On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism John Milbank In the western world, at least, socialism is in crisis as a political force. But it is also in crisis as an intellectual creed, and it is this crisis that concerns the present article. Nevertheless, the practical and the theoretical crises are -very closely allied; the real political problem for contemporary socialism may be that, increasingly, people no longer know, or have forgotten, why one should be a socialist. One might want to re-express this as ‘people no longer see any remons to be a socialist’. And the practical response might be to urge us, once again, to convince people that socialism is the truly reasonable path. And yet, I am going to argue that in certain crucial senses there simply are no ‘reasons’ for being socialist in the way that we have tended to imagine in the past. If, I shall suggest, we can overcome the lingering suggestion that socialism is a matter of science, of historical diagnosis, or of universally valid reason, then we shall actually be able to recover the most authentic core of the socialist tradition, and the Christian socialist tradition in particular. In the course of this argument I shall first of all establish a contrast between old-style Christian socialism and new-style Christian Marxism, and then go on to show that Christian socialism is in certain ways more in tune with a ‘post Marxist’ or ‘post modernist’ radicalism. Finally, I shall suggest how Christian socialism nonetheless moves beyond the ambiguity of the post-modern critique of capitalist society. My thesis, stated in brief, is that socialism is not right because it is ‘rational’, but right because it is just. And the corollary here, to adapt Pkguy, is that the critique of capitalism is a moral critique or else it is no critique at all. In recent years Christian socialists have been seduced away from the priority of the moral critique in the course of an engagement with Marxism that has too often been naive and uncritical. It is a mistake to suppose that there is a clear continuity between past and present Christian socialism, and that the latter has just borrowed from Marxism elements of empirical rigour and of congenial humanism. On the contrary, it would be more accurate to distinguish sharply between an old ‘Christian socialist’ critique of capitalism and a new ‘Christian Marxist’ one’. The contrast can be set out in roughly the following way. 4
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