¹ Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Balinski, Rebecca (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995)Google Scholar, Chapter I ‘Europe and the Theologico-Political Problem,’ 3–10.

² See O’Donovan, Oliver and O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, 100–1625(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999) 231–40; 362–387Google Scholar; Lubac, Henri de, ‘L’autorité de L’Eglise en matière temporelle’ and ‘Augustinisme Politique?’ in Théologies d’Occasion(Paris: Desclée de Brouver, 217–40)Google Scholar.

³ Manent, Pierre, The City of Man, trans. LePain, Marc A. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), 25, 200–1Google Scholar.

⁴ An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Chapter 11, ‘Machiavelli and Fecundity of Evil’, 10–20.

⁵ O’Donovan and O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius, 1–228; O’Donovan, Oliver, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 193–285Google Scholar. For the point about St. Paul and ruling by judgement alone, see 148. For the oikos and paideia, see Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 399Google Scholar.

⁶ For a synthesis of research on this question, see Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 140–58Google Scholar.

⁷ See O’Donovan and O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius, 169–231; Kantorowicz, Ernest H., The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), 42–273Google Scholar.

⁸ See Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 9–27Google Scholar.

⁹ An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 5–7; Thompson, Augustine, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325(Penn State, PA: State U.P. forthcoming)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Dante, , Monarchy, ed. Shaw, Prue (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. III xvi, pp. 91–94.

¹¹ The City of Man, 200–1; S.T. II II Q. 129 a3 ad 4; Q 161 a1.

¹² Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 359–62; ST II. II. Q8 a1; Q23 aa 1–7.

¹³ De Lubac, op. cit. (note 2 above); Milbank, John, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon(London: Routledge, 2003), 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ See Pickstock, After Writing, 121–40.

¹⁵ See O’Donovan and O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius, 423–476; 517–30; Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9–27; Figgis, John Neville, From Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907)Google Scholar; The Divine Right of Kings(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914)Google Scholar. And see Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, Lettres Persanes, ed. Goldzink, Jean (Paris: PUF, 1989Google Scholar) where he displays a certain fascination for the absolutism of the seraglio. The Encyclopédie speaks of Islam as a more rational faith, though Voltaire eventually came to see it as intrinsically despotic. I am grateful for discussions with David Hart here.

¹⁶ See Isiduro G. Manzano O.F.M., ‘Individuo y Sociedad en Duns Escoto’ in Antonianium, Jan.-March 2001 LXXVI, fasc. I, pp. 43–79.

¹⁷ See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, op. cit.

¹⁸ See An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Chapters III-X, and conclusion, pp. 20–119; The City of Man, esp. Part Two, 111207; Modern Liberty and its Discontents, ed. Maloney, Daniel J. and Seaton, Paul (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 79–117Google Scholar, 197–231.

¹⁹ Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 65–119. Manent disallows that Rousseau is a liberal, since he seeks, albeit within modern, liberal terms, once again a mode of the positive liberty of the ancients, a coincidence of individual with civic virtue. However, the coincidence, whereby the liberty of each would be immediately the liberty of all, is still put forward by Rousseau in terms of modern negative liberty of pure choice and survival, whether of the city or the individual. Certainly Manent admits that Rousseau and Marx after him were trying to resolve the aporia of liberalism – which comes first, represented civil society, or the representing state?– and to this extent their ‘ideological’ excesses were the consequences of liberal presuppositions. Yet because, at the limit, he himself accepts these presuppositions, Rousseau and Marx became for him non-liberals by virtue of their continued quest for antique sittlichkeit in modern guise. Yet if this quest leads logically to terror (and one can agree with Manent it does) and the problem is the perverted hybrid of liberalism with sittlichkeit, then the fault may lie with the impossibility of positive liberty in modern circumstances, or it may lie with liberalism itself, since an aporetic reality must periodically (or even ceaselessly) seek to resolve the dilemmas it generates. The latter view appears more logical, and on this understanding Rousseau and Marx represent part of the inevitable continuum of liberal philosophy. Manent's own Straussian perspective, which appears to combine a tragic recognition of the truth but impossibility of antique virtue, with a resignation to liberal aporias, appears every bit as ‘postmodern’ as the views of the soixante-huitardes he would reject, since he is resigned to a kind of endless undecidability. But if this is indeed the end of history, it will always generate ew perturbations beyond this end, and new post-liberal terrorisms. For Montesquieu, see An Intellectual History, 53–65; for Tocqueville, An Intellectual History, 103–14 and de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 235Google Scholar.

²⁰ Thomas Aquinas, Contra Impugnantes, I cap 4 para 14. Here he cites Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana: ‘Everything that is not lessened by being imparted, is not, if it be possessed without being communicated, possessed as it ought to be possessed’. Russell Hittenger notes that Aquinas always mirrors ‘every analogous use of the word societas by uses of the word communicatio: communicatio oeconomica, communicatio spiritualis, communicatio civilis, and so forth’– see his unpublished article, ‘The Munus Regale in John Paul II's Political Theology’, p. 24.

²¹ See Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Gift in Sixteenth Century France(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 90–95Google Scholar.

²² One can contrast Montesquieu with James Harrington (the cavalier turned republican; never a roundhead) on this point. For Harrington ‘the Senate’ is not a sovereign legislative power sundered from the executive; it is rather an aristocratic assembly of the wise that offers disinterested advice to the sovereign democratic power. But the constitution of the United States was finally based more on Montesquieu than on Harrington. See James Harrington (John Toland?)‘A System of Politics’ Chap. V, 28–32, esp. 28: ‘If a council capable of debate has also the result, it is oligarchy. If an assembly capable of the result has debate also, it is anarchy. Debate in a council not capable of result, and result in an assembly not capable of debate is democracy’. Hence democracy, as opposed to anarchy, for Harrington/Toland contains an educatively ‘aristocratic’ moment.

²³ See Milbank, Being Reconciled, 192–3 and McAllister, Ted V., Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and the search for a postliberal order(Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 160–1Google Scholar. See also Seymour M. Hersch's ‘Annals of National Security’ column in The New Yorker for May 12, 2003, ‘Selective Intelligence: How the Pentagon Outwitted the CIA,” 44–52. Hersch points out that many of the neo-conservative ‘cabal’ who have set up their own intelligence network –-Abram Schutz, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and Stephen Camtone, are Strauss's pupils and that Schutz together with Gary Schmitt had already developed in print a ‘Straussian’ approach to intelligence gathering, which of course stressed that there are always more hidden secrets than one imagines. These are the very people who overrode the professional expertise of the CIA and the DIA to insist that Iraq had massive concealed stores of Weapons of Mass Destruction! Pointing out the predominance of German and German-Jewish names here is surely not racist, but rather a necessary indication of profoundly terrible and tragic historical ironies at work. Strauss was a German Jew who fled Hitler, yet his heirs along with many others have helped to insinuate an element of Germanic authoritarianism and paranoia at the heart of an Anglo-Saxon polity. Nor has Israel –- perhaps from the outset –-escaped this taint. Meanwhile a chastened Germany now has much politically to teach the Anglo-Saxon world…

²⁴ See David Brooks’ article on Whitman's essay ‘Democratic Vistas’ in The Atlantic Monthly, May 2003, pp. 32–33. Brooks cites Whitman: ‘So will individuality, and unimpeded branchings, flourish best under imperial republican forms’. Brooks appears however – like increasingly many left of centre supporters of the U.S. Democratic Party – unperturbed by this sort of rhetoric.

²⁵ An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 80–114. See also Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 66–71, 196–203, 408.

²⁶ Pierre Manent, ‘Charles Péguy: Between Political Faith and Faith’ in Modern Liberty and its Discontents, 79–81. And see Rolland, Romain, Péguy tome I (Paris: Albin Michel, 1944), 137–9Google Scholar, 309.

²⁷ Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 66–71, 196–203, 408; Alexander Dru, The Church in the Nineteenth Century: Germany 1800–1918(London: Burns and Oates, 1963). One can also note here that Augustine's new definition of a res publica as foregathered around the object of its desire already tends to make the political a sub-category of the social: see Theology and Social Theory, 400–401.

²⁸ John Wyclif, ‘Civil Lordship’ Book I, Chap. 7 15 C in O’Donovan and O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius, p. 488: ‘God gives only in the best way of which the recipient is capable; but every righteous man is capable of the best gift in general; so God bestows only in that way, for as long as one is righteous … and so God cannot give a creature any created good without first giving uncreated good’; Chap 716c: ‘God gives no gifts to man without giving himself as the principal gift.’

²⁹ Wyclif, ‘Divine Lordship Book 3 Chap I 70, Chap 4 78 a in From Irenaeus to Grotius, 487–8.

³⁰ See the O’Donovans’ commentary on Wyclif in From Irenaeus to Grotius, 482–7 and Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, again on Wyclif at 26, and on the ambivalence of Franciscan poverty at 207. See also on the same subject Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 15–16.

³¹ See Belloc, Hilaire, An Essay on the Restoration of Property(Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Belloc's distributist notions were clearly of more Dominican than Franciscan inspiration.

³² See From Irenaeus to Grotius, 530–41 and 743–57; On Wyclif and the late post-Ockham Oxford neo-realism, see Alain de Libera, La Querelle des Universaux: de Platon à la fin du Moyen Age(Paris: Eds du Seuil, 1996), 402–410. One can sympathize strongly with O’Donovan's predilection for what one might call ‘very early modern’ conciliar realists: Fortescue, Nicholas of Cusa, Hooker, etc. In their fusion of Ancient natural law and modern constitution-making, they seem to offer an alternative to either the Medieval or the modern. But is it correct to speak as he does of ‘early modern liberalism’ here, and to assimilate such currents to the undoubted liberalism (founded in subjective rights) of Grotius? In these earlier currents there is no subjective right proceeding primarily from the ground of will in the Hobbesian-Lockean sense, and no social contract in the Hobbesian- Lockean mode of an agreement between previously sovereign individuals and establishing a primarily formal legitimacy. Fortescue's ‘mystical “compact”’ is rather the issuing of the Aristotelian social impulse at the very ‘origin’ of any conceivable humanity in the collective enterprise of shaping artificial and historically contingent institutions that nevertheless seek to express a substantive equity.

³³ See Theology and Social Theory, 197–200.

³⁴ See Péguy, Charles, Basic Verities, trans. Ann, and Green, Julian (London: Kegan Paul), 75–95Google Scholar, 101–119.

³⁵ See Arrighi, Giovanni, ‘Tracking Global Turbulence’ in New Left Review 20, 2nd Series, March-April 2003, 5–73Google Scholar.

³⁶ The ongoing researches of Paul Morris (of Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand) are tending to show this. For further reflections on the relation between religion and the nation state and the way the latter always has to re-recruit and define the former, see Asad, Talal, Formulations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 104–5; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 364.

³⁸ Manent, Modern Liberty and its Discontents, 105.

³⁹ See James Barr, Fundamentalism(London: SCM, 1984).

⁴⁰ See Theology and Social Theory, 20 and John Milbank, Review of M.S. Burrows and Paul Rorem, eds., Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective in Journal of Theological Studies, October 1995, vol. 46, Part 2, 660–70.

⁴¹ Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 100–27.

⁴² Asad, Formations of the Secular, 127–59.

⁴³ See Hittenger, ‘The Munus Regale’. And see the Papal encyclicals, De Familiae Christianae Muneribus, para. 63; and Christifidelis Laici, para. 14, as well as Lumen Gentium, para 3b;

⁴⁴ See Hittenger, ‘The Munus Regale’ for the correct comment that the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ is not a liberal one that means ‘do everything that can possibly be done at a local level, only resorting to higher levels or the centre in extreme necessity’. Rather it means ‘do everything at the appropriate level’. Hence, as Hittenger also says, liberals who think that subsidiarity should be applied to Church government as a liberal principle are wrong, but conservatives who think that it should not be applied are also wrong, since it is not averse to hierarchy. Of course, Hittinger and I would probably disagree about ‘appropriate levels’ in the case of Church government.