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The Metaphysics of Cooperation
A Case Study of F.D. Maurice
SCHROEDER, Steven
Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA, 1999, XI, 107 pp.
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Series:
Value Inquiry Book Series 84
“Schroeder … makes his point on today’s relationship between intelligentsia and workers brilliantly … this book is a most pertinent and challenging study and a laudable attempt in philosophy to get things ‘back on track’.”
The Heythrop Journal, April 2002, Vol. 43, Nr. 2
This book takes up the philosophical task described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and F.D. Maurice as digging toward the common humanity that is the ground of value. The book is an essay in philosophy defined by time (its focal point is the nineteenth century), space (its focal point is Britain), and persons (it is concerned especially with Maurice's contribution to social theory). The first chapter explores the Victorian Age as historical context and background for Maurice's work. The second explores Coleridge's thought as philosophical context and background. The third explores a range of Maurice's theological works that spans his entire career. The fourth turns, finally, as Maurice did, to the practice of adult education as the place of social transformation and, more particularly, the contested terrain where "human nature" and human souls are turned to work in the world as persons, not hands.
Contents: Foreword by Gary Dorrien. Preface. Acknowledgments. ONE Puzzled Into Silence. TWO A Circle of Friends. THREE A System That Is All Door. FOUR The Fever of the Miscellaneous Man. FIVE Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. About the Author. Index.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Schroeder is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Capital University in Ohio. He is the author of two previous books (A Community and a Perspective: Lutheran Peace Fellowship and the Edge of the Church, 1941-1991 and Virginia Woolf's Subject and the Subject of Ethics), as well as numerous scholarly articles in philosophy and religious studies. His poetry has appeared in Georgetown Review, Halcyon, Mosaic, Rambunctious Review, and the Emily Dickinson Award Anthology.
FOREWORD
His Anglican admirers aside, Denison Maurice (1805-1872) is often remembered as a prototype of Karl Marx's image of the Christian Socialist as a sprinkler of holy water on bourgeois heartburn. As an influence on modern theology, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is often remembered for his inspiring impact on a host of American transcendentalists and liberals in the 1830s and 1840s, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Bushnell. Steven Schroeder offers a richer picture of Maurice in the present work, casting his thought as a still-instructive blend of liberal-leaning incarnational theology and cooperativist social theory. Along the way, he also makes a compelling case for reading Coleridge's Aids to Reflection as a rationale for an experientialist form of Anglican orthodoxy.
The links between these seminal thinkers were biographical and theological, as Schroeder shows. Coleridge was a liberal Unitarian in his early career, but in later life he sought to provide a new philosophical basis for what became the "Broad Church Movement" in English Anglicanism. Appropriating the Kantian distinction between pure and practical reason, as well as Kant's moral intuitionism, his aphoristic Aids to Reflection made a case for the moral and experiential nature of Christian truth that inspired a host of American Emersonians, English and American Unitarians and liberals, and young F.D. Maurice. Son of a Unitarian minister, Maurice was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1825 when Aids to Reflection was published. His refusal to subscribe to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles cost him his Trinity degree and fellowship, but in the years that followed, increasingly influenced by Coleridge's religious philosophy, Maurice found his way to mainstream Anglicanism. Like his intellectual hero, his religious thinking was creative, multistranded, liberal-leaning, and provocative; as Schroeder shows, he spent much of his career defending himself from accusations of heresy. Though many others claimed this mantle in mid-nineteenth century England and the United States, the present work contains ample evidence for the judgment that Coleridge's hope for a "true to life" account of Christian truth was distinctively fulfilled in the religious thought of Maurice.
Maurice's theology was a novel blend of classical and modern motifs; at its best, modern Anglicanism has been known for qualities that he embodied and advocated. These include his resistance to dogmatism, his pluralistic, inclusive spirit; his theological emphasis on incarnation; his affirmation of reason; and his insistence that true, spiritually-refined worship is the heart of Christian life and thinking. Other aspects of Maurice's theology that hold significant interest today include his patripassionism, his relational conception of divine reality, and his insistence that Christ's atoning work destroyed not merely the penalty for sin, but the state of estrangement itself between God and humankind. In the generation after his death, Maurice became an icon of Broad Church Anglican orthodoxy on the strength of these themes and his exemplary witness. For most of his career, however, his right to the Christian name was bitterly disputed. Schroeder emphasizes that in 1853 Maurice was dismissed from his position as Professor of English Literature and History at King's College; the main point of contention was his claim that the New Testament concept of "eternity" has nothing to do with time. Maurice's Socialism heightened his vulnerability to religious attack during this critical period, a fact that Schroeder notes in objection to Marx's "holy water" sneer.
The authority given the latter pronouncement by countless historians and other observers is curious. Marx heaped violent invective on nearly everyone who disagreed with him, including hapless followers who failed to keep up with his changes of opinion. He smeared Bakuninian anarchists, Lassallean democratic socialists, and all manner of independent radicals as "castrating reformers," "toads," "vermin," "the emigrant scum," and the like. Though his anarcho-syndicalist conception of socialism had little kinship with the single-party dictatorships later erected in his name, Marx's utopianism about the socialist revolutionary ideal made it possible for several generations of communist thugs to call themselves Marxists. His absurd belief in the "withering away of the state" under socialism was partly responsible for the repugnant connotations that "socialism" acquired in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, armed with the assurance of possessing a world-conquering ideology-though he didn't call it that-Marx ridiculed the various reformers, Christian Socialists, and Social Democrats of his time for their moralism and lack of revolutionary militancy. Today it is their successors who sustain whatever remains of the egalitarian hope of democratic socialism.
Socialism is no longer innocent in any form. Most of its dominant images are repulsive. Tens of millions have perished in Communist gulags in the name of building socialism; hundreds of millions have been subjected to brutal poverty and state repression in its name; even in its democratic forms, modern socialism has produced bloated welfare states and dispirited political regimes throughout Western Europe. First appearances aside, all of this is pertinent to the present work. Steven Schroeder implicitly reminds us that there was a cooperativist tradition of Christian Socialism before Socialism became an ideology of economic nationalization and centralized state control, with or without democracy. The Christian Socialist tradition pioneered by Maurice, John Ludlow, and Charles Kingsley was community-based, fellowship-oriented, committed to worker education, and strategically social rather than narrowly political. It was explicitly reformist and grounded in moral principle, as Marx charged. It advocated cooperatives and mixed forms of worker and community ownership in the name of raising the condition of a disenfranchised majority.
With all its limitations, the kind of social Christianity pioneered by Maurice thus prefigured what remains of the democratic socialist vision today, which is the practice of community-building, decentralized economic democracy. One does not read Maurice for guidance on the economics of worker ownership or the merits of public bank strategies, but he remains a valuable witness to the original and enduring meaning of Christian Socialism. "Hence this unfashionable book."
Gary Dorrien
Kalamazoo College
SAMPLE PAGE (Note: text only, the lay-out of the page is not reproduced).
PREFACE
Apologists for Capitalism have enjoyed remarkable success in depicting the Cold War as an apocalyptic struggle between radically divergent economic systems. At the end of the Cold War, they have unilaterally declared Capitalism's victory, aided and abetted by a worldwide embrace of the Market that spans the political spectrum. Where the Market goes without saying, discussion of socialism is largely confined to strategies of containment. The mark of relevant discussion is attention to productivity, efficiency, and Market mechanisms. Economics is a descriptive science, and "value" is a necessary outcome of natural processes. As a result, ethics is a branch of decision-theory that orders given outcomes as best it can and cleans up where natural processes and human weaknesses collide in unfortunate disasters.
In such an atmosphere, description is all, and normative investigation appears vaguely anachronistic. If the Market goes without saying, then railing against it is akin to being a conscientious objector to the law of gravity.
Hence this unfashionable book.
If the Market goes without saying, it is because an important philosophical and theological discussion was sidetracked (not silenced, but marginalized) by the rise of descriptive economics between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. This book is a modest contribution to getting back on track by digging, as F.D. Maurice would say, toward the common humanity that is the ground of value.
Digging is a philosophical and theological task which calls, not for another descriptive treatise in economics, but for an essay in philosophy.
An essay, by definition, is an exploration of territory. This one is partly defined by time (its focal point is the nineteenth century), partly by space (its focal point is Britain), and partly by persons (it is concerned especially with F.D. Maurice's contribution to social theory). The first chapter explores the Victorian Age as historical context and background for Maurice's work. The second explores Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thought as philosophical context and background. The third explores a range of Maurice's theological works that spans his entire career. The fourth turns, finally, as Maurice did, to the practice of adult education as the place of social transformation and, more particularly, the contested terrain where "human nature" and human souls are turned to work in the world as persons, not hands.
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