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The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God
One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing.
We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country's most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls's wake.
Nelson starts by noting that today's liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism--the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier "liberal" position and shows that Rawls's philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.
We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country's most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls's wake.
Nelson starts by noting that today's liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism--the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier "liberal" position and shows that Rawls's philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.
232 pages, Hardcover
Published October 15, 2019
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January 25, 2021
The primary division in contemporary liberal thought is that between “classical liberals” who prioritize negative liberty and the unconstrained autonomy of the individual person as a willful, free-choosing agent, and “progressive” or “social justice” liberals who view substantive inequality as the accidental byproduct of morally-arbitrary externalities and thus seek a political regime that corrects for these accidental inequalities through “distributive justice”, even if this comes at the expense of popular perceptions of autonomy or personal merit. To what extent can liberty (as understood by liberalism) and equality coexist? This is, of course, a very old and thorny dilemma.
In The Theology of Liberalism, Eric Nelson excavates the early-modern theological roots of liberal political philosophy, arguing that political liberalism developed in seventeenth-century England as an offshoot of a theological debate over the issue of theodicy: the effort to reconcile the existence of a benevolent God with a world plagued by evil and suffering. Protoliberal thinkers revivified the fifth-century confrontation between Augustine and Pelagius, who took radically opposing views on the moral agency of humanity and its relation to the reality of evil.
Pelagius argued for man’s absolute moral freedom, holding that since God is just, and it would be unjust to inflict evil on those who had done nothing to deserve it, evil must be the result of conscious, willful wrongdoing on the part of the individual. He even suggested that it was possible for human beings to earn their own salvation, and he minimized the role of divine grace in the salvific scheme in favor of human effort and initiative.
Augustine refuted Pelagius by arguing that his theology ignored the fundamental brokenness of the human race in light of original sin, and that his overemphasis on the ability of believers to justify themselves through self-directed works effectively rendered the incarnation—and, indeed, the whole salvation history of the Christian canon—irrelevant. What could Christ have saved us from, if we were perfectly capable of saving ourselves? Whereas Pelagius viewed sin as an action that people freely committed and then justly suffered the consequences for, Augustine saw humanity as the captive of sin: incapable of its own moral rectification and wholly reliant upon an externality—the grace of God—to which it can only give an affirmative response.
Augustine won the day in the fifth century; but in the seventeenth century, with the long struggle between the prerogatives of King and Parliament in the background, English theorists were compelled to confront the Pelagian/Augustinian dilemma in a newly political context. Parliamentarians justified their views by adapting a language of “representation”, developed by exegetes of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, for the political realm. Just as humanity, according to Augustine, inherited the guilty nature of Adam’s transgression and its accompanying consequences (without impugning the justice of God) because Adam was a representative “type” of the human race, parliamentarian political theorists argued that the legitimacy of a state was grounded in the body that—in theory, at least—represented the wider public; i.e., the parliament.
Royalists argued instead for an “authorization” theory of legitimacy, according to which representation or resemblance is irrelevant, and political legitimacy is grounded on those institutions—the monarchy as well as parliament—who are authorized by the state to act on its behalf. This view was predicated on a neo-Pelagian rejection of original sin: Adam could not have been acting as a stand-in for the human race when he fell, because he could not have been authorized by his as-yet-unborn progeny to represent them; just as parliament could not claim to be the supreme governing body of the state merely by its representational character without the affirmative authorization of the people.
Liberal thinkers like Hobbes and Locke relied upon the royalist and neo-Pelagian understanding of legitimacy in order to justify the individualist and contractarian underpinnings of their political philosophies. It may rightly be said that liberalism itself, with its prioritization of the autonomous, free-choosing subject as the mediator of political legitimacy, constitutes a modern recrudescence of the Pelagian heresy. Liberal theory had a coherent, if unorthodox, metaphysics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but its Pelagian basis was radically and unwittingly undermined by the twentieth century’s most influential work of liberal political philosophy: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice.
Rawls completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton in 1943 with the intention of attending seminary and becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church; but his military service in the Pacific theater of the Second World War caused him to lose his faith. His undergraduate thesis was an explicit Augustinian critique of the Pelagian view of human agency on the familiar grounds that any human potential for self-justification “rendered the cross of Christ to no effect.” Rawls rejected the very concepts of individual merit and desert as dangerous flirtations with self-idolization, instead viewing all human moral and creative capacities as external to human subjectivity (from God) rather than internal to it (as constitutive, unalienable “properties” of the individual himself).
Though Rawls’s explicit belief in Christianity did not survive the war, his crypto-Augustinian rejection of moral desert did; and it reappeared in secular form in one of the best-known concepts introduced in A Theory of Justice: that of moral arbitrariness. When considering the just distribution of social goods, individuals who have produced a greater share of that social surplus due to their conspicuous intellectual capacity, talent, creativity, personality traits, or even work ethic, are not morally entitled to a greater share of those social goods as a result, because the aforementioned characteristics that allowed them to produce this surplus were not themselves earned or deserved by the individuals in question. The distribution of productive capacities among a population, and the resulting productivity of the individuals who receive them, are thus “arbitrary from a moral point of view”; mere accidents of nature that the Rawlsian state, through the redistribution of social goods, is tasked with alleviating.
In this picture, the state, in seeking to account for the vagaries of nature and the inequalities it produces in the social order and to provide universal distributive justice, takes upon itself the role of divine grace. Needless to say, this marks a dramatic reversal of the neo-Pelagianism that informed liberalism’s forebears, according to which, in secular terms, the role of the state is to protect the liberty of the individual to succeed or fail on the basis of his own merits. It is unclear to Eric Nelson that the egalitarian Rawlsian/Augustinian model of distributive justice can coherently jibe with the libertarian, Pelagian ethos of individual autonomy. Though sympathetic to the Rawlsian model, Nelson contents that it cannot perfectly “translate” itself from the religious sphere to the secular one, if for no other reason than that the liberal state is not God, and is thus somewhat more epistemologically limited than the uncreated Author of All Things. The “Luck Egalitarian” disciples of Rawls will have to reconcile themselves with their theological forerunners if they wish to form a coherent moral basis for the substantive egalitarian justice they seek.
In The Theology of Liberalism, Eric Nelson excavates the early-modern theological roots of liberal political philosophy, arguing that political liberalism developed in seventeenth-century England as an offshoot of a theological debate over the issue of theodicy: the effort to reconcile the existence of a benevolent God with a world plagued by evil and suffering. Protoliberal thinkers revivified the fifth-century confrontation between Augustine and Pelagius, who took radically opposing views on the moral agency of humanity and its relation to the reality of evil.
Pelagius argued for man’s absolute moral freedom, holding that since God is just, and it would be unjust to inflict evil on those who had done nothing to deserve it, evil must be the result of conscious, willful wrongdoing on the part of the individual. He even suggested that it was possible for human beings to earn their own salvation, and he minimized the role of divine grace in the salvific scheme in favor of human effort and initiative.
Augustine refuted Pelagius by arguing that his theology ignored the fundamental brokenness of the human race in light of original sin, and that his overemphasis on the ability of believers to justify themselves through self-directed works effectively rendered the incarnation—and, indeed, the whole salvation history of the Christian canon—irrelevant. What could Christ have saved us from, if we were perfectly capable of saving ourselves? Whereas Pelagius viewed sin as an action that people freely committed and then justly suffered the consequences for, Augustine saw humanity as the captive of sin: incapable of its own moral rectification and wholly reliant upon an externality—the grace of God—to which it can only give an affirmative response.
Augustine won the day in the fifth century; but in the seventeenth century, with the long struggle between the prerogatives of King and Parliament in the background, English theorists were compelled to confront the Pelagian/Augustinian dilemma in a newly political context. Parliamentarians justified their views by adapting a language of “representation”, developed by exegetes of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, for the political realm. Just as humanity, according to Augustine, inherited the guilty nature of Adam’s transgression and its accompanying consequences (without impugning the justice of God) because Adam was a representative “type” of the human race, parliamentarian political theorists argued that the legitimacy of a state was grounded in the body that—in theory, at least—represented the wider public; i.e., the parliament.
Royalists argued instead for an “authorization” theory of legitimacy, according to which representation or resemblance is irrelevant, and political legitimacy is grounded on those institutions—the monarchy as well as parliament—who are authorized by the state to act on its behalf. This view was predicated on a neo-Pelagian rejection of original sin: Adam could not have been acting as a stand-in for the human race when he fell, because he could not have been authorized by his as-yet-unborn progeny to represent them; just as parliament could not claim to be the supreme governing body of the state merely by its representational character without the affirmative authorization of the people.
Liberal thinkers like Hobbes and Locke relied upon the royalist and neo-Pelagian understanding of legitimacy in order to justify the individualist and contractarian underpinnings of their political philosophies. It may rightly be said that liberalism itself, with its prioritization of the autonomous, free-choosing subject as the mediator of political legitimacy, constitutes a modern recrudescence of the Pelagian heresy. Liberal theory had a coherent, if unorthodox, metaphysics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but its Pelagian basis was radically and unwittingly undermined by the twentieth century’s most influential work of liberal political philosophy: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice.
Rawls completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton in 1943 with the intention of attending seminary and becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church; but his military service in the Pacific theater of the Second World War caused him to lose his faith. His undergraduate thesis was an explicit Augustinian critique of the Pelagian view of human agency on the familiar grounds that any human potential for self-justification “rendered the cross of Christ to no effect.” Rawls rejected the very concepts of individual merit and desert as dangerous flirtations with self-idolization, instead viewing all human moral and creative capacities as external to human subjectivity (from God) rather than internal to it (as constitutive, unalienable “properties” of the individual himself).
Though Rawls’s explicit belief in Christianity did not survive the war, his crypto-Augustinian rejection of moral desert did; and it reappeared in secular form in one of the best-known concepts introduced in A Theory of Justice: that of moral arbitrariness. When considering the just distribution of social goods, individuals who have produced a greater share of that social surplus due to their conspicuous intellectual capacity, talent, creativity, personality traits, or even work ethic, are not morally entitled to a greater share of those social goods as a result, because the aforementioned characteristics that allowed them to produce this surplus were not themselves earned or deserved by the individuals in question. The distribution of productive capacities among a population, and the resulting productivity of the individuals who receive them, are thus “arbitrary from a moral point of view”; mere accidents of nature that the Rawlsian state, through the redistribution of social goods, is tasked with alleviating.
In this picture, the state, in seeking to account for the vagaries of nature and the inequalities it produces in the social order and to provide universal distributive justice, takes upon itself the role of divine grace. Needless to say, this marks a dramatic reversal of the neo-Pelagianism that informed liberalism’s forebears, according to which, in secular terms, the role of the state is to protect the liberty of the individual to succeed or fail on the basis of his own merits. It is unclear to Eric Nelson that the egalitarian Rawlsian/Augustinian model of distributive justice can coherently jibe with the libertarian, Pelagian ethos of individual autonomy. Though sympathetic to the Rawlsian model, Nelson contents that it cannot perfectly “translate” itself from the religious sphere to the secular one, if for no other reason than that the liberal state is not God, and is thus somewhat more epistemologically limited than the uncreated Author of All Things. The “Luck Egalitarian” disciples of Rawls will have to reconcile themselves with their theological forerunners if they wish to form a coherent moral basis for the substantive egalitarian justice they seek.
August 30, 2021
The Theology of Liberalism by Eric Nelson
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
This book starts with a dive into the historical theological issue of Pelagianism and ends with a broadside leveling the dominant philosophical underpinnings of modern politics.
It is quite a ride.
Author Eric Nelson starts with the Protestant treatment of Pelagianism. Pelagianism is the theological doctrine that human effort can merit by itself the reward of salvation. In the fourth century, the great opponent of Pelagianism was St. Augustine who maintained that God's grace was pre-eminent in determining who was saved. According to Augustine, God would dispense that grace without necessary regard to human effort. This position becomes the substratum of orthodox Christianity. In Catholicism, no human could merit initial justification, albeit God would reward subsequent good works because of his essential justice. In some forms of magisterial Protestantism, everything was a matter of grace, and grace itself was a matter of predestination.
Nelson points out the quandary this left Christians in with respect to justice. If everything was a matter of predestination without regard to human action, then where was the justice in condemning some to Hell? Salvation and damnation become morally arbitrary. Accordingly, Pelagianism made a return in the thinking of what Nelson calls "protoliberals," such as John Milton, John Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant, who affirmed that God was just and assigned rewards based on deeds, rather than being morally arbitrary.
The ur-issue of justice and punishment involves the Fall and original sin. In what way is it just that Adam's descendants suffer for his sin? Calvinists adopted the position that humanity was represented by Adam in the Fall because his essence constituted a representation of humanity. This position was rejected by, inter alia, Locke. According to Nelson, the competing position was that humans were bound by what they actually agreed to, a position which became "liberalism." (p. 48.)
It seems a substantial leap to go from 17th-century political philosophy to modern politics, but the linkage is provided by the senior thesis of the leading political philosopher of the late 20th century, John Rawls. Rawls' senior thesis argued against Pelagianism by exploring the concept of moral arbitrariness. Rawls would come to lose his faith in Christianity and become a strong advocate against moral arbitrariness.
Nelson discusses the powerful modern philosophical position known as "luck egalitarians." In essence, luck egalitarians argue that every inherited social difference is "morally arbitrary." An heir did nothing to earn his inheritance. In fact, at its logical extreme, every difference is morally arbitrary since all differences are based on inherited personality traits and therefore morally arbitrary. If you work hard and become wealthy by your hard work, your wealth is "morally arbitrary" because you simply had the good fortune to have the genes or upbringing that made you a hard worker.
This position is clearly the beating heart of Socialism. If everything possessed by anyone is only theirs in a morally arbitrary sense, then how can they complain about rectifying the injustice of inequality - taking for granted, as we must in modern liberalism, that inequality is unjust - by donating their excess to those who can make the grand adjustment to equality? It is equally clear from this that Socialism is essentially totalitarian; it denies that there can be any possible competing view: everything possessed by anyone, money, good lucks, intelligence, integrity, etc. is not really theirs but only accidentally theirs by way of a morally arbitrary distribution of fortune.
Rawls was, of course, a prime exponent of something like this view with his argument about the "original position." In Rawls' view, people pre-exist in an original state as essentially fungible entities without property, status, parents, identity, or character. They choose in this original position to a just system that will leave everyone equal unless the inequality makes the worst-off better off.
Nelson takes a leaf from debates about theodicy during the 17th-century to deconstruct "luck egalitarianism." Theodicy is the term for Christian approaches to explain how a just and loving God can permit evil to happen in the world. Nelson argues that proponents of the argument that the existence of evil must show that there is no possible way the amount of evil in the world as it exists to be inconsistent with the maximum goodness in the world. This is impossible because we do not have a Godlike perspective. For all we know, our present world may be the best of all possible worlds.
Nelson applies this insight to luck egalitarianism. Luck egalitarianism treats the distribution of assets, resources, and benefits as a "cosmic lottery." However, while egalitarianism assumes that equality is the first virtue, even egalitarians must acknowledge that some differences enrich everyone. For example, having one supergenius among the population is better than having a population of average dull people. So, luck egalitarians find themselves in the same position as anti-theists, namely, they cannot show that the current distribution of wealth, resources, assets are unjust because, for all they know, the current distribution might be the only just distribution.
Nelson's arguments reach further than I can essay here, but this is an amazing book. Nelson has exposed the seams of modern totalitarian liberals and deconstructed them. Nelson deserves kudos for bravery in this censorious period in intellectual history.
Nelson goes on to undermine the modern fascination with restitution for various historical crimes. As a philosophical proposition, Nelson notes that there is no end to historical injustice. One might argue from this that picking one group as the beneficiary of restitution for past injustice is itself "morally arbitrary." But further, given the dynamics of history and society, there is no neat way of identifying the oppressors from the oppressed. Intermarriage and social mobility quickly moot any such distinction.
This is a fascinating book. It is something of a work of stealthiness. Nelson never comes out and reveals that he is engaged in a subversive attack on the dominant philosophy of modern political science and philosophy departments. It is also incredibly important at this time.
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
This book starts with a dive into the historical theological issue of Pelagianism and ends with a broadside leveling the dominant philosophical underpinnings of modern politics.
It is quite a ride.
Author Eric Nelson starts with the Protestant treatment of Pelagianism. Pelagianism is the theological doctrine that human effort can merit by itself the reward of salvation. In the fourth century, the great opponent of Pelagianism was St. Augustine who maintained that God's grace was pre-eminent in determining who was saved. According to Augustine, God would dispense that grace without necessary regard to human effort. This position becomes the substratum of orthodox Christianity. In Catholicism, no human could merit initial justification, albeit God would reward subsequent good works because of his essential justice. In some forms of magisterial Protestantism, everything was a matter of grace, and grace itself was a matter of predestination.
Nelson points out the quandary this left Christians in with respect to justice. If everything was a matter of predestination without regard to human action, then where was the justice in condemning some to Hell? Salvation and damnation become morally arbitrary. Accordingly, Pelagianism made a return in the thinking of what Nelson calls "protoliberals," such as John Milton, John Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant, who affirmed that God was just and assigned rewards based on deeds, rather than being morally arbitrary.
The ur-issue of justice and punishment involves the Fall and original sin. In what way is it just that Adam's descendants suffer for his sin? Calvinists adopted the position that humanity was represented by Adam in the Fall because his essence constituted a representation of humanity. This position was rejected by, inter alia, Locke. According to Nelson, the competing position was that humans were bound by what they actually agreed to, a position which became "liberalism." (p. 48.)
It seems a substantial leap to go from 17th-century political philosophy to modern politics, but the linkage is provided by the senior thesis of the leading political philosopher of the late 20th century, John Rawls. Rawls' senior thesis argued against Pelagianism by exploring the concept of moral arbitrariness. Rawls would come to lose his faith in Christianity and become a strong advocate against moral arbitrariness.
Nelson discusses the powerful modern philosophical position known as "luck egalitarians." In essence, luck egalitarians argue that every inherited social difference is "morally arbitrary." An heir did nothing to earn his inheritance. In fact, at its logical extreme, every difference is morally arbitrary since all differences are based on inherited personality traits and therefore morally arbitrary. If you work hard and become wealthy by your hard work, your wealth is "morally arbitrary" because you simply had the good fortune to have the genes or upbringing that made you a hard worker.
This position is clearly the beating heart of Socialism. If everything possessed by anyone is only theirs in a morally arbitrary sense, then how can they complain about rectifying the injustice of inequality - taking for granted, as we must in modern liberalism, that inequality is unjust - by donating their excess to those who can make the grand adjustment to equality? It is equally clear from this that Socialism is essentially totalitarian; it denies that there can be any possible competing view: everything possessed by anyone, money, good lucks, intelligence, integrity, etc. is not really theirs but only accidentally theirs by way of a morally arbitrary distribution of fortune.
Rawls was, of course, a prime exponent of something like this view with his argument about the "original position." In Rawls' view, people pre-exist in an original state as essentially fungible entities without property, status, parents, identity, or character. They choose in this original position to a just system that will leave everyone equal unless the inequality makes the worst-off better off.
Nelson takes a leaf from debates about theodicy during the 17th-century to deconstruct "luck egalitarianism." Theodicy is the term for Christian approaches to explain how a just and loving God can permit evil to happen in the world. Nelson argues that proponents of the argument that the existence of evil must show that there is no possible way the amount of evil in the world as it exists to be inconsistent with the maximum goodness in the world. This is impossible because we do not have a Godlike perspective. For all we know, our present world may be the best of all possible worlds.
Nelson applies this insight to luck egalitarianism. Luck egalitarianism treats the distribution of assets, resources, and benefits as a "cosmic lottery." However, while egalitarianism assumes that equality is the first virtue, even egalitarians must acknowledge that some differences enrich everyone. For example, having one supergenius among the population is better than having a population of average dull people. So, luck egalitarians find themselves in the same position as anti-theists, namely, they cannot show that the current distribution of wealth, resources, assets are unjust because, for all they know, the current distribution might be the only just distribution.
Nelson's arguments reach further than I can essay here, but this is an amazing book. Nelson has exposed the seams of modern totalitarian liberals and deconstructed them. Nelson deserves kudos for bravery in this censorious period in intellectual history.
Nelson goes on to undermine the modern fascination with restitution for various historical crimes. As a philosophical proposition, Nelson notes that there is no end to historical injustice. One might argue from this that picking one group as the beneficiary of restitution for past injustice is itself "morally arbitrary." But further, given the dynamics of history and society, there is no neat way of identifying the oppressors from the oppressed. Intermarriage and social mobility quickly moot any such distinction.
This is a fascinating book. It is something of a work of stealthiness. Nelson never comes out and reveals that he is engaged in a subversive attack on the dominant philosophy of modern political science and philosophy departments. It is also incredibly important at this time.
July 25, 2023
Disclaimer: this is a review of a freely received advanced review copy. I did not receive the copy from the publisher, but, still.
In The Theology of Liberalism, Eric Nelson grounds the tradition of dignitarian liberalism in the religious debates of early modern political theorists. Rather than treating the theological arguments of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke as supplementary, he demonstrates that they were core to their thinking—and claims that Rawls’ theory of egalitarian liberalism and its descendants are untenable given their differing theological basis.
Nelson begins his genealogy in Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue. The dialogue poses the question: are good deeds intrinsically holy, and thus the gods love them, or do they derive their worth from divine love? For Christianity, the dilemma is whether morals are whatever God chooses, or if morals are good in themselves. The first opens God up to the charge of tyranny: if he creates morals arbitrarily, it would be tyrannical for him to reward and punish us for our conformity to them. It seems unjust to condemn sinners to eternal damnation for the mere crime of non-conformity with his will. On the other hand, pre-existing morals threaten his omnipotence. Additionally, if it’s the latter, and God is perfectly just, why is there suffering on Earth and why are some damned to eternal Hell?
Pelagius, writing in the 5th century, claimed that humans have free will and the capacity to avoid sin. This is not an empirical claim, but rather an inference from God’s perfection. As Leibniz postulates in the Theodicy, if 1. God exists, 2. he is perfectly just, 3. he punishes sinners, and 4. it is unjust to punish someone for a sin they did not choose to commit, then 5. humans must have free will. This resolved the Euthrypho dilemma—if we freely choose sin, then God is not tyrannical in condemning sinners to damnation. Additionally, suffering on Earth can be explained as the result of us living in the best possible world consistent with human freedom. We have the capacity to cause and experience suffering, but this enables us to achieve the “virtuous conquest of instinct.” As Kant writes in his Lectures, “[Man] can perhaps raise himself above a whole host of will-less angels, but he may also degrade himself so that he sinks even below the irrational animals.”
Nelson claims that Locke, Milton, Kant, and other major thinkers aligned themselves with Pelagianism, both in their theological work and in their political theory. Some liberals, like J. S. Mill, justify rights on the grounds that they raise utility, while others assert that we are too depraved to be trusted with control over others; however, Nelson claims that the dignitarian tradition derives its justifications for rights directly from Pelagianism. For Locke, Kant, and Rousseau, religion is, to some degree, accessible through intuition and reason, as it would be unjust to punish a person for rules they don’t know to follow. In addition, piety only has merit if it is freely given: as Milton claims, God has no use for “obedience paid, / When will and reason (reason also is choice) / Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled / Made passive both, had served necessity, / Not me.” Therefore, toleration and the right of freedom of religion are compelled.
Pelagianism is a heresy, though, because if we have the capacity to avoid sin, and can merit salvation through our deeds, the crucifixion becomes superfluous. To rebut Pelagianism, Augustine turned to humanity’s Original Sin. In his formulation, we are essentially sinners, and unable to earn salvation without divine providence. This re-raises the question, though: how can we be punished if we cannot but sin, if it is our nature? If our lack of freedom, our inability to merit salvation, is a punishment for Adam’s sin, then that too undermine’s God’s justice. On what grounds should Adam’s descendants be punished for a sin committed generations before their birth?
These questions lead to another key context for the foundations of liberal theory: the English Civil War. The war was fought between supporters of the monarchy (cavaliers) and of parliament (roundheads) over the authority of the king over parliament, and ended with the execution of Charles I and a greatly restrained monarchy. In the lead-up to and during the war, each side claimed that they were the legitimate representative of the people, repurposing theological claims to that end.
Parliamentarians claimed authority based on the body’s plural nature: they claimed that a larger body more accurately resembled the nation (despite the fact that the vast majority of citizens had no formal political voice.) This was also the claim made by Calvinists and Augustine, who claimed that God justly assigned Adam’s sin to the rest of humanity based on his resemblance—his essential sameness—to his progeny. In this view, Adam was a “common person,” as was Christ, whose assumption of human form is an essential aspect of the crucifixion.
Royalists rejected any idea of likeness being necessary. Locke grounded his rejection of original sin on an authorization theory of representation, where humanity does not inherit Adam’s crime because we did not, ourselves, authorize it. As both the king and parliament received implicit authorization from the people, their respective resemblances were irrelevant. Hobbes, too, claims that “no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave.” Hobbes also claimed that Christ entered into a fideiussio, a surety where the debtor remains liable until their sponsor has paid their debts, with humanity, rather than assuming their sins as a “common person.” However, Hobbes also believed in deterministic human behavior, where people are driven by their appetites and aversions. He was able to square these beliefs because he was not, like other proto-liberals, a voluntarist: he took the former side of the Euthyphro debate. In his view (a view echoed in Leviathan,) Adam did not represent us, but God could afflict us for any reason and still remain perfectly just.
Locke aligned himself with the royalist, anti-Calvinist view of representation, but he was politically a supporter of parliament. His writings endorsed representative assemblies, and legislative supremacy, but he ultimately did assert that a populace could choose to grant decision-making power to a single person. Nelson argues that this muddle, and the conclusion that legitimacy rests not on what a person would have but on what they actually have agreed to, is the foundation of liberalism.
More than 200 years after Locke’s death, John Rawls revived social contract theory with his monumental A Theory of Justice. In it, Rawls uses the device of a “veil of ignorance” to derive the principles members of a society would choose if they had no idea where in that society they belonged—what their wealth, skills, or other traits would be. In contrast to the above theorists, Rawls was an anti-Pelagian Christian, and though he ultimately rejected Christianity, Nelson claims it underpinned his belief in moral arbitrariness. In his recently uncovered undergraduate thesis, Rawls wrote (using the language of Marx’s On the Jewish Question) on the “bargain basis” of Pelagnianism.
For Rawls, the Pelagian idea that humans can earn salvation leads to an unjustifiable transactional morality, and ultimately cannot be true due to its rejection of Christ. He denies the legalism that “construct[s] the Cross as a new law and a new rule to be obeyed and rewarded.” Rather, Rawls believes in universal election: that none of us “merit” salvation, but that God saves us regardless. (It would also be just if God saved none of us.) Rawls does not adopt a Calvinist stance, in which we are unconditionally elected, but our faith is a minor, exiguous factor.
His theory follows this theodicy. According to his principles of justice, people should not be able to merit the inegalitarian prizes that capitalism gives them today, but criminals should still be subject to retributive justice. That good acts should not be rewarded but bad acts should be punished seems contradictory, but this, Rawls says, is a fallacy. Retributive justice is not the opposite of distributive justice, and cannot be judged on the same terms. This can be understood as the doctrine of Original Sin. Our sins are reflections of our essential deformity, while our good acts are derived from circumstance; merit is not entirely given, but it is enabled by grace. For Nelson, “The point is not that the mature Rawls continued to accept the doctrine of original sin, but rather that he continued to write and think as if he did.”
I have no grounding in theology and am taking Nelson at his word about all of the above connections (though I have no reason to suspect they are anything but sound.) He goes on to use the claim that Rawls’ theory is rooted in anti-Pelagianism to attack the foundations of luck egalitarianism, which I am not currently inclined to wade into; I was less convinced by the proceeding chapters than the ones summarized above. That said, the book is clearly and forcefully argued and provides a fascinating genealogy of liberalism, from Plato to Rawls, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in early modern political theory.
In The Theology of Liberalism, Eric Nelson grounds the tradition of dignitarian liberalism in the religious debates of early modern political theorists. Rather than treating the theological arguments of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke as supplementary, he demonstrates that they were core to their thinking—and claims that Rawls’ theory of egalitarian liberalism and its descendants are untenable given their differing theological basis.
Nelson begins his genealogy in Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue. The dialogue poses the question: are good deeds intrinsically holy, and thus the gods love them, or do they derive their worth from divine love? For Christianity, the dilemma is whether morals are whatever God chooses, or if morals are good in themselves. The first opens God up to the charge of tyranny: if he creates morals arbitrarily, it would be tyrannical for him to reward and punish us for our conformity to them. It seems unjust to condemn sinners to eternal damnation for the mere crime of non-conformity with his will. On the other hand, pre-existing morals threaten his omnipotence. Additionally, if it’s the latter, and God is perfectly just, why is there suffering on Earth and why are some damned to eternal Hell?
Pelagius, writing in the 5th century, claimed that humans have free will and the capacity to avoid sin. This is not an empirical claim, but rather an inference from God’s perfection. As Leibniz postulates in the Theodicy, if 1. God exists, 2. he is perfectly just, 3. he punishes sinners, and 4. it is unjust to punish someone for a sin they did not choose to commit, then 5. humans must have free will. This resolved the Euthrypho dilemma—if we freely choose sin, then God is not tyrannical in condemning sinners to damnation. Additionally, suffering on Earth can be explained as the result of us living in the best possible world consistent with human freedom. We have the capacity to cause and experience suffering, but this enables us to achieve the “virtuous conquest of instinct.” As Kant writes in his Lectures, “[Man] can perhaps raise himself above a whole host of will-less angels, but he may also degrade himself so that he sinks even below the irrational animals.”
Nelson claims that Locke, Milton, Kant, and other major thinkers aligned themselves with Pelagianism, both in their theological work and in their political theory. Some liberals, like J. S. Mill, justify rights on the grounds that they raise utility, while others assert that we are too depraved to be trusted with control over others; however, Nelson claims that the dignitarian tradition derives its justifications for rights directly from Pelagianism. For Locke, Kant, and Rousseau, religion is, to some degree, accessible through intuition and reason, as it would be unjust to punish a person for rules they don’t know to follow. In addition, piety only has merit if it is freely given: as Milton claims, God has no use for “obedience paid, / When will and reason (reason also is choice) / Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled / Made passive both, had served necessity, / Not me.” Therefore, toleration and the right of freedom of religion are compelled.
Pelagianism is a heresy, though, because if we have the capacity to avoid sin, and can merit salvation through our deeds, the crucifixion becomes superfluous. To rebut Pelagianism, Augustine turned to humanity’s Original Sin. In his formulation, we are essentially sinners, and unable to earn salvation without divine providence. This re-raises the question, though: how can we be punished if we cannot but sin, if it is our nature? If our lack of freedom, our inability to merit salvation, is a punishment for Adam’s sin, then that too undermine’s God’s justice. On what grounds should Adam’s descendants be punished for a sin committed generations before their birth?
These questions lead to another key context for the foundations of liberal theory: the English Civil War. The war was fought between supporters of the monarchy (cavaliers) and of parliament (roundheads) over the authority of the king over parliament, and ended with the execution of Charles I and a greatly restrained monarchy. In the lead-up to and during the war, each side claimed that they were the legitimate representative of the people, repurposing theological claims to that end.
Parliamentarians claimed authority based on the body’s plural nature: they claimed that a larger body more accurately resembled the nation (despite the fact that the vast majority of citizens had no formal political voice.) This was also the claim made by Calvinists and Augustine, who claimed that God justly assigned Adam’s sin to the rest of humanity based on his resemblance—his essential sameness—to his progeny. In this view, Adam was a “common person,” as was Christ, whose assumption of human form is an essential aspect of the crucifixion.
Royalists rejected any idea of likeness being necessary. Locke grounded his rejection of original sin on an authorization theory of representation, where humanity does not inherit Adam’s crime because we did not, ourselves, authorize it. As both the king and parliament received implicit authorization from the people, their respective resemblances were irrelevant. Hobbes, too, claims that “no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave.” Hobbes also claimed that Christ entered into a fideiussio, a surety where the debtor remains liable until their sponsor has paid their debts, with humanity, rather than assuming their sins as a “common person.” However, Hobbes also believed in deterministic human behavior, where people are driven by their appetites and aversions. He was able to square these beliefs because he was not, like other proto-liberals, a voluntarist: he took the former side of the Euthyphro debate. In his view (a view echoed in Leviathan,) Adam did not represent us, but God could afflict us for any reason and still remain perfectly just.
Locke aligned himself with the royalist, anti-Calvinist view of representation, but he was politically a supporter of parliament. His writings endorsed representative assemblies, and legislative supremacy, but he ultimately did assert that a populace could choose to grant decision-making power to a single person. Nelson argues that this muddle, and the conclusion that legitimacy rests not on what a person would have but on what they actually have agreed to, is the foundation of liberalism.
More than 200 years after Locke’s death, John Rawls revived social contract theory with his monumental A Theory of Justice. In it, Rawls uses the device of a “veil of ignorance” to derive the principles members of a society would choose if they had no idea where in that society they belonged—what their wealth, skills, or other traits would be. In contrast to the above theorists, Rawls was an anti-Pelagian Christian, and though he ultimately rejected Christianity, Nelson claims it underpinned his belief in moral arbitrariness. In his recently uncovered undergraduate thesis, Rawls wrote (using the language of Marx’s On the Jewish Question) on the “bargain basis” of Pelagnianism.
For Rawls, the Pelagian idea that humans can earn salvation leads to an unjustifiable transactional morality, and ultimately cannot be true due to its rejection of Christ. He denies the legalism that “construct[s] the Cross as a new law and a new rule to be obeyed and rewarded.” Rather, Rawls believes in universal election: that none of us “merit” salvation, but that God saves us regardless. (It would also be just if God saved none of us.) Rawls does not adopt a Calvinist stance, in which we are unconditionally elected, but our faith is a minor, exiguous factor.
His theory follows this theodicy. According to his principles of justice, people should not be able to merit the inegalitarian prizes that capitalism gives them today, but criminals should still be subject to retributive justice. That good acts should not be rewarded but bad acts should be punished seems contradictory, but this, Rawls says, is a fallacy. Retributive justice is not the opposite of distributive justice, and cannot be judged on the same terms. This can be understood as the doctrine of Original Sin. Our sins are reflections of our essential deformity, while our good acts are derived from circumstance; merit is not entirely given, but it is enabled by grace. For Nelson, “The point is not that the mature Rawls continued to accept the doctrine of original sin, but rather that he continued to write and think as if he did.”
I have no grounding in theology and am taking Nelson at his word about all of the above connections (though I have no reason to suspect they are anything but sound.) He goes on to use the claim that Rawls’ theory is rooted in anti-Pelagianism to attack the foundations of luck egalitarianism, which I am not currently inclined to wade into; I was less convinced by the proceeding chapters than the ones summarized above. That said, the book is clearly and forcefully argued and provides a fascinating genealogy of liberalism, from Plato to Rawls, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in early modern political theory.
June 24, 2021
This is one of the best pieces of theologically informed political theory I have read in some time. That it is theologically informed comes right in the preface, when the author asserts that doing political theory and doing theology are, properly understood, one in the same. He goes to offer a critique of distributive justice that's grounded in observing that common liberal conceptions of justice--primarily Rawls'--derive from classical theodicy debates (i.e., Arminianism, Pelagianism, Augustinian/Calvinist, and their derivatives). Well worth the time and effort.
February 28, 2020
Started strong but forgets about theology about a third of the way through and just turns into a discussion of liberalism. Also somehow never cites Carl Schmitt or discusses the theoretical underpinnings of political theology.
November 4, 2022
"El gran error ha sido suponer que una distribución igualitaria de recursos está dictada por "la justicia distributiva", ya sea porque la ventaja no ganada o no merecida es injusta, o porque el carácter cooperativo de la empresa social requiere una división igual del producto social, o porque la tierra debió haber sido dada a la humanidad en común"
Nelson intervene en un debate que se ha dado en los últimas décadas en el pensamiento político liberal anglófono: el de si el liberalismo debe tomar la vida de la libertad negativa de la mera ausencia de restricción, o un modelo distributivo que apueste por nivelar las desigualdades existentes, y demuestra su raíz en un debate teológico más profundo sobre sí estamos determinados por el pecado original, o si somos entes totalmente capaces de decidir y actuar libremente.
No me gusta el tipo de filosofía que se basa en el mero abstracto y la hipótesis, en lugar del análisis concreto, real e histórico de cómo llegó a ser nuestra realidad. Sin embargo, es interesante la exposición de estas diatribas innecesarias del pensamiento que no trasciende sus límites impuestos.
Nelson intervene en un debate que se ha dado en los últimas décadas en el pensamiento político liberal anglófono: el de si el liberalismo debe tomar la vida de la libertad negativa de la mera ausencia de restricción, o un modelo distributivo que apueste por nivelar las desigualdades existentes, y demuestra su raíz en un debate teológico más profundo sobre sí estamos determinados por el pecado original, o si somos entes totalmente capaces de decidir y actuar libremente.
No me gusta el tipo de filosofía que se basa en el mero abstracto y la hipótesis, en lugar del análisis concreto, real e histórico de cómo llegó a ser nuestra realidad. Sin embargo, es interesante la exposición de estas diatribas innecesarias del pensamiento que no trasciende sus límites impuestos.
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