Religion & Law

Sound advice, from Kenneth Anderson (American Univ.):

As a believer in liberty and consent, I should greatly like to share Philip Bobbitt's hopes for the market-state. It does not take a conservative to wonder, however, whether this is enough to sustain liberal democracy in the face of spiritual threats. A long tradition of what Lawrence Solum has called the "left Burkeans" -- Christopher Lasch, for example, or Zygmunt Bauman -- has argued that the market is as much socially corrosive of the values of liberal democracy as it is materially supportive. The market and democracy are both sustained by wells of social capital that stable material prosperity helps to deepen, but which are not the moral logic of the market itself.

The market of the market-state is not self-sustaining. On the contrary, it requires a form of social life that goes outside it in order to function in the long term. Honour, loyalty, sacrifice, gratitude to those who came before -- these are not the evident virtues of capitalism, but they are necessary virtues in a liberal-democratic-capitalist form of life. Without them, society eats its seedcorn, the social capital bequeathed by the past to bless the future. Even after the marvellous argumentation of this marvellous book, therefore, room remains to question whether the market-state pays sufficient attention to the spiritual habits of the heart that make the market-state -- and the willing defence of states of consent against states of terror -- over the long struggle of years in this twenty-first century even possible.