Commonwealth and Covenant<\/a> is a study of the \u201ceconomics, politics, and theologies of relationality.\u201d She works through these topics using the categories of \u201cseparability\u201d and \u201csituatedness.\u201d Separability is \u201cthe ability to leave one\u2019s place and develop oneself differently from past and neighbors\u201d (3). She thinks that the contemporary West has placed too much emphasis on separability but she doesn\u2019t think it a bad thing in itself. On the contrary: \u201cSeparability yields such indispensable things as innovation and the freedom to follow opportunity and change one\u2019s way of thinking and living. It is the basis for human and civil rights that are guaranteed to each person regardless of background or situation.\u201d When excessive, though, separability leads to \u201cabandonment, anomie, and self-absorption, which results in greed, an adversarial stance in politics, resource grabbing, political chicanery, and business and stock market cheating\u201d (4). If there is too much emphasis on the freedom to \u201cexit from common concerns and projects,\u201d then society descends into a Hobbesian competition, into \u201cdetached individualism\u201d (5).<\/p>\nWhat is needed is an ontology of relationality that embodies \u201cseparability-amid<\/em>-situatedness, distinction-amid<\/em>-relation\u201d (7). It is not exactly a balance. It is rather the insight that separability cannot really exist without situatedness, nor vice versa. Pally cleverly shows that some of the supposed prophets of modern separability are in fact advocates of a separability-situatedness mix. Hayek, she argues, agreed with Kant that human beings impose mental categories on the world, but, in contrast to Kant, denied that these categories were fixed. They instead \u201cadapt evolutionarily to circumstances.\u201d We rely on intuitive knowledge that goes beyond our conscious knowledge, and this knowledge is accumulated in market fluctuations, in the accumulated wisdom of common law and custom. Laws that redistribute property are damaging, Hayek argued, because they prevent families from being able to rise in status and to pass on productive values to their children. When families are allowed to spiral upward, everyone benefits. As Hayek says, \u201cThe acquisition by any member of the community of additional capacities to do things which may be valuable must always be regarded as a gain for the community\u201d (quoted, 80). <\/p>\nPally notes the irony: \u201cOne of the staunchest champions of separate, individual choice grounded his views in situatedness and was concerned primarily for societal good. The purpose of freedom, on his account, is not to please the self but to reveal much-needed societal information and so contribute to the public well-being\u201d (80).<\/p>\n
Rawls too comes off in Pally\u2019s interpretation as a separability-in-situatedness type of thinker: \u201cRawls relies on cultural values in the though-experiment itself. While he asks participants to refrain from assuming their future<\/em> positions in society, they are not, while designing it, without the values they bring in from their pasts<\/em> (before they came to the thought-experiment room). Indeed, designing fair and just policies depends on the ideas of justice and fairness that people have, ideas garnered from their values and traditions. The \u2018original position\u2019 does not wipe the mind blank\u201d (81). Besides, groups can benefit from the design adopted in the thought experiment: \u201cParticipants may design a society with sturdy support for such networks \u2013 especially as participants, like all real persons, live in them\u201d (81).<\/p>\nLocke \u201caimed at defending the earnings of commoners from aristocratic appropriation and held that the life of liberty was conditioned on societally minded virtues taught in family, church, and community.\u201d Mill\u2019s liberalism \u201cdid not aim for individualist disregard of society but aimed against the abuses of hierarchy in the public and familial spheres\u201d (115). Thus, though \u201cWestern modernity presents separability as a linchpin achievement, it has always been inseparable from situatedness amid society and transcendent\u201d (114). Pally believes that the present is a time of \u201cundue separability,\u201d but this is not the vision of the originators of liberal order: \u201cthey argued for greater separability in a context of substantial situatedness, which they applauded and relied on\u201d (115).<\/p>\n
Pally\u2019s arguments provide a useful rejoinder to simplistic treatments of individualism, but I was left suspicious that her categories are too broad to do much analytical work. Unless one is living in a dream world, it seems impossible to avoid either separability or situatedness. We can see what is new in modernity only at more refined levels. Locke expected social virtues to sustain liberty; but those societal virtues are deliberately outside the founding contract of political society. Politics is precisely not<\/em>-domestic. No doubt there is still situatedness in the midst of contract, yet the contract marks a significant shift of context. <\/p>\nMy suspicions about Pally\u2019s categories were heightened by her \u201crelational\u201d take on the Aqedah. She argues that \u201cAbraham fails his bond with God as he fails he bond with Isaac.\u201d God gives him a \u201cridiculous\u201d command, and \u201cAbraham misses the cures, fails to protest\u201d and so \u201cfails covenant with God as he breaks the bond with his son.\u201d Pally says that God never speaks to Abraham again, but instead sends a surrogate, an angel, to stop Abraham (193). That the angel of Yahweh is Yahweh is evident already from Genesis 18, and on Pally\u2019s interpretation, the Angel\u2019s concluding commendation is difficult to understand: \u201cbecause you have done this thing and have not withheld your son, your only son, indeed I will greatly bless you.\u201d Pally\u2019s claim that the angel \u201cacknowledges that Abraham meant to do right\u201d badly distorts the actual words of the text. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marcia Pally\u2019s Commonwealth and Covenant is a study of the \u201ceconomics, politics, and theologies of relationality.\u201d She works through these topics using the categories of \u201cseparability\u201d and \u201csituatedness.\u201d Separability is \u201cthe ability to leave one\u2019s place and develop oneself differently from past and neighbors\u201d (3). She thinks that the contemporary West has placed too much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[859,1502],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-theory","category-relationality"],"yoast_head":"\n
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