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case
for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2019),
359–399.

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 2.2 Agonistic Politics and Radical Political Theology

the weight of traditional formulations that constrain its cre-

ativity in dogmatics and sap its vitality in apologetics.”107
Political theology, Robbins declares, needs a “flight from
sovereignty” altogether.108 Thus, radical political theology
does not so much seek a replacement of one kind of sover-
eign power with another as it does a “call[ing] into ques-
tion all power, including that of God.”109 In other words,
it seeks to imagine and defend a democracy without sov-
ereignty, made possible by a “weak” God dispossessed of
sovereignty and power.110
That sovereignty, both human and divine, is necessarily
indivisible invites, finally, interrogation into the way mono-
theism legitimates and undergirds forms of sovereign power.
As Crockett contends, “The sovereign power of God is
intrinsically connected to the oneness of God.”111 To think
of God other than as sovereign, then, is also to think of
God other than as one.112 More orthodox political theol-
ogies, like Milbank’s, also attempt to combat political the-
ology’s historic obsession with sovereignty and the oneness
of God by recovering the Trinitarian and relational nature
of God. But radical political theologians deem this still
insufficient insofar as Trinitarian theology retains its mono-
theistic commitment to divine oneness. They instead seek
out more heterodox, post-monotheistic doctrines of God.
“Polydoxy,” in contrast to orthodox theism, conceives of
God not as transcendent, sovereign, and one, but as imma-
nent within world processes, constituted by uncertainty

107
Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 12.
108
Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 6.
109
Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 47.
110
On the “weakness of God,” see Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 43–59;
Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 173–179.
111
Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 47.
112
Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 49.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

and contingency, and fundamentally marked by multiplic-

ity, rather than unity.113 The God of radical political the-
ology, in other words, is a God “beyond monotheism.”114
Catherine Keller, for instance, contests a vision of the God–
world relation as a One–many relation, arguing instead that
the Hebrew Scriptures’ “theopoetics of creation” envisions
a “third” between God and creation. The tehom, or “deep,”
cannot be straightforwardly “identified with ‘God’, nor with
the All,” but rather signifies the “womb” of chaotic “self-
organizing complexity” out of which a mutual God–crea-
tion process of becoming emerges.115 Tehom decenters God
as the sole Creator, thus inserting instability, contingency,
and multiplicity into the very origin of being. Recognizing
the fundamental multiplicity at the heart of being, radical
political theology develops an ontology of plurality and
diversity without needing to resort to accounts of transcen-
dent unity or oneness within which to locate it.
Such a rejection of doctrines of transcendence, sovereignty,
and oneness, in favor of immanence, divine weakness, and
a metaphysics of multiplicity, opens political theology, it is
argued, to embrace democratic pluralism and the politics
of difference. As Robbins writes in his theological case for
agonism, radical democracy is simply “the political instan-
tiation of the death of God.”116 With God no longer the
sovereign, transcendent, and indivisible source of political
authority, represented by the earthly sovereign, theology

113
See Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, “Introduction,” in Polydoxy:
Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel C.
Schneider (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–15.
114
See Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity
(New York: Routledge, 2008).
115
Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 227, 39, 117.
116
Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 6.

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 2.2 Agonistic Politics and Radical Political Theology

can embrace the conflicts, pluralities, and contingencies of

democratic politics without reserve. Keller likewise inter-
prets agonistic politics in theological terms. Like creation
emerging from the tehom in a “self-organizing complexity at
the edge of chaos,” democratic politics consists in the con-
struction of a “collective assemblage across critical differ-
ence,” a self-organized plurality without hierarchy.117 Like
the multiplicitous God and the chaotic tehom, democratic
politics is marked by instability, contingency, and antag-
onism. As with agonistic theorists, Keller does not lament
the conflicts of democracy. Rather, she celebrates them as
an “amorous agonism,” generating possibilities for the for-
mation of “coalitional intersectionality” across difference
and “queerly diverse discourses of public responsibility,
social justice, and sustaining ecology.”118 Amorous agonism
embraces the conflictual political without sentimentality,
even as it sees it as an opportunity for radical hospitality and
neighbor-love. And without the haunting of a transcendent
God standing over and above the vicissitudes of the politi-
cal, radical political theology can embrace agonistic politics
as the unfolding of immanent divinity.
In sum, radical political theology sees politics and its
entanglement with notions of sovereignty as a theological
problem about the nature of God. As such, it must be coun-
tered with a revisionist doctrine of God. The transcendent,
sovereign One of classical theism grounds a politics of sov-
ereignty that eviscerates democratic life and the possibil-
ity of egalitarian political formations. To defend radical
democracy and articulate a political theology to support it,

117
Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency
and the Struggle for a New Public (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018), 33–34.
118
Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 156–157.

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 Radical Democracy and Agonistic Theology

then, means reconceiving divinity beyond transcendence,

sovereignty, and oneness. It is at this point that we see just
how closely radical political theology resembles the strat-
egies of those postliberal and civic liberal political theolo-
gies examined in the previous chapter. All operate within
an analogical frame of theorizing the political in light of
the divine. But whereas the Augustinians take the social-
ity of the Trinity to model a normative account of human
sociality, theorizing political relations in light of divine
relationality, radical political theologians simply reverse
the script. They revise notions of divinity in light of the
exigencies and demands of democratic life. Whether or not
these theological revisions are cogent or desirable is some-
what beside the point. What interests me here is the fact
that radical political theologians commit the same mistake
as the political theologies they criticize. They remain cap-
tured by an analogical frame that insufficiently acknowl-
edges the differences between Creator and creature, divine
and human. Rather than elevate the earthly political into
the divine life of the Trinity, like the Augustinians discussed
earlier, radical political theology democratizes the sover-
eign God within the immanent political.
Despite all its criticisms and innovative proposals, then,
radical political theology presumes the same analogical frame
as the political theologies of sovereignty it opposes. It rests on
a necessary correspondence between divine and political rule
that carries normative weight. In this way, radical political
theology faces the same limitations as the political theologies
inspired by Augustine: an inability to name and acknowledge
the difference creaturehood makes and the kinds of political
relation proper to finite human creatures. To be sure, the-
ologies of divine sovereignty have often been, and still are,
used to justify and legitimize sovereign regimes of inequality
and oppression. In its critique, radical political theology is

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 2.2 Agonistic Politics and Radical Political Theology

entirely right to interrogate and challenge this identification

of divine and earthly sovereignty in the name of a more radi-
cal democracy. My contention, however, is that a theological
defense of radical democratic politics need not make direct
appeal to any particular notion of divine power or Triune
sociality as the necessary basis and normative framework for
such a politics. Not only does it need not, it should not make
this appeal. Political theology, in my view, is best off refusing
to ground a theory of democracy in claims about the nature
of God altogether. Instead, turning to religious reflection on
the creature – limits, capacities, and sociality – political the-
ology is better positioned to offer an account of democracy
as a creaturely practice. Democracy, in this view, becomes
both more human and more humane. Or so shall I argue.

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 3
Being in Conflict
A Political-Theological Anthropology

Thus far, I’ve tried to show how contemporary political the-

ology has struggled to make sense of the enduring presence
of conflict in democratic politics. I’ve suggested this diffi-
culty arises, in part, because of the ways it tends to construe
political community and difference in oppositional terms, as
well as its commitment to an analogical framing of divine
and creaturely sociality and difference that overemphasizes
their continuities, obscuring their dissimilarities. I began to
address the former problematic in Chapter 2 by proposing an
account of “agonistic community,” wherein conflict amidst
difference is seen not as a threat to community but constitu-
tive of its dynamic flourishing. I develop this notion in more
detail in Chapter 4, where I explore practices of shared judg-
ment and action as key characteristics of democratic com-
munity. In the present chapter, I wish to address the second
problematic: political theology’s capture by an analogical
imagination that is insufficiently attentive to the conditions,
limits, and possibilities of creatureliness. One of the features
of creaturely sociality and difference, I argue in this chap-
ter, is the inescapable presence of conflict, something I show
belongs to the goodness of creaturely life, not its corruption.
My argument means to challenge, in other words, the hold
that the doctrine of God and theories of sovereignty have
on contemporary political theological discourse. Rather
than theorizing the political as a mirror of the divine, either

144
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

critically or normatively, I propose beginning an account of

politics with the creature. I thus turn to a number of themes
and concepts in theological and philosophical anthropol-
ogy in order to develop what I term a “political-theological
anthropology.” In examining and elucidating the distinct
features of human creaturehood – specifically finitude, con-
tingency, and embodiment – I offer an account of the human
person as zōon agōnistiko, an agonistic creature whose soci-
ality manifests in conflictual negotiations of difference.
Anthropology tends to appear as a rather ancillary concern
in modern political theology, which, in both its critical and
constructive modes, has instead prioritized themes like divine
sovereignty and providence,1 eschatology,2 ecclesiology,3
Christology,4 and natural law.5 Yet, as Luke Bretherton has

1
The classic examples being Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters
on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
For a more recent example, see Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and
Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
2
Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2009); Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God:
Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 1981).
3
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive
Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981);
Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and
Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1998).
4
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of
Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Oliver
O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1986).
5
Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America Press, 1998); Thomas J. Bushlack, Politics for a Pilgrim Church:
A Thomistic Theory of Civic Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 2015); Vincent W. Lloyd, Black Natural Law (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016).

145
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

argued, if thinking about politics is directly tied to the ques-

tion of what it means to be human, then we must acknowl-
edge theological anthropology to be “the normative basis
of political theology.”6 According to Bretherton, political
theology must think “from the standpoint of what it means
to be a creature.”7 Consideration of politics, the formation
of a common life amidst difference, emerges from reflection
on our humanity as such, for, as Bretherton writes, “to be
who we are we need others, and this entails negotiating some
form of common life with them, either through positing a
common humanity or through bringing difference/alterity
into fruitful relationship.”8 For creatures, politics arises from
both our natural capacities for association and our need to
negotiate difference within forms of association.9 The prin-
cipal explorations in this chapter regard three dimensions
of human creaturehood: finitude, contingency, and embodi-
ment. Investigating each of these, and theological and philo-
sophical attempts to grapple with them, will reveal the extent
to which conflict is both an inescapable challenge and a cre-
ative good belonging to creaturely sociality. Before venturing
into theological anthropology, however, I turn to the subject
of multiplicity in order to show again the necessity of mov-
ing beyond analogical thinking about difference and to begin
carving out space for a distinctly creaturely politics.

6
Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the
Case for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
2019), 21. A similar attempt to articulate a political theology grounded in
theological anthropology can be seen in Christopher J. Insole, The Politics of
Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
7
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 21.
8
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 313.
9
Bretherton’s “consociationalist” politics builds on the legacy of Althusius and
sees both pluralism and commonality as belonging to creatures by nature. See
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 389–397.

146
 3.1 Multitudo, Creaturely and Divine

3.1 Multitudo, Creaturely and Divine

Recall that a principal issue in the political theologies exam-
ined in previous chapters concerned conceptualizing the nature
of creaturely multiplicity at the ontological level. Postliberal
Augustinians, Augustinian civic liberals, and radical political
theologians all agree that difference and multiplicity are intrin-
sic features of creation, not secondary degenerations of some
primordial and more fundamental unity. Multiplicity belongs
to creation as such. Where these political theologies diverge is
in how this multiplicity is conceptualized theologically. Both
schools of Augustinians look to the Trinity as a template of
harmonious unity-in-difference for imagining creaturely mul-
tiplicity and unity. Radical political theologians dissent from
this picture, arguing that affirming genuine democratic mul-
tiplicity requires renouncing unity altogether, including as a
principle of divinity. Oneness, they argue, even when con-
ceptualized in Trinitarian terms, implies a kind of hegemonic
unity and sovereignty that undermine a truly emancipatory
radical democratic politics. Radical political theology instead
offers an account of divine immanence wherein God becomes
subject to the contingencies of creaturely multiplicity. Both
of these strategies, however, remain captive to an analogical
picture of divine and human sociality that fails to appreciate
the distinctly creaturely aspects of human sociality, differ-
ence, and multiplicity – that is, the difference creaturehood
makes. Here, I delineate these important divergences between
Trinitarian and creaturely multiplicity, drawing on Thomas
Aquinas’s theological metaphysics of creation. In doing so, I
intend to show how certain resources in the Christian theo-
logical tradition can enable appreciation of conflict and mul-
tiplicity as constitutive of the dynamic goodness of creation.
Thomas Aquinas may appear at first a surprising resource
to consult for a theological description of multiplicity and

147
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

conflict. After all, Thomas is often remembered as an inher-

itor of Neoplatonism’s philosophy of the One and the
many, hierarchies of being, and a metaphysics of harmony.
Moreover, many have argued that Thomas’s doctrine of the
analogia entis frames a theology of participation wherein the
qualities and faculties of creatures correspond to their divine
perfections.10 The emphasis in these readings of Thomas
is usually on similarities and continuities in the Creator–
creature relation rather than their differences. One might
expect, then, Thomas’s theology to yield a vision of crea-
tion similar to those I have been criticizing, one wherein har-
monic creaturely difference images the Trinitarian difference
of God. This, however, would be a mistake. As David Burrell
has shown, Thomas makes use of the notion of analogy not
so much to develop a theory of being, nor to delineate a basic
set of features common to both humanity and God, but in
fact to register the fundamental discontinuities between crea-
tion and Creator, humanity and divinity, and thus the enor-
mous difficulties of speaking about God at all.11 Analogia,

10
The most significant modern treatment of the analogia entis is Erich Przywara,
Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans.
John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 2014). For more recent treatments, specifically of Thomas’s
positions, see Steven A. Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being,
Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2011); Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1996); and the essays in Analogy of
Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God?, ed. Thomas Joseph
White (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011). For an
argument that the analogia entis, at least as it is commonly understood, does
not exist in Thomas’s thought, see Laurence Paul Hemming, “Analogia non
Entis sed Entitatis: The Ontological Consequences of the Doctrine of Analogy,”
International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, no. 2 (2004): 118–128; and
Laurence Paul Hemming, Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 111–136.
11
See especially, David B. Burrell, CSC, Analogy and Philosophical Language
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 119–170; and David B. Burrell, CSC,

148
 3.1 Multitudo, Creaturely and Divine

for Thomas, operates more in the mode of the via negativa

than affirmative predication.12 Thus, while Thomas recog-
nizes certain patterns of human being and action as reflecting
divinity and manifesting the Imago Dei, he is always quick to
specify the larger differences and divergences between their
divine and human manifestations. In this way, I suggest,
Thomas’s careful attention to the asymmetries and dissim-
ilarities between divine and human being and action make
him a valuable resource for understanding the unique fea-
tures of creaturely sociality. Put simply, Thomas helps move
thinking about creaturely sociality beyond analogical like-
ness, showing the ways creatures manifest sociality differ-
ently from God, in a distinctly creaturely mode.
This careful attention to similarity and dissimilarity is
especially evident in Thomas’s treatment of creation’s multi-
plicity. In his account of creation in the Summa Theologiae,
Thomas offers a theological interpretation of the plurality of
God’s creatures which sees their multiplicity to be represen-
tative of divine perfection.13 Creation is brought into being,
says Thomas, so that God’s “goodness might be communi-
cated to creatures, and be represented by them” (ST I.47.1).
Because this representation involves a relationship of finite to
infinite, and God’s “goodness could not be adequately rep-
resented by one creature alone,” God created a multiplicity
of things to participate in the divine goodness, each accord-
ing to its kind (ST I.47.1). Thus, “what was wanting to one
in representation of the divine goodness might be supplied

“Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language,” in The Theology of Thomas

Aquinas, ed. Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 77–98.
12
Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 119–124.
13
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), I.47.1. Hereafter cited
parenthetically as ST.

149
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

by another,” for “goodness, which in God is simple and uni-

form, in creatures is manifold (multipliciter) and divided”
(ST I.47.1). So far, so Neoplatonist. The multitude of finite
creatures together represent the infinite One from whom
they proceed and have as their source. But Thomas then goes
further, departing from the Neoplatonist frame of the One
and the many. Because God, whose goodness creation man-
ifests, is Triune plurality, the cause of creaturely multiplicity
is not transcendent oneness but multiplicity, what Thomas
calls multitudo transcendens, or “transcendental multitude”
(ST I.30.3.ad2).14 “Every procession and multiplication of
creatures,” Thomas says, is “caused by the procession of the
distinct divine persons” of the Trinity.15 Thus, rather than
suggesting it is the harmonic unity of creaturely difference
that represents the transcendental unity and oneness of the
Godhead, Thomas declines to speak of unity and oneness
at all. He shows instead that the multiplicatio of creatures
bears the marks of the multiplicity of the Trinity, the dis-
tinction and relations of the divine persons. In other words,
Thomas is less interested in how the harmonies of creaturely
difference manifest Trinitarian oneness and more interested
in showing how the distinction of persons in God grounds
the proliferation of difference in creation. Consequently,
multiplicity has a fundamental place in the order of being
and is in no way subsequent to unity or oneness. Again,
in Thomas’s own words, multiplicity is a “transcendental.”
As Gilles Emery notes, “the plurality of genera and spe-
cies in creatures, the multiplicity of individuals within the

14
On this often-neglected notion of “transcendental multitude” in Thomas, see
Joshua Lee Harris, “Transcendental Multitude in Thomas Aquinas,” Proceedings
of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 89 (2015): 109–118.
15
Aquinas, I Sent. d.26 q.2 art.2 ad.2. Quoted in Gilles Emery, O.P., “Trinity and
Creation,” in Van Nieuwenhove and Wawrykow (eds.), Theology of Thomas
Aquinas, 72.

150
 3.1 Multitudo, Creaturely and Divine

species, and the multiplicity of events that constitute his-

tory,” for Thomas, are sourced in and representative of the
“first distinction, that of the divine persons.”16 Importantly,
then, the analogy of divine and creaturely multiplicity cen-
ters not on their capacity for unity, but rather the irreduc-
ibility of difference.
In his conceptualizing of divine and creaturely multi-
plicity, then, Thomas appears to follow a line of thought
quite similar to the Augustinians considered in Chapter 1.
Creaturely difference witnesses to the source of creation,
who is “transcendental peace through differential rela-
tion.”17 And, to be sure, Thomas does see in creaturely
multiplicity a certain likeness to divine relations. But he
also situates these likenesses within an account of the asym-
metries and discontinuities between divine and creaturely
multiplicity. Indeed, these differences may be even more
determinative for an account of human sociality than the
similarities. Acknowledging them will open up concep-
tual space for the possibility for appreciating conflict as
an inherent part of creaturely multiplicity in a way distinct
from God’s. Consider, for instance, how Thomas speaks of
“number” with reference to God and creatures. Earlier in
the Prima Pars, in question 30 on the “plurality of persons
in God,” Thomas had carefully distinguished the nature of
Trinitarian plurality from its creaturely forms. For him, the
“numerical terms” used to speak of distinction in God do
not “denote anything positive in God” at all, but only pos-
sess a “negative meaning” intended to “remove something”
in descriptions of the divine Trinity – namely, the possible
misunderstanding that the oneness of God might preclude

16
Emery, “Trinity and Creation,” 73.
17
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed.
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 6.

151
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

personal relations (ST I.30.3). For creatures, on the other

hand, numerical terms apply straightforwardly as a descrip-
tion of material distinctions between them: “Number in this
sense is found only in material things which have quantity”
(ST I.30.3). “Numeral terms predicated of God,” Thomas
writes, “are not derived from number, a species of quantity,
for in that sense they could bear only a metaphorical sense
in God” (ST I.30.3). Indeed, metaphor, for Thomas, implies
still too much likeness between creaturely and divine multi-
plicity. In God, numerical terms do not “denote an accident
added to being,” just as “oneness does not add anything to
being” (ST I.30.3). Instead, in God, numerical terms signal
the indivisibility of the divine essence and demonstrate that
the subsisting relations which characterize that essence are
not identical. Thomas is well aware that this puts significant
pressure on the ordinary meaning of “number,” so much so
that any notion of metaphorical relation between divine and
creaturely difference begins to break down. Thomas is ask-
ing his readers to affirm an understanding of number with
respect to God that names neither division nor composite
parts within the divine essence but only the “transcenden-
tal multitude” which is the one God. Use of the concept of
number to speak of God is, then, to go entirely the route of
the via negativa.
For Thomas, numerical language – the language used to
characterize multiplicity and difference – refers to divinity
and creation in fundamentally different ways. Indeed, the gulf
between these ways is so great that speaking of their relation
in terms of “analogy” risks distortion. Moreover, the ways
multiplicity and unity relate to one another are entirely dif-
ferent in God and creatures. For while multiplicity exists in
God without division, it obtains of creatures exactly by vir-
tue of their distinct finite existences. In God, “‘One’ does not
exclude multitude, but division” (ST I.30.3.ad.3), which is

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 3.1 Multitudo, Creaturely and Divine

why both oneness and multiplicity can be named as transcen-

dentals, each paradoxically identical to the divine essence. In
creatures, however, multiplicity necessarily denotes divisions
between creatures. The critical disanalogies between divine
and creaturely multiplicity that Thomas delineates here thus
illuminate the meaning of materiality for creaturely plurality.
To be material, embodied, conditions the forms of relation
and communion available to creatures, as well as the pos-
sibilities available for their unity amidst plurality. Put sim-
ply, creatures cannot manifest unity amidst multiplicity in
the way God does because of their bodies. And, as we will
see in the following section, this is a gift of creaturehood, not
a matter of ontological lack. To be embodied is to accept a
certain degree of separateness from other creatures. Indeed,
to attempt to transcend these creaturely limits, to aspire to
divine forms of communion, often entails a violent intrusion
upon other creatures and their bodily integrity.
Creaturely multiplicity and relation, then, manifest within
the particular conditions of creatureliness, conditions that
differentiate divine and human sociality in fundamental
ways. I do not take this to be a particularly controversial
or innovative claim, even though it fundamentally dissents
from a predominant strategy in Christian moral and theolog-
ical reflection of seeing the Trinity as a normative template
for creaturely social life. My claim is simply to recognize the
difference creaturehood makes. It is precisely this difference,
I maintain, that is too often unrecognized, unregistered, and
underappreciated in theological writing on social and polit-
ical life, especially that which operates within an analogi-
cal framing of divine and human relations. Given that much
political theology does operate within this analogical frame,
either constructively proposing or critically interrogating
the patterning of social life with respect to conceptions of
divinity, breaking analogy’s hold on political theology can

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

generate new ways of thinking about politics in terms of cre-

ation, thus more fully acknowledging the complex condi-
tions of human creaturehood.
Thomas’s metaphysics of creation help us make a first step
toward imagining creaturely sociality, its multiplicity and
difference, beyond analogical similarity to God. Once freed
from the strict logic of analogy, then, we will be better posi-
tioned to attend to and theorize conflict in creaturely social
relations. Conflict, I will show, belongs to creaturely multi-
plicity and difference in ways it does not in God, and theolog-
ical projects quick to propose the social Trinity as a solution
to the complexities and precarities of creaturely life too often
eclipse this important fact. Conflict, as I conceive it later,
is inherent to the realization of creaturely multiplicity. That
we must speak of a “realization” of creaturely multiplicity
already signals important departures from the transcendental
plurality of God. Yet, as Ian McFarland rightly recognizes,
creaturely diversity and multiplicity are “realized in time and
space through creatures’ varied movements: the diverse ways
in which they realize their several and mutually irreducible
sorts of creaturely perfection.”18 To be sure, human creatures
are ordered to charitable relations with others, and this is the
perfection of their natural sociability. But charitable sociality
is not devoid of conflict. That creatures must realize the per-
fections of their unique and different selves in a multitude of
ways, making use of a variety of diverse goods within a time
and space shared with others, means that conflicts between
creatures are unavoidable. This is not a lamentable aspect of
human creaturehood. Nor does conflict arise from something
human creatures lack. Rather, as I will show in the follow-
ing section, conflict arises because creation’s goods and the

18
Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 68.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

means of using those goods are abundant and multiple, the

creatures who desire and make use of them do so in different
and various ways, and many of these goods are ones held in
common, thus necessitating forms of negotiation over their
shared use. Multiplicity, under the conditions of creature-
liness, generates conflict. Given the multiplicity of created
goods, ways of using these goods, and unique compositions
of human creatures who share a life around these goods, it is
inevitable that there will be moments in which human crea-
tures’ aspirations, desires, preferences, and actions will come
into conflict with those of others. Unpacking how this occurs
and how conflict necessarily emerges from the conditions of
creatureliness will be the task of the rest of this chapter.

3.2 Agonistic Creatures: Finitude,

Contingency, Embodiment
In what follows, I detail the meaning and implications of
three critical features of human creaturehood – finitude, con-
tingency, and embodiment – in order to show how together
they give rise to conflict as an inherent quality of creaturely
sociality.19 I do this by way of engagement with several
theological and philosophical traditions of anthropologi-
cal reflection that are particularly attentive to the fragility

19
My focus on these three concepts has commonalities with the account of
creation put forward in McFarland, From Nothing, 57–83. McFarland
excellently attends to the important distinctions between divine and creaturely
existence, treating the former in terms of being “intrinsically living, productive,
and present,” and the latter as “contingent, subject to movement, and
occupy[ing] a particular place.” My focus on human creatures and, even
more specifically, the social nature of human creatures, leads me to focus on
somewhat different aspects of creatureliness. Nevertheless, there is a certain
affinity between McFarland’s triad of contingency, movement, and place, and
my own categories of finitude, contingency, and embodiment. His discussion
informs much of my thinking in what follows.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

of creaturely life. The conclusion I reach through this inves-

tigation can be summarized as follows: Conflict belongs to
human creatures because they are embodied selves who come
to be over time in a world of contingency. This is to say,
human beings are finite, contingent, and embodied creatures,
constituted by a diverse multiplicity of aspirations, desires,
and ways of using created goods to realize those aspirations
and desires with others. I take for granted that humans are
also fundamentally social beings, which means that inherent
to their self-realization as creatures are capacities to negoti-
ate instances in which their goods, desires, and actions come
up against those of others. Finally, some of the goods that
human creatures make use of in realizing their creaturely
existence are common goods, which means deliberation,
negotiation, and coordinated action with others are neces-
sary for their shared use. In sum, human creatures are fated
to live and act together despite their multiple and often com-
peting desires for how that common life is to be arranged and
how they might live and act within it. Both sociality and con-
flict are fundamental to human creaturely existence in this
way, each internal to the other. Careful analytical probing of
the conditions of creaturehood – finitude, contingency, and
embodiment – reveals why and how this is so.

3.2.1 Finitude
“Creaturely being is limited being,” writes David Kelsey. This
limitation in being is the substance of “the ontological finitude
of the creaturely realm” and a chief marker of the dissimilar-
ity between finite and infinite existence.20 Creation, given by
God ex nihilo, is contingent being, an un-necessity, and thus

20
David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, vol. 1
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 201.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

dependent on God for its reality. “No particular constituent

element, nor any universal dimension of creation, is inherently
everlasting or exists necessarily,” notes Kelsey.21 Finitude, in
this sense and as I develop it later, is the obverse of necessity
and eternality. Moreover, as a consequence of this ontological
dependence and limitation in being, all creatures possess an
inherent tendency toward dissolution. This is quite obvious
from a biological perspective. Every material being is “a com-
plex set of interrelated energy systems that is inherently subject
over time to progressive disintegration. Energy becomes pro-
gressively less organized and eventually dissipates altogether,
and the creature ceases to be.”22 But it is also a theologically
significant claim. That creatures by nature tend toward disso-
lution is a consequence of their creation ex nihilo. Athanasius
of Alexandria thus wrote in his famous On the Incarnation
that human creatures are “corruptible by nature,” having a
tendency to “return to non-being through corruption,” unless
otherwise preserved from “their natural state by the grace of
participation in the Word.”23 Corruptibility, in other words,
belongs to human nature as such, given its finite and material
composition. As Kelsey puts it, living bodies are “inherently
fallible and defectible;” they “may and do defect from lev-
els of energy exchange and from levels of exercise of power
that they once enjoyed.”24 Living bodies are especially prone
to such processes because they must “develop from imma-
ture to mature states, and must mature in regard to a large

21
Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 201. 22 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 201–202.
23
Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 54–55. See the excellent discussion of
Irenaeus and Athanasius on creaturely vulnerability and corruptibility in Paul
M. Blowers, Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the
Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2020), 44–45.
24
Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 267.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

range of powers and in regard to a large range of capacities

to regulate the exercise of those powers.”25 Living beings are
born, grow, deteriorate, and die. And, aside from living organ-
isms, the creaturely realm as a whole is subject to atrophy and
entropic dissolution.26 Creaturely existence is delimited with
nonexistence on either side.
Another way of formulating this limitation of creaturely
being is to speak of its boundedness by time. Temporality
is a specification of finitude, denoting the particular limita-
tion of duration. Spaciality is, of course, a second specifi-
cation of finitude.27 Created beings possess a limitation on
both the duration of their being and the physical and meta-
physical space they occupy.28 For creatures, as McFarland
notes, space marks the distinction between beings, “defined
(and thus limited) by specific features that render them dis-
tinctly different from each other.”29 Space is, then, a neces-
sary condition for creaturely relation, and in this way marks
an important distinction between divine and creaturely
relationality. Here, I speak of finitude primarily in terms of
time, though with the assumption that creaturely existence
in time is always also played out in space, a reality I return
to later in consideration of creaturely embodiment.

25
Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 283.
26
For a theological reflection on the significance of this for the doctrine of creation
and eschatology, see Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief
Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 97–124.
27
See Aquinas’s discussion and dismissal of the possibility of a “sensible
infinite” – that is, a material body that is infinite – in Thomas Aquinas,
Commentaria in Octo Libros Physicorum, trans. Pierre H. Conway, O.P.
(Columbus, OH: College of St. Mary of the Springs, 1962), III, lect. 8, 350.
28
In the Christian theological tradition, even angelic beings have a certain
metaphysical spatiality by virtue of their creatureliness. Though non-material,
Thomas Aquinas argues, for instance, angels nevertheless have a “place,”
since to deny this would mean to attribute a divine property to them, namely
omnipresence (ST I.52.1–3). See McFarland, From Nothing, 65n.23.
29
McFarland, From Nothing, 66.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

Among the many creatures of God, living creatures man-

ifest their finitude in time and space through organic pro-
cesses of birth, growth, decay, and disintegration. Living
creatures relate to and interact with other living and non-
living creatures, and these interactions are both necessary
for creatures’ positive development, as well as causes of their
disintegration. We can call all of these processes “move-
ment,” construed in its broadest sense. As McFarland notes,
movement is “the mode by which creatures both exhibit and
achieve their own peculiar and distinctively created sorts of
perfection.”30 Because perfection belongs as a property only
to the uncreated, namely, God, the creature has perfection as
“its goal rather than its beginning.”31 McFarland refers to
this aspect of creatures’ finitude as a “lack” of their “fullness
of existence,” and the processes of self-realization and move-
ment as the means of coming into this fullness.32 This lan-
guage of “lack” should not be taken to mean that creatures’
development over time results from a kind of “fall” from a
primordial, original stasis. Development and self-realization
through movement over time are inherent to the goodness of
creaturely existence, not a fall from it.33 Joseph Pieper refers
to this as the status viatoris, the “state or condition of being
on the way,” which belongs to “the innermost structure of
created nature. It is the inherent ‘not yet’ of the finite being.”34

30
McFarland, From Nothing, 63.
31
McFarland, From Nothing, 63. McFarland is here following Irenaeus, Against
Heresies, vol. 1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James
Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985), 4.20.7.
32
McFarland, From Nothing, 64.
33
McFarland notes Maximus the Confessor as one especially attuned to this
aspect of creation (From Nothing, 64). See Maximus’s Ambiguum 15, in St.
Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses
to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington, DC: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2018), 127–129.
34
Joseph Pieper, On Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1977), 1.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

From photosynthesis to eating to speech, movement encom-

passes all those activities, however simple or complex, that
allow creatures to manifest their creaturehood more fully
over time.
Human creatures, the specific kind of living beings I am
concerned with in this chapter, experience the finitude of
time in a particular way, namely as selves. In addition to
their biological development and deterioration, human crea-
tures realize and manifest selfhood, or personal identity, over
time and in space with others. As Martin Heidegger put it,
the self is a being “for which its own Being is an issue.”35
Because of this awareness of its own existence, according to
Heidegger, human temporal existence is a kind of project,
one pursued either authentically or inauthentically. Selfhood
is cultivated in and through time, rather than simply given,
and manifests in relation to the world, others, death, and so
on. This temporal dimension of selfhood is obvious in our
ordinary thinking about human development. Most would
not doubt that a child is a person, even as they also under-
stand her or his personality to be only a nascent form of her
or his later self. The passage of time enables an unfolding of
personality and selfhood, an exploration and actualization
of capacities, skills, traits, aspirations, desires, and qualities
which make individual persons unique creatures. We recog-
nize the continuity (and discontinuity) between a person’s
childhood, adolescence, and stages of adulthood to be not
just a biological process of growth but also the development,
cultivation, and realization of selfhood.

35
This phrase and its various iterations appear over and over throughout Division
II of Being and Time, whose title is “Dasein and Temporality.” See Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962). For an extended treatment of Heidegger’s
understanding of selfhood, see Einar Overenget, Seeing the Self: Heidegger on
Subjectivity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998).

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

One way to name the near infinite set of activities

through which human creatures realize selfhood over time
is “action.” Not all movements in which human crea-
tures realize their selfhood are actions. Some, for instance,
involve being acted upon or suffering the movements of
other creatures – being betrayed or injured, becoming ill,
being loved. Others involve more or less unintentional
and involuntary activities – bodily change, aging, failing
in memory. But those movements we most associate with
human creatures’ realization as selves are in some way
voluntarily caused, meaningful, and intentional, and these
are actions. Action, as Charles Pinches says, is the specific
kind of activity whose context or “home” is humanness.36
In other words, an action is a movement capable of being
understood as “one of the sorts of things human beings do”
and thus belonging to an “identifiable set of behaviors that
we expect from human beings.”37 The countless kinds of
action available to human creatures are meaningful, both
for ourselves and to others, insofar as the context of our life
together as human creatures renders them intelligible. Here,
actions manifest and realize creaturely selfhood. Action sus-
tained through time, and especially actions that can be seen
together in a more or less unified or “narratable” way,38 are
fundamental to creatures’ self-identity.
To summarize what I have contended thus far: Creatures
are finite beings. Finitude entails the particular limitations of
time and space, and thus also the inherent tendency toward
dissolution. Finite being, then, is marked by the duration of
its existence – it is “being-in-time.” Temporality, however,

36
Charles R. Pinches, Theology and Action: After Theory in Christian Ethics
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 13–14.
37
Pinches, Theology and Action, 15.
38
See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 204–225.

161
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

is not a defect of creaturely existence but an aspect of its

goodness, for it is the stage upon which creatures, and liv-
ing creatures in particular, exhibit movement and thus real-
ize and perfect their creaturely existence. Human creatures
realize themselves in the particular mode of selfhood or sub-
jectivity, meaning they are capable of intentional and pur-
posive action. Time, then, is a condition of selfhood, for it
enables action and thus self-realization. But time is also the
condition of conflict. Let us explore how so.
In several important places throughout his work, Rowan
Williams instructively develops an account of selfhood as
emerging through action over time and exchange with oth-
ers. For Williams, modern philosophy and theology have
been held captive by a picture of selfhood that trades in spa-
tial terms. Particularly after Descartes, “authentic” selfhood,
identity, and self-knowledge have been construed in terms of
an “interior” or inner life which is expressed publicly to and
with others.39 Williams, following Ludwig Wittgenstein,
questions this Cartesian picture of interiority and its strict
binaries of self/other, inner/outer, and subject/object. While
not wishing to dispense with notions of selfhood or interi-
ority altogether, Williams proposes a rethinking of selfhood
in temporal rather than spatial terms. “We tend to conceive
interiority,” he writes, “in terms of space – outer and inner,
husk and kernel; what if our ‘inner life’ were better spoken
of in terms of extension in time? the time it takes to under-
stand?”40 A helpful metaphor for this imagining of selfhood,

39
See Rowan Williams, “The Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and
Bonhoeffer,” in Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in
Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 2007), 186–202.
40
Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament
Ethics,” in Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2000), 240.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

he suggests, can be found in visual art.41 When people speak

of the “life” of a painting, that which makes a work worth
contemplating, they signal the way its beauty, meaning, and
truth are elusive, not able to be exhaustively taken in by
immediate apprehension. Such demands the taking of time.
In a painting, Williams writes, “there is manifestly noth-
ing there except the work itself: there is no region behind
or beyond what is seen and sensed that would explain the
‘inner life’ of the work, nothing that is private or secret.”42
The work’s life is all “‘on the surface’, is the material sur-
face, in fact.”43 Yet it demands of the viewer the difficult
labor of sustained engagement over time, patient presence
and attention to the work, in order to appreciate its depth.
So we ought to think of human selfhood, Williams suggests,
as a depth that unfolds as it is shown, revealed, to others
and ourselves by “speaking and acting as to invite the tak-
ing of time.”44
Construing selfhood in these temporal terms, Williams
argues, entails seeing selfhood as something cultivated, “the
product of time,” rather than as something already existent
“beneath the world of time and flesh” and found through self-
excavation.45 Selfhood is not given but emerges as “an integ-
rity one struggles to bring into existence.”46 Moreover, this
emergence of selfhood occurs in the public realm of exchange
and negotiation with others. It is, Williams explains, a self-
hood gained “in relation, conversation, mutual recognition,”

41
Williams, “Suspicion of Suspicion,” 198.
42
Williams, “Suspicion of Suspicion,” 198.
43
Williams, “Suspicion of Suspicion,” 198.
44
Williams, “Suspicion of Suspicion,” 198.
45
Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 240; Williams, “Suspicion of
Suspicion,” 200.
46
Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 240, here quoting Walter A. Davis,
Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and
Freud (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 105.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

a self-knowledge attained through self-giving and reci-

procity.47 We should expect as much from creatures who
possess a natural sociability. To acknowledge the necessity
of exchange, however, is also to recognize a profound insta-
bility in the emergence of selfhood, for “conversation and
negotiation are of their nature unpredictable, ‘unscripted’;
their outcome is not determined.”48 Indeed, this emergence
of being through indeterminacy and time is a feature of the
whole creation, says Williams, “whose good will take time
to realize, whose good is to emerge from uncontrolled cir-
cumstance.”49 For Williams, then, creation’s temporality and
indeterminacy – its finitude – are aspects of its created good-
ness, not fallenness or corruption. Even so, this means crea-
tion is “pregnant with the risk of tragedy, conflicting goods,
if the good of what is made is necessarily bound up with
taking time.”50
This is the critical point for my purposes here: Certain
forms of conflict are a necessary entailment of creation’s finite
temporality and indeterminacy.51 Drawing from Simone
Weil’s careful attention to the meaning of finitude for human
action, Williams notes that “the attaining of goals in a mate-
rial environment by timebound beings entails a ‘mediation
of desire’.”52 Such mediations are necessary because not all
goods are “compossible” in a world of finitude.53 “An authen-
tically contingent world,” he writes, “is one in which you
cannot guarantee the compatibility of goods. That’s what it is

47
Rowan Williams, “On Being Creatures,” in Williams, On Christian Theology, 71.
48
Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 240.
49
Rowan Williams, “Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision,”
New Blackfriars 73, no. 861 (1992): 323.
50
Williams, “Saving Time,” 323.
51
My conflictual account of temporality here has affinities with the wonderful
theological construal of interrupted rhythm and temporality in Lexi Eikelboom,
Rhythm: A Theological Category (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
52
Williams, “Saving Time,” 323. 53 Williams, “Saving Time,” 322.

164
 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

to be created.”54 Bounded by time, we come to face conflicts.

We are constrained to make particular choices and not oth-
ers, pursue some goods and ends and not others, all of which
involves “the loss of certain specific goods for certain spe-
cific persons, because moral determination … recognizes that
not all goods for all persons are contingently compatible.”55
Again, in this perspective conflict and loss are not marks of sin
or moral failure but simply of finitude, “the temporal ways in
which the good is realized in a genuinely contingent world.”56
As will be clear in the later analysis of contingency, conflict is
often the result of an abundance of goods and possible modes
of achieving them under the constraints of finitude, rather
than a consequence of scarcity. Yet because human crea-
tures cultivate selfhood over time, pursuing a multiplicity of
goods, desires, aspirations, and goals under the constraints of
time, which press them toward some and not others, conflicts
and incompatibilities between human creatures are bound
to occur. Love will sometimes be unrequited. Disagreements
about how to organize and use common goods will occur.
Personalities will clash and persons will change over time,
making friendships difficult to sustain. And all of this
Christian theology could imagine not only in the world of sin
but also in paradise, for they are aspects of the goodness of
creaturehood, the realization of selfhood over time in a world
of contingency. Conflict, loss, and disagreement only appear
as metaphysical problems if one presupposes an account of
the self as static, autonomous, expressing desires and pursu-
ing goods in competition with others. But this is the Cartesian
self that Williams rightly pushes us to resist. If we instead see
selfhood as always already involved in exchange, negotiation,
and conversation with others – n ­ aturally sociable, we might

54 55
Williams, “Saving Time,” 322. Williams, “Saving Time,” 322.
56
Williams, “Saving Time,” 323.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

say – then practices of mediating conflicts between agents are

not only an obvious necessity if creatures are to live well with
others; they are also exactly the kinds of activities in which
genuine selfhood emerges. Put differently, selfhood is pro-
duced not simply through action, but through coordinated
action with and alongside others, which always entails what
Weil calls the “mediation of desire.”
If selves are indeed constituted in the way I have been pro-
posing, we ought to see the mediation of desire in moments
of conflict not simply as an inevitability, but actually as a
critical place in which selfhood is realized, self-knowledge
made available, and sociality manifest. Not only is media-
tion necessary if diverse human creatures are to live together
in some amount of peace, but if human creatures are natu-
rally sociable it is because the emergence of their selfhood
depends upon the transformations that occur in exchanges
with others. Selfhood emerges over time precisely through
the changes, conversions, and revisions of desire that occur
in negotiating conflicts with others. As Williams writes, “I do
not recognize the convergence of my interest and the other’s
without a move beyond opposition and negotiation.”57 The
moment of opposition, of conflict with another, Williams
calls the “adversarial moment in the construction of the self
and its knowledge of itself.”58 It is through such adversarial,
contentious negotiations with others – what the theorists of
Chapter 2 called “agonisms” – that authentic selfhood and
self-knowledge emerge. Again, as Williams writes, we “only
acquire identity in the contentions of exchange with another,
in a set of particular and historical encounters with those
elements in the world of personal transactions that deny my
illusions of control.” “I become a self,” he continues, “only

57
Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 243.
58
Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 242.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

in the self-dispossession of discovering that there are things I

cannot acquire, goals I cannot attain.”59 Put in Christological
terms, the activity of self-actualization is realized in kenosis.
Practices of negotiating difference and conflict are nec-
essary if selfhood is to develop and mature over time in
the way I have been describing, moving the subject from a
state of pre-reflective desire to one of freedom with others.
This is the essential insight of Hegel, Williams reminds.
While some have read Hegel as proposing a notion of rec-
onciliation that transcends conflict in the triumph of rea-
son,60 subordinating difference to the unified totality of
Sittlichkeit, Williams shows that Hegel’s dialectical philos-
ophy is one that recognizes the ineliminable place of con-
tradiction, misrecognition, and conflict.61 If we can speak
of the success of reason at all, Williams writes, it is in “our
discovery of how deeply we have misunderstood what we
are as spirit or mind” and thus “what we must search out
and change in ourselves.”62 The transformations involved
in negotiating conflict are ways of growing toward self-
knowledge, mutuality, and acknowledgment. Desires
undergo conversion, change, and reordering in the encoun-
ter with otherness. This is not a tragic reality but a struggle
toward authenticity and attunement with others.63 It is to

59
Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 243.
60
Williams refers to Martha Nussbaum, who sees Hegel’s project as seeking the
“elimination of conflict.” See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness:
Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 67.
61
See Rowan D. Williams, “‘The Sadness of the King’: Gillian Rose, Hegel,
and the Pathos of Reason,” Telos 173 (2015): 21–36. For a similar account
of Hegel, see Todd McGowan, Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a
Contradictory Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
62
Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 72.
63
Cf. Molly Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of
Reconciliation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 32–34.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

realize oneself and one’s desires with others. The “realm of

actual historical argument, error, penitence, and learning
which constitutes the life of spirit” is “a practice of rea-
soning love” in which persons come to find and express
selfhood with others.64 It is not without struggle and con-
tention. Indeed, as Molly Farneth has shown, for Hegel,
the life of spirit depends on social practices of confession
and forgiveness, “practices of contesting and revising
norms and judgments,” to cope with the perennial pres-
ence of conflict.65 But for Hegel and Williams, the media-
tion of desire through negotiating conflicts and difference
with others, a practice which necessarily entails change, is
exactly what makes creatures human. To avoid these con-
flicts and the risks they involve is to aspire to a divine-like
certitude about oneself, to idolize a fixity and autonomy
that eschews the necessary transformations of self and
desire proper to human development.66 “To be a human
subject,” Williams writes, “is to be involved in understand-
ing that growth, movement in time, entails a letting-go of
past identities,” and this is even “regularly accompanied
by varying levels of grief” and acknowledgments of loss.67
Nevertheless, as Williams notes, this “does not mean that
we are being deprived of some desirable good by a hostile
environment;” rather, it is simply to recognize the unavoid-
able changes and transfigurations that constitute our being
in time.68 It is a grief, in other words, proper to the limits
of creaturehood, the experience of finitude. To be a crea-
ture, to be finite, is to suffer change, the transformation of
self, in life with others.

64 65
Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 72. Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics, 79.
66
Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 58.
67
Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 114.
68
Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 114.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

3.2.2 Contingency
Thus far I have argued that the possibility of conflict is
inherent to human creatures’ realization of their selfhood
through action in time. Implied in this discussion was a pre-
sumption that the various movements of human creatures
are directed toward things in the world: objects, relation-
ships, goods, courses of action, and so on. Because these
are manifold, and the various kinds of movement toward
them multiple, human action in the world is open to taking
nearly endless possible forms. Yet because human creatures
are finite, they must choose some of these goods and courses
of action and not others. In this sense, human action is con-
tingent. It is open to many possible forms, none of which
is absolutely necessary. By contingency, I simply mean that
which is not necessary, that which is opposed to neces-
sity.69 And because human action is contingent in this way,
I argue here, it is unpredictable and open to conflicts with
the actions of others. I develop this line of argument by
turning again to the thought of Aquinas, and in particular a
dimension of his moral theory highlighted recently by John
Bowlin – namely, his understanding of the “contingency of
the human good.”70
Thomas has not often been acknowledged to be a thinker
of contingency. Standard readings of his ethics could be
summarized as follows: A normative vision of the good life
is available to us by natural reason; natural law discloses a
determinate set of goods to be realized in order to achieve

69
I am thus considering contingency primarily as a mark of creaturely humanity.
For a more general account of contingency in the natural world, and the
implications of contemporary scientific and quantum theoretical findings for
the doctrine of creation in Christian theology, see John E. Thiel, “Creation,
Contingency, and Sacramentality,” CTSA Proceedings 67 (2012): 46–58.
70
John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).

169
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

this goodness; the moral life can be outlined and specified

by rules that govern human action so as to achieve these
goods, as well as their correlative virtues. According to
readers of Thomas who privilege natural law as the center
of his moral thought, Thomas’s ethical vision is one con-
cerned with securing certain universally binding moral pre-
scriptions for action. The first precepts of the natural law,
they argue, prescribe either a determinate set of goods to
direct human moral action or binding rules for moral con-
duct which specify how to achieve the good concretely.71
Thomas is thus perceived to be a moralist decidedly against
contingency, an advocate of absolutes, universality, and
necessity. But in his careful study of Thomas’s ethics and
theory of human action, John Bowlin contests this reading
of Thomas, revealing it to be more of a Kantian projection.
Instead, he recovers the essentially theological character of
Thomas’s moral theory and account of the human good,
and along with it Thomas’s careful ­attention to the ways

71
The former is characteristic of the so-called New Natural Theory advocated by
John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle; the latter is the view of more
traditional neo-Scholastics. As Bowlin shows, those who identify with the New
Natural Law reading of Thomas see the first precepts of the natural law as
elucidating a determinate set of non-contingent, pre-moral goods determinative
of happiness, from which modern moral philosophy can specify universal
rules of moral action, something they believe Thomas himself failed to do.
Some critics of New Natural Law theory argue that Thomas’s account of the
first precepts of the natural law do indeed prescribe certain moral actions as
universally binding. What both share, according to Bowlin, is the misguided
assumption that Thomas intends to offer a moral theory that “tells us what
to do by offering a collection of precepts from which specific obligations can
be derived” (Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 93). Yet this, Bowlin shows,
is manifestly what Thomas does not intend to do. As Thomas says in the
prologue to ST I-II.90, inquiry into the first precepts of the natural law is not
intended to offer instruction for those seeking moral guidance but “to consider
the extrinsic principles of action.” The first precepts, in other words, are not
prescriptive but descriptive of moral action. They specify the goods we intend
in action necessarily and which we naturally desire. See Bowlin, Contingency
and Fortune, 107–108.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

contingency, fortune, and chance shape human action.72

Bowlin’s principal achievement is to reposition Thomas’s
account of the moral life with respect to the t­ranscendent
object of human happiness, God, and in so doing elu-
cidate the consequences of identifying God as the sole
­non-­contingent good that ­persons seek. The chief conse-
quence of this is that all other human goods are contingent
ones, subject to chance and fortune, and constitutive of a
complex web of other diverse goods to which the human
will is indeterminately disposed. Here, I follow Bowlin’s
reading of Thomas in order to identify a further implica-
tion of this attention to contingency: the ineliminable place
of conflict in social and political life.
Perhaps the best place to begin a consideration of Thomas’s
understanding of the contingency of human moral action is
to reiterate his insistence that only God and supernatural
beatitude with God are goods tended to absolutely and nec-
essarily by the will. As he says, only God is “good universally
and from every point of view,” the object of every human
will which “tends to it of necessity, if it wills anything at
all.”73 God is the object of human happiness, yet what hap-
piness consists in, “whether in virtues, or knowledge or plea-
sure or anything else of the sort, has not been determined …
by nature,” Thomas writes.74 So while the good in general is
clearly known, the particular ways of realizing the good in
concrete human action are multiple and indeterminate. As
Thomas writes, “Under good in general are included many
particular goods, to none of which is the will determined.”75
Bowlin shows that, for Thomas, “all other potential objects

72
See especially chapter 3 of Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 93–137.
73
ST I-II.10.2, quoted in Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 60.
74
Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, 22.7, quoted in Bowlin, Contingency and
Fortune, 59.
75
ST I–II.10.1.3, quoted in Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 58.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

of the will are good contingently, for the most part, from
some points of view but not all, even those goods willed sim-
ply and absolutely.”76 In other words, in light of the neces-
sary, ultimate good of God, the immanent goods of human
life are imbued with non-necessity. This is to say, no par-
ticular contingent good is necessary to reach the final and
ultimate good, and also that any number of specific goods
and courses of action are capable of realizing the good in
particular.
A noticeable feature of Thomas’s account of the human
good is his sense that contingency arises not primarily out of
creaturely lack but out of the abundance of possible ways of
realizing the good in concrete courses of action and through
the pursuit of particular goods. Thomas’s understanding of
the good life is, then, quite capacious, far from the stodgy,
narrow imaginings of his modern interpreters. As Bowlin
notes, according to Thomas “we need not intend a narrow
collection of ends and pursue a fixed repertoire of actions in
order to flourish according to our kind.”77 In fact, he writes,
“the will is not disposed by natural necessity to intend and
pursue certain goods as ends” at all, aside from happiness,
whose object is God.78 In Thomas’s view, even life itself, a
good willed and loved simply and naturally, is not an abso-
lute good but a contingent one.79 Most of the time, for the
most part, and in most circumstances, life is to be desired,
loved, and preserved, and pursuing it will be a proper way
of attaining the good. Yet, as the examples of the martyrs
show, even this most basic natural good of life is still a
contingent one which may, in certain circumstances, actu-
ally impede attainment of the highest good of beatitude. In

76
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 60.
77
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 59.
78
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 58.
79
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 61. See ST I-II.10.1; 94.2.

172
 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

such cases, the good of self-preservation in fact undermines

the good of witness, which is chosen by the martyr as a
means of attaining happiness. Thus, even a good we assume
is most basic, absolute, and necessary – namely, physical
life – is decidedly contingent and non-necessary. As Bowlin
reminds of these contingent goods, “We are always able,
at least in principle, to achieve some measure of happiness
without first securing any one of them in particular,”80 even
as any of them may possibly be a reasonable means of pur-
suing happiness.
If all created goods are contingent in this way, choice –
the exercise of prudence to determine which good is to be
willed when, how, and under what conditions – is essential
to determining “whether some contingently good means is in
fact good in a particular instance for the purpose of achiev-
ing some intended end.”81 That we are given the freedom to
choose the particular ways in which to realize the good in
a world of contingency is, in Thomas’s view, the substan-
tive heart of moral agency. For Thomas, Bowlin shows, this
indeterminacy of means implies that, in any given set of cir-
cumstances, “we are not determined to one course of action
but indeterminately disposed to many and various things,
precisely ‘because of the nobility of (our) active principle,
namely, the soul, whose power extends in a certain way
to an infinite number of things’ (De virt. card. 6).”82 The
deliberation involved in choosing among particular means
to realize the good, Bowlin shows, is “both the principal
mark of rational human action” and “the telling sign of its
formal indeterminacy.”83 We should not be ­surprised by this

80
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 59.
81
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 61.
82
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 57.
83
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 57.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

emphasis on indeterminacy and contingency in Thomas’s

account of the moral life since his was, after all, an ethi-
cal theory concerned with the virtues and practical reason
rather than the determination of moral absolutes and uni-
versal rules. The virtues aid our pursuit of the good and our
realizing the good in concrete courses of action, but they do
not prescribe for us specific courses of action or a determi-
nate hierarchy of goods. As Bowlin explains, for Thomas,
“to say that we must be just and courageous, temperate and
wise in order to flourish according to our kind tells us noth-
ing about the specific activities we ought to pursue” or the
specific actions we must perform.84
Thomas is, on Bowlin’s reading, a moralist far more con-
cerned with the dispositions and character of the moral
agent than with successful obedience of moral precepts. This
is not to say that moral precepts have no place in Thomas’s
thinking, only that he recognizes their limited usefulness in
aiding good action in a world of contingency. Bowlin writes,
summarizing Thomas on this point:
If the objects of the will are contingent, good from some points
of view but not others (ST I–II.10.2), and if the will is indeter-
minately disposed to all things that are good (ST I–II.10.1, 4),
or nearly so (ST I–II.10.2), then the human good is too complex
and unstable, and the character of right judgment with respect
to that good too diverse and ad hoc, for us to think that praise-
worthy human action can be captured in a set of precepts that
specify rational choice with respect to that good.85

Even Thomas’s discussion of the first precepts of the natural

law, then, is less a specification of moral principles for action
and more a description of “the theater in which practical
reason acts, the various activities that occupy human life,

84
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 60.
85
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 115.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

and the various ends we pursue with nature’s necessity.”86

Natural law, in Thomas’s account, describes the general
goods we pursue in human action; it is not a set of prescrip-
tions regarding how to attain those goods.87
Within this theater of human action, the good can be real-
ized in a whole host of different ways, depending on cir-
cumstance. This is what it means for the human good to be
contingent. Moral precepts are less useful tools for discern-
ing, choosing, and fulfilling the good in these circumstances
than are virtues and dispositions for acting, and this is why
Thomas prefers to focus his moral theory on the latter. In
short, for Thomas, the virtues are necessary because of both
the abundance of possible ways of realizing the good in
particular and the great difficulty of doing so in a world of
chance and contingency. To use Bowlin’s term, the virtues
are ways of “coping” with the contingency of the human
good.88 It is not that we are ignorant of the universal good
of human creatures, which is beatitude, or that we fail to
know the good in general. Rather, as Bowlin puts it, it is
that “the good is difficult to know in particular, and diffi-
cult to will even when it is known, because of contingencies
of various kinds, within ourselves and in the circumstances

86
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 108.
87
Interestingly, on this point Bowlin is more than happy to agree with the New
Natural Law theorists who maintain that the first precepts “yield no concrete
obligations or prohibitions, at least not by themselves.” The disagreement is
over “the significance of this omission,” with the New Natural Law theorists
lamenting it and Bowlin celebrating it. On Bowlin’s reading, the first precepts
specify “the goods to which we are naturally inclined. They are not inclinations
we can decide to have or abandon, goods that we can consider desirable or not,
and therefore Aquinas does not imply that we ought to have these inclinations
or pursue these goods.” Rather, the first precepts sketch the field in which
moral actions as intelligible human actions occur. See Bowlin, Contingency and
Fortune, 107–108.
88
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 70.

175
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

of choice.”89 For Thomas, the difficulties of moral action

are numerous, arising from the recalcitrance of the pas-
sions, the vicissitudes of temporal life, and the inability to
anticipate fortune’s effects on our powers to act. Indeed, the
field of human action is so marked by these difficulties that
Thomas devotes an entire question in the Summa to coun-
sel (consilium) – the inquiry preceding choice which con-
cerns the available objects of choice and their circumstances
(ST I-II.14). Because “there is much uncertainty in things
that have to be done,” Thomas writes, and “because actions
are concerned with contingent singulars (singularia contin-
gentia), which by reason of their vicissitude are uncertain,”
practical reason must investigate the quickly changing and
complex circumstances within which choice proceeds (ST
I-II.14.1). When these variables of circumstance are joined
to the additional complexity of there being often numer-
ous possible courses of action available in any given set
of circumstances, knowing, choosing, and doing the good
becomes difficult. A “situation is created,” Bowlin writes,
“where the context of choice is diverse and complex and the
goodness of any potential means doubtful and uncertain.”90
The contingency of the human good in a world of chance
and uncertainty, in other words, renders moral action dif-
ficult. The virtues, in Thomas’s account, are dispositions
and habits that enable us to cope with this difficulty, to will
and do the good with constancy under these constraints and
pressures on moral agency.
The difficulty of contingency – that we must discern and
do the good in a world beyond our control and shaped by
fortuities and matters of chance – is also what occasions con-
flict in creaturely life, especially between creatures as they

89
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 5.
90
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 72.

176
 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

seek to do the good. What appears to me to be the right and

good course of action under a particular set of contingent
circumstances may not only be at odds with what another
perceives as good; it may also directly clash with another’s
desired course of action. My perception that a family recently
evicted from their home is most deserving of the remaining
available parish funds for assistance may collide with your
hope to use the same money to aid a parishioner’s burden
from a sudden, unexpected surgery and its debilitating costs.
To which cause we should employ the limited good of our
parish emergency fund will be the work of careful delibera-
tion of various contingent factors, terminating in a decision
over the best course of action to responsibly care for and love
our neighbors. But it will likely not fully satisfy all parties
involved. Conflicts over the use of shared goods like this are
many and familiar. What’s more, conflict may occur between
persons’ courses of action as they seek to do the good. My
intent to welcome a new family to the neighborhood with a
celebratory block party may interfere with your desire for an
early bedtime so as to capably aid a friend’s move early the
next morning. Conflicts between our various attempts to do
the good in a shared world of contingency are thus bound to
occur and demand negotiation.
Thomas was well aware of these kinds of conflicts and
the difficulties of resolving them in creaturely social life. It
is against the backdrop of the multiplicity of created goods,
varieties of human pursuits, and conflicts between them that
he develops his account of the common good. Accounting
for the common good can aid, in principle, the orchestration
of diverse goods and pursuits, as well as guide judgments
about their proper ordering. Yet Thomas did not view the
common good as a principle whose use would simply dis-
solve conflicts generated by the multiplicity of human goods
and the contingency of human action. Instead, the common

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

good is a formal principle that can aid the difficult delibera-

tive work of negotiation, particularly the ordering of private
and public goods. Even still, accounting for the common
good will not produce absolute agreement between persons
regarding their individual and collective attempts to real-
ize the good. For whereas with God, Thomas says, good is
apprehended universally and with respect to the common
good of the whole universe, finite creatures can only appre-
hend good under different aspects. An object can be consid-
ered “in various ways by the reason, so as to appear good
from one point of view, and not good from another point of
view.” For this reason, “various wills of various men can be
good in respect of opposite things.”91 Appeals to the com-
mon good, then, are not meant to resolve all differences or
achieve total uniformity and consensus, even if it can prove
to be a helpful principle for negotiating conflicting goods.
Bowlin’s 2016 book Tolerance among the Virtues can
be seen, in many ways, as a follow-up to his reading of
Thomas on contingency, an attempt to address this prob-
lematic of the limitation of the common good as a means
of negotiating moral conflict, disagreement, and differ-
ence. Bowlin here develops an account of tolerance along
broadly Thomistic lines as a “natural virtue” indexed to
the plurality of human pursuits and the indeterminacy of
human action.92 In other words, while appeals to the com-
mon good may be sufficient for resolving certain kinds
of conflict, other conflicts and disagreements demand the
patient endurance of objectionable difference. Against
those who aspire to “moral colloquy” as a preeminent
ideal and thus see pluralism as an unvirtuous concession

91
ST I-II.19.10, quoted in Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 71–72.
92
John R. Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016), see especially chapter 2, “A Natural Virtue.”

178
 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

to social fragmentation, Bowlin argues that certain kinds

of moral plurality and disagreement are unavoidable fea-
tures of human creatureliness. “Human beings,” he writes,
“love many different goods, rank them in competing, often
contrary, ways, and lead, as a result, many distinct, and at
times, incompatible lives.”93 Because of this natural plural-
ity, human creatures are in need of – indeed, their humanity
comes packaged with – a capacity for negotiating difference
in a way that neither expects full agreement and resolution
of differences in unified consensus nor resents the inability
to achieve such consensus and colloquy. This is the virtue
of tolerance. According to Bowlin, tolerance is a virtue that
enables us to bear objectionable difference, disagreement,
and variance in judgment for the sake of the common life
we share with others.94 It is a “habitual willingness,” in
fact, “to endure the right sorts of objectionable differences
for the sake of the peaceful society and individual auton-
omy” we share with others, and principally for the sake of
those with whom we share these goods.95 The virtue of tol-
erance, in this sense, is a species of justice, for it “endures
the objectionable difference of some other in order to secure
for them the common good that is their due” – in this case,
the goods of peace, society, and autonomy.96 And this is
precisely what distinguishes the virtue of tolerance from its
semblances, especially the endurance of difference begrudg-
ingly, resentfully, or on the condition that it eventually
be overcome. The truly tolerant, Bowlin argues, patiently

93
Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, 67.
94
Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, 102. “The tolerant,” Bowlin says later,
“endure the objectionable differences of another in order to maintain the
society they share, the peace that abides between them, and the autonomy each
enjoys with respect to the differences in dispute;” 118.
95
Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, 126.
96
Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, 126.

179
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

endure objectionable difference because they will the good

of those tolerated, simply and absolutely, and the society
and autonomy shared with them.
Bowlin’s recovery of a robust account of tolerance for
democratic politics is a valuable contribution to religious
ethics. Certainly, Bowlin is right to suggest that the contin-
gency of the human good makes absolute unity in judgment
and moral colloquy neither possible nor desirable. Natural
difference, as he shows, is part and parcel of the real free-
dom of human agency. It is also what makes tolerance nec-
essary. Nevertheless, it is unclear that tolerance of the sort
Bowlin defends is capable of sufficiently incorporating the
forms of contestation and conflictual dispute I have been
arguing are critical to a vibrant, pluralist democratic poli-
tics, and for two key reasons.
First, Bowlin is inhibited in this regard by his belief that
conflict is primarily, indeed exclusively, attributable to cre-
ation’s fallenness. Difference, for him, is natural and fun-
damental, but conflict is not. As he says, “The conflicts and
sorrows that accompany the diversity of human goods and
loves are neither necessary nor unavoidable. They are, rather,
consequences of sin.”97 Though he admits the potential for
conflict was present in paradise, “that potential creates no
necessity. Had Adam not sinned and humanity remained
in paradise that danger would have been diffused by wise
judgment” and the issuing of law to coordinate and resolve
“various incompatibilities” between the diversity of crea-
turely goods according to reason.98 Here, Bowlin seems to
betray his argument regarding the contingency of the human
good. The notion that all potential conflicts among creatures
could be resolved by right use of reason and law ascribes to

97
Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, 73n.24.
98
Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues, 73n.24.

180
 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

humans a divine-like, rather than creaturely, form of knowl-

edge, one infinite and omniscient rather than properly finite
and contingent. Moreover, it is unclear why Bowlin feels the
need to identify conflict with sin in this way, admitting only
its unhappy consequences and not its potential for creativity
and development. It seems, for him, there is a substantive
difference between the natural multiplicity and contingency
of finite goods – conflicts among goods, we might say – and
the social reality of conflict between persons, which he sees
primarily as a kind of alienation or enmity. But we should
question such a sharp distinction between these. On the one
hand, we simply cannot easily separate the clashing of par-
ticular goods, courses of action, desires, and so on from the
people who embody and pursue them. On the other hand,
we should resist thinking of both conflicts between goods,
actions, desires, and so on and conflict between persons in
exclusively negative terms. If conflict is instead seen as inte-
gral to human development and action, as I have been argu-
ing, then one need not see conflict as an evil. Conflict, rather,
can be appreciated for its capacity to generate newness, to
develop what exists only in potential, and to imaginatively
forge patterns of mutual relation and common life amidst
difference. Bowlin’s belief in conflict’s sinful origins limits
his capacity to see this productive and generative charac-
ter of conflict. In short, he refuses to ascribe contingency to
creation all the way down, even to its essential goodness.
Failing to see the fullness of conflict’s goodness, his account
of tolerance circumvents the possibilities of an agonistic
democratic politics.
Second, while tolerance is certainly an appropriate
response to some differences, there are many other instances
in which difference can and should be challenged and dis-
puted. Bowlin himself acknowledges this and does not
view tolerance as a blanket solution to disagreement and

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

difference. But discerning which objectionable differences

one should patiently endure and which one should contest
is a difficult business. A danger lurks, therefore, of resorting
to tolerance when conflictual negotiation and dispute would
actually be the more productive path forward. Tolerance can
too quickly give up on the possibility of conversion, of both
self and other. As Rowan Williams makes clear, conflict is
often a site of profound revision, reconstruction, and media-
tion of the self and its desires. Conflict can yield insights, per-
spectives, and possibilities unavailable to us apart from and
prior to such negotiations. The danger of tolerance is that it
can discourage us from the kinds of conflict in which we and
others have our desires, convictions, and hopes changed, and
so also the possibilities for our common life. Tolerance can
encourage a distancing from difference, keeping the other at
arm’s length rather than engaging in the hope of conversion.
What I am retrieving from Bowlin’s reading of Aquinas,
the contingency of the human good and the pluralities con-
stitutive of our nature, then, are the insights of Bowlin’s
theological anthropology more than his prescriptive ethics of
tolerance. Imagining alternative and more political ways of
negotiating conflict and difference will be the task of Chapter
4. Here I wish simply to affirm Bowlin’s important proposals
for reading Thomas and his delineation of the way differ-
ence, contingency, and disagreement are irreducible features
of human being and action. Tolerance is but one possible
way of addressing the conflicts and disagreements such con-
tingency produces. Agonistic politics is another.

3.2.3 Embodiment
Both finitude and contingency are features of human crea-
turehood in part because they are entailments of creaturely
materiality. The form of materiality possessed by living

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

creatures like human beings is “embodiment.” As M. Shawn

Copeland notes, it is precisely the body that “shapes human
existence as relational and social.”99 Embodiment, in other
words, is the medium of human creatures’ relationality. In
this section, I wish to return to the question of relation, this
time through the prism of embodiment. I argued in Chapter
1 that both Augustinian postliberals and civic liberals go
awry in their analogical conceptualizations of Trinitarian
and human sociality by failing to reckon with the ways
human relations are bounded by creaturely limits. Unlike
the eternal perichoretic communion of the Trinity, human
creatures experience relation through the medium of their
bodies. And it is exactly this embodiment, and the complex-
ities of relation, distance, and separateness that emerge from
it, that is a source of conflict in creaturely social life, unlike
the divine Trinity.
Ian McFarland speaks of the importance of materiality
for creaturely relation, generally speaking, and the differ-
ence from divine relation this entails, in terms of space. With
respect to God, he writes, “The three hypostases are fully
present to one another as Trinity … By contrast, all crea-
tures are not immediately present to each other in this way.
Instead the possibility of creatures’ presence to one another
is a function of place, their relative locations in space and
time.”100 Indeed, that creatures occupy space with their bod-
ies is the very “condition of the possibility for their being
present to one another.”101 Proximity and distance mark
the various kinds of presence and relation creatures can
have to one another. Sexual intimacy, as McFarland notes,
is an instance of presence with extremely close proximity,

99
M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 2.
100
McFarland, From Nothing, 65. 101 McFarland, From Nothing, 65.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

while gravitational pull is a relation often occurring across

great distance.102 In every case, however, presence and rela-
tion are, for living creatures, mediated by the body. And
for human creatures this is especially and wonderfully so.
Embodiment mediates, and so also delimits, the forms of
communion and relation human creatures are ordered to.
Separateness and conflict are, I will argue, constitutive fea-
tures of that communion. Few thinkers have appreciated
this frailty of embodied life, along with its possibilities for
beauty and love, like the American philosopher Stanley
Cavell. I turn now to Cavell’s understanding of skepticism,
separateness, and embodiment in order to suggest that, inso-
far as separateness is an ineliminable feature of embodied
relation, conflict lingers as a possibility.
Central to Cavell’s philosophical project, and his major
work The Claim of Reason in particular, is an engagement
with modern skepticism. Through a reading of Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Cavell argues
that philosophy errs in attempting to overcome the skeptical
impulse introduced by Shakespeare and Descartes. Instead,
philosophy must acknowledge and respond to the “truth of
skepticism,” which also entails a “reinterpretation of what
skepticism is, or threatens.”103 Far from an epistemological
problem to be overcome, Cavell shows, skepticism emerges
as a difficulty of ordinary life to be negotiated and endured.
Insofar as our common life in language is made possible by
agreements, conventions, and the like, the skeptic’s ques-
tioning, doubt, contestation, and denial of this commonness
and these agreements is always a “natural possibility.”104

102
McFarland, From Nothing, 66.
103
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7.
104
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 47. Cavell defines skepticism as “any view which
takes the existence of the world to be a problem of knowledge,” which

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

Language-use and our attunement in language – which is

to say, thought and sociality – rest on no certain foun-
dations beyond or beneath these agreements and so are
always open to failure and subject to doubt. Pragmatism
and rationalism attempt, in different ways, to resolve this
frailty of our common life in language by refuting skepti-
cism and defending the possibility of epistemological and
moral certainty. Cavell, on the other hand, resists both ref-
utation and capitulation to skepticism, proposing instead
an ethics of acknowledgment capable of negotiating the
ever-present threat of skepticism, both from others and in
ourselves.
A critical strand of Cavell’s response to the problem of
skepticism concerns the body, its natural expressiveness
and opacity.105 Cavell’s attention to human embodiment
is at the heart not only of his response to skepticism but
also of his understanding of language-use more gener-
ally.106 Put simply, speech is, for Cavell, always a bodily
activity. Naturally, then, Cavell shows, skepticism’s frus-
tration with the fragility of language, the inability to deliver
certain knowledge regarding the world and others, extends

includes not just “philosophers who wind up denying we can ever know,”
but also those who seek to refute them. Underlying skepticism is a “wish
for the connection between my claims of knowledge and the objects upon
which the claims are to fall to occur without my intervention, apart from my
agreements” (Claim of Reason, 351–352).
105
See also the important discussions of language and body in Cavell in Stephen
Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing
Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990), 53–90; Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell:
Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002),
59–91; and Jônadas Techio, “Seeing Souls: Wittgenstein and Cavell on the
‘Problem of Other Minds,’” Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies 1
(2013): 63–84.
106
On the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Cavell’s thinking on this
matter, see Andrew Norris, Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical
Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 64–65.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

also to the body. Skepticism is a denial of the body, Cavell

says; it insists that the “body of the other seals me out”
and hides the other “inside.”107 This aspect of skepticism
is made especially evident in philosophical debates about
“other minds,” a subject Cavell addresses at several points
throughout The Claim of Reason, often with reference to
Wittgenstein’s discussion of pain and pain-behavior. The
skeptic, Cavell suggests, will consider a person wincing and
groaning, touching her jaw, and exhibiting a red mark on
her cheek to have given insufficient criteria for determin-
ing with certainty whether or not the pain of a toothache
is “really there.” How can I be sure, the skeptic will won-
der, that the person is not feigning, rehearsing, expressing
some other emotion, exhibiting what might be identified as
pain-behavior but without possessing actual pain? If crite-
ria cannot guarantee certain knowledge of the existence of
something like pain, the skeptic wonders, can other sorts
of criteria secure knowledge of anything? Cavell’s response
to the skeptic is to explain what criteria can and can’t give
us, what they are meant to show (in Cavell’s terms, they
can determine something’s identity but not its existence; its
being so, but not its being so).108 But, more importantly
for my purposes, Cavell draws attention to what the skep-
tic’s doubt reveals about his understanding of the body. It
is certainly likely, the skeptic will admit, that the woman
exhibiting all the pain-behaviors we normally identify with
toothaches does in fact have the pain of a toothache. But is
it certain? How can I know for sure? It seems, Cavell sug-
gests, the skeptic will not be satisfied until criteria can show
him the pain “behind” the pain behavior, the reality of pain

107
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 427.
108
See especially, chapter 4, “What a Thing Is (Called),” in Cavell, Claim of
Reason, 65–85.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

beneath its bodily expression. The skeptic will consider his

knowledge of the toothache, however justified, to be still
uncertain because, as Peter Dula puts it, “all that wincing
and groaning don’t get us to the pain itself. The pain itself
is there, somewhere, but the criteria cannot reach that far.
They stop at the body. We are stopped by the body.”109
What the skeptic’s dilemma reveals, Cavell sees, is a
refusal to acknowledge the body’s natural expressivity and
our natural response to the body in pain as a legitimate
form of knowledge. It is to deny our ordinary knowledge
of others in favor of some other “best case” for knowing
them, which is to say, a disembodied form of knowing, or
knowing that is not mediated by and through the body.
Moreover, Cavell shows, it is to refuse a kind of knowing
that places one in responsive relationship to another, in this
case one of empathy and compassion. What the skeptic lacks
is not knowledge – as if there were more to be known about
someone in pain than their bodily expression of pain – but
responsiveness and responsibility. Again, as Dula puts it,
“The skeptic discovers that knowledge is not enough and
so despairs. Cavell discovers that the skeptic relies on an
impoverished account of knowledge and then argues that
knowledge includes my responsiveness.”110 The kind of
embodied relation and bodily communication involved
in knowing others additionally involves what Cavell calls
“letting oneself be known, waiting to be known,”111 which
demands one acknowledge one’s own body as similarly
expressive and make it available to be understood in its
expressivity. As Cavell puts it:

109
Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 123.
110
Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology, 124.
111
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 459.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

To let yourself matter is to acknowledge not merely how it is

with you, and hence to acknowledge that you want the other
to care, at least to care to know. It is equally to acknowledge
that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours,
that you are in them. This means allowing yourself to be com-
prehended, something you can always deny. Not to deny it is,
I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of
your expressions, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever
be of you.112

In response to the truth of skepticism – that we cannot attain

knowledge of others with certainty and so must “live our
skepticism” in the form of acknowledgment – Cavell reveals
the body to be the site of expression and knowing.113 In other
words, embodiment is the condition for relation, of knowing
another and being known by them.
Inasmuch as the body is the condition of our knowing
and being known – we cannot know and be known by
another except by acknowledging their body and ours – the
body also delimits human relation, sets the terms for how
human beings can relate. In particular, the body generates
distance between persons and opacity in their knowing and
being known. “It is because the body reveals the self that the
body conceals the self,” Dula writes.114 Not, we must add,
because the body hides something of the other “inside,” but
rather because the body, the “field of expression of the soul,”

112
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 383, italics mine.
113
Cavell writes beautifully of this in terms of “reading a physiognomy,” a notion
he draws from Wittgenstein. “Human expressions,” he writes, “the human
figure, to be grasped, must be read. To know another mind is to interpret
a physiognomy … I have to read the physiognomy, and see the creature
according to my reading, and treat it according to my seeing. The human
body is the best picture of the human soul – not, I feel like adding, primarily
because it represents the soul but because it expresses it. The body is the field
of expression of the soul. The body is of the soul; it is the soul’s; a human soul
has a human body.” Cavell, Claim of Reason, 356.
114
Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology, 81.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

cannot be exhausted by possessive “mere knowing.”115 The

body, in other words, is a buffer, marking the limits of
knowing, forcing self and other to acknowledgment instead,
demanding they yield to the distance between them. Cavell
will call this aspect of relation “separateness.” Separateness
is the distance between embodied creatures, a distance that
can be traversed but never done away with, never removed.
To do so would be to transcend finitude, to obliterate the
body.116 Separateness is a fact of embodiment. Something
of this truth is captured, Cavell thinks, in the metaphor of
the body as a “veil” of the soul. Cavell rejects the dualist
ideas of inner and outer, interior and exterior, this image
implies but nevertheless affirms its intuition – namely, that
the other is separate from me, that there is space between us.
“The truth here is that we are separate,” Cavell writes, “but
not necessarily separated (by something); that we are, each
of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each of us is this one and not
that, each here and not there, each now and not then.”117
Separateness is generated by the body not because it hides
something – the soul, mind, and so on – but because “it essen-
tially reveals it.”118 The issue at hand, then, is not that the
other’s body conceals something from me, but rather that it
marks space within which relation can occur. “If something
separates us, comes between us,” Cavell says, it is because
of a “particular way in which we relate, or are related (by
birth, by law, by force, in love) to one another – our pos-
itions, our attitudes, with reference to one another. Call
this our history. It is our present.”119 In short, separateness

115
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 356.
116
See Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology, 169, on the
relationship between separateness, embodiment, and finitude, and their
theological resonances in Cavell.
117
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369. 118 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369.
119
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

obtains as a necessary aspect of embodiment; it marks the

space where my flesh ends and yours begins, and so also the
possibility of our relation.
The other’s separateness, and my responsibility to and for
that separateness, is exactly what the skeptic wishes to deny,
either by overcoming it or by refusing relation altogether,
ceding to simple alterity. The skeptic is disappointed with
the limits of embodied knowing, “as though we have, or
have lost, some picture of what knowing another, or being
known by another, would really come to – a harmony, a
concord, a union, a transparence, a governance, a power –
against which our actual successes at knowing, and being
known, are poor things.”120 Cavell’s descriptions here of
the skeptic’s aspirations for knowledge are important. They
register the violence, domination, and forced unity entailed
in the attempt to transcend the body in creaturely relation.
We might say they describe the attempt to wrest from God
a form of communion appropriate only for the infinite. The
consequence of this transgression of embodied creatureli-
ness is the violation and destruction of the body.
Responding to the limits of human knowing and being
known, Cavell suggests, is a principal theme of tragedy.121
Cavell concludes The Claim of Reason, drawing together
his notions of separateness, embodiment, knowing and
acknowledging, with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello.
What Shakespeare reveals in the tragedy, Cavell says, is “the
body’s fate under skepticism.”122 Cavell has a particular
interest in Othello’s obsession with Desdemona’s faithfulness

120
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 440.
121
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5–6: “Tragedy is the working
out of a response to skepticism…an interpretation of what skepticism is itself
an interpretation of.”
122
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 481.

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 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

to him. What Iago cultivates and exacerbates in Othello, to

the point of insanity, is an anxiety about Desdemona’s oth-
erness, her inability to be rendered fully transparent to him.
Unless Desdemona can be fully known – which is to say,
comprehended, possessed, made an object of knowledge –
her fidelity cannot be guaranteed. At stake for Othello is
Desdemona’s separateness. “He cannot forgive Desdemona
for existing,” Cavell comments, “for being separate from
him, outside, beyond command, commanding, her captain’s
captain.”123 Indeed, what Othello cannot accept is the great
mystery of marriage, that separateness is not overcome even
in union. As Cavell puts it elsewhere, in marriage “the ques-
tion of two becoming one is just half the problem; the other
half is how one becomes two.”124 Othello cannot accept
Desdemona as separate, and his inability to acknowledge her
as such drives him to a violent pursuit of knowledge, a trans-
gression of her body.
Importantly, Othello does not, cannot seriously, doubt his
knowledge of Desdemona’s love for him, Cavell argues. Such
has been demonstrated in her embodied life with him. What
Othello lacks, Cavell says, is not knowledge but acknowl-
edgment. He simply could not yield to what he could not
fail to know. And so his desire for certainty drives him to
murder, to the destruction of Desdemona’s body, which he
can only see as an obstacle to transparency, a veil hiding
her secret. His violence, his violation of Desdemona’s body,
seeks a knowledge more intimate than sex. Othello quite lit-
erally smothers her with his possessiveness, “on a different
bed but with the same wedding sheets,” a kind of twisted
reenactment of their interrupted wedding night.125 Love,
intimacy, and sex are unstable forms of relation for Othello;

123
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 491. 124 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 220.
125
Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology, 152.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

they expose his own dependence, call him to acknowledge

his finitude, his humanness. Thus, Othello opts instead for
what Gillian Rose calls “edgeless love,” love that “effaces
the risk of relation: that mix of exposure and reserve, of rev-
elation and reticence.” Edgeless love “commands the com-
plete unveiling of the eyes, the transparency of the body.”126
Its love is possession. Killing is the only act capable of fully
rendering Desdemona a possession, an inanimate object
of knowledge. This is the end of skepticism, Cavell shows.
Finitude is interpreted as intellectual lack and certainty is
pursued, quite literally, to death.
Separateness is a fact of embodiment, and Othello shows
the dangers of responding to our separateness in denial,
aspiring to a divine-like form of relation which transgresses
the limits and integrity of creatures’ bodies. But violence
is not a necessary response to separateness. The alterna-
tive to Othello’s and the skeptic’s quests for certainty is to
take responsibility for our separateness, to recognize that
our commonness and separateness are mutually constitutive
realities; indeed, that there is no commonness without sep-
arateness. Tragedy reveals the same truth as Wittgenstein’s
famous thought experiments in private language: that “there
is no assignable end to the depth of us to which language
reaches; that nevertheless there is no end to our separate-
ness. We are endlessly separate, for no reason.”127 And yet,
writes Cavell, we are nonetheless “answerable for every-
thing that comes between us; if not for causing it then for
continuing it; if not for denying it then for affirming it; if
not for it then to it.”128 This is what it means to identify
difference as constitutive of community, separateness as

126
Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: Schocken
Books, 1995), 105–106.
127
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369. 128 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369.

192
 3.2 Finitude, Contingency, Embodiment

produced in and by commonness, and both as irreducible

features of creatureliness. To assume responsibility for and
to our separateness means, first of all, embracing the limits
creatureliness imposes on our capacities for relation. The
Triune persons love one another by the union of indwelling;
the Triune God loves creation by incarnation, uniting flesh
to God in hypostatic union; human creatures attain to salva-
tion by union with Christ and divinization in God. Each of
these forms of relation entails a communion uninhibited by
distance and separateness. But creatures relate to other crea-
tures within the limits of creaturehood, embracing distance,
separateness. And just as marriages, friendships, and com-
panionships must involve a recognition of separateness for
them to survive, Cavell shows, so also communities depend
on the integrity of difference, the allowance of space for
another to be on her own terms. Such communities resemble
what Roland Barthes saw in various “idiorrhythmic com-
munities” throughout history which embodied “distance as
a value,” organizing a common life without uniformity and
so achieving a “socialism of distance.”129
Second, assuming responsibility for our separateness
demands a willingness to negotiate the conflicts separate-
ness produces. To admit separateness is to admit the pos-
sibility of conflict, that my love might be unrequited, that
your desires might be opposite mine, that I may be misunder-
standing or misinterpreting you and you me. While these and
other conflicts entail loss and involve change, they belong to
the dynamic goodness of creaturely life, not its corruption.
Insofar as separateness is, then, not a lamentable aspect of

129
Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some
Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), 6, 132. See also Corina Stan, The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in
Twentieth-Century Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2018), 115–145.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

fallen humanity, but a constitutive feature of the goodness

of creaturely sociality, the conflicts produced by our sepa-
rateness must not be resented, even if they can be mourned.
Could we not, after all, imagine heartbreak in paradise? Not
as a consequence of moral failure or wrongdoing, but sim-
ply as an inevitable outworking of the conflicts produced
by our multiple and varying desires and ways of realizing
them, our limited and finite agency, the contingency of our
goods, our separateness. What belongs to the order of sin
is not conflict and separateness, but the failure of responsi-
bility to and for that separateness. Othello was unwilling to
love Desdemona as a creature, unable to bear the difficul-
ties her separateness occasioned, and so refused his marriage,
refused responsibility. In this, we see conflict arise to the level
of moral failure, as it often does. Conflicts natural to us as
creatures can, and often do, materialize as violence, injustice,
harm, hatred, and any number of other forms of wrong and
estrangement. Not all conflicts belong to creation’s good-
ness, to be sure; many very clearly belong to its corruption.
The point here, however, is that there is no necessity to con-
flict’s becoming so. There are ways, as Cavell puts it, of suc-
cessfully “encompassing conflict” within relationality and
community that allow “the continuance of personal relation-
ships against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of mis-
understanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments,
loyalties, interests and needs.”130 Moral community is one,
family another, religion a third, and so on. In Chapter 4, I
will propose the democratic forging of common judgments
as still another, and distinctly political, way of being respon-
sible for and to our separateness. My point here is simply
that conflict is rooted in the ordinary realities of our sepa-
rateness, and is thus inherent to the possibility of relation.

130
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 269.

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 3.3 Ordinary Conflict: A (Very) Brief Phenomenology

3.3 Ordinary Conflict: A (Very) Brief Phenomenology

It is one thing to arrive at a theoretical account of con-
flict through analytical considerations of universal dimen-
sions of human creaturehood like finitude, contingency,
and embodiment. But does our common experience of
conflict – in marriage, friendship, family, neighborhood,
religious community, the workplace, and so on – disclose
to us any further insights about conflict’s nature, origins,
or possibilities? I wish to close with a set of more or less
phenomenological reflections on our ordinary experience
of conflict, in order to show not only how conflict arises
simply from the fact of creaturehood, but also that conflict
is constitutive of the sorts of social relations necessary for
our flourishing. Reflecting on conflict in ordinary life, that
is, pushes us to see that many of the conflicts we find our-
selves in have their origins not in moral error or failure,
sin or misapprehension of the good, but in the goodness
and flourishing of creaturely sociality. Rather than being
an accidental feature of these relations, or a corruption of
them, conflict often originates in the use of finite, embodied
practical reason to realize the good in a world of contin-
gency shared with others. And for this reason, I suggest,
few would assert that the conflicts constitutive of relations
like marriage, friendship, and other deeply intimate forms
of companionship, however difficult, are simply and purely
negations of those relationships. Rather, conflict, and in
particular, conflict well negotiated, is an integral and indel-
ible feature of flourishing relations.
Consider a quite ordinary example. A married couple,
call them Julie and Joseph, must decide where to live. Julie’s
research fellowship is nearing its completion and Joseph’s
consulting job has allowed him to begin working entirely
from home. The couple has grown weary of living and

195
 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

raising their children in their large northeastern city, and

a move is on the near horizon. Two possibilities emerge
as most favorable: Julie has been offered a new research
position in Arizona which would allow her more resources
and opportunities to continue her groundbreaking can-
cer research than has ever been available to her. Julie has
become an important emerging voice in her field, and it
is clear that this appointment would not only be a smart
career move but would also result in major strides in can-
cer research generally. Joseph’s new dispensation to work
remotely has made it possible for the family to leave the
northeast in the first place, something he was promised
some years ago and which has since generated a longing to
move to North Carolina, near Julie’s parents, with whom
both he and the children have become very close. Both Julie
and Joseph agree that raising their children near Julie’s par-
ents, especially during the early years of their children’s
lives and the few years her aging parents have left, is emi-
nently important, to say nothing of the benefit of additional
childcare, which they desperately need as working parents.
Both options have clear benefits and costs, distributed dif-
ferently to each spouse. Julie intensely desires the move to
Arizona, an opportunity both to realize her evident skills,
intelligence, and vocation and to contribute to extraordi-
narily important developments in cancer research that will
no doubt save lives. Joseph has been pining for the move
to North Carolina for years and sees the good of proximity
to family as a clear priority, especially at this point in their
lives. While both spouses understand the obvious benefits
and costs of each option, after numerous deliberations they
remain in disagreement about the most prudent decision to
make. A conflict has emerged.
It is clear from this example, of which numerous ana-
logues exist in nearly every marriage, friendship, family,

196
 3.3 Ordinary Conflict: A (Very) Brief Phenomenology

and social group, that conflict has emerged not from any
party’s moral fault, error, sin, misapprehension of the good,
or even simple self-interest. Rather, conflict emerges exactly
from those aspects of creaturely existence named earlier –
that finite, embodied human creatures must realize the good
and pursue their various and diverse desires and aspira-
tions together in a world of contingency. Julie and Joseph’s
embodiment means, most obviously, that they cannot live
in two places at the same time, at least not in the sense they
clearly wish. But embodiment also figures in this conflict in a
number of other ways, as well: in that Julie, Joseph, and the
kids simply cannot have the same kind of relationship with
Julie’s parents living in Arizona that they would living near
them; in that living in North Carolina would limit the mate-
rial resources available to Julie in her research, occasioning
more travel and time spent on research visits; in that at the
heart of Julie’s research aspirations is surely a deep desire to
see healing for the afflicted bodies of those who suffer can-
cer, a desire likely generated by her own experience watch-
ing Joseph’s parents die and her embodied presence to and
with them in their suffering. The difficulty of the situation is
then compounded by finitude.
An apparent resolution to the conflict might be to spend,
say, five years in Arizona before moving permanently to
North Carolina, thus allowing both spouses to realize, at
least in part, their conflicting hopes. But this plan must nev-
ertheless be carried out in time, shaped by its vulnerabili-
ties, precarities, and risks. Will Julie’s parents be alive in
five years? If so, what will their health conditions be? Will
the children be able to have the same relationship with their
grandparents then, having been more distant for their early
years? What will the passage of time do to the relationships
between Julie and Joseph, the couple and Julie’s parents,
and each to the children/grandchildren? How will each of

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

these relationships and the persons within them change and

develop over time? Is five years a sufficient amount of time
to make the strides in research Julie really wishes to make?
Such are the practical questions generated by consideration
of finitude’s conditioning of choice. Finally, it is clear that
Julie and Joseph’s conflict is, at bottom, a conflict generated
by the contingency of the human good and their disagree-
ment about the best possible means to realize that good
within the constraints of space and time. This is to say, it is
a conflict in their use of practical reason. They may discern,
deliberate, seek counsel, and exchange reasons as much as
they wish, but Julie and Joseph will likely never discover
a clear “right” answer to their dilemma. In this moment,
the genuine goods of vocation, medical advance, and family
cannot be coordinated so as to fully realize each of them,
nor can a theoretical “hierarchy of goods” be appealed to
in order to ensure certainty in their judgment. They must
exercise prudence about contingent singulars in order to
make the best judgment they can about how to best realize
the good and which contingent goods to pursue, given their
circumstances.
It is also important to acknowledge that what exists
before Julie and Joseph is a genuine, rather than simply
apparent, conflict, a situation wherein two sets of goods,
desires, and goals are not fully compatible and cannot be
fully realized together. The conflict cannot be easily resolved
by choosing either one of the two options, even if a general
consensus and agreement can be reached eventually about
which course of action to take. A number of compromises
can be made, making the conflict more bearable for one
or both spouses. But compromise will entail sacrifice, loss,
and sorrow; it will not provide full resolution. It is nearly
inevitable that one, perhaps both, of the spouses will suf-
fer some kind of loss. The loss need not necessarily result

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 3.3 Ordinary Conflict: A (Very) Brief Phenomenology

in resentment, misery, or personal damage; it could just as

well lead to transformations of desire, realizations of previ-
ously unknown aspirations and longings, or the cultivation
of certain virtues and deeper love and fidelity born of sac-
rifice. Loss, in other words, need not necessarily terminate
in simple negation; it can generate new forms of discovery,
growth, and development. But it is loss, nonetheless.
Situations like Julie and Joseph’s reveal that conflicts
between goods, desires, and actions are not simply matters
of practical negotiation. They also involve deeply affective,
existential, and relational dimensions and complexities.
Addressing the objective conflict at hand will likely entail
frustrations, sorrows, tensions, disappointments, miscommu-
nications, and misunderstandings between Julie and Joseph.
Indeed, there is simply no way to engage in deliberation
and negotiation about their conflict without these agonistic
dynamics emerging and contributing to the difficulty of their
decision-making. Julie will wonder about possible effects on
her future career if she declines the job offer; she may experi-
ence anxiety about the position not turning out as expected,
should the family make the move; she will fear that Joseph
might resent her for so desiring this job, and that her parents
will not understand the opportunity she has been given; she
will face uncertainty about whether she desires the research
position for genuinely noble or for selfish reasons. Joseph will
face similar difficulties: he may feel frustrated that, finally
having the opportunity to relocate to North Carolina, this
long hoped for desire might go unfulfilled; he might feel Julie
is failing to understand the importance of being near her par-
ents in this time; perhaps he will wrestle with guilt over ask-
ing Julie to sacrifice an important career advance. In their
deliberations, they will likely, at times, speak harshly, misrep-
resent the other’s position, fail to consider all complexities in
the situation, confuse the other’s disagreement with personal

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

hostility, and more. But also, over the course of difficult late-
night discussions, they will discover feelings, hopes, longings,
and desires previously unknown or unspoken. Some of these
they will lament, but others they will celebrate. They will
apologize, express surprise, have illusions broken, undergo
changes in the very desires and aspirations perpetuating the
conflict in the first place. Perhaps they will discover more
about themselves and each other, even grow to love each
other more deeply. Conflict can occasion any number of tra-
jectories for growth, self-knowledge, self-realization, and the
cultivation of virtue. And, most importantly, conflict makes
this all possible in ways unavailable to Julie and Joseph prior
to, or independent of, negotiating the conflict. Years down
the road, they will understand that the substance of their mar-
riage has been defined by their negotiation of this conflict.
In many ways, they will see that their marriage simply is the
ongoing negotiation of conflicts like these.
Finally, another critically important reality emerges
from analyzing a conflict like Julie and Joseph’s: the need
for judgment. It is clear that, given their temporal finitude,
Julie and Joseph cannot delay the final act of making a
decision until full and absolute agreement and consensus
is reached, resolving all lingering doubts, questions, anx-
ieties, and concerns. At some point, their apartment lease
will end, Julie’s job offer will be rescinded, children will
age, grandparents will die. The need for judgment is gen-
erated by finitude’s constraint on human action. This, in
fact, is a constraint practical reason faces in nearly every
instance: Finitude demands we exercise judgment without
being able to fully consider every contingency and even-
tuality, or receive guidance from every possible source of
counsel, or secure the agreement of every person affected
by a decision. As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, “The prac-
tice of judgment precludes an indefinite search for insight

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 3.3 Ordinary Conflict: A (Very) Brief Phenomenology

and understanding.”131 And so a judgment must be made

without arriving at certainty. On the other hand, the wise
exercise of judgment surely cannot mean that one partner
simply decides, with the other ceding completely to the
desires of the decider, evading the difficult work of deliber-
ation and discernment. The judgment made by the couple
must, in some way, be a common judgment, terminating in
a shared action. The dilemma they face, and that all well-
negotiated conflicts face, is how to make a common judg-
ment without full agreement. The goal of Chapter 4 will be
to answer exactly this question.
What would a successful negotiation of Julie and Joseph’s
conflict look like? I have no desire to specify a particular
course of action that would count as successful for Julie and
Joseph – such a prescription would undermine my argu-
ment for the importance of practical reason. Julie and Joseph
must come to a judgment and make a decision in light of
the particularities and complexities of their situation which
only they can fully know. What can be said is that a suc-
cessful negotiation of the conflict will include, in some way,
the encompassing of conflict, the recognition of loss, the pre-
served memory of contestation, within Julie and Joseph’s
relationship. Their marriage, that is, will incorporate loss and
make meaning of it within the story of the couple’s common
life together, even after they make a decision and take action.
They must not forget the loss and sacrifice made but must
allow the memory of conflict to live so as to preserve the gen-
uine contingency of their decision, resisting the conclusion
that this choice was absolutely necessary and thus also irre-
versible. Julie and Joseph will need to be able, in principle, to
undo their decision, reformulate it, or reorganize its terms if

131
Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005), 22.

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

it turns out to have been the wrong one or if circumstances

drastically change. In such cases, they may need to improvise
and alter their original decision, incorporating new realities
and acknowledging new contingencies, and this depends,
in part, on the memory of contestation and conflict. A suc-
cessful negotiation of Julie and Joseph’s conflict will entail
their “tarrying with the negative,” to use a term of Hegel’s,
attending to conflict’s lingering negativity as a reminder of
judgment’s final incompleteness.132
Julie and Joseph’s conflict is ordinary. There is hardly
anything surprising about its manifestation, origins, dif-
ficulties, or entailments. Conflicts such as these are com-
monplace in any kind of relationship in which commonness
must be forged across difference and persons’ achievements
of particular goods are conditioned by their shared fate
with others. In short, wherever finite, embodied selves seek
to realize contingent goods in a shared world with others,
conflicts of this sort will arise. Marriage is perhaps a most
obvious example, but friendships, families, religious com-
munities, neighborhood associations, labor unions, and
numerous other forms of human sociality likewise are con-
stituted by such conflicts. It would be strange to think polit-
ical communities would be differently constituted, and most
persons’ ordinary experience of politics suggests conflict is
as commonplace there as in any other set of relationships.
The key difference with politics, I wish to suggest, is the
strange supposition shared by many theorists that, while
conflicts in marriage, for example, are perfectly ordinary,
in politics they are to be avoided, managed, suppressed, or
averted. But if social relations like marriage are constituted
by the successful negotiation of conflict, nearly endlessly so

132
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), §32.

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 3.4 Conclusion

and often in ways that generate newness, self-discovery, and

deeper fidelity, then why should we not expect the same of
politics?133 To be sure, the differences between marital and
political negotiations of conflict are significant, as are the
differences between friendships, religious communities, civic
bodies, labor associations, and so on. As I show in Chapter
4, there is a distinct shape to democratic conflict and its suc-
cessful negotiation, and we must attend to the particular-
ities of that distinctly political form of addressing conflict.
Nevertheless, if conflict is constitutive of human relation as
such, it should be no surprise that we find conflict and the
demand to negotiate it in nearly every important set of social
relations. In Chapter 4, I offer an account of democratic
judgment as one way in which political communities might
approach enduring conflict, and even suggest that political
community itself can be imagined as an extended practice of
conflict negotiation.

3.4 Conclusion
What I have attempted to sketch in this chapter is a pic-
ture of human creatureliness in which conflict arises from
the goodness of our finite, contingent, and embodied exis-
tence. That we are finite, contingent, and embodied, con-
stituted by a multiplicity of desires and a diversity of ways
to realize our good, and yet equally ordered to sociality,
means we cannot abandon our conflicts or retreat from dif-
ference. Our separateness demands not an ethics of alterity
but of responsibility and community. Another name for this

133
Stanley Cavell, for one, has noted the many important ways in which
attending to the conflicts and difficulties of marriage generates insights about
democratic life. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood
Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

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 Being in Conflict: Agonistic Creatures

imperative is “agonism.” Agonistic democracy, as I con-

ceive it, is simply the formation of a common life with oth-
ers amidst difference, not independent of, or even in spite
of, our conflicts but through them. The activity of agonis-
tically forging community amidst difference, what I will
call a “creaturely politics,” is the subject of Chapter 4. The
challenge I have set for such a vision of politics and politi-
cal community, in light of the argument of this chapter, is
to detail an account of political community that does not
rest upon a commonness more fundamental to difference
(a shared identity, moral colloquy, common culture, har-
monious consensus, etc.). Moreover, an account of political
community in which difference is constitutive of that com-
munity must also attend to the ways conflict figures as an
enduring and persistent reality. My reconstruction of the
notion of political community and my account of “crea-
turely politics” aim to meet both of these challenges.
For now, I have been content to show how conflict arises
and what its possibilities are. The concepts I have drawn from
theological and philosophical anthropology intend to extend
and develop some of agonistic theory’s critical insights with
special attention to the place of religion and religious tra-
ditions in democratic politics. Religious traditions, like the
ones discussed earlier, possess resources for understanding
conflict as endemic to creaturely sociality, and thus are also
potentially generative and creative because of this. Agonistic
creatures, I have argued, manifest their sociality through
conflictual negotiations of their differences, an activity, I
maintain, that is constitutive of their creaturely goodness.
To identify conflict, the losses it entails and the transforma-
tions it eventuates, as belonging to the goodness of creaturely
life is to acknowledge the dynamism of that goodness, that
creatures manifest their goodness over time through change.
As Luke Bretherton puts it, forging a common life amidst

204
 3.4 Conclusion

difference means “everyone must change, and in the process,

we must all lose something to someone at some point … Loss,
and therefore compromise and negotiation, are inevitable, if
the flourishing of all is to take place.”134 The flourishing of
the common life of creatures is attained not by overcoming
conflict but through its ongoing successful negotiation. This
is the substance of a creaturely politics.

134
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 43.

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 4
Judging in Conflict
Agonistic Political Community

In 1970, just three years before his assassination and four

years before the Carnation Revolution that would mark
the end of Portuguese colonial rule in Africa, the Bissau-
Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral
gave a lecture at Syracuse University. Later published under
the title “National Liberation and Culture,”1 the lecture
took up the question of cultural unity and difference within
the pan-African struggle for liberation. Attentive to the
realities of social, cultural, and religious difference within
any revolutionary struggle, and refusing to collapse these
differences into a homogenous nationalist program, Cabral
nevertheless acknowledged the need for strong forms of
collectivity and unified action in the struggle against colo-
nial domination. The problem facing colonized peoples, he
argued, is how to marshal a collective struggle, “launched
from a satisfactory base of political and moral unity,” in
the midst of a “multiplicity of social and ethnic groups”
and forms of cultural belonging.2 This becomes especially
pressing, he said, “when, in order to face colonial violence,
the liberation movement must mobilize and organize the
people, under the direction of a strong and disciplined

1
Amílcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source:
Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973),
39–56.
2
Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” 53, 45.

206
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

political organization.”3 When Cabral surveyed the African

anti-colonial movement, he saw deep difference, even as he
recognized the need for sustained, radical, and collective
political action. Postmodern theories of difference would be
of little use to him in the face of colonial domination. The
decolonial movement needed a basis for shared struggle.
In the lecture, Cabral turned to an account of “culture” as
a source of forging collective political resistance. In particular,
he spoke of a “confluence” of particular cultures “achieving
the cultural unity of the social groups which are of key impor-
tance for the liberation struggle.”4 Appealing to notions of
culture, particularly “national culture,” might appear at first
a reactionary and essentializing strategy. Yet what Cabral
went on to describe as the building of culture has little of
the static, homogenous, and oppressive dimensions some-
times associated with political appeals to culture. Rejecting
essentialist notions of race and ethnicity, as well as theories
of national culture that neglect the class antagonisms within
every nation, he instead spoke of culture as an achievement
born of democratic struggle. Forging a political culture of lib-
eration, he argued, entails the ability to “bring diverse inter-
ests into harmony, resolve contradictions and define common
objectives.”5 In other words, culture is a form of political
identification forged in the struggle for liberation. It names
a set of common aspirations, ideas, and practices discovered
in or created through liberative praxis. In turn, the tending of
such a culture enables the ongoing capacity for organization,
deliberation, and shared action. For Cabral, a culture of liber-
ation was necessary to sustain the broad-based, popular polit-
ical activity that is the long-term project of decolonization.

3
Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” 52.
4
Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” 48.
5
Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” 48.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

Cabral’s lecture grapples with a central difficulty not only

of liberation movements but also of democratic politics more
generally – namely, how to forge political community in the
face of enduring conflict and difference. This difficulty is espe-
cially acute in pluralist democracies. The dominant strategy of
contemporary liberal theory has been to reconcile the tension
of political community and difference by defining the former
in a “thin” sense in order to make room for the latter. In
political theology, this strategy is represented by Augustinian
civic liberalism, examined in Chapter 1. An alternative post-
liberal strategy for approaching this tension is seen in various
communitarian theorists in political philosophy (Alasdair
MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer) and political
theology (Paul Kahn, John Milbank), who propose “thick”
accounts of community founded on shared moral commit-
ments, agreements, and identity. I’ve shown the shortcom-
ings of attempting to conceptualize political community,
difference, and conflict within this liberal-communitarian
binary, and so the aim of this chapter is, like Cabral, to artic-
ulate a way of thinking about political community and differ-
ence which sees the two as mutually constitutive realities. By
attending to conflict as the crux of this configuration, I seek
to reconstruct an account of democratic political community
as dynamic, pliable, and “agonistic.” In Chapter 2, I began to
sketch an account of “agonistic community” that takes con-
flict amidst difference to be a crucial feature of its flourishing.
The present chapter continues that work and seeks to answer
the question, “In what does agonistic community consist?”
I will argue it is the activity of sharing judgment and action
that marks agonistic community as a form of political com-
munity. Agonistic community, that is, is forged in the activity
of judging and acting in common.
My account of agonistic community, then, is decidedly
non-foundationalist. That is, it rests not on a commonness

208
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

more fundamental to difference, whether that be a shared

identity, set of agreements, consensus, common history,
and so on. Rather, agonistic community is produced within
the conflictual negotiations of difference. Politics, in this
view, is not so much the activity of a political community.
Political community is produced by politics. Or, alterna-
tively, political community is always constructed politi-
cally. My approach here shares much with, and is informed
by, recent theoretical considerations of populism.6 Rather
than accept the polemical and disparaging definitions of
populism given by its dismissive critics, these theorists seek
to understand populism as an expression of popular power
and channel populist energies for radically democratic
projects. The central insight of populism is that the gov-
erning apparatus of a people tends to become unresponsive
to the constituents it supposedly represents and so must be
reclaimed by “the people.” But just who constitutes “the
people” is always up for debate and contestation. Right-
wing populist movements often construct the identity of
the people over and against the other – the immigrant, the
cultural elite, the racial minority, and so on – defending
a narrow, if fictionalized, shared identity that supposedly
characterizes the “real” nation as opposed to its others
(e.g., one that is white, Christian, English-speaking,
etc.). Not only is this version of populism reactionary,

6
I have in mind here, particularly, Ernesto Laclau’s seminal On Populist
Reason (New York: Verso, 2005); as well as Laura Grattan, Populism’s
Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An
American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Margaret
Canovan, The People (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005); Margaret
Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,”
Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 2–16; The New Populism: The Politics
of Empowerment, ed. Harry C. Boyte and Frank Riessman (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1986).

209
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

exclusivist, and anti-political,7 but it also embodies the

kind of foundationalist impulse I oppose.
But populism need not be demagogic or essentialist. Not
only has history seen populist movements with coalitional
constituencies across lines of race, class, gender, religion,
and so on, but even radical democratic movements today
can be described in terms of what Laura Grattan calls “aspi-
rational democratic populism.”8 Grattan is not alone in
conceptualizing contemporary grassroots democratic move-
ments like the Industrial Areas Foundation’s broad-based
community organizing or William Barber’s Poor People’s
Campaign in terms of populism.9 Populism, for a number
of theorists, helpfully names the nature of grassroots move-
ments that are aimed at reclaiming and reasserting broad-
based popular sovereignty.10 One of the key features of
populist movements is their attempt to construct and main-
tain a political collectivity capable of common judgment and
action – a democratic “we” that is greater than simply the
aggregation of individual interests, more than the sum of its

7
See Luke Bretherton, “The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad
Based Organizing,” The Good Society 21, no. 2 (2012): 261–278. Grattan
refers to this kind of populism, using Koen Abts and Stefan Rummens’ term,
as the “phantasmal image of the organic unity” of the people, a fiction which
“conceives of the people not as a collection of individuals, whose will must
be mediated by interest aggregation, deliberation, or conflict resolution, but
as a substantive body, bound together by ties of nature, history, or identity.”
Grattan, Populism’s Power, 23.
8
Grattan, Populism’s Power, 19–48.
9
See, for instance, Bretherton, “Political Populism,” 262–267; Angus Ritchie,
Inclusive Populism: Creating Citizens in the Global Age (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2019); Harry C. Boyte, “Civic Populism,”
Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 4 (2003): 737–742; Thomas Frank, The People,
No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020),
254–255.
10
Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (New York: Verso, 2018); Jorge Tamames,
For the People: Left Populism in Spain and the US (London: Lawrence Wishart,
2020).

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

parts. “The people” is a “discursive production,” in Ernesto

Laclau’s words.11 But it is also the work of political practice,
of public articulation through shared judgment and action.
In this sense, Luke Bretherton contends, a “people” is “an
inherently constructed and contingent form of collective
political subjectivity. It takes a political process to create
it.”12 Populism, as a political phenomenon, is distinguished
by this effort to assemble, articulate, and mobilize a people,
a “we” who acts. My account of agonistic community in
what follows draws on this populist insight that political
community is produced rather than discovered. As such, it is
always contestable and open to reconfiguration. Yet it exists
as a collectivity, or community, insofar as it is able to yield
genuinely common judgments and actions.
The goal of this chapter is to sketch the contours of ago-
nistic community. Agonistic community, I will argue, is
grounded in a vision of politics as a creaturely practice, is
constituted by the exchanges and negotiations of difference
and conflict, and terminates in shared judgment and action.
Indeed, judgment is the key theme of the chapter, and I will
contend that common judgment amidst difference is the cen-
tral feature of agonistic community. I develop this argument
in several stages. First, I show that judgment is the constitu-
tive activity of political communities as such. In the follow-
ing section, I draw on the work of Johannes Althusius and
Yves Simon, examples of what I call a “creaturely politics,”
to show how political communities are dynamic formations,
composed of a diversity of interests and constituents, and
thus in need of capacities for negotiating these differences

11
Laclau, On Populist Reason, 67–124.
12
Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the
Case for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
2019), 425.

211
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

so as to share common action and sustain a common life.

Judgment, I argue, mediates the pluralism of democratic
difference and this common action of democratic agency.
It is the heart of democratic community. Following this, I
detail the nature of political judgment, first in general, as the
characteristic feature of political community, and second, in
its distinctively democratic form, what I will call, following
Linda Zerilli, a “democratic theory of judgment.” In doing
so, I argue against certain patterns of liberal theory which
take the problem of judgment to be about adjudicating var-
ious value systems in order to establish neutral criteria for
administering shared decisions, and instead attend to judg-
ment as a way of bringing an object into view as an object
of shared perception. Judgment in this sense is as much an
affective process as it is a process of exchanging and eval-
uating reasons, and a deeply conflictual and agonistic one,
at that. Finally, the concluding section serves as the real
heart of the chapter, as it reflects on what I consider to be
an exemplary form of agonistic community: the Industrial
Areas Foundation, or IAF, a radically democratic movement
of broad-based community organizing. My analysis of the
IAF’s organizing practices focuses on the place of conflict
in coming to democratic judgment, showing the ways judg-
ment, and so democratic community, are inescapably ago-
nistic. Political formations like the IAF, I argue, exemplify
the ways conflict can be generative and productive of flour-
ishing democratic community.

4.1 Creaturely Politics: Johannes Althusius

and Yves Simon
If human creatures are fundamentally agonistic, as I argued
in Chapter 3, with conflict belonging to the very nature
of their created goodness, they are also inherently social

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 4.1 Creaturely Politics: Althusius and Simon

beings, possessing natural capacities for association. As

Oliver O’Donovan puts it, human creatures are “helplessly
social.”13 While the suggestion that human persons are not
just social but also political animals is as old as Aristotle,14
a distinct tradition of political thought, owing its source,
in part, to the early modern Calvinist political philosopher
Johannes Althusius, has thematized this insight in explicitly
theological terms. “Consociationalism,” as Luke Bretherton
refers to it, is grounded in a theology of creaturehood and
“emerges out of reflection on the rich scriptural and theolog-
ical motif of covenant and how this generates conceptions of
federalism.”15 While the dominant strains of late medieval
and early modern political thought were preoccupied with
theorizing political sovereignty in terms of its divine ana-
logue, Althusius began his theory of politics by attending to
the nature of creaturely relation, seeing the political as “an
assemblage that emerges through and is grounded upon a
process of mutual communication between covenantal asso-
ciations and their reciprocal pursuit of common goods.”16
Thus, grounding his political theory in an account of the
human creature, he arrives at a vision of political society as
constituted by multiple overlapping forms of association,

13
Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005), 55.
14
Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1998), 1252a24–1253a38.
15
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 390. David Henreckson has argued,
correcting a common misreading of Althusius by historians of political thought,
that Althusius’s understanding of political association was inseparable from
his theological understanding of covenant. In this, he is an inheritor of a
larger tradition of Reformed covenantal thought that Henreckson identifies
in Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza, among others. See
David P. Henreckson, The Immortal Commonwealth: Covenant, Community,
and Political Resistance in Early Reformed Thought (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2022), 127–160.
16
Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 391.

213
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

a distribution of authority to a plurality of civic and social

bodies, and a “vesting [of] sovereignty … in the webs of rela-
tions that shape the possibilities for agency across a body
politic.”17 Althusius embodies a counter-voice to modern
political theologies of sovereignty by centering the creature
and those unique features of limited creaturely existence,
rather than the divine sovereignty of God and ruler. His is a
“creaturely politics” that presumes an account of the human
creature similar to the one I developed in Chapter 3. I turn
to Althusius here, and then to Yves Simon, a more contem-
porary democratic theorist, in order to further develop that
political theological anthropology with an eye toward its
meaning for the nature of political association. In doing so,
I aim to arrive at a picture of the human creature that sees
both difference and association, conflict and its mediations,
as basic to creaturely sociality. For such a creature, “poli-
tics” is the capacity to negotiate conflict in the formation of
a common life with others.

4.1.1 Consociatio and the Politics of

Creaturely Association
Althusius begins his Politica, a comprehensive and sys-
tematic treatment of political order, with the following
summary definition of the activity of politics: “Politics
is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the pur-
pose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life

17
Robert Latham, “Social Sovereignty,” Theory, Culture and Society 17,
no. 4 (2000): 6, quoted in Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life,
391n.80. Bretherton draws attention to Latham’s crucial recognition that,
while Althusius is surely to be credited as one of the most important early
formulators of notions of popular sovereignty, sovereignty was, for him, always
mediated by the multiplicity of associational forms constituting society, rather
than a simple collective body of individuals.

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 4.1 Creaturely Politics: Althusius and Simon

among them.”18 Politics, Althusius says, is a matter of “sym-

biotics,” or living together, and thus the primary subject
matter of politics is consociatio, or association.19 Rather
than a product of contractual agreement, association is
fundamentally a natural phenomenon.20 The human crea-
ture, he observes, “is by nature a civil animal who strives
eagerly for association.”21 But unlike Aristotle, Althusius
does not arrive at this conclusion by way of reflection on
the universal character of human rational nature. Instead, it
is an entailment of God’s creation of humanity with natural
difference. Human creatures, Althusius contends, possess a
variety of skills, capacities, desires, and powers, each dis-
tributed according to divine providence. God “did not give
all things to one person,” he writes, “but some to one and
some to others, so that you have need for my gifts, and I for
yours. And so was born, as it were, the need for communi-
cating necessary and useful things.”22 This communicatio,
mutual communication, or sharing of “things, services, and
right (jus)” is the material of political association; its effi-
cient cause is “consent and agreement among the commu-
nicating citizens”23; and its final cause is the flourishing of

18
Johannes Althusius, Politica, ed. and trans. Frederick S. Carney (Indianapolis,
IN: Liberty Fund, 1995), 17. For Althusius, politics and social life are
distinguished but intimately related, the former existing to uphold the latter.
In this way, he represents a kind of synthesis of Augustinian and Aristotelian
approaches to the political.
19
Althusius, Politica, 17.
20
As Henreckson, Immortal Commonwealth, 135–137, shows, Althusius adopts
the term consociatio, which was quite rare in ancient and medieval political
writing, from early Reformed theological writings, where it primarily referred
to ecclesial and sacramental relationships, as well as covenantal unions
like God’s with Israel and the church. Rather than an artificial, contractual
relation, association is a kind of natural and supernatural “fellowship” or
“communion.”
21
Althusius, Politica, 25. 22 Althusius, Politica, 23.
23
Althusius, Politica, 24.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

a “common life.”24 For Althusius, the political community

is constituted by a plurality of these associational forms,
each possessing a degree of authority and autonomy in its
own affairs and each contributing to the flourishing of the
polity. Association is preserved by formal or implicit cov-
enant, in which is specified the purposes, common goods,
and means to pursue those common goods that constitute
the association. Finally, the political community as a whole
exists by covenantal federation of these varying forms of
association in pursuit of the common good.25
At bottom, for Althusius, politics is the activity by which
human creatures communicate “necessary and useful
things” across their differences in the pursuit of a common
life together. In this way, Althusius’s creaturely politics
is attentive to practices of negotiation and exchange as
the real heart of political life. A politics of association is
premised on a view of human creatures as both naturally
different and naturally sociable and a vision of political
community founded upon the natural capacities creatures
have for negotiating their differences and ordering them
to the common life by way of communicatio. In terms
of Chapter 3, Althusius’s politics presumes a picture of
human persons as finite, contingent, and embodied crea-
tures, beings who pursue various goods and courses of
action, some of which are incompatible and in conflict
with others. Creatures are thus in need of certain means

24
Althusius, Politica, 19.
25
The pluralist theories of state articulated by theorists like Otto von Gierke and
J. N. Figgis, as well as the “guild socialism” of thinkers like G. D. H. Cole
and Harold Laski, can be seen as inheritors of this consociational construal
of sovereignty. See Cécile Laborde, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain
and France, 1900–25 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000); and Paul Q. Hirst,
“Introduction,” in The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G. D.
H. Cole, J. N. Figgis, and H. J. Laski, ed. Paul Q. Hirst (New York: Routledge,
2004), 1–46.

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 4.1 Creaturely Politics: Althusius and Simon

of coordinating these differences and mediating these con-

flicts in their common life, and this is the task of politics.
To be sure, Althusius’s vision of the differentiated body
politic is one that emphasizes the harmonization of differ-
ence and the achievement of concord among its various con-
stituents. For him, successful political order is marked by
the smooth operations of a body unified in difference, and
conflict has no positive role. Indeed, his conceptualization
of the polity in terms of the metaphor of the human body,
and his elucidation of the distinct hierarchies composing that
body, confirm the legitimate worries of critics of political
community. As with Milbank, it seems difference, for him,
must be hierarchically managed in order to be harmonized.26
Nevertheless, Althusius’s important insight that political
community is rooted in and founded upon the dynamic pro-
cesses of natural association and communication can be
developed in more egalitarian and democratic directions.
The twentieth-century Catholic political philosopher Yves
Simon is one example of such a trajectory.

4.1.2 Democratic Community and the

Politics of Common Action
Though he writes out of a very different tradition of political
thought than Althusius – Thomism rather than Calvinism –
Simon shares with Althusius a desire to ground political
philosophical reflection in an account of the human creature
as finite, social, and constituted by natural difference. Yet,
rather than advocating for the complete harmonization of
difference within the unified body politic, a static and hier-
archical vision of political community, Simon develops an

26
For a discussion of hierarchy in Althusius’s consociationalism, see Henreckson,
Immortal Commonwealth, 141–144.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

account of democratic community with a more dynamic cen-

ter: the capacity for “common action.”27 For Simon, demo-
cratic political community is less about the possession of a
shared moral, religious, or cultural foundation upon which
to conduct political activity; it resides instead in a peo-
ple’s capacity to forge shared judgment and action amidst
difference. In this way, Simon aids in the move beyond a
foundationalist account of political community and toward
a more fluid and dynamic democratic one.
According to Simon, even the most ideal, wise, and vir-
tuous human community needs political coordination. This
is because the activity of politics, of coordinating persons’
pursuits of various goods and their common pursuit of oth-
ers, arises not out of any deficiency of human nature, but
rather from the multiplicity and diversity of its goodness. As
Vukan Kuic notes of Simon’s theory of democratic author-
ity, “Authority springs not so much from what a commu-
nity might lack as from the good things it already has and
still might achieve. Rather than penury, it is really plenitude,
material, intellectual, spiritual, that calls for the operation
of political authority.”28 In other words, politics, for Simon,
arises out of the need to form commonness of judgment and
action amidst the multitude of possible ways of pursuing
the good for a political community. With so many “diverse
ways leading to the common good” and such a great “vari-
ety of preferences” for pursuing particular goods in society
with others, Simon notes, some are tempted to suppose that
this pluralism is due to ignorance or misapprehension of the
good. “A stubborn objection holds,” he writes, “that if men
were omniscient, unanimous adherence to the end would

27
Yves R. Simon, A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1980), 31–33.
28
Vukan Kuic, “Introduction,” in Simon, General Theory of Authority, 7.

218
 4.1 Creaturely Politics: Althusius and Simon

necessarily entail unanimity regarding the means.”29 But

exactly the opposite is the case. With greater knowledge of
goodness, a society actually discovers more possible ways of
realizing the good, conflicts between persons about which
particular means are most appropriate to do so, and thus
an even greater need for coordination and deliberation in
its common life.30 We might say that goodness and conflict
here are actually indexed one to the other – more profound
knowledge of the good produces more disagreements about
the numerous ways to achieve it. An insistence on unanimity
regarding the means to realize the good, when in fact those
means are multiple and diverse, “expresses an aversion to
the mystery involved in free choice as well as to the dark-
ness of contingency.”31 Politics belongs to this domain of
freedom and contingency, which is to say, of practical rea-
son, and so to insist on a singular course of action as neces-
sary and inevitable eschews the contingency and conflictual
deliberation entailed in practical reasoning about the good.
There are many goods and many ways to realize the good.
This is not to be lamented. Still, Simon argues, a people
must discover ways to coordinate these goods and their pur-
suits of them, as well as forge patterns of common action in
order to achieve the good together. Without such negotia-
tion and common action, a people exists only as a sum of
individuals living in proximity to one another, not anything
approaching a community, nor anything distinctly political.
Common action involves the choosing of one or several par-
ticular means among the many legitimate ones to realize the
good together. Whether we drive on the left side of the road
or the right makes relatively little difference, but the success

29
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 45.
30
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 45.
31
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 42.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

of our common life depends on our choosing one in common

action, thus realizing the good of public safety. The capacity
to choose and so command obedience to the decision of com-
mon action – the causal power of common action, as Simon
calls it32 – is democratic authority. Democratic authority is
necessary given the plurality of means to realize the good: “a
problem of united action which cannot be solved by way of
unanimity,” says Simon, “should be solved by way of author-
ity.”33 Whether authority here is identified with an elected
body, a representative, or a popular vote does not matter,
only that there is a capacity to command common action.34
The most helpful metaphor for understanding Simon’s
conceptualizing of plurality, authority, and common action
is the symphony.35 The central function of the conductor’s
authority in a symphonic performance is to enable and facil-
itate a common action amidst difference. It is the capacity
to perform coordinated action that makes an orchestra the
kind of community it is. The ground or basis of its being a
community is this shared action, along with the shared judg-
ments, commitments, and pragmatic agreements necessary
to carry it out. But importantly, the orchestral community
is not founded upon a shared identity, common culture, or
substantial set of agreements about the final ends of musical
performance, standards of taste, questions of ultimate truth,
and so on. Each member belongs to the symphonic commu-
nity as an agent desiring the good of common action, and

32
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 32.
33
Yves R. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Governance (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 30.
34
On Simon’s account of democratic authority, see Jordan L. Hylden, “Civic
Democracy and Catholic Authority in Conflict? Yves Simon’s Thomist
Democratic Authority,” PhD diss., Duke University, 2019, 209–247.
35
Here, I follow Victor Lee Austin, Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority
to Flourish as Human Beings (New York: Continuum, 2010), 16–19, who
extends Simon’s account of authority through this metaphor.

220
 4.1 Creaturely Politics: Althusius and Simon

the flourishing of the community depends upon its ability to

perform this common action in such a way that each mem-
ber participates fully.
In Simon’s account of democratic political community,
then, we see the convergence of several important themes
from Chapter 3: the diversity of goods and means to real-
ize the good as arising from creatures’ natural difference; the
need to negotiate this difference democratically in order to
realize a common life; and the basis of this common life rest-
ing on the determination and performance of common action.
In light of Chapter 3, we might say that democratic political
community consists in the ability to generate common action
amidst a multiplicity of differences and the conflicts these
differences eventuate. Simon speaks little of conflict itself;
neither does he acknowledge any positive, generative quali-
ties in it; his vision of democratic political community tends
instead to focus on the capacity of democratically accountable
authorities to manage and direct the coordination of common
action amidst difference. His political theory is democratic,
but not radically so. Later on, I will delineate the important
ways in which conflict figures in broad-based, participatory
deliberations regarding common action, suggesting the nego-
tiation of conflict is indispensable to producing and sustaining
them. For now, I only wish to appreciate Simon’s discern-
ment of common action as the substantive heart of political
community. Perhaps even more importantly, however, Simon
also identifies the requisite condition of common action and
thus the very possibility of democratic political community:
the capacity to arrive at shared judgments.
Simon puts it succinctly: “Unity of action depends upon
unity of judgment.”36 If a political community is to act in
common, it must possess common judgment. If it is to endure

36
Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government, 19.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

beyond a single action, an ephemeral, spontaneous moment

of commonness, it must possess the capacity to judge in com-
mon in an ongoing way. Democratic communities are built so
as to withstand any number of disagreements in deliberation,
but for it to exist as a deliberating community at all, Simon
recognizes, it must share certain capacities to make judgments
together over time.37 Otherwise deliberation is conducted
endlessly without terminating in action, or action is carried
out in the name of the community but is not shared or legiti-
mate. Judgment is the act by which a community moves from
the plurality of natural difference to the singularity of com-
mon action. Yet, Simon is quick to note, we should not be
optimistic about the possibilities of achieving rational consen-
sus or full unanimity in deliberation before judgment is made.
“Unanimity is a precarious principle,” he notes.38 Neither can
“unity of judgment … be procured by rational communica-
tion.”39 Common judgment is secured not by rational consen-
sus or procedural agreement, as in Rawlsian liberalism and
Habermasian deliberative democracy, but by what Simon calls
“affective communion.”40 Affect, here, refers less to emotion
or passion and more to the intuitive knowledge characteristic
of the practical intellect, the “desires and aversions born of
rational apprehension.”41 Affect, in other words, belongs to
the appetitive faculty. Politics, no less than ethics, depends on
the appetites in the exercise of judgment.42 Judgment is about
desire ordered to wisdom, the operations of love.
This is to be expected. If judgment is fundamentally an
activity of practical reason, as all politics ultimately is, then

37
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 32.
38
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 40.
39
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 32.
40
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 33.
41
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 34–35n.6.
42
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 37.

222
 4.1 Creaturely Politics: Althusius and Simon

theoretical knowledge is insufficient for its act. Hence, in

developing the notion of affective communion, Simon turns
to familiar categories in moral philosophy associated with
practical judgment: “inclination,” “the heart,” “senti-
ment,” “the appetite,” “the will.”43 This is the stuff of polit-
ical judgment, not mere abstract, technical, or theoretical
knowledge. So, Simon says, “the way of inclination alone
can procure an answer when a question of human conduct
involves contingency.”44 In all of this, Simon is shown to be
a realist about the extent of disagreement and difference in
democratic politics; it cannot be overcome or resolved by
rational means. Yet he refuses to appeal to liberal notions
of tolerance that might circumvent the enduring need for
yielding common judgment and thus common action. That
common judgment cannot be reached by means of rational
certainty, in other words, does not absolve us of the need to
judge. Simon’s turn to affective communion is an attempt to
conceptualize the kind of commonness necessary to gener-
ate common judgment in the face of disagreement.
This is as far as I wish to go with Simon. His exact delin-
eation of how affective communion is achieved is less per-
suasive, in my view, than his more general argument for the
necessity of a kind of common capacity for judgment amidst
pluralism and difference. I will turn to other resources for
my own account of affect and judgment. But Simon iden-
tifies the critical question of judgment that I take up in the
rest of this chapter: How can judgment be shared, genu-
inely democratic, amidst difference without the promise of
rational consensus? Does an agonistic community, in other
words, have any hope for achieving common judgment and
thus shared action?

43
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 33–37.
44
Simon, General Theory of Authority, 37.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

Political judgment is the means by which a collection of
people, constituted by pluralism and difference, are moved
to unified action as a political community. Judgment is the
heart of political community. But what exactly is the nature
of political judgment? And what is the nature of political
judgment construed in distinctly democratic terms? Is such
a thing possible, or are common judgment and democratic
pluralism fundamentally at odds with one another, making
something like political community altogether impossible for
pluralist democracy? The aim of this section is to develop
a democratic theory of judgment capable of sustaining the
kind of common action described earlier. Agonistic commu-
nity, I argue, is constituted by the ability to make common
judgments amidst conflict and difference without effacing
difference or transcending conflict. Here, I consider the act
of political judgment itself and then move to thematize this
activity in terms of agonistic democratic practice.

4.2.1 Political Judgment

Judgment is the key political task because politics involves
the operations of phronesis, or practical reason. As Luke
Bretherton notes, politics cannot be reduced to questions
of episteme, for “politics is always particular and contex-
tual;” neither can it be carried out by mere techne, for poli-
tics “always concerns questions of morality and ends rather
than simply questions of technique or skill.”45 Phronesis
regards the capacity to act in contingent circumstances of

45
Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics
of a Common Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 193.
A similar argument for practical reason, construed in terms of metis rather
than phronesis, is made in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain

224
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

time and place, to choose specific means in order to realize

specific ends. Politics demands the use of phronesis in order
to discern the appropriate action or set of actions needed
for a specific people in a determinate space and time, ter-
minating in judgment and action. As such, the political
judgments generated by phronesis are necessarily contin-
gent ones, incapable of rational certainty or universality,
but nevertheless not arbitrary or relativistic.46 Ideally, they
are wise judgments.
That politics is chiefly about practical judgment was a
perspective widely shared among classical political thinkers
and explicated with precision by Aristotle.47 Medieval and
early modern political philosophy continued this empha-
sis on judgment, especially in the genre of writing known
as specula principum or “mirrors for princes.” With the
increasing bureaucratization of the modern nation-state and
professionalization of its administrative apparatus, judgment
gradually fell out of favor as a central subject of concern for
increasingly rationalist political philosophies and techno-
cratic governing strategies.48 It was Hannah Arendt who, in
the wake of the twentieth century’s banalities of evil, recov-
ered the importance of judgment for political theorizing, a
remarkable feat given that her planned treatment of judg-
ment in the third and final book of The Life of the Mind was
never completed, leaving us only her brilliant interpretation
of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in her Lectures on Kant’s

Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1999), 309–341.
46
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 192.
47
See the discussion of Aristotle, phronesis, and judgment in Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1999), 312–324.
48
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 25–31.

225
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

Political Philosophy.49 Arendt’s incomplete endeavor to

give a systematic treatment of political judgment neverthe-
less resulted in a revival of interest in continuing that work,
seeking to recenter judgment in contemporary political the-
ory and democratic theory in particular.50 My account of
democratic judgment here is inspired by Arendt and the tra-
dition she initiated.
Judgment, as Ronald Beiner points out, is performed in
nearly “every contact we have with the political world,”
from reading the daily newspaper, to discussing and debat-
ing politics with friends and family, to acting as citizens
or officials in civic capacities.51 Its ubiquity makes it noto-
riously difficult to define. As Beiner notes, while politi-
cal judgment is discussed in passing in nearly every great
work of political philosophy, being presupposed in discus-
sions of basic political concepts like rights, freedom, jus-
tice, power, authority, and so on, it has hardly ever been
given the systematic treatment these other concepts have
received.52 Nevertheless, I proceed here with the follow-
ing understanding of judgment as a political act, following

49
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
50
Just a few important examples, though many more could be mentioned:
Richard J. Bernstein, “Responsibility, Judging, and Evil,” Revue Internationale
de Philosophie 53, no. 208 (1999): 155–172; Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt
on Judging,” in Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 89–156;
Linda M. G. Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in
the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 158–188;
David L. Marshall, “The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt’s Theory
of Judgment,” Political Theory 38, no. 3 (2010): 367–393; Maurizio Passerin
D’Entrèves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 245–260.
51
Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), 8.
52
Beiner, Political Judgment, 4–5.

226
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

Beiner: Political judgment is the capacity to evaluate and

appraise particulars, without recourse to rules or certainty,
and issue a determination.53 Judgment concerns things both
retrospective and prospective, pronouncing on things past
(“This policy was unjust;” “The defendant is guilty of the
crime”) or determining a specific course of action for the
future (setting a tax rate, declaring war, passing a spending
budget). Often, perhaps most of the time, these retrospec-
tive and prospective aspects of judgment converge. So, for
instance, when Oliver O’Donovan argues that judgment is,
by its nature, always reactive, “pronounc[ing] upon a pre-
ceding act” and “speak[ing] about something that already
is the case,” he nevertheless is clear that doing so “clears
space prospectively” for action to be performed by the polit-
ical community.54 The judgment that a particular policy is
unfairly discriminating, for example, implies a prescription
that it should be remedied. My attention here is primarily
on the prospective nature of judgment, and this in keeping
with my focus on politics as the domain of practical reason-
ing about the good and how to accomplish it. Judgment,
in this frame, joins prudential thinking and action. It is the
determination of what to do.

53
Beiner, Political Judgment, 8. See also Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept
of Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Kant
defined judgment in general in his third Critique as “the faculty of thinking
the particular as contained under the universal.” He then distinguishes
between “determinative” and “reflective” judgment, the former which
begins with a given universal concept or rule and reasons to a particular,
and the latter which begins with a particular and reasons toward a universal
not given. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed
Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. Political
judgment is a form of reflective judgment, in this framing; though, as will
be clear, I depart in significant ways from Kant who thinks of reflective
judgment in primarily individual and aesthetic, rather than social and
political, ways.
54
O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 8–9.

227
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

Clearly, however, judgment has additional theologi-

cal dimensions, especially in Judaism and Christianity.
O’Donovan summarizes the basic insight of Christian
Scripture and tradition regarding government: “The author-
ity of government resides essentially in the act of judg-
ment.”55 From Israel’s political experience under judges and
kings, to the teaching of St. Paul, to Jewish and Christian
reflection on the paradigm examples of political authority,
Moses and David, the principal responsibility and activity
of governing is discerned to be judgment. Importantly, this
is a constraining and deflationist interpretation of politi-
cal authority, for “it strips down the role of government to
the single task of judgment, and forbids human rule to pre-
tend to sovereignty.”56 Governing-as-judgment is the basis,
then, of theological critiques of idolatry and imperialism,
warnings against complete identification of a people with
the apparatus of political rule, and resistance to totalitar-
ian aspirations to seize government as a means of salvific
action. To theologize political authority in terms of judg-
ment, O’Donovan shows, is to invest it with the simple task
of “enacting right against wrong.”57 In this sense, governing
is primarily ordered to justice, for, as Aquinas rightly notes,
judgment is the “act of justice.”58
Moreover, to conceptualize judgment theologically as the
chief responsibility of political authority is, importantly,
to place upon it certain limits and acknowledge its imper-
fectability. Unlike divine judgment, O’Donovan explains,
political judgment regards only particular matters (mat-
ters of public concern), has a limited power (“it commands
only the same resources for exertion as any other human

55
O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 4. 56 O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 4.
57
O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 5.
58
ST II-II.60.1, quoted in O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 6.

228
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

action does”), and lacks transcendent, final authority.59 It is

this third constraint that is of particular importance for my
purposes here, for it is precisely the character of judgment
as lacking finality that occasions the possibility of contesta-
tion and revision – that is, conflict. Because political judg-
ment is subject to the final, transcendent judgment of God,
it is always open to critique, reform, even refusal, in pro-
phetic resistance and obedience to the One who judges both
the living and the dead.
This crucially important dimension of judgment’s imper-
fectability returns us to the matter of judgment’s particular
nature as practical, rather than theoretical. Because judg-
ment concerns things contingent and singular, a judgment
cannot be deduced from universals, rules, or absolutes.
Instead, it “appeals to those judging persons ‘present’, those
who are members of the public realm where the objects of
judgment appear.”60 It substantiates itself by means of per-
suasion rather than proof, as Arendt notes, and in doing so it
arises from and refers to the sensus communis, the common
sense of an ordinary world shared with others.61 Stanley
Cavell thus speaks of judgment as the attempt to “speak
for” a community, to stake oneself as representative of oth-
ers and so elicit either their agreement or disapproval.62 In
this sense, a judgment’s ground is subjective, but its reach

59
O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment, 28–29. 60 Beiner, Political Judgment, 16.
61
See Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political
Significance,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought,
ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 218. See also Hannah
Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, 223–259.
62
See Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy,” in Must We
Mean What We Say? ed. Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969), 73–96. See also Andrew Norris, Becoming Who We Are: Politics
and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 28–36.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

is universal – what Kant called “subjective ­universality.”63

More will be said about this appeal to the sensus commu-
nis that governs judgment, for it is precisely judgment’s
embeddedness in the ordinary that invites reflection upon its
democratic possibilities.64
Finally, what is it that makes political judgment political?
On the one hand, it might appear that political judgment is
simply the activity of judgment extended to matters of polit-
ical concern. A judgment is political insofar as its object is
political. This understanding is common among a prominent
strand of Kantianism, as Benjamin Barber has pointed out, in
which “political judgment [is] simply one kind of judgment”
among others (moral, aesthetic, etc.), “namely, the judgment
of things political.”65 But, as Barber and others have argued,
this fails to appreciate the unique circumstances, contexts,
and practices within which political judgment is produced,
configuring the nature of judgment as political in form. As
Barber writes, political judgment is constituted by “common
civic activity”; it “proceeds from solitude to sociability”; and
it is, in fact, politics that produces judgment, not judgment
politics.66 In other words, political judgment is judgment
arrived at politically, through collective deliberation and rea-
soning. It is not capable of being rendered privately, and even
when a singular person or institution claims to be exercising

63
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 43.
64
My account of democratic judgment and agonistic community has much in
common with Sandra Laugier’s theorization of radical democracy in terms of
ordinary language philosophy. See Sandra Laugier, “The Ethics of Care as a
Politics of the Ordinary,” New Literary History 46, no. 2 (2015): 217–240;
Sandra Laugier, “This Is Us: Wittgenstein and the Social,” Philosophical
Investigations 41, no. 2 (2018): 204–222; and Albert Ogien and Sandra Laugier,
Pourquoi Désobéir en Démocratie? (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2010).
65
Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic
Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 197.
66
Barber, The Conquest of Politics, 199.

230
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

judgment alone, she or it does so as one representing oth-

ers. To make political judgment, to judge in a political form,
as Linda Zerilli notes, thus entails a kind of “representa-
tive thinking,” what Arendt calls “thinking in the place of
everybody else,” wherein one reasons not by appeal to pri-
vate commitments, universal criteria, or known rules, but by
entering into a negotiation with others in order to first bring
an object into view and then deliberate about it.67
To sum up: Political judgment is the distinguishing fea-
ture of a political community, for it is the means by which
a community is moved from the plurality of its differences
to the singularity of a common action. Political judgment is
a community’s appraisal of a particular, be that a circum-
stance, law, dilemma, future course of action, and so on, by
which it makes a determination issuing from practical rea-
son. Finally, political judgments are justified or legitimated
insofar as they are political in form – that is, they arise from
and represent the political community as a whole. But this
raises an acute dilemma for pluralist democratic communi-
ties: How can shared judgment be reached amidst significant
disagreements of value and competing visions of the good,
especially where there exist no certain and universal criteria
by which to adjudicate these differences? Can a judgment be
both reasonable and legitimate under the conditions of dem-
ocratic pluralism? If so, how? We must turn, then, to think
about the specifically democratic nature of judgment.

4.2.2 A Democratic Theory of Judgment

The key concern of a democratic theory of judgment, and
thus also of my account of judgment as the principal mark of

67
Linda M. G. Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016), 7.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

an agonistic democratic community, is to show how shared

judgment is possible amidst disagreement and difference
without resorting to universal criteria or rules for adjudi-
cating those disagreements and differences. As I argued in
Chapter 2, positing such a common measure more funda-
mental than difference risks effacing difference, legitimating
non-democratic measures of managing difference, and ulti-
mately obscuring the place of conflict and contestation in
democratic politics. Thus, relatedly, a democratic theory of
judgment must show not only how conflict amidst difference
does not inhibit the process of coming to judgment but also
how it actually constitutes it as democratic. By democratic
judgment, I mean judgment that all share, participate in, and,
to some degree, authorize as their own.68 We will be aided in
developing such an account of democratic judgment by con-
sidering the important arguments made by Linda Zerilli in
her 2016 book A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Though
Zerilli does not take up the question of conflict directly,
her work is concerned with many of the same challenges of
democracy, pluralism, and difference that figure in this book,
making her insights valuable and fecund.
Zerilli states the challenge of developing a theory of judg-
ment for democratic pluralism as follows: “A democratic
theory of judgment must be more than a theory of normative
justification or the adjudication of different perspectives. It
must be a world-building practice of freedom rooted in the
plurality of perspectives that alone facilitates our capac-
ity to count as real, as part of the common world, what
is real.”69 Several key elements of democratic judgment are
operative in this summary formulation and worth attending

68
I address later the important question of dissent, and how judgment can be said
to be democratic in the absence of full consensus.
69
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, xv.

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 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

to. First, in contrast to much contemporary liberal theory,

Zerilli does not see the goal of a theory of judgment to be
the elucidation of principles or criteria for settling disputes
amidst value differences or competing sets of commitments,
fundamental beliefs, comprehensive doctrines, or moral and
philosophical orientations. That approach begins with a pic-
ture of persons as siloed by their incommensurable compre-
hensive doctrines and fundamental commitments, and sees
political judgment as legitimate only when licensed by neu-
tral principles all parties can assent to. It is the approach of
neo-Kantian liberals like John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas.
Both develop various iterations of an account of public rea-
son, a set of criteria for determining and evaluating what
may count as legitimate democratic rationality, in order to
“forestall irreconcilable political conflict and decisionism.”70
Such “reasonableness,” as Rawls terms it, is able to guaran-
tee shared judgment insofar as arguments can proceed from
neutral principles that all reasonable citizens share to the
particular contingencies of political life.
Like my account here, the ability to share judgment is
also at the heart of Rawls’s understanding of democratic
political community. For Rawls, however, the essence of
political community amidst moral, religious, and cultural
diversity, what he calls “social unity,” resides in a shared
overlapping consensus regarding normative principles of
political justice.71 Rawls rejects strong, communitarian

70
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 2.
71
John Rawls, “Social Unity and Primary Goods,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond,
ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 159–185. See also John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping
Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1981): 1–25. For a critical
analysis of Rawls’s understanding of political community, see James W. Nickel,
“Rawls on Political Community and Principles of Justice,” Law and Philosophy
9, no. 2 (1990): 205–216.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

notions of political community grounded in a single shared

comprehensive doctrine and prizes pluralism and differ-
ence as critical features of a flourishing democratic soci-
ety. Nonetheless, he believes a careful investigation of those
incommensurable comprehensive doctrines composing plu-
ralist society will reveal a fundamental set of pragmatic
principles regarding basic justice capable of adjudicating
differences between persons. Something more fundamental
than difference – namely, a set of universal commitments –
is thus the foundation of political community. Judgments
must be reached, and so an external basis for those judg-
ments is established, not in metaphysical, moral, or reli-
gious terms, but in pragmatic, political ones. For Rawls, in
other words, the problem of democratic judgment is one
of finding neutral criteria to adjudicate difference, achieve
consensus, and forestall conflict.
Zerilli contrasts this approach to the problem of demo-
cratic judgment with Hannah Arendt’s. Arendt, she shows,
shares Rawls’s zeal for a plural social sphere as critical for
a genuinely democratic public life, but not his appeal to
external criteria, like standards of public reason, as a means
of adjudicating difference. Instead, for Arendt, pluralist
politics is about the capacity to build a “common world”
in which judgment can occur. This is the second important
element of Zerilli’s formulation of democratic judgment.
Judgment appeals not to supposed neutral, universal crite-
ria, rules, or fundamental beliefs for its validation, but rather
to a common world that persons inhabit linguistically, con-
ceptually, and practically. Judgment, that is, appeals to the
ordinary for its legitimacy. Arendt’s notion of a common
world is markedly different from Rawls’s overlapping con-
sensus, which sets the parameters for democratic argument
and the criteria for determining judgment before any delib-
eration has begun. Arendt is concerned less with formal

234
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

criteria to ground judgment and more with the social prac-

tices and forms of life inside which democratic judgment
can occur. While Rawls seeks a commonness beneath, and
more fundamental to, difference, Arendt’s common world
is “a public space that is created out of the public expres-
sion of the plurality of comprehensive doctrines. The com-
mon world is ‘the space in which things become public’.”72
In other words, for Arendt and Zerilli, the means or crite-
ria for judging are not available to us except through the
actual practice of asking and giving reasons; the capacity
to yield shared judgment comes after and through demo-
cratic engagement amidst difference. Indeed, a key point of
Arendt’s is that judgment is only possible where there exists
a rich and active public sphere, a space of exchange and
argument amidst difference.
Moreover, the very objects of political judgment we
seek, Zerilli argues, are not even perceivable save through
this practice of building a common world. This is the third
important piece of Zerilli’s formulation: Judgment regards
the capacity to see an object in common. Zerilli speaks of
this in terms of an object’s “coming into view.” A common
world is one in which “the sameness of an object” can appear
to all members; an object can come into view as a common
object of judgment.73 This is perhaps the most significant

72
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 160, emphasis mine.
73
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 34, 265. Arendt develops this with
respect to Socrates’s notion of doxa, or “opinion.” For him, she writes, the
“assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man, according
to his position in it; and that the ‘sameness’ of the world, its commonness
(koinon, as the Greeks would say, common to all) or ‘objectivity’ (as we would
say from the subjective view point of modern philosophy) resides in the fact
that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all differences
between men and their positions in the world – and consequently their doxai
(opinions) – both you and I are human.” See Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and
Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 80.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

aspect of Zerilli’s account of democratic judgment and what

marks hers as notably different from traditional theories
of moral judgment. Rather than construing judgment as
an activity in which a person or group considers a definite
“object” and then applies a “concept” to assess it, Zerilli
sees objectivity – the apprehension of an object – not as a
given but as an achievement. Part of the activity of demo-
cratic judgment, in other words, is coming to actually see an
object and see it in common with others. We can appreciate
this difference by considering Alice Crary’s criticism of tra-
ditional conceptions of moral judgment and her alternative
account of moral judgment in terms of vision. According to
Crary, moral judgments are most often “understood as judg-
ments that apply some moral concept or other” to an object
(a dilemma, an action, a person, etc.).74 In this case, a value-
neutral object exists, and it is the task of the moral agent
to apply one of the many concepts supposedly peculiar to
morality (“good,” “bad,” “dutiful,” “just,” “selfish,” etc.)
to that object so as to make a moral determination about
it. Such a picture of moral thinking, Crary argues, imagines
the human person as existing “outside” ethics, an observer
who applies value-descriptions to objects as they are in the
world, apart from their appearance to her.75
There are two chief problems with this picture, Crary
argues. First, it imagines that the whole of moral thinking
consists in the activity of making judgments – again, under-
stood as the application of concepts. Crary wants instead
to move ethical thinking “beyond moral judgment to the
whole sensibilities characteristic of individuals as language

74
Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 1, 9.
75
Alice Crary, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 10–35.

236
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

users,” which includes affect, emotion, vision, imagina-

tion, and so on.76 Second, and relatedly, if moral thinking
extends beyond simple judgment-making, then moral life
and moral concepts cannot be easily separated from those
other supposedly “non-moral” aspects of our ordinary life
in language. Crary’s account of moral thinking, then, is one
“that expands the concerns of ethics so that, far from being
limited to a person’s moral judgments, they encompass her
entire personality – her interests, fears and ambitions, her
characteristic gestures and attitudes and her sense of what
is humorous, what is offensive and what is profound.”77 In
other words, Crary wants to challenge the idea that one can
speak of a distinctively moral domain of life and thought
at all. Moral thinking is always already wrapped up in the
concepts, sensibilities, categories, and capacities for percep-
tion that we acquire in learning language. Moreover, Crary
argues that certain moral judgments are actually unavailable
to persons apart from these elements of perception that we
gain in language acquisition and use. Proper recognition of
certain structures and behaviors as harmful to women, for
example, Crary argues, is dependent on the possession of cer-
tain moral sensitivities and perceptual capacities regarding
gender inequality.78 It is not, then, that an action, behavior,
or circumstance is perceived and then considered under the
concept of gender inequity. Rather, the capacity to see an
instance of gender inequity at all depends upon a whole set of
moral faculties, including, but not limited to, the possession
of concepts (things like attitudes, emotions, terminology).

76
Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment, 4. 77 Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment, 47.
78
See Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment, 164–191. For instance, nearly all attempts
to convince a skeptic that some action or behavior is sexist come down to some
version of, “But how can you not see it this way?” The problem is not that
the skeptic is ignorant, lacks a concept, but rather that he lacks the perceptual
capacity, emotional intelligence, or affective power to see sexism.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

Objects can only appear to us, can only come into view, as
they do so in language, which involves these faculties of per-
ception. Insofar as objects come into view at all, they do so as
already value-laden and conceptualized in language.
What does this mean for Zerilli’s understanding of dem-
ocratic judgment as the process by which an object of judg-
ment “comes into view”? It means that, according to Zerilli,
objects of judgment do not actually exist prior to the activity
of democratic judgment. Something may exist for me as an
object of private judgment, but it does not yet exist for us as
a common object. The latter is achieved through a process
of collective seeing, a kind of “political perception” depen-
dent on shared sensibilities, attitudes, and affect indexed to a
community’s ordinary language. This coming to see an object
in common is the work of building a “common sense,” or
sensus communis, about which I say more later.
Fourth, for Zerilli, the way an object comes into view as
common is through the practical, rather than merely concep-
tual or theoretical, work of “democratic world building.”79
Such work is entirely mundane, involving the exchange of
perceptions, experiences, and assessments of a public life
shared with others. For Arendt, Zerilli notes, “to belong
to a democratic political community is to have a ‘common
world’, not to share a worldview, and this common world
exists only where there is a plurality of worldviews.”80 The
common world, in other words, is irreducibly plural, lack-
ing a “common measure” to adjudicate differences, but it
is exactly this plurality in interactive negotiation, argument,
and exchange about the material world that enables persons
to bring objects into view as common. An object of common
judgment comes into view, then, not by the application of

79
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 32.
80
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 265.

238
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

concepts already at hand, but through exchanges and delib-

erations wherein persons attempt to persuade others to see
an object in a certain way. Democratic world building, then,
is the very practical and ordinary activity of speaking, delib-
erating, and disputing perspectives on an object of common
concern. Later I will argue that practices of broad-based com-
munity organizing can be seen as a world-building activity
in this way. Particularly its tradition of organized listening
practices embodies Arendt’s and Zerilli’s notion that objects
come into view as common insofar as we are able to cultivate
a common world in which to perceive them as such.
Consider, for instance, how a neighborhood might bring
a problem like gang violence into view as a common object
of its democratic judgment. Persons see a notice for a public
meeting organized by a local pastor and gather in a church
basement as strangers drawn together by a similar concern.
As the meeting begins, one person shares that she now fears
walking home from work on her normal route and so must
pay each day for a taxi. Another explains that she can no
longer take her kids to the neighborhood park because of
gang activity and laments their being deprived of opportun-
ities for play and exercise. Still another shares that his brother
was wounded by a stray bullet in a drive-by, and another
that he has been harassed several times by cops called in to
monitor the situation. Through storytelling, sharing expe-
riences, speculating about causes, and hearing from others,
the group begins to piece together a picture of neighborhood
gang violence as a shared problem, a common object of con-
cern. In discernment, they wonder if this problem is rooted in
the recent escalation of poverty, rising rents, the closing of a
nearby factory that employed a significant number of people
in the area, the public school’s termination of several high
school sports programs, a lack of adequate street lighting,
and so on. As the evening unfolds, persons begin connecting

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

problems, sufferings, and challenges they had once perceived

as individual or private but now see in common. They have
come to see their lives as socially connected and politically
entangled by deliberating about this common object. A dem-
ocratic world is being built and an object of common judg-
ment is coming into view through exchange and interaction.
Two things are worth noting about this kind of world-
building practice. First, the group’s bringing an object into
view does not depend on their resolving of conflicts between
supposedly incommensurable comprehensive doctrines they
may have. A group of Christians, Jews, atheists, utilitarians,
secular humanists, and so on need neither moral colloquy nor
agreement on shared, neutral criteria of judgment in order to
see an object in common and deliberate about it. This is not
because the object is obvious and given, but rather because
their world-building capacities of deliberation are capable of
generating shared perception of that object of common judg-
ment. Second, this exchange is deliberative; it is not simply
taking an inventory of as many experiences and viewpoints
as possible and assembling them side by side in a catalogue
of diverse opinions. Rather, it will be, if done well, a form of
argument, though not of the kind Rawls and others describe
in terms of reason-giving and rational deliberation. It will
be instead an argument over perception. Every claim, story,
perspective, and judgment will be an invitation for others to
look at the object in a new way. Certain perspectives will be
challenged or corrected, others deepened, still others ruled
out entirely, in order for an object to be perceived in com-
mon. World building is agonistic in this way, dependent on
forms of dispute and contestation to bring an object into
view. As Zerilli puts it, these “possibilities of disagreement,
conflict, and misunderstanding in attempts to reach agree-
ment about what belongs in the common world are intrin-
sic to democratic politics, and no theory of judgment can

240
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

render itself immune from them.”81 A common object of

judgment, in other words, comes into view through struggle,
through agon. Conflict is central to this activity, and I delin-
eate this further later.
Fifth and finally, democratic judgment, according to
Zerilli, is as much an affective practice as it is a discursive or
rational one. Or, perhaps better, recalling Crary’s argument,
judgment is rational insofar as it is also affective, enabled by
the sensitivities, intuitions, and perceptual capacities given to
us in ordinary language. We noted this earlier in consider-
ing Simon’s argument that political judgment, insofar as it is
an activity of practical reason, involves the will, its appetites
and desires. For judgment to be shared, he argued, it must
arise from an “affective communion” or shared affectivity
between persons. Similarly, Zerilli, in moving democratic
judgment beyond the simple adjudication of value differences
in search of rational consensus, argues that shared judgment
is grounded in an embodied, affective, and relational practice
of collective seeing.
Getting clear on the affective nature of judgment is crit-
ical to addressing the issue of achieving shared judgment
amidst difference, especially in the absence of universal cri-
teria and rules. A common feature of liberal theory, Zerilli
argues, in both its neo-Kantian expressions and among
critics who argue rational judgment is all but impossible
given widespread, irreconcilable conflicts of value, is an
inability to come to terms with the rational and affective
dimensions of judgment. Both share, she says, a “distrust
of ordinary modes of judging,” and this gives rise to a dif-
ficulty in appreciating the ways judgment is properly affec-
tive.82 Neo-Kantians see ordinary judging as compromised

81
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 274.
82
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 4.

241
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

by affect, emotions, and bias, all of which render judgment

subjective and unreasonable. Critics of neo-Kantianism, of
whom Zerilli has in mind affect theorists like Leslie Paul
Thiele and William Connolly, question the rationalism of
liberal theories of public reason, arguing that democratic
reason-giving is, at bottom, nothing but the expression of
affect, of “already primed, preconscious dispositions that
are formed through the complex interaction of the social
and the somatic.”83 Affect theoretical approaches to the
political, Zerilli believes, rightly criticize liberal theory’s ten-
dency “to treat all aspects of human thought and action in
terms of cognition,” such that “our orientation to the world
is wholly conceptual.”84 This kind of liberalism inevitably
ends up construing judgment in terms of rational adjudi-
cation of value commitments and comprehensive doctrines.
However, affect theorists overcorrect this rationalism by
privileging nonconceptual orientations to the world in a way
that simply reinforces a reason/affect dualism and, quite
alarmingly, jettisons reason as a critical element of demo-
cratic accountability. What is needed, Zerilli asserts, is an
“understanding of intelligent action and judgment in which
affect and reason are understood to be mutually imbricated
in modes of conceptuality, rather than distinct.”85
Something like this joining of affect and reason, what we
might call “rational affectivity” or “affective rationality,”
is actually obvious in our ordinary practices of judgment.

83
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 5. See, for instance, William Connolly,
Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002); Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical
Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006); and John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the
Somatic (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
84
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 240.
85
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 241.

242
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

Recall that this was one of Crary’s principal points, that

moral thinking and judgment cannot be separated from our
ordinary life in language, its pedagogy in affect. Both neo-
Kantians and affect theorists, Zerilli contends, “tend to see
our ordinary modes of judging as intrinsically partial and
distorting,” in need of supplementing with either more uni-
versal criteria of judgment (neo-Kantianism) or an account
of the redirection and formation of sub-rational affect (affect
theory).86 But we need not see judgment’s affectivity as
necessitating partiality or preventing judgment from being
shared.87 Instead, we can view democratic judgment as com-
mon insofar as it arises from the affective attunement char-
acteristic of common life in language. My later consideration
of IAF’s broad-based community organizing, for instance,
shows the ways common judgment is reached through gener-
ating affective attunement.
We are now in place to try to summarize what the activity
of democratic judgment entails. In general terms, judgment
is the process of making a determination about a particular
in the absence of universal rules or criteria. In democratic
politics, this requires an object of judgment to be perceived
in common by persons and groups with significant differ-
ences. A democratic community is able to reach such shared
vision through practices of deliberation and exchange within
a common world they have forged amidst difference. This
common world is characterized by affective attunement and

86
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 4.
87
As Crary puts it, referring to Cavell, “There is, for him, no question of
appealing to the fact that a discursive gesture is practically or affectively
potent to determine that it cannot as such contribute to rationally responsible
discourse, and there is also no question of appealing to the fact that such a
gesture is practically or affectively potent to establish its rational credentials.”
Alice Crary, “Cavell and Critique,” Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian
Studies 6 (2018): 23.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

common sensing. Having a common object in view, they are

able to issue practical judgments about that object, making
and grounding their claims by appealing to the shared social
practices, commitments, and forms of life that constitute
their common world. Their judgments are authorized, in
this way, by a “common sense” forged and shared by those
who inhabit this common world. I conclude this section by
considering the nature of this common sense and the place
of conflict within it.

4.2.3 Judgment and Sensus Communis

A democratic political community comes to common judg-
ment by appeal not to external, neutral, universal crite-
ria to resolve their disagreements, but rather to a kind of
“common sense” practical rationality forged amidst and
across their differences. Democratic judgments are autho-
rized insofar as they can be shown to make sense within
this common world of meaning. Following Kant, Arendt
calls this shared sense, at once both rational and affective,
sensus communis. To explicate its dynamic character, she
draws specifically on Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judg-
ments as involving matters of “taste.” In judgments of the
beautiful, wherein I do not simply declare a subjective opin-
ion about the status of an object as it appears to me, but
also expect others to confirm and share my assessment, an
appeal to taste seeks to ground judgment in a shared sense
of aesthetic pleasure. Arendt refers to this shared sense as
a kind of “sixth sense” which joins and mediates our per-
sonal forms of knowing with the knowing of others.88 As
Kant argued, some kind of shared sense, sensus communis,

88
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1978), 50.

244
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

is a necessary condition of judgments of taste, for it pro-

vides the public context in which such judgments can be
expressed, substantiated, contested, or affirmed.89 Sensus
communis, then, is a form of public knowing, arising from
ordinary life and constituted by common sensibilities and
intuitions. One cannot prove aesthetic judgments, and judg-
ments of taste cannot compel consent; rather, they solicit
agreement by appeal to sensus communis. The same is true,
Arendt contends, with political judgments.
Political judgments seek justification by appeal to sensus
communis and so operate by means of persuasion. Persuasion
is a form of deliberation less like proving a thesis and more
like “producing or deepening an example,” as Cavell puts
it, inviting another to examine whether an expression, con-
cept, or formulation of speech better captures the reality at
hand, is a better example of what “we” say about it, than
others.90 In terms of the earlier discussion of common per-
ception, it takes the form, “Don’t see it like that. Try to see
it like this.”91 Or, as Kant described aesthetic judgments, “I
put forward my judgment of taste as an example of the judg-
ment of common sense, and attribute to it on that account
exemplary validity.”92 In other words, in making a judg-
ment, one stakes oneself as a representative of the judging
community, not in a final sense but in order to invite contes-
tation and/or agreement. Arendt’s important insight, which
I take to be as true of contemporary democratic politics as

89
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 68–69. Prior to Kant, Giambattista Vico had
written of sensus communis, “The common sense is a judgment without
reflection sensed in common by a whole order, a whole people, a whole nation,
or the whole of humankind.” The New Science, trans. Jason Taylor and Robert
Miner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 78.
90
Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 95, quoted in Zerilli, Democratic
Theory of Judgment, 77.
91
Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment, 77.
92
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 70.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

the politics of her day, is that political discourse, delibera-

tion, and argument operate more along these lines of affec-
tive persuasion than of technical or rational demonstration.
Establishing a judgment by appealing to sensus communis
is an attempt to represent the judgment of others in oneself,
and so declare it as common.
Luke Bretherton has proposed thinking of certain forms
of participatory democracy as the construction, cultiva-
tion, and maintenance of a sensus communis. Broad-based
community organizing, for example, he sees as a political
practice that generates and sustains a form of practical
rationality wherein shared judgments amidst difference can
be made by appealing to a shared common sense. Grassroots
pluralist politics like this can enable strangers to forge a
“common world of meaning and action between diverse
traditions in a particular place.”93 It is not, in other words,
that moral and political diversity are overcome by appeal-
ing to any sort of neutral space beneath or above difference,
but rather that, within the messy praxis of encounter, delib-
eration, argument, negotiation, conflict, and conciliation,
ad hoc connections and commonalities are identified and
assembled into a sensus communis constructed from the
ground up.94 Sensus communis, that is, is politically pro-
duced, not given. Romand Coles similarly conceptualizes
forms of coalitional, interreligious, multiracial, and multi-
cultural grassroots politics as “nepantalist,” drawing on the

93
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 179. Bretherton contrasts his account
of broad-based community organizing as a form of building political sensus
communis with agonistic construals of the political. My contention is that
conflict and the agonistic negotiations of difference are always part and parcel
of a political community’s sensus communis.
94
The notion of sensus communis has much in common, in this way, with Jeffrey
Stout’s account of “moral bricolage.” See Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The
Language of Morals and Their Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 75.

246
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

Chicano/a notion of nepantla, or “in-between-ness.”95 For

him, pluralist politics that is agonistic, rather than “cos-
mopolitan,” seeks not a discursive plane above difference,
converting differences into a singular liberal “currency”
for speech and judgment; rather, agonistic politics unfolds
within spaces “torn” between moral, religious, and polit-
ical traditions and visions.96 Within such torn spaces and
through practices of nepantalist generosity, listening, and
receptive engagement, coalitions can form and common
interests can be identified. Sensus communis, as an achieve-
ment of agonistic negotiation across difference, draws on
the languages, traditions, concepts, customs, and practices
of particular constituents in order to build a common space
wherein shared judgments can be made.
I am proposing we understand the complex relationship
between commonness and difference in agonistic communi-
ties in terms of sensus communis. Doing so allows us to see,
on the one hand, that political community does not need
substantial forms of agreement, rational consensus, or social
harmony to ground shared judgments. Sensus communis is,
I’ve shown, piecemeal, contingent, and produced through
ad hoc connections across difference. Because it has more to
do with affective commonness and shared perception than
rational or moral colloquy, it can be achieved even amidst
substantial difference. Sensus communis, in other words, is
a form of political collectivity proper to agonistic pluralism.
On the other hand, sensus communis is a means of gener-
ating real democratic community. Though its construction
is contingent, a bricolage of sensibilities, practices, values,

95
Coles, Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 64–76. See also
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
96
Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 67.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

stories, and local knowledges produced in political activ-

ity, it is nevertheless a form of practical rationality that can
endure over time. Sensus communis, as a mode of practical
reasoning, can draw persons together into a common life of
shared affect and perception. It can become embedded in
institutions, histories, and memories, and so sustain a com-
munity’s judgment-making over time. More ambitious than
liberal public reason, sensus communis aims for a depth
of commonness across difference, even while resisting the
impulse to collapse or erase differences in consensus.
Sensus communis is best understood, I suggest, as some-
thing like a living repository of wisdom and skill, embod-
ied in collective experiences, preserved memory, and shared
sensibilities, and carried through time within a particular
locality.97 Sensus communis is similar in this respect to
what the Mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz calls
lo cotidiano, or quotidian experience.98 Lo cotidiano, she
writes, “has to do with the practices and beliefs that we
have inherited, with our habitual judgments, including the
tactics we use to deal with the everyday.”99 It is “unme-
thodical” and “ad hoc,” yet a kind of “common sense”
passed down, reinterpreted, added to, and revised in the
face of new challenges and realities.100 It binds persons
to neighbors, family, and ancestors, while also stimulat-
ing innovation. It is inspired by the “instincts of grassroots
Latinas” and “sharpened by their daily struggle for sur-
vival,” a collected body of “folk wisdom” that provides a
community of struggle with resources to address everyday

97
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 197–198.
98
See Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First
Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 69–70.
99
Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology,”
Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology 10, no. 1 (2002): 8.
100
Isasi-Díaz, “Lo Cotidiano,” 9.

248
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

oppression and thrive.101 Sensus communis, like lo cotidi-

ano, is ordinary wisdom, sustaining and sustained by a
community of practical judgment.
It is within this sensus communis that objects come into
view as common and can be judged by all. This, then, is our
answer to the first question identified at the outset of this
section: How can democratic judgments be sustained amidst
plurality and difference in the absence of universal criteria or
rules? Sensus communis, the contingent practical rationality
forged by a democratic community, supplies a common wis-
dom and affective attunement within which an object of judg-
ment is brought into common view and practical judgments
about it are issued. This is a formal description of democratic
judgment. Its incarnation in grassroots democratic practices
will be detailed in the final section of this chapter. First, how-
ever, I need to address the second task of a democratic theory
of judgment named earlier: identifying the role of conflict in
coming to judgment.

4.2.4 Judgment and Conflict

My argument has been that democratic judgment is not a
matter of adjudicating supposedly incommensurable differ-
ences of value, seeking a set of universal criteria or rules to
guarantee agreement and consensus. Rather, it is the process
by which a community forges a common world of meaning
and action, sustained by the wisdom and affective attunement
of a sensus communis, and brings an object of judgment into
view as common. Democratic judgment, in other words, is
about shared perception. But these notions of shared percep-
tion, sensus communis, affective attunement, and common
world should not be seen in static terms, nor as embodying

101
Isasi-Díaz, “Lo Cotidiano,” 9.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

a kind of harmonizing of difference. Conflict, I show here, is

internal to a sensus communis, and so essential to democratic
judgment. Far from being an obstacle to shared judgment, as
Neo-Kantian liberals contend, conflict can actually facilitate
judgment’s democratic nature.
Earlier I suggested that the work of democratic world
building, of constructing and maintaining a sensus commu-
nis, involves activities of exchange, negotiation, even contes-
tation. The common world, in Arendt’s terms, is irreducibly
plural. Concepts have no static meaning or determined range
of use but are constantly in circulation and revision, being
projected in new ways and redefined in others. Recall from
Chapter 2 that Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonism, in con-
trast to simple antagonism, involves parties who share a set
of concepts and values – what we might simply call “ordi-
nary language” – even while disagreeing about the meaning
and proper use of those concepts and categories. So with
democratic communities of judgment. To judge democrat-
ically means to engage in disputation over the meaning of
shared words and concepts.
We can appreciate the way conflict and disagreement are
inherent to arriving at common judgment by considering
Wittgenstein and Cavell’s understanding of language-use.
What is remarkable about human language, Cavell notes,
following Wittgenstein, is that “our uses of language are per-
vasively, almost unimaginably, systematic.”102 The extent of
this systematic coherence is attributable not to agreements
reached by convention or determined criteria or rules for lan-
guage use (“We cannot have agreed beforehand to all that
would be necessary” for our language to work103), but some-

102
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29.
103
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 31.

250
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

thing deeper, what Wittgenstein called “attunement” and

“(odd as it may sound) agreement in judgments.”104 Cavell
notes just how surprising Wittgenstein’s notion of agreement
in judgment here is:
Now the whole thing looks backwards. Criteria were to be the
bases (features, marks, specifications) on the basis of which
certain judgments could be made (non-arbitrarily); agreement
over criteria was to make possible agreement about judgments.
But in Wittgenstein it looks as if our ability to establish criteria
depended upon a prior agreement in judgments.105

Here we see just how different the approaches to judgment

taken by neo-Kantianism and ordinary language philosophy
really are. The former seeks to establish universal criteria
prior to deliberation in order for common judgment to be
reached. Agreement on criteria, established by, for example,
public reason, determines the space within which judgment
can proceed as legitimately shared. Wittgenstein reverses this,
showing how our shared and contested criteria are depen-
dent upon the more fundamental agreement in judgment,
or “attunement,” that comprises ordinary life and speech,
indeed makes such life and speech possible in the first place.
Attunement does not guarantee agreement about particular
judgments, for example, in the political sphere. Far from it.
It names the space within which disagreement can occur; it
is the condition of conflict. To use the language of the previ-
ous section, attunement allows for an object of judgment to
come into view and so defines the discursive space in which
arguments about it can be had. Cavell and Wittgenstein
push us to recognize that the possibility of disagreement and

104
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), §§241, 242.
105
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 30.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

conflict over particular judgments rests upon a more basic

agreement in judgment. Conflict and attunement are mutu-
ally imbricated.
Cavell and Wittgenstein, in other words, challenge us to
consider what it means that our disagreements and conflicts
always occur in language, and that disagreements and con-
flicts are part and parcel of language-use. Disagreement is
possible, our conflict is intelligible as conflict, insofar as it
can be articulated in language. But once this occurs, a whole
host of agreements, shared forms of life, and mutual attun-
ements become visible. To genuinely disagree presumes a
shared concept or set of concepts; the dispute is over the cri-
teria governing their uses, the boundaries of their coherence.
As Beiner notes, this sharing of a concept does not mean that
“the actual achievement of agreement is assured,” but rather
that “one cannot speak of a shared concept where there is
no possibility of agreement on how to apply the concept.”106
Thus, Beiner goes on, “fundamental disagreements” can
“arise over such concepts,” but “there must be some concep-
tual contact between those in fundamental conflict … There
must be this minimal (or formal) shared judgment if conflicts
of judgment are to occur.”107 This is the paradox into which
ordinary language philosophy invites democratic theory:
both agreement and disagreement are inherent to language
use; both conflict and commonness are intrinsic to judgment.
Again, to assert that disagreement is necessarily founded on
more basic sets of agreements is not in any way to dimin-
ish the extent or intensity of the conflicts that precede com-
ing to democratic judgment. Exactly the opposite, in fact:
Agreement in judgment, or attunement in our shared use
of language and the basic shape of concepts, makes conflict

106
Beiner, Political Judgment, 141.
107
Beiner, Political Judgment, 141, emphasis mine.

252
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

intelligible as conflict. Absent basic agreements in judgment,

difference is simply alterity. For difference to rise to the level
of conflict, it must be located within, an achievement of, our
common life in language.
Attunement and conflict, then, belong together. Intelligible
conflict presumes a commonness and common life in lan-
guage. Beiner notes the importance of this for political judg-
ment: “Judgment implies judging community,” but this
necessarily provokes and “gives rise to the question: which
community?”108 Conflicts over practical judgments always
presuppose shared language, concepts, and intelligibility, a
“we” that judges. But just who it is that shares these, shares
in this common life in language, is continually in question,
revision, and contestation. The constitution of the judging
community and its sensus communis, animated by agree-
ment and disagreement, is perpetually in motion with each
new claim of judgment, each new projection and adaptation
of a concept, and each contestation of attempts to speak on
behalf of the judging community. Cavell and Wittgenstein
reveal that the critical question for democratic judgment is
not how to establish a judging community (through pub-
lic reason, deliberative procedures, universal criteria, etc.).
Every act of judgment already presumes and prepossess
some judging community. The central question of dem-
ocratic judgment is instead about how the judging com-
munity negotiates its conflicts, polices its boundaries, and
settles disagreements. The task of democratic politics is not
to bring a judging community into existence but to extend,
open, and democratize the judging community that neces-
sarily exists in any political formation.
But not only is conflict inevitable for any linguistic and
political community insofar as the sharing of concepts

108
Beiner, Political Judgment, 144.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

entails disagreements regarding their use, conflict is also a

generative feature of the common life of the judging com-
munity. It is what makes democratic community agonistic.
Agonistic community not only acknowledges the inevitabil-
ity of conflict but also facilitates its use, directing it toward
democratic ends. One important reason why conflict, and its
facilitation rather than suppression, must be integral to ago-
nistic community is that formations of a democratic sensus
communis can often mask and reify hierarchical social rela-
tions and circulations of power. The urgency of coming to
judgment can lead democratic communities to thus rely on
and leave uncontested configurations of power and privilege
organized by economic, racial, gender, and cultural hierar-
chies. In such cases, the sensus communis becomes far too
narrow. Rather than representing the whole, it legitimizes
the interests of the few.109
Conflict and contestation, however, can be a means of
democratizing and pluralizing the sensus communis, aiding
the formation of judgments that are more common and
democratic by reconfiguring, expanding, or reforming the
practical wisdom that grounds them. Conflictual interven-
tions like sit-ins, disruptive public actions, and protests can
be ways of asserting the need for, as Bretherton puts it,
“representation of other interests and voices in the decision-
making process in order to reflect the contested nature of
knowledge and judgment.”110 Agonistic communities, at
their best, find ways to encourage and facilitate forms of
nonviolent conflict and contestation in order to challenge

109
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 194. Bretherton refers here to the
important attention to power in the construal of political practical reason
given in Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry
Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, trans. Steven Sampson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
110
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 194.

254
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

and reconfigure relations of power and the constitution of

the judging community. It is through such conflict that “the
selfish interests of the one, the few, or the many” are con-
fronted, destabilized, contested, and reconfigured so as to
identify genuinely common goods and interests.111
In this way, conflict is democratically generative. It con-
tributes to the construction of a more just and inclusive
sensus communis and prevents the practice of judgment from
simply becoming an exercise of the most powerful. Agonistic
negotiations of difference, the clashing and contestations of
public assemblies, protests, heated arguments between com-
munity leaders in church basements – these can broaden or
revise what is taken to belong to sensus communis and thus
justification for judgment. Moreover, they can generate new
ways of seeing, hearing, and discerning; new language and
concepts for determining judgments; and new capacities for
common action unavailable to persons prior to their struggle
together.112 Audre Lorde calls this the “creative function of
difference,” the “fund of necessary polarities between which
our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”113 Agonistic poli-

111
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 194. On how certain discursive practices
and norms can pathologize and sacralize marginality, and thus displace the
kinds of conflict necessary for democratic collective struggle, see Olúfémi O.
Táíwò, “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Difference,”
The Philosopher 108, no. 4 (2020): 61–69. See also Sarah Schulman, Conflict
Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of
Repair (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016).
112
The notion that certain capacities for common political action are birthed
only within the experience of common struggle is a central feature of the
work of Leo Panitch. See, for instance, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The
Socialist Challenge Today: Syriza, Corbyn, Sanders (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2020), and the essays in A Different Kind of State? Popular Power
and Democratic Administration, ed. Gregory Albo, David Langille, and Leo
Panitch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
113
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 111,
quoted in Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 207.

255
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

tics is motivated by this commitment – that conflict can both

expand and broaden the field of deliberation and judgment,
occasioning new prospects, potentialities, and imaginative
possibilities for common action.

4.2.5 Judgment and Dissent

Finally, it is important to note that judgment is not a final
resolution to the agonisms and conflicts of democratic delib-
eration, even if it is occasioned by them. Shared judgment
can occur within conflictual and pluralist communities, but
it does not then dissolve their agonisms and contradictions.
This is because judgment terminates in a decision made in the
absence of full consensus and so produces dissent. As Mouffe
says, every judgment entails a “decision which excludes
other possibilities.”114 An agonistic community cannot sus-
pend judgment until full consensus is reached because full
consensus often never arrives.115 Yet the exigencies of dem-
ocratic life demand that judgments be made nevertheless.
Moreover, we should not understand the presence of dissent
as something that makes judgments illegitimate or undemo-
cratic. The important matter is how an agonistic community
responds to the ongoing presence of dissent, whether it can
cultivate practices of tending to dissent in order to acknowl-
edge the contingent nature of its judgments and hold them
as such. In Chapter 3, I showed that shared judgments –

114
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2009), 105.
115
Foucault, for instance, understands consensus as a “critical principle,” not
an actual possibility, but one which nevertheless aims toward ever greater
inclusion in judgment. As a critical principle, it provokes consideration of
“what proportion of nonconsensuality is necessary or not,” and interrogation
of “every power relation to that extent.” See Michel Foucault, “Politics and
Ethics: An Interview,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
Pantheon, 1984), 379.

256
 4.2 Judgment and Agonistic Community

for example, between a married couple – can encompass a

certain negativity within them; indeed, that preserving this
negativity and the memory of conflict is essential for remem-
bering the contingency and fallibility of judgments made. To
remember that a judgment was contested is to know that it
is contestable, open to revision. Dissent functions similarly
in agonistic communities as a reminder of the imperfect-
ability, contingency, and fallibility of democratic judgment.
Contestation, then, not only contributes to a community’s
arrival at common judgment, but it also follows the mak-
ing of the judgment, testing it, challenging it, and demanding
further judgments to be made.
We might speak of the importance of dissent in demo-
cratic judgment-making in terms of “accountability.” If
judgment is inherently contingent and fallible, terminating in
decisions and actions that are open to contestation and revi-
sion, then communities of judgment must develop “practices
of accountability-holding,” as Molly Farneth calls them, in
order to properly attend to dissent.116 Holding accountable is
one form dissent can take after judgment has terminated in a
decision to which one objects. In this case, the dissenter holds
the judging community accountable for the effects of its judg-
ment, intended and unintended, foreseen and unforeseen.
She does this by way of public scrutiny, critique, testimony,
protest, and other social practices of accountability-holding.
Importantly, when dissent functions in this way, it should
be understood as an expression of fidelity to a democratic
community. Holding accountable is a way of acknowledging
the authority of a democratic community while also regis-
tering one’s own authority as a member of it.117 In so doing,

116
Molly Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of
Reconciliation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 119.
117
Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics, 118.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

the dissenter challenges the judging community to reform

and refine its democratic commitments and better its judg-
ments. Withdrawal, resentment, and resignation in response
to an objectionable determination might be understandable,
but these responses deprive democracies of their agonistic
vitality. Engaging in dissent as a form of holding account-
able aims to preserve the contingent, and thus revisable and
reformable, nature of judgment’s determinations.
Accountability goes both ways, though. A community of
judgment must also hold itself accountable to its dissenting
members, those who participate in the common work of
coming to judgment but dispute the determination arrived
at. An agonistic community must be responsive to dissent,
even nurture its presence, as a way of acknowledging the fal-
lible and imperfect nature of its judgment. Heeding dissent
assures those who object to a community’s decisions that
their disapproval is registered and recognized, confirming
that their fidelity to a democratic community is meaningful,
in spite of their objections.118 Dissent and opposition always
linger in the shadow of democratic judgments. They are
judgment’s “remainders.” Being responsive to these remain-
ders and enduring the conflict of their protest and contes-
tation can grant agonistic communities the capacity to see
their judgments as contingent, fallible, and reformable. As
Alasdair MacIntyre notes of moral traditions, which are sim-
ply “continuities of conflict” and extended arguments over
time, every judgment is always provisional.119 “If we do rest
in a conclusion reached by dialectical argument,” he writes,
“it is only because no experiences have led us to revise our

118
Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 213–237. See also Romand Coles, Visionary
Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 31–69.
119
MacIntyre, After Virtue, 222.

258
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

belief” in fundamental ways, at least not yet. “No alterna-

tive opinion advanced,” he goes on, “has been able better
to withstand objections than that at which we had already
arrived. But the possibility of further dialectical development
always remains open.”120 To remain open to development
and revision, agonistic communities must make their judg-
ments vulnerable to critique and contestation and account-
able to dissent. To do so is a matter of acknowledging our
finitude and the fallible nature of communities of judgment.
But it is also an act of faith in the generative and productive
potentialities of conflict and contest, that becoming account-
able to dissent is essential to the pursuit of justice.

4.3 Agonistic Community: The Industrial

Areas Foundation
My account of democratic judgment, agonistic community,
and the use of conflict has, until now, remained primarily at
a formal and conceptual level. Here, however, I turn to one
type of grassroots democratic practice I take to embody these
ideas in concrete terms. My reason for analyzing the orga-
nizing practices of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) has
less to do with it being some kind of illustrative example or
confirmation of my theoretical account of agonistic commu-
nity and more with making explicit the experience of radical,
agonistic democracy informing and shaping that account.
My arrival at this perspective on agonistic politics has been
deeply shaped by my participation in and reflection on IAF
organizing, and now is an appropriate time to make that
explicit. Looking carefully, if only briefly, at the nature of

120
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 100–101, quoted in Coles, Beyond
Gated Politics, 91.

259
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

IAF organizing is my attempt to show the concrete practical

politics informing my theory of democratic conflict. Just as
IAF organizing includes reflection, teaching, and theorizing
as part of its activism, so democratic theorizing of the kind
I am after must, in some way, arise from and articulate the
experience of agonistic democratic praxis. In what follows, I
examine several of the IAF’s organizing strategies under the
categories of “seeing,” “judging,” and “acting,”121 in order
to show how they embody an agonistic politics of democratic
judgment, or what I call “agonistic community.”
Founded by Saul Alinsky in 1940, the IAF is a network
of broad-based community organizations, with more than
sixty affiliate organizations throughout the United States
and in the UK, Australia, Germany, and Canada.122 Sharing
an approach to organizing and tactics of grassroots poli-
tics developed first by Alinsky and subsequently by leaders
like Ed Chambers, Richard Harmon, and Ernesto Cortes,
Jr., the IAF embodies a distinct form of participatory dem-
ocratic politics, one which has garnered attention from a
number of religious thinkers and leaders.123 One of its most

121
This “See–Judge–Act” typology is drawn from Latin American liberation
theology, though I make use of these terms in a slightly different way. See
Clodovis Boff, “Epistemology and Method of the Theology of Liberation,”
in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology,
ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993),
57–84; and Andrew Dawson, “The Origins and Character of the Base Ecclesial
Community: A Brazilian Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Liberation Theology, ed. Christopher Rowland (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 146–147.
122
Industrial Areas Foundation, www.industrialareasfoundation.org/affiliates.
123
See, for instance, the correspondence between Alinsky and Catholic
philosopher Jacques Maritain in The Philosopher and the Provocateur: The
Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, ed. Bernard Doering
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). Some contemporary
theological reflections on Alinsky-style organizing include Luke Bretherton,
Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities
of Faithful Witness (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Bretherton,

260
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

distinguishing features is the important place congregations

and communities of faith have in IAF organizations. Because
membership is established not by individual persons but by
institutions, religious congregations, churches, synagogues,
mosques, neighborhood groups, parent–teacher associ-
ations, labor unions, and other civic associations all play a
major role in mediating the work of a community organiza-
tion and the lives of citizens. In addition to being an exper-
iment in radical democracy, then, IAF organizing is also an
interesting case of a distinctly post-secular politics, in which
religious communities participate as religious communi-
ties in the building up of a common life amidst difference.
IAF organizations are composed of networks of institutions
within a locality, and they depend on the resources, place-
based knowledge, leadership, and relational webs of these
institutions for their work, even as they seek to bring these
institutions into relationship with each other in the pursuit of
common goods. The IAF is thus a form of broad-based orga-
nizing, in that organizations are not issue-specific, nor do
they seek to represent the interests of a particular group.124
Rather, the IAF provides an organizational context and set
of tactical strategies within which civil society’s groups and
institutions can identify matters of shared concern; orga-

Resurrecting Democracy; Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “Receiving from

the Other: Theology and Grass-Roots Organizing,” International Journal
of Public Theology 6 (2012): 421–434; Austin Ivereigh, Faithful Citizens:
A Practical Guide to Catholic Social Teaching and Community Organising
(London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2010); Alexia Salvatierra and Peter
Heltzel, Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the
World (Grand Rapids, MI: InterVarsity Press, 2014); Chris Shannahan,
A Theology of Community Organizing: Power to the People (New York:
Routledge, 2014); C. Melissa Snarr, All You That Labor: Religion and Ethics
in the Living Wage Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
124
Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize
American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 32.

261
 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

nize people and knowledge to address common problems;

practice modes of listening, discernment, and deliberation
in order to come to shared judgment; and build power for
common action.
There are three primary reasons for my turning to the
IAF’s organizing practices in light of my argument thus far.
First, the IAF embodies a deep concern for the building,
tending, and sustaining of organizations, or communities of
democratic praxis. At the heart of its philosophy of organiz-
ing is the belief that more important than and fundamental
to an organization’s actions and wins is a commitment to the
formation and nurturing of a democratic community capa-
ble of sharing judgment and action over time. This commit-
ment to the building of a people, not just the winning of an
issue, is embodied in the centrality of relational practices
of meeting, listening, assembling, institution building, and
leadership formation, all of which are aimed at the long-
term project of building a democratic culture and enhancing
the capacities of ordinary citizens to act politically. Second,
a critical feature of the IAF’s grassroots politics is its capac-
ity to generate political judgments that are common, both
among its diverse constituents and between elected officials
and those who hold them accountable. What makes the
IAF’s actions authentically democratic is that they emerge
out of time intensive, broad-based campaigns of listening,
deliberation, and reflection among large groups of ordinary
citizens. Judgments are arrived at through countless deliber-
ative meetings and thus claim to represent a wide democratic
base. When an organization makes a judgment or performs
an action, it does so not as an interest group but, it claims,
as a representative citizen body. Third, the IAF’s organizing
practices and strategies are unique in their ability to draw on
and nurture the deeply affective and conflictual dimensions
of democratic life. At any stage or level of organizing, as we

262
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

will see later, one is likely to see encounters between per-

sons that are both profoundly emotional and intensely con-
tentious. Embracing these agonistic moments and attending
to their productive and generative capacities, IAF organiz-
ing catalyzes conflict for action. It is because of these three
dimensions of IAF organizing – community, judgment, and
conflict – that I take it to exemplify a form of agonistic polit-
ical community.125

4.3.1 Seeing: Affective Attunement and

Bringing an Object into View
The IAF prides itself on the fundamental place of listening in
its grassroots politics. Organizing campaigns begin and end
in listening meetings, and the IAF sees its political action as
authorized and representative insofar as it arises from exten-
sive neighborhood listening practices. Two practices serve
as the chief contexts for democratic listening: one-on-one
meetings and house meetings. The IAF’s listening practices
provide the foundational basis of common judgment and
action, and they are the spaces in which affective attune-
ment is realized and objects of democratic judgment come
into view as common.
“One-on-ones,” as organizers call them, are twenty- to
thirty-minute meetings that organizers conduct with individ-
uals in the organization or citizens in the broader commu-
nity, in order to hear personal stories; solicit assessments
of and reactions to community health, problems, and

125
IAF organizations, I suggest, are both instances of agonistic community in
themselves, as well as important catalysts for the restoring and remaking of
political community at the local, municipal, state, and national levels. Ernie
Cortés refers to this capacity of organizing as its “reweaving the social fabric”
of societies. See Ernesto Cortés, Jr., “Reweaving the Social Fabric,” Boston
Review 19, nos. 3–4 (June–September 1994): 12–14.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

opportunities; and build relationships around common

interests.126 The goal of one-on-ones is not to “sell” the
organization or gather a signature for a petition, but rather
to listen to persons’ articulations of their experience living
in a community and with its problems, and to probe these
articulations with questions, sometimes provocative ones, in
order to move a person to a commitment to address those
problems with others. As Ernesto Cortés conceives of them,
one-on-ones are where organizers identify persons with “a
clear sense of self-interest in getting involved, a willingness
to act, and the presence of controlled or ‘cold’ anger” about
an issue.127 One-on-ones, then, are not a place for casual
small talk, nor are they “check-ins” with organization or
community members. They are aimed at identifying and
building a distinctly political kind of relationship around
shared goods and interests.128 Organizers are trained to con-
duct one-on-ones with disciplined purpose. They ask ques-
tions like: What experiences contributed to your deciding to
become a [teacher, non-profit director, pastor, social worker,
etc.]? What makes you angry about living in this neighbor-
hood? What do you think about [the recent police activ-
ity, the closing of the nearby hospital, last week’s shooting,
etc.]? What does the neighborhood you dream of look like?
What are you doing right now to change things? In con-
versation, organizers will then ask follow-up questions and
further probe persons’ answers, pushing to elicit their deep
passions, fundamental experiences, and driving motivations

126
See Edward T. Chambers, “The Relational Meeting,” in Roots for Radicals:
Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2014), 44–54.
127
IAF Organizing, www.citizenshandbook.org/iaf.pdf.
128
Montgomery County Education Association, Relational Organizing
Resources: The Art of One-On-One Meetings, 2013, http://mceanea.org/
wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2014/09/Primer-on-One-on-Ones.pdf.

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 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

in order to connect them to the common experience of oth-

ers and the organizing of those others to address issues of
common concern. Over the course of conducting sometimes
hundreds of one-on-ones for any given campaign, what
emerges is not simply an inventory of individuals’ stories
and experiences, an “aggregation of different self-interests,”
but, as Coles puts it, a “growing articulation of interest as
‘interesse’ – which means to be among or between” – as pas-
sions and perceptions are linked to those of others.129 The
goal of one-on-ones, in this sense, is to move persons from
seeing something as “my problem” to perceiving it as “our
problem,” which we might then address and act on together.
One of the most important, and perhaps surprising, elem-
ents of IAF one-on-one meetings is the place of agitation in
them. In training and leadership education, IAF leaders spe-
cifically use this language of “agitation” to describe the activ-
ity of listening. Because organizers are interested in provoking
the people with whom they meet to commitment and action,
moving them from simply coping with social problems to a
more assertive role in addressing them with others, organ-
izers seek to engage persons with respectful provocation.130
“What is really motivating you?” “If you’re so angry about
that, why haven’t you done anything about it?” “What’s
keeping you from joining our work on this?” Provocations
like these aim to agitate a person toward discovering a sense
of solidarity with others and a commitment to public action.
As leading organizer and theorist Michael Gecan puts it:
You challenge them in a way that you can only do effectively
when you are face to face, one to one, ‘How can you stand to
live in this place? What have you tried to do to turn it around?

129
Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 222, quoting Warren, Dry Bones Rattling, 224.
130
Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing
in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 36.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

Are you willing to work with groups you say you dislike to make
a difference here?’ And you let others agitate you, as they did.
‘What are you, a white guy, doing here?’ ‘What makes you think
that EBC will be any different from all the other do-nothing
groups around here?’ ‘What does any of this have to do with
ministry and faith, anyway?’131

Listening, in other words, is not a passive activity in one-

on-ones but a dynamic and agonistic exchange aimed at
excavating passion and generating emotion around an issue
in order to build a common sense of purpose. It is also ago-
nistic in the sense of being an exchange of self-giving and
receiving, wherein individuals and communities make them-
selves vulnerable to the affective power of others to reshape
their own sense of things.132 Coles describes the agitation of
one-on-ones as arising out of a kind of “radical curiosity”
about another which seeks to encourage them to “listen to
themselves more attentively and hopefully better than they
might have done before.”133 Agitation, then, is seen to be
productive, forging new attitudes, passions, commitments,
and shared perceptions. Essentially, it aims to move a person
from passivity and privacy to a sense of shared power and
common interest with others. It is agitation that makes lis-
tening an agonistic practice and central to forging a sense of
one’s capacity for shared action.
Over the course of many one-on-ones, organizers identify
leaders within a community who will be able to organize
their neighbors, contacts, friends, and acquaintances for
small house meetings. House meetings, the second major
IAF listening practice, are aimed at gathering members of a

131
Michael Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 24–25.
132
Jonathan Tran, The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory: Time and
Eternity in the Far Country (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 256–258.
133
Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 231.

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 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

community to share stories, perceptions, and experiences;

hear from their neighbors; and begin to build a sense of
shared plight and promise. House meetings embody what
I discussed earlier in terms of democratic world building.
They gather persons around matters of common concern,
across their many differences, in order to generate a com-
mon world of speech and action. In many ways, house
meetings carry the practice of one-on-ones into a larger set-
ting, usually of ten to fifteen people. House meetings are
often organized around a general issue (crime in the neigh-
borhood, problems with the local school’s facilities, lack
of jobs in a particular part of the city) and seek to draw on
participants’ experiences and lived knowledge of the issue
to move toward a shared understanding of the problem
and ways of addressing it together. The key to a successful
house meeting is to facilitate a common space of listening
to one’s neighbors, so as to forge a common sense of and
orientation to shared issues.
What is important about house meetings, in view of
my argument in this chapter, is that they are not primar-
ily spaces of reason-giving and debate, even if reasons are
sometimes given and asked for. Instead, house meetings
are spaces of expression (of anger, grief, pain, hope) and
empathic listening. Through the communication of expe-
rience, persons move toward affective attunement with
others around objects of common concern. Jeffrey Stout
has written eloquently of the importance of this affective
dimension of house meetings, which is significantly con-
nected to their being an embodied practice of listening. In
a house meeting, a participant, “demonstrating the cour-
age to expose his or her concerns and emotions to others,
begins to acquire a sense of selfhood in their eyes. This in
turn is reflected back to the one speaking. The story visibly
moves others in the group, who then take a similar risk of

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

self-exposure.”134 Over the course of a meeting, through the

sharing of stories, experiences, passions, and perceptions,
shared trust and vulnerability begin to emerge, as does a
sense of common experience: “One story and then another
will echo a story that came earlier” and connections begin
to materialize – both “emotional connections among the
individuals who are mirroring one another’s concerns, but
also thematic connections among the stories, a number of
which now appear to be about something more than the
particulars referred to explicitly in them.”135 Establishing
these two forms of connection is a critically important goal
of house meetings. The first indicates the emergence of
affective attunement between participants. As Stout notes,
it is important that house meetings are face-to-face encoun-
ters, sometimes the only in-person contact persons might
have with some of their neighbors, because it is in the body
that “we see emotion,” experience it in “the face, hands,
posture, and voice of the one speaking.”136 This embodied
form of speaking and listening is crucial to the develop-
ment of affective attunement, for, as Stout notes, contem-
porary neuroscience has consistently shown how “emotions
travel” in embodied, face-to-face contact with persons.
Mirror neurons in the brain begin “taking in and partaking
in the emotions and actions of other people … connect[ing]
us directly with the emotions of other people who are pres-
ent to us.”137 This “mirroring” of affect is how individuals
become attuned to one another. As Stout writes, “I incor-
porate a neurological model of the other person’s emotion.
I take it into my body. Our neurological systems are, so to

134
Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 155.
135
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 155.
136
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 152.
137
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 153.

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 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

speak, plugged into each other when we are meeting face

to face.”138 Of course, there is nothing automatic about
our responding to others empathically in this way; nor will
our experience of their self-disclosure be one of pure accep-
tance, without critique or question. Embodied practices of
listening depend upon capacities for empathy and virtues of
responsiveness, receptivity, and critical engagement. Righty
practiced, however, embodied listening can generate real
affective attunement and connection between persons with
respect to shared problems, concerns, and goods.
The second form of connection Stout mentions – the rec-
ognition of thematic connections between stories – indicates
an object of common judgment coming into view. After the
sharing of multiple stories and experiences around a shared
concern, common threads often emerge as stories intersect
with one another. An experience once perceived as isolated
and unique to an individual (shame, guilt, and despair over
difficulty with a home mortgage) now begins to appear as
part of a public matter (a crisis of unjust lending and home
foreclosure). “Each teller of those stories,” Stout remarks,
“might have entered the meeting thinking of this matter as
a personal concern, but it is starting to look like a commu-
nity’s concern.”139 And as personal struggles become con-
nected to a sense of common plight with others, participants
work toward a clarity of perception. An object of common
judgment and action begins to appear.
While house meetings are spaces of generating affective
attunement through storytelling and listening, they are not
simply a forum for conveying experiences and articulating
grievances. Rather, they are agonistic conversations that
seek to move in a particular direction – namely, toward

138
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 153.
139
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 156.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

common judgment and action. Organizers are thus trained

to approach house meetings not as a time to hear a succes-
sion of stories and perspectives, but rather as an opportunity
to stir up and facilitate agitation, interaction, and tension
between persons and perspectives. At the beginning of house
meetings, for instance, organizers will ask participants for
permission to interrupt persons at times, both for the sake
of time management and in order to direct a conversation
toward productive ends. During a conversation, an orga-
nizer might intervene to ask questions and probe a partici-
pant’s story, request someone to make an abstract statement
more concrete by giving an example, and invite challenges
or alternative perceptions from others in the group, all in
order to build energy through a kind of friendly, conflic-
tual deliberation. A house meeting is not a focus group, in
other words, but a deliberating body. Its aim is to bring an
object of judgment into view as common, but this can only
be achieved by the staking of claims and the “application of
value-laden concepts.”140 It is one thing to express personal
frustration about a problem or desire for some good. It is
another thing altogether to say, “This is wrong and I want
to change it,” or, “We need this to make our community
safer.” The latter expresses judgments of value and so invites
others to share, adopt, contest, or reject them. Through ago-
nistic and disputative conversation, participants arrive at
something resembling shared perception and judgment.141

140
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 158.
141
Similar patterns can be observed in the activities of ecclesial base communities
in Central and South American liberation movements. See, for example,
Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock
Publishers, 2020), which narrates the collective Scriptural reading practices
and deliberative proceedings of one of these groups, demonstrating how
common judgment can be reached through argumentative and agonistic
engagement around common struggle.

270
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

4.3.2 Judging: Framing and Assembling

Once something has been identified as an object of com-
mon concern, it must be “framed” or “cut” as an issue.
Framing takes an indeterminate, general matter of common
concern and narrows it to something definable, specific, and
winnable. Organizers often refer to this as transforming a
“problem” into an “issue.” Gentrification and difficulty
paying rising rents is a common experience; affordable
housing is an object of common concern; but city invest-
ment in five hundred new affordable housing units is an
issue that can be won. A house meeting may have articu-
lated a shared experience and discovered a common object
of judgment, but it does not yet possess an issue to act on.
Achieving the latter means that definitions have been given,
“a proposal for dealing with it has been formulated, and a
strategy for implementing the proposal has been sketched
out.”142 Framing an issue thus involves research, analy-
sis of structures of power, identification of persons with
authority to change things, along with their motivations,
constraints, and connections, and inventory of the capaci-
ties of a community organization to marshal pressure and
power to make change. Much of this is the work of commit-
tees formed to directly address technical or strategic matters
in constructing a realistic and actionable proposal for an
organization. Once the proposal is formed, it is taken back
to the various member organizations, house meetings, and
persons involved in identifying the problem in the first place
so they may evaluate and discuss the proposal. Here again
we see the importance of conflictual engagement in com-
ing to common judgment, for it may be that rank-and-file
members of an organization find a proposal insufficient,

142
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 160.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

off-based, or not aligned with their actual interests. A pro-

posal may then need to be further revised, nuanced by more
research and analysis, or informed by more grassroots lis-
tening sessions. In this process of critical engagement and
contestation over a proposal, a community organization
comes to more precise, and thus more shared, judgment as
it appropriately frames an issue for broad-based action.
An important consequence of framing an issue is that it
is able to draw persons into a community of action, assem-
bling them into a collectivity able to exercise shared agency
and power. A community cannot act together on a prob-
lem, but it can collectively act on an issue. Bretherton notes
the difference of an issue, in this regard, from vague and
amorphous problems: “To focus on problems is antipolit-
ical because it generates apathy and fatalism and so drains
energy for change and directs people away from public
action … Focusing on problems privatizes the grief people
feel by making it count for nothing and dislocating it from
any identifiable and nameable community of witness.”143
Framing an issue, on the other hand, grants people agency
by joining them to others in addressing a definable, specific,
and winnable matter. As Bretherton puts it, “People cannot
choose the problems that afflict them but they can choose the
solutions they think might help alleviate those problems.”144
Framing an issue, then, is essential to the construction of a
community of action.
We might best understand this community of action
by returning to William Connolly’s notion of the “assem-
blage,” though with some important qualifications. The
“assemblage” is a dynamic form of political community,
constantly in reconfiguration, lacking a unified center, and

143
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 132.
144
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 132.

272
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

composed of a network of alliances and connections formed

across difference, all aimed at achieving a common action.
Assemblages are provisional, “mobile constellation(s)” of a
plurality of actors, motivated by a multiplicity of interests
and reasons, but bound together by “action in concert.”145
Importantly, an assemblage is always ordered to and consti-
tuted by action. In Connolly’s view, there is no shared funda-
mental basis for collective action other than the action itself.
An assemblage is always “in motion,”146 and thus a highly
contingent, provisional, and momentary political configura-
tion, which usually dissipates once an action is complete.
Connolly’s notion of the assemblage captures something
important about the nature of IAF organizing and its forma-
tion of communities of action. The reality is that not every
member or institution of a community organization acts, or
acts to the same degree, on every issue and campaign. Nor
is the configuration of a community of action the same in
every instance. Each organizing campaign draws together
from the organization a unique set of leaders, experts, and
persons with stakes in an issue. The shape of an organiza-
tion during an affordable housing campaign may look differ-
ent from that same organization during a campaign against
predatory lending. Constantly in reconfiguration, both by
the joining of new members and institutions with new per-
spectives, skills, experiences, and resources and by the reor-
ganization of internal processes of organizing and shaping
campaigns, the assemblage is always in flux, with porous

145
William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 95–96. See also Keri Day, Religious
Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 123–129.
146
William E. Connolly, “The Power of Assemblages and the Fragility of
Things,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10
(2008): 246.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

boundaries and adaptable internal organs. The assemblage

forged to address an issue and make a common action pos-
sesses flexibility and mobility.
Yet Connolly’s image of the assemblage does not capture
a crucially important element of the IAF, which is its capac-
ity to forge communities of action consistently over time and
with significant continuities between them. Because they are
place-based and composed of local institutions, IAF organi-
zations are able to sustain a culture of common judgment
and action that persists through multiple campaigns and
actions. Indeed, the knowledge acquired over the course of
a campaign (say, about the internal operations of a city gov-
ernment, the constraints of a particular city council mem-
ber, the various competing interests at play in municipal
budgeting) is preserved, informing future actions. Practical
experience, wisdom, and strategy build over the course of
multiple campaigns, contributing to an organization’s power
and capacity for successful action. Over time, a sensus com-
munis and set of common practices develop which enable the
continual forging of common judgments and action amidst
transformations in an organization and community. Though
issues, members, leaders, and circumstances may all change
over time, even dramatically so, a democratic community is
able to endure. Because of the endurance and stability of its
practical wisdom and repertoire of knowledge, strategy, and
tactics, it is more appropriate to speak of IAF organizations
as agonistic communities than as assemblages.

4.3.3 Acting: Common Action and the

Public Use of Conflict
Finally, after countless listening sessions, strategy meetings,
and deliberative forums, an organization is ready to make
a public action. One of the most common and important

274
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

forms of public action an organization makes is what IAF

groups call an “accountability session.” An accountability
session can draw together hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of organization members and citizens in a high-energy “pub-
lic drama” of organized power and voice. One or several
“targets” are invited to the action – elected officials, business
leaders, public authorities – in order to negotiate a commit-
ment to shared action around an issue. The public action
follows a highly disciplined and organized script. A meeting
always begins with the assertion of an organization’s “cre-
dential” – a statement of its identity, purpose, numerical
composition, and representative reach.147 This is usually fol-
lowed by a prayer from a local religious leader, the giving of
“testimonies” by community members particularly affected
by an issue, and a summary of the organization’s research
report on an issue, which frames the issue under consider-
ation. Finally, the heart of the action comes when invited
guests are presented with the organization’s proposals and
asked to commit to certain actions or to work with the orga-
nization in formulating policy to address an issue. The guests
are then given an opportunity to respond, usually in about
two to seven minutes, and are asked a series of “pinning
questions” to which they must give a straightforward yes or
no answer.148 Sometimes, and especially if a campaign has
worked closely with a public official or community leader
leading up to the action, this moment proceeds as a planned,
public commitment established between an official and the
organization. At other times, however, accountability ses-
sions are less pro forma and more contentious and conflic-
tual, and the exchange between invited public officials and
organization leaders is tense and highly agonistic.

147 148
Wood, Faith in Action, 37–38. Wood, Faith in Action, 43.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

Richard Wood, having observed many of these forms of

public action, refers to this as the strategic use of “public con-
flict.”149 Often, if a public official or leader is unwilling to
commit to an organization’s proposal, he or she may obfus-
cate, speak in generalities, or drift into a kind of campaign-
speech rhetoric. Representatives of the organization will
respond to these evasions in highly conflictual ways, pushing
the official to make a clear yes or no response or shutting off
his or her microphone if he or she continues to speak without
addressing the question. Through such tactics, organizations
seek to “flip the script” of power, forcing public officials and
elites to acknowledge citizen accountability, flexing their col-
lective power and agency. As Coles describes it, “Suddenly,
those who typically preside – and who are seen to preside –
over the ‘common’ public space find themselves situated in
a common space where they are decidedly not in control, a
common space where the topics under discussion, the framing
of these topics, the duration allotted to various speakers, the
mood in the room, and so forth” are determined and estab-
lished instead by the assembled community.150 It is important
to note that organizations do not seek out this kind of public
conflict as a good in itself. Their intention is to win an issue,
and so the more work an organization can do before an action
to guarantee its success, the better. Nevertheless, if public offi-
cials prove uncooperative, an organization is not afraid to use
the occasion of a public action to try to “push officials onto
new terrain,” utilizing the assembly and its power to pressure
them to either new public commitments or public refusals to
act, which will be used against them come election season.151
In public actions like accountability sessions, then, we
see how the purposeful use of conflict can achieve greater

149 150
Wood, Faith in Action, 46–49. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 233.
151
Wood, Faith in Action, 42.

276
 4.3 Agonistic Community: The IAF

accountability between public officials and communities, as

well as pressure officials to respond to the needs of citizens
and their communities. The IAF thus makes strategic use
of conflict in order to reach shared judgments and action
between governing officials and citizens. That accountabil-
ity sessions utilize these adversarial practices means that
organizations do not always win an issue. Yet, by the end
of a public action it is at least clear where an elected offi-
cial or community leader stands and thus how an organiza-
tion should proceed. Either a common judgment has been
reached or it has not. Moreover, for the community orga-
nization, the experience of a public action contributes to
members’ sense of political agency. The energy generated
by its gathering, ritual activity, power of accountability,
and display of collective voice all give rise to an aware-
ness of a community’s capacity for common action. The
assembly, then, is as much a symbolic practice as it is a
practical action, which is why commentators use the lan-
guage of “public drama” to describe it.152 The accountabil-
ity session gathers persons to participate in a unified action
and so binds them as a political “people” capable of acting
together. In other words, it is through carrying out common
action that a democratic community is able to recognize
itself as a community.
What I hope to have made clear in this summary account
of IAF organizing is that conflict is not incidental to agonis-
tic democratic communities’ arrival at judgment but central
to its form. Conflict and contestation are critical elements
of the IAF’s politics, in part because of the way it empha-
sizes relational, embodied, and affective practices of listen-
ing, reason-giving, and deliberation. Through this work of

152
Wood, Faith in Action, 42.

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 Judging in Conflict: Agonistic Political Community

“slow democracy,” to use Susan Clark’s term,153 a sensus

communis is built and nourished over time, creating space
in which citizens come to affective attunement and issue
common judgments together. In this way, the IAF is perhaps
the most “natural” form of politics imaginable, by which I
simply mean a kind of politics proper to the finitude, con-
tingency, and embodiment of creaturely life. In these condi-
tions of creaturehood, conflict always remains as a dynamic
feature of political community. The IAF’s agonistic poli-
tics of judgment simply catalyzes this and makes produc-
tive use of conflict for radically democratic ends. In doing
so, it exemplifies the ways agonistic community attends to
the goodness of conflict in creaturely life and its capacity to
yield shared judgment and action.

4.4 Conclusion
My aim in this chapter has been to reconstruct an account
of political community along agonistic and radically dem-
ocratic lines, in which conflict is seen not as antithetical
to or subverting of genuine community, but constitutive
of its flourishing. In such agonistic community, common-
ness amidst difference manifests not in substantial forms of
shared identity, moral consensus, or fundamental agreement
but in shared judgment and action. By approaching politics
from the standpoint of theological and philosophical anthro-
pology, as thinkers like Althusius and Yves Simon do, a
“creaturely politics” discerns that political community con-
sists in the capacity to share common action amidst the var-
ious differences that constitute a community. It is political

153
Susan Clark and Woden Teachout, Slow Democracy: Rediscovering
Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home (White River Junction,
VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).

278
 4.4 Conclusion

judgment that mediates the pluralities of difference and the

unity of common action. Judgment construed in distinctly
democratic terms, I have argued, appreciates the ways con-
flict and affect contribute to the process of bringing an object
of common judgment into view. For agonistic democratic
communities, coming to judgment thus involves contesta-
tional and disputative practices of deliberation, empathic
listening and affective attunement, and the patient endur-
ance and wise use of conflict to yield common judgments.
Agonistic communities like IAF organizations embody these
kinds of practices in a way that generates a common life
shared between disparate persons, institutions, and groups
in a locality and sustains it over time. Democratic political
communities of this kind manifest the ways conflict amidst
difference can be generative of political community and con-
tribute to its dynamic flourishing.

279
 5
Loving in Conflict
Theological Agonistics

Thus far, I have been sketching an agonistic political theology

of radical democracy, one that locates democratic conflict
within the goodness of creaturely social life. I’ve argued for
an approach to thinking about democratic pluralism, politi-
cal community, and difference not in terms of divine analogy
but with respect to the unique and dissimilar features of crea-
turely sociality and relation. Lived under the conditions of
finitude, contingency, and embodiment, creaturely relations
amidst difference inevitably entail conflict. As creatures’ mul-
tiple and various goods, desires, and courses of action come
into conflictual contact with those of others, and as crea-
tures find themselves in tension with others regarding these
goods, desires, and courses of action, negotiating conflict is
essential in order to forge a common life. “Agonism” names
the endurance of these creaturely conflicts amidst difference,
with their attendant tensions, losses, and struggles. Agonism
does not belong essentially to sin, injustice, or moral error,
even as it can be exasperated by them. Instead, it is a feature
of creation’s goodness and inherent to the flourishing of crea-
turely social life.
If creatures are to share a common life with others, they
must coordinate their diverse goods, desires, and courses of
action and negotiate their differences in order to judge and
act together. This, I have suggested, is the constitutive mark
of political community, to which creatures belong by virtue

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of their natural sociability and difference. Conflict, I have

argued, is not opposed to political community but is a sign of
its dynamic flourishing. In particular, conflict plays a key role
in arriving at shared judgment. Agonistic communities, as I
have called them, are political collectivities capable of incor-
porating successful conflict negotiation into their practices of
generating common judgment and action. As the witness of
the Industrial Areas Foundation shows, practices of facilitat-
ing democratic conflict can sustain communities of judgment
and action, mediating their differences in a common life of
political agency. Democratic community, I have maintained,
is not necessarily threatened or undermined by conflict; it is
itself a practice of well-negotiated conflict amidst difference.
Nevertheless, the central place of conflict in radical demo-
cratic politics often makes religious persons and communities
nervous about engaging in adversarial democratic struggle.
Conflict is perceived by many as a sign of failure or disor-
der and so embraced only reluctantly or avoided entirely.
Contestation is perceived as a negation of duties of charity,
kindness, and empathy. Without a robust theological means
of conceptualizing conflict in terms that are religiously mean-
ingful, then, many religiously inspired democratic actors
shun conflict as “worldly,” opposed to the commandment to
love. Mary McClintock Fulkerson has thus noted the glaring
absence of substantial reflection on conflict in the theological
literature on democracy and democratic organizing.1 Such
an absence of religious thinking about conflict is likewise
often remarked upon by organizers who struggle to convince
religious leaders to join in grassroots campaigns.2 It is clear

1
Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “Receiving from the Other: Theology and
Grass-Roots Organizing,” International Journal of Public Theology 6 (2012):
421–434.
2
Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing
in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 48.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

that many religious persons and communities see democratic

conflict as a departure from, rather than consistent with,
their religious commitments.
In this chapter, I probe the experience of agonism with
a view toward conflict’s distinctly religious and ethical
dimensions. I aim to show how agonistic politics might be
viewed by religious actors and communities in terms consis-
tent with the theological grammars that shape these actors’
and communities’ religious self-understanding. What does
conflict do, theologically speaking, to and for the persons
engaged in agonistic praxis? What could a theological eth-
ics of agonism look like? In what follows, I attempt a pos-
sible answer to these questions. Returning to the thought
of Augustine, I offer a theological description of agonistics
in terms of love – the loves that constitute us as persons,
loves that establish and define a “people,” love that is shared
between friends, and love that is directed toward enemies.
My aim is to show how agonistic praxis could be rendered
intelligible in distinctly theological terms, at least for those
in Christian traditions who might recognize such terms. Yet,
in theorizing agonism in terms of love, I intend this “theo-
logical agonistics” to also have a broader appeal to religious
persons outside the Augustinian tradition, both within and
without Christianity.
Earlier in this book, I raised the question of whether
Augustine’s thought could ultimately bear the weight of
conflict or if his Neoplatonic metaphysical commitments
to unity and harmony prevent him from attending fully to
the realities of conflict in creaturely life. I remain unsure
how Augustine himself would respond to this question.
Nevertheless, I find several themes in Augustine’s writing
immensely valuable for conceptualizing democratic conflict
in theological terms. Specifically, Augustine’s moral psychol-
ogy and theological anthropology, both of which prioritize

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

desire and love, provide rich resources for thinking about

the religious meaning of conflict. This chapter also draws
on some underappreciated aspects of Augustine’s moral and
political thought, including his understanding of people-
hood, conversion, friendship, and moral exhortation.
I begin by thematizing agonistic politics as a practice of
discovering and pursuing what Augustine calls common
objects of love. Augustine, I show, thinks of both individ-
ual moral psychology and collective political society in terms
of love, and this is profoundly illuminative for the political
praxis of agonistic democracy. Second, the chapter considers
the place of conflict in social relationships generated by the
pursuit of common objects of love, namely political friend-
ships. Here, I draw together Augustine’s understanding of
the place of conflict, disagreement, and moral exhortation
in his own friendships alongside Aristotle’s account of polit-
ical friendship as a kind of friendship of “utility.” Political
friendship, in the view I propose, involves a kind of love
between citizens – what might be called “solidarity”3 – but
it is a love always first directed outward toward an object of
shared desire. Because the love of political friendship is medi-
ated by these concrete goods and the shared pursuit of them,
I argue, political friendship can encompass forms of conflict,
disagreement, and agonism. Indeed, the bonds of trust such
political friendship cultivates, I suggest, is indispensable for
agonistic political communities if they are to sustain common
judgment and action over time. Third, and finally, I consider
the significance of the Christian moral obligation of enemy-
love within the context of agonistic contestation. I take up
the work of two modern Augustinians, of a sort, who press

3
I have in mind here the notion of solidarity as “social charity,” developed
throughout the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. See especially, John Paul
II, Centesimus Annus (May 1, 1991), https://tinyurl.com/zz3ppes2, §10.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

Augustine’s politics of love in radical and liberationist direc-

tions – namely, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King,
Jr. In Gutiérrez and King, we discern that conflict and love
are not opposed. Rather conflict can be precisely the form
love takes toward an enemy insofar as one seeks their con-
version to justice and the common good. By constellating
these three aspects of Augustinian love – love of common
objects, love between political friends, and love toward polit-
ical enemies – I aim to sketch a “theological agonistics,” an
account of adversarial politics able to conceptualize conflict
in religiously meaningful terms.

5.1 Loving Things

One of the central contentions of my account of agonistic
community in Chapter 4 is that communities arrive at shared
judgment through practices of conflict. As I detailed in my
analysis of IAF organizing practices, the work of bringing an
object into view as a common object of judgment is a highly
agonistic one. The agitation of one-on-one meetings; the con-
testation and argument of listening sessions; the challenges,
critical examinations, and revisions of proposals involved in
framing an issue; and the public uses of conflict in assemblies
and accountability sessions all point to the ways in which
arriving at democratic judgment is an agonistic practice.
In agonistic community, judgments are made by cultivat-
ing mutual attunement, appealing to sensus communis, and
persuading others in perception regarding objects of com-
mon concern. This activity is as affective as it is conflictual,
involving struggle over a community’s common sense and
sensing of the political world.
One way religious traditions have spoken of this affec-
tive dimension of knowing and judging is in terms of love.
Perhaps no other thinker has so emphasized the role of love

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 5.1 Loving Things

in human moral, social, and political life than Augustine of

Hippo. For Augustine, politics is fundamentally about com-
mon loves. Recall, in the introduction of this book, it was
Augustine that President Biden and Michael Lamb invoked
as offering counsel for a democratic polity stricken by con-
flict, strife, and polarization. By turning our attention to the
common objects of our love, they said, Augustine points us
toward the possibility of social unity and harmony amidst
difference. Love, they suggested, will heal our conflicts. Like
Biden and Lamb, I find in Augustine’s theology of love a
rich set of resources for thinking about democratic plural-
ism and difference. But, unlike their aspirations to unity
and concord, I see Augustine as supplying theological tools
for making sense of the goodness, creative possibilities,
and generative potential of democratic conflict amidst dif-
ference. Love, I want to argue, actually occasions conflict
rather than resolves it. My contention in this chapter is that
an Augustinian theology of love articulates the way agonis-
tic communities arrive at common judgment through con-
flict. Specifically, it is by means of the conversion of loves,
through conflictual negotiation of difference, that persons
generate shared judgment. Because judgment is both affec-
tive and agonistic, in other words, it is best conceptualized
theologically in terms of love and conversion.
Love, Augustine believed, refers to the fundamental
desires of the soul that shape our orientation and relation
to God, others, and the world, to the political, in particu-
lar, and to the activity of judgment, specifically.4 Love, for
Augustine, is prior to both willing and knowing, even as
it grounds and manifests in these activities. Love, in other
words, joins both affect and reason in the activity of judging.

4
On the relation of love and judgment, see Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching,
trans. R. P. H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), I.27–28.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

It is, to use Oliver O’Donovan’s term, a kind of “cognitive

affection,” integral to practical reasoning.5 “Conversion,”
in Augustine’s thought, refers to the way our loves undergo
constant reshaping and reordering, sometimes through redi-
rection and other times by way of radical revision. Politics,
for Augustine, involves both love and the conversion of
loves. In political life, conversion is necessary for common
judgment to occur, for in having our particular and varie-
gated loves and those of others converted, they can become
shared, and shared loved is a condition of shared judgment.
Something like a conversion of loves occurs, for instance, in
what Benjamin Barber has described as practices of “strong
democracy.”6 Similar to the practices of agonistic democracy
detailed in Chapter 4, the participatory and highly conflic-
tual democratic practices Barber describes are characterized
by contestation and argument across difference. In processes
of conflictual democratic deliberation, persons’ hearts and
minds undergo revision and change. But the changes partic-
ipants experience usually have less to do with their intellec-
tual, moral, or value commitments, Barber says, and more
with their ways of perceiving and understanding their inter-
ests, desires, and aspirations.7 In Augustinian terms, their
loves are converted, reordered.

5
Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the
Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co., 2002), 15–16, 19. As Eric Gregory notes, “Augustinian caritas is not an
emotional feeling that disrupts practical reason and political stability; neither is
it only a disciplined virtue for spiritual elites. That human beings are lovers is an
anthropological fact, and so ordinary to the human condition.” Eric Gregory,
Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 248.
6
See Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New
Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
7
Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic
Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 208–209.

286
 5.1 Loving Things

Understanding politics and political communities pri-

marily in terms of love, rather than simply rationality or
power, is one of the signature moves Augustine makes in
his City of God.8 After evaluating Cicero’s definition of a
res publica in Books II and XIX – namely, that it is “an
association united by a common sense of right (iurus con-
sensus) and a community of interest,” thus existing only
where there is justice – Augustine concludes that neither
Rome nor any other polity in history has ever been a “com-
monwealth” in this sense, for “true justice is found only in
that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ.”9
“If, on the other hand,” he counters, “another definition
than this is found for a ‘people’,” a more realist account
of the political might be possible, which can make sense of
politics as we experience it in the saeculum.10 Retaining the
Ciceronian formula, then, Augustine provocatively replaces
the language of justice with that of love:
If one should say, “A people is the association of a multitude of
rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects
of their love,” then it follows that to observe the character of
a particular people we must examine the objects of its love …
And, obviously, the better the objects of this agreement, the
better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse
the people.11

Thus, in Augustine’s view, Rome was a res publica insofar as

it possessed a common devotion to glory; Athens, Babylon,
and Assyria likewise can be called commonwealths, even

8
In addition to Augustine, my account of love as a kind of political affect is
indebted to Keri Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and
Black Feminist Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 105–129.
9
St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry
Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), II.21.
10
Augustine, City of God, XIX.24.
11
Augustine, City of God, XIX.24.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

though their common loves were less than noble.12 And the
heavenly city of God is the truest res publica, sharing God
and God’s peace as its common love and summum bonum.13
The notion of “common objects of love,” then, provides
Augustine with a theological, social-critical category for dis-
cerning the logic and quality of any political community:
how it is produced, constituted, and sustained.
Augustine’s appeal to love as an organizing principle of
political life, it must be noted, is not an idealist move. Indeed,
many have noted how his turn from Ciceronian justice to
common objects of love is part of a much more deflation-
ary and realist account of the political.14 That political com-
munities are ordered and organized by their loves is more
or less a sociological fact in Augustine’s view, an empirical
observation. It is discernment of the objects of that love,
then, that leads Augustine to moral and political critique.
As O’Donovan notes, for Augustine, “the love that forms
communities is undetermined with respect to its object, and
so also undetermined with respect to its moral quality: ‘the
better the things, the better the people; the worse the things,
the worse their agreement to share them’.”15 So, then, both
the civitas Dei formed by “love of God carried as far as
contempt of self” and the civitas terrena formed by “self-
love reaching the point of contempt for God” are equally
shaped by the activity of love, even while fundamentally

12
Augustine, City of God, XIX.24.
13
Augustine, City of God, XIX.11. On the civitas Dei as truest res publica, see
Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of City of God,” Milltown
Studies 19/20 (1987): 55–72.
14
See, for instance, Gregory W. Lee, “Republics and Their Loves: Rereading City
of God 19,” Modern Theology 27, no. 4 (2011): 553–581, for a discussion
of the significance of this for Augustine’s political thought and its modern
reception. Cf. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 89–112.
15
O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, 22.

288
 5.1 Loving Things

distinguished by the objects of their love.16 Love, in other

words, is simply what political communities do. The real
question, in Augustinian terms, is how loves are ordered,
shared, and directed toward objects of common concern.
For my purposes, forging common objects of love is a way
of describing, in theological terms, what happens when per-
sons bring an object of common judgment into view. Unlike
Rawlsian liberalism, wherein shared judgment is only possi-
ble within the bounds of neutral “public reason,” Augustine
helps us see that shared judgment is conditioned by the
affective-rational forging of common loves, an achievement
possible for persons with radically different and competing
beliefs about the ultimate significance of those goods loved.
It is, in fact, the discovery and pursuit of common objects of
love that effects common judgment, and so political commu-
nity. Rather than presupposing agreement, common iden-
tity, or shared beliefs, then, political community is generated
by the praxis of forging common loves toward shared goods,
what Luke Bretherton calls “substantive goods in which
the flourishing of all is invested.”17 An object of common
love, a shared good, can be as particular and local as a safe
neighborhood, a clean public park, a well-functioning tran-
sit system, or as comprehensive and universal as a national
healthcare system. What is important is that it is a public,
rather than a private, good. A common good is not divisi-
ble, and so cannot be properly enjoyed without the others
with whom one shares it. This is the basis for saying that
common objects of love effect or generate political commu-
nity: as commonly loved, they bind one to others in their
common use. Not, we should say, in any sentimental way,

16
Augustine, City of God, XIV.28.
17
Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and
Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 18.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

but as a social relation in which communion and agonism,

agreement and disagreement, contestation and common
judgment all occur.
The “creative miracle” of coming to common love of such
goods is, O’Donovan writes, that “we become a ‘multitude’
no longer, but a ‘people’, capable of common action.”18
What is important here, for my purposes, is that Augustine’s
account of political community locates its substance not in
a shared characteristic of its constituents more fundamental
than their differences, but rather in the objects of their love
and judgment. Again, O’Donovan notes the importance of
this for Augustine:
Loving is the corporate function that determines and defines
the structure of the political society; it is the key to its coher-
ence and its organization. Loving things, not loving one
another. Augustine also affirmed that members of a commu-
nity loved one another; but that is a second step. The love that
founds the community is not reciprocal, but turned outward
upon an object.19

Political communities, in other words, are not charac-

terized by solidarity or consensus in the abstract but by a
commonness generated in shared love and judgment regard-
ing objects of common concern. Eugene TeSelle describes
this “minimalist” account of political community which
Augustine advances as grounded in “shared turf,” a social
space with “shared needs and interests and concerns”
which, “for Augustine … are the proper field of political
life.”20 Augustine names several of the temporal goods that
political communities love, the pursuit of which causes

18
O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, 21.
19
O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, 26.
20
Eugene TeSelle, Living in Two Cities: Augustinian Trajectories in Political
Thought (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 1998), 140.

290
 5.1 Loving Things

“peace and human society [to be] preserved”: goods of

the body (“health, keen senses, strength, beauty, and other
qualities”), freedom, familial well-being, friendship, care
of the needy, the common good of the city, and the right
use of property.21 Loving these and other common goods,
Augustine says, binds societies in peace. John von Heyking
further explains this relationship between political commu-
nity and the pursuit of shared temporal goods: In forging
common objects of love with others, “our habits and predis-
positions intermingle to the point where we cannot conceive
of those common objects of love independently of those we
share them with.”22 Bonds of collectivity are thus forged
out of common interest, love, and judgment. Here we see
an important convergence between Augustine and agonists
like Mouffe who insist that the demos is always produced
and articulated in political action. For Augustine, political
community is never given; it is profoundly fluid, in constant
re-articulation and construction as shared loves are forged,
pursued, and reconfigured.
Furthermore, it is precisely because political community is
constituted by common loves that it also encompasses con-
flict. Discovering, sharing, and judging common things is, as
I argued in Chapter 5, a conflictual and agonistic process.
Augustine recognized this: Conflict over loves, he argued, is
essential to the political life of the earthly city and what dif-
ferentiates it from the heavenly city of God. This distinction
is a critical piece of Augustine’s social ontology. In the heav-
enly city, what is loved by all, namely God and God’s peace,

21
Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), I.VX.
22
John von Heyking, “The Luminous Path of Friendship: Augustine’s Account
of Friendship and the Political Order,” in Friendship and Politics: Essays in
Political Thought, ed. John von Heyking and Richard Avramenko (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 121.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

is simple and common.23 All may share in this common

object of love completely and, because it cannot be divided or
exhausted, being infinite, this object of common love gener-
ates among citizens “harmonious obedience of mutual affec-
tion” and the cessation of all conflict.24 Not so, however,
in the earthly city. Temporal goods are multiple, finite, and
divisible, not “the kind of good that causes no frustrations
to those enamoured of it,” like the undivided good of God.25
Temporal goods must be distributed in order to be loved, and
this is the work of politics. Yet this distribution is conten-
tious, and “the earthly city is generally divided against itself,”
Augustine says, precisely because it must distribute what is
loved in common.26 Importantly, in Augustine’s account,
this conflict over common objects of love in the earthly city
is attributable less to sin than to finitude. Because temporal
goods are, by their nature, finite, there will always be con-
flicts over how to divide and distribute them, manage their
scarcity, arrange access to them, maintain them, and so on.
For Augustine, in other words, temporal goods, the objects
of citizens’ common loves in the earthly city, simultaneously
generate both unity (because of their commonness) and divi-
sion (because of their finitude). Citizens may share common
objects of love, but their particular loves toward them are
often diverse and incommensurate, demanding negotiation.
Conflict arises, then, from the conditions of creatureliness:
Finite persons must form and cultivate a common life around
finite and contingent goods shared in common.
It is at exactly this point that conversion must re-enter the
picture. In order for loves to be both properly shared and

23
Augustine, City of God, XV.3.
24
Phillip Cary, “United Inwardly by Love: Augustine’s Social Ontology,” in
Augustine and Politics, ed. John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 12–13.
25
Augustine, City of God, XV.4. 26 Augustine, City of God, XV.4.

292
 5.1 Loving Things

genuinely common, they must undergo conversion. Nothing

guarantees that our loves, which are multiple, disparate, and
contradictory, even within ourselves, will be compatible with
those of others. Thus, to love things in common demands a
kind of reordering or conversion of our loves alongside oth-
ers. For Augustine, conversion is first and foremost about the
reordering of loves to and in God. But conversion can also be
understood as a more general category, referring to the kind
of transformations of desire persons undergo all the time in
social life. Agonists refer to these transformations in terms of
the perpetual flux and reshaping of identity in its confronta-
tion with difference. But the religious language of conversion,
I want to suggest, captures something deeper and more pro-
found about the nature of subjects’ transformations in social
life – namely, the profound disorientation and loss, but also
hopeful possibilities, that arise when our loves are reordered
so as to become shared. To put it differently, because loves
are not held lightly but are deeply felt and valued, coming to
love differently, especially through forging shared loves with
different others, will often be experienced as agonism. It will
feel like undergoing a conversion.
Interestingly, while these psychological dimensions of
conflict are mostly under-theorized in agonistic theory,
Augustinian moral psychology has much to say on the mat-
ter. Charles Mathewes, for instance, argues that agonists on
the whole view persons’ moral, religious, and other value
commitments with “a certain phenomenological ‘lightness’,
as if they could be easily jettisoned, as if our aim must be
not to be stuck to any one of them.”27 The kinds of fluidity
and openness to revision that agonists imagine as necessary

27
Charles Mathewes, “Faith, Hope, and Agony: Christian Political
Participation Beyond Liberalism,” The Annual of the Society of Christian
Ethics 21 (2001): 135.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

for agonistic exchange, that is, seem to demand a kind of

detachment from one’s concerns.28 For Augustine, however,
loves are weighty. As he puts it, “My weight,” by which he
means the gravity that directs his motion and grounds his
agency, “is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is car-
rying me.”29 Persons do not, for the most part, exhibit the
kind of ironic distance toward their commitments or flexi-
bility in values that agonists imagine. And for good reason:
They take them to be true and only give them up reluc-
tantly, mourning their loss. In other words, changing one’s
mind, changing one’s loves, involves – or at least is experi-
enced like – a conversion, losing a part of oneself in order to
discover or be given something new. Forging common loves
with others transforms oneself. It is a practice of moral and
social growth, and the conflict constitutive of forging com-
mon loves does profound work on a subject. As the political
theorist Rochelle DuFord puts it, “In conflict, we wear away
at each other, making each other more perfect in the pro-
cess. Left alone to our own devices, truly unsocial, we fail
to fully develop because we do not hit up against each other
in conflict.”30 In agonistic exchange, in finding and forging
common objects of love, priorities are challenged, perspec-
tives are disputed, idolatries are confronted, private loves
are made common, neglected responsibilities are exposed,
and prized objects of desire are made vulnerable to change.
In all of these ways, the agon of democracy becomes a site
of self-cultivation and transformation. As Mathewes puts it

28
See, for instance, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73–95.
29
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), XIII.9.
30
Rochelle DuFord, “Democracy Entails Conflict,” Aeon, June 13, 2022, aeon.
co/essays/what-types-of-conflict-are-good-for-democracy. For DuFord, conflict
is “part of the natural aim of perfection in human beings.”

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 5.2 Loving Friends

in distinctly theological terms, in agonistic politics there are

constant “opportunities for humility and penance, recogni-
tion of one’s sin and the sins of others.”31 The conversions
necessary for pursuing common objects of love with oth-
ers can feel like suffering loss. Yet suffering, loss, change,
and reorientation are terms the Augustinian tradition con-
sistently uses to speak of the ascesis of the religious life,
the ordering and reordering of loves toward goodness. It
is for this reason that thematizing agonism in terms of love
and conversion might be one plausible way of interpreting
the conflicts of democracy in religiously meaningful terms.
In the conversion of one’s loves alongside others, in their
being redirected and reordered to more common ends, loves
are deepened and made richer the more they are shared.
And in coming to love objects in common with others, a
certain form of civic love can be born between strangers
and adversaries: that of friends.

5.2 Loving Friends

Love, according to Augustine, founds a people. As individ-
uals hold things in common, loving and judging together –
activities that involve contention and dispute – they are also
bound to one another civically, forming a societas, a res
publica. But what is the character of this social relation?
What kind of civic love might emerge between persons who
share common objects of love? One classical way of char-
acterizing the kind of love shared between citizens is friend-
ship. For Aristotle, politike philia, or “political friendship,”
refers to the civic bond that holds cities together, enabling

31
Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 166.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

them to judge and act in common.32 Citizens of a polis share

the love of friendship, and this is the basis of their solidar-
ity. However, many have questioned the appropriateness of
friendship as a civic category, especially its relevance for con-
temporary pluralist polities.33 Civic friendship, critics argue,
presumes a form of sameness, agreement, and identity that is
neither possible nor desirable for pluralist democracies. After
all, Aristotle explicitly identifies the primary good of political
friendship to be its capacity to maintain “concord,” prevent
civil strife and faction, and generate political unity.34 He spe-
cifically links friendship with “agreement” (omónoia), con-
sensus, and unanimity,35 and he says that the polis exhibits
this concord when “citizens agree as to their interests, adopt
the same policy, and carry their common resolves into execu-
tion.”36 Pluralists, especially those who believe contestation
amidst difference to be crucial for democracy’s vitality, view
this kind of political friendship as compromising pluralism
and difference, an imposition of totality upon multiplicity.
Jacques Derrida explored the tension between Aristotle’s
notion of political friendship and democratic difference in
his The Politics of Friendship. “There is no democracy
without the ‘community of friends’ (koina ta philōn),”
he wrote, just as there “is no democracy without respect
for irreducible singularity or alterity.”37 But these “two
laws,” he notes, are “tragically irreconcilable,” insofar

32
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: Macmillan
Publishing, 1999), 1155a22, 1167a26–28.
33
Mary Healy, “Civic Friendship,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 30,
no. 3 (2011): 229–240; Christopher Heath Wellman, “Friends, Compatriots,
and Special Political Obligations,” Political Theory 29, no. 2 (2001): 217–236.
34
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a26.
35
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a23.
36
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1167a20.
37
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York:
Verso, 2005), 22.

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 5.2 Loving Friends

as the establishment of a “circle of friends,” the political

subject of democracy, depends upon the shutting out of
others.38 Since friendship “is a question of singularities,”
says Derrida, it follows as an “inevitable consequence”
that “one must prefer certain friends.”39 Friendship, in this
way, is predicated on sameness and identity, made pos-
sible by its constitutive other, the non-friend, the enemy.
Friendship, then, is necessary for democratic community
but also threatens democracy itself, making it always a
promise yet to come. The key point for Derrida is that
political friendship seems to rest upon sameness. If we are
to embrace democracy’s pluralism and difference, critics of
friendship argue, we must abandon concepts of friendship
and solidarity that only reinforce uniformity.
It is certainly true that Aristotle believed a kind of same-
ness to be a necessary condition of friendship – namely, a
sameness respecting virtue. True friendship, according to
Aristotle, belongs only to those equal in virtue who share
agreement about the good – “good people similar in vir-
tue,” as he put it.40 Because of this, true friendships are
exceedingly rare, he believed. Like Aristotle, Augustine
also believed true friendship to be possible only for those
who share God as their common good, thus having a cer-
tain equality in virtue by means of grace. In both cases, it
seems, friendship seems to presume a kind of moral col-
loquy and sameness, an agreement about ultimate matters
that is undermined by the conflicts of democracy. But is
it the case that political friendship is, in principle, incom-
patible with agonistic, pluralist politics? In this section, I
want to propose a version of political friendship amenable
to agonism. “Agonistic friendship,” we might call it, is a

38
Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 22. 39 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 19.
40
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b7–26.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

form of genuine friendship between those who engage in

conflictual politics, even between adversaries. It is differ-
ent from the kind of “perfect friendship” or “friendship of
virtue” described by both Aristotle and Augustine. Yet it is
consistent with other kinds of friendship they theorized and
embodied in their own lives. By attending to Aristotle and
Augustine’s writing about these “imperfect” friendships, I
delineate a form of political friendship not only consistent
with the conflictual, agonistic relations I have been describ-
ing in this book, but also necessary for these relations to
be sustained over time and ordered to the common good.
In what follows, I want to defend the dignity and critical
importance of these lower-order friendships, friendships
that do not presume sameness or agreement.
Let us begin with Augustine. Augustine’s repeated assertion
is that only those who share the grace of supernatural charity
possess real friendship. “True friendship,” he writes, recalling
his “less than true” friendship with a man prior to his conver-
sion, “is not possible unless you [God] bond together those
who cleave to another by the love which ‘is poured into our
hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us’ (Rom. 5:5).”41
Those possessing the divine grace of friendship have their
friendship “in God” and love their friends in God: “He truly
loves a friend who loves God in the friend, either because God
is actually present in the friend or in order that God may be
so present. This is true love. If we love another for another
reason, we hate them more than love them.”42
Augustine’s insistence that true friendship can only exist
where the partners share God as their common and ultimate

41
Augustine, Confessions, IV.4.
42
Augustine, Sermon 336, 2.2, quoted in Donald X. Burt, O.S.A., Friendship and
Society: An Introduction to Augustine’s Practical Philosophy (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 62.

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 5.2 Loving Friends

love is both a continuance and break with his Greek and

Roman predecessors. On the one hand, it is simply an exten-
sion of the centrality of truth for authentic friendship. “A per-
son must be a friend of truth,” Augustine writes, “before they
can be a friend to any human being.”43 On the other hand,
Augustine presses this agreement in truth beyond simply prac-
tical and moral matters, as with Aristotle, to include spiritual
agreement, as well. Indeed, the former is not even possible,
Augustine believes, without the latter: “There can be no full
and true agreement about things human among friends who
disagree about things divine, for it necessarily follows that he
who despises things divine esteems things human otherwise
than as he should and that whoever does not love Him who
has made man has not learned to love man rightly.”44
Thus, for Augustine, friendship, at least in its true or per-
fected form, belongs only to the baptized, those who agree
in matters human and divine, having concordia, a “union of
hearts,” by virtue of divine grace.45
Augustine’s reformulation of friendship, which adopts
the broad structure of the concept from Greek and Roman
thought but substantially revises it in theological terms,
has significant ramifications for his social thought. Indeed,
some have argued that Augustine’s transformation of
friendship, along with his emphasis on the individual and
inwardness, means friendship “loses its inherently broad
social character and political dimension.”46 Augustine, in

43
Augustine, Letter 155, 1.1, quoted in Burt, Friendship and Society, 64.
44
Augustine, Letter 258, 1–2, quoted in Burt, Friendship and Society, 63n.30.
45
Augustine, Against the Academics, in Saint Augustine’s Cassiciacum
Dialogues, vol. 1, trans. Michael P. Foley (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2019), III.6.13.
46
Frank Vander Valk, “Friendship, Politics, and Augustine’s Consolidation of
the Self,” Religious Studies 45, no. 2 (2009): 125. See also Stefan Rebenich,
“Augustine on Friendship and Orthodoxy,” in A Companion to Augustine,
ed. Mark Vessey (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 365–374.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

this view, depoliticizes friendship, or at least locates it in

the eschatological City of God alone and among the bap-
tized who share citizenship in this city by faith, hope, and
love in this life. The consequences of this are either cele-
brated or lamented. Frank Vander Valk, for one, lauds
Augustine’s privatizing of friendship, his alleged severing of
friendship and polis which marks his “fundamental break
with received notions about the relationship between the
self and the political community,” as it lays the ground-
work for liberal theories that seek to protect the private self
and civil society from the encroachment of the state.47 For
Augustine, Valk believes, the “subordination to God” that
true Christian friendship requires “was only made possi-
ble by emancipating the self from the polis, and from the
polis’s demands for friendship.”48 On the other hand, those
critical of Augustine’s construal of the Christian self and
her relation to the political, such as Hannah Arendt, view
in Augustine a dangerous individualism and otherworldli-
ness that threatens social solidarity.49 For both Augustine’s
defenders and critics, then, “Augustinian political friend-
ship” seems to be a contradiction in terms.
To be sure, when Augustine writes directly about friend-
ship it is almost always in the context of the Christian spir-
itual life, either his own, considered biographically,50 or
that of others.51 Never does he appeal positively to friend-

47
Valk, “Augustine’s Consolidation of the Self,” 126–127.
48
Valk, “Augustine’s Consolidation of the Self,” 141.
49
Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and
Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ronald
Beiner, “Love and Worldliness: Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Saint Augustine,”
in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 269–284.
50
For instance, Augustine, Confessions, II.5; II.9; II.18; IV.4; IV.6; IV.9.
51
Augustine, Letter 130, in Augustine, Letters 100–155, trans. Roland Teske,
S.J. (New York: New City Press, 2003), 183–199; and Augustine, Letter 258,

300
 5.2 Loving Friends

ship when considering Christian political responsibility.

Nevertheless, within Augustine’s thinking about friendship
are a set of themes which, when creatively reconstructed,
can yield not just a coherent account of political friendship
but one actually particularly useful for thinking about ago-
nistic politics specifically. Two themes in particular must
be attended to, each of which has important resonances
with Aristotle: Augustine’s understanding of what I will
call “imperfect friendship” and his conviction that friend-
ship entails a practice of criticism and admonition – call it
Augustinian parrhesia – not entirely unlike agonistic demo-
cratic negotiation.
Nearly all studies of Augustine’s theology of friendship
consider only Christian friendships, and certainly, it is this
form of friendship that Augustine primarily writes about.
Nevertheless, Augustine does write approvingly of certain
examples of friendship in pagan antiquity, albeit sparingly
and with some reservation. For instance, Marcus Regulus,
the famous Roman statesman who surrendered his life to
his enemies because of an oath and his loyalty to Rome, is
admired for his commitment to truth and his devotion to
his city.52 Augustine references the friendship of Orestes
and Pylades and their willingness to die for one another as
a friendship far superior to his own best friendships early in
life.53 And, finally, though he is always quick to show the
limits and shortcomings of his pre-conversion friendships,
Augustine’s descriptions of his friendships in books four
and six of his Confessions nevertheless identify their very
real merits and virtues.54 Friendships of these kinds, for

in St. Augustine, Select Letters, trans. J. H. Baxter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1993), 490–499.
52
Augustine, City of God, I.25. 53 Augustine, Confessions, IV.11.
54
Augustine, Confessions, IV.7, 13; VI.11, 24–26.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

Augustine, are not simply sham friendships. They are gen-

uine but imperfect. Analogous to the ways Augustine con-
ceives of the best Greek and Roman civic virtues – namely,
as incomplete because they are not referred ultimately to
God, but nonetheless real in their structure – friendship
outside the supernatural perfection of grace is real, even
though incomplete.55 Political friendship, a species of this
imperfect friendship, can thus be an important earthly
good, integral to the maintenance of temporal peace, even
while it is acknowledged to be inferior to the civic love
known by the citizens of the City of God. This temporal
peace is also something Augustine values as a genuine good
of human life, even while it is incomparable to the perfect
peace enjoyed in the heavenly city. Earthly peace, natural
virtue, civic friendship – all of these temporal goods possess
a kind of dignity for Augustine as created goods and imper-
fect analogues to their perfected forms possessed by the
saints in beatitude.56 Thus, we might say, for Augustine,
political friendship is a form of imperfect friendship proper
to life in the saeculum and necessary to the good order of
the earthly city and its temporal peace. Political friendship
is of value to the Christian pilgrim because, like temporal

55
The traditional, but simplistic, reading of Augustine on pagan virtue, which
sees it only as “splendid vice,” has given way to a number of recent works
which appreciate Augustine’s more complicated relationship to Greek and
Roman virtue. See, for instance, T. H. Irwin, “Splendid Vices? Augustine For
and Against Pagan Virtue,” Medieval Theology and Philosophy 8 (1999):
105–127; James Wetzel, “Splendid Vices and Secular Virtues: Variations on
Milbank’s Augustine,” Journal of Religious Ethics 32, no. 2 (2004): 271–300;
Michael Lamb, A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 230–262.
56
According to Brian Harding, this is part of Augustine’s Platonist sensibilities –
his “assumption that imperfect goods of a given kind point towards a perfect
good that exemplifies that kind.” See Brian Harding, Augustine and Roman
Virtue (New York: Continuum, 2008), 143.

302
 5.2 Loving Friends

peace and the pagan civic virtues that constrain vice, it is

above all useful in this life.57
That Augustine finds temporal goods like civic friend-
ship and peace useful for the Christian in her life in the
saeculum allows us to make an important connection to
Aristotle’s conception of political friendship. As Çigdem
Çidam writes of Aristotle, “The idea of usefulness is cen-
tral to political friendship.”58 Delineating the three types
of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics – friendships of
pleasure, utility, and virtue, with only the latter embodying
friendship in its perfected form – Aristotle speaks of polit-
ical friendship as a matter of utility or advantage.59 Thus,
similar to Augustine, Aristotle conceives of political friend-
ship as belonging to a lower order, to the realm of necessity.
His reason for assigning political friendship this designation
helps illuminate an implicit dimension of Augustine’s polit-
ical thought: political friendships are imperfect, a matter of
utility, because they are directed outward toward shared
goods advantageous to both parties. Whereas in friendships
of virtue what is loved is simply the friendship itself and
the virtues of the friend, friendships of utility or advantage
are directed outward toward objects of shared interest.60

57
In his reading of the myth of Cacus, the solitary, tyrannical monster confined
to rule his “kingdom” of a cave, Augustine postulates that it was Cacus’s lack
of friendship – with wife, children, and companions – that gave rise to his
insatiable savagery and lusts. “If he had been willing to keep the peace with
other men as he was content to keep it in his cave and with himself,” Augustine
writes, “he would not be called bad or a monster or a semi-man.” City of
God, XIX.12. Friendship, it seems, places a kind of constraint on the will to
domination. On the figure of Cacus in Augustine’s political thought, see John
von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 2001), 128–130.
58
Çigdem Çidam, In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political
Friendship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 36.
59
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156a–1156b, 1160a.
60
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1157a.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

Insofar as political friendships are matters of mutual advan-

tage, they do not necessarily forge any “moral unity” among
or deep attachment between citizens; they are pragmatic
and usually last only as long as there exists a shared object
of interest.61 Nevertheless, insofar as they are friendships,
political friendships do exhibit forms of affective kinship
and solidarity. All friendship, even its most base forms, says
Aristotle, involves not just “reciprocated goodwill,” but even
“love” (philia).62
For Aristotle, then, social relations between those who
share objects of common civic concern – that is, political
friendships – are rightly said to exhibit a form of love. This
is not altogether different from the way Augustine speaks of
the kinds of union or mutuality generated in the common
act of loving temporal things, that is, “common objects of
love.” As Phillip Cary puts it, for Augustine, when people
love things in common with others, it “changes who they
are, for ‘what is loved necessarily affects the lover with
itself.’”63 This is why Augustine believes that the charac-
ter of a people is reflected in what they love – “to observe
the character of a particular people we must examine the
objects of its love.”64 It is not that what a people decides
to love reflects some set of pre-political values. Rather, the
actual activity of loving and pursuing common objects of
love generates a people as a political community. In the tem-
poral political sphere, Augustine believes, there are numer-
ous goods that the citizens of the City of God share with
the earthly city and which they are expected to cultivate
and tend, chiefly its peace.65 These shared temporal goods,

61
Çidam, In the Street, 30. 62 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156a.
63
Cary, “United Inwardly by Love,” 6. Quotation is from Augustine, On Eighty-
three Different Questions, 35.2.
64
Augustine, City of God. XIX.24. 65 Augustine, City of God, XIX.26.

304
 5.2 Loving Friends

the love of which generates a res publica and the pursuit of

which generates political friendships of utility or advantage,
have been called “proximate shared goods,”66 or “proxi-
mate common goods.”67 Insofar as Augustine advances a
practical politics of loving these proximate goods, we might
call it, using Sheldon Wolin’s term, a “politics of tending.”68
In the common work of loving and tending shared goods,
persons cultivate a kind of mutuality – political friendship.
The importance of shared temporal goods for friendship
has, in fact, an important place in Augustine’s thinking.
Sharing proximate temporal goods, he sees, makes clear to
whom, in particular, we owe neighborly love, given the uni-
versal command to love all persons. As he writes, “All peo-
ple should be loved equally. But you cannot do good to all
people equally, so you should take particular thought for
those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to
you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstance.”69
In negotiating the tension between the universal and the
particular, Augustine privileges a certain duty to the local.
But, importantly, the obligation to one’s concrete neighbor
is not, for him, determined solely by biological relation, eth-
nic belonging, or religious identity. Rather, the neighbor to
whom one owes particular love is determined by the fact of
sharing material, temporal goods. Thus, immediately after
invoking the notion of “lot” to speak of the particular obli-
gations of neighbor-love, a metaphor perhaps too abstract

66
Emily Dumler-Winckler, “Protestant Political Theology and Pluralism: From a
Politics of Refusal to Tending and Organizing for Common Goods,” Religions
10, no. 9 (2019): 7.
67
Jennifer A. Herdt, “Proximate Common Goods in the Context of Pluralism,”
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46, no. 3 (2016): 583–602.
68
See Molly Farneth, “A Politics of Tending and Transformation,” Studies in
Christian Ethics 32, no. 1 (2018): 113–118.
69
Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), I.61.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

for determining the duties of neighborliness, Augustine

begins to walk it back in favor of a more concrete proposal:
“Since you cannot take thought for all men,” Augustine
writes, “you must settle (rather than by lot) in favor of the
one who happens to be more closely associated with you
in temporal matters.”70 Sharing in “temporal matters,” or
being bound to another by virtue of sharing common goods
and common loves, in other words, is the basis of friendship
in earthly life. Certainly, these friendships are less noble, for
Augustine, than those that possess God as their common
good. Nevertheless, they are real, if lower-order, friend-
ships important for the well-being and peace of the tempo-
ral order.71 Political friendship is an imperfect but genuine
form of friendship.
An Augustinian account of political friendship, then,
will be one centered on the modest work of tending shared
temporal goods. The pursuit of these common objects of
love can produce mutual goodwill and love of one’s fel-
low citizens, a kind of lower-order friendship. And yet, we
should not be under any illusions that these friendships will
be completely harmonious, void of conflict. Sharing tem-
poral goods does not automatically generate social har-
mony. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sharing common objects
of love, as I argued in the previous section, occasions con-
flict, for, as TeSelle puts it, these objects are “limited goods
in plural modes … willed with differing motives.”72 That
temporal goods are shared gives rise to dispute, disagree-
ment, controversy over their use and ordering precisely
because they are shared. Thus, political friendships forged

70
Augustine, On Christian Teaching, I.61.
71
Writing of a friendship with a former schoolmate before his conversion, for
instance, Augustine notes that it was not a vera amicitia, but nevertheless was
“very sweet” on account of their common interests. Augustine, Confessions, IV.4.
72
TeSelle, Living in Two Cities, 154.

306
 5.2 Loving Friends

around common objects of love must be capable of sus-

taining conflict. Augustine knew this. It’s why he conceived
of friendship as entailing a form of mutual criticism and
admonition, practices of dispute and argument, what I have
called a kind of Augustinian parrhesia. We turn now to this
second theme of Augustine’s thinking about friendship: the
practice of conflict between friends.
In her detailed rhetorical study of Augustine’s epistolary
corpus, Jennifer Ebbeler shows that one of the most unique
and idiosyncratic aspects of Augustine’s correspondence
was his attempt to initiate forms of mutual criticism and
correction with his friends.73 While direct criticism was, for
the most part, avoided in epistolary practice in late antiq-
uity, in part because of concern for humiliation in the eyes of
the wider community, given the public nature of such corre-
spondence, Augustine not only insisted on rebuking and cor-
recting colleagues he believed to be in error but also invited
the same in return.74 Most likely taking a cue from Cicero,
for whom “frankness of speech” and “rebuke” (correctio)
were essential to good friendship, as well as the Pauline
epistles, Augustine wrote a substantial number of confron-
tational letters to those he considered friends or wished to
befriend, believing “his epistolary rebukes would initiate
a friendly, corrective correspondence during which he and
his addressee would mutually emend each other’s errors.”75
This practice of mutual criticism, provocation, and correc-
tion was not simply a feature of his letter writing, however,
but something Augustine practiced in his common life with
friends. Recounting his experience of companionship among

73
Jennifer V. Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in
Augustine’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
74
Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians, 7.
75
Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians, 47, 56.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

a group of close friends in Carthage prior to his conversion,

Augustine lists among the shared activities which “creates
unity out of the many participants”: “to speak and laugh
together … to talk nonsense and to have serious discussions,
to disagree at times without hatred, just as a person speaks
with himself, and in those exceptionally rare moments of
disagreement to find very many points of agreement, to
teach and learn from one another,” and so on.76 Such prac-
tices of disagreement and exhortation were likely replicated
in Augustine’s monastic communities, for even, and perhaps
especially, in friendships among the baptized, writes Ebbeler,
“the giving and receiving of correction by the participants”
was essential to friendship.77
An example of Augustine’s epistolary parrhesia is seen
in a letter to Macedonius, the imperial vicar of Africa. In
it, Augustine reminds Macedonius of the great nobility of
governance, and yet cautions that, unless he governs with
the intention of aiding his subjects in the pursuit of their
final end and not simply their well-being “in the flesh,” his
“virtues will not be genuine, just as their happiness will not
be.”78 Augustine addresses Macedonius with such urgency
and rhetorical intensity that he eventually pauses in the
middle of the letter, worrying that his provocations may
be interpreted as “disrespect,” admitting that his admoni-
tion in the letter is breaking with standard epistolary pro-
tocols. Nevertheless, Augustine writes that he fears that
failing to engage in proper moral criticism and admonish-
ment would itself be more “displeasing … to the friendship
you have deigned to enter into with me,” than if he were to

76
Augustine, Confessions, IV.8, quoted in Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians, 35.
77
Ebberler, Disciplining Christians, 28.
78
Augustine, Letter 155, in Letters 100–155, trans. Roland Teske, S.J. (New York:
New City Press, 2003), 412.

308
 5.2 Loving Friends

be “less frank in admonishing” his friend.79 Thus, he says,

“I am franker to the extent I am more your friend because I
am more your friend the more loyal I am. And yet I would
not say these things if I were not acting with more respect.”80
Moral criticism, Augustine insists, is intrinsic to the good of
friendship, a duty of truthfulness he owes to Macedonius.
If Augustine’s letter to Macedonius expresses more admo-
nition than direct criticism and correction, countless other
letters display Augustine’s more directly confrontational
side. His epistolary exchanges with Nebridius, Maximus of
Madauros, Paulinus of Nola, and, most famously, Jerome,
all contain rebukes and reproaches in frank and sharp lan-
guage.81 Augustine’s reasoning for engaging in such intense
“fraternal correction” comes chiefly from the Apostle Paul’s
criticism and correction of Peter. In his commentary on
Galatians, Augustine dwells on this episode and uses it to
develop an ethics of fraternal correction which informed his
own practice of friendship, in addition to providing guidance
to his monastic brothers, those engaged in living a common
life in which moral rebuke and admonition held an impor-
tant place.82 Captivated by this moment in the apostle’s life,
Augustine saw Paul’s rebuke of Peter’s withdrawal from
table fellowship with Gentiles to model a practice of fraternal
­correction critical to the Christian life. Of great importance
in the affair, Augustine believed, was the public nature of
Paul’s rebuke: “For it would not have been useful to correct

79
Augustine, Letter 155, 412. 80 Augustine, Letter 155, 412.
81
See the discussion in Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians, 64–92.
82
At the end of his career, Augustine produced an entire treatise on
the place of rebuke in the Christian life, De Correptione et Gratia
(“On Correction and Grace”), which developed many of the themes present
in his Galatians commentary regarding correction. See Mark Vessey,
“Opus Imperfectum: Augustine and His Readers, 426–435 AD,” Vigiliae
Christianae 52 (1998): 264–274.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

in private an error that had done its harm in public.”83 In

rebuking Peter, Paul was correcting also the entire community
influenced by Peter’s actions. Peter, for his part, “was entirely
willing to endure this rebuke from a junior shepherd for the
salvation of the flock,” and thus “serves as a great example
of humility,” something Augustine infers, since Peter’s reac-
tion is not mentioned in the biblical text.84 In Paul’s sharp
but charitable rebuke and Peter’s patient, humble response,
Augustine sees modeled an ecclesial practice of confrontation
and critique. Later, commenting on Galatians 6:1 (“Brethren,
even if someone is caught doing something wrong, you who
are spiritual should instruct that person in a spirit of gentle-
ness.”), Augustine shows how Paul instructs the Galatians to
similarly practice rebuke and correction as he did of Peter,
thus establishing a communal practice of fraternal correction
among the baptized.85 Importantly, this practice of critique
and correction is not identical with the practice of church dis-
cipline. Indeed, it is not specific to the correction of moral
failure, but is instead a more comprehensive practice involv-
ing dispute and argument about practical reason. As Eric
Plummer points out, unlike other commentators who speak
of Paul’s rebuke of Peter’s “sin” (peccatum), Augustine writes
instead of Peter’s “error” (error), a term that does not neces-
sarily imply a kind of moral lapse, but rather, especially in the
context of Augustine’s commentary, implies a kind of mis-
judgment or miscalculation in practical reasoning.86 Critique
or correction among friends, in other words, is not simply a
practice of pointing out faults. It is more like an ongoing dis-
putative exchange of critique and argument whereby friends
are led in wisdom and grow in prudence.

83
Eric Plummer, Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians: Introduction, Text,
Translation, and Notes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145.
84
Plummer, Galatians, 145. 85 Plummer, Galatians, 223.
86
Plummer, Galatians, 145n.49.

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 5.2 Loving Friends

Augustine’s own practice of friendship, then, complicates

the ideal of friendship he summarizes as “agreement, with
kindliness and affection, on things human and divine.”87
Rather than presume agreement and unanimity, friendship
seems to presuppose the opposite. Friendship is a relation
in which reciprocal correction and candid, even aggressive,
dispute is proper. For Augustine, in other words, the love
of friendship is agonistic. To help connect this aspect of
friendship to the political, we can note the similarity with
which Aristotle speaks of political friendship as entailing
forms of disagreement and conflict. As a species of “friend-
ships of utility,” notes Çidam, political friendship is intro-
duced by Aristotle not to eradicate conflict but to commend
“a set of practices that makes cooperation possible in and
through conflict.”88 Unlike friendships of virtue, a politi-
cal friendship “rests on a sort of compact,”89 an agreement
about what is to be shared that is achieved only through
“choice” (prohairesis) – a decision reached through delib-
erating and “judging” (krinein) together about contingent
matters.90 Political friendship, in other words, rests upon
and is constituted by activities of deliberative practical rea-
soning. And, as Susan Bickford notes, for Aristotle, deliber-
ation is “intrinsically conflictual,” for “we deliberate only
about uncertain things,” deciding together, “among differ-
ing opinions and in a context of uncertainty, how to act.”91
Deliberative practical reasoning with others always entails
disagreement, contention, and conflict on the way to arriv-
ing at shared judgment and choice. Political friendships,
then, presume difference. They are achievements of forging
common interest and action amidst difference. And for this

87
Augustine, Letter, 258, 493. 88 Çidam, In the Street, 30.
89
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1261b13–16. 90 Çidam, In the Street, 31.
91
Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and
Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 29.

311
 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

reason, as friendships of utility, they encompass both con-

flict and conciliation. As Aristotle writes, “Accusations and
reproaches arise only or most often in friendship for utility.
And this is reasonable.”92
For both Augustine and Aristotle, then, conflict is both
appropriate and necessary for friendships of an imperfect
kind. While friendship in its complete form, perfected either
by grace or virtue, exhibits only agreement, harmony, and
concord, political friendships, as imperfect friendships of
utility, are constituted through conflict in order to enable
cooperative action regarding shared goods. Indeed, without
political friendship sustaining the agonistic practices of delib-
erating, judging, and choosing, politics threatens to devolve
into irrationality and domination. Political friendship, how-
ever, incorporates conflict into a sustainable social relation
and orders it to the common good.

5.3 Loving Enemies

Thus far, I have been speaking about love and conflict, and
their interrelation in the constitution of political relations,
within relatively “ideal” political contexts. My theorization
of agonistic politics in terms of Augustinian love has pre-
sumed, certainly, a great degree of pluralism, difference, and
moral disagreement. But how do love and conflict operate
in explicitly non-ideal political contexts – that is, situations
of oppression, injustice, and inequality? To consider this, I
turn finally to the notion of “enemy-love.” As I discussed
in Chapter 2, recognition of democracy’s friend–enemy
dynamics is a central theme in agonistic theory. For ago-
nists, politics presumes antagonism, and the goal of demo-
cratic politics is the conversion of enemies into adversaries,

92
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1162b5.

312
 5.3 Loving Enemies

opponents to be contested rather than existential threats to

be eliminated. Augustine was similarly attentive to the antag-
onisms of political life – manifestations of what he called the
libido dominandi – and for this reason he saw enemy-love as
an important concept for Christian political engagement.93
For Augustine, enemy-love is love that recognizes another as
an enemy and yet pursues the enemy’s good so as to make
her or him a friend.94 My focus in this section will be on
two figures not often considered “Augustinians” but who,
I believe, extend important Augustinian insights, especially
Augustine’s theology of enemy-love, in creative directions.
This trajectory of Augustinianism, articulated most pow-
erfully by Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
emerges from theological reflection on liberative struggle in
contexts of oppression, and so is particularly attentive to the
experience of political conflict and the difficulties of love.95
Both Gutiérrez and King saw that liberation could only be
won by recognizing that injustice and inequality made per-
sons, classes, and social groups enemies of one another.
These enemy relations, they believed, are not simply, or even
primarily, the result of persons’ psychological distortions or
personal animosities, but of socio-economic structures and
material conditions. The enemy is not a personal antag-
onist but someone caught up in structures and systems of
exploitation. They are an enemy, in other words, because of
their opposition to the common good. Loving enemies and
being reconciled, then, entails certain social and political

93
See, for instance, Augustine, City of God, I.30.
94
Augustine, “Eighth Homily,” in Homilies on the First Epistle of John, trans.
Boniface Ramsey (New York: New City Press, 2008), 126.
95
In considering Gutiérrez and King “Augustinians,” I am following Gregory,
Politics and the Order of Love, 188–196. Gregory’s interest in Gutiérrez and
King regards their attention to the political relevance of love, but he does not
consider the place of conflict in their employment of love as a political virtue.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

transformations, such that those who undermine the com-

mon good are converted to seeking its flourishing.
Gutiérrez’s and King’s freedom struggles had real ene-
mies: persons, groups, and institutions who buttressed and
sustained the structural logics of white supremacy, colo-
nialism, and capitalist exploitation. Liberatory struggle,
then, had to take the form of contestation and confronta-
tion of the enemy. Such agonistic struggle, they believed,
is not opposed to Christian love. It is an expression of it.
In their theological reflection on situations of oppression,
Gutiérrez and King turned to the concept of enemy-love to
conceptualize how agonistic struggle against enemies could
be a political expression of Christ’s love commandment.96
Enemy-love, in the context of oppression, injustice, or
inequality, they argued, involves the use of conflict, opposi-
tion, confrontation, and power to seek the enemy’s conver-
sion to the common good.
Gutiérrez developed the major themes of his “theology
of liberation” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, amidst
Latin America’s mass poverty, political instability, and
capitalist exploitation. In 1971, he published Theology of
Liberation, wherein he proposed a new methodology for
theology – “critical reflection on praxis” – grounded in
an “Augustinian theology of history.”97 Like Augustine,
Gutiérrez conceptualized political and social life in terms
of love. Charity, he argued, is “the center of the Christian
life” and “the foundation of the praxis of Christians, of

96
See especially Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or
Community?” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of
Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), 247; and Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History,
Politics, and Salvation, rev. ed., trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016), 156–171.
97
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 5.

314
 5.3 Loving Enemies

their active presence in history.”98 Eric Gregory suggests

that Gutiérrez’s political theology is thus best understood
not, first and foremost, as a species of Marxism but as
an Augustinian vision of “political love” joined to a lib-
erationist theory of justice.99 This is perhaps most clearly
seen in an important section at the end of Theology of
Liberation, where Gutiérrez directly addresses the issue
of class struggle, bringing together themes of enemy-love
and conflict. Initially titled “Christian Fellowship and Class
Struggle” in the book’s first edition, then retitled “Faith and
Social Conflict” in its revised edition, the section displays
Gutiérrez’s creative appropriation of an ethics of love.100 In
the original version of the section, Gutiérrez addresses class
conflict as a simple fact of modern capitalist society. The
division of classes, social antagonism, and the making of
enemies, he argues, are produced by the material conditions
of inequality and the unjust distribution of property. This
structural feature of the global economy, says Gutiérrez,
“poses problems to the universality of Christian love”
because it is impossible to detach oneself from these antag-
onisms and conflicts.101 He articulates the problem: “The
Gospel announces the love of God for all people and calls
us to love as he loves. But to accept class struggle means to
decide for some people and against others.”102 How, then,
can the love commandment be fulfilled in the context of
class conflict?

98
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 6.
99
Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 189.
100
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 156–161.
101
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation,
trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1973). Hereafter cited as Theology of Liberation (First Edition), 273. See also
Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Praxis de Liberación: Teología y anuncio,” Concilium 96
(1974): 353–374.
102
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation (First Edition), 275.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

To answer this question, Gutiérrez turns to the notion

of enemy-love. Love takes different forms when directed
toward either the oppressed or the oppressor, the friend or
the enemy. Love toward the oppressed manifests as solidar-
ity, whereas love for the oppressor takes the form of opposi-
tion and struggle. Gutiérrez writes:
In the context of class struggle today, to love one’s enemies
presupposes recognizing and accepting that one has class ene-
mies and that it is necessary to combat them. It is not a ques-
tion of having no enemies, but rather of not excluding them
from our love. But love does not mean that oppressors are no
longer enemies, nor does it eliminate the radicalness of the
combat against them. “Love of enemies” does not ease ten-
sions; rather it challenges the whole system and becomes a sub-
versive formula.103

Gutiérrez is here thematizing enemy-love as a particular way

of engaging in conflict. To love the enemy is to directly chal-
lenge the qualities, actions, and circumstances that make
them an enemy – that is, the ways they harm or undermine
the common good. To confront and contest the enemy, how-
ever, is also to seek their salvation. Quoting the Italian theo-
logian Giulio Girardi, Gutiérrez writes, “Love for those who
live in a condition of objective sin demands that we struggle
to liberate them from it.”104
The goal of enemy-love is the same as love of the
oppressed: liberation. “One loves the oppressors,” writes
Gutiérrez, “by liberating them form their inhuman condi-
tion as oppressors, by liberating them from themselves.”105
Liberating the oppressor, however, can only come by way
of direct opposition, contestation of their interests, and

103
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation (First Edition), 276.
104
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation (First Edition), 275.
105
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation (First Edition), 276.

316
 5.3 Loving Enemies

struggle against them. Enemy-love, in this sense, has very

specific and material entailments. It must become “concrete
history, process, conflict,” making use of power, persua-
sion, pressure, and all of the tools of class struggle.106 To
love the enemy is to dismantle a structural relationship of
oppression and exploitation, a process that is at once social,
political, and economic. In the revised version of Theology
of Liberation, Gutiérrez further develops this theology of
class struggle by drawing on statements from the Latin
American bishops and papal social encyclicals.107 Drawing
especially on Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical Laborem
Exercens, he situates class struggle and social conflict within
an account of the common good. Class struggle, understood
in terms of enemy-love, is ordered not to the elimination of
the enemy or even to their defeat, but rather to their con-
version to the common good. Gutiérrez quotes John Paul II
on this point, who says that if the struggle between labor
and capital “takes on an aspect of opposition toward oth-
ers, this is because it aims at the good of social justice.” It
is not simply a “struggle ‘against’” another, but “‘for’ the
just good.”108 To speak of enemy-love in terms of the com-
mon good is to relocate it from the domain of the personal
and existential to that of the political, and so also to frame
action toward the enemy in political rather than personal

106
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation (First Edition), 275.
107
The revised edition of Theology of Liberation demonstrates Gutiérrez’s
concern to situate his work within the broad scope of magisterial social
teaching, especially after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s
criticisms of liberation theology in Instruction on Certain Aspects of the
“Theology of Liberation” (1984) and Instruction on Christian Freedom and
Liberation (1986). Especially in this section of the book, Gutiérrez, while not
substantially altering his key arguments, reformulates them using the language
and concepts of Catholic Social Teaching. In the footnotes, he offers an
extended engagement with John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens.
108
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 251n.62.

317
 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

terms. Doing so, as Gutiérrez repeatedly emphasizes, is a

way of purging hatred from opposition, of re-envisioning
class struggle not as a zero-sum war but as a movement for
conversion and reconciliation of those at enmity.109
Moreover, to frame enemy-love in terms of converting the
enemy to the common good is to gesture toward the very
concrete actions such conversion might entail, especially
regarding property, wealth, and power. Earlier in Theology
of Liberation, Gutiérrez had already gestured toward the
connection between “political charity” and transforma-
tions of property ownership. Charity, he writes, “means the
transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who
appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others,”
specifically by transforming the “foundation of society, that
is, the private ownership of the means of production.”110
Loving one’s enemies in the context of class struggle might
entail, for example, the expropriation and redistribution of
the enemy’s productive properties, assets, and capital.111
Indeed, as is affirmed in magisterial social teaching, justice
may sometimes demand expropriation of property, espe-
cially land, for the sake of the common good.112 The point,

109
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 160.
110
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 116.
111
This raises the question of the relationship between love and coercion, which
I am not able to fully address here. For Augustine, the two are not necessarily
opposed, as evidenced by his treatment of the Donatists. Similarly, for
Gutiérrez, it seems that coercive actions like expropriation can be a legitimate
form of love. The difference between the two is that, for Augustine, coercive
action is conceived in terms of punishment and moral correction, whereas,
for Gutiérrez, it is understood in terms of justice and reparation. Gutiérrez is
also more suspicious than Augustine about the legitimacy of violence in such
coercive action.
112
See, for instance, Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, https://tinyurl.com/
mr2789hw, §24; and Gaudium et Spes, no. 71, in Vatican Council II:
Constitutions, Degrees, Declarations, ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport:
Costello, 1996).

318
 5.3 Loving Enemies

for Gutiérrez, is that any “real resolution” to the problem of

class conflict requires “that we get to the causes that bring
about these social conflicts” and “that we do away with
the factors” that produce inequality and antagonism.113
For love to be realized, in other words, the structural and
material conditions that generate and sustain antagonism
must be transformed to enable mutuality. Ultimately, for
Gutiérrez, the goal of liberatory struggle is not simply jus-
tice but love, the creation of a “fraternal society of equals”
sharing communion.114
This notion that enemy-love is ordered finally to a kind
of communion is a major theme in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
thinking about love and conflict in the context of the black
freedom struggle. Like Gutiérrez, love was the central con-
cept in King’s political theology. As Preston Williams notes,
“King believed with Augustine that a true state or repub-
lic is determined by its people’s loves.”115 Love, for King,
was the motivation, form, and content of Christian politi-
cal action. Therefore, it should not be surprising that, when
confronting the major issues of his time – white supremacy,
class oppression, and militarism – King framed his political
opposition and contestation in terms of enemy-love. Enemy-
love, in King’s understanding, incorporates the use of con-
flict, ordering it to the end of communion. As James Cone
puts it, for King, love toward the enemy “defines the means
by which justice is established and also the goal of the strug-
gle for freedom, namely the beloved community.”116 King’s

113
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 159.
114
Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 159.
115
Preston Williams, “An Analysis of the Conception of Love and Its Influence on
Justice in the Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Journal of Religious Ethics
18, no. 2 (1990): 18.
116
James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 126.

319
 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

theology of enemy-love was profoundly shaped by the phi-

losophy of non-violence he inherited from Gandhi, and, like
Gandhi, King emphasized the importance of direct action
and confrontation in non-violent strategic action.117 As he
engaged in struggle and reflected theologically upon it, King
developed an account of enemy-love that placed power and
conflict at its center, using both to seek the conversion of the
enemy and the establishment of relationships of mutuality
and communion.
In The Divided Mind of the Black Church, Raphael
Warnock writes of the spiritual legacy King inherited from
the black church and passed on to successive generations as
one of “oppositional piety” and contestational witness, each
rooted in the “fundamentally oppositional character of the
gospel.”118 Integral to this political spirituality of struggle
was an understanding of love that embraced conflict. For
King, love is a “method of negotiation,” a way of engaging
the other in order to creatively forge a common life with
them.119 Throughout his career, King gave various versions
of a sermon entitled “Loving Your Enemies,” in which he
emphasized that enemy-love is “creative, redemptive good-
will.”120 As a creative and redemptive force, love has the
capacity to transform social relationships, converting rela-
tions of antagonism to ones of friendship. Love “has within
its very power transforming qualities” able to “redeem
and transform the enemy neighbor.”121 Thus, the end of

117
See especially, Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in The
Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015), 44–45.
118
Raphael G. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety
& Public Witness (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 26, 182.
119
Williams, “Love and Its Influence on Justice,” 27.
120
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in The Radical King, 59.
121
Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘Loving Your Enemies’, Sermon Delivered at the
Detroit Council of Churches’ Noon Lenten Services,” in The Papers of Martin
Luther King, Jr., Volume VI: Advocate of the Social Gospel, September

320
 5.3 Loving Enemies

enemy-love, King says, is not “to defeat or humiliate the

enemy but to win his friendship and understanding.”122
One of the unique and innovative components of King’s
theology of enemy-love was his attention to power and its
productive possibilities. King construed love and power
in mutually implicating terms, contesting a common prej-
udice that “love is identified with a resignation of power
and power with a denial of love.”123 Love and power,
he argued, were not only compatible, insofar as they are
grounded in the unity of love and power in God,124 but
love and power must be held together, lest power with-
out love become “reckless and abusive” and love without
power become “sentimental and anemic.”125 King termed
this joining of love and power “the power of love,” and
advocated its expression in “organiz[ing] mass nonviolent
resistance based on the principle of love.”126 What, then, is
power for King? “Power, properly understood,” he says in
“Where Do We Go from Here?,” “is the ability to achieve
a purpose.”127 More specifically, it is “the strength required
to bring about social, political or economic changes.”128
When the struggle for change is inhibited because of injus-
tice, power must take an oppositional form. Power must
“compel the majority to listen,” organize for political and

1948–March 1963, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 2007), 427.
122
King, “Loving Your Enemies,” in The Radical King, 58.
123
King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 578.
124
Williams, “Love and Its Influence on Justice,” 21.
125
King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 578.
126
Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘Loving Your Enemies’, Sermon Delivered at Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume
IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958, ed. Clayborne
Carson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 323.
127
King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 577.
128
King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 577.

321
 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

economic self-determination, and confront the oppressor in

self-assertion.129 In his 1967 essay, “Black Power Defined,”
King reflected on the civil rights movement’s necessary tran-
sition from nonviolent protest and direct action to the work
of building sustained power “to enforce change” at systemic
and structural levels.130 While protest is effective in mak-
ing moral appeals to those in power to effect change, the
future of the black freedom struggle, King maintained, was
to move toward “organiz[ing] our strength into compelling
power so that government cannot elude our demands.”131
Manifesting this kind of power, King went on to explain in
the essay, would entail the wielding of economic power, par-
ticularly in labor strikes, and accumulating political power,
especially in expanding the black electorate, building politi-
cal organizations, and running black political candidates for
office. “Power,” he concluded the essay, “will not be legis-
lated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It
is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its
elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it
under its own control.”132 Power, for King, is necessary for
enemy-love because truly loving the enemy means freeing
them from the forces of oppression that dehumanize them
also. The “power of love,” then, is not sentimental or emo-
tive but love’s capacity to transform the material conditions
of oppression through collective power.
A second important dimension of King’s theology of
enemy-love is the role of conversion in the process of com-
ing to shared judgment. “Love seeks to convert,” he says,
and so to establish a relationship of mutuality between

129
King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 578, 580.
130
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Black Power Defined,” in A Testament of Hope,
303, emphasis mine.
131
King, “Black Power Defined,” 303. 132 King, “Black Power Defined,” 312.

322
 5.3 Loving Enemies

those formerly at enmity.133 Shared judgment is the goal of

enemy-love, for King, and conversion is the means by which
such attunement is reached. For King, while agonistic strug-
gle sometimes involves bargaining, accommodation, and
compromise, it is not primarily ordered to these but to
something much more ambitious: common judgment, or, as
he often put it, mutual “understanding.”134 Jason Springs
notes that King’s adversarial practices of nonviolent direct
action did not often “involve negotiated settlement or
merely mutually tolerable compromise.”135 Rather, King
sought to engage “a potential enemy as an adversary to be
lovingly confronted and repositioned,” in order to “bring
him to his senses.”136 The language of “sense” here recalls
the critical importance of affect in coming to judgment, dis-
cussed in Chapter 4. In relations between adversaries, affec-
tive sharing can only be reached by a kind of conversion
of perspective, value commitment, moral imagination, or
structural position.137 To arrive at shared judgment – say,
about the evils of racism – involves a conversion of love, the
re-establishing of a sensus communis, a “common sense”
that perceives racism as evil. In a letter to King reflecting
on the successes of the Montgomery bus boycott, Bayard
Rustin noted this kind of affective conversion as an achieve-
ment of the action. The effect of the boycott was that it gave
“the closed mind of the white southerner an airing it has
never had before … who though they retain basic prejudice,

133
King, “Loving Your Enemies” (Detroit Council of Churches), 427.
134
See, for instance, King, “Loving Your Enemies” (Detroit Council of Churches),
427; King, “Loving Your Enemies” (Dexter Avenue Baptist Church), 319.
135
Jason A. Springs, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From
Enemy to Adversary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 253.
136
Springs, Healthy Conflict, 253.
137
See Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism, 111–112, for a similar
reading of King.

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 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

have lost something in the course of this year that begins

their long struggle to genuine understanding.”138 For King,
oppositional and agonistic political struggle is not aimed at
defeating an enemy but converting them so that they might
share in common judgment and action.
Writing out of contexts of social struggle against oppres-
sion, both Gutiérrez and King develop an account of the
politics of agonism in terms of love – loving one’s enemy and
struggling for the conversion of their loves. In doing so, they
propose a theological conception of democracy that is both
more realist than Augustinian liberals, insofar as they take
seriously the necessary, but productive, use of power and
conflict, and more hopeful than agonistic theorists, insofar
as they believe agonistic struggle can actually yield shared
judgment and the conversion of enemies into friends. For
Gutiérrez and King, agonism is about love and conversion.
When loves are disordered, manifesting in oppression, vio-
lence, and injustice, conversion will entail metanoia, repen-
tance from sin, reparation for harm, and the instantiation
of justice. It is only through such repentance that mutuality
and shared judgment and action are possible, for, as Pope
Francis notes, solidarity is fundamentally a “moral virtue
and social attitude born of personal conversion.”139 In mak-
ing love and conversion central themes in their political
visions, uniting them to an account of liberatory struggle,
Gutiérrez and King embody a kind of radical Augustinian
agonism, one that envisions conflict as a means of converting
persons to the common good.

138
Martin Luther King, Jr., “From Bayard Rustin,” in The Papers of Martin
Luther King, Jr., Volume III: Birth of the New Age, December 1955–
December 1956, ed. Clayborne Carson, et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1997), 492–493.
139
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, https://tinyurl.com/275hmrb4, §114, n87.

324
 5.4 Conclusion

5.4 Conclusion
In this chapter, I’ve shown what a theology and reli-
gious ethics of agonism might look like. Augustine and
the Augustinian tradition, as I read them, are particularly
conducive to conceptualizing agonistic politics insofar as
they center love and conversion in envisaging political
society. Persons and political communities, according to
Augustine, are constituted by loves. Though these loves
are diverse and often in conflict with one another, politics
enables a practice of negotiating conflict and even coming
to love and judge in common. Such is the achievement of
political friendship. Of course, politics occurs not simply
among friends; it also offers a way of resolving conflicts
with enemies – that is, conflicts born of sin, injustice, and
wrong. In these political contexts, love seeks the enemy’s
conversion. It aims to confront, challenge, and pressure the
enemy to forsake injustice and oppression and to love the
common good.
For Augustine, though, conversion names something
much broader than merely forsaking sin and loving the good,
and so it would be a mistake to see conversion as necessary
only in situations of evil, injustice, and wrong. Conversion
is a much more natural capacity, one that comes packaged
with our humanity. The conversion of loves is the means
by which human sociality is sustained, in which the multi-
ple, conflicting, and divergent desires, hopes, sensibilities,
and intuitions belonging to us as creatures are negotiated in
the pursuit of a common life. This kind of conversion, the
conversion of loves, is at the heart of Augustine’s spiritual-
ity. Conversion, for him, was not only a process of ordering
loves disordered by sin, but more fundamentally a process
of learning to rightly love all things in God. Similarly, in
agonistic democracy, conflict and conversion are not simply

325
 Loving in Conflict: Theological Agonistics

indications of and resolutions to wrong. They are the means

by which shared goods are discerned, common loves culti-
vated, and shared judgments generated. Theologically speak-
ing, agonistics names the experience of undergoing revision,
reordering, transformation, and conversion of love, both
one’s own and those of friends and adversaries, in the build-
ing of democratic community.

326
 Epilogue
Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

Agonistic democracy is a politics of mass participation. It

involves organizing and mobilizing ordinary citizens to engage
in the conflictual work of discovering, deliberating about, and
acting toward goods shared in common. It depends on prac-
tices of joining people and communities who have significant
disagreements and differences, so that their conflicts might
become productive, the means of building a common life
together. Agonistic democracy, in other words, is a project of
forming a demos, a democratic people, through conflict.
Today, the great social, economic, and ecological threat
to agonistic democracy, indeed to the survival of democ-
racy itself, is neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism, Wendy
Brown argues, is in fact “undoing the demos.”1 Advocates
of neoliberalism aim to extend capitalist and market logics
to every sphere of human life – government, work, educa-
tion, family, culture, law – and so refashion the political
in the image of the economic.2 As a form of governance,

1
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(New York: Zone Books, 2015).
2
The literature analyzing neoliberalism is vast, conceptualizing it in various ways
as a form of statecraft, an economic ideology, a form of governmentality, etc.
For the most nuanced and comprehensive treatments of the history of neoliberal
development, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007); and Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of
Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2020).

327
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

neoliberal regimes subject common goods to commodifi-

cation, privatize public services, and deregulate major sec-
tors of the economy, thus constricting the arena of social
life accountable to public authority and political control.
Since the 1970s, the neoliberal state – its policy-makers,
politicians, and administrative bodies – has continually
outsourced the task of governance to corporations – their
owners, boards, and lobbyists – and financial institutions. In
the name of defending a supposedly free market, it actively
impairs and impedes the capacities of organized collectiv-
ities, like labor unions, and disciplines political parties to
observe the imperatives of private enterprise, disempow-
ering democratic citizens while evermore enhancing corpo-
rate power.3 Rendered as solitary, competitive individuals,
responsible for securing (i.e., purchasing) even the most
basic necessities of life as scarce goods, neoliberal citizens
must then navigate a culture of precarity that undermines
their ability to act and exist politically. In other words, neo-
liberalism names the dismantling of material conditions in
which collective democratic self-rule can occur.
Neoliberalism is also, Brown argues, a distinct “politi-
cal rationality,” a mode of thinking, feeling, and imagin-
ing thrust upon persons who are made to inhabit a world
increasingly being recast in the image of the marketplace.4
In other words, in addition to being a form of governance,
neoliberalism is also a form of “governmentality,” a regime
of subject formation, shaping the hearts and minds, habits
and dispositions, hopes and fears of citizens.5 It is a project,

3
William Davies, “The Neoliberal State: Power against ‘Politics’,” in The
SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. Damien Cahill, et al. (London: SAGE
Publications, 2018), 273–283.
4
Brown, Undoing the Demos, 20–21.
5
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

328
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

Brown argues, of transforming the homo politicus into an

homo oeconomicus. Not only does neoliberalism reconfig-
ure the political in fundamentally antidemocratic ways, it
also disempowers citizens from contesting its hegemony.
Neoliberalism disciplines democratic citizens by depoliti-
cizing them, promoting their capacities as consumers while
suppressing their agency as political actors.
Can democracy survive in neoliberal times? Can ago-
nistic democracy challenge and transform a political envi-
ronment so hostile to democratic rule? Despite a grim
landscape in which democracy is being both eroded and
directly challenged, seeds of hope for democratic renewal
can be found across the globe in emerging forms of mass
democratic politics. New social movement organizing,
indigenous and landless peoples’ occupations, renewed
labor militancy in public and private sector organizing,
electoral successes by popular social democratic par-
ties across Latin America, and more–radical democracy
is contesting antidemocratic developments at every turn.
Some of the most intriguing examples are experiments
in participatory budgeting across the world. From Porto
Alegre to Seoul, New York City to Paris, municipalities
have begun responding to popular pressure to democratize
public spending by submitting portions of city budgets to
direct democratic control. Citizens are the source of pub-
lic funding, the idea goes, so they should get a say in how
those funds are allocated. Challenging neoliberal austerity
by reinvesting in public goods, and renewing democratic
participation through broad-based civic action, participa-
tory budgeting movements represent a glimmer of hope for
mass democracy in the shadow of neoliberalism.
One of the most ambitious experiments in participatory
budgeting is in the Portuguese city of Cascais. Since it began
in 2011, Cascais has spent more than fifty million euros

329
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

on projects proposed and developed by citizen councils.6

Journalist Nick Romeo has written in detail about Cascais’s
participatory budgeting process, in which at least 15 per-
cent of the city’s annual budget is directly controlled by citi-
zens.7 The process begins with several “Public Sessions of
Participation” in each neighborhood of the city, where per-
sons gather into small groups at tables to present, discuss,
and debate proposals for public works projects. Here, they
vote to bring a proposal before the whole gathered assembly,
which hears short presentations and speeches on proposed
projects, deliberates about their utility and feasibility, and
then votes on which proposals to advance to the next stage
of the democratic process. Proposals are presented by both
individuals and civil society groups, and sessions involve a
broad base of people of disparate backgrounds, ages, occu-
pations, social classes, and political persuasions who share
the fate of living in proximity to one another. After nine pub-
lic sessions, successful project proposals go through a rigor-
ous process of technical analysis, appraising their possible
cost and achievability, and then are submitted to the general
public for voting.8 Advocates engage in coalition-building,
campaigning, and public persuasion for particular causes,
and votes are cast over the course of a month to select which
projects will go before the mayor for final approval.
The genius of Cascais’s participatory budgeting process
is that it creates public space for individuals and social
groups to articulate their needs and desires before others,

6
“Participatory Budget,” Participa Cascais, op.cascais.pt/orcamentoparticipativo/
pages/60892ceda7533e00b1d35f 93.
7
Nick Romeo, “How to Spend Your City’s Money,” The New Yorker, March
24, 2023, www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-to-spend-your-citys-
money. See also Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2024).
8
Romeo, “How to Spend.”

330
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

thus affording diverse peoples and groups the opportunity

to identify goods held in common. Importantly, this is a
deliberative space, in that their coming to see these goods
in common comes by way of intense discernment, persua-
sion, and argument about what a community needs most.
The process is an attempt to forge communities of common
judgment where goods come into view as common objects
of love through agonistic, participatory mediation. In
some places, participatory budgeting faces the temptation
to elude this messy work of organizing and to implement
more efficient forms of aggregating individual preferences
through polling or impersonal ballot-casting instead. But
in Cascais, budgeting begins in the gathered public assem-
bly. Participatory budgeting public sessions are spaces of
intense, conflictual democratic activity, as citizens must
wisely discern and judge together which of the many goods
and possible forms of action available to them should be
pursued with the limited public resources available.
Observers attribute the success of Cascais’s participatory
budgeting to several things. Chief among them is the central
importance of public gathering. The practice of embodied,
interpersonal deliberation has not only attracted citizens to
participate in public sessions but also improved the quality
of civic life and citizens’ self-understanding as empowered
actors.9 Public sessions are guided by trained moderators,
involve voting rules to encourage coalition-building rather
than interest-group clashing, and make use of skilled pro-
fessionals to ensure deliberation pursues reasonably achiev-
able goals.10 Efforts are made to encourage the presence and

9
Roberto Falanga, et al., “Participatory Budgets in Canoas (Brazil) and Cascais
(Portugal): A Comparative Analysis of the Drivers of Success,” Journal of Civil
Society 16, no. 3 (2020), 288.
10
Romeo, “How to Spend.”

331
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

participation of underrepresented groups, thus ensuring the

diverse and plural composition of deliberative assemblies.
In all these ways, Cascais seeks to cultivate the space of
public deliberation to ensure citizens’ full participation.
Second, and doubtless related to this, participatory bud-
geting has demonstrated a remarkable ability to transcend
traditional partisan divisions. Popular among both the left
and the right, and championed by the city’s center-right
mayor Carlos Carreiras, participatory budgeting provides
an institutional space and set of practices wherein constit-
uents of many backgrounds, values, ideologies, and pref-
erences are given opportunities to discover goods held in
common.11 Listening to the reasons of others and justifying
one’s own in the process of debating particular social goods
can build a sense of commonness and solidarity across dif-
ference. Finally, an important component of Cascais’s pro-
cess is that persons and groups whose proposals do not
make it through the initial public sessions, technical anal-
ysis stage, or general voting process are invited to refine
their proposals and resubmit them for future budgets. In
this way, dissent can become productive for the democratic
process. Moreover, even proposals that do not advance to
the final stages of the process often become important indi-
cators of public need to be addressed by other means. As
Romeo puts it, participatory budgeting produces a kind of
“map of the city’s desires and anxieties,” trusting that ordi-
nary citizens often know better than experts and public offi-
cials what a community needs and how to achieve it.12
Local participatory budgeting initiatives will not trans-
form global capitalism. But they are an example of how
experiments in mass democracy can begin to contest

11
Falanga, et al., “Participatory Budgets,” 283–284.
12
Romeo, “How to Spend.”

332
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

neoliberalism’s evisceration of political life and reintro-

duce broad-based participatory governance in the midst
of democracy’s many crises. In 2017, as many as seventy-
five thousand people participated in Cascais’s budget pro-
cess, more than the number of people who voted in that
year’s city elections.13 In Portugal, as in other places, par-
ticipatory budgeting is rebuilding civic trust and revital-
izing the democratic capacities of ordinary citizens, their
abilities to engage in conflict, conciliation, and judgment.
While they may not immediately revolutionize the world
economy, grassroots democratic practices like participa-
tory budgeting can transform the people who participate
in them. By regularly taking part in exercising democratic
power with others, citizens resist neoliberal depoliticiza-
tion. Even more, citizens can learn and cultivate demo-
cratic virtues in these laboratories of radical democracy,
acquiring the skills and dispositions necessary for radical
self-governance. Especially in contexts of deliberative inten-
sity and argumentative exchange, citizens find that they
must exercise virtues like cooperation, truthfulness, trust,
responsiveness, and temperance if deliberation is to actually
bear fruit in common judgment and action. In participatory
budgeting, for example, citizens become disposed to see
public resources as ordered to genuinely public goods, and
thus are encouraged to steward them for the common good.
Rather than seeing tax dollars as a kind of fee paid toward
an impersonal and distant state, citizens come to view pub-
lic funds as the resources of a community to be used for
the community by the community. Having a stake in the
direction and administration of such funds, they might then
develop virtues like justice, mercy, and generosity. Actively

13
Nick Romeo, “A Powerful Model to Strengthen U.S. Democracy,” Time,
February 1, 2024, time.com/ 6591071/strengthen-u-s-democracy-essay.

333
 Epilogue: Agonistic Democracy in Neoliberal Times

participating in the care for their common life, they might

be more disposed to virtues of loyalty, civic piety, and trust.
In other words, the social practices of grassroots democracy
have the potential to form and transform passive neoliberal
subjects into active, even virtuous, democratic citizens.
Despite their limited capacity to effect global structural
change, local forms of participatory democracy are neverthe-
less critical for countering neoliberal alienation and vulner-
ability. Without them, disempowered citizens will continue
to be tempted by the allure of culture wars, nationalism, and
demagogic populism – forms of pseudo-conflict that promise
to vanquish opponents rather than build a common life with
them. If there is a future for democracy, it is an agonistic
one. If there is hope for its renewal, it lies in the organized
work of ordinary citizens ready to embrace, tend, and tarry
with the conflicts of democracy.

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355
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accountability, 61, 115–121, 221, analogy, 10–11, 21, 31–32, 37–38,

242, 257–259, 262, 274–278, 41–44, 53–57, 65–69, 95–98,
284, 328 141–154, 183, 280
action, 16–17, 24–27, 34, 61, antagonism, 2, 45, 54, 62,
74, 87–92, 99, 110–134, 90–107, 130, 141, 207,
147–181, 195–212, 217–231, 250, 312–320
262–267, 271–279, 291, 310, Aquinas, Thomas, 54, 135, 147–153,
317–324, 331 158n27, 169–182, 228
divine, 74, 228 Arendt, Hannah, 33, 110–111,
adversary, 105–108, 295–314 225–239, 235n73, 244–246,
aesthetics, 39, 44–49, 93–94, 250, 300
227n53, 230, 244–245 Aristotle, 60, 213, 215, 225, 283,
affect, 131, 212, 222, 237, 295–305, 311–312
241–250, 262–270, 279, ascesis, 69, 82–84, 295
284, 304, 323 assemblage, 97, 125–128, 141,
Agamben, Giorgio, 9 213, 272–274
agonism, 12–22, 26, 91–92, association, 61, 89, 130, 146,
96–141, 100n6, 145, 166, 212–217, 261
182, 199, 204, 212, 246n93, Athanasius, 157
250, 256, 283, 290, 298, 324 attunement, 167, 185, 243,
agonistic community, 15–18, 97, 249–253, 263–270, 278, 279,
123, 132–134, 206–279, 284, 323
230n64 Augustine, 3, 11, 43, 51, 69–86,
broad-based community 93–94, 302n56, 318n111
organizing, 210–212, Augustinian civic liberalism. See
239–246 Augustinian liberalism
agreement, 27, 33, 39–40, Augustinian liberalism, 4, 35–94,
109–110, 178–179, 184–185, 102, 142
198–201, 208–209, 215, Augustinian civic liberalism,
222, 229, 240, 245–253, 37–38, 69–94, 98, 126,
278, 287–290, 297–299, 142, 147
307–312 postliberal Augustinianism,
Althusius, Johannes, 33, 42–44, 36–69, 75, 88, 92, 93, 95–98,
211, 278 142, 147

356
 Index

authority, 9, 19, 54, 78, 99–102, communitarianism, 73, 86,

108, 136–141, 213–221, 100, 120–123, 129–132,
228–229, 257, 271, 328 208, 233
comprehensive doctrines, 5–8,
Baroque, 228–229 240–242
beauty, 48–50, 94, 163, 184, 291 confession, 82–83, 91n129, 168
Bowlin, John, 170–182 Connolly, William, 96–106,
Bretherton, Luke, 204–213, 116–130, 242, 272–274
224, 246–248, 254–255, consensus, 3–20, 33, 74n82, 96,
272, 289 106–121, 127, 178–179,
broad-based community 198–204, 209, 222–223,
organizing. See agonistic 233–234, 241, 247–250, 256,
community 278, 287–290, 296
Brown, Wendy, 327–329 consociationalism, 146n9, 213,
216n25, 217n26
Cabral, Amílcar, 206–208 contingency, 17, 22–29, 44, 68,
capitalism, 13, 32, 41–42, 56–62, 103, 119, 128, 135n97,
88, 327, 332 137–147, 155–157, 164–182,
Cavell, Stanley, 115, 184–194, 194–203, 211, 216–233,
229, 245, 250–253 247–249, 256–258, 272–280,
charity, 26, 36, 44–68, 81, 86, 292, 311
107, 281, 283n3, 298, conversion, 52–53, 62–63, 79–84,
313–324. See also love 92, 106, 166–167, 182,
Christology, 22, 77, 145, 193 284–286, 292–295, 312–326
church, 59, 77–78, 239, 255, 261 covenant, 213–216
citizenship, 69–74, 82–92 creation, 17, 22–23, 22n39,
civic liberalism. See Augustinian 23n40, 30–33, 37, 45–50,
civic liberalism 65, 75–78, 93–97, 135–157,
class struggle, 58, 315–319 158n28, 159n33, 164,
Coles, Romand, 6n12, 51–53, 64, 169n69, 180–181, 193–194,
84, 246, 265–266, 276 215, 280
collective action, 89, 105, creaturehood. See theological
122–128, 273 anthropology
colonialism, 22n39, 52, 59–65, Crockett, Clayton, 135n98, 139
206–207, 314
common goods, 17, 36–40, 57–63, death of God, 98, 135, 137–140
73, 80–87, 100, 104–108, decisionism, 112–116, 233
126–130, 132–133, 156, 165, Deleuze, Gilles, 44, 49, 49n30,
177–179, 213–220, 255, 100, 126
261, 284–289, 291, 297–298, deliberation, 8, 35, 39, 90, 107,
304–306, 312–318, 324–333 112–115, 124, 131, 156,
common world, 24, 232, 173–177, 196–207, 210n7,
234–250, 267 219–222, 230–279, 286, 311,
communion, 11, 59, 82, 153, 331–333
183–193, 222–223 deliberative democracy, 6–8

357
 Index

democracy Habermas, Jürgen, 6–12, 9n23,

deliberative, 6–8, 112–116, 111–113, 222, 233
115n50, 222 harmony, 2–4, 11–19, 34–37,
grassroots, 34, 210, 249, 44–49, 52n36, 58–67, 89–95,
259–272, 281, 333–334 106–111, 126–127, 147–151,
radical, 12, 95–99, 104–121, 190, 204–207, 217–218, 250,
128–131, 136–147, 212, 282–285, 292, 306, 312
230n64, 261, 333 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
demos, 62–64, 105–110, 291, 48, 167–168, 202
327–328 hegemony, 65, 113–116,
Derrida, Jacques, 43n7, 44, 57n46, 128–131, 329
296–297 Heidegger, Martin, 160, 160n35,
dissent, 16, 34, 116–121, 185n106
256–259, 332 hierarchy, 21, 53–69, 99, 136–
dissonance, 49, 67, 94, 110 141, 148, 174, 198, 217–218,
253–254
embodiment, 17, 22–25, 33, Hobbes, Thomas, 137–138
66–68, 135n97, 145–146, Holy Spirit, 46–47, 51n35, 298
153–156, 183–205, 278–280 Honig, Bonnie, 12, 109–111,
enemy, 104–108, 297, 312–326 115n50
eschatology, 71, 80, 145, 158n26 house meetings, 263–272
human nature, 17n33, 85, 99,
finitude, 17, 22, 66–68, 135n97, 157, 218
145–146, 155–168, 182,
189–205, 216–217, 259, identity, 4, 16–19, 33, 42–48, 58,
278–280, 292 100–105, 110–111, 118–130,
Foucault, Michel, 44, 99–100, 160–167, 186, 208–210, 220,
256n115 278, 289–297, 305
foundationalism, 16, 60–64, immanence, 21, 32, 74, 98,
112–113, 136–138, 185, 135–147
208–210, 218, 232, 234 incarnation, 74–78, 193
friendship, 86, 93, 104–107, 165, Industrial Areas Foundation, 34,
193–203, 283–284, 295–312, 210–212, 259–279, 281
320–326 Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, 248
fugitivity, 121–125
judgment, 7, 16–17, 33–35,
genealogy, 27–29, 41–44, 53–55, 63–69, 115–131, 168,
119n60 174, 179–180, 198–291,
God, doctrine of, 21, 44–46, 310–312, 322–333. See
136–147 also practical reason; sensus
grassroots democracy. See communis
democracy justice, 3–17, 24–27, 60, 71,
Gregory, Eric, 69–94, 286n5, 81–89, 99, 110–112, 121, 141,
313n95, 315 179, 228–234, 259, 284–289,
Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 312–319, 324 312–326, 318n111, 333

358
 Index

Kant, Immanuel, 225–230, multiplicity, 21, 42–44, 50, 57,

227n53, 244–246, 251 97–114, 127, 140–141,
Keller, Catherine, 97, 136, 140–141 146–156, 165, 177–181,
King Jr., Martin Luther, 313–314, 203–207, 214n17, 218–221,
319–326 273, 296

legitimacy, 7–12, 18–19, 28, natural law, 56, 145, 169–175

111–121, 137–139, 234, neoliberalism, 13–19, 32, 41–42,
318n111 56–58, 66–68, 86–89,
liberalism, 5–8, 6n12, 31–42, 105n23, 128, 327–334
56–62, 69–75, 86–89, Neoplatonism, 150
99–100, 100n6, 121–126, nepantalism, 246–247
222, 242, 289 neutrality, 88, 212, 233–236
liberation theology, 34, 260n121, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42–45, 43n7,
313–326 99–101, 110
listening, 119, 239, 247, nominalism, 49–50
261–279, 284
lo cotidiano, 248–249 O’Donovan, Oliver, 60, 200,
Locke, John, 137 213, 227–229, 285–286,
Logos, 77 288–290
love ontology
desire, 78, 287–290, 292–295, of difference, 42–44, 49, 56–58,
330–334 89, 99
of enemy, 107–108, 312–326 fundamental, 44, 56, 65,
of neighbor, 76–77, 80n103, 75–76, 100
86, 141, 176–177, 248, of peace, 41–55
305–306, 320 political, 42, 55–56, 64–69,
order of, 50, 69, 80–86 75–80, 86, 104–106,
140, 291
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 14, 39–40, Trinitarian, 21
208, 258 univocal, 49
Marxism, 53, 58, 99, 104, 315 ordinary language philosophy, 14,
Mathewes, Charles, 69–94, 135, 230n64, 251–252
133–134, 293–295
mediation, 47, 57, 164–168, 182, parrhesia, 301, 306–309
214, 331 participatory budgeting, 329–334
metaphysics, 14, 30, 42–46, peace, 6, 11–14, 23–26, 32,
51, 56, 94, 135, 140, 41–72, 81, 88, 94–95, 133,
147–148, 154 151, 166, 179, 287–292,
Milbank, John, 38–76, 80–84, 302–306
88–89, 94, 139, 208 perception, 177, 212,
monotheism, 97, 127, 139–140 237–241, 245, 247–250,
Mouffe, Chantal, 12, 96–97, 265–270, 284
104–116, 125–131, 135n97, perfection, 12, 72–74, 85–88,
256, 291 148–149, 154–160, 302

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 Index

pilgrimage, 80–82, 90, 302 responsiveness, 116–120, 127,

play, 87–91 187, 269, 333
polarization, 4–5, 19, 93, 285 Robbins, Jeffrey, 97, 136–141
political community, 16n32, Rose, Gillian, 48n25, 192
80–99, 122–134, 203–279, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 137–138
287–293, 300–305. See also
res publica sacramentality
political theology, 3–4, 8–42, sacramental ontology, 74–78,
9n23, 70n70, 75n83 86–90
populism, 209–211, 334 sacramental pluralism, 37, 69,
postliberal Augustinians. 80, 86–92
See Augustinian liberalism saeculum, 37, 71, 75–84, 91, 287,
postliberalism, 38–69, 73–76, 302–303
93, 122, 142, 208. See also Schmitt, Carl, 8–11, 9n23,
postliberal Augustinians 20, 27–29, 104–107,
power, 9, 20, 28, 42–44, 53, 114–115, 136
88–91, 100–119, 136–143, selfhood, 33, 100, 160–168,
157, 173–176, 190, 209, 160n35, 267
215–220, 226–229, 237n78, sensus communis, 229–230, 238,
253–277, 256n115, 287, 244–256, 274, 278, 284,
314–334 323. See also judgment;
practical reason, 27, 173–176, practical reason
195–203, 219–231, 241, 248, separateness, 153, 183–184,
254n109, 286, 310–312. 188–194, 203
See also judgment; sensus Simon, Yves, 33, 211–223,
communis 241, 278
providence, 22, 52, 78, 145, 215 sin, 37, 51n35, 52–53, 71, 78–80,
public reason, 7–10, 20, 102, 164–166, 181, 194–195,
112, 232–234, 242, 248, 292–295, 316, 325
251, 289 skepticism, 184–192, 237n78
socialism, 35–42, 56–65, 88, 193
radical democracy. See democracy societas, 129–130, 295
radical theology, 32, 98, 134–147 solidarity, 21, 34, 57, 66, 89,
Rawls, John, 5–8, 6n12, 6n15, 121–122, 128–134, 265, 283,
12, 18–19, 23, 70–71, 100, 290–305, 316, 324, 332
110–113, 222, 233–235, sovereignty, 8–10, 20–22, 52,
240, 289 63n64, 97–102, 114–115,
reconciliation, 55–59, 95, 135–147, 210–214,
167, 318 216n25, 228
representation, 10–11, 61n59, space, 8, 30, 74–78, 103–120,
114, 254 130, 146–163, 183–190,
republicanism, 60–63, 69–75, 193–198, 224–227, 235,
86–90 246–252, 263–270, 276–278,
res publica, 133, 287–288, 290, 330–332
295, 305 Springs, Jason, 14, 25–26, 323

360
 Index

state, 5n11, 16n32, 28, 59–62, 108, 120–125, 132, 139–140,

71–73, 216n25, 225, 300, 147–153, 180, 190, 206–207,
319, 327n2, 328, 333 210n7, 221, 233, 279,
Stout, Jeffrey, 18, 69–70, 246n94, 292–308, 321
267–269
Surin, Kenneth, 53–55, 64 value, 15–27, 30, 88, 107,
119–124, 130, 193, 212,
theological anthropology, 14–17, 231–242, 247–250, 270, 286,
22–23, 46, 66–68, 96, 135, 293–294, 304, 323, 332
144–146, 156, 182, 204, 214, violence, 14–17, 42–46, 45n15,
278–283 51, 67, 96, 101–102, 106,
creaturehood, 16–25, 31–56, 118, 190–194, 206, 318n111,
65–68, 76, 93–98, 142–195, 320, 324
203–205, 211–218, 277–283, virtue, 12, 17n33, 32, 39–43, 40n4,
292, 325 56–75, 80–93, 106–120,
time, 81, 123–134, 154–168, 183, 169–180, 198–200, 269,
197–198, 204, 221–225, 286n5, 299–304, 311–312,
247–248, 258, 274, 277–279, 313n95, 324, 333–334
283, 298, 305
tolerance, 57, 91, 95, 102–106, Williams, Rowan, 48n25,
118–119, 178–182, 162–168, 182
179n94, 223 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 104,
transcendence, 9, 97–100, 135–143 115, 129, 162, 184–186,
Trinity, 11, 20, 31–32, 44–50, 185n106, 188n113, 192,
56–59, 65–67, 79, 95–98, 250–253
142–154, 183, 193 Wolin, Sheldon, 12, 73n79,
109n30, 123–130, 305
unity, 2–5, 10–13, 20–21, 31–49,
61–67, 66n67, 88, 94–97, Zerilli, Linda, 33, 212, 231–243

361