Red Toryism and the Case of the Lost Revolution

Abstract

This article explores the theological commitments of Red Toryism through an engagement with the work of Phillip Blond and John Milbank. Investigating the notion of the common good in Red Toryism from ecclesiological and ecological perspectives, and making a comparison with the "long revolution" proposed by Raymond Williams, I argue that Red Toryism misses the theological potential of the long revolution. Losing this revolution presses theology without warrant towards an unnecessarily conservative construal of civil society.     

Religion and Politics in the Philippines: The Public Role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Democratization of the Filipino Polity

Abstract

From a social-ethical point of view, an appalling lack of a sense of common good continues to haunt Philippine political life even after the restoration of democracy through the 1986 People Power revolution. Our study contends that it is mainly caused by a polity that does not allow for a participatory deliberation and envisioning of the common good and a political culture that is not nurturing but hindering the collective and institutional commitment for it. While the Roman Catholic Church has been partly responsible for this democratic deficit, it nevertheless remains a social force with a moral high ground for political transformation, if it is able to change its social location and re-invent its social mission. A self-critical Filipino church whose base ecclesial communities are inserted like leaven in civil society holds the most important key to the democratization of Philippine polity and culture in the light of the Gospel.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

China,Natural Resources,Sovereignty and International Law

Abstract

This article explores China’s attitudes towards the regulation of key natural resources by international law, domestically and at the trans-boundary and international levels. It considers the impact of international law on China’s own practices, and the contribution of China towards shaping international law. The article suggests that popular conceptions of a relatively isolated, sovereign absolutist China do not accord with contemporary legal realities, including in its dealings with natural resources. While China’s construction of strong sovereignty shapes its attitudes towards legal regulation, practice also suggests that China adopts a nuanced approach which includes legal compromise, and a commitment to multilateral regulation or bilateral diplomatic settlement of issues previously within the competence of national governments. China is often an active and constructive participant in contemporary law-making, even if – like all countries – it also seeks to instrumentally use international law.     

The Reward of a King: Machiavelli,Aquinas, and Shakespeare's Richard III

Abstract

Richard III centers on the rise and fall of a man who claims that he will “set the murderous Machiavel to school” and proceeds to seize the crown of England, only to lose his grip on that coveted prize in his own sudden personal and political unraveling. Insofar as we see Richard as a genuine but failed Machiavellian, it remains difficult to determine the extent to which Shakespeare's critique of Richard is a critique of Machiavelli. Yet Shakespeare's account of Richard's hopes, successes, and failures, examined in light of relevant classical texts, points to fatal flaws in Machiavelli's account of reason, conscience, and the end of human actions, demonstrating that the concept of the objective good is an essential component of any meaningful and coherent account of human action. Thus, Richard's ultimate descent into madness is a sign of the fate that even the “best” Machiavellian statesman or society is destined to share.     

Law,Principle, and the Theologico-Political History of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the possibility of political theology within Christianity, and in response, offers a conceptual-historical portrait of sovereignty and its juridical dimensions. Beginning with the introduction of Roman law into the medieval Church, the article traces the logic of “legal principle” as the basis of sovereign decision and how the form of legal distinctions adopted into canon law translate the Romanitas of law into the theory of papal sovereignty. By the Romanitas of law, that is to say the principle of sovereignty in law. The article then seeks to describe the conceptual translations of Roman politics and Stoic metaphysics into theological form and the logic of this translation into medieval natural law. The article concludes by evaluating how the civic theology of Rome is conceptually inherited by the politics and legal framework of sovereignty and returns to Peterson’s critique of Schmitt, arguing that political theology can be understood as a dynamic where politics is theologized, assuming that in the history of religion, theology and politics are never fully distinct to begin with.