Thomism – Infrapolitical Reflections

One of the merits of Sandor Agócs’ The troubled origins of the Italian Catholic Labor Movement (1988) is located on the question of Thomism during the rise of a national industrialization and the new centrality of the worker. This is a question that informs the very genesis of modern political thought, so I want to zoom in to the specifics: in Agócs’ narrative, the reinvention of Thomism goes hand in hand with the ‘social question’; that is, not just as the substrate for state legitimacy, but also as a supplement in the very mediation between the state and social incorporation. After reading Agócs a question lingers: what to make of the success story of social Thomism in the long history of modernity, that includes episodes from the both the left and the right; from the Italian Catholic Social Movement to Corporate Francoism, from the Pinochet Constitution drafted by Jaime Guzman to the most recent articulations of an interpretative common good in the contemporary American postliberal constitutional and interpretative balancing? One easy way out of the explanation is to delegate the answer to the historical uses (and misuses, depending who is defending what) of Aquinas’ thought, but that hardly answers the question. A while ago, John Finnis made a claim that could point to an important destination:

“This grand metaphysical overview of reality, and of our knowledge (‘theoretical’ in the first two kinds of order, ‘practical’ in the second two) of it, has been as fundamental to the new classical natural law theory from its beginnings as it was to Aquinas. It enables us to identify as illegitimately reductionist almost all the streams of social-theoretical thought, including political and legal, that have emerged since early modernity. It helps in identifying the errors of those would-be followers of Aquinas who reject the new-classical natural law theory on the ground that it neglects or subordinates nature and metaphysics; the misunderstanding of Aquinas, and of the relation between practical and theoretical thought” [1].

For Finnis, although writing for legal theorists, Aquinas’ thought properly understood possesses a ‘metaphysical view of reality’, a sort of plasticity interlocking practical reason for action and morality that serves socio-theoretical ends. In other words, the thomistic plasticity for social legitimation can be connected to what Martin Heidegger held as ‘adequatio’ as a fixed point in the problem of Medieval representation of beings. And this means that thomism is always already a theory of legitimate ground for governing that reality. As Finnis suggests in different moments of his work, the lesson of Thomism is construed in its emphasis on the rule of law as the source for justice and fairness, and in this sense it was never alien to modern social contract. Karl Barth’s rhetorical question -“Why did Hegel not become for the Protestant world something similar to what Thomas Aquinas was for Roman Catholicism? – can now be understood in its most consequential light.

Now it makes sense that Agócs refers to early twentieth century Italian Catholic Neo-Thomism as a “counterrevolution”, although he does not denote that this would be a second instance of counterrevolution with social prospects that the post-French Revolution figures (De Maistre, Bonald, and Donoso) could not meet in their antimodern stance. And here the divide is sharpened: whereas the counterrevolution post-1789 had very limited and unstable sources in social facts, Neo-Thomism offered a theory of law that was consistent with modern class dynamics supported towards social cohesion and stabilization proper to the ideal of the community centered in urban centers. If one defining feature of political modernity is reversibility, it would then make sense that thomistic natural law could rise to the demands of any given historical time to offer a nexus informed by the onto-theological structure of adequatio and analogia entis, whose proper end is the stabilization of social pressure. The second order ideological uses of Thomism (left, right, revolutionary, moral conservative, traditionalist, pre-post Vatican councils) are contingent to its malleable adequation generated by its own claim to natural morality. Heidegger once pointed in this direction when he claimed that Aquinas’ philosophical horizon was fundamentally the inception of metaphysics over theology as faith (that is actio and efficiency unto subjection) [2]. If modernity is the realization of onto-theology, then it can only make sense that Thomism takes as many garments as necessary to prevent gazing towards the abyss, becoming a manifold phosphorescent theory of social morality.

Notes

1. John Finnis. “Aquinas and Natural Law Jurisprudence”, in Duke & George, Natural Law and Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 32.

2. Jean Beaufret. Dialogue with Heidegger (Indiana University Press, 2006), 106.

In section 79 of Gramsci’s Notebook 6 we are offered a strong definition of “politics” that I think illuminates the core of the Gramscian program fundamentally as a substantive morality. Gramsci writes the following against the “particularism” of normal associations (say the aristocracy, the elite, or the vanguard): “[an universal] association does not set itself up as a definite and rigid entity but as a something that aims to extend itself to a whole social grouping that is itself conceived as aiming to unify all humanity. All these relationships give a universal character to the group ethic that must be considered capable of becoming a norm of conduct for humanity as a whole. Politics is conceived a process that will culminate in a morality; in other words, politics is seen as leading towards a form of sociality in which politics and hence morality as well are both superseded.” (30). It is an astonishing definition, given the precise way it mobilizes the content of this new politics. Of course, there is the explicit the Hegelianism of the ‘universalist’ translation through the dialectical conflation between state and civil society, which just a few sections prior to 79, Gramsci deploys in order to posit the ultimate goal of communist society.

But in this section he goes further, since it becomes clear that the state and civil society, as they march towards an ‘integral state’, dissolves politics into pure morality. But Gramsci immediately clarifies that it is not just a “morality” of a new dominant class (which could still be contested vis-a-vis other values), but rather a “morality that is superseded”. This is an absolute morality beyond value disputes. In other words, it is an absolute morality that needs to be so because state and civil society have become a unified whole. Concretely, this means the dissolution of politics and of any concrete order of the republican tradition, which recognizes that, precisely because civil war is the latent in the social, no morality can be granted hegemonic status. At bottom, this is the reason why we need politics and institutions to mitigate conflict. The Gramscian moral universe frames a world in which the conflict not only disappears, but rather it becomes pure morality towards a “substantive common good” in which every person is obliged to participate. Indeed, one could claim that the theory of hegemony as morality has never appeared as strongly as in this fragment. I think it is fair to say that the telos of hegemony is, in every case, a drive towards the consolidation of this uncontested morality.

Needless to say, this is a frontal assault on positive law, which aimed, from Hobbes to H. L. Hart, to clearly differentiate between politics, institutions, and morals. In a surprising but direct way, Gramsci’s definition of politics as substantive morality is closer to the tradition of “Thomism” in at least three compartments of Aquinas’ thinking. First, because it posits a substantive morality as a unified conception of aims, which negates any competing positions between values. Secondly, the substantive morality of politics informs the Gramscian theory of the state, which, very much like the Thomist subsidiary structure, understands institutions not as a concrete order of conflict (stasis), but rather as a depository for the reproduction of civil society (that is why Gramsci also in notebook 6 will speak about the “state without a state”) in the image of the state. However, if we are to be fair to the natural law tradition, I think we can claim that Gramsci is really an archaic and not a “modern” (or revolutionary) Thomist, since even John Finnis in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980), in an attempt to square natural law with modern liberalism, countered Hart’s objection of unified moral aims in this way: “…there are basic aspects of human existence that are good leaving aside all the predicaments and implications…all questions of whether and how one is to devote oneself to these goods” (30). Finnis distinguishes between general principles and personal elaborations of aims. However, Gramsci is not interested in establishing generic “principles” for plural aims, but rather he seeks the actualization of a morality that is substantive because it is understood as “superseded as morality” as such. The kingdom of the Gramscian integral state is only realized if the heterogeneity of the social is captured by the hegemony of a supreme morality of Humanity.

The distance between Gramscian moral politics and the modern natural law foundation (Fuller, Finnis) is driven home when later in section 88 of notebook 6 he claims that: “…one should not think of a “new liberalism” even if the beginning of an era of organic freedom were at hand” (76). This confirms that Gramsci is interested in crafting a morality tied to the efficacy of immanent individual ends and desires, and not at the level of generic principles of a common order. If one takes this moral politics seriously, then it becomes difficult (impossible, in my opinion), to square the primacy of this morality with positive law and the republican tradition at large. At its “best light”, the Gramscian absolute morality can only yield a faith in “Humanity”, which feeds from the production of enmity (turning dissent into ‘inhumanity’) in a civil war, as it cannot be otherwise.