[This essay is the original text of John Milbank’s lecture at Megaron, Athens Concert Hall, on 28 November 2018. It is posted on antifono.gr together with the Greek translation (see here), made by Nikos Manolopoulos and Vassilis Xidias. A slightly shortened version of the English text is posted on the web-page Jacobite (Jan 2019)].
What is the main line of fracture in global politics today? Does it remain one between the now traditional Right and Left, or has a new Populist versus Liberal division supplanted the old one?
For those on the Left, the instinct will be to say that any such supplanting is either illusory or perverse. However, that verdict could represent a triumph of political prejudice over political critique. After all, the Right-Left faultline has existed only since the French Revolution. Originally it denoted a division between those more devoted to the legacy of the ancien régime on the one hand and those in favour of a more liberal and democratic approach, which might have various connotations, on the other.
To understand this genealogy is also to see that in fact it is what we have come to understand as the normative political division that is itself somewhat illusory and perverse. What survives, after all, today, of the conservatism that opposed electoral democracy and was rooted in landed aristocracy, an international dynastic order and the cult of sacral monarchy? Yet this was what originally defined the European Right throughout the Nineteenth Century and even somewhat beyond.
What is more, even the assumption that such a Right represented the true, deep and ancient past is rather suspect. To the contrary, it was in important ways just as ‘modern’ as left liberalism. Where the latter thought that order could only be distilled from respect for the individual and the aggregation of individual votes, the former, conservative position considered that it could only be imposed from a unified sovereign centre. Liberalism was a politics of the Many, Conservatism a politics of the One; but in either case a specifically modern and post-Hobbesian numerical calculus in the face of an assumed natural anarchy was to the fore.
Equally squeezed out by either side, as to a degree noted by a more critical liberal thinker like Alexis de Tocqueville, was a more qualitative politics of the mediating Few. By this I mean a more genuinely traditional politics focussed not exclusively on the problem of order, but equally on the question of positive political purpose. On the pursuit of true human flourishing both collectively and individually, a flourishing taken to include participation in political life and the distilling of rule out of such participation on the part of citizens.
