June 13, 2022
DC Schindler’s Books Realpolitik: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism This is one of the richest strands in ongoing Catholic debates about liberalism, political power, the common good, and the relationship between church and state.
Schindler develops a subtle and persuasive argument for why liberalism is an “evil political form,” one that consists in rejecting the Jewish-Greco-Roman unity embodied in Christian forms, specifically the Catholic Church.
Liberalism creates the situation described by comedian Steven Wright: “Last night, someone broke into my apartment and replaced everything with an exact copy.” Liberalism embraces aspects of the Western tradition, but it is based on radically different grounds and its vision of reality is fragmented. Even when liberalism claims to embrace religious traditions, it does so only by rethinking religion as merely an object of individual choice, that is, as precisely non-traditional.
However, Schindler goes beyond simply criticizing liberalism; he presents a profound and beautiful ontology of social order and a somewhat different model of church-state relations from that proposed by Catholic integralists.
Schindler joins the podcast to discuss the book, including topics such as:
- To oppose illiberal philosophy as “unrealistic” is to reject human beings as rational creatures.
- The false claim of liberalism’s neutrality (or non-religion)
- “Forms of Christianity” and Their Fragmentation
- Why Liberalism is an Evil Political Form
- 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 all traditions of “making space”
- The problem with distinguishing between “civil society” and the state
- Why wealth plays a central role in understanding the relationship between the individual and society
link
https://newpolity.com/new-polity-press-titles/the-politics-of-the-real
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