A summary of some arguments from Part II of Milbank’s book.It is important to Milbank’s approach that he does not treat sociology as a “discipline” but as a worldview, philosophical standpoint, or theological perspective. He calls it a theology and a church in disguise, offering an account of history that is irreconcilable with Christianity’s. He makes two subordinate points.
First, Milbank wants to show that theology entered into the construction of sociology, and he spends a good bit of one chapter reviewing several 19th-century Catholic social theorists and showing the continuity between their metaphysical assumptions that those of Durkheim and Comte. Again, the point is that theology has helped to construct a secular sphere, and he locates a heresy regarding the role of secondary causes in the doctrine of providence.
Second, sociology and especially the sociology of religion is not politically neutral but is a part of the intellectual “policing” of the boundaries between religion and secular public. Sociology guards the public, secular realm from incursions by religion. It is part of secular reason’s self-defense system. Sociology is not merely studying an object called “secular society” that lies obvious and open to investigation, but rather in its studying of secular society, it is at the same time constituting and defending its existence. This is the sense in which sociology is a church: it is a church that evangelizes for private religion and secular public sphere.
Milbank discusses the development of sociology in three phases: the French phase that culminated with Emile Durkheim, the German sociology particular of Weber, and the sociology of religion in various manifestations. I won’t deal with particular writers, but look at some general features of his critique.
Sociology arose out the questions left by liberalism and political science, particularly the relation of the individual to society. The question is posed as, “do individuals construct society? Or does society construct individuals?” Milbank, for his own part, thinks this is just a fundamental antinomy or aporia of social reality that we cannot get round. Both are true, and neither should be given priority over the other. I think Milbank’s is the only sensible answer to this question.
But sociology, for philosophical reasons, was not satisfied with this, and instead took “society” as a basic fact, indeed as the basic fact, prior to politics or the setting up of goals or aspirations for individuals, prior to culture and religion. Unlike liberal political science, sociologists do not seek to explain social phenomena. Society is not something to be explained, but is an explanation. Milbank claims that the specifically sociological method is to trace particular political or economic or cultural facts to their social “causes.”
To take a rather sophisticated example: Mary Douglas has developed a theory of society and religion based on the two factors of group and grid. The intensity of direct social pressure is group (a small group, with lots of face to face interaction, would be strong group) and the degree of social classification is grid (eg. Military would be high grid, since it has rigid rules bounding behavior within particular roles). She tries to predict the style of religion, the cardinal virtues, ideas of self, and art forms from the interactions of these two factors. She tries to explain the entire worldview of a society based on the predictive power of these social factors.
Provocatively, Milbank’s response is not that sociology is reductive because it seeks to reduce religion and culture to social factors. His far more radical contention is that there is nothing purely “social” that can be isolated from cultural, political and religious factors. Cultural and religious factors and the issues of power are, in his constant phrase, “always already” there. Religion (perhaps not invariably) enters into the very formation of the social structure. Rrelated to this is Milbank’s objection that sociology is ahistorical, and its claim that “society” is an unchanging underlying reality that grounds culture and religion must be contested. In short, sociology is not reductive; the problem is that there is no “social” to which everything else can be reduced.
We can apply Milbank’s insight here to Douglas’s model. She finds that social factors link up with cosmology such that there is a homology between the type of society (the interaction of grid and group in her terms) and the understanding of sin, virtue, and the dominant symbols. Milbank responds, Sure there is a “fit,” but the question is the direction of causation and the more basic question of whether we can find a single cause for a complex cultural reality. Douglas’s claim and all similar sociological claims can be turned around: The reason why there is a fit is because the religious/cosmological beliefs have actually formed the society in a particular way. It is not because a group has a “strong group” structure that it is millennial, but rather it has a strong-group structure because it is millennial. There is no way to pry social structure and cosmology apart and prove that one causes the other. The claim of “social” causation can always be turned around the other way.
Milbank offers historical counter examples to refute the notion that the “social” can be isolated so as to become a causal factor. In the medieval town, the very existence of independent guilds and corporations is due to the influence of Christianity. Political life is imbued with religious norms. Economics, through mechanisms such as the just price, are influenced by ethical norms. Where is “the social” factor that can explain these things? It simply doesn’t exist as a separate factor. The more social order is “inside” religion, the less one is capable of isolating social factors and using them to explain religion.
Related to this criticism is his charge that Weberian sociology treats religion as in essence a private and individual reality, that is, an extra-social reality. Weber says that religion begins with a charismatic leader who draws people through the force of his personal magnetism but once the leader is gone, and the original excitement goes, to continue the religion has to come up with ritual forms, creeds, structures of government, or else it will simply die away. Berger has a similar conception of the development of religion. Milbank rightly points out that religion is essentially social. There was no moment when Christianity did not have strong ecclesial emphasis. The social forms, the ritual, the teaching (if not formal creeds) are always already there. Even the “charismatic” founder Jesus comes into an existing social-religious order, and his charisma is charisma only against the background of Jewish Messianic expectation, and all its associated “cultural” and “social” features.
On Weber, Milbank writes, “The problem with his whole sociology is that he makes religion, in its essence, to be an extra-social affair, and only provides ‘social explanations’ . . . for religious organization, and religious doctrine — both being seen as ‘secondary’ phenomena . . . To disseminate itself, a religion requires narratives, doctrines, consistent norms — but one should note, against Weber, that it is quite impossible to define the supposedly initial, ‘charismatic’ assumptions in abstraction from these categories. A religion commences in its dissemination.& #148; Later, he adds that charismatic leadership, innovation and development in religions take the form of a re-reading and a re-formation of existing texts and symbols: “Individuals who set their ‘personal’ authority over against established texts, norms, and customs, have always already begun to ‘perpetuate’ themselves in the form of a re-textualization, a re-normalization.” This is certainly how Christianity began, not with a charismatic individual without texts and rites but with a re-interpretation of the existing texts and rites.
Why would sociology treat “society” as a separate factor that can be used as an explanation for religion and culture? Part of the reason is the commitment of sociology to what Milbank calls the “liberal protestant metanarrative.” By “liberal protestant metanarrative” Milbank means a particular story, an account of universal history, that traces various stages in man’s religious development from magic through the salvation religions, and to the modern religion of individualism, privatized religion, ethics and humanity. Rather than seeing this as a matter of contingent changes within Christian ethos and doctrine, Weber and Troeltsch see this as the gradual unveiling of what was latent in Christianity all along, the gradual unveiling of the universal truth of religion. There is a kind of Hegelian necessity to the development.
Milbank objects to this largely because of its historicism. It universalizes and declares inevitable what is a particular and contingent history. He would not deny that in an ultimate sense, this history is the product of the providential guidance of God but he insists that the traditional Christian view says that God’s guidance of history is mysterious and difficult to discern. And he asks, how does one show that a particular history discloses the “essence”? Why not assume that a particular history is a departure from its origins, rather than a logical progression from it?
He also objects because of the way this narrative is complicit with the secular. It indicates that “progress” lies in the direction of privatization of religion, individualism, anti-ritualism, and this helps to protect the secular sphere from intrusions of religion, from a substantive overarching purpose and goal. The progressive societies are those that are like the West. Weber, according to Milbank, is particularly opposed to all efforts to “orientalize” the public sphere, that is, he resists the “capture” of the public sphere by some substantive view of justice or good. Socialism is especially dangerous to the West because it would introduce substantive values into public life that the West has eschewed. Thus, the sociological narrative of history makes the secular the pinnacle of human progress and thus underwrites its superiority. Sociology has tended to privilege the Western liberalism as the standard by which every other social order is judged.
The liberal protestant metanarrative makes for some ironic twists of interpretation. Weber, as I’ve said, assumes that religion is in essence a private affair: but to suggest that this is the essence of religion is to assume that the modern West has revealed the essence of religion. Similarly, Weber makes a sharp distinction between the private realm of values and the public realm of instrumental rationality (Milbank traces this to Kantian sources). Sociology is mainly about the sphere of instrumental rationality, and other values only appear in Weber’s sociology as deviations from this norm. Again, this whole method of analysis assumes that the secular is permanent, while in fact it is contingent. The separation of value and instrumental rationality is required by Weber’s philosophical assumptions, which also lie in the background of the liberal metanarrative that sees religious and moral history culminating with Kant. Thus, Weber’s whole method is circular: He treats instrumental secular reason as the permanent reality of the public sphere but he only knows this because he has assumed the narrative that treats the secular as the permanent underlying truth of Christianity.
Weberian sociology thus assumes that the modern secular sphere is a permanent factor in human society, only waiting to be unveiled in more “primitive” and “regressive” social orders. He assumes a irreligious public sphere, ruled by egotistical pursuit of self-interest and by considerations of sheer power, and alongside this, occasionally impinging prophetically into the secular sphere, a sphere of value. What is ruled out, made theoretically and methodologically impossible, is a Christian vision. What is squeezed out, Milbank argues, is Christian charity as a public realm.
We might say that Weberian sociology is fundamentally a denial of the possibility of the church, a public that does not operate in terms of bureaucratic rationality, a public sphere of charity and forgiveness.