On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Francisco Unger looks at John Milbank’s “Liberality versus Liberalism,” from Telos 134 (Spring 2006).
John Milbank’s article “Liberality and Liberalism,” as evidenced by its suggestive title, pulls some of the conventional punches. There is a dichotomy between the values of the Enlightenment-affected liberal mindset and the real turnout of liberal institutions. Crass egotism in the market, chilled international relations, and a profaned life for the individual are the fruits of a social model that bases itself on supposedly “natural” conditions of humanity and utility. The unconventional part of Milbank’s critique rests precisely in his religious foundations. He wants a revival, or perhaps the birth, of radical social criticism based on Catholic theology. There is probably some ire to Milbank’s voice, because he is challenging a liberalism that thought it had put such religious dissidence to rest—therein the “liberality” of the marketplace, in which all are accommodated and all space is taken over. But Milbank believes post-Enlightenment efforts for reform based on secular grounds have mostly come to naught. Looking around in the present day, the reader is likely sympathetic. The entrance of divine grace into human life, the Christian guiding light of charity, and the notion of an exchange of gifts as the only fair exchange (non-exploitative), are all solutions to our unhappy liberal aporia. At least that is Milbank’s story.
Michael Marder’s 
