Sadeian liberalism

Milbank, summarizing and critiquing the work of Pierre Manent, suggests that “there was, from Machiavelli through Hobbes to Montesquieu and Hegel, a bias toward the primacy of evil.” Honoring good was “the everyday unexceptional reality,” but not “the normative defining one.” Instead, what was considered defining was “the exceptional suspension of normality in the moment of crisis that reveals a deeper truth and on that basis makes founding civil gestures.” The truth is evident especially in “circumstances of pure anarchy and of threat to the city or its rulers; then evil assumes priority preciously in the face of violence. All lies, subterfuges, and resorts to counterviolence then become justified.” Manent, Milbank notes, “is the only liberal I have read who admits that liberalism is at bottom Sadeian and Satanic.”

Putting this together with the previous post, it’s curious how Milbank’s description of liberalism connects to Calvinism. On the one hand, liberalism is voluntarist, which Milbank (not accurately, in my judgment) claims is also true of Calvin. Yet, the voluntas that is central to liberalism is the free will of the individual human; liberalism is thus anti-Calvinist. Yet, liberalism also picks up the Calvinist theme of depravity, though isolated from Calvinist emphasis on grace, special and common. Liberalism, on Milbank’s description, is a mosaic constructed of incoherent fragments of Calvinism and anti-Calvinism.