DR CHRISTOPHER BROOKE - DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (POLIS)

'WHY SECULAR LIBERALS NEED ROMAN CATHOLICS (AND MARXISTS)'

My remarks carry the title, ‘Why Secular Liberals Need Roman Catholics’, and then, in brackets, ‘and Marxists’—so that’s the conclusion I’m going to reach, in about fifteen minutes time. And I’m going to get there by way of a brief discussion of the religious crisis of the French Revolution of 1789, and the modern political ideological traditions—socialism, conservatism, and liberalism—that emerged as different kinds of reaction to that Revolution in the early part of the nineteenth century. But first, I want to say something about Emile Perreau-Saussine, and then about the character of scholarship on the history of political thought as it has been practiced in this university, and I’ll make my way to the question of the French political tradition from there. So that’s just a brief map, to orient you all before I begin.

I didn’t know Émile Perreau-Saussine well, and I didn’t know him long. I arrived in Cambridge to teach in the Politics Department in October 2009, and so Émile was—all too briefly—my colleague. And he was a good colleague, both in our Departmental life together and outside it. In particular, I remember enjoying an evening here at Fitzwilliam for dinner that Michaelmas Term, when Émile was proud to show me round, including—and especially—the fine oak-and-concrete College chapel. But what I remember most from that evening was his delightful conversation—we found so many things to talk about, from our experiences of academic life in the United States, to the state of the European left, to—of course—the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And while it was clear that we were never going to agree about that many things, I had a strong sense that this couldn’t and that it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. I wanted to reciprocate his hospitality, to have him over to dine at King’s the following term—above all—to carry on the conversation. I would have loved, for example, to have discussed the books of Alasdair MacIntyre with Émile, which meant even more to him than they have done, over the years, to me. But Émile’s shocking, sudden death this time last year meant that I was never able to return his invitation—and the debts that weigh on us the most are the ones we know that we can never repay. One of the greatest films ever made, Casablanca, ends with the line—delivered to a Frenchman—that ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’. But that is all that Émile and I could enjoy: a beginning. Fate intervened; Émile died young, far too young; and that is why we are all here today.

I only came to Cambridge, as I said, a little over a year ago, and, from the outside, I always thought that the history of political thought operation here was a strikingly secular affair. The second volume of Professor Quentin Skinner’s 1978 book, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, might have been subtitled, ‘The Age of Reformation’, but it does not have as much to do with religion as that subtitle seems to suggest; and my own PhD supervisor, Richard Tuck—who had been at Cambridge for a quarter of a century before he migrated to the other Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught me—although Richard once magnificently explained the Arminian theory of grace by means of an example concerning a parent offering to buy an ice-cream for a child, he was one of those people for whom it was just obvious that religion was nonsense, an irrational, anthropological curiosity.

(I remember in particular a very funny seminar at Harvard where those of us in the room with firsthand experience of the Church of England had no difficulty at all understanding the famous description of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book Leviathan as a ‘farrago of Christian atheism’, which the Americans present seemed to find a contradiction-in-terms. As the joke goes, the best thing about the C. of E. is that you can believe anything at all; but the worst thing about it is that nobody does.)

And so my sense of the Cambridge tradition, from the outside, as I say, was that the world of history and politics here was thoroughly non-religious—in light of which, it seemed to me to reflect well both on Cambridge and on Émile, who was took his Roman Catholicism very seriously indeed, that he seemed to like it so much here, and to do so well here.

But if Cambridge scholars like Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck were surprising in their largely secular approach to the thought of a largely religious age, there were also historians of political thought here in Cambridge who have in recent years been moving in the opposite direction, re-injecting religious content into a historiography that had to a considerable extent been trying to do without it. Gareth Stedman Jones has recently retired as the Professor of Political Science, and in the volume on Religion and the Political Imagination, which he co-edited, and to which Émile contributed an excellent chapter on ultramontanism in post-Revolutionary France, we find the suggestion in the introduction that [and this is a quotation]:

The equation of the Revolution with modernity makes it easy to forget that the years between 1789 and 1802 could be viewed as the last in a series of reformations and religious wars, which had rent Europe apart since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Looked at that way—and many contemporaries, both inside and outside France, did look at it that way—the Revolution could equally be viewed as a failed Reformation.

And the repercussions of the religious crisis of the French Revolution can be seen wherever one looks. Gareth concluded the introduction to his magnificent edition of the French Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier’s 1808 book, The Theory of the Four Movements, for example, by noting that ‘conventional scholarship still tends to attribute the origins of “socialism” to a heightened concern for equality arising from the French Revolution’ and to the consequences of industrialisation; but in fact, Fourier’s book ‘is most immediately a reminder that the French Revolution had involved not only the transformation of the state, but also the attempt to replace the Church’, and Fourier’s economic criticism, so influential in shaping the subsequent socialist tradition, began in this context. The Theory of the Four Movements is a reminder that ‘socialism’ began as an attempt to discover a successor, not to capitalism, but to the Christian Church.’

And if the socialisms of Fourier, and also of his fellow Utopian Socialist the comte de Saint-Simon, began with religious concerns at their core, and if the distinctive ‘throne and altar’ conservatism of the fearful reactionary Joseph de Maistre is obviously and obsessively religious, too, then what—we might ask—of French liberalism, which also takes its distinctive shape during exactly the same period, around a decade after the Revolution of 1789?

Well, recently we’ve had Helena Rosenblatt, at Hunter College in New York, publishing her study of everybody’s favourite French liberal Benjamin Constant, a book called Liberal Values, which has sought to restore to the hitherto largely-secular Constant of the earlier scholarship his abiding concern with religion that culminated in his five-volume study, De la religion, which began to appear right at the end of his life. Without religion, Constant thought, all we had to fall back on was a psychology of self-interest that could only produce a society of what he called ‘industrious beavers’; whereas in a genuinely moral society we needed to be drawn out of ourselves, and it was our ‘religious sentiment’ which enabled this to happen, making possible the right kind of disinterested behaviour. And at the start of the current academic year, Professor Rosenblatt visited the Monday research seminar here in Cambridge, which I convene, along with Gareth Stedman Jones’s successor as Professor here, John Robertson—who himself has an exciting project about the writing of sacred history in the age of the Enlightenment—and she gave a paper about the hopes that various French liberals had well into the nineteenth century for a Protestant Reformation in that country: Napoleon Bonaparte had even held discussions with his advisers on the subject, before agreeing instead to the Concordat with the Pope in 1801, which re-introduced the Catholic Church to France. And the most famous nineteenth-century example of a French liberal’s deep interest in the social and political consequences of Protestantism is on display in Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic study of Democracy in America.

Why do we find this concern with religion everywhere we look, across the ideological politics of the early nineteenth century? One classic theme in the Cambridge historiography of political thought—it’s central to the works of both Richard Tuck and my King’s colleague Istvan Hont, for example—concerns human sociability: the question of how naturally diffident human beings can be fitted to live alongside one another more or less harmoniously? And if the seventeenth-century political authoritarianism of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or the small-scale republics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eighteenth-century political imagination become implausible or unattractive options, then three obvious places to look for sources of social cohesion became political economy (though the market seems to generate antagonism and class struggle as much as self-sustaining and self-reproducing patterns of interdependence), or nationalism (though this too has been known to cause a few problems of its own), or religion—an option Rousseau himself explored in the penultimate chapter of his book, The Social Contract, where he argued that those who act as if they do not subscribe to the dogmas of what he called the ‘purely civil profession of faith’ should be banished from the state, ‘not for being impious, but for being unsociable’.

So if we stick with liberalism, and broaden the discussion a bit, we can ask the question: is liberalism a kind of disguised—or, perhaps even not-so-disguised—Protestantism? From the Right, two hundred years ago, Joseph de Maistre, whom I mentioned a moment ago, denounced liberalism as ‘political Protestantism carried to the most absolute individualism’. From the Left, far more recently, my Cambridge colleague in the Philosophy faculty Raymond Geuss has been associated with the view that the influential American political philosopher John Rawls’s so-called ‘political liberalism’ is a kind of only half-secularized Protestant Christianity—and the recent publication of Rawls’s undergraduate dissertation from Princeton on midcentury Protestant notions of sin makes this interpretation, it seems to me, biographically quite plausible. Many people today still insist—quite anachronistically—that John Locke was one of the most important liberal theorists of them all, and it was the achievement of John Dunn—another of my colleagues from King’s—to demonstrate early in his career, in the 1960s, how inseparable Locke’s political ideas were from a particular version of Protestant theology. And we might also reflect that much liberal discourse looks pretty religious, substituting notions of ‘rationality’ or ‘human rights’ for the place formerly occupied by God.

In my own scholarly work right now, I’m trying to write a history of liberal ideas about distributive justice over the last hundred and fifty years or so—that’s the question of how stuff ought to be divided up in a particular political community—and I’m repeatedly struck by the way in which two distinct justice traditions seem to develop in parallel to one another over more or less the same period: on the one hand, there is the liberal theory of distributive justice, ostensibly secular and with a political-economy inflection, being thrashed out in the traditionally Protestant, Anglophone countries; on the other hand, there is the Roman Catholic social teaching (which underpins the politics of postwar European Christian Democracy, for example). And some dates stand out. 1891, for example, marked the publication of both the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick’s Elements of Politics and of Pope Leo XII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, ‘on capital and labour’, which is the key document in this Catholic tradition. 1971 saw the appearance of both John Rawls’s Theory of Justice—the book that has loomed large over the thinking of many liberal political philosophers over the last four decades, as well as of two key documents of the Catholic social teaching, the apostolic letter of Pope Paul VI, Octogesima Adveniens, also called, ‘A call to action’, and the declaration of the synod of bishops, Justicia in Mundo.

So we have this persistent ambiguity, which seems to me impossible to resolve, about whether liberalism is best understood as a secular or as a religious historical and philosophical tradition. And just as the awkward and ambiguous relationship between liberalism and capitalism means that those of us who are secular liberals, more or less, teaching in the more or less secular, liberal universities, badly need to have Marxists taking a part in our ongoing conversations, who orient their own thinking around the decisive rejection of the prevailing economic order, so too, it seems to me, the similarly awkward and ambiguous relationship between liberalism and Protestantism means that we also badly need to have seriously Roman Catholic intellectuals in our midst, too, scholars like Alasdair MacIntyre—who was himself once also a Marxist—or our friend Émile Perreau-Saussine.

Well, to conclude. Before I sat down to write these remarks, I emailed an American student who studied last year in Cambridge, both with me and with Émile, about what it was like to be supervised by him. ‘The mix of passion and seriousness is what I would highlight the most’, Alice Gissinger wrote back.

He gave me guidance, comments, inspiration, with such a gift for imparting the love of his subject. In just a few weeks he had sent me to the Rare Books room, shared a hundred bibliographical references, shown me my way through the stakes and the rhetoric of the 1905 French Separation of Church and State with such grace, insight, and conviction that I left my first supervision with him knowing this would become the subject for my Senior Thesis.

I remember, too, a habit Émile had at the beginning of every supervision: eyebrows arching a little, leaning back in his chair as though in worry he would ask: ‘Ça vous a plu?’ (Did you like it?) He meant to ask whether the prodigious reading list of the latest week had been to my liking, whether he had hit the right note to stir his student’s intellect. He should have known that he always did. Thank you all very much.

DR RICHARD REX - QUEENS' COLLEGE AND FACULTY OF DIVINITY

Emile Perreau-Saussine identified himself as a political philosopher, placing himself squarely in the tradition of Plato by avowing a profound and abiding interest in the relationship between the city and the soul, in the interaction, as he explained that pairing, of politics, morality, and religion. In his forthcoming book, Catholicism and Democracy, he addressed these issues in his distinctive way and on a typically broad canvas. Catholicism and Democracy was meant to be the first case-study in a series of analyses that would address a general problem posed by the emergence of the modern State in the wake of the Enlightenment: What is the place of religion in politics, and indeed in the public sphere, now that the modern secular State has emancipated itself from the matrix of the Confessional State within which it first took shape?

It has been obvious since the 1790s that this was a problem for religion. Most of Catholicism and Democracy is therefore taken up with the Catholic Church’s protracted and troubled process of adjustment to secular political modernity, a process which reached its theoretical or theological culmination at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, with the Declaration on Religious Liberty and the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes, on ‘The Church in the Modern World’.

However, one of Emile’s insights or contentions was that the position of religion in the modern State is also a problem for political society. Not, I should add, a problem in the 9/11 sense, that is, in the sense that religion, or a specific religion, is, as such, purely and simply a problem. The challenges posed by Islamist terrorism are no different in kind from those posed by other, usually secular, ideologies of terror. Terrorism has been, if not endemic, then at least recurrent in western culture since the end of the nineteenth century – in fact, since the effective secularisation of European intellectual culture, the cultural chasm of the 1890s.

Emile was particularly struck by the fact that the oldest of the world’s surviving democracies, the United States of America, is not only the strongest of them but also, as is often noted with some incredulity in Britain, the most religious. He was struck equally by the fact that this was already apparent to one of the earliest and most thoughtful commentators on American democracy, Tocqueville. What may surprise you is that Tocqueville saw the powerful role of religion in America as a blessing. For as Emile reads him, Tocqueville saw religion as a solution, perhaps the solution, to the problem of State power in the era of mass politics. That problem was the threat of majority power to minority freedom, and thus in fact to all freedom. What could restrain a ruler as powerful as ‘the people’? Only some spiritual power. The particular problem in the Old World, as opposed to the New World, was the collapse of spiritual power in the wake of the French Revolution. The churches had been too much part of the Ancien Regime, and their social power, even their spiritual power, crumbled when the foundations of the Ancien Regime were shaken.
For Emile, the thinkers who saw this problem most clearly were Joseph de Maistre and Auguste Comte. Maistre was the intellectual inspiration of Catholic Reaction and Counter-Revolution, and his attempt to rescue spiritual power resulted in the forging of a new kind of Catholicism, militant Ultramontanism, an attempt to reconstruct the industrial world in the image of a Middle Ages that had never existed, a Gothic Romantic paradise of Christian order. Maistrean Ultramontanism could probably be called the first fundamentalism. Comte, a generation or so later, concluded that Maistre had backed the wrong horse. In place of Catholicism, which Comte saw as superannuated by the Enlightenment and modern science, he proposed in the 1840s to fill the vacuum of spiritual power by founding a new religion, the Religion of Humanity. Although his solution now seems merely quaint, one can forget that successful new religions can still be founded. Mormonism, which originated in America at much the same time, was one such. And for a generation Comtean thought held sway in Liberal France, and was almost the guiding ideology of the Third Republic.

Maistre and Comte are largely forgotten today – though a major biography of Comte has recently appeared – but the problem they identified has not gone away. It has continued to be remarked upon not only by commentators from religious perspectives but also, though less often, by those from secular perspectives. It was famously summed up by the Catholic jurist, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde, who contended in 1967 that ‘The liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot itself guarantee. On the one hand, it can subsist only if the freedom it concedes to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of individuals and of a homogeneous society. On the other hand, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing its liberalism’. Most recently, that last giant of the Enlightenment, Jürgen Habermas, took up Böckenforde’s challenge in an exchange with Joseph Ratzinger that took place at Munich early in 2004.
Habermas’s engagement with Böckenforde, however, shows just how difficult Western Secular Rationality – or ‘Reason’, as it is sometimes called – has found it to grapple with both theological and postmodern critiques of its own positions. And this tends to confirm the diagnosis which has been offered by shrewd physicians of the body politic from Maistre onwards. Habermas begins by agreeing that Böckenforde’s diagnosis ‘cannot be dismissed out of hand’, but does not want to let that give heart to defenders of religion, in case they end up using it as an argument to draw people back towards faith. However, his capacity to meet this challenge to the relativistic tendencies of Reason is distinctly limited. He reports a comment made to him by a fellow scholar to the effect that European secularization is beginning to look like an anomaly in need of correction. Yet his only response is to liken this opinion to the anomie of Weimar Germany as exemplified, for him, in the writings of Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss. His rather dodgy conclusion is that we simply should not push the question too far. As an historian of the Reformation, I am reminded by this of Calvin’s prohibition on pushing too far the question of how to reconcile predestination with the justice and goodness of God. These responses are perfectly understandable – but they are not reasonable. Which was fine for Calvin, who subordinated reason to revelation, but not for Habermas, the Last of the Apostles of Reason. Who is Habermas to tell us when to stop asking questions?

The most revealing observation he makes is that ‘political virtues ... are essential if democracy is to exist’. Where he differs from Böckenforde and Tocqueville is in his confidence – for which I see little evidence – that liberal democracies are able to generate, transmit, and perpetuate these virtues from their own resources. They have been trying this for a while now, not long, but it’s not going too well. Why this observation interests me, as an historian of the early modern era, is that in the political thought of the Renaissance humanists, as in that of their medieval scholastic predecessors, the same basic problem was detected in the dominant political system of their day – monarchy. Monarchy, of course, had many advantages, providing clear and decisive leadership, and a personal focus of loyalty. However, it had one big problem. What if the king went off the rails? What could you do to minimise the risk? The only answer anyone ever came up with was education. The Institution of a Christian Prince, to take the title of Erasmus’s exemplary contribution to the genre, was all about initiating the future ruler, in childhood and youth, into the practice of Christian morality, of the cardinal and theological virtues, in the pious hope that this would impose some internal spiritual constraint on a power which, by definition, could not be subject to external constraint. Did it work? Perhaps not.

The solution, to modernity, seemed clear: regime change, the replacement of monarchy by a new system of government which, of itself, would safeguard good order, justice, and liberty. The idea that, if the system is well designed, it will be proof against the darkness of the human heart is a recurrent delusion, one to which our own age is peculiarly prone. In our lifetimes it has begotten the culture of the ticked box: it is so much easier to guarantee the right procedures than the right outcomes. Yet the best theorists of republican government, Machiavelli and Rousseau, like the best theorists of monarchical government, have seen all too clearly that the key in both systems is the same: the virtue of the rulers. Republics need good citizens. Republics, in short, need Republicans. Without virtue, without active, vigorous, and respected virtues, no citizens, no republic, no common good. Yet where shall we find virtue amid what Habermas calls the ‘ethical abstinence of a postmetaphysical thinking, to which every universally obligatory concept of a good and exemplary life is foreign’? This is where religious – and also non-religious – groups come in. Ethical views and values can only be generated, formulated, transmitted, lived, and died for, within social groups loyal to something greater than each, greater than all, greater even than the State. Such groups can no longer be coterminous with the State in an age of freedom, but they must be substantial and secure enough to maintain a discernible position in society. Emile, developing Tocqueville’s analysis, would argue that the modern State, while – as in the USA – maintaining strict neutrality between religions as long and as far as their activities remain within the law, should equally permit and even in some ways encourage such groups, partly because of the need which even Republicans acknowledge for the cultivation of virtue among the citizens, but partly also, in proper political humility, out of the realisation that lawfully flourishing religious groups are among the most durable forces in the face of the perennial temptation of the State to arrogate to itself excessive power, a temptation to which there is no reason to believe the liberal democratic State immune.

Historically, it is no accident that Western liberalism and the secular State emerged from the politico-religious matrix of medieval Church-State rivalry and the later division of Europe into Protestant and Catholic. Habermas himself is happy to admit the place of Christian theology in the genealogy of human rights, though he will not let Christians get too cocky over that. But, during the religious turn of the late twentieth century, we saw Catholicism provide a social framework within which opposition to Polish Communism could coalesce, and Islam throw back a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. States need strong religious groups to help protect citizens against the State itself, and perhaps also against themselves. Equally, of course, we have seen in some Catholic countries, notably Ireland, an institutional obliviousness towards horrific abuse arising out of excessive deference to spiritual power; and in some Muslim countries we see ferocious persecution of non-Muslims or ‘wrong’ Muslims, not to mention the systematic repression of women, through the implementation of sharia law. There is no doubt that religious groups need a strong and neutral State to protect them from each other, themselves, and their leaders, not to mention to protect society from the abuse of spiritual power.
It is a delicate balance. Emile certainly did not want to see the State return to making binding judgements between competing claims to religious truth. The State’s antennae are simply not tuned to that wavelength. Still less, however, did he want to see the secular State aspire to the sort of control over religion that was taken for granted in the confessional State. That, for him, was the hubris of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which brought nemesis, in the form of Napoleon, upon the French Revolution. Just as bad was the endeavour of the Liberal States a hundred years ago to displace religion by main force from its social position. Another version of that endeavour stretches its shadow over the modern State today, in the imposition by the State of a specific moral code upon the public sphere, and the drive to exclude from the public sphere anybody who refuses full assent to that code, which is widely confused with liberalism, but not in any sense identical with it. This is a political version of the Confessional Secularism which Brad Gregory has detected at work in the American academy, where, for example, Tor Egil Førland has argued for the exclusion of religious believers from academic work in universities; one might compare the suggestion by a professor of this university that Christian belief disqualifies its adherents from thinking about moral issues, and his call for them to ‘get back where they should be, on their knees’ – a clarion call for exclusion from the public sphere. Emile was a true liberal, taking liberalism as a system which leaves room in the State for those who do not think or feel in every way as the majority does. At the moment, to conclude, it is religion alone which prophetically reminds the majority that not everyone thinks the same way about everything.

DR PHILIPPE DE LARA - UNIVERSITE PANTHEON-ASSAS

EMILE'S QUEST ON RELIGION AND MODERN POLITICS

Emile Perreau Saussine’s death is a tragedy for his family and all those who loved him, and it is also a tragic loss for philosophy. We have carried on an ongoing conversation for 15 years, mainly on political and social philosophy. His faith and his belonging to the Catholic Church was a central fact of his life and thought. I am a secular Jew, and I might adopt the view Wittgenstein once expressed to his friend Drury: « I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing any problem from a religious point of view ». So we had a common standpoint in taking religion seriously, but in extremely different ways. Therefore our conversation on religion was relaxed, open, and yet restrained, discreet I would say: none of us ever tried in any way to convince the other of anything. Contrariwise to our discussions about social and political theory, primitive societies or about the assessment of Alasdair McIntyre’s and Charles Taylor’s compared merits: then we could have fierce arguments.
I would like to say a few words on his last finished book, Catholicisme et démocratie, just published in French, and forthcoming in English translation.
The issue at stake in the book is a classical one, and it is addressed to us in a rather straightforward way: is there a significant place for a religious institution like the Church in a secular age, and what can be now the meaning and function of such an institution ? These questions are answered not by asserted claims but through a historical narrative, of how the Catholic Church has been dealing with the modern democratic world, that is for the last two centuries. The issue must be understood not as about faith, or about the plausibility of this or that religious belief or maxim, but about the possibility and significance of a living and organised community, allow me to say boldly: the issue is about the social fact of the Church. There is a strong claim underlying and feeding this interrogation: the idea that a society without religion/ religious authority — if this is a sound description of what democratic and liberal societies intend to be — well such an idea, Emile thought, is at least unsatisfactory, probably not consistent and maybe dangerous. What is called « secularisation » does not consist in getting rid of religion, be it by its disappearance, or its becoming a strictly private matter, or through a kind of mitigation or trivialisation, in the sense Chesterton put it when he said: “the world nowadays is full of ancient Christian virtues who became mad” (sorry if I misquote, I translate from French).

I would like to highlight first some features of Emile’s style, of his tone of voice, because it may be a good way to get to the substance of his intentions.
Many if not most of the great modern catholic writers who addressed these issues could be labelled as of the imprecatory type. To my opinion, the greatest among them is a Briton, Gilbert K. Chesterton, but we French put up a good show with Bernanos, or the late Philippe Muray. Emile shares a lot with this tradition: his wit, his ironic perception, an instinctual diffidence and distance towards contemporary mores and values, sometime ferocious but without hatred. Yet he is by no means of the imprecatory type. All the opposite: his voice is dispassionate and confident. One could think: this was his character, liberal and lively, optimistic. Of course he was. Almost impossible to imagine him in anger. Yet, there is a paradox, a paradox I am sure he cultivated consciously, in his recasting a painful story, full of dissent and bitterness, inside the Church and between the Church and the world, in a rather peaceful narrative. He speaks in an even if not friendly way of nearly all the actors of this story, including the French revolutionaries. In the end, his refusal of the unreligious understanding of human freedom, of the idea that “autonomy” (that is the liberal idea of freedom) is self contained, is as firm and stubborn as that of the imprecators, but he does not pump up the volume. He seems to convert almost naturally the catholic feeling of alienation toward modernity into a positive leverage in the liberal world.

This is by no means the confidence of a dogmatic shepherd knowing with certainty where to lead his flock. His confidence lies rather in the idea than his doubts and quests as a Catholic will be audible and significant for outsiders. There is no doubt in his mind that readers can be interested and affected by the issue, whatever their faith or absence of faith. Therefore the surprising subtitle of the book, “A history of political thought”. One could find here a great conceit. Using such a phrase is part of Emile’s sense of humour, but he means it for real. He strongly insists that liberalism cannot escape not only the religious, but also the churchly dimension of the human condition, if I may say so. One does not have to agree with this conception of the centrality of the Church for modern politics to acknowledge a great achievement in it: Emile’s ability to speak at the same time for the inside and for the outside, to involve its reader in matters and conflict belonging to the history of the Catholic Church. This not of course by pretending that everybody is (or should be) catholic but, on the contrary, by modestly inviting the non members, that is the majority, to pay attention to what is happening in the club.

One could sum up the book by saying that it favours a kind of “liberal Ultramontanism”, which makes sense of Catholicism, again as a social fact and not as a personal faith, in the modern conditions of the separation of Church and State and of religious freedom. The city of man is made of the various nations; the city of God has to be distinct, even distant, and therefore organised in its proper form and space. The Church has lost and cannot claim for any “inner” authority within modern nations, but it has gained an “outer” authority, maybe higher and more authentic, thanks to and not despite religious freedom and separation of churches and State. But it would be unfair to Emile’s spirit to put it like this: first because his book is mostly a narrative, as I said, and second, because nothing is asserted in this book without qualification. Emile is in fact dealing with two ideas he does not pretend to put together easily to say the least: a) a Tocquevillian idea of the need for some unifying “pouvoir spirituel” in a democratic, that is individualistic, society (liberal freedom needs education, atomism must be reunited somehow); b) an Augustinian sense of the distinction between the two cities. What is then the city of God, what is the Church, if not (not anymore) a political body? Emile is confident in the possibility of a felicitous harmony between the Church as an institution and liberal society but, at the same time, he is worried about its appropriate form, which can be neither the iron of a kind of state apparatus, nor the elusive ether of inner religion. When he tells the story of balance and conflicts in history between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism under their various versions, he stresses that every position has its logic and its point, and each of them its flaws and even dangers. He is neither a Pope centered Catholic fighting against the idea of national autonomy of Churches, nor the opposite. Because neither the first view nor the second are solutions as such, rather branches of a quest for a solution. This seems rather paradoxical, given the fierceness of their opposition in history, and still nowadays.

Here is Emile’s basic contention:
“c’est peut-être la dépendance à l’égard du divin qui, en tempérant la tyrannie de la majorité, rend possible la liberté politique. La vie religieuse peut aller de pair avec une sagesse que la vie démocratique ne produit pas d’elle-même : une sagesse qui passe par la conscience des limites de l’autonomie humaine. »
“Maybe only the dependence on the divine can allow for political freedom, by moderating the tyranny of the majority. Religious life can go along with some kind of wisdom that democratic life cannot produce by itself: a wisdom aware of the limits of human autonomy.”

But this belief is in no way a political guideline for the Church, rather a puzzle, an unanswered question: what could be nowadays an institution faithful to this view of the “dependence on the divine”?

The most significant figure of the book is perhaps Lamennais, who precisely did not promoted always the same conception of Catholicism during his life and bridged various and opposed trends among Catholics, from the priority of the allegiance to the Pope, to the foundation of catholic socialism. Lamennais searched restlessly a third path beyond clerical hierarchy and beyond liberal individualism, and was influential by this search more than by his findings.

I shall conclude by suggesting that Emile’s book is important in that it could be considered as the outline of a new way of dealing with the issues of religion and democracy, a way which understands and responds to the end of the conflicting period of secularisation. A way relaxed and yet anxious and demanding, like our conversation. Otherwise put, I believe that his style in reconstructing the history of Catholic politics is not only personal and provocative, but very relevant for the present moment of democratic experience. No doubt he would have extended his insight to further inquiries: on Christians in politics, on civil religion, or on what is called inter-rreligious dialogue. Who knows? We shall have to continue the conversation by ourselves.