“those beliefs emerged through various accidents of history, haphazardly and without direction”
I might actually quibble a bit over this, inasmuch as the material advancement of society was an integral force in expanding the prominence of these beliefs. But other than that I can simply mutter agreement.

1) You can repeat that naively whiggish narrative of history as much as you like, but history is not inherently progressive, nor does it develop along a single tendency or path, as your post strongly implies. I find myself quite comfortable claiming that to suggest that the monadic individual, the uniform nation-state, the autonomous market, etc., were destined to develop with its seeds of such in Rome, is highly risible, as well as the idea that the Middle Ages represent a delayed pause in such development. No serious historian believes this (and I say this as someone with a BA in History and currently undertaking a Doctorate in Philosophy with interests in the Philosophy of History and the History of Philosophy). This is the stuff of 19th century liberal historians that was dispelled long ago. Its only advocates today are “popular” writers about history who still believe in those hoary progressive narratives like Steven Pinker. This is fideism.

2) You completely ignored the main substance of my rebuttal to divert attention away from the philosophical, theological, biblical, etc., arguments that I made and the narrative that I spun in order to focus on a narrative of peripheral importance. This is the second time you have done so.

As I wrote earlier, you do not have a response. Instead, you have chosen to cavil an example that I used to make an illustration. My guess is that you do not have a response — what you have are PREJUDICES toward liberal ideas and beliefs, but you remain unaware of how those beliefs emerged through various accidents of history, haphazardly and without direction. They do not measure up to the witness of the Gospels or the Church, nor are they compatible with virtue and the natural law.

The legal historian Sir Herbert Maine made a very telling remark, when he said that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract. I believe the history of Europe and the West, from Roman times to the present day exemplifies this.

You appear to be presenting a picture of the ethos of “pre-modern” society, characterized by the manorial economy, which was then superseded by a new thing, the individualistic commercial spirit and the economy it produces

My contention is that that is false: there was no “new” spirit, but the growth and development of a perennial tendency of Western civilization.

The fragmentation of power in the period between the sack of Rome by Alaric and the coronation of Charlemagne (the “Dark Ages”) brought large-scale commerce to a standstill and forced people into small collectives, both for production and for defence. Nowhere was this truer than in England, as you rightly observe.

This interlude, as I have called it, left Italy almost unaffected and by the 11th century, the law school of Bologna was reviving the study of the Roman law, not in any antiquarian spirit, but because its liberal, individualistic spirit suited the needs of Italy’s mercantile republics, Genoa, Florence and Venice. The same is true of Southern France, where the cities of Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse and the great port of Marseille were, effectively, petty republics.

Even in England, by the very beginning of the 14th century, the rise of the wool trade, exporting to the weaving centres of Flanders, saw the beginnings of the Foreign Exchange market in London, where foreign bills of exchange were being discounted in ‘Change Alley.

In the countryside, the manorial system was undermined by clearing tillage for pasture for the international wool trade, the great religious houses being in the forefront of this and by available markets for surplus production n the growing towns, leading both landlords and tenants to agree to the commutation of personal services for money rents, a process almost complete by 1350.

In other words, Europe displays a continuous development, both social and economic, from Imperial Rome to the present day, stultified, for a time and in some places, by the manorial system.

Allow me to drive this point home. I have no problem with the owning of property, trade, and commerce. The problem is the modern market, an unnatural arrangement established by the state, which is autonomous of social and sacred concerns. (Verily, it has become a repository for the sacred itself, much like the state.) The modern market makes community impossible, reorienting such to an intermediary role between the self-interested self-ruling individual and the state. The effect is impiety toward nature and God, the destruction and fragmentation of family and community, the untethering of “emancipated individuals” from civic responsibility, and the reorientation of the sacred from the church to the state. Communities lack means of self-government — of ruling and being ruled in turn — when economic life is dependent upon neo-feudal corporate lords.

This is the great irony of the “conservative” liberal position: in reconciling to the Enlightenment and its legacy — its hostility to tradition, its individualism, its deification of the state and market, its domestication of Christians and neutering of the church — it has allied itself with the very forces of its undoing. You don’t like “gay” marriage? Then why support a social and economic system that turns marriage into a contract, increasingly disconnected from child rearing, between two autonomous individuals. The reason “gay” marriage is even possible is because marriage has been “liberalized” over the last few centuries. You don’t like avarice in the marketplace? Then why support a social model that fundamentally construes “individuals” as naturally in opposition to one another and the state and its created markets as the only means of arbitration?

The way a society defines and organizes itself certainly affects the way people think about themselves and the way they live. To protest rampant consumerism, the idolization of the individual, and the decline of tradition, while supporting the “free” market, is to ally with the very engine driving what you protest. The response that FPR proposes is a return to rootedness, church, community, and the like over artificial state-created markets AND state-managed technocratic bureaucracy. This is another irony: for all the bluster of “conservative” liberals over statism, they are themselves still statist — they love markets that require the modern state to “emancipate” people from traditional social obligations, turning them into “individuals,” and the monopolization of law and trade policy by a distant and centralized government. The further irony, as William Cavanaugh argues, is that this makes the state a repository of the sacred as it fulfills this “emancipatory” role, essentially turning it into an idol, a mediator that replaces Christ in political, social, and economic life. And this shouldn’t be a surprise. The modern state emerged in opposition to the Christian church, privatizing it and rebranding it as “religion,” which allowed for the monopolization of public life by the state. This is in contrast to the witness of the early church in Paul’s writing and the Book of Acts, where the church is construed as a new ekklesia, an essentially political body. For them, as for other premoderns, there was no strict difference between the political and the social or the political and the civic; rather, the church was to the new center of social AND political life with Christ at its head. While not challenging Rome directly, the Apostles INTENTIONALLY subverted it by eroding its legitimacy, which is why the Romans were so hostile to the church. To the extent that “conservative” liberals support the monopolization of public life by the state, they subvert Christ. The only way to counteract this is to reemphasize community, the obligations it imposes upon the “individual,” and its control over economic matters as well.

Here are some sources for further reading that I draw upon. This is very broad, encompassing issues such as secularization, the modern state, modern capitalism, democracy in America, biblical studies, political theology, and the nature of political power. It is hardly exhaustive, but a good list with which to begin:

The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict by William T Cavanaugh

Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church by William T Cavanaugh

Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William T Cavanaugh

Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ by William T Cavanaugh

Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time by William T Cavanaugh

The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology by Oliver O’Donovan

War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity by Stanley Hauerwas

World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age by C. Kavin Rowe

Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation by Richard A. Horsely

Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology by Dieter Georgi

Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty by Paul W Kahn

On Power by Bertrand de Jouvenel

Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam by Talal Asad

The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader by Wilson Carey McWilliams

Redeeming Democracy in America by Wilson Carey McWilliams

In fact, I’ll make the general accusation that they haven’t been addressed because those criticizing me don’t have an answer to them. Instead, they are focusing upon an example of negligible importance as if it deflates my argument. No dice.

Michael PS’s recent post is rather illustrative of this. Look at my argument above. There I use an example of premodern economic organization to illustrate a contrast with the modern capitalist market. It is one of many possible examples that I could have deployed. Michael then criticizes the use of such and writes, “What JA describes was an interlude, in parts of Europe, telling known as the Dark Ages,” as if I advocated a return to any such model. Well, what Michael PS describes is a straw man, tellingly known as a fallacy. (And one that is ahistorical. The manorial system was not unique to the Dark Ages, but maintained during the Middle Ages as well. As he admits, it wasn’t eradicated until the French Revolution. And while he is right to suggest that all of Europe wasn’t under such — a point I did not make and in no way hinders my use of it as an example — it was present in England. And since in England is where modern capitalism has many of its roots, I saw it as a fitting example of contrast.)

Of course, I am not advocating a return to feudalism of any sort. I, along with many others on FPR, do not really have a single vision for society — such inflexibility is part of the purview of modern ideologues with its utopian demands for global democratic capitalism or other forms of statism. Rather, we generally acknowledge that there are many forms of polity and economic organization that are viable given the diversity of human culture. My largest concern is that such modes of organization and the institutions undergirding them adhere to virtue and natural law, something impossible under modern society, a point which, again, still stands because my critics prefer to focus upon irrelevant examples rather than the argument itself.

In France South of the Loire and in Italy, where the written law and municipal government survived, it was quite unknown. It never established itself in Iberia, whether under Moorish or Christian rule

Following the Revolution, the last vestiges of the manorial economy were eradicated everywhere that armies of Napoléon gave a thoroughly Roman code of laws to the continent and restored the concept of an equal citizenship to civilisation.

What JA describes was an interlude, in parts of Europe, telling known as the Dark Ages

Nevertheless, it is obvious that there has been a social and religious decline since the medieval. I think it is reasonable to posit that economic change is a part of that decline. An economy that rewards abortion like our present day economy is very different from that of a peasant economy, where children posses economic value.