Markus wants to distinguish between the fact that people who act in the public realm always act with ultimate ends in view, and that their actions are either moral or immoral from the notion that there is a neutral public space. The public sphere, he claims, shouldn’t be thought of as “the sum of a multiplicity or a fabric woven of many actions by many people.” Rather, for Markus’s Augustine, the public sphere is “much less personal,” and consists of “practices, customs, institutions.” To be sure, they “may be the cumulative effect of long sequences of human action, shaped by collective behavior over many generations, routinised or institutionalised over time. They have come to form a complex which now helps to shape and condition human action and behaviour, but they determine it no more - and no less - than a language determines what we say in it.”
This is helpful, but it is hard to see how it yields a “neutral” public space. If the institutions and practices of a political community shape action, they shape it in a particular way, toward particular virtues, and away from others. As soon as a practice or custom takes form, that discriminates against alternative practices or customs. How is that neutrality?
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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