Hauerwas on “Radical Democracy”

Stanley Hauerwas gave an interesting paper offering a Christian defense of “Radical Democracy.” He covered some of the work of John Howard Yoder, who on Hauerwas’ reading is by no means politically quietist, albeit he is a pacifist. The most interesting portion of the lecture, though, was Hauerwas’ summary of the work of Sheldon Wolin regarding the contribution that Christianity made to political thought. According to Wolin, Plato was the first to raise the question of political life as a whole, but Plato urged his readers away from the contingency and messy temporality of political life to the philosophical life of contemplation of the forms. Because of time, human politics is inevitably a tragic affair, and the best that one can do is make sure that we don’t get our hopes up too high. Empire, on Wolin’s reading, is the political form of this Platonic escape from temporality, for it attempts to close down the give and take of political life by imposing an imperium sine fine . Rawls can be seen as the great modern theorist in this tradition, an attempt to erase time, memory, contingency, and particularity from political life and theory (think of Rawls’ hypothetical “original position” in which we are asked to construct a political system under a “veil of ignorance” concerning our standing in society, apart from the fact that we are self-interested rational beings) . Hauerwas noted that Rawls’ theory ignores the fact that the fact of birthright, the fact that we are born into traditions and into communities with shared memories. This effort Wolin describes as “liberalism,” whereas he is an advocate of “democracy,” which apparently is a very different thing.