Jun 13, 2022
D. C. Schindler's book The Politics of the Real: The Church between Liberalism and Integralism is one of the richest entries in the ongoing Catholic debate over liberalism, political authority, the common good, and the relation between Church and State.
Schindler offers subtle, convincing arguments as to why liberalism is "the political form of evil", specifically consisting of a rejection of the Christian form - specifically, the Jewish-Greek-Roman synthesis embodied in the Catholic Church.
Liberalism creates a situation like that described by comedian Stephen Wright: "Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates." It adopts aspects of the Western tradition but only on radically different grounds, with a fragmented vision of reality. Even when liberalism claims to make room for religious tradition, it does so only by reconceiving religion as a mere object of individual choice - that is, precisely as non-traditional.
But Schindler goes beyond criticizing liberalism, offering a profound and beautiful ontology of the social order and a somewhat different model of the relation between Church and State from the one proposed by Catholic integralists.
Schindler joins the podcast to discuss the book, including topics such as:
- Why objecting to non-liberal philosophy as "impractical" is a rejection of man as a rational creature
- Liberalism's false claim of neutrality (or non-confessionalism)
- The "Christian form" and its fragmentation
- Why liberalism is “the political form of evil”
- The roots of liberalism in medieval nominalism
- The anti-Catholic meaning of the Declaration of Independence's “laws of nature and of nature’s God”
- How the "neutral public square" subverts every tradition it "makes room for"
- The problem with distinguishing "civil society" from the state
- Why property is central to understanding the relation between individuals and society
Links
The Politics of the Real https://newpolity.com/new-polity-press-titles/the-politics-of-the-real
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