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Even after 500 years, some Protestants get all weird over the Protestant Reformation. A FB friend posts:

Many of my clergy colleagues seem vehemently against any observation of the Reformation yesterday or at all. Here’s my question, and it seems to me it can be answered either way: Absent Luther and the 95 Theses, would there have been an English Reformation? What would it have looked like and when would it have occurred?

Paging through the responses, the consensus is that the Reformation, minus Luther, would have occurred, but, without Luther, would have occurred differently in England than it did.

For those who are not tuned in to things religious, this is the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation. And, so, there is some amount of chatter on the Internet about the same.

That Anglicans might not commemorate the Reformation seems a bit odd to me. But that is part of the patient-therapist relationship and I don’t want to go there.

From a purely historical vantage point, the question is intriguing. Is the Reformation a one-off? Can we ascribe it to the powerful personality of a lone monk; or, even more intriguing, to the Spirit’s illumination of or visitation to said Monk? Who’s image is printed on the coin?

As a social theorist and historian turned economic theorist and historian (long story), I do have a horse in this race. For economic historians, there is nothing the least bit surprising about the arrival of the Reformation. What is surprising and what invites research is — why Germany? Why not Italy? Why Germany? And why not Great Britain or the Netherlands or anywhere? Why Germany?

To answer this question, we need to address a prior question: why do economic historians find nothing surprising in the Reformation’s arrival?

Why? Because the Reformation requires a shift in social subjectivity predicated upon changes in social mediation that have long been the subject of historical inquiry. Why? Because the shift in where divine grace is located, from material substances to immaterial (divine) actions, is well understood and well documented. Why? Because the isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance leaves a paper record that is quite deep and quite wide. Why? Because capitalism is the parent, not the child (vide M Weber) of the Reformation.

Given this foundation in research, we still have to deal with the difference between Germany and England — not to mention France or the United Provinces. Why Germany? Why not England?

Let us assume that the capitalist social formation takes off in Ghent, in 1342, when the Abbot of St Pierre instructs the fullers to install a clock in the workhouse recently erected by them in the parish of St John. And let us assume that the leading (not exclusive) clients of the textiles there produced were Italian or Spanish. Suffice it to say that English wealth was not there yet. Nevertheless, among the beneficiaries of the economic activity between the Dutch lowlands, Spain, and Italy were the German towns that stood in-between. German lands benefited immensely from trans-continental trade. British towns, not so much.

Supposing then that the Reformation chiefly bears evidence of a shift in social subjectivity, from value-in-things and substance metaphysics to value-in-abstract and transcendental metaphysics, we should in this case expect that the migration of shifts in social subjectivity should follow a course that allows: (1) for cultural, historical and institutional differences from place to place and (2) for the transmission of expressions of social subjectivity from place to place. So, for example, while Cranmer’s, Luther’s, Calvin’s, and Zwingli’s institutional forms and cultural affinities will give rise to differences in their respective reformations, we should anticipate that they will share similar suspicions over the capacity of material bodies to convey grace, over the capacity of human action to convey or elicit divine favor, and over the transcendental character of divine will and action.

The Anglican version of Reformation only differs from the Lutheran if we forget those many within the Anglican communion who felt a stronger affinity towards Luther than towards Calvin and who — often for socially and historically specific reasons — bore contempt for anything coming out of Westminster, the Orangemen being only the most obvious example. The settlement — itself a historically, institutionally and socially specific artifact — is inconceivable in Germany, France, or the United Provinces. And, yet, oddly, it is a very reformed outcome: if outward forms do not convey grace then it should make no difference whether they are retained or abandoned. Do the words of consecration force God’s hand? Is it the priest that is the conduit of this grace? Some Anglicans walk very close to the line; but, and this is critical, they do not call themselves nor do they subscribe to Roman Catholicism.

Today Anglicans are weathering some of the consequences of this tight-rope walk. Anglicans disciplined under the authority of foreign British imperialism and occupation — whose faithful enjoy a dramatically different social, political, institutional, and historical formation — have elected to abandon many of the features that North American and British Anglicans find most definitive to their faith. In this respect post-colonial Anglicans take on more the appearance of radical Orangemen than broad-tent Elizabethan Anglo-Catholics. For this reason, Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski is certainly correct:

I think given the dynamics of the 16th century some political entities would have ended up following Bohemia and the Hussites in breaking with Rome. Zwingli and Zurich for instance. Papal refusal to grant an annulment still might have led to heightened tensions between Henry and Rome that view the right climate could have inspired a move similar to Bohemia’s split. But it is hard to say. Which is all to say, Luther was a spark to tinder (FB).

Socially and historically specific conditions are critical to how the Reformation unfolds; but not, I would argue, to the Reformation itself, which was a natural outgrowth of the new social formation — capitalism — and the novel forms of social subjectivity — including spiritual subjectivity — to which it was adequate.

But this raises another speculative question: would reformed and evangelical social subjectivity survive the end of capitalism? Or might believers be more inclined in a post-capitalist world to embrace the graceful bodies they have reason to value?

Last week a past Federal Reserve Governor, Daniel Tarullo, published a working paper, urging economists to develop a theory of inflation that governors on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) could rely upon to set interest rates. While sympathetic with Governor Tarullo’s larger point, I do take issue with how he gets there, at least in part. The problem, as I see it, is not only that the what the FOMC does lends itself to being politicized. That goes without question. My more general objection is that, the decisions made by the FOMC are political — and rightly so. In what follows I want to suggest how we might recognize the fundamentally political nature of the FOMC’s job while protecting its members — and its decisions — from the kinds of political meddling from which Congress, rightly, wished to protect its decisions.

The US Congress has given the Federal Reserve a dual mandate: (1) to maintain employment at near “full employment” (however defined); and (2) to keep inflation in check. Its chief means for fulfilling this dual mandate is (1) easing or tightening the monetary supply; and (2) closely related, establishing the Federal Funds interest rate. In theory, these related mechanisms determine how ready investors are in the short term to part with — i.e., invest — their capital in assets that are more “fixed,” less “liquid.” So, for example, when the Fed lowers interest rates it means to encourage investors to invest their money in “fixed” assets that promise to offer higher returns than the interest rate on offer. But should the economy be expanding at a rate faster than investors can manage — i.e., when the overall effect of “easy money” is to raise prices and wages, not investments in fixed assets — the Fed will “cool” the economy down, usually by raising interest rates and tightening the monetary supply.

Last week Daniel K Tarullo, a former Fed governor, published a stunning admission. In a working paper titled “Monetary Policy without a Working Theory of Inflation,” the former Governor admitted “we do not, at present, have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policy-making” (2). Which means that, when he and the other governors met to set interest rates such that inflation could be maintained at the benchmark 2% — and when the governors meet today to do the same — they do not actually have a working theory for where they should set interest rates to achieve this goal.

“Not to worry,” you say. We know, roughly, that raising interest rates will tamp down inflation, and that lowering interest rates will — in the long run — fan the fires of inflation. Moreover, in light of its two fold mandate — employment and inflation — lowering interest rates under conditions of higher than desirable unemployment has the serendipitous consequence of bringing investors to invest in fixed assets that generate employment: a factory, a jet plane, a mine. Killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Yet, while they have contributed to a reduction in unemployment, over a decade of zero bound interest rates have not generated inflation at the target 2% rate desirable for a healthy, expanding economy. This, in turn, has led some to fear that raising the interest rate under conditions of inflation that are less than 2% will (1) discourage investment; and so (2) lead to higher unemployment.

One out of two isn’t bad. That’s fifty percent success. At least all of those unemployed folk will enjoy reasonably cheap prices; which, because they are unemployed, are still too high.

Overall, I found Governor Tarullo’s working paper stimulating. I agree (who doesn’t?) that the infamous Phillips Curve — which models the relationship between inflation and unemployment — is a less than perfect instrument. I also agree that the FOMC members are compelled to draw upon information for which there is no accounting in our existing models. Chiefly this information concerns what committee members feel future markets will look like and, therefore, how they will behave. Is the future brighter and rosier than the present? And, if so, does this information trigger a looser policy — to generate the growth I foresee? — or does it instead trigger a tighter policy — to put the breaks in advance on the overheated economy I foresee? Much will depend on how I read the tea leaves.

Governor Tarullo is troubled by these tea leaves, what he calls “unobservables.” I am not. Since interest rates are set to establish a general tendency toward some goal, not to hit that goal in an instant, I think that it is sufficient to take notice of where we are, where we have been, and where we want to be — how far are we from 2% — and work accordingly. I also think that the margins separating the judgments of one governor from another with respect to “(1) potential GDP growth, (2) the ‘natural rate’ of unemployment, and (3) the ‘neutral’ or ‘equilibrium’ rate of interest ” (4) are so modest as to warrant less weight than Governor Tarullo grants them.

Far more obscure — I agree with Governor Tarullo — is the crystal ball foretelling future market performance, because this performance is so dependent upon variables that do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Reserve. In short, they are political.

Still, all politics are not the same. From 1945 to roughly 1971, all political actors were on roughly the same page, at least where the Federal Reserve was concerned. All of this changed over night when President Nixon took the dollar off the Gold Standard.

No. There is nothing magical about Gold. But, to what is the Dollar pegged if not to Gold? It is pegged, of course, to the total value of the goods and services in the economy. But, to what is the value of these goods and services pegged? To the Dollar.

The real significance of taking the Dollar off the Gold Standard was, in effect, to make the US and its economy a player in the global economy; not its standard; not its arbiter — but a player. More specifically, it allowed President Nixon to devalue the Dollar sufficiently (irrespective of its now irrelevant Gold value) to make US goods more affordable on the global market: things in the US became less expensive. US producers became — through this purely monetary vehicle — more productive.

Not that President Nixon needed the help; he buried his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, in a landslide in 1972. But, remembering the last time he had run, as the Vice President of a President who refused to take any action to expand the economy, President Nixon did not want to take any chances. In 1960, Nixon had lost by a hair’s breadth to Kennedy. Not again. Taking the Dollar off the Gold Standard was insurance; perhaps unnecessary, but useful nonetheless.

So, in 1971, the Federal Reserve was placed in the unenviable position, in the absence of Gold, of regulating the monetary policy for an economy that was not, in fact, growing; but was growing only on account of its recently liberated currency — liberated precisely for political reasons.

Absent actual economic expansion, but gifted with a now floating currency, Arthur Burns and then G William Miller struggled under untenable conditions. With Germany and Japan (since 1968) back at full industrial capacity, there was virtually no chance that the US — without a working national rail system, absent a single-payer universal health care system, without a viable universal educational system — would outcompete Germany or Japan on their own terms. Which is why Fed Chair Volcker had not choice but to put the beast out of its misery, raising interest rates almost twenty percent and, therein, putting an end to “stagflation.”

This political act, however necessary in fact, virtually guaranteed President Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Could anyone in the 1970s have predicted “stagflation”? Yes. And many did. Could anyone in the 1970s have predicted Chairman Volcker? No. But many hoped for his coming.

The business community is currently pining away for relief from taxes and regulations which are already among the least restrictive in the industrialized world. Where Japan’s and Germany’s productivity bumps have been grounded in — well — actual increases in productivity, US investors continue to rely upon federal assistance in the form of hand-outs from the bottom and middle to the top of the income hierarchy, shifts that hold absolutely no promise to increase productivity or growth, but only to increase the share of wealth owned by those in the top centile.

In this regulatory environment, is there any wonder, really, why inflation remains well below 2% while employment — or should we not say underemployment — has hit a twenty-five year low? Consumer purchasing power is completely stagnant. Full employment and below target inflation? If any one was wondering how, practically, to invalidate the Phillips Curve, this is how: send all of the efficiencies earned by working families to the top of the income hierarchy. That’s how.

This is politics, pure and simple. It was politics in 1971; it was politics in 1980; and it is politics today. Now, the goods news is that Chairwoman Yellin is as straight a shooter as anyone could want or find. The bad news is that under the current regulatory environment 2% is a completely unrealistic goal. Which is one of the reasons why I am still a bit confused by Governor Tarullo’s complaint.

I actually think that, without too much effort, we could identify the coefficients Governor Tarullo is seeking. That is to say, I think that we could identify a set of variables, weighted differentially, that would allow us to account for the dramatic falling off of what Lord Keynes called the “propensity to consume.” The propensity to consume is not only a function of wages, but of wages relative to a stable currency and the value of goods on the market. Lord Keynes argued so many years ago that when wealth is bunched at the top of the income hierarchy, we might have an aggregate increase in wealth, but a much smaller growth in aggregate consumption: full employment, but stagnation.

Perhaps this was Governor Tarullo’s point; that we need to explicitly state and fold into our models what everyone already knows: that our productivity is being directed largely into the accounts of those who have the least propensity to consume. And this, of course, will dramatically dampen any inflationary pressures.

Lord Keynes invited us to speculate in another direction. What would happen if the efficiencies earned in the economy were spread out more broadly? And what if we then hit the wall of full employment?

Though the rentier would disappear, there would still be room, nevertheless, for enterprise and skill in the estimation of prospective yields about which opinions could differ. For the above relates primarily to the pure rate of interest apart from any allowance for risk and the like, and not to the gross yield of assets including the return in respect of risk. Thus unless the pure rate of interest were to be held at a negative figure, there would still be a positive yield to skilled investment in individual assets having a doubtful prospective yield. Provided there was some measurable unwillingness to undertake risk, there would also be a positive net yield from the aggregate of such assets over a period of time. But it is not unlikely that, in such circumstances, the eagerness to obtain a yield from doubtful investments might be such that they would show in the aggregate a negative net yield (General Theory, ch. 16).

Horrors! The disappearance of the rentier? Doubtful investments a negative net yield? Imagine!

We might — perhaps we should — imagine income inequality to maintain its upward climb, leveling off eventually as the rentier approach full command of all wealth. Such would not be an unrealistic assumption. In that case, we would be well-advised, as Governor Tarullo suggests, to scrap the unrealistic 2% goal for inflation; a goal which, after all, was based on a regulatory environment that now lies almost forty, and arguably sixty, years behind us. In that case, we would invite governors to hazard guesses grounded in the expectation of an expanding inferior goods market, with pockets of high tech, but with national wealth, by and large, invested in economies enjoying a more productive regulatory environment: India or Germany or, God forbid, France.

But, let us speculate, Lord Keynes-like. Let us suppose that, as in 1968 or 1971, there were a dramatic political shift where those in policy making positions suddenly focused on raising the fortunes of working families. Such is the kind of unpredictable future that Governor Tarullo imagines; where shifting policies give rise to shifting wealth and consumption patterns that invite us to rethink interest rates, employment, and inflation. What if, suddenly, wealth were to accrue to those who earned it, to working families? And what if, suddenly, their spending began to generate real economic growth, real wage growth, and real increases in prices and profits? Of course, relative to GDP, such increases, in and of themselves, would not be cause for alarm. Indeed, perhaps we would find ourselves precisely in that circumstance imagined by Lord Keynes at the end of Chapter 16, where, with the disappearance of the rentier and the lackluster returns on speculative ventures, growth, wages, and interest would find a sustainable equilibrium.

Ok. Pure speculation. Fantasy. Of course. But, now let us suppose that the Fed set as its goal not 2% inflation, but such interest rates as necessary sent efficiencies downward and outward: Yes. Negative interest rates that cost capital for hold it; cost capital for not investing it in economic growth.

Politics! Well, of course. Its all politics.

 

I begin every class, every semester, with a short section I call “Gymnasium in a Box.” Gymnasium in a Box introduces students who are not classically trained to the “canon”; or at least as much of the canon as students can handle in ninety minutes. Students get a taste of Homer, Thucydides, Socrates (Gorgias), Plato (Republic), and Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics and Politics), as well as St Thomas, Immanuel Kant, George WF Hegel, and K Marx.

My theologically inclined friends are aghast: St Thomas? The Summa? Really? Why?

Aristotle is perhaps best known as Plato’s most gifted (or, in any case, most prolific) student. He was prevented by Athenian law from succeeding Plato at the Academy. Aristotle was foreign born — a Macedonian — and, worse still, was very close to the Macedonian court: his dad, Nicomachus, was Philip’s physician; and Aristotle was Alexander’s personal tutor. Onay ealday onyay ethay oolschay.

But then Philip defeated Athens and Alexander, Philip’s son, saw no good reason to prevent Aristotle from establishing the Lyceum.

I will admit some attraction to Aristotle and to Aristotle’s most devout Roman Catholic son, Thomas. The challenge for both was to begin from scratch. Times are changing, both in the fourth century BCE and in the thirteenth century CE. Appearances can be deceiving. So, if you have to build from the ground up, on what will you build?

To their credit, both Aristotle and Thomas erected their respective mansions not upon what cannot be seen — Plato and Occam — but upon what can be seen. That is to say, although each acknowledged that there existed broad swaths of reality that he did not understand, each left this mystery in God’s hands. For those of us with one foot or more on earth, we need to look at the evidence. We need to look to the natural order.

But, what is “natural”? This question was as relevant in the fourth century BCE as in the thirteenth century CE as it is today. What is “natural”?

If, as Christians, we build upon Romans 1-2 or Romans 13.1-7, then what is “natural” is as clear as day:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse (Rom. 1.20).

Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; and the powers that be are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, withstandeth the ordinance of God: and they that withstand shall receive to themselves judgment. For rulers are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. And wouldest thou have no fear of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise from the same: for he is a minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is a minister of God, an avenger for wrath to him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be in subjection, not only because of the wrath, but also for conscience’s sake. For this cause ye pay tribute also; for they are ministers of God’s service, attending continually upon this very thing. Render to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due ; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor (Rom. 13.1-7).

Not a believer? No problem. Here is a “natural” order that everyone can buy into. No Christ — no faith! — necessary.

I suspect that natural theology is attractive during turbulent times because we want something a little more rigorous than faith; something a little more self-evident than the dead and raised Palestinian Jew. Got it.

And so we build on a different foundation, confident that because we are building on God’s natural order — Creation — we won’t go too far off track. But here’s the rub. Creation is fallen. Indeed, Paul himself seemed to feel that Creation itself was waiting for the children of God to take the lead guiding all of Creation to redemption. But it gets worse.

In his first letter to the community at Corinth, Paul went out of his way to turn Stoic ontology on its head:

In my History of Economic Thought lecture, we have already begun to transition from the classical to the neoclassical thinkers — from thinkers grappling with a wide range of seemingly independent variables to thinkers who recognize that all of their variables are differentially related to one another. The breakthrough was in large measure due to the elimination of market barriers. So long as local custom, law, habit, and regulation impeded and impaired market forces,  the smooth trend lines familiar to us from economic modeling could not appear because they did not exist.

Now, finally, in the 1860s, economic thinkers such as Leon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and even Karl Marx begin to take note of the comprehensive, integrated nature of the maturing capitalist social formation. And we begin to see the familiar x and y linear graphs that will forever be a feature of economic science. So that this:

becomes

where over time (the x axis) the utility won from any good moves from p to r along the y axis.

What is sometimes difficult to explain to students is why, during one of the most violent periods of modern history, the trend lines smooth out. And, yet, a moment’s reflection reveals the answer. Economic integration, if successful, destroys the purely local, customary laws, regulations, and habits that invariably impede and impair market efficiency. Empire-building, if successful, destroys the communities that lay in its path. The very success of these projects is displayed graphically in the smooth trend lines that begin to appear in the 1860s.

I am thinking of these trend lines today because the so-called champions of “individual liberty” are among the most fierce advocates of eliminating particularity and so further smoothing these trend lines. So, for example, regulating coal for the sake of community health and climate change remediation counts as a particularity that, when unregulated, destroys lives and sustainable planetary ecosystems. The elimination of regulations governing carbon content, for this reason, helps smooth the trend line displaying the marginal benefits of coal extraction, processing, sales, and use. Of course, the particularities removed in this case are the bodies of individuals and communities directly involved in coal extraction, as well as the planet on which they live. These particularities are “smoothed.”

Which raises the interesting question of what precisely we mean here by “liberty.” But, no sooner have we asked this question than its answer stares us in the face. We are talking here not about the liberty of Sally Drug Store Clerk or Ricky Accountant. We are talking about the liberty of capital itself as it enters and destroys our communities — is free to enter and destroy our communities. This destruction smooths the trend line. Ain’t that right David Koch, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell? Ain’t that right Donny Boy?

My initial, off the cuff, response to the drive for Catalonian independence is, wtf? The richest, wealthiest, best educated, most progressive region in Spain wants to break free from its neighbors?

And, yet, I must admit that as a long-time Californian, I have often thought: OK. You don’t like our state Constitution’s equal rights clause? You don’t like our green bent? You don’t like our over-the-top Democratic — leaning socialist — politics? Well, then, perhaps you also don’t like the huge subsidies we — along with New York, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts — send to Washington, DC, and, by way of Washington, to all of you loser red states. So there! Catalofornia that!

We owe to the capitalist social formation the drive towards integration. More homogeneous laws, regulations, and institutional arrangements give rise to lower transactional costs. But we also owe to the capitalist social formation the drive to achieve efficiencies at the expense of others. The answer, for California as for Catalonia, is not isolation and independence — though I totally understand that drive — but greater outlays earmarked for raising the standard of living, learning and caring of our fellow countrymen and women.

In the Spring of 2015, I stumbled upon Ta-Nahisi Coates at Howard University reading an excerpt from his Between the World and Me. The reading sent me to my bookstore where I purchased several copies of Mr Coates’ book. I gave it as Christmas presents that Winter to all of my relatives. Now two years later, equally serendipitously, I stumble upon Thomas Chatterton Williams’ review of Mr Coates’ most recent volume: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (see “How Ta-Nahisi Coates gives Whiteness Power,” NYT 10/06/2017). Writing from Berlin, Williams, who is also African American, appears even less happy with Coates’ latest offering than he was with the first.

Race and ethnicity have served as social markers for just shy of 2.4M years. The boundaries these markers erect or reinforce depend greatly on the social formations in which they appear. Understanding race therefore requires both that we understand these formations and that we understand them as socially and historically specific; race along with the formations in which race is embedded often perdure long after the conditions that marked race in socially specific ways have waned.

I was reminded of this problem of race by the way that Mr Williams framed his disagreement with Mr Coates; he framed his disagreement in terms deeply familiar to students of modern German history — in terms of the Sonderwegthese.

In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander. In different eras, and depending on who employed it, the term could imply different things. It began as a positive myth during the imperial period that some German scholars told themselves about their political system and culture. During and after World War II it turned distinctly negative, a way for outsiders to make sense of the singularity of Germany’s crimes.

Yet whether viewed from within or without, left or right, the Germans could be seen through such a lens to possess some collective essence — a specialness — capable of explaining everything. In this way, one could speak of a trajectory “from Luther to Hitler” and interpret history not as some chaotic jumble but as a crisp, linear process.

. . .

A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.

No one has done more to popularize this “all-American sonderweg,” according to Williams, than has Coates.

As in the German Sonderwegthese, so in the all-American one, we are invited, writes Williams, to entertain a particularly virulent version of “identity epistemology, or knowing-through-being,” which then became “identity ethics, or morality-through-being.” In the same way that post-war German historians made Antisemitism and authoritarianism a near ontological quality of being German, so believing one’s self to be “white” became an ontological attribute of this belief itself — a kind of covering principle for the thoughts and actions of all persons who entertained this belief.

So, for example, Williams takes issue with Coates’ seemingly ontological inflection of gentrification:

“To empathize on any human level with the lynched and the raped, and then to watch all of the beneficiaries just going on with their heedless lives, could fill you with the most awful rage. I feel it myself, for example, walking through Washington, D.C., or Brooklyn, where gentrification has blown through like a storm. And I feel it not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime” (Coates, We were Eight Years).

The issue Williams takes with Coates on gentrification arises not only from the fact that both writers — Williams and Coates — have each lustily participated in the process.

In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same. Most of us harbored conflicted feelings about the processes we were engaged in, but few of us considered advancing white supremacy to be one of them. Mr. Coates, a self-made millionaire and longtime Harlem resident, briefly catches himself in the essay, admitting, “And I know, even in my anger, even as I write this, that I am no better” (Williams NYT)

The issue is with the implication that individuals with means to purchase properties out from under their long-time occupants in gentrifying neighborhoods are investing money that, in “a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.” That is to say, the issue that Williams takes with Coates’ characterization is that it makes those who participate in a specific action — in this case gentrification — complicit in a range of other activities, and bearers of ontological qualities, that Coates equates with “whiteness.”

Speaking as a European historian, I find myself conflicted by Williams’ objection. The Sonderwegthese was and remains simplistic. Moreover — and I take this to be Williams’ point — it brings us to credit mechanisms such as race and ethnicity with powers that in fact lie elsewhere and so brings us to ignore or downplay the real mechanisms at work. In the case of Nazi Germany, purveyors of the Sonderwegthese downplayed class as a factor and ignored the progressive, democratic dimensions of German politics and society from 1871 to 1932. Similarly, perhaps, in the case of gentrification, when we focus on “whiteness” we may ignore or downplay social and economic mechanisms driving the invasion and occupation of urban landscapes by the well-graduated and well-compensated at the expense, to be sure, of minority families forced to occupy these same neighborhoods a century ago. In this sense, Coates’ single-minded focus on race — on “those who believe themselves to be white”; on “whiteness” — may bring us to overlook mechanisms such as economic policies that appear to have less to do with race than with wealth, power, and prestige.

But, now let us suppose that, like every thing in any modern capitalist social formation, we take race also as a commodity, a social form composed both of utility, for those who find race useful, and of abstract value, which integrates race into the comprehensive world of other value-bearing commodities. If this is the case, if race is a commodity along these lines, then its value as a social marker needs to be distinguished from the ways race has been inflected in other kinds of societies where it has played a role. In our society, where abstract value mediates all social relations, race has value. At the very least this means that race is exchangeable for things that have equal value, that it is subject to opportunity costs, to trade offs, to diminishing marginal returns, to monopoly and quasi-monopoly constraints, to regulation, to gluts and dearths, etc. Here the value of “whiteness” continues to differ from the value of “blackness”; in aggregate, it requires more units of “blackness” to equal “whiteness.” Or, if you prefer, “blackness” trades for less on the open market.

If I am correct, Coates is not inviting us to ontologize race so much as he is challenging us to recognize the continuing, persistent value race enjoys within an economic formation that differentially values “whiteness” over “blackness.” He is challenging us to recognize that these differential values arose socially and historically out of a specific history; a history in which human labor, already commodified, was also forced to be African, and a history where its “blackness” earned higher returns for equal amounts of labor insofar as it was legally owned and wholly controlled by those who employed this labor; whereas, by contrast, “whiteness” cost employers more insofar as it could resist employment legally. This differential valuation has not disappeared. So, while single-minded focus on race may bring us to overlook or downplay social and economic mechanisms, it is also true that these mechanisms are racially inflected: “blackness” has value.

Since we have not, as a society, had this conversation — have not institutionalized and memorialized it — we are not ready to move on. The invasion of the Americas was driven by Europe’s sudden economic expansion; but it was the economic inflection of America’s indigenous peoples — peoples who, in Jeremy Bentham’s memorable expression, enjoyed “no government, consequently no rights: no rights, consequently no property — no legal security — no legal liberty: security not more than belongs to beasts” (1789). Europeans’ rights to the Americas was erected on the view that unexploited land, like unexploited labor, was unnatural and subhuman: “beastly.” But, we have not had this conversation. We have neither institutionalized nor memorialized this genocide. Nor have we institutionalized or memorialized the genocide to which this one paved the way.

When the production of wealth is made the only legal means to produce — much less understand — value, the generation of value will take precedence over everything else, not simply as a means for producing material wealth, but even more as a means for understanding the world at all. When men and women are forced to feed this process; when against their will they are compelled to produce the wealth that commands value, their bodies are subject — as Adam Smith put it — to the natural wear and tear of any means of production whose utility arises from its relatively more favorable marginal cost relative to other means of production; for example, of machines or European wage laborers. We have not had this discussion. We have neither institutionalized nor memorialized the reduction of men and women to mere means of production because were we to have that discussion it would implicate us today. In a society mediated by commodity production and exchange, race has value.

Once race no longer has value — even then — it will not be time to forget the value “blackness” contributed to the immense, expanding engine of US industry from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The value “blackness” has contributed economically can be calculated; and not only the value of cotton, tobacco, rice, and soy. The value of “blackness” also includes the efficiencies transferred from Africans to Europeans when I easily slip unnoticed into secure neighborhoods that enjoy well-funded schools and well-maintained homes on well-lit streets monitored by smiling, congenial police officers. I did not “earn” this “right.” I worked not one minute for it. But someone did.

Is this an all-American Sonderwegthese, as Williams suggests? No. Were we to talk openly about the value of “whiteness” and “blackness”; were we to institutionalize in our schools, laws, and regulations; were we to memorialize in our parks, museums and public spaces the violence of this economic calculus, including its continuing racial inflection — then we could happily report that we are not talking about European Americans today, but about European Americans in the past. Lacking such institutionalization and memorialization, however, we are talking and need to continue to talk about the still peculiar path of America. Race has value.

 

Mr Sessions. I respectfully disagree.

As a professor at UC Berkeley, I was faced with a difficult choice last week. Should I respect the academic boycott called by all responsible parties on campus, including the professors association and my union? Or should I respect my students’ right to the education they signed up for when they agreed to attend Cal?

Just to make sure, I checked with my priest on Sunday. “Would it be OK if I held class in Fellowship Hall or, if necessary, in the sanctuary?” “Absolutely.”

During past disturbances, Saint Mark’s has always been my salvation — both literally and figuratively. And not for me only. It is also a declared sanctuary for refugees, Muslims, and others on the right wing “hit list.” And so it has also become sanctuary for my students and for me when, for reasons of conscience, we cannot hold class on campus.

But, that is not my problem. My problem is that, unlike the Attorney General, I do not support free speech. Yes, the US Government has an obligation to uphold free speech. And, so, clearly, President Trump is in violation of the US Constitution when he opposes the right of private sports figures to express their opposition to public violence against people of color. His statements are an impeachable offense.

But, consider the case of the heart surgeon who finds support among students who do not embrace western anatomy. They have formed a club: the One Ventricle Club. They believe it is their right to invite the “one ventricle surgeon” to address the medical school: freedom of speech! “Western medicine” holds a strangle-hold over medical schools, they cry. Medical students who embrace “one ventricle” are being silenced!

Obviously this poor analogy does not pass muster. Particularly in the humanities, but also in the social sciences, a wide range of views have occupied center stage over the centuries. Political Science or Sociology or Economics, to say nothing about Literature, are not subject to the same standards as open heart surgery. So, it is held, most recently by the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, that we should reinstitute “free speech” on our campuses.

“Protesters are now routinely shutting down speeches and debates across the country in an effort to silence voices that insufficiently conform with their views.”

Of course, the “views” Jeff Sessions has in mind are those of Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Steven Bannon, who, collectively, enjoy the same intellectual integrity as my smelly sock. (Indeed, without success, I have seriously tried to register my smelly sock as an official student organization so that it could address our students in Zellerbach Hall.)

College is not a political Petri Dish. It is not an experiment, either for want-to-be open heart surgeons or for want-to-be political actors. College, at its best, is where students master the canon — whatever that canon happens to be when they enter college. We may hope that our institutions are not teaching eighteenth century open heart surgery. So, we may also hope that our literature, history, and economics departments are no longer instructing students as though Great Britain still ruled the seas. Times change. And with the times so too must change what and how we instruct our students. But this has never meant and can never mean that “anything goes.”

The State of California has commissioned us as officers of the State to grant degrees to students based upon our own mastery of our fields of study. When students from the “One Ventricle Society” invite a heart surgeon to address the merits of one ventricle medicine, the regents have an obligation to say “No.” This falls outside of our charge. Similarly, when right wing student groups invite Ann Coulter, or Steven Bannon, or Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus, these individuals are the academic equivalents of the “One Ventricle Society.” They hold as much standing in the academy as my smelly sock.

Stated differently, as republican values and institutions are eclipsed by outright fascism, our institutions of higher learning are under an obligation to understand how this has happened. But they are under no obligation to facilitate the coup d’etat.

This is not to say that students should not be permitted to form a “One Ventricle Society.” More power to them. It is only to say that any medical school that entertained their idiocy deserves its accreditation withdrawn. Ditto Coulter, Bannon, and Yiannopoulos.

Readers of this blog will recognize that I hold a fairly mainstream view of the transition from non-capitalist to capitalist societies. That is to say, along with the overwhelming majority of scholars today, I do not believe that there is anything peculiar to “the West” or to “Christianity” that gave rise to capitalism. Historians instead look at the relatively fragmented and weak character of western Europe to account for the rise of capitalism. Compared to China, India, Byzantium — or, for that matter, compared to the Mali or Songhai in Africa or the Mayan in the Americas — the scattered communities north and west of the Mediterranean were going nowhere; which suited them just fine.

Like communities everywhere, Europeans of course recognized temporal succession — one event after another. So, too, educated Europeans recognized that long ago a great empire, the Roman empire, had occupied the territories they now occupied. Indeed, educated Europeans were inclined to feel that they remained members of a Holy Roman Empire, which they distinguished from Byzantium, on the one hand, and the Abbasid Caliphate on the other. Yet, not until the quattrocento did Europeans come to feel not only that tomorrow would succeed today but that it would be different than today. Historians consider this change evidence not simply of a qualitatively different understanding of time, but a transformation in time itself.

To be clear, time is not simply temporal succession; time as a physical constant within E=mc² existed since the first moments following creation. Time as a social form, by contrast, is always structured by social practice. From a critical historical vantage point, this means that time before the appearance of capitalism was as much a social construct — as much a fabrication — as time after its appearance. The issue here therefore cannot be to “redeem” a specific kind of time — time as experienced prior to the appearance of capitalism, for example — as much as redeeming time itself. Saint Paul had it right when, in his letter to the Romans, he folded time among the things that were longing for redemption:

For the earnest expectation of the creature waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who has subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now (Rom. 8:19-22).

Time has always been in bondage to corruption. It has always been subject to vanity. But not willingly.

In my field, economic theory, we say that efficiency can be measured in terms of the marginal efficiency of capital/labor; which is always a function of time. Marginal efficiency of capital labor equals some quantity of labor time as a function of capital (or capital as a function of labor time) divided into the value or a quantity of utilities produced by the capital/labor. In this formula time is subject to capital/labor efficiency over time.

“Time” as measured in the time it takes to read Cat in the Hat or the time to wander through a field of daisies; or the time lost out of sheer exhaustion — child next to parent on a bed in the afternoon; such time has value only because it can be measured in terms of utilities generated relative to other opportunities’ costs.

Which is to say, time is subject to vanity; it is subject to decay. It needs to be redeemed.

But what would redeeming time look like?

Let us say that time no longer weighed us down. Let us say that time bore us forward. Let us say that we “had time”  . . . to read that story, to take that walk, to plant the seed, to share the meal, to listen to the music, to write the “Thank You” note, to notice the world. Let us say that we “had time.”

Having “time,” of course, is grace. It means that time is no longer subject to vanity. It is no longer subject to decay.

I am listening to my daughter and I am not looking at my watch. I am not counting time. I am working at my vocation, at my calling. I am not counting time.

Time is bearing me forward. It is no longer constraining me. We are both fellow creatures waiting for the manifestation of the children of God.

So, now, what if we are the children of God? What if we are those for whom time is waiting? How are we realizing the expectation of time? How are we redeeming time?

In economic theory, we frequently convey this idea by talking about efficiency, about AI, about automation. We will enhance the production function. We will increase the marginal efficiency of capital/labor. But in this way of talking, time remains bound. And in this talk we remain bound to time.

Christians are called upon to redeem time.

 

Either Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency believes Trump’s supporters are a bunch of idiots, or he is incompetent — one or the other.

This is what Scott Pruitt really said when asked about the role climate change might have played generating the most powerful storm system in the past two hundred years:

“To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced,” Mr. Pruitt said to CNN in an interview ahead of Hurricane Irma, echoing similar sentiments he made when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas two weeks earlier. “To use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this people in Florida,” he added.

So, the U.S. is kind of like Haiti or Bangladesh. Either we can address climate change OR we can handle an emergency. “We are just an eencie weencie wittle country; not the biggest most powerful nation ever in history!?”

“Hey Florida! Texas! Louisianna! Georgia! The Carolinas! Hey! Brace for decades of ever more severe weather!

“You have just become the poster children of our Carbon Restoration Project! Take that to your ballot box.”

I am paraphrasing of course.

We would all probably do better were the word “liberal” simply abolished. What are we talking about when we say “liberal”? Do we mean “generous”? Do we mean “unconstrained”? Do we mean “progressive” (the opposite of “conservative”)? But, of course, even if we wanted to, we cannot abolish words.

To make matters worse, “liberalism” has come to be associated very nearly with its opposite in the United States: a “liberal” is someone who favors constraints; a “conservative” is someone who opposes constraints. Go figure.

Enter John Milbank and Adrian Pabst and their The Politics of Virtue, whose unfortunate subtitle is “post-liberalism and the human future.” The subtitle is unfortunate because, notwithstanding much hedging, Milbank and Pabst advance what appears on its face a mash-up of definitions of “liberalisms” that do more to confuse than clarify their argument. On the surface, Milbank and Pabst endorse the dominant taxonomy:

Both challenges exposed the limitations of the two liberalisms that have dominated Western politics for the last half-century: the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the 1960s and the economic-political liberalism of the right since the 1980s (1).

To this dominant distinction, however, Milbank and Pabst add another category: “liberalism as a philosophy and an ideology” (2). As a philosophy and ideology, liberalism both temporally and logically precedes liberalism as economic system and cultural form. Temporally, liberalism sets itself against the constraints of nature, generally, and of human nature specifically. And logically it grants abstract value precedence over material substance. This gives rise to the “metacrisis” of liberalism: “The metacrisis of liberalism consists more specifically in its evermore exposed tendency at once to abstract from reality and yet to reduce everything to its bare materiality” (3).

Milbank and Pabst’s characterization of the metacrisis of liberalism could suggest something close to Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism in 1867; where Marx notes how commodification gives rise to an isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance. In that case, we should anticipate Milbank and Pabst to trace the metacrisis of liberalism to the moment in history when social actors began to differentiate between the abstract, immaterial value of a good and that good’s material form of appearance. Instead, Milbank and Pabst credit this fissure between abstract immaterial value and bare materiality to the “violent ontology” and “pessimistic anthropology” of individuals who have embraced the “philosophy” and “ideology” of liberalism.

That is to say, rather than grounding the rise of liberalism socially and historically in a gradual transformation in practices over time, Milbank and Pabst instead credit its appearance to individuals whose violent ideas about being and pessimistic views of human nature give rise to the philosophy and ideology of liberalism.

If you are interested in explaining why liberalism appears when and where it does, you should not look to the historical or social landscapes in which it appeared. Rather should you look at the perverse, violent, and pessimistic ideas and philosophical concepts of the individuals who created and imposed liberalism upon the historical and social landscape.

This twin tendency leaves an irreducible aporia between human will and artifice on the one hand, and imagined laws of nature and history on the other – the violent ‘state of nature’ (as for Hobbes) or conflict-ridden human association (as for Rousseau) that requires the remedies of coercive state control and market competition. In this way, liberal ideas and institutions rest on a violent ontology and a pessimistic anthropology that incentivise and reward bad behaviour (3).

We might still justifiably wonder why, after 2.4M years of human history, it was only in Europe’s sixteenth century that human beings first practically isolated abstract value from its material form of appearance. What constellation of social, political, economic, and cultural forms led individuals, quite suddenly, to abandon 2.4M years of practice and tradition in favor of the novelty of abstract value?

It would seem that explaining this sudden attraction might be of some value. In the place of an explanation, however, Milbank and Pabst instead offer a summary based loosely on Karl Polanyi and Fernand Braudel’s interpretation of this transition. Polanyi and Braudel credit political intervention for the appearance of this historical anomaly. For Braudel as for Polanyi, ever since they settled into communities these communities displayed two qualities: material life and markets. Material life, for Braudel, describes “the stratum of the non-economy, the soil into which capitalism thrusts its roots but which it can never really penetrate (1982:229). Above the non-economy “comes the favored terrain of the market economy, with its many horizontal communications between the different markets: here a degree of automatic coordination usually links supply, demand and prices” (229-230).

Then alongside, or rather above this layer, comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This — today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution — is the real home of capitalism (230).

Capitalism takes hold and spreads in the quattrocento because it is in the fourteenth century that state actors intervene in and constrain markets to behave in a manner to their benefit.

Braudel, it should be noted, is building upon Karl Polanyi’s ground-breaking 1944 study The Great Transformation, which explicitly set itself against the dominant liberal narrative according to which capitalism is a story of ever greater freedom from government constraints. To the contrary, shows Polanyi, capitalism only appears and can only be maintained through public interventions into private enterprise. Polanyi’s account appears everywhere, on nearly every page, in Milbank’s and Pabst’s text. (The official index — 8,9,47,55,59,61,74,75,89,96,87,98,99,102,106,114,123,125,126,142,150,174,281 — understates Polanyi’s presence.)

To their credit, Milbank and Pabst do acknowledge the limited nature of Polanyi’s and Braudel’s account. In a footnote to Chapter 7, they admit:

One could argue, against Arrighi and Fernand Braudel, that earlier focuses on finance in centres such as that of Genoa were not the decadence of an originally productive capitalist economy but, rather, pre-capitalist anticipations of capitalism that still awaited the beginnings of the extraction of surplus value from waged labour, beginning later in Dutch towns and, supremely, the English countryside. But the latter development only led to a ‘take-off’ when later combined, not just with colonialist primary accumulation overseas, but also with a state-sponsored speculation on the national debt (279).

Yet, the acknowledged limitation simply throws us back upon earlier, pre-capitalist instances of avarice and greed. So, for example, what is interesting about the Dutch towns to which Giovanni Arrighi calls our attention is not the extraction of surplus value or wage labor we find in these towns, but why surplus value or wage labor, which were complete novelties, should occur to anyone at all.

Individuals are perverse; upon this we can all agree. The question is why did this specific perversion appear and spread so readily in early modern western Europe? Milbank and Pabst assume — but do not show — that its appearance can be traced to a “violent ontology” and “pessimistic anthropology.” But I believe that I can show that its origins were far less malevolent, indeed, benign.

In his Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, medievalist Jacques Le Goff calls our attention to the archival research of Henri Pirenne at the end of the last century. Among Pirenne’s exploits was collecting and indexing the records of textile manufactures back to the tenth century. It was one particular record that caught Le Goff’s attention: “In Ghent, in 1324, the abbot of Saint-Pierre authorized the fullers ‘to install a bell in the workhouse newly founded by them near the Hoipoorte, in the parish of Saint John'” (45). If Le Goff is correct, then Pirenne’s research had stumbled upon what may well be the first instance anywhere that the value of productive human action had been measured in equal units of abstract time.

Working with these same documents, Harvard social historian David Landes fits Pirenne’s record into a narrative of time measurement stretching back through the thirteenth century, when, owing in part to Europe’s mini-Ice Age, cloistered communities were hard pressed to accurately announce times of prayer (Revolution in Time, 53-82). According to Landes, the Chinese escapement mechanism reached Europe no earlier than the thirteenth century. Its utility was recognized almost immediately. Driven by a spring or by a chain weighted on one end, a sprocket fixed with a peg, would ring a bell at regular intervals, thereby reminding Frère Jacques that was time to ring a larger bell — Ding, Dang, Dong — inviting his brothers to prayer. Roughly a century passed between the first sacred use of bells to their installation in the workhouse in Saint John’s parish, a century during which, according to Landes, cloistered bells proliferated throughout Europe.

A second factor in the expansion of abstract time and value was western Europe’s relatively fragmented economic, social, and political fabric. Institutionally Europe was light years behind Byzantium, the Yuan or the Ming dynasties. Indeed, institutionally Europe could hold a candle to none of the empires, whether of Afroeurasia, the Pacific Islands, or the Americas. Europe’s frigid, icy, wet, and rocky landscape stood as a barrier against those who thought to conquer its peoples. And, yet, let on its own, Europe’s fragmented institutional landscape proved specially resilient. At the same time, Europeans quickly absorbed any new technology that found its way to their shores. The escapement mechanism, which was little more than an astrological toy for Chinese royalty, had no other function within China’s finely articulated, integrated social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. In Europe, by contrast, the escapement challenged many of Europe’s most sacred institutions.

So, for example, where for centuries value had been subject to a delicate social calculus hammered out among the estates — clergy (justice), nobility (security), and trades (livelihood) — the discovery of abstract time and value suggested that this calculus might be obsolete. Similarly, where time (itself a divine creation) had waxed and waned seasonally as one moved away from the equator, abstract time and value suggested two different temporal metrics: one that followed the moon, the sun, and the stars, and another that measured abstract time.

As EP Thompson has shown in his ground-breaking Customs in Common, for many centuries these two metrics worked side by side, but often in tension with one another, well into the twentieth century.

A third factor in the spread of abstract time and abstract value was, therefore, that it constituted the only metric that Europeans shared in common. Indeed, it is not too much to say that abstract time and abstract value define Europe in a manner far more rigorous than a mere point on a compass such as “the West.” When in the fifteenth century Orthodox Christians and Muslims looked “west,” they were deeply disturbed by what they already saw. In a matter of decades, not centuries, Europeans were shedding centuries old traditions and customs in what historians would mistakenly refer to as a renaissance or “rebirth.” But it was not a rebirth at all. It was something entirely new.

Other historians in other fields have noted the transformations overtaking Europe following the invasion of abstract time and value. We can list them here in no particular order. (Those wishing for a more detailed description can request my book or articles.) There is, of course, the simultaneous eroticization (secularization) and elimination of Mary’s breasts, which followed not from more realistic printing, but rather from the practical isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance; simultaneously we see the gradual elimination of wounds from the risen and glorified Body of Christ; and, of course, there is the centerpiece itself: the Bread and Wine of the Holy Sacrament. Recall that St Thomas devoted chapter after chapter showing not how God could be in things — for that was self-evident — but rather showing why God was not sacramentally present in every thing.

As abstract value and time made their way across Europe — as the actual physical rhythms of towns folk and peasants alike became accustomed to clock time — social actors also became accustomed to keeping two separate temporal ledgers: one marking abstract value, the other marking material value. When, in 1517, Martin Luther tacked his 95 Theses to the church door of Wittenberg no one needed convincing that grace cannot be conveyed by bodies, that God is not in things, that value is abstract.

As always, intellectuals will show up belatedly to explain what has happened; but what had happened had happened without either their cooperation or their knowledge. Capitalism arrived in Europe not on account of state intervention, but actually in spite of it. It was not empire-building and capital accumulation that made capitalism; rather was it capitalism that sent European monarchs trolling the globe for gold and silver. It was not European conflict that brought monarchs to seize control of markets (contrary to K Polanyi, F Braudel, and G Arrighi). Rather was it capitalism that generated conflicts that demanded such control.

Yes, monarchs and oligarchs made good use of the new social form; but it is critical that we notice: they were not its authors.

We might rest our case there. Empirically, the preponderance of historical evidence points to Europe’s revolution in time as the signal process in our peculiar habit of isolating abstract value from its material form of appearance. So Milbank and Pabst are correct to note that there is nothing whatsoever natural or inevitable to the spread of this contagion. They are mistaken, however, when it comes to the mechanisms responsible for its introduction and expansion. And this mistake weakens their argument significantly. How?

When Milbank and Pabst adopt the Polanyi-Braudel line, they, in fact, adopt a line of neo-Marxist reasoning that reinscribes what it wishes to critique. That is to say, it ascribes to ideology and to philosophy that which, in fact, arose from social practice. I suspect that this rhetorical strategy enjoys roots far deeper than either Milbank or Pabst appreciate. Already in the eighteenth century, but everywhere in the nineteenth, a habit of mind had already spread throughout both liberal and conservative Europe that counted what it mistook as “nature” to be superior to “intellect.” (In the late 19th century this will have reached its apotheosis in Nietzsche’s Dionysian versus Apollonian opposition, which, obviously, lent itself just as easily to right as to left wing revolution.) When, by contrast, we recognize how the opposition itself arises out of the peculiar two-sided character of the commodity, we also then have at hand a more adequate understanding of the path forwards.

To be quite clear the “violent ontology” and “pessimistic anthropology” to which Milbank and Pabst draw our attention is an ontology and an anthropology immanent to the commodity form itself. On the one hand, this means that this ontos is, happily, not fundamental in M Heidegger’s sense. It is not what human beings fundamentally are. Rather is it what human beings become under the conditions of commodity production and exchange. Yes. Human beings are sinful. But 2.4M years suggests that their sin always — always — appears in grace. For 2.4M years, nomadic human communities across the globe found reason to share with and care for the members of their communities, and the communities of others. Nor was this the exception. It was the rule. A fundamental anthropological pessimism only takes root when both sin and grace lose their bodies, when sin becomes an ontological, transcendental, fundamental characteristic of human being, rather than a flaw.

The tragedy, of course, is that capitalism works. Once the new mediations of time, value, and labor have “naturalized” themselves, we enter a Matrix-like world where the actions of all are channeled towards feeding and expanding the Matrix. The good news is . . . the Good News. It is the Gospel. Christians can — and should be encouraged to — expose the sin entailed in and by the capitalist social form. And Milbank and Pabst are right to fault liberalism as a false alternative. Liberalism itself is a central element in “the Matrix.” But not — or not primarily — as philosophy and ideology, but as practice and social form. Which means that we cannot think our way out of this bag. It will take more than decoupling ourselves from the machine. Transformed practices and transformed regulatory regimes give rise to transformed experiences and understandings, which give rise to transformed practices.

This is the substantive mystery outlined by St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (1-2). Liberalism, by contrast, believes that this will happen naturally, on its own, without redemption, without conversion, without sanctification, without practice, and without the Body of Christ — privately, in isolation, in the inner man. We disagree.