The debate below between Pat Deneen and Peter Berkowitz is interesting and perhaps exceedingly relevant, given the coming "regime change." I’m going to open my course for seniors with it.
I agree that Peter distorts virtue by understanding it primarily as useful for liberalism or constitutionalism. Surely liberty is for the practice of virtue, and not the other way around. The proper way to limit "the state" is by thinking of it as existing for the family, religion, friendship, etc.
But Pat might commit the Marxist error of making the practice of virtue seem too dependent on the prevailing mode of "the division of labor" or techno-development. So he may exaggerate the morally destructive power of "capitalism." ALL that is solid has not melted into thin air etc. Sam was certainly right that he follows Marx in not seeing modern government and modern technology as genuinely human goods.
One reason "the liberal state" and the modern, globalizing economy come to prevail is that they are the source of great benefits associated with justice and efficiency. It’s true enough that, in freeing us from the various despotisms associated with racism, sexism, classism, "religionism," etc., they do tend to empty life of much of its "particularity" or moral content. And a hugely productive society does have the downside of tending—but finally only tending—to reduce virtue to what’s required for productivity. A good Marxist criticism of feminism is that its purpose is free women to be wage slaves, just like men. But a good criticism of that good criticism is that women really haven’t become nothing but cogs in a machine. Today’s family guy and working mom can be grateful both for the new opportunities for genuine self-fulfillment available to women and for the Wal-mart that makes lots of stuff available quickly at low prices.
Let me emphasize that I don’t think Pat is completely wrong, just that he exaggerates. And maybe he does so at the expense of thinking about how the practice of virtue is possible in our time and place. People, despite it all, still fall and love and know they’re born to die. Courage is still required and is still possible. Any "realist" thanks God or nature that we remain stuck with virtue.
Distributism to me is mostly "literary politics" that almost surely can’t be implemented and would likely morph into petty tyanny if it were. Even the Christian Democratic parties of Europe’s efforts to focus political attention on the "common good" and "subsidiarity" unintentionally served creeping and creepy "apolitical statism" of the EU.
Modern liberalism, it also seems to me, derives its real strength from embodying—although in a somewhat distorted way—the Christian/Biblical "personal" thought about the untruth of both civil and natural theology. We aren’t born to be citizens and nothing more, and we aren’t born to be parts of nature and nothing more. Modern liberalism errs by denying that personal reality is necessarily social. But the primacy of personal identity is some sense places a severe limitation on any civic communitarianism. The highest and truest forms of human community can and should resist politicization—and, of course, commodification.
